By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How Wars Don’t End

On February 24, 2022, the great Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov and his wife were awakened in Kyiv by the sound of Russian missiles. At first, he could not believe what was happening. “You have to get used psychologically to the idea that war has begun,” he wrote. Many observers of the invasion felt and continue to feel that sense of disbelief. They were confounded by Russia’s open and massive assault and amazed at Ukraine’s dogged and successful resistance. Who, as the Russian columns advanced in those first days of the war, would have predicted that the two sides would still be fighting well over a year later? With so many more weapons and resources and much more manpower to draw on, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Russia would crush Ukraine and seize its main cities in a matter of days.

Yet well into its second year, the war goes on in a very different way than expected. An invasion of Ukraine, many assumed, would involve rapid advances and decisive battles. There has been some of that, including Ukraine’s dramatic counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in the late summer of 2022. But by early May, despite talk of a prominent Ukrainian offensive, the war had long since become a grinding conflict along increasingly fortified battle lines. Indeed, the scenes from eastern Ukraine—soldiers knee-deep in mud, the two sides facing each other from trenches and ruined buildings across a wasteland churned up by shells—could be from the western front in 1916 or Stalingrad in 1942.

Before the Russian invasion, many assumed that wars among major twenty-first-century powers, if they happened, would not be like earlier ones. They would be fought using a new generation of advanced technologies, including autonomous weapons systems. They would play out in space and cyberspace; boots on the ground would probably not matter much. Instead, the West has come to terms with another state-to-state war on European soil, fought by large armies over many square miles of territory. And that is only one of many ways that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine harks back to the two world wars. Like those earlier wars, it was fueled by nationalism and unrealistic assumptions about how easy it would be to overwhelm the enemy. The fighting has occurred in civilian areas as much as on the battlefield, laying waste to towns and villages and sending populations fleeing. It has consumed vast resources, and the governments involved have been forced to use conscripts and, in the case of Russia, mercenaries. The conflict has led to a search for new and more deadly weapons and carries the potential for dangerous escalation. It is also drawing in many other countries.

The experience of an earlier great war in Europe—we know it as World War I—should remind us of the dreadful costs of a prolonged and bitter armed conflict. And, like today, that war was widely expected to be short and decisive. Yet the world, and Ukraine, now face disquieting questions. How long will Russia persist with its campaign, even though its hopes of celebrating victory continue to recede? What more significant damage and horrors will be inflicted on Ukraine and its people? And when can those countries most affected by the conflict, from Ukraine’s neighbors to the broader membership of NATO, stop worrying that the war will spill outside Ukraine’s borders? But the past also offers an even darker warning—this time, for the future, when the war in Ukraine finally ends, as all wars do. Ukraine and its supporters may reasonably hope for an overwhelming victory and the fall of the Putin regime. Yet if Russia is left in turmoil, bitter and isolated, with many of its leaders and people blaming others for its failures, as so many Germans did in those interwar decades, the end of one war could lay the groundwork for another.

 

Sarajevo Syndrome

In the spring of 1914, few thought a land war between major European powers was possible. European states, so their inhabitants complacently assumed, were too advanced, too economically integrated—too “civilized,” in the language of the time—to resort to armed conflict with each other. Wars still took place on the periphery of Europe, in the Balkans notably or in colonial territories, where Europeans fought against less powerful peoples—but not, it was thought, on the continent itself.

Much the same was held in the early weeks of 2022. Leaders, policymakers, and the public in the West tended to view warfare as something that happened elsewhere, whether in the form of insurrections against unpopular governments or the seemingly endless conflicts in failed states. True, there were concerns about major-power conflict when, say, China and India clashed along their shared border or when China and the United States traded barbs over the fate of Taiwan. But wars were a thing of the past or far away to those in the more fortunate parts of the world—the Americas, Europe, much of Asia, and the Pacific.

In 1914 and 2022, those who assumed the war wasn’t possible were wrong. In 1914, there were dangerous and unresolved tensions among the European powers, a new arms race, and regional crises, which had led to talk of war. Similarly, in the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow had clarified its grievances with the West, and Russian President Vladimir Putin indicated his intentions. Rather than rely on assumptions about the unlikelihood of a full-scale war, Western leaders who doubted the prospect of a Russian invasion should have paid more attention to his rhetoric about Ukraine. The title of the lengthy essay Putin published in 2021 said it all: “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” He argued that Ukraine was the birthplace of Russia, and its people have always been Russian. In his view, malign outside forces—Austria-Hungary before World War I and the European Union today—had tried to divide Russia from its rightful patrimony.

Putin also echoed early-twentieth-century leaders in concluding that war was a reasonable option. Following a Serbian nationalist’s assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, the rulers of Austria-Hungary quickly convinced themselves that they had to destroy Serbia, even if it meant war with Serbia’s protector, Russia. Tsar Nicholas II was still smarting from the humiliation he had been dealt when Austria-Hungry annexed Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire in 1908, and he vowed he would never back down again. German Kaiser Wilhelm II, commanding the world’s most powerful army, feared appearing cowardly. Each of these leaders, in different ways, felt that a quick and decisive war offered the best way to reinvigorate their countries. Similarly, Putin resented Moscow’s loss of power after the Cold War and was convinced he would quickly overwhelm Ukraine. And he confronted leaders in Europe and the United States who had their minds on other things, just as a century earlier, when the crisis erupted on the continent, the British government was preoccupied with trouble in Ireland.

Equally dangerous was the aggressors’ assumption that a war would be short and decisive. In 1914, the major powers had only offensive war plans predicated on quick victories. Germany’s notorious Schlieffen Plan imagined a two-front war against France and its ally Russia. The German army would fight a holding action in the east, where Germany and Russia shared a common border. And Germany would launch a massive attack in the West, swooping down through Belgium and northern France to encircle Paris—all within six weeks, at which point, the Germans assumed, France would surrender, and Russia would sue for peace. In 2022, Putin made much the same mistake. So convinced was he of Russia’s ability to rapidly conquer Ukraine that he had a puppet government in waiting and ordered his soldiers to bring their dress uniforms for a victory parade. And like imperial Germany a century earlier, Russia paid little heed to the potentially catastrophic costs if things did not go as planned.

Leaders with the power to take their countries into war—or hold them back—can rarely be considered mere machines tabulating costs and benefits. If Putin had made the proper calculations at the beginning, he would probably not have invaded Ukraine, or at least he would have tried to extricate Russian forces as soon as it became clear that he would not get the rapid, cheap conquest he expected. Emotions—resentment, pride, fear—can influence decisions great and small, and as 1914 showed, so can the experiences of those making the decisions. Like Nicholas, Putin remembered a humiliation. As a young KGB officer, he had witnessed firsthand the Soviet empire’s retreat from East Germany and then the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, and he saw the eastward expansion of NATO and the EU—both of which had started under his predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—as an indignity and a threat. The West downplayed Russia’s fears and largely ignored the blows to its national pride.

 

The Fast-War Fallacy

As World War I indelibly demonstrated, wars rarely go as planned. Military strategists were aware of the growing importance of trench warfare and rapid-firing artillery, yet they failed to see the consequences. They were unprepared for what quickly became static frontlines, in which the opposing sides carried out massive exchanges of artillery and machine-gunned fire from fortified trenches—tactics that led to very high casualty rates with minimal advances. A war meant to be over in months ground on for more than four years and cost far more in human lives and economic resources than anyone had imagined at the outset.

Although the war in Ukraine is only in its second year, it, too, has unfolded, for months-long stretches, in a situation of hardening frontlines with very high human costs. Such a reality does not preclude the possibility of significant new operations by either side and consequent shifts in momentum. Well over a year into the war, advances will likely come at a much higher price. Ground that has been fought over, as the generals learned in World War I, is more difficult to move across. And both sides have used the winter months to prepare their defenses. Although such figures must be treated cautiously, Western intelligence agencies have estimated that during some of the worst fighting, Russia has suffered an average of over 800 killed and wounded daily. Ukrainian officials have acknowledged peaks of between 200 and 500 Ukrainian casualties per day. Russia has already lost more soldiers in this war than in its ten years of fighting in Afghanistan.

The right kind of military preparations can matter more than overall firepower. In the early twentieth century, the British and German navies devoted enormous resources to building fleets of Dreadnought battleships, just as their counterparts today have sought aircraft carriers. But new and sometimes cheap technologies, such as mines a century ago and drones today, can render these substantial war machines obsolete. In World War I, British and German battleships often remained in port because mines and submarines posed too significant a hazard. In the current war, Ukraine has sunk the heavily armed flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with two relatively low-tech anti-ship missiles, blown apart hundreds of Russian tanks with drones and artillery shells, and hamstrung Russia’s supposedly superior air force with its air defenses.

The war in Ukraine has resurfaced the age-old problem of insufficient or misdirected defense spending. Before 1914, the British kept their army small and underfunded and were slow to introduce new technologies such as the machine gun. In the run-up to World War II, the United Kingdom and France were late to rearm, creating a disadvantage that helped convince their leaders to try to appease Hitler. Thus, the two countries did little to resist Germany’s takeover of Austria and Czechoslovakia, giving the Nazis an even stronger position in the heart of Europe. Similarly unprepared, European leaders did little to respond to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his undeclared war in eastern Ukraine in 2014. That and the fact that the Ukrainian armed forces, then still modeled on the old hierarchical Soviet model and underequipped and poorly trained, had performed badly in 2014 were critical parts of the context in which Russia decided to invade in 2022.

No less than in the past, the ability to keep society functioning and the war machine going can make the difference between victory and defeat. At the outbreak of World War I, armies on both sides found that in a matter of weeks, they were exhausting stocks of ammunition meant to last for months or more. The belligerents had to mobilize their societies to an extraordinary degree to ensure they could keep fighting. So grand was the strain on Russia that it brought about the collapse of the old regime in 1917, the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, and a brutal and destructive civil war. In today’s battle, Ukrainian society has met the extraordinary challenges and hardships imposed on it and, by many indications, is more united than ever. But it is unclear how long the country can hold together as its infrastructure is steadily destroyed and more people flee abroad. More immediately, Ukraine may struggle to secure enough ammunition and other equipment, such as armored vehicles, to carry on, especially as both sides step up their fighting during the warmer months.

By the spring of 2023, Russia had already upped its defense production and obtained weapons from several other countries, including Iran and North Korea. Yet according to multiple reports and leaked intelligence documents, the Western powers—led by the United States, on which Ukraine depends—have been painfully slow to ramp up their delivery of weapons and materiel, leaving Kyiv with critical shortages. Much will depend on whether the West will continue to increase its support. Putin’s Russia faces severe strains of its own, with cracks beginning to appear among the Russian elite and as hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians, especially men of military age, leave the country. Will Russia hang together as the Soviet Union did in World War II? Or will the years to produce a repeat of 1917?

 

Putin’s Verdun

The longer a conflict lasts, the more critical allies and resources become. Germany and its partners had some early successes in both world wars, yet as the fight wore on, the opposing coalition won the economic battle and the one on the battlefield. In each case, the United Kingdom could rely on its overseas empire for wealth and raw materials, and later on, the United States became, as President Franklin Roosevelt put it in World War II, the “arsenal of democracy” and ultimately a full military partner. That preponderance of resources and manpower was critical in bringing about Allied victories.

At the time of Putin’s 2022 invasion, Russia appeared to have a significant advantage over Ukraine, including a far more robust military and more of everything that could be counted, from tanks to troops. But as the war has continued, Ukraine’s allies have proved more important than Russia’s might. Indeed, for all the bravery and skill of Ukraine’s armed forces, Kyiv could not have endured as long as it has without the extraordinary flow of arms and money from NATO countries. Wars are won or lost as much by access to resources or attrition of the enemy’s resources as by the skill of each side’s commanders and the bravery of their combatants. And the public of each belligerent nation must be sustained in their hopes of winning, and such persuasion can come at a significant cost.

One of the hallmarks of the two world wars was the enormous symbolic importance given to particular towns or regions—even if the costs of defending or capturing them seem to defy reason. Hitler wasted some of his best forces and equipment at Stalingrad because he refused to retreat. Not all the Pacific islands the American troops struggled to capture from Japan had great strategic significance. Consider Iwo Jima, in which the United States suffered more than 26,000 casualties in just 36 days, incurring some of the highest single-battle losses in Marine Corps history: the victory gave the Americans little more than a landing strip of debatable strategic value. And then there was Verdun in World War I. That fortress near France’s border with Germany had some strategic significance. Still, its historical symbolism made it essential to Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German general staff. He felt that if the French could be defeated at a place so intertwined with French history, it would weaken their will to keep fighting. And even if they chose to defend it, they would take such losses that, as Falkenhayn put it, he would “bleed France white.” It was a challenge the French understood and accepted.

The offensive started with a massive German attack in February 1916. When Falkenhayn’s initial plan to seize all the hills around Verdun failed, the Germans found themselves committed to a devastating battle they could not win. At the same time, they could not withdraw from locations they had already taken, including the outlying French fortress of Douaumont: the gains had cost too many German lives, and German leaders had told the public that Douaumont was the key to the more extensive campaign. The battle of Verdun came to a close ten months later with around 143,000 German and 162,000 French dead and some 750,000 total casualties. In the end, the French had recaptured a large part of the territory the Germans had managed to seize, though the war would continue for nearly two more years.

 

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