NATO's Phantom Armies.

And the ghost of Carl von Clausewitz.

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As the military phase of the crisis in Ukraine enters its long final stage, with the broad outcome now unmistakeable for all with eyes to see, you would hope that pundits, whatever their personal views on which football team they would like to win, would nonetheless accept reality, and start punditing about Europe and the world after a Russian victory. Yet such is the grip of conventional thinking and the fear of letting go of hallowed beliefs about the world, that this is hardly happening. Indeed, from all points of the ideological compass we hear of a menacing new stage in the evolution of the crisis, that of NATO intervention, or, as I suppose we should write it, NATO INTERVENTION. For some, the only way to “defeat” Russia and to “stop Putin,” is for NATO to “get involved,” whereas for others such intervention is a desperate US imperialist expedient which will simply provoke World War III and the end of the world.

If you have read some of my past essays, you will realise that both of these arguments are completely false. But although I, and other much more eminent and widely-read writers have been saying that for some time, it hardly seems to have registered. So this is an essay I thought I would never need to write, but now seems necessary. It goes into what you might call excruciating detail, but then in this kind of subject the devil is in the detail, or even the detail of the detail. That said, there are a lot more levels it doesn’t cover, on which people who are much greater military experts than I am can comment, but rather sticks to the big picture. So….

While I was thinking about how to tackle this essay, I ran into the ghost of the great Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz and, slightly against my expectations, he readily agreed to provide some opening thoughts. I made a note of our conversation afterwards, and it went roughly like this:

Aurelien: Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to my site, especially since I’ve invoked you a number of times before.

Clausewitz. Oh, not at all. You see, people have been completely misunderstanding and misquoting me for two hundred years now, and it’s not getting any better. This is in spite of the fact that I don’t think Book I of On War—the only one I ever really completely finished— could be much clearer, and you can read and absorb it in an afternoon.

Aurelien. And what’s the essential message that you think people are not getting now?

Clausewitz. Look, it’s very simple. Military action it itself is a technical affair that can go well or go badly, but that result only has importance insofar as it’s attached to some political objective you want to achieve. By “political”—since we’re speaking in English—I don’t mean party politics, I mean the policy of the state itself: in other words what the government is trying to make happen. (In German it’s the same word.) But the absolute pre-requisite is that the government has a picture of what it wants to achieve, and some idea about how that might happen. In particular, it has to identify what I called the Centre of Gravity, which is to say the single most important target against which you direct your efforts, and which will achieve that objective for you. In my time, it was often the enemy army, but it might also be the capital city, the strength of a coalition or even the morale of the population. So what you are really targeting, in the end, is the decision-making process of the enemy. As I said in my book, war is about forcing our enemy to do what we want, not just mindless destruction. These days, we don’t talk so lightly of war, and we don’t always have simple enemies, so I would say “any military operation has to have an ultimate, non-military purpose, or it’s a waste of time.”

Aurelien. So where do we go from there?

Clausewitz: Well, of course it’s not enough to have a strategic plan, no matter how well defined and sensible. You need the military capability, both in terms of equipment and units and also training and professional skills, to implement the plan. So we say that, below the Strategic level, and the strategic planning, comes the Operational level, where you try to bring all of the more-detailed Tactical-level activities of your individual forces together, in a coherent plan, to achieve a result that makes the Strategic objective possible. And historically, from the days of Alexander onwards, that’s always the most difficult part.

Aurelien: And in the present war?

Clausewitz: Well, the simplest way to put it is that, whilst both sides have had strategic objectives of some sort, only the Russians have actually had proper strategic and operational plans. The West has wanted to bring down the current system in Russia for a long time, and more recently its leaders have also been afraid of growing Russian military power. But all of this has been very incoherent, and seems to be hopelessly and paradoxically mixed up with beliefs about racial and cultural superiority over the Russians. The result is that there’s never been a proper strategic plan, beyond the hope that strengthening Ukraine, for example, would somehow weaken the Russian system. And as for Ukraine itself, well, the West has never really had a strategic plan, still less an operational one: just a lot of posturing and disconnected initiatives. If you like, it just amounted to keeping the war going in the hope that Russia would collapse. That’s no way to prosecute a war in my opinion: the bits are simply not connected together, and in that case you can’t win. And now I have to go and argue with Tukaschevsky and Patton, who are still obsessed with manoeuvre warfare in Ukraine.

And that’s where the conversation ended. But it made me start thinking that the most fundamental obstacle to any NATO “involvement” in Ukraine is conceptual. Nobody really knows what it’s for or what it would look like. Nobody knows what it would be intended to accomplish, or what the “end-state,” in technical language, would be.

This has been pretty much the case since the beginning. At all points, at least from the end of 2021, the West has been surprised by Russian actions, and has had to scramble to keep up. The draft treaties of December 2021 were not anticipated, and there was no coherent western response to them. The subsequent build-up of Russian forces was misunderstood: some thought no invasion was being planned, others misunderstood the nature of the invasion itself and what the objectives were. Ever since, the West has been at least one step behind, continually surprised and reacting to Russian moves. In addition, many of its own moves have been based around doing what is actually possible (attacking Crimea, sending certain types of equipment) rather than moves that might help the West and Ukraine catch up with the Russians, let alone take the initiative. This all offends against one of the eternal principles of War, which is Selection and Maintenance of the Aim. The West has been unable to identify any aim in its involvement except that which is by definition impossible militarily (restoration of the 1991 borders of Ukraine) or that which is just a political fantasy (removal of Putin from power.) It would be fairer to say that the West has no objectives, as such, but rather a series of loosely-defined aspirations.

There’s a slightly technical but interesting example which has been very influential in clarifying this kind of situation, so let me make a short diversion into it. During the Korean War, there were a number of engagements between American F-86 fighters, and MiG-15s flown often by Chinese and sometimes Russian pilots. The technical characteristics of the aircraft were very similar, and the difference in the skill of the pilots was not great. Yet the F-86 emerged victorious most of the time. John Boyd, then an officer in the US Air Force, studied the problem and realised that, in a situation where kills could only reliably be obtained by getting behind the enemy, that required turning more tightly that your opponent. It emerged that the F-86 had a small, but actually vital, advantage, and that, after a number of rounds of manoeuvres, it was generally able to position itself behind the enemy aircraft. The importance of this was that the US pilot retained the initiative, whereas the enemy pilot was always trying to shake the F-86 off his tail.

Boyd later systematised this process, by dividing it into four steps. The first is Observation (“what can I see?”), the second is Orientation (“what does that mean?”), the third is Decision ‘(“what am I going to do?”) and the last, of course, is Action. And then you start again. Collectively, these stages are known as the Boyd Cycle, or more colloquially the “OODA Loop.” But what Boyd realised was that whoever reacts quickest can actually get inside the enemy’s Loop, such that by the time the enemy is ready to take action, the situation has changed and the process of deciding what to do has to start all over  again. This applies pervasively, from the original plane-to-plane combat up to the strategic level.

This is, in effect, the situation the West has been since the start of the crisis: running to catch up. The Russians have proved themselves (to no-one’s surprise if they study history) to be quick to adapt their tactics, and modify and introduce new weapons. The West has not. Thus, we now see the Ukrainians frantically transferring forces this way and that to meet the latest attack, and neither they nor their western sponsors are sure which attacks are real and which are feints. Indeed, it’s doubtful whether Ukraine and the West have ever had the initiative in this war: even the celebrated offensive of 2023, I would suggest, was essentially forced on Ukraine by the Russians as a way of further depleting their own military, and the western aid they had received.

Now one explanation for this disparity actually takes us back to technical characteristics: not of aircraft, this time, but of organisations. The loose Greater West group that has been supporting Ukraine is divided among itself, and its most influential actor, the United States, is divided within itself. Russia is a single power, with an evidently high degree of coherence. (Unity of Command, by the way, is a military principle in some traditions.) Even under ideal circumstances, therefore, the West is going to be slower to react than the Russians, and circumstances are far from ideal. The Russians thus have, and will have for the foreseeable future, the initiative, and the advantages of a faster OODA Loop.

Because the West had no strategic plan at the beginning, and only very vague strategic aims, and because it has never had the initiative and cannot react as fast as the Russians, talk of NATO “getting involved” is essentially empty. It’s true, at one level, that NATO could disarm itself even more quickly by sending some units to Ukraine, to be annihilated by glide-bombs and long-range missiles without seeing the enemy, but that doesn’t answer the question of what the deployment of any such forces would actually be for.

As often, when confronted with this kind of problem, political leaders retreat into a cloud of generalities. We will be told that some deployment or other is to “show Putin he can’t win” or “demonstrate NATO’s determination to resist aggression.” The problem, of course, lies in translating that kind of cloudy aspiration (since it isn’t even properly a strategic objective) into the kind of operational and tactical plans that Clausewitz was talking about. In practice, this generally amounts to Doing Something for the sake of Doing Something, which is an infallibly bad idea, and often results in decisions being taken through the tripartite pseudo-syllogism I’ve often cited: We must do something, This is something, OK, let’s do it.

Imagine, if you like, the thirty-two current members of NATO around the table, discussing what “can be done.” Even the principle of “doing something” would be controversial, and the US itself is likely to be bitterly divided on the question anyway, and will find it difficult to have a position. Countries that can’t or won’t send troops will be more gung-ho than countries that can. The US will want to command the operation, even if it doesn’t actually deploy any troops. The operation will have to be commanded from Mons because there are no similarly capable HQs elsewhere in Europe. There will be interminable arguments about who will command the force itself, who will contribute to its HQ, what the political reporting lines will be, and even what its Rules of Engagement will be, since NATO nations have different laws about the use of force outside a general armed conflict. Oh, and what is this force actually going to do? What is its purpose and how will we know whether it has been achieved? It will probably take days of discussions just to settle what the decisions are that actually have to be taken.

Moreover, the decision will have to be unanimous: any hint of internal disagreement will be “playing into the Russians’ hands.” So enormous time and effort will be devoted to agonisingly complex and internally contradictory plans and objectives, with something for everybody, and nothing that is open to serious objection. We’ve been here before: the classic example is the UNPROFOR deployment to Bosnia from 1992-95, which suffered from the fundamental problem that (1) Lots of nations wanted something “to be done,” though not by themselves, and (2) there was nothing of value that a military force could actually do. This produced a shambolic and frequently changing mandate, varying with the balance of forces in the Security Council,  which was impossible to implement (the forces simply were not available) and was useless to commanders in the field. Any NATO “involvement” would be much messier than that.

But let’s just assume that the International Military Staff are sent off to prepare options, and they find there are only two. They are (1) an expeditionary force to fight with the Ukrainians and attempt to hold, and if possible recover, territory, and (2) a purely demonstrative presence, somewhere in a relatively safe area, with the hope of “discouraging” the Russians from attacking, or at least making a political point, whatever that might be. We’ll come to the specific practicalities of various options in a moment, but first we need to understand that, in either case, there are a number of common prior questions that have to be answered.

How long is this for? Not only does the time for training and deployment have to be taken into account, but even then you can’t leave forces in the field on operations indefinitely. Nations generally rotate forces after they have been deployed for 4-6 months. That means that whatever size of force is sent, there has to be another one behind, training and preparing. And behind that, another one. If you can’t do that, then all the Russians have to do is wait, and your forces will go home. Depending on the size of the force it wants to send, NATO would probably find that, for both political and resource reasons, it could sustain a maximum of two deployments.

What’s the Force Posture? The legal position would be complicated, to put it mildly. Few NATO nations would be happy to be explicitly parties to the conflict, because that would open their own national territories to attacks against which they had no defence, without being able to usefully strike Russia. Some complicated formula would have to be found which would mean they could respond to Russian attacks, but not initiate a conflict (which would be suicidal anyway.) But what happens when Russian troops seal off their supply routes, or loose a stray artillery shell on the airport they rely on for re-supply? What happens when Russian aircraft are continually patrolling just outside of engagement range but not displaying any hostile activity? What happens when a missile overflies the NATO force and strikes  target five kilometres away? What happens when Russia troops drive by frequently, taking photographs, and ultimately demanding that western troops leave the area by a certain date or suffer unspecified consequences? What happens if the Russians cut off fresh water, and prevent supplies of food getting in?

Individually, these sorts of contingencies can be dealt with by one nation with clear instructions. The problem lies in finding some kind of consensus on what to tell the Commander before the mission starts, and some way of reacting to unexpected developments. The risk is of sending troops off armed with some kind of word-salad that tells the Commander everything and nothing, and that when something genuinely  unexpected happens, the system will just seize up, incapable of taking a decision. And we may assume that the Ukrainians will be trying to get NATO involved in the fighting, by one subterfuge or another, including, for example, launching attacks from territories where NATO troops are deployed, with western weapons.

What happens if things go badly wrong? The credibility of a military deployment depends to some extent on its ability to react to events, and deal with unexpected problems. It’s highly unlikely that any NATO force sent to Ukraine, whatever its size, would have reserves easily available, and therefore it could not escalate. Back in the Cold War, there was a NATO multinational military unit with the snappy title of Allied Command Europe Mobile Force (Land), known familiarly as the AMF(L). It was a readily available force, capable of quick deployment to a point of crisis. But the key was that it was simply the tip of the spear, and could rapidly be reinforced if a crisis worsened. It might therefore (thought NATO) serve a deterrent function. The same is not possible in Ukraine, even in principle. Supposing a NATO force were actually attacked? Would it withdraw? Would it try to fight? Up to what level of casualties? What happens if it comes under bombardment from weapons such as missiles or glide bombs, or a mass attack by drones, to which it is unable to respond? What happens if, after a couple of demonstrative shots, the force is threatened with destruction unless it withdraws? Not only would that cause a political crisis in the alliance, it’s quite possible that individual nations would withdraw their forces from NATO command and bring them home.

How are we even going to operate? As Clausewitz was walking away, he turned his head and shouted “don’t forget about doctrine!” He was quite right of course. Doctrine is what tells militaries how to fight, and it needs to be practised regularly so that commanders at all levels are familiar with it, and do not need to be told what to do. Back in the Cold War, NATO had a defence concept that involved defending as close to the border as possible for political reasons, and falling back on its lines of supply and reserves. Meanwhile, the air forces would be trying to destroy the second and third echelon Soviet forces, and attacking logistic centres and airfields, a well as maintaining air superiority over Western Europe. There were very detailed operational plans: for example, the 1st (British) Corps, reinforced to its wartime strength of about 90,000 men, was responsible for stopping the Soviet Third Shock Army. The hope was that, as the Red Army advanced into unfamiliar territory further from supply, it could eventually be halted East of what was called Line Omega, where the NATO military would have the right to ask for tactical nuclear weapons to be released. Now the point about this is that all sorts of doctrinal consequences flowed from it at different levels, and that doctrine could be written, taught, practised and revised.

None of this exists today. NATO as an alliance does not really have military doctrine at all, and certainly none adapted to the current situation. The deployment to Bosnia in 1995 was mostly just sitting around, and the deployment to Afghanistan was an entirely different kind of war. There are no senior officers in any NATO army today with experience of command of large operations, and, since the average service of a soldier is typically 7-8 years, most NATO armies have no soldiers who have been in combat, and probably not many officers either. The Russians did retain military doctrine from the Soviet era for large-scale high-intensity combat, but we have seen how quickly they have had to modify it in Ukraine. NATO could never expect air superiority over a battlefield in Ukraine, and it has no doctrine (and no equipment) for fighting under conditions of enemy air superiority. It has no doctrine for dealing with glide bombs launched from ranges where the launching aircraft cannot be detected or at least its target is unknown, and no doctrine for dealing with attacks by ballistic missiles and drone swarms. (Yes, it has equipment capable of theoretically destroying drones, but no doctrine for meeting a sophisticated drone swarm attack using decoys. Its troops simply wouldn’t know what to do.)

Moreover, we are moving towards a concept of war where enemy units are easy to find and destroy, and where one of the principles of war—Concentration of Forces—no longer applies as it once did. As far as we can see from the videos available, most attacks are now on a small scale, but coordinated across a very wide area. Thus, warfare today resembles chess played on a board two hundred squares to a side, with perhaps a hundred pieces per player. It’s a type of warfare that puts immense responsibility into the hands of junior officers and NCOs, who must all be thoroughly trained in the same doctrine, and have completely interoperable and very sophisticated communications equipment. And even then, we’ve seen that the fresh units being employed by the Russians in the Kharkov direction are making all sorts of mistakes in their first encounters with the enemy.

NATO has none of these things: its national contingents can’t necessarily even talk to each other, its troops have no common doctrine, and it has absolutely no idea institutionally how to fight a war of this kind, even if, by some miracle an operational objective could be agreed upon. In fact, NATO never had an offensive operational doctrine, nor did it have a doctrine for the defence of static fortified positions, which is what Ukraine has been doing. Its only doctrine was for a fighting retreat along its own lines of communication. There is, therefore, no historical precedent to use either.

So far so bad, you may think, but that’s only the cerebral side of the problem, although arguably the most important. (No amount of sophisticated equipment will do you any good if you have no idea what to do with it.) There are at least two other major hurdles to overcome, and the first is actually putting a force together: what the professionals call Force Generation. In turn, this has both a political and a military component. If NATO were ever to “get involved,” then the force would have to look like an international one, with at least token contingents from the vast majority of NATO’s 32 nations, and all nations would have to be publicly supportive politically. In the past, this has been a massive problem: the international deployment to Afghanistan in 2002 was held up for weeks while German members of parliament were recalled from the beaches of Croatia to give the necessary approval for their country’s forces to take part. Most nations have legal or parliamentary hurdles to overcome before troops can be deployed outside the national territory. The chances of a major political spanner in the works at some point are probably of the order of 100%, even with a small deployment.

Secondly, the force has to have a credible structure. It’s no good 25 of 32 nations volunteering to provide rear-area logistic support from Poland. The International Military Staff will have to take whatever concept is finally agreed, and develop a force structure to meet it. Then they will have to ask nations to contribute the units. Politics, both domestic and international, is also involved here, of course. Nations might well offer, or refuse to offer, forces for reasons that have nothing to do with the ostensible mission. Some types of units may be in short supply: strategic communications is a good example. Not many nations have experience of operating outside their national territory these days, and if you have a single operational Signals regiment, are you going to risk losing it?   There will be the usual vicious arguments about command as well. In most international operations, there is a so-called “framework nation,” which provides the commander and about 70% of the headquarters staff, ensuring things work smoothly. It’s common to change this nation every six months or so in international missions, but that might be a problem in Ukraine. Out of all of this, a properly balanced force has to be constructed, capable, at least in theory, of carrying out a mission.

And what would that mission be? Well, here we come to the heart of the problem. I think it’s clear that there is nothing militarily useful that NATO can do to affect the outcome of the fighting, so any deployment is going to be mostly theatre, aimed as much at domestic public opinion as at the Russians. That last statement may seem surprising to some, in spite of what I’ve already said, but just consider a few things. It’s notoriously the case that western militaries have allowed their capacity to fight conventional high-intensity wars to evaporate almost to nothing. As I’ve often pointed out, that’s fine so long as you don’t set out to antagonise a large state that hasn’t. As you’ll realise from the discussion so far, NATO would face enormous problems of coordination, doctrine and force generation, even if it could agree an objective. Its troops are not trained for this kind of war and have never operated together. But the units are there, aren’t they? And the equipment?

Not really. It would take a separate essay to go into this in adequate detail, but you can look up the size and composition of western militaries for yourself, and with a few calculations, you can see that the West would be hard-pressed to field a force more powerful than the reported nine Brigades trained and equipped by the West for the Great Offensive of 2023, which just bounced off the Russian forces without achieving anything of note. And those Brigades contained a number of experienced units and commanders. A NATO force would have to cover long distances, without air cover or protection against long-range attack, just to be in position to fight. And much of its equipment would be no better than, or even inferior to, that of the units in the 2023 attacks.

But what about the Americans, I hear you ask? Well it’s often said that the US has “a hundred thousand troops in Europe.” But if you go to the website of the US European Command, you will see lots of photographs and slick videos, heart-warming stories of cooperation and training activities, and articles about troop rotations, exercises and plans to base more US troops in Europe Real Soon Now. But there’s almost nothing about actual fighting strength, and a lot of the links to lower levels go to videos and news articles. In fact, if you check on outside sites including Wikipedia, it’s fairly clear that there are only three US Army combat units in Europe: a Stryker cavalry regiment in Germany, an airborne unit of Brigade size in Italy, and a helicopter unit, also in Germany. The picture is confused by rotations, exercises, training and command structures, and announcements of planned deployments (there is a Corps HQ now, but no Corps) but the message is clear enough. The US has no ground combat units in Europe remotely suited to high-intensity land warfare. There are lots of aircraft, of course, but it would be impossible for European or US air units to operate successfully from bases in inside Ukraine, and if they were based outside, they would largely be a political symbol.

Given enough time, money, political will and organisation, most things are possible. But there is no chance, to repeat, of NATO assembling a force which would constitute anything more than a nuisance to the Russians, while putting many lives in danger. So all I can imagine is purely political deployment, of forces not intended to fight. Planners would probably provide two options: a “light” option which could be called something like a “liaison force” or a “monitoring team,”  and a “medium option” of a force of combat units, even if they were not expecting to fight. (There is no “heavy” option.)

Even the “light” option would require a multinational team, interpreters, security guards, communication specialists vehicles, helicopters, a logistic support unit and a guaranteed supply of fuel, food and other necessities. As an indication, the Kosovo Verification Mission of 1998-99, under the auspices of the OSCE, had nearly 1500 observers, plus support staff, with vehicles, helicopters and aircraft, for a country comparable in size perhaps to Crimea. Even then, they had no capability to protect themselves, and were withdrawn for their safety before NATO bombing started. Just attempting to cover the main population centres of Ukraine would be a massive commitment, and the force would have to stay well away from the fighting. Oh, and the Ukrainians would be doing everything they could to get the Russians to target the mission, or make it look as if they had done so.

A purely ceremonial force of a couple of battalion-sized units, deployed around Kiev, might be a typical “medium” option. But wait: such a force would have to be inserted, probably by rail, over bridges that might or might not be intact. Many of the personnel would have to be flown in to airports or airfields under permanent risk of attack. The Ukrainians could not be relied on for logistic support (or anything else) and that would have to come by the same railways and across the same bridges. And you can’t just send a couple of battalions: you’d need a headquarters with strategic communications, a logistic unit, a transport unit, an engineer unit, interpreters, cooks, probably helicopters and an air movements team. And all you would get would be a force incapable of serious activity, existing as a target for the Russians and hostages for the Ukrainians. I could go on, but I think that’s enough.

Which brings us to the last point. The West is still feeding off the fat of the technological investments of the Cold War. It’s not an accident that even the most modern tanks and other fighting systems sent to Ukraine are designs from the 1970s and 1980s (albeit modified), or else developed for use in countries like Afghanistan. It’s not obvious that the West still has the technological base and qualified people to conceive, design, develop, manufacture, deploy, operate and maintain new and sophisticated equipment for high-tech wars any more. There are entire types of technology, such as long range precision missiles, where the West doesn’t have a capability now, and in practical terms seems unlikely to develop. (There are too many stories of recent western military technology disasters to even list them here.) Nor is it clear that western states can attract the numbers and quantity of recruits they need, and few will join up enthusiastically to be blown to pieces by Russian missiles.

In that sense, the West had better husband the resources it does have, because they are declining, and replacing them would take a long time, if it can be done at all. That is perhaps the single strongest argument against NATO “getting involved.”