No End Of A Lesson.

If we can only learn it.

There’s nothing like a really crushing military and political defeat to concentrate the mind and force the learning of lessons. (A military defeat is bad enough, but if that defeat is political as well as military, then this process can become irresistible.) But learning anything from defeat requires three things: a willingness to accept that you have been defeated, a recognition of the nature of the defeat, and a preparedness to consider doing things differently. The West is in the throes of at least one, potentially two, crushing defeats at the moment, and so the question arises: will the right lessons be learned? Can the right lessons be learned? And how do we identify these lessons anyway?

Some defeats have been obvious and complete, and have led irresistibly to major changes. A good example is the reforms forced on Prussia by the overwhelming defeat of their troops at the battle of Jena-Auersted by Napoleon in 1806. Prussia not only lost the battle, it lost much of its territory and half its population, and had to agree to massive reparations and a humiliating reduction in the size of its Army. The way was therefore opened for military reformers to propose the modernisation of the Army and the introduction of national service on the French model, and for political reforms such as the abolition of of serfdom to be undertaken. Ironically, several generations later it was the crushing defeat of the French by the Prussians in the war of 1870-71 which brought about not only fundamental reforms in the French Army (including, ironically, the re-introduction of military service) but the disappearance of the “Empire” of Louis Napoleon and the definitive installation of the Republic.

But even victories can lead to important changes. Technically, the British and the French “won” the Crimean War of 1854-56, although this was mainly due to the professionalism of the French officer corps. The British involvement, on the other hand, was a shambles, and for the first time a disgusted educated public learned about poor or non-existent organisation and logistics, the suffering of the ordinary soldiers, the disastrous situation of the sick and wounded, and the incompetence of the military at all levels. The result was a fundamental reform not just of the military, but of the state as well. As was the case with Prussia in 1806, the British establishment realised pretty quickly that a proper modern state had to be created, and fast. This led not only to the Cardwell Reforms, which fundamentally reorganised the Army, but also to the Northcote-Trevelyan  reforms which created the western world’s first professional Civil Service, and to the general modernisation of the state.

In all of the above cases, the need for reform was undeniable, the reformers were ready and the occasion duly presented itself. But more importantly, perhaps, it was clear that there was a larger purpose to be served; of accommodation to a changing world, and that if the necessary changes were not made, disaster would result. We are in a situation now where the world is changing, so the question arises of whether our leaders are able to meet the requirement for change or even recognise it, especially as that change will have to take place at an international level.

We have been here before, of course. I have argued several times that the nearest analogy to our present situation is the Suez Crisis and its consequences. In 1956, several things became clear to the British and French. The first was that the United States could not be trusted to support them in an international crisis. The second was that the two countries’ Empires—costly, and requiring substantial assets to protect them—were no longer viable as a means of ensuring Great Power status. In both cases, though in slightly different ways, there was a progressive move to shed the costs of Empire, and refocus on Europe and the North Atlantic area. But the British considered that Suez also showed the need to cultivate the Americans, make them psychologically dependent on the British, and try to ensure that Washington did nothing of importance without consulting London. (The analogy that has always appealed to me is the British Resident “advisor” in a Gulf State in the early part of the last century.) This strategy was largely successful for several generations: the US leaned heavily on the advice of the smaller and nimbler British system, which was able to avoid the endless, exhausting personality-based power-struggles that deformed Washington. The French drew the opposite conclusion; that they required strategic independence. The development of their own nuclear weapons, the withdrawal from the military structures of NATO and the subsequent development of their own reconnaissance satellites were all steps in this direction.

Now these were very profound questions, but not, I would argue, more profound than those we face today as the Ukraine War grinds down. (I will restrict my argument to that conflict, to keep it to a reasonable length.) So how do we start thinking in a structured way about the “lessons” of Ukraine, or for that matter even bring ourselves to accept that there are any?

I want to use a slightly unexpected figure as a guide here: the British author Rudyard Kipling. I can’t remember what the current approved view of Kipling is: suffice it to say that he was never the uncomplicated praise-singer of Empire that tradition made him out to be. Kipling was, after all, born in India and was never really part of the British establishment (He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 but never any decoration by his own country.) In 1902, at the end of the Boer War, Kipling published The Lesson, a short poem, written in vigorous, blunt, language, about the many failures that the War had revealed. He was a kind of stern schoolmaster, reproving a schoolboy who had made a mess of his studies, but who had the potential to do better. It was not just a complaint though: indeed, the essential message was contained in the first stanza:

We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

Kipling’s judgement was unsparing about the government and society of his day. The failure was not down to “a single issue,”  but the failure of “our most holy illusions.” The failures were “our fault” and “not the judgement of heaven,” and the fault was with both “Council and Creed and College” and

all those obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and overlie us.

The British had, he argued had:

…forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.

It’s interesting, first of all, to see how far we have come since Kipling’s time, or from the eras of the other examples cited above. The first thing that strikes you is that all of those cases involved fundamentally serious people, who realised that the fate of their country, whether it was Prussia, France or Britain, demanded a clear-eyed recognition of what had happened, and a determination to learn the lessons and apply them. Indeed, the entire basis of Kipling’s poem is the suggestion that the disaster of the War is capable of teaching the British lessons which they should and will learn and apply. The very first lines of the poem make this crystal-clear.

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,

We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.

In other words, Kipling is appealing to the essential pragmatism of the British and their ruling class. The system isn’t working, he says, we have made a horrible mess of things, let us have the sense to do better. And indeed, the British Army and to some extent the State itself did take the lessons to heart, and there were reforms. Can we imagine anything like that happening now?

Well, let’s begin from the current situation which, I would argue, is a lot graver than was the case after the Boer War, when Britain’s imperial and Great Power prestige (the main reason for the war) was looking shaky. Let me suggest three practical lessons, although whether any of them will do us any good is question we will come to later. At the end I will discuss a more speculative, but I think more important, lesson to be learned.

First, Russia has confirmed itself as the dominant military power on the continent of Europe, and this is not likely to change. Its armed forces are of a size and quality that the West cannot begin to match, its military-industrial complex is enormous by western standards and is capable of producing military technology on a scale and to a quality beyond anything the West can consistently manage. (In the end, western military technology has turned out to be OK, but not much more.) This will not change because (leaving aside social and political problems) the West no longer has the scientific and technological base, the skilled and educated workforce or the industrial capacity to match those of Russia. Moreover there are certain technologies, like high-velocity long-range missiles, which the Russians have invested in and the West has not. There are also other technologies, such as 5+generation fighter aircraft where the West has a good capability, but which are likely to have limited importance on a future battlefield. So what are we going to do about that?

Second, the United States is no longer the indispensable balancing factor against Soviet, now Russian, strength, that it was once thought to be. Although the cartoon-like idea of the US “protecting” Europe in the Cold War was wildly exaggerated (Europeans always provided the vast majority of the military forces) it was nonetheless hoped that, in a crisis, the possibility of US involvement would have a stabilising and deterrent effect on Soviet behaviour. Whether that would have happened in practice we shall thankfully never know, but it is clear that the US cannot play such a role now. There is no indication that Russian behaviour has been moderated in any way by US statements or behaviour during the entire length of the Ukraine crisis. Indeed, the opposite is the case if anything: in the interminable theatre of proposed “deep strikes” in Russia, Putin’s throat-clearing about possible reprisals has clearly caused the Americans to back off. (History may indeed record that finally the US acted as a restraining influence on some of the more delirious European leaders.) In any event, it is now brutally clear that the US cannot significantly influence events on the ground in Ukraine, and that it knows this. Nor is it able to protect its (few) troops, its installations or its ships in Europe from an unacceptable risk of destruction by Russian missiles. And this is not likely to change: US forces are ageing and shrinking, and new equipment is being delivered in smaller numbers and after increasingly longer delays. The very structure of the US defence industry (to say nothing of US society itself) makes this difficult or impossible to reverse. So what are we going to do about that?

Finally, the West, and especially the Europeans, are now caught in a technical dilemma to which there seems no obvious solution. After the Cold War, and especially after 2001, the doctrinal and equipment focus shifted to out-of-area wars, using drones, special forces and indirect engagement of irregular groups. The heavy equipment intended for Cold War battles was frequently useless in such conflicts, and it became clear that the immensely sophisticated aircraft developed to counter the anticipated Soviet fighters of the 21st century were a wildly expensive way of conducting air-to-ground combat. (A French General who had commanded in Mali reckoned it cost around a million Euros to kill one jihadist.) This had the effect of running down the capability to fight a conventional war to almost nothing, and leaving the equipment for fighting such wars in storage. Doctrinal memory in the military is necessarily short: the European trainers of Ukrainian conscripts over the last couple of years had probably never seen combat (NATO left Afghanistan in 2014, after all), and could only teach counter-insurgency tactics, since that was all they knew. But they had no idea, even at third hand, what a major conventional war was like, and so no ability to train others for it. The results have been evident.

However, in desperation, the West has now given away a fair amount of its low-intensity equipment pool to Ukraine: in the 2023 offensive, some Ukrainian Brigades looked as if they were about to leave for Afghanistan. Its capacity to mount low-intensity operations has thus declined significantly, and its logistic stocks to support such operations have been raided for Ukraine. Moreover, much of this equipment is itself aging (the M777 howitzer was designed in the Cold War.) So even if the extravagant promises of new funding to replace equipment sent to Ukraine and to respond to the Russian “threat” are translated into cash (which is not certain), and if the defence industries of western countries were capable of producing it (which is not certain either) then what would you buy? How would you decide what kind of forces you wanted, so that you could recruit and train personnel and buy equipment?

For the last twenty-five years, western nations have been pulled in different directions. Ever-smaller and increasingly aging legacy conventional forces on the one hand, and investment in counter-insurgency capabilities on the other. Equipment has been used in low-intensity wars because it was available rather than because it was suitable, and training and doctrine for use of large-scale forces in high-intensity combat have now mostly lapsed, since there are no large-scale forces to use any more. If the rhetoric about the Russian “threat” is taken seriously, the Western armies will have to learn and practice doctrine and command and command techniques only ever used in anger in 1944-45, and of course they will first have to acquire the massive forces needed.

But what are they going to do, exactly? In the Cold War, the enemy was just across the border, and advancing to combat would take a matter of hours. In spite of NATO’s helpful extension of its frontiers with Russia over the last couple of years, the heartland of NATO and the EU lies a good thousand kilometres from the currently-claimed Russian border. It’s clear the Russians have no interest in a general military conflict with NATO, and indeed no need for one to achieve their strategic objective of military dominance of Europe. And it is not obvious what realistic goals a rearmed NATO could have, even if that were possible. Shiny new combat aircraft would not even be able to reach the Russian border with a useful combat load, and would run into the best air defence on the planet. Shiny new tanks would be left in storage most of the time, for lack of any commonly-accepted rationale for using them somewhere they could actually go. And of course these are not decisions individual nations can take for themselves: they have to be made collectively. Some within the EU leadership are apparently urging member states to be ready to fight Russia within the next decade. But where? With what? And with what objective? (I would love to be a spectator at the first meeting of NATO’s Strategic Concept 2030 Working Group, or whatever they will call it.)

In 1967, a decade after the events, Anthony Nutting, a Foreign Office Minister who resigned over the Suez Crisis, published his personal account of it, entitled, you may be surprised to hear, No End of a Lesson. And indeed Suez was a lesson for both Britain and France, and had certain direct and indirect consequences. It hastened the British decision to withdraw from a worldwide imperial role, abolish conscription and concentrate on NATO and the Atlantic. It led ultimately to a decision not to replace the ageing Ark Royal with a new conventional take-off carrier in the 1960s. For the French it encouraged them to pursue their embryonic nuclear weapons programme, and to establish strategic autonomy as a major national goal.

But we’re not in that situation now. Indeed, whilst I’ve suggested three principal lessons that could be drawn from recent events, it’s not clear where they lead. It’s not even really clear what the exact questions are. This is the more so, since western governments will anyway be subject to enormous practical constraints. As I’ve discussed at length, comprehensive rearmament, or the reintroduction of conscription, are practically impossible, and it’s hard even to know where to begin to devise an operational concept, even if larger forces could somehow be generated. Thus, western, and especially European governments, will continue to have small, and generally shrinking, military forces, who will find it increasingly difficult to attract enough recruits. Their equipment will be increasingly obsolescent, and their defence industrial base will not be able to keep up with developments in Russia, and for that matter probably in China. Where new equipment is fielded, it will be increasingly expensive to procure and maintain, and will be fielded in smaller numbers. It’s hard to imagine what kind of problem that situation is an answer to.

It’s genuinely hard to see what a plausible reaction by the West to the end of the Ukraine adventure would be, apart from sound and fury. As I’ve suggested before, there will certainly be a period of epic sulk, a refusal to accept reality, statements of We Will Never, and so on, but it will be almost impossible to imagine how 31 states around a table, contemplating the debris of their hopes and plans, could ever really agree on anything much.

In the meantime, when all else fails, you can always blame others, I suppose. This is what happened in Iraq, it is what happened in Afghanistan, and there are signs that it is what will happen in Ukraine. We seem already to have reached the stage where the various partners are staking their claims that it was Not My Fault. All the muttering about sending western combat units to Ukraine, which has produced nothing, as I predicted, was indeed intended to strike poses and score points (“we would have gone, but nobody would follow us.”) So the Blame Game has already started.

Kipling was more honest than that. The Boer War, he argued, was not just a military failure, but a national one. “We made an Army in our own image…” he wrote, “Which faithfully mirrored its makers' ideals, equipment, and mental attitude.” The West has been making armies in its image for some time now. The Iraqi Army that folded in the face of the Islamic State, the Afghan National Army that melted away in the face of the Taliban, or for that matter the Armée nationale congolaise that fell apart when confronted with Rwandan-backed militias. Yet the West tried to recast the Ukrainian Army in its own image, and look what happened. But perhaps its not the fault of the Iraqis, the Afghans of the Congolese or the Ukrainians, or at least not exclusively: perhaps there’s something wrong with the very model, with the “holy illusions” in Kipling’s words, of western military organisation and thinking.

But how would we change it? How could we conceivably agree what needed changing? How could we even agree on what the questions were? All wars generate lessons, and any competent military tries to learn them, even during the conflict itself. The much-maligned British and French militaries of World War 1 constantly adapted their tactics as the war progressed, and even in the short period between the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the invasion of France in 1940, the French General Staff did try to analyse and disseminate the lessons of the former. But in both cases, the state of military technology was such that knowing what should be done was one thing, and developing the means to do it quickly was quite another. Some lessons are fundamental, of course. One is the importance of mobility, where, as Kipling noted, the British had forgotten that using foot-soldiers to chase after cavalry is not effective because “horses are quicker than men.” Any number of such blindingly-obvious lessons could be drawn from the Ukraine experience, concerning mobility, logistics, command and control, and so forth, which we can expect military geeks (of which I am not one) to to argue over for decades to come.

Yet I think it would be a mistake if the “lessons” of Ukraine simply degenerated into endless debates about details of technology and organisation. There is a known historical tendency to take isolated incidents which have received a lot of publicity, and mistake them for eternal lessons in the nature of war. Now clearly, there are some long-lasting rules of general application: don’t fight an attrition war with somebody whose resources are greater than yours, for example. Another would be, don’t make gratuitous assumptions about the inferiority of the opposition or the excellence of your military technology. Both of which, I suppose, could be subsumed under the heading of “don’t stumble into wars without making sure you are prepared for them.”

But there’s also a tendency to assume that technological developments permanently change the nature of war, when they don’t. In the absence of radar and high-speed fighters, it was reasonable in the late 1920s and into the 1930s to suppose that there was no defence against the bomber aircraft. By 1940, the British discovered that daylight bomber raids were close to suicidal, and even night-time ones could have an unacceptable rate of attrition. In the same year, the new German tactics later christened Blitzkrieg, involving fast-moving armoured units advancing deep into the enemy’s rear and close cooperation between these units and aircraft, was thought to have revolutionised warfare, but within a few years counters to these tactics had been developed. And finally, (from a long list) after the 1973 Middle East War, with its widespread use of man-portable anti-tank weapons, the funeral rites of the tank were being intoned. Yet at that very moment, British scientists were working on compound armours to defeat such weapons, and defensive systems for tanks continue to improve even today.

So it’s as well to avoid rushing into judgement on detailed lessons, especially since the fighting isn’t over yet. For example, everybody is suddenly talking about drones, as though they were a new technology, and not one that has been in use by the military for a generation. Drones are just pilotless aircraft, whether directly controlled from the ground or autonomous, and whether disposable or reusable. We haven’t yet begun to see their full potential, but already countermeasures are being developed . Some are very simple, like anti-drone cages and netting, some are more ambitious, like area-defence weapons, lasers and even anti-drone drones. It may well be that in a few years technologies are developed which make the use of drones more difficult, if not impossible. We shall have to see. Likewise, it is now being assumed that the battlefield is place of perfect visibility, where nothing can be hidden. But this is largely because the two sides’ capacities for what is called ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) have largely been left alone. Ukraine benefits from an enormous NATO ISR capability which the Russians have elected not to attack, but which, in a real war, would be destroyed in the first few hours, after which the picture might not be so clear.

And so on. But there are perhaps just a couple of very fundamental technical issues with which any attempt to draw “lessons” from this conflict will have to grapple. One is the future of the Main Battle Tank. It’s been widely noticed that the tanks being used in Ukraine are almost all of Cold War era design, and even then, some of them are based on earlier models. Where they are different is largely in upgrades to their firepower, survivability and electronics. The Russians have been taking T-72 hulls dating from the Soviet era, stripping them out and rebuilding them as modern tanks. It is possible to argue that the tank reached its essential Platonic form in the heavy German models of 1944-45, and that everything since has been either more firepower, protection and armament, or more sophistication, such as autoloaders and gas turbine engines. A tank crewman of 1945 would recognise a Leopard 2A6 as a tank. Perhaps the 80-ton monsters with 140mm guns foreseen in the 1990s will never be built, and hulls will just be upgraded for decades to come. After all, a tank in the end is just a vehicle providing mobile, protected firepower, and that is likely to remain a requirement forever.

The other is the manned combat aircraft, and what future it has, if any. Here, recall that in the Cold War NATO aircraft had two priorities. Because the Soviet Union was assumed to be attacking, the first priority was to retain air superiority over NATO territory. This involved highly sophisticated air superiority fighters, many types of which still exist. The other priority was interdiction and strike (with tactical nuclear weapons if necessary) behind Soviet lines, to deplete the forces that would follow in the second and third echelons of any Warsaw Pact advance. When that scenario became suddenly obsolete, these aircraft were in development or even production, and were rapidly repurposed for all and any tasks. Indeed, these days combat aircraft tend to be designed from the start as “multi-role” platforms, not always very successfully. But just what is the point of such aircraft now? In any hypothetical war now, the Russians would attack Europe with missiles, not aircraft, just as they would use missiles to defend their own territory, and indeed to protect their forces as they advanced. And good luck with any hopes of flying NATO aircraft in low-level attack sorties against Russian air defences.

Beyond all this, though, is a larger and darker question, and interestingly enough it takes us back to Kipling. Of all the “lessons” that the war in Ukraine has so far taught us, it is that wars kill people. Lots of people. This fact, considered self-evident until quite recently, is nowhere to be found in the discourses of our politicians and our pundits, because other people with funny names are doing the dying. Let’s play with a few numbers.

A plausible number for Russian battle deaths since February 2022 is 75,000. Whilst Ukrainian deaths must exceed that figure, for technical reasons we won’t go into here, the numbers are highly speculative and this is not the place to enter into the controversy. But let’s stick with Russia. The population of that country is around half of that of the United States or the European Union. Suppose, therefore, that we take a round figure of one hundred and fifty thousand deaths in battle as a comparator, in a war in which either of those entities participated. To that, even with modern battlefield medicine, we can add at least twice that number wounded, some lightly, some gravely. So the number of “conflict-affected” soldiers, in the bloodless modern jargon, would be about half a million. Try to wrap your neurones around the idea of half a million killed and wounded.

I don’t think it can be done. I don’t think that modern western societies are equipped any more to imagine death on such a scale when it happens to themselves, and not to others. And interestingly, there is a relatively close historical analogue, and it also involves Kipling. In the autumn of 1914, as it became clear that this was going to be a long war, the British government asked for volunteers to join the Army. Within a few weeks, three quarters of a million men had volunteered; not, for the most part out of bellicosity or hatred of Germany, but out of those discarded discourses, duty and patriotism. Kipling himself was prevented from joining up by poor eyesight. His son John—who had inherited the same problem—pleaded with his father to use his influence to allow him to join anyway, which Kipling did. John Kipling was sent to the front and killed instantly. Ever after, Kipling was haunted by guilt, and at the end of the war he produced one of his greatest poems, The Children, with its repeated haunting question:

But who shall return to us the children?

It’s not a conventional anti-war poem, although its descriptions of the dead are unsparing. It remembers those who were killed and wounded, but also touches on the responsibility of society as a whole, as The Lesson had done twenty years before:

They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning

Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning….

In that War; almost 900,000 British soldiers died (comparisons with Ukraine are not really possible, because the War lasted longer and involved enormously larger forces.) The effect on British society was shattering, as Paul Fussell’s classic work demonstrated, and successive generations were long haunted by the sheer scale of the killing.

But although British society of 1914 had something in common with the West today—notably a concept of war fought by professionals “over there,” with small battles and relatively few casualties—it also had advantages which our societies lack. Apart from the general recognition of patriotism and duty—long gone now—and at least some residual religious belief, there was also a strong sense of having fought a just war to prevent German domination of Europe. It’s hard to imagine such sentiments today. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what tweets, what focus-group-shopped phrases, could even begin to cope with the kind of losses that a real war would involve. This, perhaps is the greatest lesson of Ukraine: who shall return to us the children?

So far as we can see, the Russian losses have not led to the kind of trauma we might expect. This is not because they are strong and we are weak, or because we value human life and they don’t, it’s because they have a discourse and a living historical memory which is able to accommodate death in battle for the nation, and we don’t. There are already pictures online of war memorials in Russian towns and cities, constructed along the same pattern as those for earlier wars. It’s hard even to imagine what memorials could be constructed in the West today for the dead of a new war, let alone how long it would take to agree what they might say.

To bring this discussion down to earth, let’s conclude with a brief worked example. Imagine that, in spite of the horrendous problems I have described elsewhere, defence budgets could be increased, armies expanded and equipment bought to confront the “Russian Threat.” Let’s make up a minimally plausible scenario: anti Russian unrest and violence in the Baltic States, threats of Russian intervention. Let’s wave away the practical problems, and assume that a handful of NATO mechanised brigades could be sent as a “deterrent” and then real fighting breaks out. One of these brigades (typically 3-4000 soldiers these days) is from your country. In a couple of days of fighting, it loses perhaps a thousand dead and twice that number of wounded, largely from missile and artillery strikes, and without seriously engaging the enemy. Let those numbers (typical of what has happened in Ukraine) roll around in your mind for a moment. Could our societies, our media, our political systems, even begin to cope with that? Where would they even start?

Kipling’s insistence that the responsibility for death and suffering in war lies with those who sent the troops is something we all instinctively share. We do not know what the longer term consequences of the war in Ukraine will be for the West, but we can assume that they will not be pretty, and that those responsible will try to avoid blame. In his haunting Epitaphs of the War Kipling imagined a dead statesmen reflecting ruefully that:

I could not dig: I dared not rob: 

Therefore I lied to please the mob.

  Now all my lies are proved untrue 

And I must face the men I slew. 

In this war, the dead have not been Ours but Theirs, but they are not any the less dead for that. And if the video-game fantasies of certain politicians and pundits are not firmly stamped upon, some of Ours may die as well. And then, who shall return to us the children?