Rethink, rearm, respond

Many millions of us across the free world are holding out for the heroic fightback against Putin, tuning in obsessively to Ukrainian outlets and international media on the ground for the latest news of the resistance. There are reports of Ukrainian forces shooting down Russian transports. British supplied NLAW anti-tank weapons, designed and manufactured in a joint project with a subsidiary of Sweden’s Saab Group, are being used by the defenders. Footage is circulating of Russian vehicles stranded and out of fuel. As Major General Julian Thompson of the Royal Marines, a Falklands veteran commander turned military historian, explains in Lifeblood of War (1991) his study of logistics in conflict, time and again history shows how a military commander who fails to understand logistics risks breakdown and defeat.

At the time of writing, in Kyiv President Zelensky is still rallying the response. The Ukrainian government hasn’t collapsed as was feared. Western governments and central banks are in the process of detonating a bomb under the rouble, crashing the currency in part by making it difficult to access some of Russia’s reserves.

On the ground in Ukraine, weapons have been handed out to the citizenry. Improvised defence units are being formed. People who last week were shop-workers, IT staff, web developers, construction workers, bank clerks and civil servants are fighting and dying  in defence of their country in an effort to repel the invader.

But we need to be realistic about their chances of success, at least in the medium term. For all the individual and collective acts of bravery, and the way in which so far the Russians have looked arrogant and poorly trained, the terrible, brute truth is that the forces are hopelessly mismatched in terms of firepower. Since the Russians stepped up their New Look military modernisation in 2008 some of the proceeds of all that oil and gas the West bought have been spent on improving Russia’s military capability. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2022, Russia has 900,000 combat troops to deploy, and reserves of two million, against a Ukrainian force of 196,000  regulars and 900,000 reservists. The Russians have 399 attack helicopters; Ukraine has zero. Russia has 2,927 battle tanks. Ukraine has 858. Russia has 1172 combat aircraft, up against 124 Ukrainian battle-ready planes.

Short of the Russian military refusing orders or President Putin being removed by some combination of his senior staff and advisers, in the unlikely event any of them could get near the puffy-eyed, paranoid plutocrat, the most plausible outcome, sadly, is still eventually Russian weight of numbers and weaponry winning out. If that happens, he takes Ukraine after besieging the main centres of population.

Putin may have intended to work in stages, deploying less than his full firepower in the first phase in the hope that his war aims could be accomplished with minimal civilian casualties, reducing the risk of disquiet in Russia at the sight of prolonged death and destruction on fellow Slav territory. Western intelligence fears that having failed in the first four days to get as far as he intended, Putin will now turn up the dial, unleashing air power and artillery on a bigger scale to knock out Ukrainian forces and stun the population into submission.

With resistance tougher than anticipated he’ll throw more at it on the basis that having started this war he has to win. In the weeks ahead he may drop in paramilitary-style organisations, made up of thousands of war-crazed fanatics, to up the terror factor amid the rubble. In this way, incredibly, thanks to the delusional Russian romantic, historical imaginings and ramblings of Putin, we are back, on the European continent, to 1940s-style horrors.

What then? There may be a bloody partisan campaign against the occupiers. If it happens, this will be the first European partisan war of the modern social media era, with the Western media paying full attention and amplifying the clips of food and military convoys being attacked, in the way that those attacking the Allies in Afghanistan operated years after 2001. The West can help, although it raises complex questions about how far NATO states can go in offering arms and assistance, when Putin may be looking for a pretext for further conflict.

On Sunday afternoon Putin gave a glimpse of what he’s capable of in the next phase, when he put his nuclear forces on alert, inducing a collective shiver. 

This should give pause to anyone arguing this aggression will pass, that he’ll stop in Ukraine as a purely rational actor who wants only that country. He can’t possibly want a Third World War or notoriety as mankind goes up in a series of mushroom clouds? Western governments are now worried about his state of mind. Perhaps he is detached enough from reality to risk it.

Everything that has happened in recent weeks demonstrates that once again – as with Hitler – it makes sense to take seriously what the tyrant has bothered to write down and prize armed deterrence in response. Hitler’s plans for civilisational conflict and racial warfare were hidden in plain sight, in a best-selling book. It wasn’t populist showboating; it was his real, deranged worldview. Similarly, Putin’s quite mad scribblings about greater Russia and restoring it as a great European power are there to read in his long essay of last year. This isn’t just about Ukraine. He sees the “theft” of the Baltic states as a historic loss that must be reversed. Putin wants to smack Poland, if he can, and he menaces Finland and Sweden.

Whatever the immediate outcome, there is now going to have to be a rapid rearmament of free Europe to deter action by Putin or a successor. Policy must be rebuilt on a worst case basis. Gambling on a good outcome didn’t work on Ukraine, after all. A leader who could invade that sovereign country, when many said he wanted “merely” a few disputed territories, is capable of even worse the longer he spends in the bunker.

This realisation is what drove the extraordinary and welcome u-turn in Germany on Sunday morning. Delusional “sophisticated” Merkelism – talk some talk on Russia but also get hooked on Russian energy and don’t spend properly on defence – has now gone up in flames. The new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has buried decades of German strategic doctrine and he now sees this in terms of defence of the West. Germany will spend more than 2% of GDP on defence from now on and invest billions more immediately in kit.

In Britain, this new dispensation will also require a complete rethink. On defence, the cuts will have to be reversed and there will need to be major investment in expanding the army, air power, cyber (where the British have made major advances already) and the navy.

On energy policy, the party is over. We are no longer living in the era of COP26. This is real life, not a David Attenborough documentary.

A newly-published report by the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, sent my way by a well-plugged in Reaction member, explains how exposed Europe is if Putin cuts off or reduces gas supplies. The talks between the US (the biggest LNG supplier) and Qatar (the second largest supplier) offer some brief respite if they do even more to refuel Europe. Beyond that, next winter looks tough if Putin is still in place. European governments need new sources of energy, quickly.

This will require a complete rethink in eco-friendly Number 10 and across government. In the Commons press gallery I sat  through BEIS questions in the Commons last week and it might as well have been taking place in a parallel universe, where the talk seemed to be of hydrogen buses and green this and that and from one Liberal MP even scones.

Actually, there’s room for sensible compromise here. If reducing reliance on hydrocarbons is the commendable goal, war eras have a habit of speeding up innovation. This could happen on batteries and all manner of other fields of research. In the short and medium term we’ll need to keep the lights on, though. Britain will need storage capacity and LNG and gas and oil wherever it can get it from. It is plain weird that the government is not moving faster to scale up North Sea re-development to extract more of what is left. I’m told that the Prime Minister wants to avoid awkward conversations with the eco-friendly Mrs Johnson and his greener friends and family.

On nuclear, Britain has faffed about for twenty years. Tony Blair and Brian Wilson, then energy minister, tried to get a debate going but were beaten back. Two decades on and progress has been slow. We’ll feature more on this on Reaction next week, but in broad terms the debate has until now taken place in predominantly market terms. Successive governments wanted new nuclear capacity but understandably didn’t want it on the national balance sheet. The capital markets could take the strain, and the government would underpin the process, was the general idea. I suspect after Ukraine we’re now in a new phase, when a wartime mentality is going to be needed on essential infrastructure. The government should commission and build whatever is needed immediately, and when later in peacetime it provides a steady flow and energy security for decades there can be another round of privatisation or a steady stream of profits to deal with the debt.

We’re in a new world.

Reaction Podcast – new episode

The latest Reaction podcast is out. It’s a discussion of the Ukraine crisis recorded on Friday evening. We’ve gone back to the old-style format we did for years, pre-pandemic, rather than making it a YouTube video as well. We had positive feedback last week from listeners, and somehow it’s a different kind of conversation recording only audio and not video. More like good old radio. On that note, I was struck by what the BBC’s Justin Webb said at our Reaction event this week, where I interviewed him in front of an audience of members and guests. For all that its demise was predicted, he said, radio is back and flourishing. Initiatives such as Times Radio have taken off. The station LBC has expanded, although it is moving as much into video. I wonder if uncomplicated audio is liked even more now because we’re bombarded already with too much visual stimuli, and that will only get worse when the twits designing the “immersive” metaverse get their way. Real people talking on the radio, or a podcast, feels  properly civilised, somehow. Thank you also to those of you who came out to the Justin Webb event, it was great to see members of Reaction and friends there. And thank you to Maitland/AMO for hosting in their theatre space.

What I’m reading

Francis Fukuyama’s latest book –  Liberalism and its Discontents. Since his frequently misrepresented end of history theory became a bloke in pub talking point he’s taken some stick. At the end of the Cold War, Western liberal market economics and democracy had won, he said. This has been greeted ever since in mocking terms: End of history?! Don’t make me laugh! Actually, it’s not his fault if the West then chose to squander its victory and advantages. The essential point stands that liberal democracy and markets have proven as a system the best option available for widespread prosperity, and peace. Fukuyama is consistently one of the most interesting thinkers on what lies ahead. His landmark essay last year on China – in essence, the democracies must arm ourselves and stand well back – was an outstanding contribution to the debate. I’m starting his new book this evening, once I’ve had a strong vodka (Ukrainian) and tonic.

Iain Martin,
Editor and Publisher,
Reaction