The Danger in NATO’s Slow Attrition Strategy in Ukraine

“Aside from the hazard of China or Iran adding to the number of ongoing wars, the currently slow attrition strategy is only working against President Putin because he is trapped.”

The early failure by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to help Ukraine inflict severe costs on Russia has allowed Moscow to adjust and prepare for a protracted conflict where it can meet these accumulating personnel losses, now estimated at between 85,000 Russian combatant deaths (the French low estimate) and 180,000 (the American count). NATO’s default inclination is to stabilize rather than intensify the level of pressure applied to Russia through arms transfers to Ukraine, as demonstrated by its political reluctance to concentrate on dramatically increasing artillery ammunition output. According to Air Force Command and Staff College professor Charles T. Kamps, this strategy of slow graduated punishment was the principal reason why the Linebacker II Bombing campaign failed to produce political effects during the Vietnam War. This risks continuing the war until either China or Iran may find it worthwhile to exploit a distracted NATO by launching attacks in their respective spheres of influence. Chinese President Xi Jinping has committed to resolving the Taiwan issue by 2027, though this may be hyperbole. Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey has shown that world wars typically emerge out of simultaneous deterrence failures. This is applicable to the current circumstance of simultaneous wars, crises, and confrontations. As such, NATO must stand firm at the first domino because it has insufficient armaments production to prosecute wars to defend all of Eastern Europe, Taiwan, and the Straits of Hormuz, from where Europe gets most of its energy for transportation. Crises are more easily confronted when they occur sequentially rather than concurrently, and this means resolving or winning them as quickly as possible.

Western policymakers are searching for the strategic Goldilocks zone in the war in Ukraine: At one extreme is the incentive to drag out the conflict so that Russia both incurs costs that will lead to the conceivable overthrow of Russian President Vladimir Putin but also without allowing Moscow to justify politically an escalation that could lead to an Article V provocation of the NATO charter, or the use of chemical or tactical nuclear weapons. Aside from the hazard of China or Iran adding to the number of ongoing wars, the currently slow attrition strategy is only working against President Putin because he is trapped. The relative performance imbalance in favor of the Ukrainians shows that Russia will pay an extremely high price for an ultimate capitulation by Kyiv. Consequently, rationally, President Putin should pull out of the war and rebuild for a future confrontation with NATO, but he is instead politically ensnared in the conflict and his personal survival is bound to victory.

Although the cost to Russia of the Ukraine War has far exceeded Moscow’s initial expectations of a quick fait accompli by convoy parade into Kyiv, the additional impacts of Western sanctions, weapons shipments, Ukrainian gains, and deaths on the battlefield have not on their own altered the cost-benefit analysis in a fashion dramatic enough as to result in policy concessions from the Kremlin. President Putin may indeed believe that he has a medium-term advantage given the additional year or so it will take NATO countries to match Moscow’s artillery production, but he must also be aware that the war’s delayed impact on the economy will alienate the under-35 cohort from which the bulk of the Russian army is conscripted. President Putin may also be hoping, as Adolf Hitler did, that a war in the Middle East (1941 Golden Square revolt in Iraq) or Asia (Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor) would reduce Russia’s war burden. More likely, his policy advisors are wary of a United States provoked to mobilization, as Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto warned the Tokyo War Cabinet.