Vlahos: Ukraine Shares Same Fate as the South in the American Civil WarDanish journalist Flemming Rose interviews AGON's Michael Vlahos.
Is the Ukrainian army headed for collapse? American military historian Michael Vlahos has an outside view of the issue. He joined Danish journalist Flemming Rose to discuss the state of the war. The following is a translation of Flemming’s write-up for AGON readers. For this week’s Free Thought, I spoke with U.S. military analyst Michael Vlahos, who believes that the Ukrainian army is heading for a collapse. Dr. Vlahos predicts that Russia will win the war and that Putin will sit at the border when negotiations on the future of Ukraine begin. Does Ukraine Hold the Long End? I don't know about you, but I think it's hard to understand the course of the war in Ukraine. Despite the gloomy reporting from the front by major US media outlets—The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times—Western experts continue to insist that Ukraine is holding the long end. Last week, security analyst Mark Galeotti stated in the British newspaper The Sunday Times that “Ukraine is winning the war”, even though it will continue into 2024. The same picture is painted by one of America's leading foreign affairs commentators, David Ignatius, in The Washington Post, where he predicts that this year, as a result of the ongoing offensive, Ukraine may succeed in cutting off Russia's land corridor to Crimea, thereby threatening Moscow's control of the strategically important peninsula. In the journal Foreign Affairs, military historian Lawrence Freedman has also argued this summer that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is stronger than ever, while all trends in the conflict—military, economic and diplomatic—are going Ukraine’s way, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin is therefore under increasing pressure. He has, states Freedman, no good options left. Finally, the American security expert Edward Luttwak acknowledges in an analysis in the digital media UnHerd that the Ukrainian offensive has probably not gone as desired, but Luttwak still believes that Ukraine with a mobilization of 2–3 million men can win the war and liberate the occupied territories. However, Luttwak bases his prediction on Ukraine having a population of 30 million. That number comes from January 2022. In an analysis by the think tank Jamestown Foundation, which is connected to the American intelligence community, it is said that the Ukrainian population has today shrunk to just 20 million, slightly more than the Netherlands, but fewer than Taiwan. And of the 20 million, according to the Jamestown Foundation, retirees make up over half: 10.7 million. Jamestown estimates that about 2 million Ukrainians are mobilized, which corresponds to about 10 percent of the population. This is a high number, which in other wars has had negative consequences for a country’s economy. This applies to Finland during the Second World War and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. According to the Ukrainian parliament, there is a shortage of labor in the energy sector and in both industrial and arms production because the employees have been mobilized. Add to this that in the past three months the Ukrainian army has only been able to recruit about half the number it had planned. This is the reason why President Zelensky has fired the heads of all the country’s recruitment offices citing corruption. And that is undoubtedly part of the explanation, but it could also be that there are simply no longer enough people left in Ukraine. With that in mind, one may well have doubts about the realism of Luttwak’s prediction of a Ukrainian victory based on the math he presents. Nevertheless, there is a wide range of Western experts who believe that Ukraine still stands to win the war. And maybe they are right. Predicting Ukrainian Collapse The syllabus said that democracies are better at waging war than tyrannies. There is no empirical and historical basis for this. It is part of America’s religious doctrine, which does not care about reality. American military historian Michael Vlahos is of a different opinion. He predicts a collapse of the Ukrainian army and believes that it is in a situation that in many ways can be compared to the fate of the Southern states in the American Civil War. At the same time, he assumes that the Russian army will emerge from this war as perhaps the strongest in the world. Vlahos—as the radical assessment above indicates—is not one of those who like to march in time. He once left his job at a higher education institution because he got tired of people saying one thing and doing the opposite. Michael Vlahos elaborates: “Everyone kept talking about critical thinking. The teachers and management said to the students: We are here to teach you critical thinking. And although ‘critical thinking’ was mentioned a total of 24 times in the syllabus, the aim of a detailed syllabus of 186 pages, where the ‘correct’ answers are on every other page, is not to teach the students to think critically. The ‘correct’ answers were hammered into the students’ heads again and again. Everything followed a strict manual and all the correct answers were known in advance. It became an intellectual awakening for me, and eventually I couldn't stand it”. Can you give an example? “The syllabus said that democracies are better at waging war than tyrannies. There is no empirical and historical basis for this. It is part of America’s religious doctrine, which does not care about reality”. Wanted to Penetrate the Mystery of War We will come back to that with the US’s civil religion and dogmatic view of the world, but first we need to hear a little more about Michael Vlahos’ background. Vlahos has a long career behind him, during which he has taught war and strategy at Johns Hopkins University in Washington and at the US Navy’s university, The Naval War College in Rhode Island. Vlahos has also been employed by the CIA, and in the late 1980s he was head of research in the US State Department. In recent years, he has been associated with the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy in Washington, and he is the author of the book Fighting Identity: Sacred War and World Change. Vlahos traces his interest in war history back to his earliest childhood, when his parents gave him an illustrated history of the world, and at that time war filled much of history. He explains: “I have spent most of my professional life understanding the mystery of war and why war is so central to the life and death of civilizations and how war has served as a positive and negative force in human evolution”. Three Decisive Factors In early August, Vlahos published a sensational essay in the conservative Compact magazine under the dramatic heading “The Ukrainian Army is Breaking”. According to Vlahos, it is the interaction of three factors that can cause an army to break. First, when the initial optimism and belief in victory turns to a perception that the war cannot be won. Just such a change of mood, says Vlahos, can be traced in Ukrainian society and at the front, where several express that the stated goal of victory—re-establishment of Ukraine’s borders from 1991—is no longer realistic. Second, Vlahos points out, a critical tipping point occurs if external support from allies begins to slip. No Western allies are saying it out loud, but Ukrainian politicians acknowledge that they are under heavy pressure from several Western countries to begin negotiations to end the war, and this week one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters in Congress, Republican Andy Harris, said, who is chairman of a Ukrainian support group in the House of Representatives, that this summer’s offensive has failed and that Ukraine is unlikely to win the war, and that it is therefore time to reduce American support. At the same time, The Wall Street Journal noted in a sensational article a few weeks ago that Western military decision-makers knew in advance that Kyiv had neither the necessary training nor the weapons—from grenades to fighter jets—to push back the Russian forces. Third, an army’s will to fight approaches a critical turning point, according to Michael Vlahos, when the attitude towards those who at the beginning of the war have shown the way to victory and triumph, and who have been hailed as heroes, who become the object of criticism and in the end are branded as liars and frauds. Comparison With the First World War In Ukraine, that trend can manifest itself in a split between army chief Valery Zaluzhny on the one hand and President Zelensky and his inner circle on the other. Observers point out that Zaluzhny was against this summer’s offensive, while Zelensky, as a result of pressure from the United States in particular, insisted on launching it. If the offensive ends in failure with such heavy losses that Ukraine will not be able to rebuild its forces, the war-torn country risks being plunged into a domestic political showdown over responsibility and blame, it says. As I said, Michael Vlahos believes that all three factors are now at play in Ukraine, and that this weakens morale. He draws comparisons to the First World War 1914–1918, when six out of seven great power armies collapsed. It led to surrender, mutiny and revolutions. Over the four years, Germany lost 3.1 percent of its population and France 3.6 percent. Vlahos estimates that in just one and a half years Ukraine has lost 2.5 percent of its current population in the form of killed and wounded who cannot return to the battlefield. This corresponds to 250,000 people. Vlahos suspects that the numbers may be higher, but for the sake of the morale of the Ukrainian population, they are a state secret. According to the American intelligence documents, which were leaked in the spring, the Ukrainian military at that time had lost around 130,000 killed and wounded. Vlahos also insists that it recently emerged that up to 50,000 Ukrainians have lost at least one body part, an arm, a leg or something else. That figure for Germany in the First World War was 67,000—a war in which Germany suffered a loss of 1.7 million dead at the front and 450,000 civilians out of a population of 65 million. Ukraine’s Losses Are Greater Than the Russians’ But, Vlahos points out, casualty figures are not, when it comes down to it, decisive for whether an army can continue the fight. Even worn out armies will fight on if they believe in the cause. The British Army lost 60,000 men in the first day at the Somme in July 1916, while Italy lost 350,000 in 17 days at Caporetto in the autumn of 1917. But both armies continued the war. In contrast to a widespread opinion in Western opinion, Vlahos believes that Ukraine has suffered significantly greater losses than the Russians, if you ignore the first phase of the war. The background to his calculation is the strength ratio in artillery guns and shells, where the Russians are believed to have a preponderance somewhere between 5:1 and 10:1. Precisely that type of weapon has been the most deadly in this war, so unless the Russian army has mostly shot out of the blue, this difference will be in their favor, says Vlahos. During World War I, casualties from artillery fire accounted for 70 percent of all casualties, and Vlahos believes that is also an excellent guideline for understanding casualty figures in the current war. Furthermore, he believes that the Russians have been better at adapting to developments on the battlefield. No Frozen Conflict Vlahos does not believe that the war will end as a frozen conflict. Instead, he predicts a Russian victory, in which Ukraine and the West will be forced to accept demands for a neutral Ukraine without a significant defense. Ukraine risks becoming the size of Belarus, both in territory and population, and just like Belarus without access to the sea. If you had to point to an example from the history of war, which is similar to what we see in Ukraine, what would it be? The Southern States Had the Same Goal as Ukraine And you think that the result will be the same in Ukraine as in the civil war? “The North was several times larger than the South, just as Russia is several times larger than the Ukraine. The northern states were much richer than the southern states and had most of the industry, the same applies in the relationship between Russia and Ukraine”. Vlahos points to the enormous losses the Southern states suffered in the American Civil War. One million men served in the Confederate army, of which 350,000 died and about 200,000 were wounded. “It is incredible that the Southern States could continue for so long. They lost about the same number of men as the Northern States, but the Northern States had a population more than twice as large. The southern states could have lasted longer if they had invested more in defense, but instead they attacked and invaded the northern states four times. They suffered huge losses”. Why did they do it then? And you think that the result will be the same in Ukraine as in the civil war? “The North was several times larger than the South, just as Russia is several times larger than the Ukraine. The northern states were much richer than the southern states and had most of the industry, the same applies in the relationship between Russia and Ukraine”. Vlahos points to the enormous losses the Southern states suffered in the American Civil War. One million men served in the Confederate army, of which 350,000 died and about 200,000 were wounded. “It is incredible that the Southern States could continue for so long. They lost about the same number of men as the Northern States, but the Northern States had a population more than twice as large. The southern states could have lasted longer if they had invested more in defense, but instead they attacked and invaded the northern states four times. They suffered huge losses”. Why did they do it then? The Northern States Also Got off to a Bad Start And just like Russia in Ukraine, the Northern states also did badly at the beginning of the civil war? The major media follow the government’s narrative in the same way that Pravda did in the Soviet Union. Do you think the same is happening to the Russian army? The Battle for the Narrative I
hear a very different story when President Biden and his ministers, top
advisers and intelligence chiefs speak out. They all say with one voice
that Russia has already lost the war. How does it hang the same? He continues: America’s Apocalyptic Vision And then we come to America's civil religion, i.e. the religious doctrine that, according to Michael Vlahos, drives the United States, and whose fingerprints he also sees in Ukraine. He says: How does it play out in Ukraine? It’s Not About Ukraine And do you think that is also happening in Ukraine? What will President Biden do if things go as you predict? |