America's Ukraine strategy is slowly bleeding the nation and its people to death. This is what authors Carl Marlantes (an American author and Vietnam War veteran) and Elliott Ackerman (a best-selling author and an infantryman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan) write in The Atlantic.
In the article titled “Abandoning Ukraine”, the two point out that the US is providing military aid to Ukraine to not lose the war started by Russia, but not to win it.
„On a recent trip to Ukraine, we walked through the ruins of a children's hospital in Kiev hit by the Russians, toured an apartment building in Kharkiv where floor after floor had been destroyed by Russian missiles, and visited the front lines to meet soldiers who speak of the brutality of Russian human wave tactics. But the most disturbing thing we saw was the American strategy in Ukraine, which is giving the Ukrainian people just enough military aid to keep them from losing their war, but not enough to win it. This strategy is slowly bleeding Ukraine and its people to death," the authors write.
„We are both Marine veterans. We have a combined 60 years of combat experience between us, including Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. We are not unfamiliar with the horrors of war. Still, we both felt deeply disturbed when we finished our trip,” they point out.
The speed of innovation on the battlefield made some long-awaited Western weapons systems almost obsolete by the time they were delivered to Ukraine.
An example of this is HIMARS, the long-range missile artillery that the US is fielding at a maddeningly slow pace. A year ago, HIMARS was the most requested system on the battlefield. It is now less than 10 percent successful due to Russian innovation in electronic warfare.
Each missile launched by HIMARS costs approximately $100,000. Due to the rapid decline in HIMARS effectiveness, the Ukrainians have developed a drone that has a similar effect and costs about $1,000.
However, the Ukrainians are rightly worried that within a few weeks the Russians will develop countermeasures that reduce the effectiveness of this type of drone. It's literally an arms race.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has spent a lot of time pleading with his allies for weapons and permission to use them to their full potential. But now his administration is simply pleading for the delivery of weapons that have already been promised. Currently, these delays are the result of US Department of Defense protocols that affect the rate of utilization of US stockpiles.
Each of the services is required to keep certain quantities of weapons and ammunition in reserve in case of war, and they are not allowed to fall below these levels.
However, the United States is nowhere near such a crisis. If anything, ironically, we keep our weapons in reserve for a crisis just like the one in Ukraine. We must make these weapons available to those who would use them in our common defense, the authors state.
There is a risk that the war in Ukraine will be lost – not because the Russians are winning, but because Ukraine's allies didn't let them win. If we encourage Ukrainians to fight without giving them the tools they need to win, history will surely conclude that the Russians were not the only ones who committed crimes against Ukraine.