Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Kenneth Israel
With his retirement as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff looming on Oct. 1, 2023, Gen. Mark Milley once again waved a white flag on behalf of his chain of command superiors, President Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, in a CNN interview on Sept. 17. Astonishingly, Milley conjectured how hard it would be to evict 200,000 Russian troops from Ukraine after more than 570 days of intense fighting.
I am sure Milley’s public admission of the “eviction difficulty” was music to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ears. Certainly, it will be difficult to win the war against Russia’s naked aggression and restore Ukraine’s borders unless the U.S. and the NATO allies significantly increase air power, precision munitions and national resolve. We must wholeheartedly commit to enabling Ukraine to win. It makes no difference how many soldiers are left on the battlefield when defeat and death are the only options available.
At the end of World War II, German soldiers surrendered en masse; more than 1.5 million German soldiers surrendered in April 1945 alone. However, if you are managing a long-distance war so as not to irritate the primary belligerent — in this case, the U.S. trying not to “provoke” Putin — then every operation becomes longer, more complicated and more costly. Putin does not want a satisfactory bargain or friendly compromise. What he really desires is an excuse to take over all of a mutilated Ukraine and re-establish the limits of the former Soviet Union. “Accommodation” at any price, or any other clever verbal maneuver expressed on public national news, is the modern-day equivalent of “appeasement” and “defeatism.”
Putin has done nothing more than dust off the World War II German game plan of 1935-1945. Germany’s military leadership focused on several related and precise strategic initiatives: invoke conscription, reoccupy the Rhineland, annex Austria, and partition Czechoslovakia before absorbing all of it.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, holds a news conference at NATO headquarters on June 15, 2023, in Brussels, Belgium.
Germany’s military leaders gambled on the Allies’ indecision and isolation instincts. If this strategy sounds familiar, it should. Putin’s grand strategy is taking a similar approach: Invoking Russian conscription and supplementing it with Wagner Group mercenaries, reoccupying Crimea, annexing major portions of southern and eastern Ukraine, and targeting the eventual surrender of all Ukraine.
Putin even has used the same justification as the Nazis did in World War II. Putin has pitched the need to reunite all native-speaking citizens who are contiguous to the nation to which they are united by race. Coincidentally, only approximately 20% of the alien populations of WWII Czechoslovakia and modern Ukraine identify with the aggressor country — Germany and Russia, respectively.
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