China, Ukraine, & GWOT: The Warping Power of Dissolution Begat by Lies

one war at a time; start with the war you have

As CDR Salamander has - blessings to Neptune - gained thousands of new readers in the last few years, so before we dive into Ian Ward’s extensive but spotty in places article in Politico last week, The Republican Ukraine Skeptics Who Saw War Firsthand: Veterans of the war on terror saw the limits of military power firsthand and are driving the erosion of support for Ukraine, below … I feel the need to make sure everyone knows my long-held position.

Ward outlines three (R) “Tribes” when it comes to pushback on supporting Ukraine in their existential fight against Russia for reasons from the present threat from the People’s Republic of China to general world weariness.

1. Primacists

2. Prioritizers

3. Restrainers

I’m not sure where I sit in those tribes. I share views with all of them in places. I sympathize with at least parts of each. None really has the answer to the knot of a problem the West and its auxiliaries face in 2024.

Perhaps I am an island unto myself, but I do know this; the fundamentals of how I see America in the world has remained unchanged through three decades - two of them online and on the record - only slightly modified by the events of the day and the challenge of the moment. This doesn’t make me smarter or better than anyone else, but what it does give me is firm comfort in my position.

You can go back and read the ends of my posts from 2010 and 2011 to see some earlier versions, but in 2019 over at the OG Blog in a post titled, A Quarter Century Waiting for the Salamander Strategic Reset, I believe I fleshed out my position best.

A half decade later it holds up well and I stand by every word. Yes, this is a long quote of myself, but hey - it’s my substack…right?

I guess this is another opportunity to bring up the 25-yr old “Salamander Strategic Reset” pondered out by LT Salamander a couple of years after the end of the Cold War, and slightly revised through the years.

1. First, know the challenge: The Soviet Union was a rather unique global challenge that lasted decades and as such warped our perception of ourselves. The Soviet Union died by its own hand, and still high off the false mirage of the DESERT STORM’s easy victory that immediately preceded it, we became infatuated with our sudden dominance astride the world - “peace dividend” or not.

Through the 90's GBR, CAN, BEL, FRA, NLD and other armies decamped from Germany after the fall of the Soviet Union, but we did not. Why? We became addicted to being what we are not designed to be; a quasi-empire.

2. Know yourself: we are by design a mercantile republic, not an empire, yet to keep the Soviets at bay for over four decades, we adopted the mantle of one. It is not a natural state. We are blessed with good neighbors, two oceans, and for the moment the best global economy. Our responsibility to the world is an example of solid economics and good government - not enforcer of order.

3. Know the state of man: there will always be tyrants. To live under tyranny is the basic state of man. A higher state of man with liberty and free discourse must be desired and fought for by the people it will impact - it cannot be imposed by an external power and then left to the imposed to implement in the long term. It will be seen as foreign to the people it is being imposed on, and the people will become an antibody to it. A nation will bleed itself white of blood, treasure, and legitimacy, wandering the planet looking for monsters to slay. There will always be monsters. If you embark on that quest, it will never end.

4. Bring them home: We should not be garrisoning the world as we approach the third decade of the 21st Century. Our allies are strong and well populated enough to be their own 1st line of defense and we do not need to be on their ramparts so that they can work on other projects. We should have no maneuver forces based on the land of our allies. Zero. We should not have any of our naval forces based in the ports of foreign nations, on a permanent basis. With our allies, can we have combined training, HQ and logistics bases? Absolutely. Should we on a regular basis have large scale exercises where we surge forces from the USA and back? Absolutely. That is our natural state.

5. Play to our comparative advantage: Again, we have friendly land borders and two large oceans. We are a maritime and aerospace power, not a land empire. We are blessed with resources, talent, stable government and rule of law unprecedented in the history of mankind. That is what we are undermining by trying for force the unnatural fit of empire. The secondary effects here and globally are clear for all to see if they wish to.

6. Land reserve: we have no standing need for large standing ground forces. None. Outside short notice aggressive war on our part, there is no reason we need the active duty ground forces we have. Our design and national character has the answer for us; the vast majority of our ground force capability in peace should be in a robust and diverse National Guard system. We can activate and bring up to full readiness as needed. As doing so would be a significant disruption to economies and families throughout every community in the USA, it will stand as a check on those who have a desire to try out their dreams of global empire. The nation will have to be behind it, not a klatch of think-tanks, politicians, media types, militarists, or excitable residents of Blobistan. Well equipped, distributed, and fully part of every part of the USA. Let the vast majority of our Army (and mobilization enablers in USAF/USN) be of and from the citizenry.

7. An expeditionary mindset: We should have a reasonable active army and USMC, but they should be expeditionary by design and scalable w/integrated reserve and National Guard components that will flesh them out. There are a variety of ways to design this active force, but it will only be a much smaller % of today's. Active component+reserves+National Guard units - actual numbers may be more. We will need more logistics, air and sea, in reserve/National Guard status - and that should be just fine.

So, that is the Executive Summary. You really want to “break the wheel” of strategic stumbling, drift and inertial? This is a way to do it.

Now I want to shift your mind to Ukraine. In this post from 2008 - yes kiddies 16-years ago, six years before the events of 2014 and 14 years before the kick off of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War - I laid out three Courses of Action (COA) that could unfold in Ukraine if, as I saw in 2008, Ukraine wanted to go West.

Unfortunately for everyone, Russia picked my most dangerous COA:

...and here is the sales pitch.

The influence of Russia in Ukraine is strong, and Ukraine is in a precarious position politically. At present, the Party of the Regions, headed by the pro-Russian former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, is the largest party in Ukraine and holds a plurality in the Ukrainian Parliament. The present democratic government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is barely surviving.

It would be in the best interest of America's national security to expedite the process of Ukraine's becoming a member of NATO, not to postpone it. As things stand, it will take Ukraine years to join the Alliance. If the process is shortened, it will reduce the period of time that Ukraine is a bone of contention and a source of friction between the West and Russia.

As a member of NATO, Ukraine will be more free of the influence of pro-Russian forces and will develop more rapidly into a mature, vibrant democracy. Given historical, economic and close cultural ties with Russia, Ukraine could become an important catalyst in the evolution of democracy in Russia.

Risky, but worth it. Let’s call the last para COA-1. COA-2 is that Russia responds by taking the Crimea and pushing the "ethnic" Russians throughout Ukraine to emulate their Ossetian and Abkhazian counterparts. COA-3 is that Ukraine securely folds into the West and Russia stews in its own juices for awhile until it accepts the new reality.

COA-3 is most likely (though the time line is in question if we take the advice of Henry - and therefor is in danger). COA-2 is most dangerous. COA-1 is best case with a little wishful thinking thrown in.

No need to republish all I’ve written on Ukraine since Bush43 was CINC, but I kind of like this post from March 2014 as a snapshot in time, read it if you wish. This is a long enough post as it is, and I’m sure I’ve already lost some readers.

As always, I like to make sure I put all my cards on the table. I stand in 2024 roughly the same place you find me in the snapshots from 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2019.

As readers here know, I spent 8 years on GWOT in uniform, from deployed in the C5F AOR in the first few months after 9/11/01, to East Coast Staff Duty before heading across the Atlantic to spend the last few years of that first decade wearing a NATO hat from the Continent to Kabul, trying to make what turned out to be a futile effort happen.

So, yeah, I get it - but what I don’t get is the inability of people to see the larger movements in play.

There is a national security version of “String Theory” where everything is connected, but it isn’t a binary choice, and most of it is beyond our control. The world deals us the hand it wishes to, we don’t have control over it…but we have to maintain the ability to keep things properly compartmentalized and act in our interest.

We don’t need to garrison the world nor fight all its wars, but we should help shape events to our advantage, provide encouragement to others who are our friends, and frustrate the ambitions of bad men and the nations they control.

You will find few people more skeptical of the Iron Triangle/Military Industrial Complex than I am. You will find few people who will acknowledge that the US military has a problem with truth and layered optimism-filters than I do.

Yes, I know we do not consistently select our best for promotion to the highest levels of leadership. Our record this century makes this self-evident.

Yes, I see the People’s Republic of China and the path she is on. I started “The Long Game” series over at my OG blog in July 2004 - literally two decades ago. The Long Game is the game today. Yeah, we’re here … I guess.

Now, what are we going to do about it?

Just as we can’t garrison the world and fight its battles, neither can we retreat fully across our ocean moats and kind borders to focus on just one possible threat. The world has its own plan. Perhaps China is the next great threat, maybe it won’t be. We aren’t that great at picking the next war.

Maybe Russia will fix her demographics, or maybe she won’t - but if she is a threat, what if, at quite modest cost, we could have her consume what was left of her Soviet inheritance in an act of futility against a wall of Ukrainian FPV drones - taking her off the stage for generations, again?

Maybe.

Anyway, so, yes. I get these arguments as outlined by the Republican’s in Ward’s extensive article, but I don’t align with where these Representatives and Senators - who with most things I find them on my side of the argument - stand on the big picture.

I wish there weren’t a Russo-Ukrainian War, but there is.

I wish Hamas had stayed inside the walls of Gaza, but they didn’t.

I wish China did not have a bone to pick with her Century of Humiliation, but she does.

“In 2003, I made the mistake of supporting the Iraq War, [but] a couple months later, I also enlisted in the United States Marine Corps,” said Vance, who deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a corporal with the public affairs section of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing. Vance’s tenure in the military features prominently in his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which he recounted how his time in the Marines helped him overcome his troubled upbringing in post-industrial Ohio to become a disciplined and functional adult. But on the Senate floor, his account of his military service was notably less sanguine.

“I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” Vance recounted, the emotion rising in his voice. “[I saw] that promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”

As the Senator from Ohio knows even more now, yes - we were all lied to - especially on Iraq. It was a bi-partisan lie … but one that was happily supported by uniformed leadership. Well, that really is their job. You get your higher direction and guidance from your civilian masters, and agree or disagree, you do the best you can do. No one threw their stars on the table, but I didn’t throw my silver oak leaf clusters on the table either. I enthusiastically participated in the charade at the tactical and operational level. I own that.

I’ve always been skeptical, or at least think of myself as being so, and the GWOT experience has me where I believe none to little even now. If I read something I agree too much with, I look for something I disagree with. I read broadly from left to right, US to international, and listen closer to those I disagree with as close if not closer than I do to those I align with, always looking for where I might be fooled again. I’m not sure enough people do that on both sides of the present argument.

The stew of lives and aspirational delusion of the past does not mean that everything is a lie today or that we are once again tilting to make the world safe-for-democracy.

These members’ accounts of their disillusionment with the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia complicate a prevailing explanation for the resurgence of anti-interventionism on the right. In contrast to the common claim that this resurgence is merely an artifact of the Republican Party’s loyalty to Donald Trump, conservatives’ own accounts indicate the origins of this shift — though undoubtedly encouraged and accelerated by Trump — predate him. As a result, they suggest that, contrary to the predictions — and, in some cases, the hopes — of its critics, the GOP’s anti-interventionist faction is not likely to dissipate anytime soon, even if Trump is defeated in November.

We don’t get to pick our reality. The fact remains that the international system that exists today enables the standard of living our nation enjoys…and underwrites the debt we are barely able to contain. We cannot walk away from the challenges the world throws at our feet because if we do, the supports that underpin everyone from Miami to Fairbanks will be undermined.

We should not, as we did at the turn of the century, run around searching for dragons. We do require wisdom to know what is a real challenge and to be humble in our ways and means. Humbled by reality from AFG to IRQ, yes, but we cannot have the sins of those who managed the failures of GWOT at the start of this century blind us to larger issues today that if not properly prepared for, will grow in favor of no free man by mid-century.

The legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is, of course, not the only reason these Republicans oppose the U.S. policy in Ukraine. They have also argued that the U.S. can’t afford to support a ground war in Europe, that it distracts from the rising threat of China, that Congress should spend the money to lock down the southern border. Above all, opposing U.S. aid for Ukraine presents a prime opportunity for Republicans to attack the Biden administration, which has made support for Ukraine a centerpiece of its foreign policy.

If we stand steadfast and lead, Europe will, in fits and starts, take their rightful place at the front on their continent. Sensing that strength, our friends - and those who would like to be our friends - in the Pacific and Asia will do the same. Showing weakness in one area will degrade our standing in the other. “String Theory.”

We do not have to do it all, and we have had surprising success the last eight years getting moribund Europe to move in a more constructive way on defense. Not a perfect success, not everywhere, but as much success as one free nation can have to help steer the path of other free nations with their own agency.

We have addressed challenges in more than one theater during world wars, and global threats during the Cold War of the 20th Century. We can, and must, do this again.

Rather than being reflexively isolationist, they argue, their foreign policy views are a direct response to the U.S.’ documented failures abroad.

It also helps explain the intensely emotional and divisive tone this debate has taken on: For many anti-interventionist members who are vets, the war in Ukraine isn’t just an abstract foreign policy debate. It is a test of whether the Republican Party — and the military leadership in Washington more broadly — have learned the lessons of their service.

“It’s a largely unspoken but shared belief among many of us that we’ve seen the mistakes that the last generation [of] leaders in our country have made,” Banks said. “And we refuse to repeat them.”

Banks is spot on here. This is where Congressional oversight is needed. More in your face, and deeper in the questions. Proper, sharp-elbowed oversight from Congress where Representatives and Senators are not intimidated by uniforms needs to continue. Stop the silly deference and “thank you for your service” apple polishing. They are public servants. They allowed SES to be considered GOFO equivalents - treat them the same way.

Crane, now the Republican representative from Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District, dates the origins of his own foreign policy thinking to the weeks after 9/11, when he dropped out of college in Arizona to enlist in the U.S. Navy. Like many of his fellow post-9/11 enlistees, Crane told me, he was motivated by a mix of anger and patriotic duty, and he believed the George W. Bush administration’s rationale for the war in Iraq that began in 2003: that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous and despotic tyrant aiding al-Qaida, and that the U.S. would bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East. After 2½ years serving aboard an Aegis missile cruiser, Crane joined the Navy SEALs and deployed to Iraq, eventually serving three deployments with SEAL Team 3.

But as the war dragged on, Crane said, he grew gradually disillusioned with the U.S. mission. He was vaguely aware of news reports that the Bush administration had fabricated its pretext for the war and was badly mismanaging the war effort, but it “wasn’t all-consuming,” Crane told me. The real “light bulb moment” came during his third deployment in 2010, when his unit was tasked with locating and capturing a high-value Iraqi combatant. Crane and his fellow SEALs chased their target all over the country before capturing him and imprisoning him in an Iraq jail. A few days later, though, Crane said he learned the captive had been let go after the target’s associates walked into the jail where he was being held, bribed the Iraqi guards and secured his release.

“At that point, I realized that we were not going to be able to achieve our goals,” Crane said. “We were also probably risking our lives pointlessly.”

Yes. That is true and valid … but what does that have to tell us about Russia and the PRC in 2024?

In Congress, Crane has emerged as one of the leading Ukraine skeptics in the House, having voted against every effort since 2023 to send additional U.S. aid to the embattled nation. He has been generally supportive of U.S. aid for Israel in its war in Gaza, but in April, he was one of 21 Republicans who voted against an additional $17 billion in aid for Israel, arguing that it ran afoul of fiscal responsibility and included money for Hamas. (The proposed package contained $9 billion in humanitarian relief for residents of Gaza.) To explain these votes, he has re-appropriated the argument — first coined by Republican Dwight Eisenhower and later claimed by progressive Democrats — that the “military-industrial complex” exercises undue influence over U.S. foreign policy decisions.

“The military-industrial complex is alive and well, and I do believe it’s very influential up here in Washington, D.C.,” he told me. “Business is good for a lot of massive corporations when the United States of America is at war.”

More than a decade out from his final deployment, he’d like to see the Republican Party learn the lesson he learned in 2010.

“There is this ever-intensifying desire for intervention around the globe,” he said, “even when I don’t think that we’ve been very successful with it, when I know we can’t afford it, and when we probably create more chaos than we solve.”

No American or NATO military formations are engaged in combat in Ukraine, nor are there plans for such. Ukraine is just asking for support to fight for their existence. Should the USA have cut off Great Britain in 1940?

For many members of the new generation of anti-interventionist Republicans — including Indiana’s Banks — that lesson was learned on the ground.

In 2014, while serving as a member of the Indiana state Senate, Banks was called upon to deploy to Afghanistan as an officer in the Navy Reserve supply corps. Banks oversaw the acquisition of American military equipment and its transfer to the Afghan army, ensuring the transfer of everything from combat vehicles to helicopters to ammunition to night-vision goggles.

Coming on the heels of President Barack Obama’s preliminary decision to remove U.S. forces from the country, Banks’ mission was, in theory, part of a broader strategy to transfer responsibility for the conflict to the Afghan government. But even as this transfer of responsibility and materiel was underway, Banks sensed something was amiss.

“All of us who were there questioned the decisions to [turn] all of these vehicles and weapons over to people who couldn’t tell you where those vehicles ended up,” Banks told me. “It was a total cluster-fuck.”

…

“I don’t regret my service — I believe it was meaningful, and I’m proud of it — but I refuse to be a part of a generation of leaders in this country that blindly bankrupt our country or blindly engage in wars that will cost the lives of Americans without a purpose,” Banks said.

Yes, agreed, but there is a clear purpose in Ukraine. Three main ones, actually;

1. Help a people fighting for self-determination in an existential battle against one of the major bad actors on the world stage.

2. Reinforce the rather recent international standard that one nation cannot take the territory of another through aggressive force of arms.

3. While executing #1 & #2, we degrade Russian power to being a secondary actor on the world stage for at least two decades.

Here is the fleshing out of the three tribes:

Two and a half years into the war in Ukraine, Republican thinking on foreign policy has divided into three approximate “tribes”: “primacists,” who continue to abide by the conventional Reaganite doctrine of “peace through strength”; “prioritizers,” who think the U.S. should construct its foreign policy around confronting the unique threat of China; and “restrainers,” who are skeptical of U.S. military intervention abroad, regardless of the form it takes.

From the restrainers’ point of view, the fundamental problem with U.S. military intervention abroad isn’t that its motivations are malicious but that its outcomes are unpredictable — that “the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions,” as Dan Caldwell, a policy adviser at the restraint-oriented think-tank Defense Priorities and a veteran of the war in Iraq, put it to me.

The great disgrace of Afghanistan was the narcissism of abandonment of others who made the mistake of putting their necks on the line because you said you would back them. Same as Congress cutting off South Vietnam and leaving her to her fate, soon followed by Cambodia and Laos and the millions of deaths and displacement that followed.

Should Russia achieve her aims in Ukraine, not only will the Ukrainian people lose their ability to have self-determination, who knows how many millions will die or be displaced in the chaos that will follow. In such an aftermath, Central and Eastern European NATO will be under renewed pressure by a more confident Russia. USA & Western standing in the world will be compromised going into mid-century, discouraging allies and friends, and encouraging bad actors on the international stage.

No, I don’t want to fight other people’s wars. No, I don’t want to garrison the world. No, I do not think that we need to travel the globe with our military power,

No. None of that. However, I do see where today, now, there is a requirement for American leadership, American resolve, and what there is of American industry to rise, again, to the occassion to help shape a global system in such a way that benefits our nation today, and as is often forgotten, the generations to come.

The lies of the past do not have to haunt us for seven generations. Find those who led the lied and hold them accountable - in public. Don’t promote them, elect them, give them board seats, ambassadorships, speaking gigs, media spots, bogus book contracts, or name destroyers after them. Hold them accountable, but don’t let their failure cause us today to miss the call.