The Weekly Sift

Why have predictions about recent wars gone so horribly wrong?

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Ukraine. On February 21, 2022 — just three days before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — Robert Kagan, a foreign policy specialist who had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, wrote a forward-looking article in The Washington Post: “What we can expect after Putin’s conquest of Ukraine“. Kagan skipped over the oncoming war entirely, to the post-conquest aftermath, when Ukraine would “cease to exist as an independent entity” and be incorporated into Russia, which would now border four new NATO countries (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania) in addition to the previous Estonia and Latvia.

Kagan’s view was a typical expert take on the military situation. Earlier that month, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, told Congress that Kyiv might fall only three days into a full Russian invasion. After the invasion began, President Biden offered to evacuate Ukrainian President Zelensky, to which Zelensky famously replied “I need ammunition, not a ride.“

If there would be any hiccup in this conquest at all, Kagan imagined, it could only be in the form of an insurgency after Russian troops overran the country.

Some analysts today imagine a Ukrainian insurgency sprouting up against Russian domination. Perhaps. But the Ukrainian people cannot be expected to fight a full-spectrum war with whatever they have in their homes. To have any hope against Russian occupation forces, an insurgency will need to be supplied and supported from neighboring countries. Will Poland play that role, with Russian forces directly across the border? Will the Baltics? Or Hungary? And if they do, will the Russians not feel justified in attacking the insurgents’ supply routes, even if they happen to lie in the territory of neighboring NATO members? It is wishful thinking to imagine that this conflict stops with Ukraine.

And yet, four years later, Ukraine is still resisting the Russian invasion — not as an insurgency, but as a nation with a free capital and territory under its control. Zelensky is still president, and still in Kyiv. Who will ultimately prevail in this war is still very much up in the air.

The kind of mistaken certainty military experts expressed prior to the first shots being fired in Ukraine is far from unusual. The United States was supposed to defeat North Vietnam and the Taliban. The Iraq War was expected to end quickly with a more clearly favorable outcome. The Soviet Union was bound to succeed in Afghanistan. China should have had no problem handling Vietnam. The Trump administration expected that the successful decapitation strike the US and Israel mounted against Iran at the end of February would bring the Tehran regime to its knees and end the war quickly.

None of that happened. But why didn’t it? And why did so many learned people think that it would?

Phillips O’Brien’s War and Power is an attempt to answer that question, and to apply that answer to the current rivalry between the US and China. (The book came out last October, before the attack on Iran.)

O’Brien deserves a certain amount of credit right now, because he did not think Russia would roll through Ukraine. In “The New Appeasement“, published in January, 2022, O’Brien wrote:

If we have relearned any lesson over the last two decades, it is that military operations are expensive, usually counterproductive, and with the constant possibility of going dangerously wrong for the richest and most advanced economies, let alone weak ones. … If Russia we actually stupid enough to attack Ukraine, it would tax their military in a way not seen since the Cold War ended.

Why did he see Russia vs. Ukraine differently? War and Power is a study of the factors that make for success in war.

Existing forces. Too often, O’Brien says, analysts focus on the immediately available resources of the two sides: number of soldiers, quantity and quality of equipment, and so on. They take those assets and use them in war games that play out various strategies. Often, those games produce some decisive outcome in a short period of time.

Actual wars, he argues, looking back at the wars of the last two centuries, seldom work out that way. All the nations entering World War I, for example, had war plans that resulted in some quick victory. None of those plans became reality.

What is likely to happen instead is that the war quickly chews up the resources that were available at the beginning: Soldiers get killed or wounded, equipment gets destroyed, and sometimes entire types of equipment (and the tactics that go with them) prove to be obsolete in the face of new realities. (The cavalry charge, for example, had to be abandoned due to machine guns. Horses that would have been the stars of a 19th-century battlefield became mere draft animals, and then lost even that role to trucks.)

So the outcome of a war winds up depending not just (or even primarily) on the resources available at the beginning, but on each side’s ability to replace their loses with new weapons developed to match the challenges the war has posed. This depends on the entire societies involved: How wealthy and technologically sophisticated are they? Do their populations have the will to keep fighting? Does the war engage the innovative abilities of the whole nation? What kind of allies does each side have, and what can those allies provide?

What O’Brien saw in Russia was a corrupt system in which units often did not have the equipment that existed on paper, and the equipment that existed in the real world often did not perform as designed. (My favorite first-days-of-the-war story was of a Ukrainian farmer on his tractor who found a broken-down Russian tank in his field. He offered to tow it back to Russia.) The Russian military had never fought against a determined, sophisticated foe, and had no experience organizing complex operations like the suppression of air defenses. Their command structure did not give lower-level officers the power to change tactics that weren’t working. Putin himself lived (and still lives) in an informational bubble, making decisions based on the facts that people aren’t afraid to tell him.

The result was that much of the Russian advantage in tanks an similar equipment was wasted. Poor logistical planning produced traffic jams on the few roads to Kyiv, making those tanks sitting ducks for air power that Russia was unable to suppress, as well as artillery and attacks from small units of Ukrainians. Ukraine’s army proved to be resourceful and creative. As the war has dragged on, Ukrainians have mastered the new warfare of drones, which pre-war analysts did not see coming. Ukrainians in the field knew what they were fighting for and were willing to do so, while Russians often did not and were not.

So here we are, more than four years later: Russia has taken enormous losses and still is no closer to victory. Putin’s stooge Trump has backed away from supplying the Ukrainians, but Europe has increasingly stepped up. The outcome is still in doubt.

National interest. O’Brien is also critical of geo-political analysis that focuses on “national interest” as an abstraction that denies the significance of choices made by leaders. The field has shied away from what it contemptuously calls the Great Man Theory of History in favor of larger forces that constrain leaders to follow certain paths.

But leadership matters. O’Brien points to the late 19th century, when Great Britain could have felt threatened by the rise of the United States, but chose not to. So leadership of the world crossed the Atlantic without without Americans and Englishmen needing to shoot at each other.

Throughout the world wars, the choices of leaders mattered, for good or ill. For example, in the late 19th century Britain sought an alliance with Germany, but Kaiser Wilhelm rejected the idea, forcing the British to ally with France and Russia instead. How World War I might have played out in a Britain/Germany world — or if it would have happened at all — is anybody’s guess.

O’Brien could not have asked for a better example of leadership choices than the Iran War that has played out since his book’s publication. Trump need not have torn up the agreement Obama had negotiated to restrain Iran’s nuclear program, and need not have gone to war at all. Even after choosing war, he could have stated clear goals and rallied the nation behind them, but did not.

So even as Iran endures massive destruction and casualties, it may well outlast Americans’ willingness to pay high gas prices.

China vs. the United States. The rise of China is the kind of development that doesn’t have to lead to war (see the US vs. Great Britain), but often does. An obvious flash point is Taiwan, which China covets and the US protects.

What will happen if we go to war?

The final chapter of War and Power applies the concepts O’Brien has been developing. He does his best not to sensationalize his conclusions, but I have a hard time seeing how the US wins this war (short of escalating to nuclear weapons).

Initially, he says, the US would have several big advantages: US equipment is generally more technologically advanced, and US forces have a lot of war-fighting experience, while Chinese troops and systems are largely untested (and didn’t do well when they fought Vietnam in the late 1970s). It’s hard to imagine the Chinese pulling off the kind of complex operation the US did to snatch Venezuelan President Maduro out of his own palace.

So a quick American knock-out is a possibility. But if the war lasts, the advantage turns: The Chinese are good at making stuff, and we aren’t any more. As planes are shot down, ships sink, and ammunition from bullets to missiles gets used up, the Chinese will replace their losses much more easily than we will. The productive advantage that won World War II for us might win the next war for China.

And in the Trump era, Americans have lost all sense of diplomacy. So could we count on South Korea or Japan to stand with us and make the things (like ships) that we no longer manufacture in any quantity?

In the end, the war might hang on the Taiwanese themselves. How badly do they want to stay independent? In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, we saw the fruitlessness of propping up an ally that doesn’t want to fight. Taiwan might prove as resilient as Ukraine. Or it might not.