
by Aurelien
July 30, 2025
from
Aurelien2022 Website
Italian version

Source
I've written several essays in the last year or
two trying to peer dimly into the
post-Ukraine world, including
one
on the political consequences of defeat, and
one
on the difficulty and consequences of a
Russian "victory."
I've been
very critical of,
the West's incapacity to understand and react to
what's going on,
...but I haven't said very much about what options
might still be practically open to the West, and especially Europe,
when the time comes to start picking up the pieces and mopping up
the blood.
Now of course we all remember the old cliché
about prediction being difficult, especially about the future.
But
today, rather than prediction, I'm going to propose a structured
approach to this problem which may help to reduce the final
uncertainty a bit.
The first step is to divide all the relevant
factors into:
-
Things that have already happened or can be
considered as such.
-
Things whose general outline of development
is fairly clear, but where there is room for debate about
exactly how it might turn out.
-
Everything else.
By thinking hard through the first two
categories, we can in principle reduce the rest to more manageable
proportions.
When we've done that, we can look at what room for
maneuver the West may actually have, and perhaps identify a few
realistic possibilities.
So where are we now?
I would suggest there are at
least four things that we have to regard as fixed.
Some of them may
surprise some of you.
- The first is the size and power of the Russian
military, and the industrial and scientific base that supports it.
Put simply (and to repeat once more), at a time when the West
largely gave up its capability for heavy-metal land/air warfare, the
Russians kept theirs.
There's no magic about these choices:
the
Russian tradition is one of land warfare, and they have important
land frontiers.
This meant that they retained a sizeable military,
and also retained national service to produce large numbers of
trained soldiers.
Their equipment was optimized for the kinds of
wars they expected to fight, and the structure and doctrine of their
Army (though this is a complex subject) stayed much closer to the
Cold War model than that of the West did.
Their defense industry
remained under state control, and in general the country retained
its traditional emphasis on science, technology and engineering. It
has also worked hard to become strategically independent as far as
possible.
In addition, it is a large and diverse country, with land
communications to much of the world, and impressive deposits of raw
materials. Among other things.
None of this is going to change.
That means that
Russian military dominance over the West is not a future threat, or
a danger to avoid, it is a present reality, and for reasons we'll go
into in a moment, is not likely to change in any useful timescale.
Now as in previous essays, I want to underline the difference here
between weapons systems and actual capability.
Weapons systems by themselves are useless if they don't provide you
with the ability to do what you want to do.
Thus, the real issue is
whether the weapons systems a military has, enables the military to
carry out the tasks it is given. So the maritime (and especially
underwater), capability of the West is very good, and probably
better than that of Russia.
But there is no obvious prospect of a
maritime conflict with Russia.
Likewise, western nuclear systems,
although possibly less modern than those of Russia, are certainly
adequate, but nuclear systems don't fight each other, and at least
at the moment there's no sign of nations being mad enough to engage
in nuclear war.
If we look at actual tasks that militaries
might be given, the Russians have a far greater capability to
perform their tasks than ours have.
Nor is it useful to compare the performance of
Russian and western equipment directly, as military nerds have a
habit of doing.
It's probable that at least some western fighter
aircraft are superior to at least some Russian fighter aircraft, but
that has first to be adjusted by numbers, and the capabilities of
the main armament, and then seen in the context of actual
operations, which are not about knightly jousts between individual
aircraft, but rather control of airspace.
At the moment, the
Russians can effectively control airspace much more easily than the
West can, by use of missiles rather than combat aircraft. The same
applies to tank vs. tank comparisons, another favorite standby of
military nerds. (Tank vs. tank combat in Ukraine has been extremely
rare.)
- The second is the political, military and
intellectual infrastructure to support the military capability. This
is a bit more complicated, so bear with me.
The war in Ukraine is
being fought by something like 700-800,000 Russian soldiers with a
sizeable,
administrative, logistic and command infrastructure in the
rear, with facilities for:
-
replacing losses and repairing what cannot
be repaired in the field
-
deploying new and modified equipment
-
treating the seriously wounded
-
organizing the endless flow of
personnel and logistics in both directions
-
recruiting, training,
deploying and discharging huge numbers of personnel
-
developing and
procuring new equipment and modifications and
-
adapting
doctrine and tactics
-
collecting intelligence on the enemy
-
planning future operations and making contingency plans,
...among other
things, such a war also needs high-level strategic and operational
direction, and close integration with the intelligence services and
the diplomatic service.
Such an infrastructure does not remotely exist in
the West at the moment.
Even were a magic fairy to grant western
nations ten times the holdings of high-intensity warfare equipment
they now have, and even if recruitment offices were to be overrun by
human waves of volunteers, there would be no infrastructure to turn
any of that into deployable forces, let alone be able to sustain
them.
Russia calls up roughly 300,000 conscripts per year in two
batches, and has recently been taking 30-40,000 volunteers per
month.
By contrast, the United Kingdom recruits 12-15,000 military
personnel per year, and the US about 50-60,000. These two
situations are simply not comparable, and of course the Russians
have a single infrastructure, whereas the West has dozens of them.
The Russians also have well-established and rehearsed supply lines
going West towards any potential conflict. The West now has nothing
resembling that.
The Russians also have the doctrine, training and
experience of commanding very large numbers of troops at what is
called the Operational level of war, which is about the high-level
military planning and concepts designed to achieve the strategic
political objective.
The Russians, students of Clausewitz, have
always been good at this.
One way of thinking of it in practice is
to consider that there are Russian Generals in Ukraine commanding
forces the size of the entire German Army, and reporting in
turn to an officer with even higher level responsibilities.
I don't
think there is reliable information about either troops numbers in
Ukraine or Russian orders of battle, but it's enough to say that the
Russians are operating at a scale and with a complexity that no
western military would know how to do, even if the troops and
equipment were suddenly to appear.
Moreover, western militaries
would have to develop these organizational and intellectual
capabilities collectively, whereas the Russians by definition are
one force doing the same thing.
This is not going to change...!
Knowing how to do this in theory is only part of
it, of course: you also need the practical experience of manoeuvring
and fighting massive forces, which the Russians have and the West
does not.
The West may still study the theory in its military
academies, but the gap between theory and practice is why militaries
make mistakes when war starts.
The Germans made mistakes in Poland
in 1939 and learned from them.
The Russians made mistakes in Finland
in 1940 and learned from them.
It took the armies of 1914 perhaps a
year to understand the nature of the war they were fighting, and
another couple of years to begin to find answers to the problems it
posed.
They could do this because they had the population and the
military and industrial base to endure over the long term.
The West
today does not...
The Russians made a number of mistakes in the early
months of the Ukraine war, but had the capability to learn from them
and make changes and improvements.
The West does not.
It is trapped
in a Catch-22 situation:
the only way to acquire experience of this
level of warfare is by practicing it, but practicing it would
destroy the forces that the West actually has, with no chance of
replacing them.
This is not going to change...!
- The third is the nature of geography.
Russia is
an enormous country with land communications to most parts of the
world. In the event of a conflict with any
NATO state it can quickly
move forces to where they are needed, along secure interior lines of
communication and largely free of the threat of attack.
It also has
the space to concentrate large forces for purposes of intimidation,
if not necessarily to fight. This is not going to change.
Western
forces are scattered everywhere: think for a moment of the logistic
and other challenges of bringing Spanish forces to Rumania or
Italian forces to the Baltics, over long distances, mostly by sea
and with the constant threat of attack.
A token Brigade in Poland
for a period is one thing.
The entire French Army sitting in fields
in Estonia is something quite different. Moreover, Russia can keep
very large forces adjacent to NATO borders for as long as it likes.
NATO cannot do the reverse.
By extension, geographical dispersion
means political weakness. NATO's membership, from Portugal to
Iceland to Turkey, constrained by geography and with borders with
Russia that were never planned, now has few common interests.
Overwhelmingly consisting of small countries with very limited
military forces, and subject to the principle that as numbers
increase arithmetically, the potential for disunion increases
geometrically, NATO is an alliance which has recently become even
more fragmented than it was.
This is not going to change...!
The US now has no serious ground combat forces in
Europe. It has a single armored division in the US which could in
theory be brought up to operational capability and dispatched across
the Atlantic, but that would take months or even years, and there is
nowhere to put it.
There are US aircraft in Europe and they could be
reinforced to some degree in a crisis, but it's hard to see how they
could be effective against the kind of layered air defense that
Russia possesses.
In any event, the idea of forward basing of
military units in the Cold War was that in crisis and war they would
be reinforced by mobilized reserves. Even if such reserves existed
(which it's hard to imagine they ever would) there is no
administrative and physical infrastructure to bring them to where
they would be needed.
In a crisis, Russia could mobilize its Army
and move units fairly quickly around, using its interior lines of
communication.
But imagine, for a moment, trying to recall and send
hundreds of thousands of reservists from France and Germany to
Rumania, with all their equipment.
All this is why facile
calculations of the total size of western and Russian military
forces completely miss the point.
Moreover, it's easy to see that a
political crisis in Sweden, and some threatening noises from Russia
could lead to massive and expensive movements of troops to the North
to respond to fears that in the end turn out to be hopelessly
exaggerated.
There is a limit to the number of times NATO can play
this game, whereas Russian with its interior lines of communication
can keep playing it for some time.
None of the above is going to
change.
- Finally, there are permanent changes in military
technology.
Now by "permanent" I do not mean that the technology
will remain the same forever, or that it will be as important as it
currently is forever; I mean that it has now been invented, and so
will be permanently available.
There are two technologies in
particular which are important here.
- The first is conventionally
called "drones" but it's more complicated than that. Several
different technologies brought together enable autonomous but
networked remotely-controlled flying vehicles to attack targets with
great precision at anything from a kilometer or two to several
hundred kilometers beyond the front line, and this distance is
increasing all the time.
Small, cheap drones can be guided to their
targets manually.
Longer-range drones can be sent independently, use
their sensors to detect and attack targets in a programmed order,
and share targeting data with other drones or aircraft.
Drones can
be used for patrols and reconnaissance, and to attack other drones,
as well as to confuse enemy defenses.
This has two principal
consequences.
One is that the battlefield becomes much more
transparent.
Surprise, though not impossible, has become much more
difficult except at low level and in special circumstances such as
the Ukrainian attack on Kursk.
Concentrations of forces can be
spotted quickly, and this ability (by infra-red for example) is
improving all the time.
The other is that drones have also produced
a revolution in accuracy.
The Russians are now using them, in
coordination with missiles, to attack very precise targets well
behind the front line, thus finally fulfilling the dreams of
airpower enthusiasts a hundred years ago.
In World War 2, the
accuracy of bombing was simply not adequate to disarm a country from
the air:
today, with drones, it is getting that way.
The result of these two developments is in
principle to favor the defense, because it's the attacker that has
to move and expose himself.
I suspect I'm not the first to have
noticed, several years ago, that the battlefield in Ukraine
resembles nothing so much as the Western Front in the First World
War.
In that era, the problem for the attacker was to cross the open
ground between the front lines of the two sides before the defender
could emerge and set up their defenses and bring up reinforcements.
Barbed wire and other fortifications made the attacker's job even
more difficult.
The solutions that were found - creeping barrages,
armored vehicles, infiltration tactics - have their analogues today,
but, even at the end of the War, the attacker's role was still the
more difficult.
Bear in mind though that we are talking only of the
tactical level, and only of a defender in a prepared
position with fortifications.
Just because NATO forces rushed to
Finland might be strategically defending, does not give
them any special advantages.
Indeed, networked reconnaissance drones
can provide an advantage every attacker has always wanted: knowing
which attacks are succeeding, and thus should be reinforced, and
which are failing.
At the moment, the Russians have a significant
lead in these technologies, and they have the advantage that
data-sharing within one force is much easier than data-sharing
within many.
That is not going to change...!
- The second technology is that of highly accurate
and very fast missiles.
This is an area that the Russians have
specialized in since the late 1940s (they made off with many of the
scientists and much of the technology of the German V2 program)
and have continued to advance it, as well as associated defensive
missile defense technologies.
The West has not emphasized missiles
anything like as much, preferring manned aircraft for both purposes.
The result is that Russia has today an arsenal of very accurate
missiles which can be fired from land, from ships or from aircraft,
and used in conjunction with drones.
The West has a limited
capability against some of these missiles, but it looks as though
the Russians have now managed to cross a technology threshold to the
production of missiles against which there is, in principle, no
defense possible, because of the speed with which they arrive.
It may be possible at some hypothetical moment in
the future, using technologies that have not yet been thought of, to
destroy these missiles in the number required to defeat an a serious
attack...
But for practical purposes the situation is not going to
change.
Like drones, such missiles are now extremely accurate, and
the effect of any missile on its target is highly dependent on this
accuracy, because the power of the explosive warhead falls off very
quickly with distance.
Thus, under some circumstances, modern
high-speed high-precision missiles can achieve effects which only
tactical nuclear weapons could have achieved in the past.
This means
that highly accurate attacks can be carried out at distances of
hundreds of kilometers, using missiles that in principle cannot be
intercepted.
This will give countries, at last, the capabilities
that manned bomber advocates dreamed of in the 1920s. It is a
technology (a series of technologies really) that cannot be
disinvested, and which will have a transformative approach on
combat, and on the management of crises.
Let's turn to elements of the future where there
is some legitimate doubt about what might happen.
One such is the
faint and almost mystical belief in the idea of western rearmament.
I've already made a few disparaging
remarks about this possibility, and I have devoted several
essays to why
conscription will not be re-introduced, and so why western armed
forces can never be substantially larger than they are now.
I'm not
going to go through all that again.
I'm just going to touch on a
couple of points where there is legitimate room for disagreement,
even though not a lot.
- The first is the practical effect, if any, of
announcements of large increases in defense spending by some western
powers. Here, the most obvious point is that you can only buy what
is available to be bought.
It seems to be assumed that this money
will be spent on equipment, or more colloquially "weapons," but
weapons are of no use without people trained to use them.
And "weapons" require support and support
requires more people.
If you have ever seen a Main Battle Tank being
transported, you will know that it moves around on a massive
trailer, driven by someone with the training and experience to
maneuver sixty tons of tank and ten tons of vehicle without hitting
anything.
You need those people too, and indeed for all the wild
talk of billions and billions of this or that currency, no-one has
ever been able to explain how people currently not motivated to join
the military will suddenly become so motivated, and in very large
numbers.
I suppose the intention is to dump the problem on a
recruiting consultancy.
But the reality is that,
"join the
Bundeswehr, get trained and spend the rest of your engagement
sitting in a field in Poland, getting drunk in the evening and
fighting gangs of Polish skinheads," is not going to play well as a
recruiting slogan.
In fact, there is no reason to suppose that
western forces will be able to increase substantially in size, no
matter how much money is spent, and many reasons to think they
won't.
And without reserves, western armies will be fragile
institutions, wiped out after a few days of combat.
- The second possibility is that, somehow, and with
enough financial incentives, western technology could produce
equipment in the numbers and at the quality to do something to
address the current imbalance.
Now of course this depends on the
ability to recruit or conscript military personnel in numbers that
can only now be dreamt of, and we have just seen how difficult this
is.
But could it be true, nonetheless, that the massive increase in
demand for military services recently promised could somehow be
converted into at least a modest overall increase in capability?
The first thing to say is that you could probably
buy your way to reasonably full recruitment of your existing
structure.
Financial incentives can do a certain amount, it appears,
if only because financial disincentives, such as poor wages, have
been shown to do the reverse.
So a sharp increase in wages would
probably produce more applicants, if not necessarily suitable ones.
There are a whole set of potential tricks to apply, depending on the
country, from free university education, to allowing ex-prisoners to
serve, to removing nationality or other obstacles, and finally just
lowering health and fitness standards for admission, on the basis
that, with enough effort, almost anybody can finally be made fit
enough to serve
I say "almost" because recruits with diabetes of
Long Covid (among many other examples) may simply be too difficult
to bring up to standard.
So in practice, filling out western militaries to
their current intended establishments may be the best that can be
hoped for, and this would act as a kind of maximum-level reality
check of what can be accomplished, even with insane amounts of
money.
Rigorous reservist obligations could be imposed to squeeze a
few more people out of the system at a pinch.
And that's it...
But
surely,
you can buy equipment?
Alter all, surely the more you pay
the more you get?
Well, up to a point.
There are certain pieces of
equipment which are relatively simple to operate (logistic vehicles,
for example) where stocks could be held in reserve against
breakdowns and enemy action in wartime, because recalled reservists
could drive them, or civilian drivers could be mobilized under
emergency legislation.
Likewise, if you lose a tank because a drone
blows the track off, or the engine fails, a tank in reserve might be
a good idea.
Thereafter, you pass to levels of stocks: ammunition,
of course, but also consumables for vehicles, spare tank tracks,
and, naturally, drones.
Availability of aircraft is never 100%, and
the opportunity to field some held in reserve would help to keep the
numbers up. But again, money can only buy so much.
The trouble is, the world is not an Amazon store,
and money cannot create capacity, or trained manpower, let alone raw
materials, where there are none.
A recent European Commission
report pointed out the worryingly high proportion of imported
materials in European armaments, ranging from explosive components
to special steels and alloys to electronic sub-assemblies.
Europe is
fully dependent on imports for 19 critical materials used in the
production of defense equipment, and the most important supplier is
China.
What is most concerning is that Europe imports relatively
little in the way of genuine raw materials dug out of the ground for
defense goods:
in may cases, it imports processed and semi-finished
materials, themselves made up of a alloys, composites etc, sourced
from different countries.
It would be theoretically possible, at
enormous cost, to create new entire industries in western countries
(the US is in an equally bad way) to produce, for example,
semi-finished raw materials.
But no amount of money can provide the
West with mineral deposits it does not have, and which are
susceptible to every kind of disruption imaginable, both natural and
political.
The days when defense companies
"manufactured" defense equipment passed a long time ago.
These days defense
companies are best described as "system integrators," taking
sub-assemblies, navigation and control systems, weapons and
fire-control systems, among others, and integrating them into a
functional system, that changes gradually over time, as component-
parts are upgraded.
This produces multiple single points of failure,
and not necessarily for malign reasons.
A constructor of
landing-gear assemblies may already be working at full capacity to
supply customers all over the world, for example.
Defense has become a victim of market
neoliberalism.
So much has been sub-contracted, contracted out and offshored that putting together weapons systems is now an affair of
dizzying complexity involving many suppliers and countries.
And as
we have seen, it's not necessarily the headline imports that matter
so much as the provider of raw materials to the sub-contractor to
the sub-contractor, and in some cases defense system integrators may
not even know who that is.
Guaranteeing supply chains, not just for
equipment, but for spares and ammunition, is difficult enough
anyway. Massively expanding the requirement makes it exponentially
more difficult.
All this may seem strange.
Don't defense
contractors welcome wars and rearmament?
Won't they be fighting each
other for juicy new contracts?
Well, up to a point, when it's a
question of taking up surplus capacity with incremental new
production.
But even then, whereas in the Cold War
defense companies
were often nationalized, or highly dependent on government sales,
they are now ruled by the pervasive psychotic obsession with the
next three months' profits.
Management may well decide that even
modest efforts to recruit extra staff, bring production lines back
into operation and scour the world for increased supplies of
sub-assemblies and components cannot be justified to shareholders.
Defense companies make their money from long periods of peace, when
demand is steady, production can be predicted years in advance, and
planned modifications take place regularly.
There is nothing more
profitable, after all, than selling a year's worth of spares for a
piece of equipment that has been in service for twenty years
already.
Speculative investments in new new factories, training new
workforces, finding new sources of supply, developing new
technologies for products that may never work and may never be
bought, are absolute poison to today's MBA-besotted managements.
- The third possibility is of a sudden outbreak of
unity and determination among western powers faced with a renascent
Russia, and a planning system capable of turning that political will
into logical and connected initiatives.
Even to suggest such a
thing, perhaps, is to invite ridicule, in the light of the
confusion, disarray, panic, amateurism and ignorance of the last
decade or so, not to mention the lack of any vision of the future,
no matter how superficial and how controversial.
As I've
suggested, the only policy uniting the West at the moment is
blind faith and a refusal to contemplate reality, hoping that
somehow, in some way, they will escape the consequences of their
cumulative errors in dealing with Russia since the end of the Cold
War.
When that last hope disappears, the most likely result is not a
grim collective determination to survive, but rather a feeding
frenzy in which nation will turn on nation, politician upon
politician and pundit upon pundit, all seeking to exculpate
themselves and find someone to blame.
The world in, say, 2026 will
be so far beyond what western governments are capable of
understanding and dealing with, that the result will be
institutional paralysis and a kind of collective nervous breakdown.
Oh, there will be ringing statements of defiance and calls for
unity
and determination, but these sentiments will be addressed to western
publics, and not to Russia, which will take no notice because they
are not backed up by anything.
- The last possibility
- or uncertainty really - is the
degree to which the Russians are prepared to resume ordinary
relations after the end of the War.
Bizarrely, there seems to be a
belief in some quarters that the Russians will come to the West,
with an attitude of humility if not actually on their knees, asking
for forgiveness and seeking readmission to the International System
(™).
I can't imagine where such beliefs come from...!
The Russians will
be the dominant military power in Europe, the West will be incapable
of any serious military resistance, and the US will be effectively out of the game.
This does not mean that the Russians will therefore
want to expand militarily towards the West, though I think it's safe
to assume that they will do so in specific cases if they believe
it's essential to their security.
(Even the most anti-western,
pro-Russian commentators are, I think, too inclined to give the
Russians the benefit of the doubt in such cases.)
What is at play
here is not the future territorial division of Ukraine, nor the
exact circumstances of the end of the War there.
It is the political
and military configuration of Europe for the next 25-50 years, and
ensuring Russian dominance of Europe, in such a way that no future
threat can possibly arise.
I can't pretend to psychoanalyze the
Russian character, but after what they have been through over many
generations, it is likely that they will be prepared to resort to
extreme measures if they think they have to...!
Historically, the
Russians have preferred hard power to soft power:
in Machiavelli's
formulation,
preferring to be feared rather than to be
loved, if
those are the only two options...
To some extent, Russian conduct will be
influenced by wider international policy considerations.
They will
not regard creating a favorable impression in the West as
important, but they will give some attention
to BRICS nations and
others, in order to avoid seeming to be a threat, or yet another
rising imperialist power.
They will look to strengthen their
influence in the General Assembly of the UN, and in various
international organizations, as well as with the African Union and
ASEAN, not because they see those organizations as particularly
significant in themselves, but as a way of spreading power and
influence internationally.
If you accept the above analysis, then the
remaining uncertainties essentially fall into two types.
One is the
degree to which western leaders can actually accept a position of
military inferiority, and the political vulnerability that comes
with it, not as a theoretical possibility but as a reality to be
lived with.
The second is the effect on European institutions such
as NATO and
the EU, which will probably be
terminal, but whose
demise may be messy and even violent.
After generations of preaching
and instructing the world what it should do, it is a reasonable
concern that,
the western political system will simply
come apart
under such stresses...
At some point,
the West will have to give up
angry gesticulation, self-righteous indignation and ridiculous
demands, and start working out how to live with Russia.
And it will
be on their terms...
What other choice is there?
The West faces a much
more powerful, angry and potentially vengeful Russia which has
sacrificed lives and money in pursuit of what it sees as its core
security interests.
Such attitudes will endure a long time, and we
need to start taking account of them now.
That means, as I have
suggested,
a low-key, non-confrontational policy towards Russia,
geared to the preservation of national sovereignty and political
independence as far as possible.
It will also move the balance of military power
within the West back to Britain and France, as the only two European
nuclear powers.
Countries like Germany and Poland that are seeking
to expand their conventional forces are wasting time and money
beyond a very limited point.
In the past, there was a decent
argument that small countries with capable militaries could impose a
cost on an invader out of all proportion to anything that might be
gained.
That is no longer true...
The armed forces of those two
countries, including headquarters, assembly areas, military ports,
airfields and supply and repair depots, could be dismantled by
long-range missiles in a matter of hours, and no response would be
possible.
Theoretically, Russian drones could hunt down and destroy
every single tank and armored vehicle in the Bundeswehr or the
Polish Army without the possibility of retaliation.
So the likely consequences include a massive
reshuffling of the cards in the West, and a move back in the
direction of national defense policies and ad hoc alliances.
It's likely that some of the newer members of NATO and the EU will simply
be hung out to dry:
there is nothing that can be done for them
anyway.
Not a nice prospect for some, no doubt, but one we should
start thinking about now.
The alternative is what, exactly...?
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