School of War - Ep. 19: Fred Kagan on Ukraine

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Fred Kagan, Director of Critical Threats Project at AEI, joins the show to discuss the first week of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Times: 00:42 - Introduction  01:40 - The situation at present 06:39 - Nature of original build-up of Russian forces 14:50 - Russian strategic and operational style 17:47 - Lack of political preparation 20:44 - Putin's background 24:22 - Will Russia win? 30:14 - What are Putin's weaknesses? 34:20 - What happens next if Kyiv falls? 39:41 - Impact on American national security

The idea behind this podcast was to focus on military history. But right now, military history is being made as we speak in Ukraine. Let's get into the weeds of it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who are not these buildings now.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm joined today by Fred Kagan, Senior Fellow and Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. Fred, thanks so much for joining. Great to be with you, Aaron. So the subject of the day today, obviously, is Russia and Ukraine.

And I'd like to start us just in the present moment. We're recording this at about 3.15 in the afternoon on Wednesday, March the 2nd, on the on the east coast of the United States. So the middle of the night over in Ukraine. Give us a sense of where things stand in the war. And, you know, in particular, if you would speak to, I think we went through something like a 48-hour period. I don't think I got swept up in it exactly, but I was sympathetic at times to this feeling that, wow, gosh, you know, things are going very poorly for the Russia. Zelensky's leadership is inspiring, you know, maybe hope against hope the Ukrainians have some kind of shot here in conventional terms that at first seemed hopeless. So speak to that element

of things, if you would, and just where things stand. Well, I mean, amazingly enough, I think the Ukrainians do have a shot. And I saw General Petraeus quoted today noting that. And it's really, it's tough as a military historian and military analyst to look at the correlation of forces, as the Soviets like to call it, between Russia and Ukraine, and suggest the Ukrainians have any kind of show at all. And so I think all of us have the problem that when you just sort of cast a normal net assessment based on numbers of troops and tanks and artillery and age of systems and planes and all that kind of stuff. You know, the Ukrainians should not be able to defend against the Russian

assault. But we've got to face the reality that by those standards, the Ukrainians shouldn't have been able to do what they've done in the last week. This is, you know, I never would have imagined that the Ukrainians would have been able to stop Russian advances cold, more or less, and then stop repeated Russian attempts to renew advances. So it requires explanation, right? what you know how how did that how did that happen and at at at risk of messing up your desired to approach or chronological approach here i think i'd actually go back right away and say up front listen you know our top line forecast my top line forecast for the months preceding this invasion was wrong i i assess that Putin wouldn't order this kind of invasion and that was obviously

wrong. Ironically, one of the reasons why I made that Rome forecast was because I was right in certain assessments of weaknesses that I saw in the way the Russians were preparing for this attack. So the way the Russians composed the forces that were in Belarus and are now attacking Ukraine on both sides of the Nippa River toward Keev, made no sense. sense from the standpoint of preparing to conduct high-speed mechanized maneuver warfare. And I can go into that in more detail if you want. But as I watched the Russians and the Russia T Institute for the Study of War, which has been doing the great work that I'm relying on for these assessments, as they watched them,

we were shaking our heads and saying, listen, this is a pretty way of preparing to conduct this kind of war, and then making the erroneous conclusion that, first, First of all, Putin's generals knew that, second of all, that they were telling him that, and third of all, that he would therefore not order it. One of those assumptions was clearly inaccurate because he ordered it, and having ordered it, he's reaping the consequences that were actually sort of a little bit predictable. But even so, and even before we get into that, I'll tell you other things that have me gold-smacked. I don't understand why there are any Ukrainian aircraft in the era right now.

I would have assumed and indeed assessed that the Russians could ground the Ukrainian Air Force within 24 hours, if not soon, even that. I don't understand why they're Ukrainian drones or Turkish-made Ukrainian drones operating still. I would have assessed that the Russians could have prevented them for flying. They haven't. And at this point in the war, I have to conclude that they can't. And that, you know, forces me to note that some very fundamental assessments of Russian military capability that I and I think most other military analysts have been operating on are invalid. And, you know, we'll see what comes in the next few days.

Military is can learn and the Russians have such overwhelming numbers that there's still time for the Russians to get it together and, you know, conduct coherent operations and overcome their setbacks. But right now, candidly, it's not looking good for them because they don't seem to be learning that fast. And it's becoming less clear to me that they can. So there's a lot there. Let's let's start with, I'll take you up on your offer to go into a little bit more detail in terms of what you were seeing, assembling on the border, whether it was, you know, the Western or the West, is the Western military district that is north of Ukraine. And then is it the central that's east of Ukraine?

It's the two military districts that are relevant that the Western Western District has responsibility for the border from Belarus all the way to basically the place where the Ukrainian border makes a sharp term to the south. Yep. And then the Southern military district is responsible for the rest of it. Got it. What were you seeing gather there? And when were you seeing it too? I think that's interesting. My understanding is on the classified side of things,

people were tracking this as early as October. There were some inclings that I heard in November, and then obviously by December we were all kind of paying attention to it. But what was forming, what did it seem to you to suggest, and what could such forces actually be used for? Why did you not think they could be used for this? So, you know, we along with most everybody else started seeing this when, you know, in November, when the U.S. administration started talking about it,

and then people started, you know, publicizing it. And we started tracking it closely, and we started seeing it. Now, we had been seeing various movements and buildups and exercises before then. But, you know, we followed closely with the administration's warnings. And then we got some, you know, then we were able to follow it a little bit from open source. Let me start by saying, if you're going to conduct high-speed mechanized maneuver warfare, span of control is very important. Span of Control is the military concept, how many direct reports, how many direct subordinates

does any individual commander have? And the more direct reports you have, more direct supportments you have, the less attention you can give to each one and so on. Very well-established principles for many centuries in military history about what optimal spans of control are. And they come down to basically between three to five subordinates. And for high-speed mechanized maneuver warfare, on the lower end of that, is better. than on the higher end of that because things change so rapidly and you need to be able to

adjust so rapidly that if you have a lot of subordinates, you're going to lose touch with things. And then it becomes harder to coordinate them and achieve coherent effects that take advantage of your ability to mass combat power. In addition to that, we've learned over many centuries the importance of combined arms. So we have tank forces, we have infantry forces, we also have artillery forces and we have in helicopters and air power missiles and other things like that. And the advantage in warfare generally, but especially in American-inous nuclear warfare, goes to the side that is able to combine arms most effectively. For all of those reasons that militaries of the world over the course of the 20th century settled on

an organizational structure that assumed that there would be, you know, a division that had some artillery of its own, had a command of control capability and so forth. The division would have three to four regiments or brigades underneath of it. And then each one of those brigades would have three or four battalions under its command, and that would be broken down into companies and so on. And the Russian military is formally organized in exactly that way. There were divisions, there were regiments underneath them. There were battalions.

And so what the Russians did was, so instead, as they were, they built up in Belarus and in Western Russia, they didn't take, first of all, they didn't take their premier elite forces and put them there. The best forces ostensibly that the Russians have are in the First Guards Tank Army, which is the large formation that is around Mosby. And as we were looking for indicators that the Russians were getting serious about an invasion, we kept trying to stare at the First Guard's Tank Army and saying, are those divisions moving south and west? And they didn't. So that was puzzling. And then we were, we were. I always saw where are these guys coming from? Well, the Russian forces that are in the other

rooms, the maneuver, the motorath rifle and tank forces that are there came from the Eastern military district. They came from the Pacific. They came from the Chinese border. Okay, that's weird anyway. It gets a long way to draw. And there were Russian forces that were a lot closer than that. But the other thing is, those are not the forces that have been getting love from the Russian Ministry of Defense over the years, because that's not the border they're worried about fighting all. So those forces have tended to not be as well trained, to not be filled in the same way to not get the equipment modernized in the same way. So it was odd. And then we saw other forces that were kind of in the central military district, which is opposite Kazakhstan.

That one's a little bit better than the Eastern Military District. But again, sort of head scratcher, why are we doing this? When we looked into exactly which forces were coming, it got even stranger. because granted you're going to pull from the Eastern Military District and the Central Military District. Okay, for whatever reason you're going to do that. I would have expected to see at least entire regiments or brigades, if not entire divisions, move. We didn't see them. What they put together at Belarus is an ad hoc composite of individual battalions drawn from 15 or 20 different regiments and brigades spread across the Eastern Military District sort of won together into this mass that, you know, we spent our time

trying to figure out from open source, what is the command of control structure here? Is there a regimental headquarters? Is there a regimental headquarters? Is there a division headquarters? We never could answer that question. In addition to that, when they started moving down towards southeastern Belarus, we were also scratching our heads because we're saying, look, so there's like no military infrastructure in southeastern Belarus, because it abuts the Chernobyl. It's exclusion zone. And so who wants to hang around there? But there's a whole bunch of other excellent reasons why there's not a lot of military infrastructure. So we're thinking, okay, look, so if the Russians are serious about doing this, they will spend some time building up some bases

down there so they can have logistical support because, you know, tanks drink fuel, even Russian tanks. I mean, they're not remotely as bad as American tanks, but even Russian tanks drink a lot of fuel. Soldiers need to eat, all that kind of stuff. So we figured they would spend some time building bases, in southeastern galleries before, they didn't do that either. So we're watching all of this and we're saying, okay, let me get this straight. You're taking forces from your least well-prepared military district that is like 7,000 miles away. You're not taking entire units. You're taking individual battalions. You don't seem to be bringing normal regimental or brigade headquarters or having any kind of a normal command and control structure. You're not building the military logistical

infrastructure that you would need to support all of this kind of stuff. This doesn't look like what you would do if you were serious about preparing for an invasion. And it turns out that we may have been wrong about the seriousness about preparing for the invasion, but we were certainly wrong that they wouldn't do it because they ordered that. And then the problems that we're seeing are all the problems that we predicted that they would have basically if they actually tried to do something as crazy as what they have actually tried to do. I'm curious about your account or your, you know, even if it's sort of best

educated guesswork as to what the Russian thinking was in terms of their their concept of operations here. Is there, you know, is it possible that for, you know, this could play to the question of why Ukrainian air assets are still in play. Are there things being held back, whether it's forces around Moscow or air assets to hedge against the possibility of a wider conflict with NATO? Or where is the rationality in this otherwise strange pattern that you're describing? Again, I would have been very open to that possibility, except that as the attack ground down, I would have expected to see that stuff come forward.

I don't think Putin is holding back at this point. And so I could be wrong. I mean, it could be that we'll see, you know, we'll find divisions of the first tank army show up and then things will change. But we're not seeing that. So I now have to be open to the possibility that this actually is what the Russians can really realistically bring to bear in this conflict in a short period of time for various reasons that we can talk about. I have a hypothesis, which is nothing more than a hypothesis. And until and unless the Kremlin archives are open 30 years from now after Putin's collapse and the restoration of democracy to Russia, we won't know.

I think that when this attack, when the mobilization was first order, the military didn't expect to be told to conduct the invasion, that the mobilization was ordered, at least from the military's perspective, to send messages and to create pressure that would support non-military approaches to achieving Putin's objectives in Ukraine and vis-vis NATO. I read the deployment of troops in the Eastern military district as a message to NATO saying we could bring our forces all the way from the Pacific, we can use our entire military. You don't just look at what we had. Don't just look at the First Guard's tank army. The threat to you is much bigger than that. I read it as intended as a message like that. And I read the whole thing as intended as a message to Zelensky to say,

listen, we've got you in a bear trap, right? but you're going to be the victim of this bear trap, and you better surrender and you better do what we say. And then at some point when Zelensky didn't surrender, and when the Biden administration, we have to give the Biden administration a lot of credit for playing back the Russian information operations and hybrid war stuff on them very skillfully so that whatever efforts they were running in Ukraine and generally to try to set conditions to get their objectives without having to enwave, at a certain point, Putin said, okay, we're doing this. And at that point, I assume it was too late for the Russian military to reset before having been ordered to conduct an attack that ostensibly they were prepared for, but that in fact, I think they weren't taking that seriously.

And there's some anecdotal evidence to support that in the reports that we're getting that the Russian soldiers, some Russian soldiers anyway, thought that they were. they were, this was a drill, didn't, they didn't know that they were going to war until they were ordered to cross the border. Now, that may just have been operational security and just, you know, a whole bunch of, you know, that could have been a lot of things, but this looks to mean like a plan that was, like a mobilization that was not intended initial support and actual invasion. And then the boss changed his mind or hadn't communicated at the outset clearly and said, okay, we're doing this. And I think there probably was a moment. the military leadership was getting was saying, okay, okay, sir.

Just to linger on the reports on the individual troops, and obviously, you know, you can see these interviews with captured Russians on Twitter, and they're very striking, you know, operational security, sure, but when I think of operational security, I think, you know, you don't know if you're going on the fifth or the eight or the 12th. Your officers maybe don't find out the coordinates of where you're going until, you know, You got to prep to get on the birds or whatever. You know, that's operational security.

There is, you're a scholar of these things. There is political preparation required to go to war. You know, the troops in England in 1944, you know, didn't. There was operational security for sure, but they knew they were going to go fight the Nazis and they knew why. It's sort of stunning if lack of preparation on that front was intentional. No? So that was the other reason why, or one of the other reasons why we got our top. on forecast roll. It never occurred to me that Putin would launch a war like this without preparing

his population for it. And so we had been staring and we have been staring at the domestic Russian information space looking for indications that Putin was preparing the Russian people for a serious military endeavor that could cost a lot of Russian lives. We never saw it. As we were leading up to the days of the invasion, Russian senior officials were laid. Pooning the West for the invasion warnings, days before the invasion in Russian media, it was still a running joke. Oh, the idiot Westerners. They've been cited one of our reports.

I thought it was great. They made fun of explicitly one of our reports saying, look at that. Another stupid thing tank is saying that there's going to be a Russian invasion. Ha, ha, ha, ha, how stupid they are. And you think they actually believe that? I read that as more misinformation, but you think that they were being. in earnest in their jobs. Well, it sort of doesn't matter from the standpoint that I'm thinking about, which

is the one thing that we're doing was telling their people that there was going to be a war. They were telling the people there wasn't going to be a war. And by the way, that's still the Russian law. They're still saying there be a war. So I think we have to conclude that Putin really did believe, and we've got our intelligence, you know, the intelligence people are meeting this stuff, which sounds right. But I think that Putin really think that Russian tanks would cross the border and Zelensky would flee and the Ukrainians would run and surrender.

And Russian troops would just drive down the road to Kiev, installed whoever they were going to install as the new satrap. And then go home and it was all going to be over. I have to come to the conclusion that Putin thought that that's what was going to happen. And so he didn't actually have to prepare anybody for anything. And then was stunned for reasons that just, I mean, that just go to insanity. I mean, it's just he must be out of touch with reality to have thought this. But then he was stunned that the Ukrainians actually have fought like lions. And not only that, but have fought well and that his guys were not ready to fight them.

Do you think it's relevant that, you know, he's an intelligence officer by trade and not a military officer? I feel like anyone with substantial military experience would just, you know, consider the example of Crimea in 2014 or any of the other successful limited operations that the Russians have conducted. And then just look at a map, look at a map of Ukraine and conclude that this is, you know, a bigger problem. It might be that his experience as an intelligence officer has conditioned him to listen to certain people in his inner circle at the expense of other people and his inner circle. at the expense of other people in his inner circle. And again, you know, there were indications from various U.S. intelligence forces and U.S. government officials that the U.S. intelligence community thought that he was no longer receiving good military advice, that he wasn't listening to the right people, that he was in a bubble.

And the bubble, you know, consists of his FSB buddies. It doesn't include, you know, uniform military who know how to fight. And I think it's possible that, and I discounted those reports for various reasons. And I think I was wrong to discount them in retrospect. I think Hugh hasn't been getting good military advice. He himself has no qualifications to look at specifics of a military plan and having a, you know, a worthwhile opinion one way or the other. I'll tell you what, Aaron, we've watched the chief of the general staff get awesome for

who's been there for a decade. the military district commanders, who's the Southern Military District Commander, Zoravlov, who's the Western Military District Commander, those guys both commanded in Syria. They wrote a lot about their experiences. We studied for you guys a lot. They really look and sound like pros.

They really do. And I've spoken with American senior officers who engaged with them in the past, and in fact I asked one of those officers at a certain point, do you think this is what we're seeing? Do you think it awesome enough would order an operation like this? Or would fail to tell Putin that he thought this was going to be a mess?

And he said, no, I don't. I think Putin, it's possible that those guys, look, it's possible that we overestimated them. It's possible that they were professional, but then they started drinking their own Kool-Aid, which happens. It's possible that they're cowards and didn't tell the boss what a mess. which was likely to be, it's also possible the boss didn't give them a chance to. And when you look at the stage-managed meetings, like that National Security Council meeting a week ago Monday when he humiliated the head of his foreign intelligence agency,

which was a, I enjoyed watching that a lot in a certain sense. You know, I don't know what the meetings are like if, you know, when Kadaasimov was going in presumably with Sergei Shogu, the defense minister. and Putin's FSB cronies where they were going to brief them on this, I don't, if those were staged managed anything like that, you know, now, I mean, it can't have been staged like that because those are all for public, you know, their consumption knows. But if any kind of anything remotely like that was going on, I don't know that Putin was giving people a chance to tell them. So I don't know where it broke down on the military

hierarchy, but people that we really thought and still think in principle should know a lot better are doing things that are militarily very stupid. Got it. Okay. So let's, let me take the opposing view just for a second because we spent, you know, 20, 30 minutes here on how Putin may be high in his own supplies, made a ton of mistakes. Maybe this doesn't work out in the end conventionally, which is, you know, kind of, kind of shocking. Sure. On the other hand, you know, we didn't take Baghdad in 2003 and seven days. You, you're a student of these things. I am in a much more limited way. I've lived them for a brief period of my life in other respects. You know, stuff's just messy. It gets messy, really messy. Nothing ever really goes how you plan it to. And at the end of the day, if you do have, you know, really substantial overmatch of forces and leadership that can more or less hold it together, you know, in a situation like this year, you know,

probably win. When I should, you know, asterix win conventionally. After that, there are other phases that you're going to have to account for. So do you think that it is still more likely than not that there is a conventional victory of arms in the sense that Kiev falls? Well, maybe I'll let you fill in the blank there because I'm curious to know how you would define conventional military victory here. Is it even possible at this point that Putin could actually swallow the whole country? Is it at best, you know, the eastern half of the country, you know, what, how do you rate his odds? Well, look, I mean, I'm glad you started that way because that's the 2003 example is vividly in my mind because if I would call correctly, we weren't, you know, two or three days into that

when we had headlines about how, you know, the U.S. was in a quack mire and it was Vietnam all over again because there was some kind of operational pause reported somewhere. And we did some stupid stuff in that war too. I mean, there was, you know, there was, I'm not going to go into it here, But there were some things that we did that were militarily unwise that really had, you know, bad outcomes. And yeah, the stuff, you know, stuff happens. I'm going to say, though, not like this. Not, I mean, not like this. This is like wheels coming off stuff happening.

What I'm watching for in that sense is are the Russians learning? Are they getting so far I'm not seeing it. And that's surprising me. You know, the war began with the Russians' track, a assault or airdrop onto the two airfields right around Kiev, the Antenov airfields of the northwest and the Buddy Spiel International Airport to the southeast. And the Ukrainians crushed both of those airdrops.

Now, I wouldn't have bet that they could do that, but they did. So the Russians tried again. They tried other aerodrops, and the Ukrainians crushed those two. Okay. That's weird, but okay. I haven't seen confirmation of this yet, but I mean, I've seen the reports that the Russians have tried another air draw at Kharkiv, and that one got crushed. Okay. Look, first of all, I should say, as in most armies, the airborne troops are the most elite element of Russian army. If those guys are screwed up, then a lot of things are screwed up. And the Russian, military. Now, as I mean, you know, air drops are hard and it's easy to get screwed up in air drops even for elite forces. But when you see multiple attempts at that by elite units in sequence and they don't seem to be improving, that's not a good sum, right? It's not a good sign that they keep trying the same thing. It's not a good sign that they keep trying it and failing

and they don't seem to be improving in it. So I don't know. And then there are other aspects of the failures here that we're not seeing improving. So, for example, right now the Russians seem to have given up on the idea of Russian Keith. Because the first thing they did was to try to draw right into the city. And the Ukrainians explained to them when that was a bad idea. So now the Russians seem to be working to envelop the city from the West primarily. And so we've got that big long tank or that big long column.

We can talk about what that column consists of, but that big long column that's come down. And the forces seem to be sort of flowing around the city to the west. But I'm seeing some reports that suggest that actually the Ukrainians have, even on that development attempt, have been able to retake positions that the Russians took while they were doing that and sort of driving the Russians further west. That tells me that things are continuing to be badly messed up on the Russian side in terms of their ability to plan, coordinate, you could talk to operations. So bottom line, man, you look at this, you do your basic net assessment stuff.

You count tanks, you count artillery tubes, you count birds, you count missiles, you count Ben, you say the Russians are going to win, right? I mean, it's just any measure, you say the Russians are going to win. And even today, these would come to the same conclusion. But as you know, and as students of military history know, those numbers, there are times when those calculations actually are just completely wrong. And so far, I'm seeing enough indications on both sides in terms of the will to fight and ability to organize and make things happen on the Ukrainian side and the incompetence and incapacity on the Russian side, even among elite units. that make me say, no, I think the Ukrainians actually, I think they have a chance. So I don't want to overstate it because, again, I mean, all the net assessment would tell you,

no, they don't. And so if you were going to put money on this, you would have to put money on the Russians win the conventional phase. But my advice is if you're going to do that, I'd hedge that bet. So going down the road then of contemplating that the Russians could actually lose the conventional fight for, let's say, for Kiev, and I'm educating myself to say Kyiv, as opposed to Kiev, which I've always said. What is the mechanism of their defeat or what combination of factors finally compels Putin to conclude that, you know, his options range from withdrawing from the country to some sort of endless stalemate around the city, city limits? Is it, is it the threat to the supplies?

of the troops and fuel and food? Is it loss of vehicles? You know, how many, I have no idea how many tanks Russia produces today. I presume not more than they are losing. So just, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're Zelensky's staff, what is, what is, what is your concept of operations? How do you win this? Well, you win this by stopping them by inflicting bad of these on them. And, I mean, ideally, you prevent them from

inserting the city. And you dig in, but you also conduct a mobile defense, which the Ukrainians are doing. I mean, Ukrainians are being very skillful here. And, you know,

we're seeing Ukrainian. So I told you about the Russians were not deployed in, you know, in the regiments properly. Ukrainian seem to be. So we're seeing, you know,

Ukrainian brigades and regiments moving around as units and operating coherently and conducting. and conducting, you know, counterattacks. So the Ukrainians are doing this right. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing, the courage we're doing this. Look, if you're dealing with any kind of normal, rational commander-in-chief,

at a certain point, Gif Rasmov or his successor, depending on how that goes, goes in and says, you know, listen, Vladimir Vadovich, we don't have the combat power to break through the defenses. that Ukrainians have established and we don't have more combat power to mobilize in any short period of time. So your options are you can let this settle into as kind of a stalemate here while we try to build up more power, which by the way, it's going to be very hard because we have no money.

Or you can level leave and we can just, you know, start pouring, you know, $150, $100,000,000, 22 and 152 millimeter shells on it and wreck it. Or you could think about looking for some kind of way out of this. That would be at a certain point what the military, you know, what a professional military officer would say to a commander chief who is willing to listen to it. And so the Ukrainian point, what the Ukrainians are trying to do is to try to get to that point as quickly as possible where the Russian frontline mobile troops have been depleted to the point where they don't have a combat effective force strong enough to be able in any plausible way

to overcome the defense in depth that the Ukrainians are conducting. By the way, the fact that the Ukrainians have shown a willingness to engage in urban warfare and to fight in a way that gets their city wrecked, their cities wrecked. should hasten the moment when get awesome a successor goes to Putin with that message, because even if they complete the encirclement of Kiev at this point and can prevent the Ukrainians from countermecking and breaking out, then they've got to take it because the Ukrainians are not going to surrender. And Kiev's a big city. The force is required to encircle it at large. The force is required to take it in urban warfare, large.

Yeah. Cadd these those guys are going to take. Yeah. One day we should, we could spend a whole episode on casualty calculations for, for urban terrain. Yeah. It's not. Yeah.

It's not pretty as you know. So what, one last question about Keev and then one last question overall after that. Let's, let's take the other side of that. Let's, let's say Keev in some sort of timely fashion, we'll say within the next month. Falls. What's next? Is there any realistic prospect given the pace of, things and the cost of things for the Russians so far, that they go as far west as

Leviv, is that never been their concept anyway? You know, where in Putin's realistic best case outcomes here, does the line get drawn? Where does it stop? The best case is all of Ukraine. And, you know, I've played in my mind with the possibility that Putin would, you know, carve off and Liv and Yvronafon Kijs as being areas that could be rummed something. I don't really believe it. Because, first of all, I mean, Ukraine is Ukraine.

Second of all, those areas are going to be hotbeds of resistance and insurgency. And even if Putin imagined for a time that he would let them sort of be, I've long felt that he would rapidly come to the conclusion that he was going to have to take them anyway. Because otherwise, they're just going to be there for insurgency in the rest of the country. and it's going to be just too hard to manage. I also think that his intention was to get more border with actual NATO countries and letting, you know, having that buffer. He doesn't want to buffer.

I mean, we need to not fall for the Russian line, right? He doesn't want to burr. He wants to reconquer the territory of the former Soviet Union or the Tsarist Empire or some combination of the two. And he wants to undo, you know, he wants to put a go and get in time machine, go back to 1990 and not have the full Soviet Union. Union fall. So I think that he would try to push out there. But embedded in that question is one that, you know, I'll get into now if you want to, which is there's going to be an insurgency.

Yeah. No, let's let's get into that because even this is, of course, this is the case, even in his best case conventional outcomes, it is hard to imagine based on what we've seen in the last few weeks, any scenario other than a bitter, hard-fought insurgency or, you know, counterinsurgency, depending on your point of view. Well, I'm going to call uncertainty because I'm on the Ukrainian side. Of course, of course. I know. I know you are too.

Yeah, look, I mean, so that just, that looks really bad for Putin. And the thing is that, and again, I do want to give the Biden administration credit for having stripped so much of the informational cover from him that he was trying to set up, that he just, I mean, he looks like safe. I mean, he just, he looks like safe. And he need, if he wanted, if he had set out, to optimize conditions for a bitter Ukrainian insurgency. He couldn't have done anything different.

He set the optimal conditions in every way. You go in it, I mean, and it's in many, it does remind me of 1941. You know, when you would look at, you know, when HIP had looked at the Soviets, and he said, look, it's a wrecked country. There's a lot of industrialization, but we've had the great famine. We've had to produce. Everybody hates Stalin who would fight for that, you know, George and SOB anyway. They're all, you know, they're not, you know, they're subhuman and all

and that kind of stuff. We'll waltz in. It'll be no problem. And then we'll enslave them. And then you tell everybody that, right? And then you invade and then you're surprised when the Soviet, you know, the people of the Soviet Union who turn, turn out not to be unbelievably stupid, understand what's in store for them if they lose. Fight like lions. And they're not fighting for Stalin. They're fighting because you've made it clear to them what will happen if they do. Putin has done exactly that with the Ukrainians. He's made it clear that he will obliterate Ukrainian statehood, that he will obliterate Ukrainian

nationhood, and that he will russify the country and do it with extreme brutality and extreme prejudice. There's nothing that he could do that would make this more of a black and white issue for Ukrainians than what he's done. And then you just roll the tanks and you talk about denotifying the country. So, you know, he set conditions for an insurgency here. Well, I don't need to talk to you about insurgency. You know insurgency as well as I do.

The 1 to 50 ratio of, you know, counterinsurgeons to population that's in the U.S. Counterintency Manual isn't drawn from U.S. examples. It's drawn from a lot of examples. it's a very good rule of thumb. Okay, there's 44 million Ukrainians. I'll be generous and say, let's only say he's only got to worry about 30 million of them. I think probably he's got to worry about 45 million out of 44 at this point. But I'll be generous to say it's only 30 million.

Do the math. I was surprised, you know, and your skepticism about the invasion overall was shared by among other analysts, Edward Lippecbac, who was making his analysis on the basis that the number of Russian troops involved, topping out somewhere around just under 200,000, it seems, was too low even for the conventional fight, let alone the occupation of the country. We can get into that if you like,

but let me step back as we conclude here and just ask, accepting that there's a range of possible outcomes here, you know, from conventional Russian victory followed by bitter insurgency, on the one hand to some kind of Russian collapse on the other hand. Either way, what does this mean for American national security policy going on? We can take that in any number of directions.

An obvious one is what does it mean for those who think, even now, I see them arguing even now. You can tell by the way, I'm afraid this question where my view is that, you know, gosh, so sorry, this is this really sucks. You know, maybe I need to share some arms with the Ukrainians and some sanctity. but we still need to basically wipe our hands of Europe and focus on the Pacific. You know, what does it mean for that argument? And what else might it mean in terms of the broader consequences?

Well, look, I mean, my answer, my general answer to the Asia first or China first crowd still holds, you've heard the expression major non-NATO.I. Right. It's a legal term. It has the definition in U.S. law. And there's a bunch of things that flow if you're a major non-NATO. NATO ally. There's something embedded in that legal expression that is profoundly important, which is that the NATO alliance and the American commitment to NATO is the gold standard

of American commitment to anyone against which all other American commitments are measured and all other American commitments are in some way lesser. The best you can hope for if you're not in NATO is to be a major non-NATO ally. Anything that the United States does to undermine confidence in our commitment to NATO will exponentially undermine confidence in our commitments to not major non-NATO allies, of which Taiwan is not one. And Taiwan can't be one because it can't be a formal ally because the United States doesn't recognize it as an independent. country. And this is one of the things that I've always found bizarre about this entire conversation is that what you're saying is we shouldn't fight to defend an independent

country that the whole world recognizes an independent sovereign state that we, the Brits and the Russians signed a treaty with in 1994, talking about Ukraine here obviously, to persuade it, to give up its nuclear arsenal that it inherited from the Soviet Union. and then recognized its territorial integrity and have recognized it fully and have committed to NATO membership for it. In the Bucharest decorations, one of the reasons that Putin's angry about is NATO committed to membership for Ukraine and Georgia at some point in the future. And that somehow washing our hands of that and just saying, hey, you know, Ukrainians to do

what HR would call it the Martin Perkins fallacy, saying, hey, you know, you're saying, hey, you know, get in there, you know, get in there, Jim, go fight those Russians, let us know how that goes. But then we're going to turn to the Chinese and we say, okay, but Xi Jinping, I just want you understand. That shows how serious we are about defending this island that we don't even recognize as an independent state. It's not a very credible kind of argument to make. So there is no American credibility if American credibility in Europe is lost. There is no American credibility after that. So that doesn't mean that we have to fight to defend Ukraine against Russia.

That's complicated. I understand the various issues there. We've got to fight to defend Poland. We've got to fight to defend the Baltic states. We don't have an option. If we don't do that, we will have cratered American credibility across the globe. And Xi Jinping is not going to say, oh, my God, I need to be scared. The Americans are keeping their powder dry to defend Taiwan.

that is not going to be the conclusion that he draws. You can tell that because of the way that the Taiwanese are reacting to what we're doing and the way the Japanese are reacting to what we're doing and the way the rest of the Asians who are worried, the Asian countries that are worried about China are reacting. None of them are saying, oh, Americans, please don't get caught up in this European thing. We need you to focus out here. They're sending messages of support to Ukraine and resistance to Russia

because they understand the principles that are at stake. Fred Kagan, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Thank you so much for joining. Great to be with you, Aaron. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.