Russia/Ukraine is not a sports competition.

Victory in war requires a bit of thought.

Look at most western media coverage of Ukraine these days, and you would think that you were reading accounts by sports journalists of a series of matches between two teams, over a season. Highs and lows, player substitutions, management changes, arguments about penalties, arguments about tactics. But in reality of course, the consequence of trying to describe a serious modern war that way, is that most readers have as little idea what the crisis in Ukraine is all about as the pundits themselves do.

One of the things I noticed during a career in the lower reaches of government, taking the rubbish out, bringing the sandwiches in and so forth, was how little political systems are open to understanding and assimilating genuinely new concepts. I don’t mean changing their minds: that happens all the time. I mean changing the fundamental way in which they view the world, or an aspect of it. This isn’t a criticism of the people involved, necessarily; it’s much more a reflection of the blinding speed with which events develop, the limited time there is for thought and analysis, the incessant demands by the media for instant commentary, and the fact that every situation is not only far more complex than it appears at first; it’s inevitably mixed up with a whole lot of other complex issues as well, not to mention a whole range of different and varied actors. The result is what I call the Existing Framework Syndrome: there is no time, and often there is no inclination, to find out what’s really going on. So the question becomes, How Do I Fit this Event into my Existing Conceptual Framework? and by extension, Which Event that I think I Understand Does this one Most Resemble?

This kind of approach enables necessary off-the-cuff judgements to be made by governments, and decisions to be taken and sold to medias who are themselves usually disastrously ill-informed on anything of importance. The problem is therefore successfully conceptualised, and temporarily dealt with, and everybody is happy until it becomes clear that the framing was in fact wrong, and another frame needs to be found. Of course, attempts to impose frameworks can be competitive, since not everybody will have the same favourite models: some may have models learnt from studying history, for example, or at least believing that they have. So in the case of the 1999 Kosovo Crisis, Roland Paris identified a “metaphor war”, as westerners who couldn’t find the province on a map nonetheless competed with each other to impose onto it their own personal models of what was happening. The most hilarious attempt was another outing for the Munich myth: major power threatens internationally-recognised state with violence if it does not give up part of its territory inhabited by ethnic minority to its control. Yes, that Milosevic really was the new Hitler.

In Ukraine, though, the very scale and complexity of the conflict has left pundits scrabbling around for ways of even conceptualising the Russian operation (and of course making it look wicked), and so coming up with impressive-sounding, but meaningless formulations. “Unjustified aggression:” fine, and your definition of justified aggression is….. ?” “Brutal invasion:” fine, and your idea of a gentle invasion would be …? Not to mock, but this is a case of the collective punditry of the West being overawed by something that it has no experience of, nor any adequate intellectual capacity to understand. There are no well-understood conceptual frameworks that cover this kind of crisis, and the War simply doesn’t resemble any of those pre-cooked intellectual junk-food meals that every journalist keeps in the desk draw or backpack today. Military pundits themselves may perhaps have memories of commanding thirty or a hundred soldiers in Afghanistan against the Taliban, from which they try to generalise by multiplying everything by about a million.

So inevitably, pundits wind up writing about things they think they understand, and analysis of Ukraine dribbles down to the Least Common Denominator, treating the whole ghastly business as though it was some kind of long-running sports competition, where sometimes one team is ahead, sometimes the other, and experts can spend hours sounding off about who they think is going to “win” and why. And just as people who have never played sports after leaving school can have an opinion about the likely winner of a sports series, so anyone who once saw a war film can have an opinion on Ukraine.

Well, it’s a free society, I suppose. Still, we have a right to expect from those who put themselves forward to explain such things that they have at least tried to prepare themselves intellectually first. That doesn’t necessarily mean having served in the military either: plenty of military commentators have been spectacularly wrong over the last year. What it does require, though, is an understanding of what the planning and conduct of extremely serious, complex and long-term military operations looks like from the highest military and political level. You can get this from personal experience and observation: you can get this from books to some extent, if for example you make a deep study of the Eastern Front in World War 2 and apply the lessons, but you can’t get it, to be blunt, from playing video games or even spending six months in Afghanistan as a platoon commander. The framework you need is essentially a formidably intellectual one (though obviously it incorporates practical limitations) and I would be very surprised if that intellectual framework is taught anywhere in the West anymore. Certainly, I have found that trying to explain to others what experts much more informed than I am think is happening, is essentially impossible. After I point out that this is an attrition war, and that control of territory as such doesn’t mean very much, my interlocutor will say “yes but you can’t deny the Ukrainians are winning because they recaptured this or that territory.”

No, I’m not setting myself up as a new Clausewitz (though I will invoke him again in a minute) but I want to explain why the de facto sports metaphor of reporting the war is misleading and even dangerous, and look at what we can learn from other, better-informed minds about how to understand conflicts of this size, duration and seriousness.

The basic problem come from the human need to identify, or argue about, a “winner,” without worrying too much about what “winning” means. So we see articles with titles like “Three Ways Ukraine Could Achieve Victory,” “Why Putin Can’t Win” and “Can Ukraine Keep Up its Winning Momentum?” all constructed, usually, on the basis of the latest rumours about troop movements, advances and defeats, equipment deliveries or promises thereof, and alleged morale problems. The trouble is, winning a war is a bit more conceptually complex than winning a cricket or a baseball series, and the reasons for that all come down essentially to victory conditions.

In sport, it’s basically simple. There are understood and accepted victory conditions: in general, whoever scores the most points in a certain time wins. In some cases (cricket is the classic example) draws are possible (in England, given the weather, they are normal) and over a five-match series everything may depend on the last hours of the last match. Even in sports like motor-racing, it might be quite late in the season before someone or some team has piled up enough points that they cannot mathematically be beaten. And if one individual, or team, wins, then automatically the other loses.

This tendency to think in sports metaphors has a couple of very important consequences. One is that the focus of attention is always on the short term. Will X be fit for the next match? Can Y overcome their persistent failure to score goals? Will the course at Z favour the champions or the challengers? The other is that in many sports, the outcome can be uncertain until quite late, and depend at least partly on non-material factors. So your football team may be down by three goals to two with fifteen minutes to go, but an inspirational episode by your best player produces two goals in ten minutes. Hurrah! Your opponent in a motor race may be leading by several minutes and then his car breaks down, and he retires. That recent reshuffle and bringing in a couple of new players transforms the team and you win the rest of the series.

But war mostly isn’t like that. Oh, certainly, small-unit actions which produce tactical victories can have their importance. (Though ask any South African about the difference between Rorke’s Drift and Isandlwana.) But victory in war is a large-scale thing, and involves victory conditions, which often go far beyond battlefield success.

Let’s just ask Clausewitz to remind us what War is all about. It is, he said, a political instrument. A state sets itself a policy objective, and it decides that war is the best way to achieve that objective, or at least an essential part of it. The political leadership sets the victory conditions in terms of that objective, and the military develop plans to bring those victory conditions about by military action. But Clausewitz was also very ready to accept that the achievement of victory conditions by military force wasn’t easy or automatic, and it’s at this point that the sporting metaphor starts to be horribly misleading. I want to use a few historical examples to try to show how pundits punditing  about “victory” have very little idea what they even mean.

To begin with, in sports, as well as in political competitions (another popular and misleading analogy) or for that matter in competition in high technology goods, “winning” can be calculated relatively easily because the opponents are trying to do the same thing. Some CDs and DVDs outsell others. A politician wants the same seat in parliament, and the same government job, as a competitor. All political parties want a majority of seats. And most obviously, a football team wants to win more matches and be higher placed in the championship than any other. Winning and losing is therefore expressed and understood in relatively crude terms. Even then, of course, pundits can find themselves a little overreached when no party has an overall majority, when a famous candidate fails to be elected, or when an obscure party suddenly has a breakthrough. But at least pundits can say, with Monty Pythons Flying Circus “well it was pretty much as I expected, except the other side won.” The rules are the rules.

That’s not the case in war, where the objectives of the two parties are often quite different. And defeat for one side does not always mean victory for the other. So consider the famous battles of Heracula and Ascumum, fought and won by King Pyrrhus in 280 and 279 BC. Both were victories for the Epirans and defeats for the Romans. Who could ask for more? Well, the comments of Pyrrhus after the second battle have gone down in history in different forms and in different languages, but they amount to: “Another victory like that and we are ****ed.” For Pyrrhus had lost so many of his best troops, and so many of this best commanders, that he had to withdraw and go home The Romans, by contrast, fighting on their home territory, had large numbers of fresh recruits to bring to the next battle: Pyrrhus had none. So even in the simplest classical battle imaginable, ‘winning” can be a complex thing. If you have an Army of a hundred thousand men, and you put your opponent’s Army to flight having each lost abut half of your strength in casualties, then in the abstract you might have won. But if two further armies of the same size are bearing down on you and you have no reserves, well, it might be time to retreat. Great commanders like Napoleon can fight and win successive battles against different parts of an enemy force, but that’s why they are great commanders.

Let’s look at a few particularly flagrant examples of this confusion about what “victory” means. And much of it is grammatical: “a victory” can mean something quite different from “victory” in the absolute sense. Now remember Clausewitz’s point about victory conditions being essentially political. Until those political conditions have been achieved, there is no victory. Nothing is more ridiculous than the common lament about “winning the war and losing the peace.” These things are not distinct from each other, and the second follows directly from the first. It is the military’s job to create the conditions where the political objectives can be met. If the political leadership does not know how to convert military victory into political success, then it should never have given the job to the military in the first place. This is how disasters like Afghanistan happen. If you take the shelves-full of policy-papers for the country that were circulating after 2001, then, ignoring the Powerpoint nonsense and the hundreds of Annexes, what you had was a thought-process that went something like this.

• Defeat the Taliban.

• Do Stuff.

• Create new Switzerland, only with better weather.

• Withdraw troops.

What was missing, of course, was any indication of what these stages were to contain, or how they were supposed to relate causally to each other. There was, in other words, no transmission mechanism to convert military victory (if you could manage it) into political success.

But this is a constant temptation in politico-military planning, and it’s far from new.  The most egregious example I can think of, actually, is one that might not strike you as obvious, because it has been so much discussed and written about, and its victories and defeats analysed in microscopic detail. What I have in mind is the German invasion of the Soviet Union—Operation Barbarossa. When I was growing up, the relatively few books that touched on the Eastern Front portrayed it as an epic clash of titans, in which the Germans came within an ace of winning, with one victory after another, only to be eventually thrown back and decisively defeated. That’s not an uncommon picture even today, but most modern historians would say it's seriously misguided. Many would argue that the war was effectively over by October 1941, and that after that, the German defeat was only a question of time. Others would even argue that defeat was certain as early as August 1941. Why is this?

Well, the place to start is the unbelievably crude and ignorant assumptions made by OKW and OKH about the way the war would go (indeed, as we shall see, the way the war would have to go). Basically, the campaign plan was :

• Destroy the Red Army and the Soviet State in about 3-6 weeks.

• Leave occupation forces.

• Go home.

And no, I’m not joking. You can read the documents and diaries of the time. It’s fair to say that the mistakes made in the German analysis of the Red Army and the Soviet State constitute the greatest intelligence failure in modern history. But the point is that the actual campaign plan; moving troops, units, aeroplanes, all that stuff, was explicitly  based on this bizarre analysis being completely valid. It had to be valid, because the Germans only had the troops and the industrial capacity to fight a war that was going to be over in a couple of months.

Ah, but surely there were titanic battles won by the Germans at least up until Moscow in 1941, the first serious reverse? Then they won some battles in 1942. True, but this is precisely the distinction between military victories and winning the war. Yes, the Germans surrounded and cut off large parts of the Red Army, but nowhere near on the scale they needed to. Many units escaped, because the Wehrmacht did not have enough forces to seal the pockets, and many of those who were trapped either fought fiercely to the end, or began partisan warfare. The Germans had not expected this at all. As the months passed, the Red Army and its production base became stronger, just as the Wehrmacht became weaker. No amount of purely military success could change that, because there were inherent limitations on what forces of that size could accomplish. Perhaps you can already see some contemporary echoes.

All this was because the objectives that the two sides were pursuing were fundamentally different. The Germans had one chance to win a rapid, knock-out blow which would remove Britain’s last ally, forever put an end to the Red Menace and deliver immense quantities of food and raw materials to the Reich. So for the Germans, victory meant achieving their fantastical objectives in, let’s be generous, three months. It meant smashing the apparatus of the Soviet State so that it could not ramp up war production or raise new armies. It mean completely destroying the Red Army as a fighting force before it could call up reservists and receive new equipment. Three million soldiers in combat units would have to be killed or left to die, since the Germans hadn’t thought through the prisoner of war problem. And German casualties absolutely had to be as light as possible.

For the Soviet Union, the objective was simple: survival. Their manpower reserves and their defence industry were superior to those of the Germans. If the State and the Red Army could be held together as functioning systems, they would eventually win, and no amount of purely military victory would change that. By the autumn of 1941, it should have been obvious that the Germans could not win, even if the timing of the inevitable Russian victory was open to question. And once more this was because the transmission mechanism, to turn military power into political objectives, was simply missing.

Sometimes, strategies fail because victory conditions are impossible for practical and political reasons, rather than purely military ones. The British bombing of German cities between 1941 and 1945 was targeted literally at the “morale of the civilian population”, as though Morale was the name of a town somewhere. Given that the British could only bomb at night, and that bombing at night was highly inaccurate, area bombing forced itself on the British as a strategy, and so they were obliged to adopt the following campaign plan:

• Drop bombs, kill people, destroy homes.

• Stuff happens in Germany.

• Nazis overthrown and war ends.

Again, I’m not being facetious, you can read about this for yourself. But it is obvious that the British victory conditions—domestic revolution brought about by bombing, leading to unconditional German surrender—were the stuff of fantasy, and indeed no-one in London (or later in Washington) was ever able to describe the transmission mechanism that was supposed to bring them about. Critically, the essential stage of the plan—a domestic revolution—was not something the British could control, or even really influence. It was just an aspiration. By contrast, the Nazi objectives were much simpler: keep the state together and keep war production going. In this they were largely successful.

In summary, therefore, if the political end-state you are seeking is not actually achievable, all apparent”victories” and temporary “triumphs” are essentially a waste of time.  A final, and relatively recent example, though, shows how, even the when the West is capable of formulating a political end-state, it doesn’t necessarily turn out as expected. This episode also reflects the superficiality of much western strategic thinking, reflected in the pervasive tendency to personalise conflicts and crises. If This Leader or That Dictator can only be brought down, it is thought, peace will return. This pattern of thinking is very old : at one point or another, President Nasser, Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Saddam Hussein, Col Gaddafi, President Assad, and many others, were seen either as dangerous forces for destabilising their countries and regions or, in that grand old phrase “oppressing their people.” So, getting rid of Gaddafi, for example, would usher in a new period of democracy and stability in Libya and in the region.

The most curious case is that of Slobodan Milosevic, whom western leaderships had bizarrely type-cast as a fanatical Serb nationalist. (It must be said that few of them had ever actually met a real fanatical Serb nationalist.) Milosevic, the argument went after 1995, was the sole impediment to a peaceful resolution of all the problems in the Balkans. If he could only be got rid of, the pro-western moderate politicians who were always being lunched out by western embassies would surely take power and all would be well. But somehow when it came to actual elections, Milosevic always won, and nobody could understand why. By no accident at all, a group, of Kosovar Albanian radicals launched a nasty little insurgency campaign, which had produced several hundred deaths by 1998, and gave some NATO nations a clever idea. The campaign plan was:

• Threaten NATO military action unless Serbia gave up Kosovo to “international”control with NATO troops.

• After Serbia backs down, make sure Milosevic takes the blame.

• Milosevic loses the 2000 elections.

• Pro-western moderates come to power.

• Peace and joy in the Balkans.

The irony here is that, although the NATO part went disastrously wrong (NATO stumbled into a bombing war for which it was not prepared or equipped, and the alliance very nearly came apart as a result), part of the end-state did actually emerge. Milosevic backed down under Russian pressure, and was defeated in the 2000 elections. But. But. Milosevic was driven from power, after the elections, by (real) Serb nationalists in the streets of Belgrade, waving Serbian flags and chanting “Serbia, Serbia.” He was despised as the man who had sold out the Kosovo Serbs to NATO, and was replaced by, well, someone nobody had heard of until then, because he didn’t spend so much time in Embassies. Vojislav Kostunica was an anti-communist hard-line nationalist politician with no particular desire to give up Kosovo. And of course the story continues.

Now perhaps it’s time to bring an end to historical examples. But I just want to insist, yet again, on the fact that it’s common, indeed normal, for the combatants in war to have victory conditions that are not simple mirror-images of each other, but quite different, and that one side’s conditions may be easier to reach than the other. It’s well-known, for example, that most resistance groups, nationalist and anti-colonialist movements have “won” through a strategy of not losing: just hanging on, and exhausting the other side. This worked against the French in Algeria and the Portuguese in Angola, though by any normal standards the colonial powers “won” the war. But it can work in the other direction as well. The faction of Irish Nationalists who never accepted the 1921 partition tried a number of times to “drive the British out” of Ulster, most notably during the period of the “Troubles” between the late 1960s and the late 1990s. But the armed wing, the Irish Republican Army, was never strong enough to defeat the British militarily, and take control of Ulster. And had the British “withdrawn” from the Province (a term that was never defined) the result would have been a bloody civil war which the Protestant majority would have won. In essence, therefore, the IRA’s objectives were impossible, and all the British had to do was try to disrupt their operations while waiting for them to give up, which eventually proved to be the case.

In this context, let’s conclude with a word or two about Ukraine, and about the strategies of either side: this is important, because I think that the NATO strategy is a good example of the rule that if you don’t really understand what you are trying to do, you’re most unlikely to achieve anything. Ukraine is at least as much an intellectual conflict as it is a military one. In spite of the almost-irresistible temptation to believe that “this was planned,” the reality is that nobody in the West remotely imagined, a couple of years ago, that we might be where we are. The Russians, on the other hand, did, at least in principle. The ultras in western capitals who fantasised about, or even openly wished for, a conflict between Russia and Ukraine assumed it would lead to a Russian defeat in a couple of days and the installation of a “pro-western” government.  In the present shambolic situation, the nearest thing they now have to a campaign plan amounts to:

• Blow up bridges and stage daring commando raids.

• Wait for Russian morale to collapse.

• New pro-western government evacuates and says sorry.

And if there is any credible document which has a more sophisticated strategy than that, I would really like to see it.

The Russians are not intellectual supermen, any more than they are militarily invincible. But intellectually they are operating at a different level from us, and have been for some time. Consider: the strategic objective has been publicly announced for fifteen years: improve Russia’s security by denying western powers presence and influence in nearby territories, while cultivating defence and economic ties with non-western nations. This means building up Russia’s conventional and nuclear capabilities, especially in areas such as missiles, where the West is weak, and creating an increasingly autarkic economy, both intended to improve Russia’s negotiating position. We can assume that, early in 2022 the Russian government decided that their political strategy stood no chance of being effective, and turned to a military one, which itself would have been thought out ahead of time.

The military-strategic objective was the neutralisation of Ukraine and the creation of a partially-disarmed area corresponding roughly to the old Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact States. This could be done by intimidation, violence, or both. The campaign plan looked originally to overawe and shock Ukraine into making the necessary concessions. When that failed, Moscow turned to the attrition option instead. Since Russia has decades of ammunition stocks and weapons production, and a vast reservoir of trained manpower, it cannot lose an attrition war, for which, in any case, it has long prepared.

As we approach the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of Kursk, after which the defeat of the Germans and their numerous European allies was unmistakeable, there are some eerie conceptual similarities around. Just as in 1943, the West cannot win, but the timing and nature of the Russian victory is not yet clear. Russian ability to generate forces and produce armaments has been greatly under-estimated. The Russian Army and the political system did not collapse after a few days or a week. And so on.

Whichever side you “support” in this war (if I can’t cure you of using sporting metaphors) one thing is clear. The Russians have a worked-out strategy and the West does not. Of course, not all strategies are successful, and improvisation sometimes wins wars. But not this time, I fear.