Ep 202: Fred Kagan on Ukraine’s Attack and the Future of War

Fred Kagan, senior fellow and the director of the Critical Threats Project at AEI

Aaron MacLean:

Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and the Critical Threats Project. The Critical Threats Project also partners with an organization called The Institute for the Study of War, which has been putting out daily reports on the war in Ukraine since things kicked off and which are frankly essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what's going on with this conflict. And for those who are following it in the press, you should know that a lot of what you're reading in the press originates as a CTP ISW product. And we have the man himself here with us again today.

Fred, thank you so much for joining.

Fred Kagan:

Thanks, Aaron. It's great to be with you.

Aaron MacLean:

So the occasion obviously is this, I'll just say spectacular raid by the Ukrainians targeting Russian strategic air assets over the weekend. There's a lot else that's going on, and even if we assess that this attack is important, we would still need to put it in the broader context of other operational ends in the strategic context. There are negotiations going on in Turkey, I think as we speak, et cetera. But let's do the opposite of what I was taught to do in officer training, which was to go big to small. Let's actually go small to big. What happened on Sunday? What just happened?

Fred Kagan:

Well, the Ukrainians pulled off an incredibly impressive operation using small, first-person view drones that they had smuggled in somehow to Russia in containers and got in the container trucks in the air to Russian strategic bomber and other aircraft bases in the Russian Far East near the Mongolian border in Murmansk, all the way up in the Arctic Circle and then a couple closer to home. They had set these things up so that the containers automatically opened on signal, drones took off, were flown to the bases where the bombers were at, struck the bombers, and maintained surveillance to observe the battle damage, which the Ukrainian officials were apparently able to see. We have some of the footage and they clearly destroyed a number of extremely expensive and at the moment irreplaceable Russian strategic assets.

Aaron MacLean:

And they're saying, the number that I've seen reported, which seems to come from them and that's how in the CTP-ISW reporting, how you characterize it, something in the vicinity of 40 aircraft. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but that would be something like a third of Russia's strategic air capability. And what we mean by strategic, to be clear, is nuclear capable. These are also the bombers that are deterrents against NATO, the United States, et cetera, but have also, to be clear, been used to hit Ukraine directly. Right?

Fred Kagan:

Yeah. So there's a couple of things to unpack here, Aaron. One is, yes, we only have the Ukrainian reporting about exactly how many they hit. Open source analysts have been able to confirm a small percentage of what the Ukrainians claim. From my part, I don't really doubt the Ukrainian number because the Ukrainians are likely reporting on what they saw and we see what the reconnaissance drone footage was. So all this tells me is that they haven't released all the footage that they actually have. Cloud cover has been dense in Russia over the last 24 hours, so it's been hard to get good clear satellite imagery. Some people have used more advanced satellite imagery to do some counts. We'll see over time exactly what can be confirmed independently. But I'm not prepared right now to cast out on the Ukrainian number.

I do think that we need to be careful talking about the effect of this on the Russian nuclear triad. People are making a lot of that and I understand, yes, these are nuclear-capable bombers. Now to be perfectly clear, there are very few bombers in the sky these days in the hands of nuclear powers that are not nuclear-capable. And most of the planes that we're talking about here are Tu-95 Bear turboprops. I'm not really sure who has been thinking that the Russians were going to fly Bears over North America in the teeth of US air defenses and so on, and somehow get them through to penetrate. Maybe they thought they were going to do that, but the primary Russian nuclear deterrent is the Russian ballistic submarine fleet and of course, the ICBMs, and this just didn't touch that at all.

So in terms of the nuclear balance issue, I think one can easily exaggerate the effect of that. The key thing is your point, the Russians have been using elements of their strategic triad to conduct attacks against Ukraine and the Ukrainians have struck back on that. That's the risk that you take when you use those kinds of assets in war.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, we discussed this issue on the show before, especially in the early days of the war when there was much concern about nuclear escalation from Putin. Formally speaking, that concern can never really go away and we could discuss where the lines are that would make us uncomfortable. I also was struck by the vehemence of some voices in the aftermath of the attacks of accusing the Ukrainians of engaging in destabilizing actions that are counterproductive, which I don't know if you would agree with this, Fred, but it sort of occurred to me that if the Ukrainians had struck a bunch of Russian ICBM silos, I could find that argument more plausible. Granted the Russians do launch ballistic missiles at the Ukrainians from time-to-time, but what if they're going after weapons that were clearly there to provide a strategic deterrence against us and that were not being used against the Ukrainians?

Could I make Ukraine a culprit? I could. Could I also make the case that it would be destabilizing and dangerous? I definitely could, but to argue that they shouldn't attack the very assets that were launching cruise missiles at them because that's escalatory, well, that to me seems to be identical to the argument that self-defense is escalatory. And if we think that self-defense is escalatory, then our actual position is they should surrender.

Fred Kagan:

No, listen, Aaron, I agree with you. I spoke with Ukrainians early on in the war about this escalation risk and their point was that we accepted the risk that the Russians would use nuclear weapons against us the minute we started fighting against them. That's what happens if you choose to defend yourself against a nuclear armed power, you're running the risk of a nuclear attack on your territory. They know that. But I think you're right. It's really important to understand that this is not the part of the Russian nuclear triad that is the key Russian deterrent, that is and remains the Russian nuclear ballistic missile submarines. Ukrainians have not shot at those and they're not going to, and the Russians are not using those to attack Ukraine, nor are the Russians using their ICBMs to attack Ukraine. They are using nuclear-capable ballistic missiles that are truck-launched, [inaudible 00:08:39] Bears and so on, and Ukrainians are shooting at those.

And look, if you are a nuclear power and you engage in a war and you use assets that are dual-use assets, those assets become fair game. We flew B52s, which were a big part of our nuclear triad, over Vietnam. The Vietnamese tried hard to shoot them down. Would that have been escalatory if they had? No. That's again, when you use particular assets in war, if nothing else, those assets become fair game and to say that they're escalatory, well, if you were going to view it that way, then you shouldn't have put them, you shouldn't have been using them to begin with.

Aaron MacLean:

So a couple of questions on the mechanics of the attack itself, and you may not, the information here may just not be public, but I am curious about the question of control of these drones. When you watch the videos that have been released, it looks just like the videos that you get from the front lines in Ukraine itself, which is to say these FPV drones, they sort of look like somebody's flying them. It's not clear that that's the case though. It's not clear, but I saw some reports that there was some degree of "AI" involved. I have no idea what that means. What is your sense of, okay, so they position these trucks pretty close to the airbases, the trucks “presto” open at the top like a Tom Clancy novel, the drones fly out and this is literally like a Tom Clancy novel, isn't this?

Fred Kagan:

It is, yeah.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. It's amazing. The drones fly out, what distance to go. How do you think control worked at that point?

Fred Kagan:

Look, I don't know. Look, what is clear is that the Ukrainians were getting video back from these drones and what that means is that they were in communication with the drones. If they were in communication with the drones, then they could have been controlling the remote. Okay. The question is, how were they in communication with the drones? We don't know. I doubt the Ukrainians are going to say. My hunch is that the Ukrainians probably had fitted some of these drones with Russian SIM cards and were using Russian mobile systems. Both sides have been doing that in this war. And in fact, the Russians had been testing the capability to turn off their mobile networks, the ISW reported some time ago in part we think to be able to stop the Ukrainians from trying to use their mobile networks. That's one low technology, no difficult explanation required way that this could have gone down.

The Russians weren't expecting this. They didn't know that this was in place, so they obviously hadn't turned off their own communication systems. That's one way. Other people are talking about how it had to be satellites. Well, I mean, it didn't have to be satellites, it could have been, but we don't know. But what we do know is that the drones were providing feed, and if they were providing feed, then they could have been remotely controlled.

Aaron MacLean:

There's sort of two obvious places we can go from here in the conversation. I want to do both. One is, what does this mean for the war in Ukraine? Why does it actually matter? And then the other one is, what does it mean for war? And maybe let's start with that actually. So as we just reflected on, the notion that something like this could happen, is decades old. Tom Clancy was writing about it in, I guess, that was the '80s. Was that Red Storm Rising?

Fred Kagan:

Yeah.

Aaron MacLean:

Thereabouts. And there are smart analysts who we both know who have been painting terrifying pictures, at least to me, of what could happen in places like Norfolk Naval Base on the opening stages of a war with China where containerized mass drone assaults suddenly launch like this and now it actually happened. It was actually done. Say more about that. Say what you've learned about this in terms of the continuities and the evolution of war it's illustrating or for that matter, anything new that you see.

Fred Kagan:

Look, Aaron, I've had the same thought that I think you refer to, which is we just watched a bunch of Russian strategic bombers go up in flames at the hands of a bunch of very inexpensive FPV drones flying out of containers. Could those have been B-2s at the hands of Iranian drones flying out of containers, let alone Chinese? Well, the question is, are the B-2s in actual revetments or are they sitting out in the open? If they're sitting out in the open, what are the counter-drone systems that we've got in place? I have a feeling I'm not going to like the answer to those questions. So I do think that one of the things this should prompt is an urgent re-evaluation of the threat, the kind of threat these systems can pose to our very expensive bombers, some of which are actually, for us at least, critical elements of our nuclear triad and things on which we would absolutely rely in a war with China or with Russia for that matter.

I think we should be alarmed. I think we should have been alarmed for a long time, but I think this is as clear a wake-up call as we're going to get and it should prompt a lot of action. Some of that action is going to be hard to take quickly. Constructing stuff is not easy or fast. Some of it should be things that we undertake pretty rapidly to set up at least electronic warfare and such counter-drone defenses as we can in the vicinity of strategic bases. Look, the good news is that a lot of these systems are not all that expensive, but buying enough of them to cover your strategic footprint in the United States and abroad is going to cost a lot of money and take a bunch of time and concentration. I hope this is something that the Department of Defense will focus on urgently after this.

Aaron MacLean:

And there's a couple ways to think about countermeasures here. One is hardening the targets, as you were just talking about. The other is the obvious desperate need around the world for some sort of cost-effective defense system that can target drones in a cost-effective way. The microwave systems are the ones that we didn't discuss here on the show. I'm not expert enough to say how cost-effective they are or how realistic it is. There are some people who are selling them, who believe passionately that they are. I don't know how closely you follow that or what your thoughts are on this question of countermeasures to cheat drones.

Fred Kagan:

Nobody's investing enough in this with enough urgency is my basic thought on it. That includes the Ukrainians, actually. We've been going through a period where people were really imagining that electronic warfare was going to be the solution, and what we're seeing is that that's not the case. First of all, there are things like fiber-optic drones that are basically immune to electronic warfare. And second of all, even actually just trying to jam all of the frequencies that tactical drones can operate is beyond what is feasible to undertake on a modern battlefield. And we're seeing that now because both the Russians and Ukrainians are still able to operate radio-controlled drones even in the most densely covered electronic warfare environments. And there's just been a lot of innovations with frequency hopping, with accessing frequencies that are difficult to jam, and various other technological innovations. So electronic warfare is not going to be the solution here.

In terms of the directed energy systems of whatever variety or microwave systems, yes, I think that that's going to be part of the solution, particularly for point defense of strategic targets for the rear. We need though what I called using too much jargon, kinetic counter-drone defenses. Basically, you need defenses that can inexpensively shoot drones out of the sky and you need them to be small and portable. What we are learning from the battlefield in Ukraine is that people present these microwave systems or other sorts of systems and talk about how mobile they are and they're the size of a small truck and that's very mobile by traditional military standards. The problem is that on the battlefield in Ukraine with the millions of tactical drones that are operating, anything that's the size of a truck, that's a valuable target, gets killed and you can overwhelm any defensive system and we know that because the Ukrainians have killed very high-end Russian electronic warfare systems, they've killed very high-end Russian air defense systems that are supposed to go shoot them down.

I'm skeptical about the survivability of systems like that on the battlefield, and you also run into questions about power supply and where you're going to get enough electricity for them on the battlefield because then your generators and your fuel supply and other things become major targets for drones. It's very complicated. So I don't think that those are a magic bullet, but I think they're part of the solution. What we need are not magic bullets, and I was reading an article today, I've forgotten where, about a startup that is working on the AI-directed Gatling gun that can shoot down tactical drones. We're going to need systems like that and we're going to need those systems that can be vehicle mounted. Candidly, we're going to need systems that can be carried by soldiers to keep squads alive in the face of these drones.

This is going to be essential because otherwise, you're not going to be able to survive a maneuver on the battlefield. So I encourage everybody who's working on counter-drone of whatever variety to keep doing that, but I would like to see more investment and more concerted investment in kinetic counter-drone systems and particularly very portable ones.

Aaron MacLean:

The thing that struck me, I think, most of all about this attack, Fred, was the role of surprise, which seems like obvious observation than it is, but it's worth sort of saying out loud and I'm curious your reflections on that. So there's this desperate need for countermeasures. At some point, hopefully soon enough to keep our feet out of the fire, America's feet out of the fire, it will happen and then that will just reset the table and this will continue to evolve, this thing being war, will continue to evolve in iterative fashion, as I do not need to explain to Fred Kagan.

I've heard people say in the last few years that the nature of the battlefield is such, the battlefield paradigmatically speaking in 2024 or 2025, is such that motion is so easily detected, the maneuver is just very hard. It favors the defense. You can eke some movement out through grinding attritional means, but the days of maneuver are essentially over for now. And on some level, certainly there seems to be a lot to be said for that, it's not exactly false and yet, there are these moments, we had a couple of them in the Middle East. Hamas' attack itself on October the 7th, the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah, the sort of spectacular centerpiece of which was the beeper attacks. These moments where fighting forces, good guys or bad guys, sort of as an issue to decide, use very old-fashioned, I'll call them, stratagems, techniques of deception, they leverage their intelligence picture of the other side and they find ways to achieve major effects.

In Hamas' case, ultimately, knock on wood, suicidal effects, TBD, certainly damaging effects to the Iranian Axis, but operationally enormously successful in the short run. In the Israeli case in the north, they defeated Hezbollah. It's really striking, and contributed to the fall of Assad. In the Ukrainian case, we'll see now. We'll see what the effect of this is. This is a smaller scale thing I think, but we'll see what the effect of this strike ultimately was. But I keep trying to tell many of my friends who believe that we are back in World War I with drones, which we kind of are. That doesn't actually mean that breakthroughs aren't possible and actually the things that you need for these breakthroughs are as old as warfare itself and the way you're going to do them is going to keep changing. But that, we just proved again on Sunday, this is my pet theory, thank you for indulging me, but we just proved again on Sunday that this kind of thing can be done.

Fred Kagan:

Well, I'm in favor of your pet theory. I think you're right. First of all, I'm going to start by observing, and we'll talk about this more if you want to, people forget that World War I ended as a war of maneuver. So maneuver was restored to the battlefield in World War I. We didn't have to wait for World War II to happen for that to occur, and that's why the war ended. So that's one thing. The second thing is, I know I don't have to tell Aaron MacLean that the doctrinal definition of surprise is to attack the enemy in a time, place, war, and manner for which he is unprepared. And when you find yourself in a situation where you can't sneak up on the enemy, so you can't really achieve surprise by place and you can't really necessarily achieve surprise even by time in the face of pervasive surveillance, you can still attack in a manner for which the enemy is unprepared. And both sides have been working on that.

That's exactly what the Ukrainians just did. The time and place, obviously, the Russians didn't see this coming, but the biggest issue was it never occurred to the Russians that the Ukrainians would try to attack them in this way. The Russians have been making gains most recently, very limited gains, nothing particularly significant, but they've been making gains on the battlefield, particularly in the Pokrovsk area by finding different ways in which to attack. They're not really using mass attritional attacks anymore. Now they're back to a kind of World War I infiltration tactics, on motorcycles and buggies and various other things.

Is it effective? Well, they're taking very high casualties. They're not getting a lot of ground, but they're taking fewer casualties than they have been before and they're still able to take some ground. Ukrainians are struggling to come up with fully effective defenses against this approach. They will. Then the Russians will find another way to attack. You are right, war continues to evolve. Otherwise, we would've gotten ourselves into a cul-de-sac long time ago and never escaped from it. The fact that we keep getting into these cul-de-sacs and then getting out of them, that's a pattern that's not going to change.

Aaron MacLean:

Talk about the consequences of this attack for the war in Ukraine specifically. A lot of the criticism of the attack, here in Washington, was that this was going to somehow poison the diplomatic process that is underway now in Turkey. I'd like to get your reaction to that. Another thing we should address, in whatever order you please, is these aircraft were being used for cruise missile strikes in Ukraine, which is a particularly potent form of attack, expensive, but potent. Is this going to have, at the margins or even substantially, a helpful defensive effect for the ongoing two-directional strategic air campaign being waged?

Fred Kagan:

To deal with the second question first, look, it depends on exactly how many bombers the Ukrainians took out of commission, but I'm sure that it will have an effect, and I'm sure that we will have, or I would expect that we will see a reduction at least in the short term, in the rate of Russian cruise missile attacks, which is important because those tend to require the use of defensive assets that are scarce for Ukraine. Either they're F-16s chasing down cruise missiles or their ground-based air defense systems that could otherwise be engaging drones or other targets. So reducing them, and some of those cruise missiles have become increasingly effective and hard to shoot down. So reducing those, that attack will be helpful to Ukraine. We'll have to see exactly what the long-term battle damage assessments are here before we have a real sense of how significant that will be.

In terms of the negotiations, a few things. First of all, this Ukrainian operation has overshadowed the fact that the Russians launched the largest single air attack of the entire war last night, the day before the negotiations were set to begin. And that was not, as far as I can tell, retaliation for this strike. That was a planned activity. I'm sorry, the one doesn't cast more of a shadow than the other. If the Ukrainians hadn't done this, we'd be talking about how the Russians were doing that. I would actually argue that this was an important thing for the Ukrainians to do from the standpoint of getting the Russians to change the way that they are approaching these so-called peace negotiations because the Russians have not been negotiating for a ceasefire. The Russians have absolutely rejected the idea of the ceasefire that President Trump and President Zelensky have both offered. The Russians are instead insisting on a negotiation of their pretty end of the conflict, and they've laid out their terms very clearly, Aaron, and the terms are Ukraine surrenders. That's the term.

It's not for Oblasts, it's recognition of the Oblasts, it's a change in the Ukrainian government, the installation of a government that suits Russia, its negotiations continuing along the line of demands that had begun shortly after the invasion and that would've imposed a very side-like set of restrictions on the size of the Ukrainian military rendering Ukraine permanently helpless in the face of Russia. It involves Ukraine changing its constitution to declare permanent neutrality, abandoning any NATO aspirations ever, abandoning the EU aspirations as well in fact, and so on. In other words, to re-establish itself as a Russian puppet state with a new government. Those are the Russian demands. And the only thing that's changed as we've gone through this so-called negotiation process is the Russians have increased their demands.

So it's not like there was a real chance at peace here, other than a capitulatory peace in which Ukraine surrenders, which Ukrainians are likely not going to do. So to talk about how this Ukrainian strike upends a peace negotiation is to misunderstand what that negotiation actually has been for the Russians. Now, I think on the flip side of this, you could say, “why have the Russians been behaving this way?” And the Russians have been behaving this way because Putin is convinced that he's winning the war as President Trump has said and that he will win the war, and that the Ukrainians can't really do anything to hurt him significantly and that they're not going to be able to survive. Well, if you actually want to see a peace negotiation happen, and I would love to see this war come to an end, I would love to see a just and acceptable peace that is in the interest of Ukraine and the United States and Europe, which can't be on anything like the terms that Russians are currently demanding.

If you want that to happen, the Russian calculus has to change. It's Putin who's the problem here. It's not Zelensky, it's not Ukraine. The only thing the Ukrainians are being stubborn about is they're stubbornly refusing to surrender. So somebody's got to change Putin's calculation. Well, the best way to do that would be for the United States and Europeans to lean in to giving Ukraine the war material that it needs in order to start inflicting battlefield setbacks on the Russians and force Putin to reckon with those and realize that he's actually not going to be able to win on the ground the way that he thinks he is. But this is another way of establishing leverage. This is a way of demonstrating to the Russians, "No, actually we Ukrainians can inflict a lot of damage." They're showing him we can destroy multi-billion dollar bombers, we can inflict billions of dollars of damage on you, and we can hit you many thousands of miles away.

That's the message the Ukrainians just sent. I think that that's a positive contribution to any long-term resolution of this war that can be in anyone's interest other than Putin's. So in that sense, I think it's very short-sighted to be talking about that this is in any way undermining the peaceful resolution of this conflict.

Aaron MacLean:

Another argument I encountered yesterday in my sort of pathetic Twitter debating about all this. I say pathetic because, definitionally, all Twitter debating is pathetic. So I don't think I was uniquely pathetic, I'm just sort of ashamed to have been doing it at all, or X debating I should say now. But one argument I encountered was that this attack was inherently escalatory, and it's sort of based on a flawed concept that the Russians can be compelled "on the battlefield" to be more serious at the negotiating table. I was just sort of assertive without evidence, even though admittedly it's a heavy lift.

So instead it's really economic pressure, you need to put economic pressure on the Russians to make them get serious at the negotiating table, to which my response is one, I don't detect enormous appetite in Washington for that at the moment. Two for it, I'm for it. It would be good in combination with other things, but three, if it was serious economic pressure, which is how wars like this do tend to be one, in fairness, well, that's going to put things that Putin really cares about at risk and well, that's escalatory now. Serious economic pressure would be escalatory or put it this way, it would run the same risks of escalation as an attack like this did. Anytime you're really putting pressure on and putting someone in a box, there's an escalation risk there. That's just how this works. That's just how life works. So I don't know if you have a response or how you think the economic pressure sanctions debate is going, but that is another argument that's out there.

Fred Kagan:

Well, look, in the first place, I would love to see more economic pressure on the Russians. I think that it's very important because the Russian economy is vulnerable and the Russians are struggling to supply their military and Putin needs it. So I'm in favor of that. We'll see what kind of appetite there is. I know various senators are talking about bringing forward bills with bone-crushing sanctions. I would love to see those advance and see President Trump's appetite for having that happen. You're a student of military history as I am, Aaron. Can you think of a war in which major combatants were engaged for high stakes and had taken high losses that ended because one side imposed economic pressure on the other? People have tried that repeatedly. We had Napoleon's continental system that failed, Allied blockade of Germany and World War I certainly contributed, but it wasn't until the fronts collapsed that Ludendorff went to the Kaiser and said, "We need to call it a day." He was prepared to sacrifice the German population and economy.

We tried hitting the German economy and Japanese economy in World War II. Didn't happen. We hit them, but it didn't lead to an end of the war. I think on balance, you'd be challenged to find a case in which economic pressure that wasn't combined with effective military success actually led to the termination of a war, especially when the aggressor and the one who's driving the continuation of the conflict thinks he's winning on the battlefield. And it's just absolutely not the case that it's unrealistic to think that the Ukrainians could begin to inflict significant battlefield setbacks on the Russians. They could if they were properly equipped. They could, if they were properly supplied. There are changes that they need to make as well, they know what those are, we know what they are, but they could.

This Russian military that's on the ground in Ukraine is vulnerable and the Ukrainians hurt it periodically. They could hurt it more. They don't need to chase every last Russian out of Ukraine. And I think this is part of the problem that when people are talking about, well, the Ukrainians can't really do anything to the Russians, you say, "Well, what do you mean by anything? Can they regain some territory that is significant in some way?" Sure.

Again, are they going to chase every last Russian out of Ukraine militarily? No, they're not. But if they could create a situation with the proper support from the West and their Asian allies as well, in which the Russians were unable to advance, in which they really were able to just stop the Russian advances and in which the Ukrainians were able to begin pushing the Russians back in select sectors and the Russians were not going to be able to stop them from doing that in a straightforward way, Putin would, let's say, that would be an opportunity for Putin to recalculate. And that's what's required because as long as Putin thinks that he's going to win, he's going to try to win.

Aaron MacLean:

There's a lot of bad faith, I think, in some of these arguments that you're seeing being offered in a kind of catchy coming and going style where when things are going badly for the Ukrainians, well, this is an unfolding tragedy. We kind of have to put them out of their misery rather than cut them off and bring this to an end. But if it's going off for them, well, that's escalatory and dangerous, so we got to stop them, we got to cut them off. Either way, the policy outcome is the same. And I think it's worth saying, and I'm curious your view on this, certainly people around this administration or influential in this administration in a way that was not true in the first Trump term, and I'll set aside Trump himself 'cause I think he's got his own unique strategic concept that I think is actually separate from what I'm about to describe, and we can talk about that too.

But there are people who are just genuinely hostile to the Ukrainian cause and it's not that they, in the way that a lot of anti-Vietnam war protesters in the '60s didn't so much want peace, they just wanted the other guys to win. And I think there are people in Washington who want the Russians to win, and I've tried to explain this on any number of occasions, oftentimes to European interlocutors, who are sort of aghast at this and they literally don't understand how that could be, how a serious American could want Russia to win. And I try to explain, well, if you believe that global liberalism is the threat, the great threat, there is a kind of idea of a MAGA Internationale in which Russia is comparatively one of the good guys because they're also, Putin is also, in this theory, opposed to the liberals and Ukraine is a kind of extension of liberal imperium. And so we advance the broader political goals of the Internationale through seeking their defeat.

And you could get to the point logically where it's actually important that they lose. And then this sort of intersects, this is a coalition and it's complicated, but it intersects with these more classically "realist arguments" that NATO expansion was a mistake, that America is overextended in Eurasia and we need to go to spheres of influence. And that's a sort of healthier way of maintaining world order and world peace. That's not quite the same thing as the desire for the MAGA Internationale, but it's related and you find both ideas operating in the same people sometimes.

There was just a piece, I don't know if you saw it, Fred, I think it was from our friends at the Quincy Institute calling for a "double reverse Kissinger," which I actually appreciated because I actually do it is a logical conclusion of a lot of this conversation. So it's the reverse Kissinger, which we've discussed on the show before, is of course, “we're going to flip Russia to help us in our competition with China.” And I had a good conversation with Richard Fontaine about that if people are interested. But the double-reverse Kissinger would be that actually we now have good relations, the end state is good relations with both Russia and China, and there's a kind of, again, "conservative concert" of powers that establishes world order, and that is the natural way for the United States. How it is that Eurasia dominated by a Russian-Chinese condominium improves the American prospects for freedom and prosperity is yet to be explained to my satisfaction.

But that is, I think, the concept. So one of the frustrating things to me, Fred, about the debate in DC right now is that people don't feel like they can put their cards on the table. And so there's a bit of dishonesty in what we're talking about and what we're shadowboxing about.

Fred Kagan:

Well, happily for me, I get to focus on the external enemy and those who are fighting it abroad. I think that was an extremely articulate and thoughtful presentation of a phenomenon that we observed. But I don't really know that I'm going to offer you my own perspective on that other than to say that I thought that was a perceptive and thoughtful presentation.

Aaron MacLean:

How do you see things going in Ukraine in the next, let's say, quarter to a year? What are the major scenarios or options that are on your mind how things likely could play?

Fred Kagan:

Look, we're going to see continued and redoubled Russian offensive operations. Putin is going to continue trying to hammer Ukraine into the ground. We are seeing already the increasing Russian pressure in Northern Ukraine and Sumy Oblast and in Kharkiv and that's going to continue. The Russians are going to try to push into Sumy. I think they probably at some point may, if they could get far enough into it, they'd probably stake a claim to it and also to Kharkiv. This, by the way, watching this phenomenon reveals what nonsense it is to talk about how limited the Russian aims are because the Russians actually continue to articulate a series of different aims up to and including all of Ukraine. And President Trump made that observation a few days ago, and I thought it was right. He said, "I think Putin wants it all." I said, "Yeah, he does." That's what this is about. So the Russians are going to try to get it.

The Ukrainians are under a huge amount of pressure. If they make a mistake on the ground, the Russians probably can take advantage of it and have things go pretty badly. If the Ukrainians can avoid making significant mistakes though, I think that the odds are that the fighting continues about the way that it's been with the Russians making slow grinding advances at a rate that will take them years even to complete the seizure of the four Oblasts that they've already claimed, always assuming that they can because Russians have actually shown no ability to take a large fortified city, such as they're now facing in Donetsk also, as they would be facing in Sumy since 2022. So the odds are that this continues. We have agency in that. We have agency in that. If the US cut off Ukraine entirely at this point, you would see a significant increase in the effectiveness of Russian air and missile attacks.

Unfortunately, what the Ukrainians just did doesn't affect the Russians' ability to use Shaheds and ballistic missiles. The only system the Ukrainians have that can shoot down ballistic missiles is the Patriot. That's a very important system. If the US stops supplying the Ukraine with Patriots, Patriot interceptors, it will be very bad. We saw during the period in which intelligence sharing was cut off, that also puts Ukrainian civilians at risk since Ukrainians rely on that intelligence sharing for early warning of attacks and it hinders Ukrainian defensive operations. It could be pretty serious.

I think the Europeans are working hard to offset those capabilities insofar as they can. No one has a replacement for Patriot right now. So the US cutting off aid could make things worse. I don't think it would be likely to collapse the front or collapse the situation, but it would make things worse. On the other hand, if President Trump did what he has sometimes said he would do on concluding that Putin is unserious about the peace and lean in and actually start harming the Ukrainians, I'm confident the Ukrainians could stop the Russian advances. And I think that they would be able to start preparing over time for potential counterattacks and counter-offensive operations. That would be on a more limited scale than what they did in 2023. That, hopefully, would be more successful. We would have to find out.

So on the one hand, the forecast cone is pretty narrow. Weathermen like to say, “when you're in drought, predict drought.” When you're in positional warfare, predict more positional warfare. But we do need to remember that again, as I said, World War I ended as a war maneuver, and it is possible that one side or the other will find a way to restore maneuver to its battlefield. I would submit, with all due respect to those who don't want to see Ukraine succeed or survive, that it's in America's interest for it to be Ukraine, to be the side that restores maneuver. Among other things, our military would benefit from that. I'd like to know how to restore maneuver to a battlefield like this, but just in case a battlefield like this might be coming to us one day, I'd like to see the Ukrainians do that for a lot of reasons. We could help them with that and I think we should.

Aaron MacLean:

Fred Kagan, whenever I want to understand what's going on in the war in Ukraine, I call you. You've been kind enough to be a friend of this show back when no one listened to it. So thank you for coming on now that a few people do.

Fred Kagan:

I'm always delighted to talk with you, Aaron, and I really appreciate the conversations that I have with you and your erudition and your thoughtfulness.

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