Does include some injury
Hypersonic Missiles
The conversion of naval missiles to land based launchers is something that should have been foreseeable, as that exact scenario happened way back in the Falklands war, where the Argentinan navy converted their ship to ship Exocets into a land based system to defend Port Stanley harbour.
The UK turned air-launched Brimstone missiles into ground-launched missiles for Ukraine.
The Pomerantsev book should be required reading in the DNC and Biden campaign, especially by the well-meaning establishment technocrats who think the way to win is by appealing to facts and reason and people’s better natures. When fighting against fascists, the low road is always the most effective route to take.
Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West - and will likely lose - if the West mobilizes its resources to resist the Kremlin. The West’s existing and latent capability dwarfs that of Russia. The combined gross domestic product (GDP) of NATO countries, non-NATO European Union states, and our Asian allies is over $63 trillion.[1] The Russian GDP is on the close order of $1.9 trillion.[2] Iran and North Korea add little in terms of materiel support. China is enabling Russia, but it is not mobilized on behalf of Russia and is unlikely to do so.[3] If we lean in and surge, Russia loses.
The notion that the war is unwinnable because of Russia’s dominance is a Russian information operation, which gives us a glimpse of the Kremlin’s real strategy and only real hope of success. The Kremlin must get the United States to the sidelines, allowing Russia to fight Ukraine in isolation and then proceed to Moscow’s next targets, which Russia will also seek to isolate. The Kremlin needs the United States to choose inaction and embrace the false inevitability that Russia will prevail in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s center of gravity is his ability to shape the will and decisions of the West, Ukraine, and Russia itself. The Russian strategy that matters most, therefore, is not Moscow’s warfighting strategy, but rather the Kremlin’s strategy to cause us to see the world as it wishes us to see it and make decisions in that Kremlin-generated alternative reality that will allow Russia to win in the real world.
Those whose perspective aligns with the Kremlin’s are not ipso facto Russian dupes. The Kremlin links genuine sentiment and even some legitimate arguments to Russia’s interests in public debate. The Kremlin is also an equal opportunity manipulator. It targets the full spectrum of those making or informing decisions. It partially succeeds on every side of the political spectrum. Perception manipulation is one of the Kremlin’s core capabilities — now unleashed with full force onto the Western public as the Kremlin’s only strategy for winning in Ukraine.[4] That is not a challenge most societies are equipped to contend with.
The United States has the power to deny Russia its only strategy for success, nevertheless. The United States has allowed Russia to play an outsized role in shaping American decision-making, but the United States has also made many sound choices regarding Russia’s war in Ukraine.[5] The key successes achieved by Ukraine and its partners in this war have resulted from strategic clarity.[6] Lost opportunities on the battlefield, on the other hand, have resulted from the West’s failure to connect ground truths to our interests quickly enough to act.[7] Fortunately, the United States faces an easier task in overcoming the Kremlin’s manipulations than Russia does in closing the massive gap between Russia’s war aims and its capabilities. The United States must surge its support to Ukraine, and it must do so in time. Delays come at the cost of Ukrainian lives, increased risk of failure in Ukraine, and the erosion of the US advantage over Russia, granting the Kremlin time to rebuild and develop capabilities that it intends to use against the West — likely on a shorter timeline than the West assesses.[8]
The United States must defeat Russia’s efforts to alter American will and decision-making for reasons that transcend Ukraine. For the United States to deter, win, or help win any future war, US decisions must be timely, connected to our interests, values, and ground truth, but above all – these decisions must be ours. The US national security community theorizes a lot about the importance of US decision advantage over our adversaries, including timeliness. Russia presents an urgent and real-world requirement for America to do so in practice.
This bit deserves highlighting too. It’s easy enough for Putin’s propagandists to play on the stupidity and ignorance and bad faith typical of modern Western conservatism. However, they also have side disinfo operations aimed at more dogmatic and/or less sophisticated members of the populist left, ones based in real-world concerns.
For example, as we see with RFK Jr, there’s a path to be found from wellness woo conspiracism (“Big Pharma does shady/greedy things” => “vaccines and mask mandates are means for ‘the elites’ to control us”) to converting pacifists into isolationists and Russian appeasers re: Ukraine (“the military-industrial complex is cause for worry” => “‘the elites’ are profiting from opposing Russia in this war.”).
A similar situation played out in certain sectors of the UK’s left during Brexit, where legitimate opposition to the neoliberal default model of economics was sometimes foolishly conflated with rejection of the EU project overall. Kremlin propagandists have been playing this game for a while now.
