US aid to Ukraine has been restored and is on its way. While part of me has been celebrating, most of me knows how much work is still to be done. Even with the new package, the US is giving insufficient aid to Ukraine. Our chance to win this war on the cheap faded when we were too slow to ramp up aid in 2022. And no, I’m not saying F-16s would have magically appeared in 2022, but I am saying that had we put more resources in from the start Ukraine might have been more prepared to follow up the liberation of Kherson when Russia hadn’t significantly dug-in yet. But that ship has sailed. Victory in Ukraine will be considerably more costly. And it’s not just about saving Ukraine and defeating Russia. It’s also crossed into a question of US military readiness on two fronts.
First, US and NATO doctrine is now of unknown effectiveness in the new intense drone era. US doctrine is based on air supremacy and has never been tested in the context of what Ukraine is currently facing. We recently saw that Israel (a US doctrine analog) is able to destroy an S-300 site in Iran, but that wasn’t against Russia and it’s unclear what level of electronic warfare jamming was in place by Iran. The US is also getting practice in various places versus irregular troops employing drones, but not in a near peer environment. I’m not saying that NATO doctrine couldn’t win against, say China, but I am saying that much has changed in warfare that has not been tested by the US in a large conflict.
In the face of Russian air superiority Ukraine has managed to sink or drive away much of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Vessels which were supposedly equipped with modern anti-missile defenses. The sinkings may have been due to poor Russian equipment performance, but it may not be entirely. US ships are not invulnerable. The USS Cole incident in October of 2000 exposed holes in US naval defense at the time. While the US Navy will certainly be studying the current conflict and performing tests, tests are not live fire against real enemies. What seem like minor differences can end up having significant consequences if the enemy can take advantage. And while this is a naval example, the principle works with aviation as well.
The second front of concern for the US military is one of readiness to assist non-NATO allies. Assistance to NATO allies comes with article 5 and presumably a full US military involvement. Ukraine, a country we want to support but is not a part of NATO, has been exposing a weakness of the US military. That weakness is the custom design of all of our gear to be used fairly exclusively in a Air Supremacy environment. Air Supremacy is an assumption our military trainers have built in to the system. Unfortunately this means that some of our gear and training assistance is less impactful when the whole aviation package does not come along with it. As such, the US government needs to consider not just direct US defense, but the ability to give a useful package of aid to a country such as Ukraine which cannot guarantee Air Supremacy.
So the US has several purely selfish reasons to up its aid to Ukraine. If we wish to truly test out NATO doctrine in a near-pear drone/electronic warfare environment we need to give Ukraine ALL of the tools in which to make that happen. Yes that will take some time for training. Time we’ve already been wasting. But so long as we give half-heartedly to Ukraine our own doctrine goes untested versus a real enemy and if we are honest with ourselves becomes an increasingly large uncertainty. We may be okay. We may not be.
These reasons are of course the selfish reasons to increase aid levels to a point at which the Ukraine military looks enough like a NATO military for the doctrines to be truly tested. The more important reason is that Ukraine simply needs more money if it is going to win. I’ve seen numerous numbers kicking around for Russian military spending but it’s roughly in the area of $100 Billion per year. While western militaries together plus Ukraine’s own budget is roughly approximate, some of that will be misleading. US military aid is priced at US military price markups. What the US pays for a missile is not what Russia pays for a similar missile. Just like a coffee in Manhattan is priced differently than a coffee in Watertown, NY.
Further, without a voluntary Russian withdrawal, Ukraine has the onus of needing to go on the offensive to gain back its land. We can’t be funding Ukraine at levels which put it on parity with Russia. It needs to be funded at levels which will make it dominate Russia. This will be needed to both overcome the natural disadvantages of attacking, but also to overcome the inherent costliness of fighting in a fast evolving war zone. It costs money to try new things and many of those things don’t end up working. Finally, Ukraine needs a material advantage in quality and quantity to make up for both fewer people and to balance out our side actually caring about our people and wanting as many as possible to come back home.
Wars can be won on the cheap. See Afghanistan (multiple times) and Viet Nam. But doing so generally involves a considerable amount of time and suffering. We want Ukraine to win, but we really also want them to win as quickly as possible. We want to reduce Ukraine’s suffering, we want to rein Russia in, and we want to discourage other bad actors in the world from thinking they can get away with something.
I doubt there is much chance for a new aid package this year considering how difficult it was to get the last one. But come November, we need the people in office who will make supporting Ukraine the priority it needs to be. Supporting Ukraine in winning can’t be done by sending 40 year-old cast off equipment and funding it to parity. We need to invest in Ukraine as a top priority. We need Ukraine to win, and we need them to win BIG. And we aren’t going to do that by matching Russia’s defense budget. We need to commit to funding Ukraine in such a way that leads to a resounding victory.