Timing is everything. A discharge petition will likely succeed in passing the Senate bill to fund Ukrainian defense, but this parliamentary procedure will also likely take a month to accomplish. Altogether, opponents of Ukraine aid will have starved Kyiv of funding and ammunition flows for exactly as much time as Vladimir Putin planned to spend building a mountain of Russian corpses around Avdiivka prior to his ceremonial reelection. Not by coincidence, Alexei Navalny has died in the hands of the Russian prison system.
The excuses of the opposition leaders are weak. Speaker Mike Johnson demands to know what the strategy for victory is, then throws up his arms in exasperation. It is an act. Speaker Johnson knows nothing about strategic military planning. He would not recognize a 21st century war strategy if it smacked him in the head. “The really important thing to bear in mind here is that this spending does not help Ukraine,” Elon Musk blathers. “Prolonging the war does not help Ukraine. This is very important to appreciate.” The important thing to appreciate about Musk is that he is transactional; he imagines the sacrifice of Ukraine in the short term will purchase peace for the world in the long term. Putin’s Russia does not operate on the same principles as Musk, who is fooling only himself.
All of these critics pretend to care about the bloodshed when reducing American support for Ukraine clearly kills more Ukrainians. Reflecting the Kremlin’s message, they worry the whole world will bleed unless we stop helping Ukraine immediately. In fact they are creating the exact conditions necessary for bloody strategic defeat of the United States and its most important strategic alliance. They are the ones advocating for endless wars. As Tucker Carlson has learned to his embarrassment, Putin does not reward western sycophants. He scorns them instead as useful idiots. He uses them to soften and prepare the West to receive his aggression.
Backers of the Senate defense spending bill like to argue that the aid package will mostly be spent inside the United States. Job creation is nice, but the real headline is that this money will improve the American defense industrial base (DIB). Munitions production capacity has been neglected for decades in the West, where the political establishment rejects reindustrialization. As a result, the war in Ukraine has exposed just how shallow American magazines are. For example, the single biggest reason why Joe Biden has only given Volodymyr Zelenskyy a handful of ATACMS is that only a few thousand of them were ever manufactured.
Pentagon planners have moved to address this problem, but building up DIB takes time, and more importantly it requires consistent funding. For example, the US Army is trying to meet a goal of accepting 100,000 rounds of 155mm howitzer ammunition per month. Given the ammunition expenditure rates seen in Ukraine, that seems a dangerously low bar, but it would nevertheless double current US output. Notably, the Ukraine aid package is supposed to make this production increase possible. Congressional delays in funding are therefore already creating time and opportunity costs, affecting America’s ability to deter would-be adversaries — and inviting aggression.
Europe has been even slower to get off the mark in raising production. The European Union is only halfway to its goal of delivering one million rounds per year thanks to protectionist politicians excluding non-EU suppliers. Orders are taking a year to reach the battlefield. Increasingly, smaller NATO countries like Denmark are simply shipping their artillery and ammunition to Ukraine without immediate replacement while their economies play catch-up. So far, no western power has tried long-term contracts to incentivize suppliers. Thus, even though the unit costs of precision guided munitions are declining, supply is not meeting demand.
Understandably, Kyiv does not limit their shopping to markets in Europe or the US. They find ammunition suppliers worldwide. Since 2022, Turkey and South Korea have been the big winners in Ukrainian arms sales. Russian authorities recently announced a retaliatory ban on bananas from Ecuador after that country agreed to sell arms to Ukraine as “scrap.” Ukraine is also manufacturing more ammunition themselves all the time, because unlike European countries that are not being invaded by Russia, the Ukrainians treat the situation as an emergency.
With the benefit of centralized authority, Russia has nearly overheated its economy with two years of wartime spending to ramp up production. The United States and Europe are still lagging behind Moscow in this strategic arms race even though they have far larger economies. With a modicum of effort, they can still collectively outpace Russia during 2024, foreclosing any opportunity for wider war while turning the tide of battle in Ukraine, and Putin knows that.
More than helping Ukraine, then, the western powers are collectively trying to deter further Russian aggression. Efforts to reduce or delay American DIB development over Ukraine aid, on the other hand, invite future Russian aggression, even if they come couched in the mewling language of pacifism.
Nor can the war in Ukraine be seen in isolation from Iran’s proxy wars in the Middle East or China’s ambitions in the Taiwan Strait. While the US Navy has little presence in the Ukraine aid bill, ammunition bottlenecks are a similar constraint on action. If combat began today, it is unclear that the US Navy could keep fighting a war against China for very long before they ran out of ammunition. Now the Department of the Navy is calling for a new generation of cheap drones to meet the threat and overwhelm the PLAN by operating in swarms.
Drones have emerged as the new battlefield munition and Ukraine now leads the world in development. Sea drones are clearing the Black Sea of Russian surface warships. Attack drones are striking oil terminals and fuel facilities deep inside Russia. Ukraine is set to produce a whole new tactical drone arsenal this year, including their own so-called “Lancet drones.” Recent operations on the left bank of the Dnipro River have demonstrated the value of these drones for stopping Russian attacks and attriting equipment. If he really wanted to understand Ukraine’s strategy for winning the war, Mark Johnson would visit their new drone factories, made possible through extensive public-private partnerships. While these arrangements last longer than the gaps between budgetary continuing resolutions (CRs) in Congress, they are dynamic, allowing for rapid introduction of innovative designs.
By contrast, Russian milbloggers have complained about a decline in the quality of the tactical drone kits that troops receive. For while there are “government contracts for five years in advance for these drones,” the first person viewer (FPV) drone war is changing faster than Russia’s centralized decision-making system can adapt. Moreover, changes to the electronic battlefield guarantee that “the must-have high-tech of June 2023 will begin to rapidly become obsolete by the fall of that year. And in a year [the Russian soldier] won’t be able to fly beyond his own trenches at all.” Writing in January, the Marine Corps of Sevastopol Telegram channel predicted “catastrophic consequences. Within six months or so” unless contracting is made more competitive.
Put simply, Europe, the United States, and Ukraine can out-produce Russia this year. It is a winning strategy in a war of attrition. In fact it is the only winning strategy. But it requires accepting that the war will be longer than you might want it to be. In the meantime, we can leave it to Ukrainians to figure out the most efficient way to kill Russians, and learn from them.
The fall of Avdiivka was not a surprise. Open-source analysts had predicted it ten days beforehand based on the reduction in western aid. Military analysts all seem to agree the defense of the Avdiivka salient became impossible due to the interrupted flows of ammunition. Ordering the withdrawal from Avdiivka this weekend was the first significant decision by Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the new commander of Ukrainian forces. In all likelihood, the departure of Gen. Velery Zaluzhnyy, and his repacement by Syrskyi, were also prompted by the intransigence of Mike Johnson.
"The life of military personnel is the highest value,” Syrskyi said in a statement to the press. “We will return Avdiivka anyway.” At this hour, it appears that Ukrainian forces have completed a successful withdrawal in good order to prepared defensive positions west of Avdiivka. Russians were unable to encircle and destroy the defending force. Open source analysts count hundreds of destroyed Russian vehicles around the devastated suburb of Donetsk City. Russian milbloggers admit to 16,000 Russian deaths taking Avdiivka, about one-third of Ukrainian estimates of Russian casualties and still more than the death toll of the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan. Celebration of the victory at Avdiivka is therefore muted. Russian offensive action in the area has culminated, though it continues near Kupyansk and at Robotyne.
Without a drastic political turn in the West, Vladimir Putin will never out-produce the West. Contrary to what Elon Musk says, time is not on Russia’s side. Time allows the West to get its act together, finally, whereas even dictators have limits, and sovereign wealth funds cannot run deficits forever. If Ukraine receives what they need for victory, Putin will not be able to start another war like this one. If we want more and bigger wars like this one, on the other hand, then all we have to do is abandon Kyiv and stop improving our DIB. Putin will recieve that invitation with satisfaction.