There is another kind of war termination — the kind that is peddled to innocent students in “conflict-resolution” classes, the kind that gains international applause and Nobel Peace prizes: war-ending not obtained by exhaustive war but by the benevolent intervention of third parties. This end can never yield peace. Its only product is frozen war, as in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the perpetual imminence of renewed war dissuades construction and the return of workers from Germany.
Peace achieved by the exhaustion of resources is the most durable form of peace because deprivation is better remembered than other people’s deaths. But of the two belligerents, only Ukraine can run out of material resources. Except now it cannot, because the United States has seemingly added Ukraine’s sustainment to its other entitlement programmes — a commitment augmented by whatever contribution the British and northern European countries care to make, and the relative pittance given by France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
In the days of Herakleitos himself, war was the father of peace principally because it killed off young warriors, forcing a relaxation of conflict until the next generation grew to military age. It was that process that weakened Sparta’s strength. In World War Two, the Germans were clearly running out of men by the end, when 16-year-olds served on anti-aircraft gun crews, and the Volkssturm conscripted men up to age 60. Some 5.3 million died in uniform, including 900,000 men born outside Germany’s 1937 borders, both Austrians and Volksdeutsche conscripted by the SS, which never acquired the right to conscript in Germany itself. The ever-worsening manpower shortage forced the SS to betray its most basic principle by recruiting non-Aryan troops, not only Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army of 130,000 at its peak, but also SS Turkic, Indian (ex POWs), and Arab units recruited by the Palestinian Mufti Amin al-Husseini.
As for the Red Army, it lost millions in defeat and pell-mell retreat in 1941 and then again in 1942, losing still more men on the offensive at the end. But in 1943 Russian generals no longer impatiently marched men over minefields instead of clearing them, nor sent them to attack without artillery support and tanks. By 1944, it was the Russian artillery that conquered battlefields by fire, and that is how Russia did not run out of men, even if its demography remained skewed for decades.
The Allies were never in such straits because the British evacuated from Dunkirk more than two-thirds of their soldiers in 1940, then drafted many South Africans and Indians for their North African misadventures. By late 1942, at El Alamein, they had vastly superior artillery in lieu of infantry, with more of the same in Italy from 1943, when fresh Americans, the French Army’s Moroccan Tirailleurs and Goumiers, and the free Polish II Corps did most of the hard fighting.
So it was not until 1944 that the exhaustion of the British army’s appetite for fighting emerged in insistent demands for the massive aerial bombardments of any significant resistance, or at least energetic air support at every turn. Having started much later, most American servicemen were not even tired when the war ended, with total losses individually tragic but demographically unimportant. This was even more true of all later American fighting, until now.
In Ukraine, so far there is no question of war-ending manpower losses. In spite of a declining population, the number of male Ukrainians who annually reach military age is at least 235,000, or 20,000 per month. Ukrainian casualties, both killed or invalided out of action, have not exceeded 5,000 per month. As for Russia, colourful stories that relate the use of mercenary units and the lucrative contracts offered to combat volunteers are not true indicators of a manpower shortage: every month more than 100,000 Russian males reach military age, while the monthly average of killed and invalided wounded is under 7,000.
So the stories reveal something else: Putin’s refusal to declare war, fully mobilise the armed forces, and require conscripts to serve in combat, suggests he fears the reaction of Russian civil society. Yes of course Russian civil society had been silent on the war, or near enough. But its silence is not the silence of the grave signifying nothing. It was a very eloquent silence: fight your war but leave our sons alone.
Putin started the war on February 24 with an ultra-modern, high-speed, paralysing coup de main based on the soundest principles of “hybrid warfare”. This works beautifully in war games, and is beloved by beribboned generals who have never fought patriotic Europeans in arms. Having expected, therefore, to take Kiev in one day, and all Ukraine in three or four (that was, of course, the forecast of the CIA, too), Putin discovered abruptly that he could not.
Because Putin did not stop then, he cannot stop now. We might be headed for another Seven Years’ War. It did not seem like that when the Ukrainians counter-attacked in August, and Putin briefly considered retreating to Donetsk and Luhansk, as he signalled overtly. Then seven months after starting his Six Days’ War, Putin finally mobilised the trained reservists he needed on day one.
War is only a great teacher for those who fight it, and the new Russian troops — perhaps 200,000 will show up of the 300,000 recalled — will have to catch up with the Ukrainians, who have been studying war all year. So, Putin will soon need to send more troops, at the risk of more popular resistance at home. But if Putin can persist, we should fight the war in true 18th-century fashion: with the most vigorous material support of Ukraine’s war, but not necessarily with every possible sanction, to keep some in reserve to deter Russian retaliation that may weaken our allies’ resolve. Ukraine itself imports and pays for Russian gas every day.
And yes, it would be nice to find another Étienne-François de Stainville, Duc de Choiseul to find an elegant way out of the war, perhaps by staging face-saving plebiscites. Because to hope for Putin’s fall is not a strategy.
An earlier version of this piece appeared in Strategika, an online journal of strategy and military history published by the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
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