Ukraine Conflict Reteaches Old Lessons of World War II

It is:

• That quality beats quantity;
• That mass armies are no longer necessary;
• That mass production of weapons is not necessary.
• That simple, dumbly designed weapons that are easy and cheap to manufacture should always be despised and replaced by far more complicated, difficult to use, prestigious ones available only in far smaller quantities.
• That our wonder precision high tech weaponry will always work perfectly
• That in our age of high tech wonders, offensives by our small, elite armies will always smash supposedly slow-moving ponderous enemies.
• That there is no need to stockpile weapons: Computerized just-in-time replacements will always flow far more cheaply and efficiently.
• That our weapons will always be superior and more advanced to those of our always backwards enemies because they do not share the benefits of the magical free market and open borders, unregulated stock markets as we do.

For 40 years all these assumptions appeared to work.

There were indeed a very few long-drawn out conventional conflicts like the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war or the 1992-95 conflicts over the disintegration of Yugoslavia. But these were regarded as unimportant sideshows. The collapse of communism had Ended History, the farcical Francis Fukuyama maintained back in 1992 and That was That.

Ironically, it was former National Security Adviser Zbigniiew Brzezinski, the High Priest of what passes for Neoliberal Strategic “Thought” who himself refuted Fukuyama’s fatuous thesis to me 31 years ago in eight pungent words.

“After the End of History,” Zbig said, “comes – More History.”

Over the past two years,the progression of the war in Ukraine, Europe’s biggest and bloodiest conflict since World War II, has entirely confirmed Brzezinski’s prediction: More History is back in our midst – and with a vengeance.

Every one of the eight Neocon and NeoLIberal triumphalist mantras I listed above has been refuted and overturned in the blink of an eye. 

To paraphrase the magnificent 17th century metaphysical poet John Donne, new technology calls all in doubt, the element of (Western) firepower is quite put out.

Each one of the eight Conventional Wisdoms I listed above is now dead as a dodo. The evolution and revival of war has buried them all.

Quantity and the vastly expanded military-industrial base to produce weapons is now as crucial to winning wars – and maintaining control after them – as it was in the 1940s. Russia and China have learned this lesson and have successfully acted on it. US and European leaders still wander around in a confused daze and imagine they are acting when they are quite useless.

Mass armies are necessary to defend, survive and win.  A few prestigious wonder weapons (wunderwaffen) are as useless today as they were to the Nazi Wehrmacht in 1944-45. And most of the time, they never work anyway.

It turns out our prospective enemies are not slow-moving and ponderous at all. And even if the Russians Army started out that way two years ago, it quickly learned to adapt and evolve fast.

US generals, military analysts and pundits are still in deep denial of these self-evident facts staring them in the face. It is clear who today’s strategic and combat dinosaurs are. And they are not in Russia and China.

German Leopard Main Battle Tanks, supposedly NATO’s best, have repeatedly failed in Ukraine. Deploying them under terrible generals and operated by brave but unskilled, inexperienced Ukrainian crews only provided the Russian Army with an object lesson in how to destroy them.

No one except the naive fools who still believe the claims of the US industrial trade publications imagines for a second that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could hold its own against a Sukhoi-Su-57 or a Chengdu J-20 or J-31.

Two years of war in Ukraine has indeed transformed the balance of the world: Except in the opposite way to which it was intended. 

The war which The Genius Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser of the United States, imagined would “break” Russian forever has broken NATO beyond repair instead. Three quarters of a century of Western deterrence has been destroyed and half a million innocent young Ukrainian lives lost – for nothing. Except for the Genius Jake Sullivan’s Dreams.

O Brave New World that has such people in it!