You Can't Get There From Here.

All the boring stuff after defeat in Ukraine.

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Pundits are providing us with a lot of innocent amusement these days, and generating a lot of colourful controversy, by punditing about such issues as possible peace plans for Ukraine, possible coups in Kiev, alleged western attempts to replace Zelensky, the potential impact of corruption investigations, theoretical future deployments of western forces in Ukraine, and so on. This is all (mostly) harmless fun, and keeps pundits in need of audiences and money but without any political or military expertise harmlessly occupied. But nonetheless, most of it remains at the level of feverish speculation.

For several years now, on the other hand, I have been trying to encourage people to look at longer-term and more fundamental questions concerning the adaptations that the West is going to have to make to a Russian victory and to Russian military preeminence in Europe. Today I want to discuss an issue which so far as I know has not even been raised, let alone properly considered. If the post-Ukraine relationship between Russia and the West is going to be tense and adversarial, and if the possibility of actual open conflict is not to be excluded, then how do we even understand what that might mean, and how, if at all, can we prepare for it?

Some politicians and pundits already believe they have the answer, of course. Thus, fantasies of spending 5% of GDP on defence, wild schemes for bringing back conscription (or sort of), trying to rebuild a military production capacity, buying more of this or that type of equipment … surely the answer is in there somewhere? But it’s not. As I have stressed repeatedly, none of this makes any sense, and most of it is a waste of money, until you have done a great deal of thinking, and have a clear idea about what you are trying to achieve. Otherwise, it’s like going off to a Garden Centre and coming back with a random collection of garden tools and plants with no idea what to do with them. But for the West, of course, the problem is worse than that: imagine thirty households of different sizes and incomes trying to decide the details of how, if at all, to reclaim a piece of waste ground, and you have some faint idea of the problems involved.

So in this essay I will tackle three questions. First, how are we to understand this talk of conflict and even “war” between Russia and “the West,” and is it even possible to discuss it sensibly? Second, what would that understanding imply in practical terms? And third, assuming that the first two questions can be answered, what would actually be required if it was decided to mount a response? Needless to say, these questions are interdependent, and to some extent overlap each other, but I’ll try nonetheless to approach them in a logical sequence, and I will in particular make use of historical examples. I want to stress how utterly unclear the concept of “war” with Russia is, and how we are living at a moment of unprecedented strategic uncertainty, even if our politicians and pundits don’t seem to understand that.

For a start, we no longer know what “war” itself even is. Technically, of course, there are no wars any more, except those authorised by the Security Council. Instead of “wars,” which were declaratory legal situations, we have “armed conflicts,” which are objective situations defined by levels of violence in certain areas. (We don’t have time to go into the whys and wherefores: it’s enough to say that this simple development is evidently too intellectually challenging for most politicians and pundits to grasp.) But old habits of thought persist, and pundits talk about Britain or France being “at war” with Russia, while politicians say they believe that “war” could “break out” in the next decade, even if neither has much idea of what they mean.

Let’s attempt to dispel the confusion a bit by saying that what’s being invoked here is the idea that, at some time the near future, western and Russian forces could come into collision, leading to an exchange of fire, possible casualties and possible escalation towards a larger conflict. Whether this corresponds to popular understanding of “war” or not is irrelevant, not least because a simple clash between aircraft over the North Sea would be enough just by itself to produce a diplomatic crisis within the West, even if the situation didn’t deteriorate further.

The problem is that for essentially the first time in history, we have no idea what serious conflict with another state (“war” if you insist) would actually look like, or how, or even why, it would be fought. Thus, “war” with Russia today is just a kind of existential concept. For most of human history it hasn’t been like that. In the eighteenth century in Europe war was a matter of political objectives, set-piece battles, professional armies, campaigning seasons, peace treaties and gains and losses. The longer-term consequences of the French Revolution and the increasing sophistication of government meant that, by the end of the nineteenth century, war was seen as a sustained undertaking, with large armies of conscripts, fought for important, generally territorial, objectives. Before 1914, war was seen as largely about industrialisation, mobilisation of very large forces, transport by rail and a long and bloody conflict. (It’s a myth that European armies in 1914 expected a short war, though they certainly hoped for one.) Before 1939, war was conceived as requiring the entire capability of a nation, involving massive destruction and the use of new technologies such as aircraft, as well as potentially finishing off European civilisation. Apart from wittering on about drones, few of today’s pundits seem to have even the remotest idea of what future conflict might look like, which is perhaps excusable at the moment, or indeed to have thought about it in an organised fashion before putting finger to keyboard, which is not.

The point of this is not that studies, plans, exercises etc. imply prediction. This is a common assumption, but it’s wrong. It’s rather that you have to have some working assumptions about the nature and extent of any conflict you might be involved in, or you simply can’t plan for anything. These assumptions may be partly or even wholly invalidated with time, but at least they provide a basis to work on, and for the military to make plans. There’s no point in the political leadership asking the military to “plan for war” without these minimum assumptions: you might as well go to an insurance office and ask for “an insurance policy.” So let’s look at couple of examples.

The “this changes everything!” after World War 1 was the manned bomber, whose ability to “leap over” frontiers and even oceans and drop bombs directly on cities terrified governments as much as it did the general public. Such passive defence measures as could be taken were taken and, in an early sighting of the theory of deterrence, there was discussion of building long-range bombers to discourage potential enemies. At that stage there was no defence against such an attack though: the British politician Stanley Baldwin has been much mocked for his 1932 statement that “the bomber will always get through,” but he spoke no more than the truth. As Baldwin pointed out, even with fighters on high alert, by the time they could be scrambled and find their targets, the bombers would be on their way home. However, this appreciation provided an orientation for future British air policy: development of high-speed fighters able to communicate with the ground and each other, development of radar for early warning, and formation of a central command and control system for air defence. At the same time, the bomber fleet was vastly expanded and new types ordered, in the hope of delivering a quick knock-out blow to Germany. It’s true that the reality turned out to be somewhat different, as it usually does, but it was essentially this structure that enabled the British to win the Battle of Britain, and meant that the British started the War with a coherent set of policies and plans.

In contrast, the massive conventional and nuclear war in Europe that was feared from the 1950s to the 1980s was never actually fought. But both sides took the possibility extremely seriously, and so there were coherent plans and doctrines for such a war. This was particularly the case for the Soviet Union, for whom this would be the Big One: the final, inconceivably destructive conflict launched by the West in a desperate effort to frustrate the worldwide triumph of Communism, and which would settle the future of humanity. The war was expected to be total, including what was then coyly described as a “strategic nuclear exchange,” and to result in devastation worse than that of World War 2, from which it would take decades to recover. But the unconditional priority given to military spending, a permanent wartime economy and massive advance preparation would bring the Soviet Union victory. If you’re interested you can follow this apocalyptic mindset through all levels of Soviet military preparations.

The West didn’t really think in these terms, and for political reasons couldn’t, but that didn’t stop it developing doctrines and structures that tried to counter Soviet preparations. It was assumed that the Soviet Union would be the attackers (which was indeed their doctrine) and that a crisis would take weeks to develop. This meant that NATO forces could be optimised for defence (thus, slower, heavier tanks, for example) and that relatively small forces in peacetime could be complemented by millions of mobilised reservists, thus incidentally implying universal military service or something like it. In turn, and importantly for today, there was little need to think about the logistics of projecting forces forward. NATO also put a lot of importance on airpower, where it considered it was superior to the Warsaw Pact.

We’ll never know, thankfully, what such a war might have been like in practice, but the fact that each side had a fairly precise concept, and that this served as a basis for plans, force structures, training and exercises, shows how far we are now, by comparison, from any organised thinking about some future hypothetical “conflict” at all. So we’ll have to do it for them. Let’s propose that we need to look at a range of possibilities, from small-scale clashes between Russian and western forces, not necessarily causing casualties, up to some kind of direct land/air engagement on the continent of Europe for limited objectives. We can assume higher-level and more extensive conflicts if you like, but the reality is that they are now, and probably will always be, beyond the West’s ability to prosecute. Nothing that has been seen in the evolution of western military doctrine since 2022, still less in military practice, suggests that the West has even begun to absorb the lessons of the Ukraine conflict.

Now before we go on, I need to stress that giving the military scenarios to plan for is only part of the task. The other, much more difficult, is to elaborate some kind of political doctrine and procedures for handling outbreaks of conflict, or the threat of one developing. Doing this nationally is not easy. Doing it internationally can be agony. The only time (a rather smaller) NATO had to confront a serious military operation was Kosovo in 1999, and that almost destroyed the alliance. Trying to manage, say, a Russian demand that NATO ships keep a certain distance from Russian vessels on exercise under the threat of them being attacked, would probably be enough to bring the decision-making process in Brussels to a screeching halt after just a few minutes’ discussion, with no obvious way forward. So the first objective, and one which I don’t think we’ll ever get, will be an agreed NATO politico-military concept for handling provocations, accidents and escalation with Russia.

OK, but let’s assume we do. What types of plans should we tell the military to make, against what types of contingencies. Here are a few, and, once again, I don’t put them forward as prophecy. Rather, they are generic examples of the kinds of assumptions you need if all the heavy breathing about “preparing for war” is ever to assume any concrete form.

The first, which I think is actually quite realistic, is policing air and sea frontiers. A major military power, as Russia now is, has by virtue of that status an intimidatory capacity against weaker nations such as Europe, or the United States as a European power. This capability is existential, whether or not it is deliberately used. But I would expect the Russians, both on general principles and for specific reasons, to probe western air and sea frontiers, seeking to disrupt NATO exercises, disrupt maritime and air traffic and so forth. If the Russians were pushing at the same time for some kind of European Security Treaty which would favour them heavily, then behaviour of this kind would be quite logical and reasonable. Some kind of NATO policy for responding to such situations will be needed, and I doubt that it will be easy to construct. But we’ll come to practical consequences later.

Next, there are land frontier scenarios, which could involve direct conflict between Russian and NATO forces across international borders. In practice, these scenarios are limited to the Baltic States and to Finland, which has helpfully given NATO a massive border with Russia which it cannot defend. We don’t need to concern ourselves for the moment with how such a crisis could arise, not least because history suggests that such attempts are usually futile. It’s just worth pointing out, perhaps that another flare-up in Georgia could also provoke demands by the ignorant and bellicose for NATO involvement, and that would have to be somehow taken account of, at least in theory.

Finally, would be a deliberate larger-scale conflict between Russia and NATO, for some reason that we won’t even attempt to go into here. Now in practice, this would have to be initiated by Russia, because NATO doesn’t have either the forces or the logistic capacity to mount an attack of its own, even if it had the political cohesion, as we’ll see later. This would have to involve Russian forces transiting Belarus and Ukraine, and invading, probably, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Rumania, before conceivably going further.

At this point, I want to transition to boring but essential things to understand, like maps, distances, roads and air and sea transport routes. The first thing to stress is that this is not the Cold War. In those days, massive forces were deployed effectively facing each other. The Bundeswehr alone could deploy twelve divisions within 48 hours (and on their own soil, of course) as well as territorial defence units. The Belgians, Dutch and French had forces already in place. Reinforcements (mostly personnel and light units) would arrive by road and train for the apocalyptic battle in what is now the centre of Germany. The British, with farther to come, would have transported some 40,000 personnel to reinforce their own four divisions but again, most of the reinforcements were in personnel or light units, and they were only a few hours from Antwerp. Virtually none of the infrastructure to do this exists today.

Nor did Warsaw Pact forces have far to go. The Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, some 350,000 strong, and kept on permanent high alert, was expected to be wiped out in the first few days of combat, so they took their logistics with them. It was then hoped that second and third echelons would eventually push through to the Channel, largely unopposed. By contrast, a Russian attack today on Poland through Ukraine or Belarus, even starting from somewhere like Kharkov, would have to advance a thousand kilometres just to get to the Polish frontier. This perhaps puts suggestions about a Russian “threat” to France or the UK into some kind of context.

We’ll keep this possibility in mind as a theoretical one, not least because it is an extreme case of what will be recurrent theme for the rest of this essay: the distances, the terrain, the availability of forces, the problems of logistic resupply would be an order of magnitude more serious than any military operation has ever encountered before, and the resources available, even in the Russian case, are dramatically smaller even than in the recent past.

The reality is that an actual major conflict between Russia and the West would be fought overwhelmingly with missiles and drones, and would be extremely one-sided. The Russians don’t have the capability, if they ever did, to overrun western Europe with conventional ground forces: indeed, I’ve argued, and continue to believe, that even the full occupation of Ukraine would be too ambitious a target. But current, let alone near-future, Russian missiles and drones could strike western targets from land sea and air: the Pentagon, the Elysée, 10 Downing Street, would all be vulnerable, and even carpeting the surface of western states with Patriot batteries (if they could ever be deployed in such numbers) wouldn’t do much to stop them. And it’s enough to look at a map to see why, even if the West were to develop similar missiles, its aircraft wouldn’t be able to get close enough to launch them. Geography is a bitch. But then this isn’t a new discovery. In one of the least-studied parts of Book 1 of On War, Clausewitz insisted on “the country” as an “integral element” of conflict, and the importance of fortresses, rivers and mountains for swallowing up forces that would otherwise be available for combat: something that those who complain about the Russians “going slow” in Ukraine might do well to reflect upon.

So to keep things to manageable proportions, let’s take the case of the deployment of NATO forces in some kind of “deterrent” or “preventative” role, in the case of a confrontation that could lead to actual fighting. The most obvious scenarios would include a clash involving the Baltic States, Finland or both, and a crisis in the Black Sea with the possible risk of both naval confrontation and amphibious operations against Bulgaria and Rumania. (We could throw Georgia in as well to liven things up a bit.)

Now, what is a “deterrent” or “preventative” role in such situations? As its name suggests, it’s an activity intended to prevent something from happening, or at a minimum stop a situation from getting worse. So how do you do that? Well, there are two fundamental elements. First, you have to be able to act quickly, second you have to have a visible escalation plan in case your deterrence fails to deter. Otherwise, your posture is not credible. Back in the Cold War, and for a while afterwards, there was a NATO unit snappily entitled the Allied Command Europe Mobile Force (Land). This was a small, high-readiness multinational unit, intended to deploy at short notice to the NATO flanks. For political reasons, virtually every NATO member committed a contingent, even if it was tiny. It deployed many times on exercises over the years, and probably could have deployed in a real crisis, always assuming political agreement had been forthcoming. However, it had two important characteristics. First, its land component was a light brigade of about 5000 men. Its military potential was thus very limited, and it was mainly intended as a political signal. However, behind the AMF(L) was a massively larger military machine, capable of deployment reasonably quickly. Thus, the AMF(L)’s deployment was intended to be a political warning: we are ready to fight if necessary, and the cavalry is not far away.

It goes without saying that such a logic is not possible today. From time to time, the deployment of European “deterrent” forces in parts of Ukraine was talked about, and excitable pundits frequently told us it was going to happen. It didn’t, of course, because there was one basic flaw: if the Russians were not overawed by the simple presence of European forces, and simply ignored them, let alone attacked them, there would be nothing further the West could do. In such a situation, the Russians would have had what is called “escalation dominance,” which is to say that they could move to progressively higher levels of violence, and the West could not. In effect, the proposed deterrent force was itself deterred from deploying. We can expect more-or-less the same story on the flanks of NATO. If they want to, the Russians can always overmatch any NATO deployment without breaking sweat. The only hope that such a deployment would have, is that the Russians would not particularly want to have an armed clash with NATO for wider political reasons. That may be so, but it would be unwise to bank on it, and of course it depends on how seriously the Russians themselves view the situation. Similarly, nothing would stop the Russians threatening to simply wipe the force out with missiles and drones unless it was withdrawn, or indeed, threatening to destroy it on its way into position. Since this is a threat they actually could carry out, it amounts to a deterrent posture.

Which leads to the last part of this essay. Let’s assume that, nonetheless, planning is put in hand for such an operation somewhere on the flanks of NATO. What would it involve, and would it even be possible? My contention is that the answers are (1) more than you can probably imagine, and (2) no. But let’s set that out in a little detail.

Back in the Cold War, standing forces in place were quite large: the German Army alone had a peacetime strength of some 350,000 and the French a little more, even ignoring reservists who could be mobilised quickly. This meant that large forces could be deployed near the frontiers or in Germany itself. Units would stay in place for a long time (I knew some British officers who had spent nearly their whole operational career in Germany), grow their own infrastructure and know the area over which they were going to fight very well. Neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact would have had to “project” the forces for a future conflict: the important ones were there already. The logistic structure was in place, the transport systems were highly developed, and in many cases the two sides had simply taken over facilities from the old Wehrmacht.

Now if we consider one of the examples above, the Finnish Army is normally concerned with peacetime training (about 20,000 conscripts per year.) At least at the moment, it has no permanent, professional forces that could be stationed on its frontier with Russia—itself over 1300 kilometres long—and is thus dependent on mobilisation for any useful resistance. Now it so happens that during the Cold War, the border between East and West Germany was just about the same length: in peacetime something like a million NATO troops were deployed behind it.

Clearly, you can’t press the analogy too far. The terrain is, to put it mildly, different from Germany, as the Red Army discovered in 1939/40, and so is the climate (Clausewitz again.) And the only plausible objective for the Russians would be Helsinki, in the extreme South of the country. Above all, today’s Russian Army is a fraction of what it was in 1939, when it deployed a million men on that operation alone. On the other hand, if NATO wanted to “deter” or “display determination” along what is now its longest border by far with Russia, then it wouldn’t have many options. If the forces could somehow be found (see next paragraph) then a permanent NATO presence in the country, even down in the South, would be a fabulously expensive and difficult logistic undertaking that would need perhaps a decade of planning and construction, and probably amount, in practice, to a presence just around Helsinki, with occasional forays outside;

But could the forces be found, anyway? If you want a symbolic force only—a multi-national battalion, for example—then the answer is probably “yes.” But it would be a purely symbolic gesture with no military significance and, as we have seen, no deterrent value. (This doesn’t mean it won’t happen, of course.) But the chances of deploying a permanent international force of any useful size are remote. Armies are tiny these days compared to the Cold War, and there is little sign that they will get usefully larger. It’s one thing to have Belgian forces deployed in Germany during the Cold War, a couple of hours from home. It’s another to have infantry units deployed for a few months to Iraq or Afghanistan under field conditions. But having an important fraction of your Army permanently deployed several thousand kilometres from home in peacetime is probably beyond the capability of any European state today to manage, even if it were politically acceptable. Moreover, why Finland? Shouldn’t we do the same thing for the Baltic States, for Poland, for Rumania and others as well, or even instead? Arguments, not least about funding, could go on for years. (And believe me, that only scratches the surface of the problems.)

So since they aren’t coming to us, and since we can’t get to them, the only way in which western (including US) forces could find themselves “at war” with Russia would be if they were deployed in a crisis. There are, as you might expect, a few problems with that idea. Time is the first. Now to repeat, even during the Cold War, a short-notice attack was not considered very likely. There was an entire industry of Warning Indicators that intelligence agencies on both sides watched, and it was assumed that war would follow a period of political tension that might last weeks. So NATO war-games (and one imagines similar games in Moscow) included sustained agonising about when the crisis was sufficiently serious to mobilise and move forces. But, to repeat again, distances and transport requirements, and thus timescales in those days, were simply not comparable with the situation today. In addition, units would have deployed to areas they knew, joined other units already there, and the transportation facilities required for the relatively short distances involved existed then. They don’t now.

Let’s stay with that last thought. After all, whilst there will be no bonanza of defence spending, nor any massive expansion of forces, a number of governments are planning to buy new equipment or more of the same, and it’s likely that there will be a modest increase in the size and capability of western forces, notionally to meet the Russian “threat,” and to engage them in military operations. But the question is whether this actually makes any sense at all, and the argument thus far suggests it doesn’t. Such forces are too small and too weak to have any deterrent value, and would rapidly be annihilated in any combat. But OK, let’s say that because it’s necessary to Do Something, NATO will set up some kind of intervention force ready to race to the scene of a possible confrontation and provide at least a political response and a token military presence.

Or maybe not. Recall that in the Cold War, NATO’s orientation was defensive. The assumption was that NATO forces would fall back towards their own logistics, on good roads and through routes they knew. Whilst it was hoped to counter-attack, and ultimately drive the Red Army out of NATO territory, there was no intention, and anyway no capability, to go further. Thus, logistics was relatively speaking neglected, and very little attention was given to movement, and none to force projection. It simply wasn’t necessary to plan to project forces hundreds of kilometres forward, so the capabilities, skills, equipment and personnel to do so were never developed. In the last thirty years, there has only been one serious effort at force projection at a distance, and that was Iraq 2,0. In that case, movement was by sea, and the invading forces had as much time as they wanted, and complete command of the air and transport routes. But the capability for such an operation no longer exists, even if it were relevant here.

So sending even a token politically-inspired force—two mechanised brigades and a headquarters say, 10-12,000 personnel—to the fringes of NATO would require force projection across a distance that has never been attempted before in military history, at a time when western capability to move heavy forces has never been more limited. And it would need to be done quickly. This creates its own set of problems, because a multinational force would have to be kept at a permanently high state of readiness, fully trained, fully equipped, fully exercised and ready to deploy. (By comparison, several European armies pride themselves in having a Battalion at this level of readiness.) Even then, the logistic challenges of projecting forces over that distance are enormous. A modern tank weighs around 60 tonnes, and can only be transported by rail, or, away from railway lines, by a 30-tonne tank transporter. But tank transporters are only used these days for routine movements and there are’t enough of them in Europe to have any real strategic mobility. Many road and rail bridges in Europe can’t support such loads anyway. Essentially the same is true for most other types of unit. Perhaps, over the course of weeks or a month, a single Brigade might arrive, somewhat travel-stained, in time for the end of the crisis.

NATO has carried out exercises designed to at least rehearse this capability, and the result have not been funny. We are told that Exercise DACIAN FALL held recently, “involved” the deployment of a 5000-strong multinational Brigade to Rumania, of which 3000 troops were French. But it’s almost impossible to be sure even of the basic facts. Something between 5-800 French troops were in place already, and some of those “involved” never actually deployed outside France. Most estimates put the number of actually deployed troops at no more than 2000, and even then it took weeks for them to arrive. This is probably the best that can be hoped for.

But surely, I hear you say, wasn’t this done in World War 2? Didn’t the Germans conquer great swathes of Russian territory a matter of weeks, and against opposition at that? If they could project millions of men like that, why can’t we project a few thousand? Well, for a long time our understanding of this episode—in the absence of any reliable Soviet sources, it should be said—came from the self-serving memoirs of German Generals, according to whom the victorious Panzers would have sliced their way to Moscow except for the intervention of Autumn rains and Winter cold, neither of which could have been anticipated. But with the opening of Soviet archives, and with the researches of a new generation of military historians—notably David Stahel—it becomes clear that the invasion was doomed from the beginning, and for very much the kind of reasons discussed above. The German High Command made no serious attempts to assess the Red Army’s capability, and simply assumed that after a few massive German victories it would melt away, the regime in Moscow would fall and the whole campaign would be over in six or eight weeks. (This may remind you of something.) Logistics was simply wished away, because the campaign would be over before logistic problems arose, the more so since Stalin had helped himself to half of Poland in 1939, and thus the two armies were directly facing each other. The consensus these days is that once this fantasy of rapid victory failed to materialise, the campaign was basically lost.

Indeed, it’s arguable that the Germans only got as far as they did because of catastrophic errors on the Soviet side. Much of the fault was Stalin’s: for selling the Germans the petrol they used for the invasion, for the destruction of the Red Army’s officer corps, for not heeding warnings of attack until the very last second and, most of all, for insisting that the Red Army be stationed close to the frontier to counter-attack quickly, which meant that once the Germans were through the front line, the Red Army had nothing much in reserve. But on the other hand, the Red Army did manage to operate successfully in mud and in sub-zero temperatures because they were trained and equipped for doing so, and did actually seem to have read what Clausewitz said about the importance of “country,” and used it to their advantage.

Which is more than our current generation of pundits (including military pundits, sadly) seem to be able to grasp. Distance cannot use be wished away. It takes fuel to move anything, including the vehicle that’s doing the moving. An armoured brigade can have anything up to 250 combat vehicles, and as many in support roles, and you can’t send it as an attachment to an email or as an Amazon package. Vehicles and equipment require maintenance in sophisticated facilities. An armoured brigade will consume perhaps fifteen to twenty metric tons of food a day. And.So.On.

In other words, the “war” that politicians and pundits seem gleefully to anticipate, will not take place, because it can’t take place. There are a number of things that could happen, ranging from small-scale air and sea clashes, to massive and paralysing Russian attacks on one or more western countries, to very small-scale political deployments on the flanks. But not much more than that. The idea of massive armoured battles in the Baltic States is a fantasy, and let us hope that no western government ever actually takes it seriously. There are more important and more fundamental things to worry about just now.