Suchergebnisse

The ongoing war in Gaza is tragic in terms of human suffering and there is little sign that this conflict will come to an end any time soon. This article asks what lessons can be drawn from recent British military history in defining success or failure.

There is more continuity in the history of U.S. military basing policy than is typically assumed.

The Australian government asserts that China's military buildup is the largest of any country in post-war history. Their threat perception is overblown.

8/1/1942: Military commissions conclude for eight nazi saboteurs. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these trials in Ex Parte Quirin.

In this article, Sanaa Hardadou explores the history of military coups and insurgencies in Burkina Faso. Hardadou finds that despite their initial promises, the coups often eventually further destabilized the country and subjected it to international and internal conflicts. This in turn served to divide the country and Africa.   Introduction The recent Russia-Africa summit … Continued

When Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup d'état to oust the civilian government of the Directorate in France, he justified his actions as necessary to save the spirit of the Revolution. The army, in Napoleon's view, had a solemn obligation to defend the nation against threats both at home and abroad.The notion that a military, as guardians of a national spirit, has the right to seize the authority of the state became known as Bonapartism. This seemingly persistent belief in certain militaries in Africa emphasizes the need for comprehensive reform.Military regimes can perceive themselves to be better at governance than civilians. The simplicity of efficiently carrying out orders stands in stark contrast to the seemingly endless bureaucracy impeded by incompetence and corruption. In crises where politics leads to impasses in service delivery, the military's projection as being "above politics" can help it seize and keep power in fragile states.Despite the anti-French rhetoric of coup leaders in Africa, many of them nonetheless invoke this spirit of Bonapartism in acting to "save" the state. As the French Revolution began to eat itself under the Reign of Terror, for Napoleon the only means to preserve the Revolution was for its defenders to remove the civilian leadership by force.This was no singular event. Several times in the 19th and 20th centuries, the French army forced dramatic changes in the state whenever the national spirit had been challenged. Bonapartism furthermore formed a significant part of military formation in France's colonies, particularly in Africa.The problem with Bonapartism is that it has greatly undermined attempts to professionalize security forces. When we speak of professional soldiers outside of a (former) colonial setting, we mean a trained soldier who readily accepts and defends civilian authority. Such a situation is so taken for granted today that we do not always appreciate how necessary this is for a thriving democracy.If a military perceives itself to be better, more competent, or in some way less fallible than the civilian government, then a risk of Bonapartism can persist regardless of how well trained they might be. U.S. training of officers, such as those in Niger, may unintentionally lead to a growing confidence in the military about their competence and increase the risk of a takeover.The officers leading the coups in Niger and Gabon cite persistent civilian misrule, aided in no small part by continued French dominance in domestic political and economic policies in both countries, as the primary justification for their intervention. They present themselves as acting in the best interests of the nations they are nominally intended to protect. Seizing power away from incompetent civilians is merely a continuation of their duty.Scenes of crowds celebrating the removal of decades-long dictatorships do indicate at least a modicum of legitimacy for the military's actions in Gabon. Many coup leaders across Africa have justified their actions on the demonstrable misrule by civilian governments. In almost every scenario, however, the coup leaders merely became the new dictators. These actions further emulate Napoleon's hold on power, although few did so as blatantly as Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, who declared himself Emperor 4 December 1977.Bonapartism is not solely a francophone problem and can exist in any state with weak democratic institutions. In the cases of Zimbabwe and Egypt, despite the civilian façade, the spirit of Bonapartism still lingers. For both states, the military has long been the true source of the state's authority.Zimbabwe's elections are a mere formality, a political tradition rather than any substantive effort to change the civilian authority. Aside from the Egyptian military's brief foray into relinquishing power to the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012, the civilian leadership serves at the pleasure of the military, not the electorate. When the military felt that Egypt was at risk under the leadership of the Brotherhood, they acted to save the state by retaking authority, a quintessential Bonapartist action.The coup in Sudan that ousted Omar al-Bashir was a remarkably similar instance of a military acting to change the civilian leadership during a crisis. However, the current infighting among senior officers points to an entirely different matter. It's actually a misnomer to refer to states like Sudan as "weak." Rather, the problem lies in the fact that the state is too powerful in relation to other aspects of the society, particularly the economy.Such states are the 'only game in town' in terms of attaining mobility, income, and basic security. Fights over who controls the state become so violent because of a lack of options. As long as other sectors remain underdeveloped, the risks of coups will persist. In such cases, it may well be counter-productive to invest too much in the militaries, and making control of the military all the more tempting.There are steps the African Union and other international bodies can take to militate against Bonapartism. The first concerns the AU's Lomé Declaration of 2000, which established a norm against unconstitutional regime changes by stating that any extra constitutional changes in a government is grounds for immediate suspension. In practice, this commitment has been far from rock solid, with the AU making numerous exceptions over the years.Moreover, tougher penalties could be applied, especially in the form of mandating Security Sector Reform (SSR) as necessary processes to return to the AU.SSR entails a comprehensive overhaul of a state's security sector. The security sector includes not only the military but also the police, judiciary, and any intelligence services. Importantly, SSR requires more than mere training, as the Niger and Burkina Faso cases demonstrate. Therein lies the rub of military governance and strengthening democracies: the only body with the authority to restructure the military is the military itself.Save for the odd counter-example, democratic promises by army officers have rarely been realized. Even in instances where elections have been held, the military nonetheless retains inordinate influence over the civilian leadership, and the threat of future coups persists.SSR is neither cheap nor easy to adequately implement. One of the most important factors is rewriting a constitution with sufficient judicial strength to ensure that an elected legislative body has the ultimate authority over all security forces. Doing so must result in the end of Bonapartism for the military and the conclusion that they are not the sole nor ultimate defenders of the nation.The rush to hold elections after a coup is often seen as an act of good faith by coup-leaders to return a country to democracy. However, to be a democracy does not only mean having elections, as democracy contains a set of values, including civilian oversight and regulation of all coercive forces in a state.Every soldier needs to be educated on the importance of civilian leadership as they are far more likely to know what is in the best interests of the civilian population than a general. Military training by foreign experts without complementary democracy training is, as Niger bears out, counter-productive to the overall mission objectives of combating Islamist insurgencies. US foreign military training reportedly includes instruction on safeguarding democracy and human rights.While US policy is to immediately halt all military aid following a coup, the policy has not always been strictly enforced, more rigorous enforcement may be more effective in the long term. These recent coups raise the difficult question on the efficacy of democracy and human rights training for militaries who are evidently not receptive to the message.Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte attempted a similar overthrow of a civilian government as his more illustrious uncle in 1851. This more foolhardy power grab led Karl Marx to quip that "history repeats itself, the first as tragedy, the second as farce." Unless the right lessons are learned, the Bonapartism lurking in African militaries will continue the tragedy of military rule.

With the pendulum of war swinging in Russia's favor and the Western alliance only now clearing the way for more aid to Ukraine, many have been waiting for the Institute for the Study of War to offer its take on who is to blame and what is to be done. ISW has been one of the most referenced think tanks in mainstream media reporting on the war in Ukraine and has played a prominent role in creating and sustaining war optimism in the West in 2022 and 2023. Its daily battlefield reports have repeatedly played up Ukrainian victories and emphasized Russian failures and losses, almost always uncritically reproducing the version received from Kyiv.Such reporting is unsurprising when we consider the specific nature of ISW as a think tank. Funded by important military contractors in America's military industrial complex such as General Dynamics, DynCorps International, and CACI International, ISW is also a creation of the "Kagan industrial complex." It was founded by Kimberly Kagan, the wife of military historian Frederick Kagan, who in turn is the brother of Robert Kagan — co-founder of the infamous neo-conservative think tank the Project for a New American Century. It would be remiss not to mention that Robert Kagan is married to none other than Victoria Nuland, who was until recently heading up the U.S. State Department's policy on Ukraine and Europe.Given the hawkish and neoconservative ideological bent of ISW's leadership, one would not expect their stance on the war in Ukraine to change even in the light of new developments. Yet, its recent report "Denying Russia's Only Strategy for Success" is a remarkable double down. Not only does it present the recent deterioration of Ukraine's military prospects as a Kremlin disinformation campaign, it is also a manifesto for military escalation.Instead of examining where the Western alliance has come up short, or any concession of Russia's resilience and adaptation to the challenge of war, the ISW report is squarely focused on the apparent superpowers the Kremlin enjoys in the domain of "perception manipulation." It claims the Kremlin "floods Western discourse with false and irrelevant narratives" to condition Western publics to "freely reason to a conclusion that Russia's prevailing in Ukraine is inevitable." Reviewing the references the report is based on, it is clear the authors have no direct proof of Kremlin activity. Their work mostly relies on other ISW reports and cites tweets by Elon Musk and David Sacks or cherry-picked media articles as evidence of Westerners being duped by Russia. Unpacking the central thesis of Russian disinformation, the report goes on to claim that the West has a vast superiority over Russia in terms of resources and technology and that all that is needed to defeat Vladimir Putin is "strategic clarity." As ISW are experts in military history, it seems incredible they have forgotten the numerous historical examples of countries with superior GDP being defeated by economically and technically inferior opponents. Sidestepping such inconvenient points, the ISW report focuses on the West's loss of clarity — be it the genuine divisions and fear within NATO or distractions caused by other issues. The blame for this is placed squarely on the Kremlin, implying that Russia has almost superhuman capacities to control Western perception. Unsurprisingly, the report urges Westerners (referred to as "we" and "us" throughout the text) to blow this Kremlin-induced fog from their minds. In other words, if only the West can eradicate "defeatism," return to its core "values" and "virtues" and understand the true nature of the Russian threat is in its disinformation capacities, then the rest will be simple. The Western alliance will bridge its "need gap" and produce a "surge" in support to Ukraine to ruin Putin's dream of a Russian victory. Once again, there is not a single sentence here that refers to the real war-making capacities of NATO or Ukraine. Where do the munitions come from? What about the manpower? Which NATO members are ready to step up their commitment? The ISW report fits into the previous track record of poor quality military analysis from neo-conservative think tanks on the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. One must conclude that the purpose of this ISW report is in fact to boost the morale of analysts overwhelmed by pessimistic questions about the war's new trajectory. Indeed, the ISW report dismisses talk of peace as "surrender" to Putin. It also rejects those concerned about escalation and a NATO-Russia war and explicitly saying that the West must escalate to resist Putin's aggression. Failure to resist is tantamount to surrender.The discourse of discrediting previous Western diplomacy with Russia as cowardly and failed appeasement is well-established and repeated in the report. ISW goes one step further by calling for the rejection of all "Russian premises" in understanding the conflict in Ukraine. This is a sure way to ensure there can be no basis for any negotiations with Russia.This brings us to the crucial final part of the report where, having "debunked" a spectrum of points as merely part of the Kremlin's grand perception manipulation campaign, the authors outline the logical next step in the war: a new escalation. The first part is to "deny Russia's sanctuaries," by which the authors mean encouraging Ukraine to have free rein in attacking targets inside the Russian Federation. Second, they call for NATO to support new forms of asymmetric warfare to catch Russia off guard and somehow offset their increasing dominance on the frontlines. Finally, the report vaguely calls for the West to "target Russia's capability globally," which appears to advocate espionage, political and economic warfare, and perhaps even terrorism. In summary, the report advocates blowing up various targets connected to Russia in the hope this derails their summer offensive in Ukraine. ISW has issued a clear call for the West to fearlessly up the ante against Russia. In reading it, one recalls the strong influence ISW has had up to this point in shaping perceptions of the war in Ukraine. What is striking is the way the group has revealed its own hand as a crucial agent not in supplying objective and accurate military reports but in waging information warfare. One could even say that ISW itself "floods Western discourse" to condition U.S. public opinion to "freely conclude" that it is necessary to escalate against Russia. Although deeper research is needed, it would seem likely that ISW is far more successful in spreading discourses on the war than any Kremlin agency. Indeed, Russia has no equivalent to ISW's global influence and reach in the information domain. The Kremlin's presentation of its war aims or ability to contest key points has been clearly weak in the West. Despite all the ISW claims, it appears that Russia has long given up on serious "perception manipulation" in the West in favor of hard power. As a debacle looms for the Western alliance in Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War is offering a Plan B of escalation to solve the current situation. With the anniversary of NATO this month, we can expect their arguments will be heard in various meetings across the Western world. One only hopes the counter-argument for restraint can be made without being shouted down as a Kremlin propaganda tactic.

The revolutionary violence that swept Kyiv's Maidan Square on the night of February 21, 2014 unleashed the forces of Ukrainian nationalism and, ultimately, Russian revanchism, and resulted in, among other things, the first full-scale land war in Europe since 1945.President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the Maidan the "first victory" in Ukraine's fight for independence from Russia. Yet too often lost in the tributes to Ukraine's 'Revolution of Dignity' are two simple, though ramifying, questions: What was the Maidan really about? And did things have to turn out this way?Revisiting the events of that time may help us more fully understand how we arrived at this fateful moment in world affairs.So, what precipitated the Maidan Revolution?In November 2013, Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych rejected the terms of the European Union Association Agreement in favor of a $15 billion credit agreement offered by the Russian Federation. Many in the western part of Ukraine had supported the EU deal, as it would have, in their view, secured Ukraine's future within Europe.But, as the Europeans, Americans, Ukrainians and Russians knew full well, the association agreement with Brussels wasn't merely a trade deal. Section 2.3 of the EU-Ukraine association agenda would have required the signatories to:"...take measures to foster military cooperation and cooperation of technical character between the EU and Ukraine [and] encourage and facilitate direct cooperation on concrete activities, jointly identified by both sides, between relevant Ukrainian institutions and CFSP/CSDP agencies and bodies such as the European Defence Agency, the European Union Institute for Security Studies, the European Union Satellite Centre and the European Security and Defence College."In other words, the trade deal also included the encouragement of military interoperability with forces viewed, rightly or wrongly, by the Russian government as a threat to Russian national security.In addition, the EU association agenda required Ukraine to put up barriers to trade with Russia. An alternative proposal put forward by Romano Prodi (former Italian Prime Minister and EU Commission president) would have allowed Ukraine to trade with both Russia and the EU but was rejected by Brussels.Yanukovych's rejection of the EU agreement brought thousands of protesters to Kyiv's Independence (Maidan) Square. Yet policy disagreements over issues of trade and national security can and are routinely adjudicated via democratic procedures, as they are in the U.S. and Europe. And such an adjudication was eminently possible, even as late as the morning of February 21, 2014, when a deal brokered by Russia and the EU was struck between Yanukovych and the Ukrainian opposition that included a revision of Ukraine's constitution, the creation of a unity government, and an early presidential election to be held 10 months later in December 2014.But on the night of February 21, Yanukovych fled, and a new government was installed by voluntarist rather than democratic means. The immediate post-Maidan government included the far-right Svoboda Party, whose members, according to a contemporaneous Reuters report, held "five senior roles in Ukraine's new government including the post of deputy prime minister."Edmund Wilson once wrote that "it is all too easy to idealize a social upheaval which takes place in some other country than one's own." And that was a trap into which the Obama administration — along with almost the entirety of the American media, intelligentsia and think tank world — fell in the immediate aftermath of the Maidan.It would be fair of critics of this view (and there are many) to ask: What were their alternatives to the Obama administration's support for the Maidan and Kyiv's post-revolutionary government?Mr. Obama might have said "A deal was struck. Stick to it." This would have required a degree of statesmanship unusual to any American president. But, as Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer observed only a month later, "...there was a deal that was cut with the European foreign ministers. That deal was abrogated and the Americans were very happy to jump on that immediately in ways that would have been completely unacceptable to anyone in the U.S. administration if we had been on the other side."And so, the U.S. lent its support to the post-Maidan government (and the Anti-Terrorist Operation, or ATO, launched in April 2014) against the largely, but of course far from entirely, indigenous uprising in the Donbas. Thus began the first phase of the war, which lasted until the evening of February 24, 2022 and cost 14,000 dead and 1.5 million refugees.In addition to the ATO, Kyiv also pursued a policy of decommunization in the east (later cited by Putin as among his many grievances with post-Maidan Kyiv) and repeatedly refused to implement the Minsk Accords. As a former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, Jack F. Matlock, noted in Responsible Statecraft, "The war might have been prevented — probably would have been prevented — if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO."The second phase of the war opened on the evening of February 24, 2022, as some 190,000 Russian troops invaded Ukraine. The costs to Ukraine have been staggering.The World Economic Forum recently estimated that the cost of Ukrainian reconstruction will reach $1 trillion. Still more, "Approximately 20% of the country's farmland has been wrecked and 30% of land either littered with landmines or unexploded ordnance." Casualty estimates are known to be among the most closely held state secrets during wartime, but some, like former Ukraine prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, have estimated Ukraine suffered a combined 500,000 dead and wounded in its war with Russia. Meanwhile, the population of Ukraine has plummeted from 45.5 million in 2013 to an estimated 37 million today.Looking back, the warnings issued by a small minority in the winter of 2014, including, but not limited to: the present authors; Professor Stephen F. Cohen; The Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven; Ambassador Jack Matlock; Professor John J. Mearsheimer; and others were dismissed by the Obama administration, policymakers, the media and the most influential think tanks in Washington. Yet the effort to wrest Ukraine into the West's orbit via revolutionary violence, despite the objections of fully a third of that country, has been nothing short of catastrophic.

In response to Hamas's brutal attack on Israel on October 7, the IDF invaded Gaza with a stated purpose of destroying the terror group. As such, the IDF is fighting what many have come to call a "war of counter-insurgency." Hamas has no "army" in any well accepted sense of the word. Rather, Hamas's military arm is reasonably well-organized (and well-funded) confederation of guerrilla fighters. The IDF's aim is to kill or otherwise incapacitate Hamas's fighters and, insofar as possible, leave civilians alone.But the IDF is not really fighting a war of counter-insurgency in Gaza. What it is fighting is best understood as a "war of occupation." The Israelis left Gaza in 2005, and now they are back as de facto occupiers. This characterization isn't to imply that the IDF will stay in Gaza in the long term. They may, they may not. It is rather an apt description of the challenging and dangerous military situation the IDF faces as it stands today. What is the difference between a war of counter-insurgency and a war of occupation, and is it useful for understanding the war in Gaza?In a war of counter-insurgency — at least as understood by politicians and theorists insisting that such a war is being fought — there are insurgents and civilians. The former are politically motivated, well-armed, and deadly. The civilians are simply "in the way." They are politically neutral if not exactly supportive of the troops sent to "help" them. In the understanding of the counter-insurgency experts, most civilians just want the war to end so they can get on with their lives. The West German operations against the Red Army Faction provide an example of a war of counter-insurgency, as does, perhaps, the American effort against al-Qaida and the Islamic State. In these cases, the insurgents were difficult to identify, but they did not generally enjoy the support of local population. This situation made military operations easier. In a war of occupation, however, there are insurgents and hostile civilians. The former are, as in a war of counter-insurgency, armed and deadly. But the latter — and this is the crucial difference — are decidedly unfriendly to the occupying forces. Whatever their political leanings, the occupied believe that the foreign troop should go home. The civilians may not be active combatants, but they are likely to give aid to the insurgents simply on nationalistic grounds. Thus understood, wars of occupation — often propagandistically called "wars of counter-insurgency" by occupying powers — have been common and deadly in modern times. One need only recall the British in Malaysia, the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Vietnam and Algeria, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. In these cases, the insurgents were difficult to identify, but — and very significantly — much of the local population was decidedly hostile to occupying troops. This situation made military operations more difficult.The example of a war of occupation I know best is that of the Vietnam war, and it illustrates how difficult it is to fight — let alone win — such a war. From the beginning, the U.S. said it was fighting a war of counter-insurgency in South Vietnam, a "different kind of war" the Pentagon and successive presidential administrations called it. The U.S. did not invade North Vietnam and it said it did not invade the South Vietnam. But invade is what it did. The U.S. sent 2.6 million military personnel to South Vietnam over the course of the war; at the high point of operations, it had over half a million men there. The U.S., essentially, occupied much of South Vietnam.One of the places the U.S. occupied was Quang Ngai province on the northeast coast of South Vietnam. This, tellingly, is where the My Lai massacre occurred. U.S. ground troops in Quang Ngai hunted — and sometimes engaged — the Viet Cong, the "insurgents" of counter-insurgency theory. But they also encountered a population of South Vietnamese that was profoundly hostile to the Americans. The locals sniped at them, laid boobytraps and mines, aided the Viet Cong, and were generally involved in anti-American resistance.U.S. troops recognized the antagonism of the Vietnamese population in Quang Ngai, a population they were nominally defending. In the wake of the My Lai Massacre, the U.S. Army conducted an investigation to find out what had gone wrong with their counter-insurgency strategy. The investigators asked the perpetrators why they had killed civilians. The soldiers often responded by saying they did not know they were "civilians." The Vietnamese in Quang Ngai were, so the American troops claimed, all "VC sympathizers" and therefore dangerous. It's important to recognize that the American soldiers were not saying that it was (as the common trope goes) "difficult to tell combatants from civilians." They were saying that all the civilians were potentially threatening. In Gaza, the IDF finds itself in a situation like that of the American army in Quang Ngai province. The Israelis are there nominally on a counter-insurgency mission. But in fact, they have occupied Gaza. Hamas does not want them there, but neither do most Gazans who are suffering under the IDF onslaught. Is it too much to say that most Gazans hate the IDF? Perhaps not. Critics might well say that many Gazans hated the IDF before the Israeli invasion. Again, perhaps true. But the invasion and occupation certainly have not improved the situation. In a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research, 57% of Gazans said Hamas was "correct" to attack Israel on October 7. Nearly all of those surveyed — 97% — said the Israelis were committing "war crimes" in Gaza. This fact — a nearly uniformly hostile population — makes IDF military operations very difficult. The Israeli forces must fight Hamas, but they also must worry about hostile Palestinian civilians living under what the Palestinians see as IDF occupation. The dangers of conducting military operations in such a context are numerous, but the most significant — at least from the point of protecting civilians — is that the IDF will come to view the hostile residents of Gaza as "Hamas sympathizers" with tragic results.The perils of inherent in a war of occupation were vividly illustrated on December 15 when the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza City. According to the IDF, the Israeli troops "mistakenly identified three Israeli hostages as a threat" even though they were unarmed and were waving a white flag. The IDF went on to explain that the killings violated the Israeli rules of engagement. Of course they did, but that's to miss the point: from the perspective of the Israeli ground troops, all Gazans, no matter how innocent they appear, are perceived as a threat. This is particularly true of military-aged males, and all three of the murdered Israeli hostages were military-aged males. In modern times, wars of occupation have not ended well for the occupied or the occupiers. Typically, hostile civilians — what the occupying power sees as "sympathizers" — suffer tremendously and the occupying power leaves defeated. Such was the case in Algeria, Vietnam (twice), and Afghanistan (twice). The IDF knows this fact well, having fought, and lost, a war of occupation in southern Lebanon intermittently from 1982 to 2000. It remains to be seen if the Israelis have truly learned this lesson.

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar


Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in the United States for a state visit that is expected to highlight India's importance as a rising economic and military power, and the only country in Asia that can be a counter to China in the 21st century. Modi's Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has long promoted its Hindu nationalist agenda by claiming that India was the world's richest region under glorious Hindu rule for thousands of years before being conquered by Muslim invaders in the 11th century and British invaders in the 18th century. The BJP says foreign invaders transformed a sone ki chidiya—a golden bird—into an impoverished chattel. Modi has promised to make India a great world power again, and his U.S. visit aims to be a step in that direction.
The BJP often cites historian Angus Maddison, who estimated that India accounted for 32 percent of world GDP in 1 CE (during the Hindu period), a share that sank to just 4 percent by the time British rule ended in 1947. However, the BJP is cherry picking data from Maddison's work to create a false historical narrative of a once‐​rich country impoverished by foreign invaders. For a full picture, read my new Cato Policy Analysis, "Indian Nationalism and the Historical Fantasy of a Golden Hindu Period."
A close look at Maddison's magnum opus, Contours of the World Economy 1–2030 AD: Essays in Macro‐​Economic History, tells a less flattering story. India's high share of world GDP in 1 CE was due mainly to its high share (33.2 percent) in world population. Since this yielded a GDP share of 32 percent, India per capita income was slightly below the world average at just $450 per year. This did not rise at all in a thousand subsequent years of Hindu rule. So, this supposedly golden period was one of stark poverty and economic stagnancy. Conditions were almost as bad in the rest of the world. High mortality, arising from disease, drought, and war kept India's population stagnant at 75 million for a thousand years till 1000 CE. Simply staying alive was a challenge.
Under Muslim and British rule, India's GDP edged up. Falling mortality rates meant a significant rise in the population too. This rising population partly offset the rise in GDP, so per capita income grew slowly. Maddison estimates it at $550 in 1700, towards the end of the Muslim period. This edged up to $619 by the time British rule ended. Progress was very slow in the thousand years of Muslim and British rule yet was better than the stagnancy in the preceding thousand years of Hindu rule.
Colonial‐​era history books spoke of the great blessings that British imperialism had brought to India. Maddison's figures show those claims to be absurd. But they also disprove the claim that colonial rule impoverished India.
After becoming independent, India's GDP rose much faster and mortality rate fell more dramatically than ever before. By 2003, says Maddison, India's per capita income was up to $2,160. Both in terms of income and life expectancy, India's golden period—if you can call it that—is today, not in the ancient Hindu past.
India is still a lower middle‐​income country, but in PPP (purchasing power parity) terms is already the third largest economy in the world. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund estimate that it was the fastest‐​growing major economy in the world in 2022 and will continue to be so this year. It runs a fiercely independent foreign policy and has refrained from condemning Russia for invading Ukraine. India is a major buyer of Russian oil. Even so the United States sees India as an important strategic partner, though not an ally. That is why Modi's visit is expected to include the signing of military deals for U.S. supply and coproduction of high‐​tech aircraft engines and drones. Despite foreign policy disagreements and worries about the suppression of dissent and liberal values in India, the United States wants to help Modi build an India that will become a major Asian power that can check China's dominance.

What better place than a National Defense Industrial Association confab to announce a new program in which "multiple thousands" of drones will be unleashed across land, sea, and sky "to counter the PLA's [People's Liberation Army's] mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit and harder to beat."


It rings a bit like science fiction but to a roomful of defense executives, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks' words on Monday must have been music to their ears. A lot of dollar signs. Especially when Adm. John Aquilino, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, joined in and told the NDIA "Emerging Technologies for Defense" audience that there could be as many 1,000 drones deployed in 24 hours — "Here's a metric for me: 1,000 targets for 24 hours."


At which point Hicks signaled that might be just the baseline. "We'll also aim to replicate and inculcate how we will achieve that goal, so we can scale whatever's relevant in the future again and again and again. Easier said than done? You bet. But we're going to do it," she said.


Welcome to the second era of the drone war, the first being during the U.S. Global War on Terror, where drones like the MQ Reaper were primarily used for surveillance and manhunting. It was billed as an "evolution" in targeted conflict in which the government promised "cleaner" war with fewer civilian deaths and American boots on the ground. Today's era is about "meshing" both surveillance and lethal action with a pronouncement of drones, all shapes and sizes, and not just the big expensive ones. This is being tested and improved everyday with tens of thousands of drones on both sides in Ukraine and now the Pentagon is promising the next level of that for its coming war with China.


"While both combatants entered the war with drones, there has been a Cambrian explosion in missions and types of drones over the past 18 months," gushed retired Australian army major general Mick Ryan in an article on Monday. "Just as the Cambrian period saw the most intense period of evolution in history, so too has the Ukraine War spawned a rapid evolution in these machines."


Ryan says the swarming of drones across the battlespace has resulted in "an extraordinary increase in the visibility of events on and beyond the battlefield." This allows for "the speed of decision and action" and "the precision of engagements on the battlefield, as well as against strategic targets." He also notes while Ukraine has been credited with advancing its drone technology more rapidly, its still losing in the ballpark of 10,000 UAVs a month.


The U.S. not only wants to replicate this (the project is literally called "Replicator") for a future war, but it welcomes the challenge of ramping up an industrial base that is already struggling to fulfill orders to send promised U.S. weapons to Ukraine for its current war.


To succeed in this, Hicks said the initiative has the full backing of the Secretary of the Defense and Defense Innovation Unit. It will require working with "non-traditional and traditional defense companies," and that Congress "has the opportunity to be a key enabler in getting capabilities to the warfighter at speed and scale." Read: give us more money and less red tape.


Getting Congress on board won't be difficult. First, point out the amazing opportunities of drone swarms, just like major general Ryan did in his op-ed. Next, explain, like Hicks does, that China is gaining on us. It's most important asset is "mass" she said. "More ships. More missiles. More people." The DoD must snap into action to challenge that.


"We must ensure the PRC [People's Republic of China] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression, and concludes, 'today is not the day' – and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond," she said.


Then, ensure that their friends in the defense industry will be happy as most of the top five contractors have been seeding pieces of every major project in their districts for years, not to mention the $33 million in campaign contributions (in the 2022 cycle alone).


It's a win-win for everyone, at least in the military industrial complex, especially when you can talk like Adm. Aquilino, straight out of a Tom Clancy novel. Well, sort of: "Operational concepts that we are working through are going to help amplify our advantages in this theater…there's a term, hellscape, that we use."


I'm sure the term is being used by a lot of folks right now, aside from the uniformed high hats at the JW Marriott in Washington D.C., starting of course, with people on the ground in southern and eastern Ukraine. I guess it differs in meaning based on who is actually creating the "hellscape," and how.

The Pentagon failed to properly track a majority of the sensitive weapons that the U.S. has sent to Ukraine since Russia's invasion, according to a major new report from the Department of Defense's inspector general.
The U.S. has given Ukraine roughly $1.7 billion worth of weapons that it considers to be at high risk of diversion, $1 billion of which was not inventoried according to American legal standards for end-use monitoring, according to the report, which also notes that inventory practices have somewhat improved since the early days of the war.
The IG report does not allege any diversion of U.S. weapons, an inquiry that the office describes as "beyond the scope of our evaluation." The investigation only addressed the highest risk weapons and did not look at the vast majority of U.S. aid.
The news comes just two weeks after the United States announced its latest weapons package for Ukraine. If congressional Republicans succeed in blocking a new emergency funding bill, that announcement may be the final tranche of military aid that Washington gives Ukraine.
To understand the report's importance, it's useful to look more closely at what "end-use monitoring" (EUM) means in practice. In U.S. law, EUM focuses on ensuring that American weapons reach and remain with their intended recipients. This entails all sorts of complicated logistics, including periodic audits.
In that sense, EUM is a bit of a misnomer. U.S. officials are not actually investigating the way weapons are used in a conflict; they just want to be sure that American arms haven't fallen into the enemy's hands or been given to a group that doesn't share U.S. goals.
In Ukraine, these efforts have been complicated by the vagaries of war. There are few U.S. officials in the country and even fewer that can get to the frontlines, where many weapons are kept, meaning that Kyiv has been forced to improve its own arms tracking procedures while fighting a brutal and often fast-moving war.
As fears of weapons diversion grew — driven in part by Ukraine's long history as an arms trafficking hub — the Biden administration announced in late 2022 a program of "enhanced" EUM for high-risk weapons like Stinger missile launchers, which non-state groups could use to take down a commercial airliner. The program employed a dual approach, improving inventory standards while training Ukrainian officials to find and stop attempts to smuggle weapons out of the country.
At the time, arms control experts welcomed the plan but criticized its narrow focus. The new IG report now indicates that officials have failed to live up to their own promises on EUM, raising the chances that diversion could happen without raising red flags.
Of course, this is far from the first time that the U.S. has fallen short in its EUM practices. Between 2018 and 2021, American officials failed to report that Guatemalan officials had on multiple occasions used U.S. military jeeps to intimidate international organizations and U.S. embassy staff, according to the Government Accountability Office.
But the Ukraine case is particularly concerning given reports that Russia has captured several U.S. weapons systems and is now seeking to reverse engineer them. Arms control experts argue that this should serve as a wakeup call for U.S. officials.
In a recent op-ed, Dylan Cordle and Jen Spindel of the University of New Hampshire argued that American EUM policies would benefit from a major overhaul. "Bureaucratic changes should address communication, resources, and coordination of US EUM efforts, and new technologies can more securely, transparently, and efficiently conduct EUM," Cordle and Spindel wrote.
Among other recommendations, they suggest moving all EUM authority to the Defense Department instead of splitting it between the Pentagon and State Department. They also call for new hiring authorities that would empower oversight officials to quickly scale up EUM efforts. Their most innovative idea is to use blockchain technology to help with inventorying weapons."Regardless of how EUM proceeds, the war in Ukraine has revealed some of the weaknesses within current programs, and we envision that 2024 will bring renewed attention to EUM as the US tries to comply with its own legal and ethical guidelines," Cordle and Spindel wrote.

Update 9/15: The Biden Administration announced Thursday that it will only withhold $85 million of its committed military aid to Egypt, releasing $235 million of aid that had been conditioned on improving human rights in the country. The administration had withheld $130 million in 2021 and 2022.Today, the State Department must decide whether to withhold some of the $1.3 billion in military support that the U.S. gives to Egypt each year. Under normal circumstances, this would have been an easy decision. Washington has given Cairo more than $50 billion in weapons aid since 1978, a testament to the long and close relationship between the two countries.But the past few years have been more complicated. As President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi has increasingly cracked down on dissent in the country, a growing group of Democratic lawmakers has fought to reduce aid to his government. The Biden administration withheld $130 million each of the last two years in response to heavy congressional pressure, and the State Department announced on Monday that it would block at least $85 million in aid this year. But lawmakers are determined to go further."Over the last year, Egypt's human rights record has continued to deteriorate, despite the Egyptian government's claims to the contrary," wrote a group of leading Democratic senators in July. "Therefore, we urge you to withhold the full amount of $320 million.""[T]he bilateral security relationship can be effectively sustained at a reduced level of assistance while upholding our values," argued the lawmakers, which included prominent progressives like Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as well as centrist leaders like Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).To better understand the factors influencing today's decision and the history of the relationship, RS spoke with retired Maj. Gen. F.C. "Pink" Williams, who served as the U.S. defense attaché to Egypt from 2008 to 2011. Williams recently wrote a chapter on the history of U.S.-Egypt military relations in an edited volume entitled "Security Aid in the Middle East." The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.RS: The State Department is set to decide whether it will withhold up to $320 million in military aid to Egypt, citing human rights concerns. How should the Biden administration think about that decision?Williams: It's a mixed bag whether this does any good or not. Over the years, we've threatened to withhold aid. Sometimes we've carried through with that; sometimes we haven't. My personal opinion is that it hasn't had any broad effect on governance or the human rights situation in Egypt.There are those that would argue that it's somewhat effective around the edges, and I could probably support that. When Sisi releases a few political prisoners, some people will say, "well, that's in part because of the pressure we applied on the funds." I think that's hard to assess, but I do believe that withholding of funds is not going to make any substantive change in how Sisi acts.RS: Something you talked about in your chapter in this recent book is this idea that Egypt and the U.S. have pretty different views of the military relationship. Can you spell that out a little bit?Williams: Given that the whole relationship was initially built around the Camp David Accords, Egypt decided that the funding was basically a reward, or a bribe, if you want to put it that way. They've never really moved away from that. They're not trying to change the world here. They're trying to, frankly, get money for their regime and their government.Now, we, on the other hand, began to move away from the Camp David [approach] as we saw that it was unlikely that another conflict would occur between the Israelis and the Egyptians. We don't see the aid anymore as needed to get the Egyptians to keep the peace because it's clearly in their best interest to do so anyway. So then we started coming up with other reasons why we're giving the aid. As human rights and democracy became tied more and more to foreign aid, it was only natural that we would go down that road. So we started with some differences anyway, but then they widened quite a bit over time.RS: In the long sweep, how has U.S. military aid in particular affected the shape of politics and the political system in Egypt?Williams: I don't think it's had very much effect. We tend to forget that nations and regimes act in their perceived best interest. It's only natural that they would do so. Of course, we see support for democracy and human rights as not just an altruistic goal but also something that's in our best interest. However, when you push those themes in other countries with other cultures and other backgrounds, I think you have to be careful. From the Egyptian point of view, the regime's going to do what it thinks it needs to to strengthen itself and to ensure its longevity. Unfortunately, many authoritarian regimes see repression as a tool for staying in power. It's just that simple. So the idea that, for any amount of money, a dictator is going to do something that he thinks is going to weaken his position is pretty far-fetched.RS: What most surprised you about the relationship during your time in Cairo? Did Egypt's military and that relationship meet the expectations you had going in?Williams: I'm a fighter pilot by trade, and when we sold Egypt the F-16 back in 1980, I was part of that program. They sent two of us to Egypt as instructors for a year. When I returned many years later, I was not surprised at the state of the Egyptian military or their ability to effectively use the equipment that we had provided because I had the background from early on.What surprised me quite a bit was the shallowness of the relationship. We really didn't — and do not, as far as I know, to this day — have any significant knowledge of the Egyptian planning processes, their strategic plans. We're still just giving them money and equipment, and they're keeping the peace. They are doing other things for us too that I shouldn't give short shrift in terms of intelligence, but I was very surprised that we didn't have a deeper relationship after all those years.RS: Can you talk more about what the U.S. does get out of the relationship? It's kind of striking that you're saying that our influence appears limited.Williams: Some of that comes back to expectations. The idea of influence is that we'll give them this money, and we'll guide them. Again, you go back to differences in culture and differences in perceived interest. This idea that you're going to have all this influence because you give them money — which is a very widespread opinion in Washington in my experience — is unrealistic.However, on a practical level, the intelligence situation is not something we can go into in any depth, but obviously they are positioned and have resources that we don't have that can provide some decent information to us. And on the counterterrorism front, I think they've been quite helpful. And the Suez Canal priority and the overflight [permissions] that they provide us save us all kinds of time and money.RS: You were stationed in Egypt during the Arab Spring protests. How did that political turmoil affect your work and affect the country's ties with the US?Williams: Everything didn't come to a complete standstill, but it really ground down. All the non-essential personnel were evacuated from the embassy. There were roughly 400 embassy personnel on a normal day, and we were down a little bit below 100.We had various bases scattered about Egypt, where we had small contingents of American pilots and maintainers and other advisers. We pulled all those people in from those bases, and they were either subsequently evacuated or they worked work for me in the embassy. So all the interaction and advising at the outlying sites came to a halt. From the point of normal day-to-day interaction, it was pretty much nil.Now there was a lot of interaction because there was, of course, great concern in Washington about what the Egyptian military was going to do with all this. If you recall, they weren't doing anything initially. They were trying to stay out of it initially. When people wanted to talk to the Egyptians, they generally would come through my office because they knew that we could get contact with them and access to them, and we could set up phone calls. The way they were doing it was that they would have a counterpart call their counterpart. In other words, they would have Robert Gates, who was secretary of defense, and he would want to talk to the Egyptian defense minister [Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein] Tantawi.They were trying to maintain this contact and get some assurances from these guys that there's not going to be a bloodbath out there in Tahrir Square. The majority of those contacts were negotiated and coordinated by the Office of Military Cooperation because we had the access. So what do we get for all this money? Well, we at least got them to take our phone calls. And they were not taking [other calls]. There were ambassadors from other countries calling me saying, "What do you know? What is happening?"That is not the same thing as me claiming that we materially influenced the actions of the [Egyptian Armed Forces] in that time. They are sitting there assessing the situation and saying, "What is in our best interest? How do we get through this and still be an intact military and an intact regime on the other side?"RS: That's a really good example of an acute moment where there's an attempt to have an influence in favor of democracy, in favor of human rights. Do you think over the long term that U.S. aid to Egypt has had a positive effect on human rights in the country?Williams: It's probably had some good effect in individual cases. In other words, we're bringing pressure, and Sisi or [former President Hosni] Mubarak is looking to get us off his neck, so he releases some political prisoners. For those people, that's a big, big outcome. Not being in Egyptian prison is a really good thing.I would not ever claim that it has resulted in some philosophical shift in the outlook of either the Mubarak regime or the Sisi regime or the [Mohamed] Morsi regime for that matter. They view things differently, and they run governments differently than we do.I'll give you an example. During the revolt, of course, we were right there. We were very close to Tahrir square. I walked into work one morning, and I get a photo. My staff says, "Look at this." It's a photo taken from the embassy looking out, and there's an Egyptian tank with some soldiers, and they've got this guy strung up by his heels on the gun barrel there. I don't know what he did or what caused the situation, but there he was, and he's alive and everything. So I take this over to the Egyptians and say, "Hey, guys, this is exactly the kind of thing that you don't need to be doing. You don't need to hurt yourself with this." And that was a theme we were talking to them about. We were talking to them about these stories coming through of interior forces abusing people, and that's bad. Frankly, [we told them] "That's bad press. It hurts your cause, and you should not be doing this." Well, I show him this photo, and what are they interested in? They were taken at night, right? What they're interested in is "How did you get that photo? What is that technology?" They didn't even blink about this guy strung up from his heels on this tank. It just kind of shows you the mindset.RS: How should we handle the future of US aid to Egypt?Williams: First, we need to stay engaged. When people say, "Why are we doing all that for Egypt?" I say, "look at a map. You can't change geography." Same reason we have to put up with Turkey. You can't change geography. So we need to stay engaged. Russian influence building, Chinese influence building, the perception throughout the region that we can't be trusted — all these things only make it harder to try to engage and have any influence at all. Nevertheless, I think we have to try.To the money, we're not talking about a ton of money here. I would continue to fund it. You can tie it to human rights, but I wouldn't go through this exercise of conditioning the funds or taking away the funds once a year. They know we're interested in human rights. We can have those discussions. But I don't know that tying the funds has had any substantive effect.So I would stay engaged, I would be careful about tying the aid to their human rights performance, and I would try to assure them that, as we have been there through the years for the long haul, we're still going to be there for the long haul.

 Yesterday, I participated at a roundtable consultation with the Social Sciences Research Review Board* [SSRRB], which is DND/CAF's equivalent of a research ethics board.  The meeting was partly to brief us (some profs researching the military, some research ethics board folks) and partly to get our feedback on how things are going and about potential reforms.*  The SSRB process is essentially run out of the Director General Military Personnel Research and Analysis.  And that was cool to learn since DGMPRA is a partner of the CDSN, with one of its staff, Irina Goldenberg, serving as one of our Co-Directors.  I would say that this institution, like research ethics boards, are necessary evils for researchers, but they are not evil.  They can be inconvenient, but as one REB participant said, they create necessary friction.  Social science has a history of doing harm to its research subjects--with the most infamous ones being the Milgram experiments and the Stanford Prison experiments.  What is it about psychologists that cause them to be the exemplars for this stuff?  I don't know, but I do know that Carleton has separate REBs for psych versus other social sciences since the former needs more vigilance than the latter.Part of the challenge of REBs and especially SSRRB is that we hear the horror stories, but do not have a good sense of how much they slow researchers down, how much of that is due to the researchers and how much of that is due to the review process.  I can give you one example that is most trivial that slowed my latest one down: the Carleton REB required me to change my various documents (the consent form I give to my research subjects, for example) to update the new Carleton logo.  Which is, to be clear, utter bullshit since an old logo or a new one has no implications for whether I would be creating risk for the research subjects if they consented to be a research subject (to agree to be interviewed).  But the change did not take me long.  Anyhow, SSRRB does not have a website!  So, their ability to convey info is not great, so we can borrow from a organization (and CDSN partner) that interacts with SSRRB quite often: CIMVHR! CIMVHR is the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research, and while much of their work is on health stuff, which goes to a different board, their members do a lot of social science stuff (more on that below).  So, the CIMVHR website provides much more help for SSRRB than, well, SSRRB does right now:We encourage all applicants to review the Social Science Research Review Board (SSRRB) requirements before applying; For SSRRB inquiries contact: ssrrb-cerss@forces.gc.caSo, our first recommendation was for them to get a website!Anyhow, they explained the process, and it was most relevant as I just had a student face serious challenges.  To get SSRRB approval, one needs an internal sponsor within the CAF or DND.  What is most confusing about this is that it needs to be an L1 organization--which means the Army or the Navy or the Air Force or a command like CANSOF or CJOC.  Does that mean that it needs to be approved by THE L1?  The commander of the Navy, the chief of the army and so forth?  Um, depends on what you are asking?  If you are asking to survey a specific unit, one can perhaps work with someone at the LCol level rather than having the big boss sign off.  The SSRRB folks said that they could help folks find a sponsor, which my student didn't experience.Why a sponsor and then why are other approvals needed?  The SSRRB folks said this was mostly to prevent survey fatigue and researchers getting in the way of operations, etc.  I did ask about whether this could serve as a veto in the research process since there is language in the documents (from Treasury Board) about the research being in the interests of the organization.  The SSRRB folks insisted this didn't happen, but it is hard to tell if that is the case.  The big thing in play is that the Arbour Report had a recommendation (#46) specifically focused on this stuff.  Specifically, why should academics have to go through their university REBs and then do it again with SSRB?  They are working on three three options:Allow for concurrent review with academics so that folks don't have to wait and if they get feedback from one system, they can then revise what is in the other.Have SSRRB accept or waive the ethics stuff in their process if a researcher can provide them with a REB certificate from their home institution, and just work on the stuff that is DND/CAF-centric--security/operational issues, whether the research has already been done (lots of internal research that we don't have easy access to), or whether it gets in the way of operations.Collaborative agreements whereby a university's REB and SSRRB agree perhaps to SSRRB essentially be one-stop shopping--that if one gets SSRRB approval, then the home university accepts that as a legit REB approval.  The idea here for any reform is to make it easier/simpler/quicker for academics.  Grad students and junior faculty do not have a lot of time to go through multiple processes.  So, this is a work in progress, but it does look like things will get easier although perhaps not easy.  Getting a sponsor is not so easy and getting commanders to approve of research in their area of responsibility is tricky as well.  But eliminating duplicative REB processes would be a big improvement.I mentioned social science above--one of the things that drives me crazy works in a positive way here: a narrow definition of what counts as social science.  In the minds of the SSRRB folks, as far as I can tell, there is a tendency to consider surveys as social science and may be focus group stuff, but not other stuff, which means that other stuff (which really is social science) does not fall into their domain.  So, one can do elite interviews (the stuff I do) since they are "consultations".  One can also do program eval, which don't count as research if worded correctly.  So, either one's REB or SSRRB can help frame a project so that going through SSRRB's approval process is not necessary.  On the other hand, having that stamp of approval is handy for getting commanders to allow pesky academics to have access to subordinates.So, the big punchlines are: SSRRB may not be as much a gate keeper as folks think, and if they are gate keepers, they are willing to change due to the Arbour report to make things better.  Oh, and there are ways to dodge them.  I still worry about the parts of their procedures that give senior folks in the CAF the ability to veto research, but the practical reality is that one can't do a variety of research projects on the military if  the commander is hostile, whether or not there is a procedure that gives them a veto.One last thing: DGMPRA have done a lot of studies on personnel issues, so if one is working on that, it is best to approach them and see if a related project may have produced data--they are willing to share data.  Tis what the collaborative agreements are for.   

With the failure of Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive despite billions in armaments and months of training, the post mortems have begun.

They follow: The West was too slow in providing missiles and aircraft; Russia had too much time to prepare trenches and minefields; Ukraine needed more time to learn combined-arms tactics and employ Western armor effectively. Yet underlying all these excuses was a broader analytical failing that has yet to be acknowledged: flawed and often facile historical analogies led defense planners to underestimate Russia's resilience.

Even today, with the horrific costs of overconfidence plain to all and Ukraine at a crucial crossroads, the same flawed analysis of the Russian adversary persists.

Time and again, policymakers and commentators based their expectations of the war based on flawed historical parallels. One example is Russia's acceptance of mass casualties and use of "human wave" attacks where they lose three or more soldiers for every Ukrainian casualty.

Time and again — right up to the present — commanders and commentators cite this as a sign of severe Russian weakness. Whether discussed in the jargon of an "asymetrical attrition gradient," or simply referring to Russian soldiers as "cannon fodder," analysts frequently note that such profligacy with human lives is a legacy of ponderous Soviet and Tsarist armies.

But what they fail to note is that this tactic often brought victory. Tsarist armies took massive casualties in battles with Swedish, Persian and Turkish forces as they built the Russian empire. In defeating Napoleon, the Russians suffered as many casualties as the French despite the advantage of fighting on their home ground and their familiarity with the Russian winter.

Soviet Marshal Zhukov absorbed 860,000 casualties to the Germans' 200,000 at the Battle of Kursk in World War II. He also lost 1,500 tanks to the Germans' 500, yet Kursk is remembered as a great triumph that crushed Hitler's final hopes of victory. Can one imagine Germany celebrating its superior casualty ratio while being defeated by Stalin's hordes?

However shocking this tactic may be, it is a resource that Moscow has and Kyiv does not. Consider the battle for Bakhmut and the daily bulletins trumpeting Ukraine's success in killing thousands of Russians, right up to the moment that Bakhmut fell to Wagner Group mercenaries — weirdly reminiscent of the Pentagon's body-count bulletins in the Vietnam war.

At Bakhmut Ukraine lost the indispensable cream of its army to hordes of dispensable Russian convicts-turned-storm troopers in doomed defense of a strategically insignificant town that President Zelenskyy vowed would not fall. The average age of Ukrainian soldiers is now 43.

Losing Bakhmut hurt Ukrainian morale, but it is Russian morale that pundits say is shot. And they remind us that military disasters sparked Russian uprisings in the past — in 1905 after defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, or the debacle of WWI that led to the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917.

Given their hardships and suffering, why wouldn't Russians do it again and overthrow Putin? Pundits often ignore that, after a decade of economic chaos and global humiliation in the 1990s, Putin is respected for restoring stability and national pride. Tsar Nicholas II, by contrast, was rather more like Boris Yeltsin — weak and out of touch, reliant on hated advisers, presiding over chaos.

It's also likely that, unlike a distant debacle with Japan or European carnage triggered by an Austro-Serbian dispute, many Russians believe in this war because they see Crimea and Donbas as historically and culturally Russian.

Whether it stems more from deep-seated imperial attitudes or a decade of anti-Western propaganda, Russians still back Putin and even take pride in standing up to the best NATO can throw at them. An effort to appreciate the views of Putin and his people is not being "pro Russian" even if we find those views wrong or repugnant.

On the contrary, such an approach is key to "thinking in time" with accurate historical analogies, and vital to avoiding the conceit of assuming that Russian soldiers or citizens will behave as we would.

On the eve of Ukraine's counteroffensive, U.S. Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley declared that Russians "lack leadership, they lack will, their morale is poor, and their discipline is eroding." Of course, if your main historical lesson is that Russian armies crack under strain, then you look closely for signs of dissent and soon find a looming collapse.

This is how superficial history joins with confirmation bias to produce flawed analysis. Stymied by fierce Russian fighting, Ukrainians troops themselves told Milley he was wrong: "We expected less resistance. They are holding. They have leadership. It is not often you say that about the enemy."

As Kyiv's crisis deepens and recriminations spill out in public, commanders at all levels of the Ukrainian Armed Forces agree that they and their NATO advisers badly misjudged Russian tenacity: "This big counteroffensive was based on a simple calculation: when a Moskal [slur for ethnic Russian] sees a Bradley or a Leopard, he will just run away."

But what about taking the fight to Russia? Former CIA Director General David Petraeus predicted that Russian resolve could "crumble" in response to Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow. Such strikes "bring the war to the Russian people" and might convince Putin's regime that, like the USSR's Cold War quagmire in Afghanistan, Russia's current war in Ukraine is "ultimately unsustainable."

In fact the old Soviet elite did not see the Afghan war as unsustainable, nor were they much concerned about public opinion. It took both a generational transition and a bold new leader who prioritized improving ties with the West — Mikhail Gorbachev — to finally manage an exit.

The point is not that war isn't costly. The Afghan war was, and the Ukraine war is even more so. The point is that accepting defeat in a major war that was justified as a vital national interest is unlikely until there is both a new leader and turnover in the ruling elite.

As for "bringing war to the Russian people" by bombing Moscow, when did that ever work? NATO brought the Kosovo War to the Serbian people in 1999 by bombing Belgrade, and it only rallied them to the side of dictator Slobodan Milošević; 25 years later, Serbs remain strongly pro-Russian and anti-NATO. And when Chechen rebels bombed Moscow and other Russian cities in the early 2000s, it only rallied Russians around Putin and helped justify his increasingly authoritarian rule.
These aren't mere historical quibbles, but illustrations of flawed analogies that framed both strategic expectations and tactical decisions. And they have cost dearly, in both Ukrainian lives and now Western support. Confidence in Washington-Brussels elites falls even as officials still claim that Ukraine is winning and Putin "cannot outlast" the West.

In fact, as NATO empties its warehouses of equipment and misses deadlines for producing new munitions, it's hard to conclude otherwise unless one is trapped in another oversimplified WWII analogy: that of America as the "arsenal of democracy."

Many have contrasted America's innovative private arms producers with Russia's technology-starved state factories, predicting that Moscow would soon exhaust its munitions. Instead, Russia has consistently belied the "all brawn and no brains" narrative, not only outproducing the West in tanks, artillery and shells but defying sanctions to develop new precision-guided bombs, drones and missiles. Perhaps those discounting Russian ingenuity forgot the Katyusha multiple-rocket launcher, a legendary artillery weapon that both the Germans and Americans copied in WWII.
With a looming crisis in efforts to keep Kyiv supplied with munitions, it is useful to look closer at American arms production in WWII, when the "arsenal of democracy" was in certain respects more like Putin's economy than Biden's. But today Washington faces a complex set of institutional obstacles: "least-cost production models," contractor aversion to stockpiling, export restrictions, and environmental regulations the likes of which do not trouble Putin. A final lesson from WWII's "armaments race" is a caution against technological hubris such as that seen in today's gushing about the superiority of Western Leopard or Abrams tanks over the Russian T-72 and T-80. Germany's Tiger tank was clearly superior to the Soviet T-34 in WWII, but the latter was cheap, reliable, and easy to produce in numbers; at Kursk, Soviet tanks outnumbered German ones by 2:1. So as NATO planners and media pundits take up the "cannon fodder" refrain again with reference to the heavy losses Russians are taking as they advance in the battle for Avdiivka, these planners and pundits would do well to consider a quip famously attributed to Soviet wartime leader Josef Stalin: "Quantity has a quality all its own."