Recommended Read: Lessons Of Ukraine

Big Serge has a new essay out under that title. Well informed readers won’t be surprised by much in the essay, but it’s well organized and expressed. It serves as a reminder at this crucial stage in world events of why America needs Trump’s peace if we are ever to MAGA. I’ll just offer a few excerpts, but I do highly recommend the entirety:

LESSONS FROM UKRAINE

Serge begins with a paragraph that reminds us that one man can still make a difference. Who but Trump could have got us this close to peace?

There are certain occasions, mercifully rare, when one becomes acutely aware that a historical turning is underway. One looks at the calendar and takes note of the date: this precise moment will be etched in the historical record. Invariably, these occasions involve an aspect of surreal horror: everyone remembers where they were on 9/11, disturbed and transfixed watching the Twin Towers burn, then collapse. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, had the quality of history narrowly avoided. On that day, a fraction of an inch made all the difference: instead of history turning, the President turned his head.

Overall, however, the theme is: Big War Is Back. And Russia may be the only country in the world that is prepared. Just how unprepared the US military is can be gauged from these paragraphs:

On the eve of the war, the Ukrainian Army was the largest and best-equipped in Europe. Ukrainian tank and howitzer parks were the 2nd largest in Europe, lagging only the Russians. Since then, Ukraine’s Western patrons have delivered more than 7,100 armored vehicles, along with 6,000 unarmored Infantry Mobility Vehicles like Humvees: more armored vehicles than the Wehrmacht used in Operation Barbarossa: that is, the largest and most devastating campaign in history.

This is the reason that many analysts state that Russia has actually destroyed several Ukrainian militaries—the orginal AFU, and then the NATO supplied iterations. We need also to bear in mind that those Soviet era armored vehicles—on both sides—have proved to be quite effective in the Ukrainian environment.

The enormous scale of the Russia-Ukraine conflict isn’t limited to armored vehicles but extends into munitions and strike systems. The most demanded item of the war is the howitzer shell. At the beginning of the conflict, Russian forces were firing 60,000 shells per day. Although this number has declined with the exhaustion of reserves and the limitations imposed by the rate of production, Russia is still firing around 10,000 shells per day. Before the war, American shell production was 14,000 shells per month. Even with efforts underway to raise this to 100,000 shells monthly, there remains a yawning void between output and the expenditure observed in Ukraine.

US-backed forces might expect to use air power as a partial substitute for ground-based howitzers and rocketry, but the math here is similarly discouraging. In August of 2024, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense tallied a total of 9,590 missiles and 14,000 drones launched by Russia since the start of the war. By comparison, American production of the venerable Tomahawk missile sputters along at around 100 per year. The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff missile shows better numbers at a rate of 550 each year, but this is still far short of Russian totals. The reality is that American missile production is insufficient to cover current usage, even without the prospect of a major future war.

Production of American air defense interceptors also lags far behind expenditure rates in Ukraine. The PAC-3 missile utilized by the famous Patriot air defense system is produced at a rate of 230 per year: enough to load about seven Patriot batteries with a single salvo each.

The scale of the Russian air campaign has pushed the Ukrainian air defense network to the limit, and this is no mean feat. Ukraine began the war with the densest air defense network of any state in Europe. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Ukraine inherited the equivalent of an entire Soviet air defense district, including hundreds of launchers. To exhaust this defense, despite the backstops provided by dozens of western-donated systems, was a huge task.

Essentially the Neocons had two plans. Plan A was to crush the Russian economy with sanctions. Woops! Plan B was to attrit the Russian military to the point of collapse. Woops, again! The point is, America was not prepared for and didn’t actually have the logistical ability to engage in Big War with Russia.

Wars are easy to start but often difficult to finish, and combatants tend to get more than they bargained for. Humanity has relearned this lesson in Ukraine. …

But it is not clear that either American politicians or the American public have absorbed its meaning. It is easy to mobilize public sentiment against Russia, that familiar enemy of Cold War nostalgia, but generating excitement for thousands of daily casualties and the return of conscription is different. …

The American public would like its wars to resemble 1991’s Desert Storm, which was decisively won in a matter of weeks with fewer than 300 casualties. It’s relatively easy to mobilize public support for wars like this, which are short, decisive, and relatively bloodless. It’s much harder to generate support for something that more approximates the First World War. As the Vietnam War showed, the American public is likely to quickly grow weary of a grinding slugfest halfway across the world.

Big War in the 21st Century will probably also be Slow War, and the public won’t like it one bit.

Serge has a sub-theme to these reflections on the return of Big War, which is that spheres of influence matter. Of course, that’s what the war in Ukraine is all about. Russia and the Neocons both knew that spheres of influence mattered, but the Neocons tried to con the public into believing that Russia was being unreasonable:

… The idea of spheres of influence is foundational to international politics: it is embodied in American history by the Monroe Doctrine.

Today, an ascendent faction in American foreign policy seeks a return to this principle and reorient towards a “hemispheric” foreign policy focused on securing dominance in the Americas by cowing Canada into submission and acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal. And no wonder. What the war in Ukraine has shown is that spheres of influence are real – not just as an abstract construct in a theory of geopolitics, but as a concrete manifestation of geography. The issue is not whether a power like Russia, China, or the United States “deserves” to have preponderant influence over its neighbors. It is more like a question of physics.

…

Taiwan, for example, is barely 100 miles off the coast of Fujian, a Chinese province with a larger population than California. Debating whether the Chinese can match the US Navy misses the point. What will matter, more than anything, is where the game is played. China’s inability to project power against America’s west coast has little bearing on its potential to sustain a war directly off its own coastline, since, as the Russians have shown in Ukraine, even a relatively poor power can accrue significant advantages from fighting right in its own backyard.

The bottom line:

Knowing what type of war you are signing up for is paramount. It is doubtful whether Europe would have rushed to war in 1914 if they could have foreseen the reality of the Western Front. Ukraine intimates that future wars will be industrial, mass casualty affairs, …

How many times have we seen that over the course of history? Which suggests this paramount lesson from Ukraine:

In the end, the best way to win in an era of Big War is probably to avoid war altogether.

Trump’s deal.

SIMPLICIUS Ѱ @simpatico771

"Then I said, you don't have the cards."

🂲

7:53 PM · Mar 3, 2025

Speaking of spheres of influence.