Warning: Stark choices ahead for the US and NATO

War is about compelling your enemy to do your will. At the start, it is primarily brute, physical force — fighting, killing, destroying. But the longer a war goes on, other forms of force come into play: sustaining the human, materiel and fiscal ability to continue fighting; and the psychological will of a government, a society and its military to continue. Further, in protracted wars, stark choices often emerge. It is no different with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

In a short war, brute force can be decisive. But sustaining and psychological forces increase in importance as a war protracts. This is what’s going on in Ukraine now, and why it is vital that the U.S. and NATO augment the Ukrainian sustaining force and why fortitude in allied political and societal will is key.

{mosads}Putin’s war aim is clear and expansive: Conquer and subjugate Ukraine. When he illegally invaded Ukraine, Putin amassed a conventional force that he thought was large enough and capable enough to subjugate Ukraine quickly, and he put his nuclear forces on heightened alert. This was the brute force Putin used in the attempt to oust the Zelensky government quickly and then replace it with a Russian puppet regime. It hasn’t worked.

Russian conventional forces performed poorly when they met determined Ukrainian military and paramilitary resistance. Putin’s army then escalated its indiscriminate ground and air fires to support his slow-moving ground offensive. Now he has added the threat of chemical weapons to his escalatory list. The fighting, however, is still taking longer than Putin wants. So his sustaining and psychological forces rise in importance. 

But Putin is having trouble with cohesion within Russia’s fighting units and trouble replacing its battle losses, both in terms of soldiers and materiel. He is employing Chechens to replace battle losses; next may be Syrians fighters. He began his invasion with an inflated view of his military capacity, insufficient operational logistics and replacement systems, shallow strategic reserves, and a fragile fiscal position — all negatively affecting his fighting power. So he is reaching out to China for help. Further, extensive allied sanctions diminish his fiscal position and psychological force every day.  

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Reports of inner circle dissatisfaction (or perhaps Putin’s anxiety) is resulting in purges. Social unrest may grow as available money dries up, body bags flow into Russia, and VPN use expands. Russian citizens may begin to see a reality much different from that which Putin’s propaganda projects — that is, of course, unless Putin is able to crush dissent and free press even further. 

Ukraine’s resistance is producing a stalemate. But Putin is trying to regain momentum by using massed, indiscriminate bombing, terrorizing Ukraine’s civil population, and threatening chemical and nuclear escalation. 

The Ukrainian people want only to preserve their territorial integrity and political sovereignty. They have huge sums of psychological force behind them: their government is determined, their citizens’ resolve is inspirational, and their military retains its cohesion and fighting power. So far, Ukraine can replace human losses incurred in fighting, but it cannot sustain its fighting force without allied fiscal and materiel support. Even some of its psychological force may erode if allied fortitude wanes. Putin knows this. That’s why he will target arms shipment convoys.

The allied war aims are mixed — as common in alliances. The first aim is defensive: deter Russia from attacking any of NATO’s member states. The second: prevent Russia from attaining its aims in Ukraine. So far, the means to accomplish both aims are: maintain allied unity, reposition military units on NATO’s eastern flank, and provide military, humanitarian and fiscal aid to Ukraine — avoiding direct NATO-Russian military contact. Both are limited aims. The apparent allied logic is that such aid will protract the war long enough that Ukrainian resistance and Putin’s incompetent brute force, as well as his ever-weakening sustaining and psychological position, grinds down the invasion, thus compelling Putin to stop. This strategy might work.

{mossecondads}But war is also the realm of probability and uncertainty, fog and friction. There is no way to calculate how the forces at play in war will interact, no formula to gain mathematical certainty that a particular strategy will work. Events on the battlefield and in capitals are unpredictable in any absolute sense. Enemies don’t act as you want them to. So, warring parties can only forecast as best they can, watch closely to see if their forecasts are accurate, and adapt quickly when they’re not.  

Putin told us that he will escalate to whatever brute force is necessary to accomplish his war aim, and he has. But if Putin decides to further escalate before the combination of Ukrainian resistance and his weak sustaining and psychological position prevents him from achieving his aims, the allies will find themselves with a stark choice: employ enough physical force of their own to compel Putin to stop, or yield to Ukraine to Russia and continue only the sanctions regime.

Other nuclear-armed authoritative regimes with geographic ambitions are watching. The U.S., NATO, and other allies must pull out every possible diplomatic stop and use every other means available to avoid this stark choice — but they must also prepare for it. None of the Allied political leaders wanted to fight World War II, but they knew they could not capitulate to the Nazis. The stakes were too high. So, they did what they had to do. 

James M. Dubik, Ph.D., a retired lieutenant general of the U.S. Army, is a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War. He served in military command and operational roles in Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq, and helped train forces in Afghanistan, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Honduras, and many NATO countries.