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Jan 25, 2023 https://spoilsofwar.substack.com/p/magic-weapon-for-ukraine-disasters
More Magic Weapons for Ukraine!
We're Even Sending the Kevlar Death Trap.
News that the U.S. plans to send M-1 Abrams tanks
to Ukraine makes clear that our proxy war effort is definitively divorced from military reality. The Abrams, by the Pentagon’s
own admission demands
intensive maintenance and highly trained crews. Furthermore, unlike any
other vehicle on the battlefield, it has poor mileage and runs on jet
fuel, thereby necessitating a whole separate
fuel supply system. (Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forced the
Army to buy this jet-engined monstrosity back in the 1970s in order to
save the failing Chrysler Corporation.) The Abrams, and the Leopards
that the Germans have finally been bullied into
donating, are merely the latest in a steady progression of “game
changers,” magic weapons hailed, by virtue of their supposedly superior
technology, as the key to a Ukrainian victory. Early in the war the
Javelin anti-tank missile was cast in that role, followed
by the anti-aircraft Stinger, then by the M777 howitzer, which was
succeeded in turn by the HIMARS long range precision strike missile and
the Patriot air defense missile. Inevitably, after initial, much touted,
successes, the other side has adapted. For example,
the Russians adapted to HIMARS by dispersing the ammunition dumps and
other favored targets, while they soon acquired plenty of Javelins
themselves, by whatever means – enough at least for Russian commanders
to distribute a Russian translation of the manual
to their troops early in the conflict.
An Expensive Blunder
In truth, the tanks, especially in the limited
numbers being consigned, will have little decisive effect.
As retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Danny Davis, an
armor veteran, suggests in an instructive article in
19fortyfive, Ukraine
already has about 1700 tanks comprised largely of Soviet-era models from
its prewar arsenal plus subsequent donations and captures. Davis makes
clear, that in tank battles, technological
superiority contributes much less to victory than crew training. He
states unequivocally that if the Americans and Iraqis in the 1991 Gulf
War (in which he fought in a tank battle) had swapped weapons, the
result would have been the same. (General Norman Schwarzkopf,
U.S. commander in that war, said the same thing at the time.) Ukrainian
crews thrust into battle after necessarily truncated training on these
complex and inherently delicate weapons systems are clearly going to
have a tough time, not least those entrusted
with the Patriot anti-missile batteries donated by the U.S. and
Netherlands. As Geoff LaMear, a U.S. Army air defense officer,
writes “sending Patriot
missile systems to Ukraine is an expensive blunder.” Among other
examples, he points out that “American personnel spend months studying
what is a complex and highly technical system.
That time is dedicated by military planners despite U.S. troops
typically facing no language barrier in doctrinal or technical
documents, having access to experts with years of experience, and
support from the contractors who design the systems.”
Death Traps for Ukraine.
Indeed,
so others with experience of the system
relate, training on this system takes a minimum of six months.
Interestingly, I hear reports that Patriot batteries in the U.S. Army
require the constant presence of industry contractors in order to
operate – which raises questions about just who will be working
those Ukrainian Patriots. We are even
sending the Stryker wheeled armored fighting vehicle, known to troops as “the
Kevlar death trap.” The near-universal lack of informed
commentary in the mainstream media regarding such salient details
highlights the general decline in Pentagon coverage across the board
Repair is a Long Way Away.
The
proliferating mish-mash of weapons systems
shoveled into the war, requiring separate logistics supply chains
stretching far beyond Ukrainian borders, reminds us how far U.S.
“defense” has painted itself into a corner so far as actual military
effectiveness is concerned. The dubious reliability of many
of these weapons, thanks to their baroque complexity, is amplified by
an accelerating trend toward elaborate maintenance arrangements
increasingly distant from the battlefield. Chuck Spinney, the former
Pentagon analyst who identified the military’s underlying
problems in his pathbreaking 1980 “Defense
Facts of Life” and numerous other reports, explains the
issue this way: “The proliferation of different types of technically
complex weapons will proliferate the variety as well as quantity of
totally different spare parts and as well as their specific
repair equipment. A cardinal rule of battlefield logistics has always
been to repair as far forward as possible — but western, particularly
American technology has been moving repairs rearward toward distant
depots — making frontline forces more dependent
on complex test equipment and high quantities of spare parts. Rube
Goldberg, ad hoc battlefield repairs by smart GIs is becoming far more
difficult or impossible. Magnifying the complexity of a support system
in the middle of a war, particularly a serious
industrial level war — like that in Ukraine, is a prescription for an
unavoidable disaster.”
But it’s Designed to Be This Way
The
problem is entirely of the military industrial
complex’s own making, thanks to its decades-old practice of producing
ever-more technologically ambitious systems that are more costly,
fallible, and profitable for the industry. In consequence, they are
never produced in the number desired even as mounting
costs generate demands for higher budgets, even as the overall force
structure remorselessly shrinks. A
recent report from the
Center for Strategic and International Studies highlights the extent to
which the policies that have spawned our gargantuan defense budget have
yielded a relatively toothless defense. Not
of course that the report’s author, Seth Jones, a career denizen of the
war machine, puts things quite that way. His report is basically a
demand for more of the same. Bemoaning the degree to which supplying
Ukraine has largely depleted weapons stocks that
will take years to replace, he calls for a surge in defense production
powered by more spending. This proffered solution will of course make
defense what one weapons industry consultant terms
“the defining feature of the U.S. economy”
dependent on arms sales both at home and abroad. Even though the U.S.
leads the world in weapons exports, Jones demands jettisoning of
irksome restrictions “outdated
for a wartime environment” on arms sales abroad: “There is a growing
need to speed up sales of U.S. arms to specific foreign
allies—especially in Europe and the Indo-Pacific—in an effort to better
compete with China and Russia..” Jones underpins his argument
with a call to prepare for the war with China, for which he claims the
U.S. is woefully unprepared. “Tensions are rising between China and the
United States in the Indo-Pacific. Timelines for a possible war are
shrinking. But the clock is ticking. The United
States needs to be ready before a conflict starts, in part to maximize
(deterrence.”
So who cares if we shower Ukraine with a haphazard
assortment of weapons, depleting our own stocks along the way? There’s money being made, and much, much, to come.
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