Long article. Link below:


No End Of A Lesson.
If we can only learn it.

Aurelien
Sep 25, 2024

There’s nothing like a really crushing military and political defeat to concentrate the mind and force the learning of lessons. (A military defeat is bad enough, but if that defeat is political as well as military, then this process can become irresistible.) But learning anything from defeat requires three things: a willingness to accept that you have been defeated, a recognition of the nature of the defeat, and a preparedness to consider doing things differently. The West is in the throes of at least one, potentially two, crushing defeats at the moment, and so the question arises: will the right lessons be learned? Can the right lessons be learned? And how do we identify these lessons anyway?

Some defeats have been obvious and complete, and have led irresistibly to major changes. A good example is the reforms forced on Prussia by the overwhelming defeat of their troops at the battle of Jena-Auersted by Napoleon in 1806. Prussia not only lost the battle, it lost much of its territory and half its population, and had to agree to massive reparations and a humiliating reduction in the size of its Army. The way was therefore opened for military reformers to propose the modernisation of the Army and the introduction of national service on the French model, and for political reforms such as the abolition of of serfdom to be undertaken. Ironically, several generations later it was the crushing defeat of the French by the Prussians in the war of 1870-71 which brought about not only fundamental reforms in the French Army (including, ironically, the re-introduction of military service) but the disappearance of the “Empire” of Louis Napoleon and the definitive installation of the Republic.

But even victories can lead to important changes. Technically, the British and the French “won” the Crimean War of 1854-56, although this was mainly due to the professionalism of the French officer corps. The British involvement, on the other hand, was a shambles, and for the first time a disgusted educated public learned about poor or non-existent organisation and logistics, the suffering of the ordinary soldiers, the disastrous situation of the sick and wounded, and the incompetence of the military at all levels. The result was a fundamental reform not just of the military, but of the state as well. As was the case with Prussia in 1806, the British establishment realised pretty quickly that a proper modern state had to be created, and fast. This led not only to the Cardwell Reforms, which fundamentally reorganised the Army, but also to the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms which created the western world’s first professional Civil Service, and to the general modernisation of the state.

In all of the above cases, the need for reform was undeniable, the reformers were ready and the occasion duly presented itself. But more importantly, perhaps, it was clear that there was a larger purpose to be served; of accommodation to a changing world, and that if the necessary changes were not made, disaster would result. We are in a situation now where the world is changing, so the question arises of whether our leaders are able to meet the requirement for change or even recognise it, especially as that change will have to take place at an international level.

We have been here before, of course. I have argued several times that the nearest analogy to our present situation is the Suez Crisis and its consequences. In 1956, several things became clear to the British and French. The first was that the United States could not be trusted to support them in an international crisis. The second was that the two countries’ Empires—costly, and requiring substantial assets to protect them—were no longer viable as a means of ensuring Great Power status. In both cases, though in slightly different ways, there was a progressive move to shed the costs of Empire, and refocus on Europe and the North Atlantic area. But the British considered that Suez also showed the need to cultivate the Americans, make them psychologically dependent on the British, and try to ensure that Washington did nothing of importance without consulting London. (The analogy that has always appealed to me is the British Resident “advisor” in a Gulf State in the early part of the last century.) This strategy was largely successful for several generations: the US leaned heavily on the advice of the smaller and nimbler British system, which was able to avoid the endless, exhausting personality-based power-struggles that deformed Washington. The French drew the opposite conclusion; that they required strategic independence. The development of their own nuclear weapons, the withdrawal from the military structures of NATO and the subsequent development of their own reconnaissance satellites were all steps in this direction.

Now these were very profound questions, but not, I would argue, more profound than those we face today as the Ukraine War grinds down. (I will restrict my argument to that conflict, to keep it to a reasonable length.) So how do we start thinking in a structured way about the “lessons” of Ukraine, or for that matter even bring ourselves to accept that there are any?

I want to use a slightly unexpected figure as a guide here: the British author Rudyard Kipling. I can’t remember what the current approved view of Kipling is: suffice it to say that he was never the uncomplicated praise-singer of Empire that tradition made him out to be. Kipling was, after all, born in India and was never really part of the British establishment (He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 but never any decoration by his own country.) In 1902, at the end of the Boer War, Kipling published The Lesson, a short poem, written in vigorous, blunt, language, about the many failures that the War had revealed. He was a kind of stern schoolmaster, reproving a schoolboy who had made a mess of his studies, but who had the potential to do better. It was not just a complaint though: indeed, the essential message was contained in the first stanza:

We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

Kipling’s judgement was unsparing about the government and society of his day. The failure was not down to “a single issue,” but the failure of “our most holy illusions.” The failures were “our fault” and “not the judgement of heaven,” and the fault was with both “Council and Creed and College” and

all those obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us.

The British had, he argued had:

…forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.

It’s interesting, first of all, to see how far we have come since Kipling’s time, or from the eras of the other examples cited above. The first thing that strikes you is that all of those cases involved fundamentally serious people, who realised that the fate of their country, whether it was Prussia, France or Britain, demanded a clear-eyed recognition of what had happened, and a determination to learn the lessons and apply them. Indeed, the entire basis of Kipling’s poem is the suggestion that the disaster of the War is capable of teaching the British lessons which they should and will learn and apply. The very first lines of the poem make this crystal-clear.

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,

We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

In other words, Kipling is appealing to the essential pragmatism of the British and their ruling class. The system isn’t working, he says, we have made a horrible mess of things, let us have the sense to do better. And indeed, the British Army and to some extent the State itself did take the lessons to heart, and there were reforms. Can we imagine anything like that happening now?

Well, let’s begin from the current situation which, I would argue, is a lot graver than was the case after the Boer War, when Britain’s imperial and Great Power prestige (the main reason for the war) was looking shaky. Let me suggest three practical lessons, although whether any of them will do us any good is question we will come to later. At the end I will discuss a more speculative, but I think more important, lesson to be learned.

First, Russia has confirmed itself as the dominant military power on the continent of Europe, and this is not likely to change. Its armed forces are of a size and quality that the West cannot begin to match, its military-industrial complex is enormous by western standards and is capable of producing military technology on a scale and to a quality beyond anything the West can consistently manage. (In the end, western military technology has turned out to be OK, but not much more.) This will not change because (leaving aside social and political problems) the West no longer has the scientific and technological base, the skilled and educated workforce or the industrial capacity to match those of Russia. Moreover there are certain technologies, like high-velocity long-range missiles, which the Russians have invested in and the West has not. There are also other technologies, such as 5+generation fighter aircraft where the West has a good capability, but which are likely to have limited importance on a future battlefield. So what are we going to do about that?

Second, the United States is no longer the indispensable balancing factor against Soviet, now Russian, strength, that it was once thought to be. Although the cartoon-like idea of the US “protecting” Europe in the Cold War was wildly exaggerated (Europeans always provided the vast majority of the military forces) it was nonetheless hoped that, in a crisis, the possibility of US involvement would have a stabilising and deterrent effect on Soviet behaviour. Whether that would have happened in practice we shall thankfully never know, but it is clear that the US cannot play such a role now. There is no indication that Russian behaviour has been moderated in any way by US statements or behaviour during the entire length of the Ukraine crisis. Indeed, the opposite is the case if anything: in the interminable theatre of proposed “deep strikes” in Russia, Putin’s throat-clearing about possible reprisals has clearly caused the Americans to back off. (History may indeed record that finally the US acted as a restraining influence on some of the more delirious European leaders.) In any event, it is now brutally clear that the US cannot significantly influence events on the ground in Ukraine, and that it knows this. Nor is it able to protect its (few) troops, its installations or its ships in Europe from an unacceptable risk of destruction by Russian missiles. And this is not likely to change: US forces are ageing and shrinking, and new equipment is being delivered in smaller numbers and after increasingly longer delays. The very structure of the US defence industry (to say nothing of US society itself) makes this difficult or impossible to reverse. So what are we going to do about that?

Finally, the West, and especially the Europeans, are now caught in a technical dilemma to which there seems no obvious solution. After the Cold War, and especially after 2001, the doctrinal and equipment focus shifted to out-of-area wars, using drones, special forces and indirect engagement of irregular groups. The heavy equipment intended for Cold War battles was frequently useless in such conflicts, and it became clear that the immensely sophisticated aircraft developed to counter the anticipated Soviet fighters of the 21st century were a wildly expensive way of conducting air-to-ground combat. (A French General who had commanded in Mali reckoned it cost around a million Euros to kill one jihadist.) This had the effect of running down the capability to fight a conventional war to almost nothing, and leaving the equipment for fighting such wars in storage. Doctrinal memory in the military is necessarily short: the European trainers of Ukrainian conscripts over the last couple of years had probably never seen combat (NATO left Afghanistan in 2014, after all), and could only teach counter-insurgency tactics, since that was all they knew. But they had no idea, even at third hand, what a major conventional war was like, and so no ability to train others for it. The results have been evident.

However, in desperation, the West has now given away a fair amount of its low-intensity equipment pool to Ukraine: in the 2023 offensive, some Ukrainian Brigades looked as if they were about to leave for Afghanistan. Its capacity to mount low-intensity operations has thus declined significantly, and its logistic stocks to support such operations have been raided for Ukraine. Moreover, much of this equipment is itself aging (the M777 howitzer was designed in the Cold War.) So even if the extravagant promises of new funding to replace equipment sent to Ukraine and to respond to the Russian “threat” are translated into cash (which is not certain), and if the defence industries of western countries were capable of producing it (which is not certain either) then what would you buy? How would you decide what kind of forces you wanted, so that you could recruit and train personnel and buy equipment?

For the last twenty-five years, western nations have been pulled in different directions. Ever-smaller and increasingly aging legacy conventional forces on the one hand, and investment in counter-insurgency capabilities on the other. Equipment has been used in low-intensity wars because it was available rather than because it was suitable, and training and doctrine for use of large-scale forces in high-intensity combat have now mostly lapsed, since there are no large-scale forces to use any more. If the rhetoric about the Russian “threat” is taken seriously, the Western armies will have to learn and practice doctrine and command and command techniques only ever used in anger in 1944-45, and of course they will first have to acquire the massive forces needed.

But what are they going to do, exactly? In the Cold War, the enemy was just across the border, and advancing to combat would take a matter of hours. In spite of NATO’s helpful extension of its frontiers with Russia over the last couple of years, the heartland of NATO and the EU lies a good thousand kilometres from the currently-claimed Russian border. It’s clear the Russians have no interest in a general military conflict with NATO, and indeed no need for one to achieve their strategic objective of military dominance of Europe. And it is not obvious what realistic goals a rearmed NATO could have, even if that were possible. Shiny new combat aircraft would not even be able to reach the Russian border with a useful combat load, and would run into the best air defence on the planet. Shiny new tanks would be left in storage most of the time, for lack of any commonly-accepted rationale for using them somewhere they could actually go. And of course these are not decisions individual nations can take for themselves: they have to be made collectively. Some within the EU leadership are apparently urging member states to be ready to fight Russia within the next decade. But where? With what? And with what objective? (I would love to be a spectator at the first meeting of NATO’s Strategic Concept 2030 Working Group, or whatever they will call it.)

Continues here...

https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/no-end-of-a-lesson?triedRedirect=true