America’s Gamble

With the EU’s Von der Leyen openly declaring that Ukraine has lost 100,000 of its active troops in 9 months of conflict, the future looks bleak for NATO, Ukraine and the EU.

Loosing an estimated 100,000 troops in 9 months according to Ursula von der Leyen, when Ukraine has under 200,000 active military (source: Wikipedia), does not look good for Ukraine’s prospects. Western weapons do not shoot themselves. Additionally NATO countries have made it clear they will not send their own troops to die!

It always was a conflict dependent upon manpower attrition.

What made the statement from Von der Leyen even more substantiated was the Ukrainian governments reaction. Ukraine only expressed anger that confidential and secret information was released and not that it was wrong! The subsequent removal of that section of her speech and the claims it was inaccurate just added to the bungling.

This shows the danger of running a military campaign via social media and the press. Fools the lot of them.

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Equipment mindset or manpower mindset

It seems to me that US driven military campaigns always fail because the US are equipment centric and give little significance to feet on the ground. We saw this in Afghanistan; so much equipment but no conviction to keep troops there.

This mindset of course impacts NATO too, as the USA consider NATO their exclusive right to drive & direct. The Falklands conflict was the exact opposite. With kit left behind or knocked out, it took real soldiering with elements of autonomy and initiative to over achieve, despite the odds.

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Quick fix training

The current hope that training this proxy army to fight also can’t work. Firstly it is not a positive motivation when the trainers are not prepare to fight. But more importantly the time available to train them is insufficient to create a coherent force that gels together. They will undoubtedly resort to their old disjointed ways.

I came across this on twitter which adds to the problems. The idea of drill, stamina building, self reliance and all the boring repeated processes of military training is lost on them too.

The Ukrainians probably like most forces of the world seem to think that you can avoid hard physical training because there are cars, armoured vehicles or static trenches.

Once again as the Falkland’s conflict teaches us. The loss of the helicopters and other transport opportunities would normally be devastating for an army, but not if the training instills a pride and ability to “crack on regardless”.

You can lead a horse to water but if they don’t understand what makes the British Forces probably the best in the world they will consider it a waste… and based on this account they do consider it a waste.

Lost opportunities

NATO would have come out of this stronger ignoring the military options that the US favoured. And we have not even started to discuss what was NATO’s exit strategy! They should have supported a peacekeeping mission to enforce the Minsk agreements instead.

Russia would have had no justification to go in, sanctions hurting the EU would be avoided and BRICS would not be expanding!