(The link should allow passage through The NY Times paywall.)
In a subscriber-only newsletter, Paul Krugman has been looking at what’s been happening in Ukraine, and has some observations of note.
It starts with a burn:
...And one important strain of MAGAism was and is the belief that wokeness is making America militarily weak. Back in 2021 Senator Ted Cruz famously shared a video comparing Russian military ads, which feature manly men doing manly things, with a U.S. ad telling the story of a female recruit raised by two mothers. “Perhaps a weak, emasculated military is not the best idea,” Cruz declared.
Remarkably, the idea that wokeness makes us weak has persisted despite the failures of the decidedly un-woke Russian military in Ukraine. Senator Tom Cotton, who has published a book titled “Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power,” recently declared that “soldiers join the army to kill the bad guys — not to learn to speak like they’re in a faculty lounge.”
OK, there are so many things wrong with this worldview that it’s hard to know where to begin. National power in the modern world has far more to do with economic strength than it does with military might and also reflects “soft power” — the influence of a country’s values and culture. Even when it comes to military prowess, modern wars don’t involve much hand-to-hand combat among guys with bulging muscles. What they involve, mainly, are strategic duels using long-range weapons, aided by a lot of technology. And winning such duels surely depends in part on having leadership that is smart and well informed — that is, an officer corps that has indeed learned to speak as if it’s in a faculty lounge.
emphasis added
Krugman admits he’s not a military expert, but he does know economics and makes a strong case for looking at the numbers.
Even before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine I was a fan of the military historian Phillips O’Brien, whose 2015 book about World War II, “How the War Was Won,” has a memorable opening sentence: “There were no decisive battles in World War II.” What he meant was that the conflict was mainly a war of attrition, in which no single battle did much to shift the balance of power, especially given the rate at which all the main players were producing new weapons until late in the game.
O’Brien was, as it happens, one of the few commentators to reject the idea that Russia could overrun Ukraine in a few days. He predicted, instead, that Russia-Ukraine would turn into a war of attrition — and that Ukraine stood a good chance of winning such a war.
Krugman looks at one of the key factors in the conflict. Against Russia’s seemingly overwhelming military power, Ukraine has been able to wield soft power — relationships and actions that have made it possible for Ukraine to be the recipient of aid from the west that has countered the Russian advantage in numbers.
(He notes that there’s also another factor: the Ukrainians have shown an unexpected talent for “MacGyvering,” improvising effective military technology from civilian equipment.)
And there's this important point:
But wait, there’s more. Again, one thing I learned from O’Brien is that modern wars burn through military equipment at an incredible pace. Russia began this war with a huge number of tanks and an immense amount of artillery. But many of the tanks were destroyed in the disastrous early attempt to seize Kyiv, and the Institute for the Study of War now believes that the Russians are “depleting their stocks of artillery ammunition” to the point where they “will struggle to continue their current pace of operations.” (To be fair, the Ukrainians, who still use a lot of Soviet-era artillery, are also having problems.)
What this means is that productive capacity — ultimately, economic power — tends to be decisive in a war of attrition. And Russia is just hugely outclassed by that measure:
Krugman graphs to show the relative differences between Ukraine, Russia, and those aiding Ukraine. It, pun intended, makes the differences pretty graphic.
With my caveat that Ukraine’s continued persistence depends on continuing aid from NATO in this war of attrition, and that this is not the entire story, I still find Krugman’s conclusion to be notable:
But this is, as I said, largely about math. And the arithmetic, incredibly, seems to favor Ukraine.
Kos has been continually harping on how important logistics are. This puts it in a larger context. Read The Whole Thing.
UPDATE
A NY Times article provides an example of what Krugman is talking about, both the economic aspects, and the ability to McGyver weapons:
A Ukrainian unit is tinkering with tape, a scale, a 3-D printer and other items to turn a fragmentation grenade into a tank-killer. It’s a steep and risky challenge.
...“War is an economy. It’s money,” said Graf, a stout, bearded Ukrainian soldier in charge of his unit’s drone team. “And if you have a drone for $3,000 and a grenade for $200, and you destroy a tank that costs $3 million, it’s very interesting.”
...Ukraine has stayed ahead in the drones arm race in much the same way as it has succeeded on the battlefield: Lower-level commanders have more leeway in how and when to use them, and drone units like Graf’s have less bureaucracy to navigate to test and deploy their weapons.
...Russia, Mr. Bendett said, has taken a more industrial approach to the drone arms race, preferring munitions that are mass produced, though some Russian volunteer groups are making progress in testing and sending drones to the front line. The only drawback for the Russians: navigating Moscow’s Soviet-era bureaucracy to get the right equipment into their soldiers’ hands, Mr. Bendett said.
emphasis added