David Smith & Julian Spencer-Churchill
Earlier this year, while funding for military aid to Ukraine was stalled in the U.S. Congress, critics of the Biden administration rightly pointed out that their country was now more than two years into bankrolling this war, yet their government still had no strategy for how that money was being spent. The critics’ argument was understandable. Because Kyiv had not translated previous aid packages into a clear battlefield victory, the time had come for President Joseph Biden and his advisors to produce a definite strategy for victory in Ukraine. Otherwise, there was no sense in sending even more aid to yet another losing forever war.
It is unfortunate that this legitimate criticism was drowned out by the overwhelming noise of U.S. populist isolationism, because it raises a very important issue, and not just an American problem. The West’s ambiguity in its war aims, and its apparent lack of a strategy, have resulted in ad hoc and piecemeal actions meant to virtue-signal political support for Ukraine rather than achieve any decisive results on the battlefield. Even the steps taken to arm the Ukrainian military have been gestures mostly driven by Western leaders’ need for political announceables, not any concrete plan to enable battlefield success. The West’s military approach to a political problem is directly responsible for Ukraine’s failure to achieve any decisive political victories.
This problem is not new nor unique to the war in Ukraine. There is, among those who study war, a long and venerable tradition of theorizing about the difficult relationship between military necessity and political reality. According to Karl von Clausewitz, author of Vom Krieg (1832), “war is politics by other means,” therefore, military strategy, or the use of the instrument of force, must be subordinated to the precepts of grand strategy, which is focused on the political aim. One cannot overstate the importance of a well-understood political objective to the success of military operations. The description of such an “end state,” which is basic to all NATO battle procedures and operational planning, is vital to directing combat efforts and committing scarce resources.
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