Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February provoked global outrage against Moscow and support for Kyiv, both largely unabated today. Western allies quickly imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia a year ago and have sent billions in defense and humanitarian aid to Ukraine since—including US$27 billion in military assistance from the United States alone. In September, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that Washington’s goal in the war was for Kyiv to liberate all sovereign territory occupied by Moscow.
And yet Washington’s seemed reluctant to provide Ukraine with the weapons it would need to meet that goal. Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden agreed to send M-1 Abrams tanks, only after Germany refused to send its Leopard 2s without the Americans pledging their commitment first. This year, the U.S. will spend more than US$815 billion on defense, further developing what’s already the most powerful military in the world—with the most cutting-edge aircraft, tanks, missiles, ships, and logistics tools. By all appearances, if their strategy were truly focused on repelling Russian forces and re-establishing Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, the Americans could supply Kyiv with much more war materiel. So what is the U.S. strategy in Ukraine, exactly?
Rob Lee is a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program and a former Marine infantry officer. To Lee, the apparent ambiguities here make sense in the context of America’s competing priorities in the conflict: defending Ukraine and keeping the war from spiraling into regional and global chaos. These aren’t priorities the U.S. can choose, Lee says; they’re written into the situation, and they’re constantly competing with one another. They’re also complicated by Moscow’s disinterest in backing down or compromising, willingness to feed unlimited civilian conscripts into the war, and, so far, freedom from domestic consequences—whether for the popularity of the war or for the Kremlin’s continuing grip on power.
Eve Valentine: What would you say we know, and don’t know, about the U.S. strategy in Ukraine?
Rob Lee: We know it’s driven by two priorities. One is to prevent Russia from defeating Ukraine. The other is to prevent any escalation of the war that broadens it and brings Russia into direct conflict with NATO.
But we also know these are competing objectives. As much as the U.S. and its Western allies would love to see them realized together, they’re separate.
For example, if Ukraine were to succeed to the point where it was able not just to defend the territory it held when Russia invaded last year but to push back into Crimea—which the Russians annexed in 2014—the U.S. would see that as carrying the risk of a nuclear escalation from Moscow. Similarly, if Russian forces were to get routed and start collapsing, and Moscow were to see itself as facing domestic and international humiliation, that’s a scenario, too, that could potentially trigger a nuclear escalation.
Neither scenario would necessarily mean a nuclear escalation is likely. But even if it were very low-probability, the U.S. would still have to understand it as very high-risk—as potentially catastrophic on its own terms, and as the kind of event that could force NATO directly into the breach.
What we don’t know is how the U.S. will balance these competing objectives as the war evolves.
Valentine: So, what do we know about how the U.S. is balancing the objectives so far?
Lee: One way to try to glean an answer to that question is from any patterns in U.S. military support to date—and one I think we can see among them is that this support has often been measured in response to specific difficulties the Ukrainians have been experiencing.
For instance, initially, the U.S. provided Javelin and Stinger missiles, which aren’t particularly heavy types of equipment. A lot of artillery only came in April, when Ukraine was running low on it. Heavier missile systems, like HIMARS, which are much longer-range, only came in June, when disparities between Russian and Ukrainian munitions were becoming really apparent. But notably, when the U.S. did provide HIMARS, it emphasized it was not providing ATACMS, which are much longer-range still.
Now, there’s a lot going on behind these calculations, and there’s a lot more going on on the ground while they’re being made, so you can’t read the situation entirely decision-by-decision—whether it’s to provide HARM air-to-surface missiles last summer or, significantly, tanks now. Or for that matter, not yet to provide F-16 fighter jets. You can see the overall pattern, though, as intended to signal to Russia that the U.S. is very serious about supporting Ukraine’s self-defense—but not interested in escalating the conflict any more than it has to.
You can’t read the situation entirely decision-by-decision. You can see the overall pattern, though, as intended to signal to Russia that the U.S. is very serious about supporting Ukraine’s self-defense—but not interested in escalating the conflict any more than it has to.
Valentine: That might suggest the U.S. is leaning somewhat toward the second priority—non-escalation. Are there any patterns pointing the other way?
Lee: There’s reporting that suggests the Biden administration has recently become less reticent to allow Ukraine to strike in Crimea. And Ukraine has done some of that, even if just with commercial drones that they’ve jerry-rigged to use as unmanned kamikaze weapons—but there’s some evidence suggesting a change of thinking in Washington and other NATO capitals about what kinds of weapons can and should be provided, and what the escalation risks really are.
That said, the context for this thinking is fluid. The fundamental reality of the war is fluid. The situation on the ground in Ukraine is fluid; Russia’s response to it is fluid; and so the relative weight of the United States’ divergent priorities is going to be fluid.
Before Moscow decided to mobilize the Russian population through involuntary conscription, for example, the manpower situation was favorable for Ukraine. But once the Kremlin mobilized its population with conscripts, it gave itself a considerable manpower advantage. And it’s an ongoing mobilization—and there just isn’t enough of a domestic backlash in Russia to threaten it. By all appearances, Moscow can keep it up.
So Ukraine may have gotten enough weapons to succeed in the circumstances they were in back in August and September, but once Russia mobilized and gave itself a much larger force—even if it’s not very well-trained—the question became whether the U.S. and the West needed to provide more and qualitatively stronger military capabilities in order for Ukraine to be able to overcome the change in Russian manpower. It’s just one illustration of how the priority of helping Ukraine defend itself is in a shifting tension with the priority of not escalating the conflict.
Valentine: To what extent do you think this fluidity validates criticism that the United States doesn’t really have a strategy in Ukraine at all?
Lee: Strategies depend essentially on objectives. The reality is that there are multiple interests for the U.S. to balance here. There’s helping Ukraine defend itself; there’s containing the conflict; there are broader issues—for instance, in how the war is affecting the global economy; and there may be more issues still coming into the frame as they war goes on.
There can be an understandable tendency in the media to criticize national leaders or governments or their militaries for not acting in legibly strategic ways. Sometimes that may be fair. But it can assume a single, fixed objective. And when it comes to the war in Ukraine, that assumption wouldn’t be true.
There can be an understandable tendency in the media to criticize national leaders or governments or their militaries for not acting in legibly strategic ways. Sometimes that may be fair. But it can assume a single, fixed objective. And when it comes to the war in Ukraine, that assumption wouldn’t be true.
Valentine: In the meantime, with Russia persisting and Ukraine continuing to resist, the conflict has become bogged down in a lot of trench warfare that seems to be hurting Russia. It’s costing them dearly, in soldiers’ lives and government spending, and the Russian economy is getting weaker. Is there any reason to think it would be an element of U.S. strategy just to wear Russia down?
Lee: I don’t think so. If you look at it even just mathematically, Russia is a country with more than three times the population of Ukraine—and a much larger economy. For all the terrible attrition the war has meant for Russian soldiers, and for all the terrible cost it’s exacting from Russian society generally, none of it seems to be threatening Vladimir Putin’s popularity or rule.
On the polling we have access to—granted, there are going to be issues with any polling in Russia these days—it seems Russians support the war more now than they did a year ago. Meanwhile, Ukraine has lost soldiers at a significant rate, as well. The Kherson counteroffensive back in August, for example, was a success for Ukraine, but it was also costly. So when we think about attritional fights, we have to remember that, even if Russia sustains a lot more mortalities than Ukraine does, Russia can endure those losses more effectively than Ukraine can. An attritional fight just isn’t obviously in Ukraine’s interest, unless it can afflict disproportionately more casualties than it incurs—and use up much less ammunition in doing so.
And ammunition is an ongoing issue. Ukraine is using up more than it and its allies can produce, and right now, it’s not clear that anyone’s going to be able to ramp up production fast enough to sustain the fight. This could be a big question deep into 2023. And even if Ukraine does get enough artillery ammunition, air-defense missiles are yet another big question. Russia produces a certain number of cruise missiles every month, while also getting missiles and drones from Iran. Ukraine will keep trying to shoot them down, but the issue is whether Ukraine has enough air-defense missiles to do that consistently and effectively.
So I don’t think an attritional fight is a situation the U.S. wants Ukraine to be in, because it’s not clear that the U.S. and NATO are in a better position to sustain industrial aid to Ukraine than Russia is to support itself.
Valentine: What do we know about how Moscow perceives U.S. strategy right now—and what the implications of that perception might be for Russia’s strategy in turn?
Lee: Before the war began, Moscow believed it would win fast with overwhelmingly superior capabilities—that the Ukrainians would just accept the invasion, the U.S. and NATO wouldn’t get meaningfully involved, and the whole thing would be wildly successful. Which was all obviously very wrong.
When we think about attritional fights, we have to remember that, even if Russia sustains a lot more mortalities than Ukraine does, Russia can endure those losses more effectively than Ukraine can. An attritional fight just isn’t obviously in Ukraine’s interest, unless it can afflict disproportionately more casualties than it incurs—and use up much less ammunition in doing so.
Still, more than a year later, there are no indications that the Russians have limited their ultimate objectives for the war—no evidence that they intend to back off and cut their losses.
Along the way, they’ve held out hope that NATO unity would break, whether for military reasons, or on account of the disruption of natural-gas supplies from Russia to Europe, or for other reasons—and that hasn’t happened, either. In the U.S., there may be some softening in public support for the idea of backing Ukraine indefinitely, but polling shows a solid majority of the American population is still for it. Across the West, support is holding.
Moscow sees that—and so knows it’s in for a long war. They can see the U.S. and its allies holding firm, and they can also see them calibrating carefully. They can see this isn’t a fight anyone’s going to win with a knock-out punch. So it’s going to be significantly about endurance. And the Russians believe they can endure for longer than Ukraine can—with conscripts, with ammunition—and it’s not obvious that they’ll be wrong as a long war grinds on.
Valentine: What aspects of U.S. strategy do you think will be least visible as this long war plays out?
Lee: The biggest aspect will be intelligence sharing. It will have been critical at the beginning of the war, and it will be critical now. When we think about how HIMARS missile systems operate, for example: They’re precision-guided munitions. They can hit targets based on GPS coordinates. And the U.S. intelligence community has clearly been providing Ukraine with this kind of operational intelligence it needs to use these systems. There’s been some reporting to substantiate this, and I think we’ll eventually learn that it’s been extensive—given the capabilities the U.S. has for sharing intelligence compared with even recent other wars—but it’ll never be directly visible.
There are other aspects of strategy that will be hard to read in real time. For example, there’s the question of why the U.S.—and its NATO allies—wouldn’t provide Ukraine with certain weapons systems sooner. And as Bob Hamilton points out, the answers go to complex political and logistical reasons: A lot of it has been because of the politics of getting Germany onboard to send Leopard 2 tanks; a lot of it has been because of the logistics of getting the Ukrainians trained up to use them and other advanced weapons systems.
Moscow knows it’s in for a long war. They can see the U.S. and its allies holding firm, and they can also see them calibrating carefully. They can see this isn’t a fight anyone’s going to win with a knock-out punch. So it’s going to be significantly about endurance. And the Russians believe they can endure for longer than Ukraine can.
Another aspect still is that the U.S. and the NATO coalition haven’t fought or supplied a real industrial war like this in a long time. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. obviously used a lot of munitions, but they were munitions the U.S. military could deploy at sustainable rates. A high-intensity conventional war like the one in Ukraine today requires far more artillery ammunition, far more precision-guided missiles—the kinds of thing the U.S. hasn’t had to test its defense industry on in a very long time. For decades, at least, if not going back to the Second World War.
The question of U.S. industrial capacity bears on its strategy for the war in Ukraine, but it also bears on its strategy for preparing for potential future conflicts. It appears the U.S. thought it could ramp up production much more quickly than it could. So it’s learning a lesson here.
Valentine: What else do we know about how U.S. strategy in Ukraine may be playing into a broader geopolitical strategy?
Lee: China and Taiwan would be the clearest connection. It doesn’t depend on much speculation to say that the U.S. hopes Russia being repelled from Ukraine will deter China from invading Taiwan—that it will make Beijing think more than twice about its capabilities for a fight like that, about its chances for success, about the risks of getting involved in a conflict that could draw out with all kinds of unforeseen consequences, regionally and globally.
Despite the question of U.S. industrial capacity, the war in Ukraine is demonstrating how effective U.S. weapons systems are. Beijing will know that they’re only seeing a fraction in Ukraine of what U.S. systems can do—and that will make an emphatic point to China about the gap between their military and the U.S. military.
Meanwhile, in Europe, collective security is stronger than it was before the war. I think there’s a recognition now, among the U.S. and its European allies, that large-scale conventional war isn’t just a thing of the past—and that Russia, in particular, is going to be a significant adversary and threat for the foreseeable future. So we’ve seen Finland and Sweden join NATO; there’s going to be no question in the long term about whether Ukraine will join NATO; and everyone’s relearning the value of hard military power. A lot of the thinking in Washington and the capitals of Europe will be changing about what kinds of surprises they might encounter next and how to be ready for them.
These are old ideas that might have been out of vogue for a time, but the U.S. and its allies may be reacquainting themselves with their importance. The world is changing in uncertain ways, sometimes quickly, and that’s requiring adaptation in all kinds of domains. The Covid pandemic required it of the Biden administration and governments around the world. With the war in Ukraine, part of what adaptation means may be recognizing that conventional wars are still part of human reality and—relearning how they work and what they require.