If you are not following Perun’s youtube channel of weekly one hour presentations on military topics from around the world, looking at ‘big picture’ strategy and procurement issues, you are missing out on a lot of good information about military strategy.
Perun usually runs his videos like PowerPoint presentations but occasionally he interviews a subject expert. This week he has posted an interview with Professor Justin Bronk who is an expert in modern air warfare (Senior Research Fellow at Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) & Editor of their on-line journal “RUSI Defence Systems”; also Professor at the Royal Norwegian Air Force Academy; also Member of the Editorial Board of “Weapons and Equipment” at the Central Scientific Research Institute of Arms and Military Equipment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine).
The interview is primarily about the state of the air war in Ukraine but towards the end of the interview, Perun asked Prof. Bronk to discuss some broader issues of import. What he had to say was worth hearing.
The parts I’m referring to are at the following time-stamps in the video:
00:59:48 “Closing Thoughts & The US Role”;
01:01:28 “An Open Mic On Risks And Issues”.
(Total length is 1:10:26)
For those unable to watch the embedded video, I have transcribed some of the Professor’s comments below.
Prof. Bronk:
And again, in all of this, the key factor is time. Europe is now doing mostly the right thing. There is a lot of investment starting to go into increasing production. A lot of the countries that have kind of gained a reputation for feet dragging, particularly Germany, are actually supplying huge amounts of stuff to Ukraine now and a lot of money as well, in terms of support for people and the economy and reconstruction and things. But they can’t quickly replace what the US has in terms of ready production of key munitions (ventures?). That will take time.
The Ukrainians don’t necessarily have time. Time costs a huge number of lives for them. So, political games in Washington around the next election – it’s very interesting to see quite how badly it’s going down, of course with the Ukrainians, but not just in Europe, but with US key allies in the Asia-Pacific as well, who are looking at, you know, Washington essentially just deciding to take a vacation on Ukraine while they (beg?) desperately for ammunition while they’re under heavy attack, having made these commitments to them, and going, “OK, so do US security commitments and alliances mean what they said they meant viz China in the Indo-Pacific?” And so, for example, Republican policy hawks who argue, “Well, you know we shouldn’t be sending loads of military aid to Ukraine because we need to focus on China” – What they’re doing with Ukraine, the US at the moment, is massively undercutting the entire alliance network that the US relies on as a containment strategy and military alliances for a China scenario in the Indo-Pacific, because allies are watching this with despair, really.
Perun: What are the aspects or elements of the war that are not discussed enough in the public sphere?
Prof. Bronk: So,there’s quite a few issues that I think don’t necessarily get discussed enough in a public space but I think one of the key underlying issues is that when we go over ... if we go over the cliff edge as it were, where the situation actually becomes impossible to recover, we won’t know we’ve gone over it when we do. It will only become clear when it’s far too late. So, in terms of reading the dynamics of the way that the initiative and the movements back and forth on the front are going, it’s worth bearing in mind that there’s a significant lag between the policy implications and the sort of time-frames within which policy decisions to change things could have an effect. By the time you are observing something fairly clearly in the open source, in public, the decisions those people then think “Well, we should do this.” – Those would have to have been done a few months back at least in order to change that. So there’s a lag time which I think people don’t necessarily appreciate.
And also from a political side, in terms of, you know, the consequences of essentially abandoning the Ukrainians, in terms of not providing the support they need, and not taking this seriously enough in terms of the amount that we spend, in Europe, as well as obviously the US political system just having a sort of psychotic episode, is … I don’t think they’re discussed properly either.
If Ukraine loses, not only will it be a catastrophe for them, but first of all, the Western credibility in deterrence terms will be completely destroyed because we will have shown we just didn’t care enough to take it seriously even when we weren’t being asked to do the fighting.
The Russians will have a significantly expanded army compared to what they had before the invasion – their production, mobilization is just going in that direction regardless – but they would then be hugely emboldened.
Europe would be facing a wave of millions of refugees from Ukraine – traumatized, extremely bitter, many of them combat experienced. If you look at what happened to Europe’s politics with the wave of about 2 million refugees from Syria, people haven’t thought through what this would do – even if you strip out the moral side of it, of abandoning people desperately trying to defend themselves whom we pledged to support, for as long as it took, whatever that message means.
And in any event, Russia’s going to be a threat longer term and that will suck in US commitments either way because Europe is the US’s key market for most of its manufactured goods and a lot of its services and they are completely interlinked. So, either way this is going to affect the US, and as I said, it affects the ‘deterrence envelope’ in the Indo-Pacific.
So, even for those who argue that, on the basis of ‘realpolitik’, “Well, let’s just do some sort of deal and it’s not going to be too expensive, whatever.” — (a) The Russians will not offer a significant deal – they think they are going to win. So if you look at what the Russians are offering, the terms – it’s essentially a surrender request – but the terms are essentially that Ukraine gives up all of the four oblasts – not just the two that are majority occupied – but all of the four oblasts that Russia has claimed are now part of Russia, even though they don’t control the vast bulk of two them and not all of the other two. So, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, Luhansk ... and Odessa is sometimes chucked in there, potentially Kharkiv as well, so Ukraine’s second and third largest cities; but also to then say that Ukraine must promise to never join NATO but it can join the EU – that’s the kind of fig leaf – and Ukraine must maintain a leader who is friendly to Russia. Now, that latter bit is incompatible with democracy because no Russia-friendly leader will ever be elected in Ukraine again, and if one were put in place, and there was democracy, they would be voted out immediately. So, one of the requirements for joining the EU is that you are a functioning democracy. So, the Russian terms in themselves are mutually incompatible. It’s just a device to give ammunition to people making bad faith arguments and useful idiots in the West who continue to try to undermine that support [of Ukraine].
The Russians are not interested in a meaningful ceasefire – they’re interested in Ukrainian surrender. And if they get a ceasefire they will just come slamming back in on their own timetable having extracted all of those concessions and broken the trust that remains between Ukraine and the West.
So, there isn’t a way out of this that isn’t disastrous, except to start taking it seriously and to do so really urgently. We need to spend a hell of a lot more money on urgently upgrading our [UK & Europe] defense production and getting Ukrainians as much as we can and rebuilding our own stockpiles to enable us to go deeper in terms of giving away what we haven’t already in the meantime, accepting that even the best case is that Ukrainians hold for the rest of 2024 – the Russians are going to have a large offensive in the summer, almost certainly – and then get Ukrainians into shape where they can go back on the offensive in 2025 hopefully against a more exhausted Russia … but that’s the best case.
The alternatives are really, really dark indeed.
And that goes doubly for the US because only the US can actually salvage the situation in the immediate term.
[Note — I’m in Australia and it is well past my bed-time, so I won’t be around in the comments just yet. Will check in when I can. Not getting to sleep tonight, so I’m up and checking in on comments.]
