James Hasik

Battlefield Lessons for the Arsenals of Democracy

"The NATO summit has ended, pledges of assistance for Ukraine abound, but execution still lags." That's how starts my recent essay for the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where I recently came aboard as a non-resident senior fellow (NRSF). If you're not from around Washington DC, NRSF is a exalted but unpaid gig for people with PhDs to try to effect political change, one erudite essay at a time. CEPA is a great platform for that.

As I argue in the essay, there's a military-technical revolution, as the Russians used to say, continuing to unfold in Ukraine, as it has been unfolding slowly for some years now. The lessons to be drawn may be more or less radical. Defense ministries and industries could conclude that everything must change, and totally overhaul their equipment purchasing and marketing. Or, they might conclude that combined arms warfare is still a thing, and that their armor and aircraft need serious upgrading to stay relevant. Either way, to make a difference on the battlefield, they need responsive procurement—something at which the US Department of Defense really does not excel. After alluding to my recent book on the marketing of the MRAP, I conclude with explanations why.

Anyway, you can read all about it here: "Battlefield Lessons for the Arsenals of Democracy" (CEPA).

James Hasik is a senior research fellow at George Mason University, and a senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

James Hasik is a senior research fellow at George Mason University, and a senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Kill the Cannons, and Kill their Gunners

To destroy the power of the Russian Army in Eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians' allies should help them target Russian sources of strength. Nullifying the enemy's advantages should be done cost-effectively, so that it succeeds more quickly. This requires a strength-on-weakness strategy—an asymmetric strategy, of putting precision on mass. Defeating the Russian Army means, in order of likely increasing importance, (3) destroying its ammunition, (2) destroying its guns, and in particular, (1) killing its gunners. Whether the US and its allies can produce enough precision weapons in short order to attrit Russian power in these ways may substantially determine the outcome of this war. This is wartime thinking, for a wartime problem.

 

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In his famous book The American Way of War (Macmillan, 1973), Russell Weigley argued that from its Civil War through the Vietnam War, US military strategists preferred strategies of annihilation, as practiced first by Sherman and Grant. They preferred this over both Bonaparte's strategy of decision through battle, as pursed by Lee in the Civil War, and talked up more recently through the "maneuver warfare" strategies of the US Marine Corps. They also preferred this over strategies of attrition, as pursued by Washington in the Revolutionary War. (I thank Joseph Stieb of Ohio State University for some of that summary.) Notably, Weigley was writing as the Vietnam war was winding down to ill effect, and just before the US military started completely rethinking its approach. Its thirty-year enthusiasm for precision is a technological strategy, but one which has held some promise of returning American strategy to that colonial and Washingtonian respect for attrition.

 

Much has been written since of how the experience of Vietnam and the threat of the massive Soviet war machine led US planners and industrialists to conceive and develop precision weapons. Meeting the Soviets tank-for-tank and cannon-for-cannon was stupid if the tanks and canons could be dispatched with precision aerial bombardment. Michael Rip and I chronicled some aspects of this development in our 2002 book from the Naval Institute, The Precision Revolution. As we observed therein, the Russian military was veritably shocked by the speed and thoroughness by which the US military defeated the Iraqi military—an armed force which their Soviet forerunners had equipped and trained. Note that attrition need not proceed slowly

 

Whatever their shock and awe at the time, Russians did not really internalize the message. The book jacket of Benjamin Lambeth's Russia's Air Power in Crisis (Smithsonian, 1999) rather explains the problem, at the end of the comparative chaos of the 1990s:

 

although the VVS [Air Force] is key to Russia's future military capability, it is unlikely to regain even a semblance of its Cold War strength in the near term... only the stabilization of Russian society as a whole could foster a renaissance of Russian air power.

 

By the 2010s, we were hearing much from other pundits and experts about the Gerasimov Doctrine and the Shoigu Reforms. The progenitors of these eponymous concepts, people have suddenly remembered, are absolutely products of Putin's kleptocratic system. Of course, the problem with kleptocracy, to paraphrase Lady Thatcher, is that you eventually run out of money to steal. There was no stabilization—just a subjugation by Bortnikov's Federal Security Service.

 

As Lambeth showed, military air arms are challenging formations to equip, train, and operate. Add precisions weapons, and the intelligence and planning requirements increase remarkably. The Russians never tried that hard. Apart from those mostly aging anti-ship and anti-aircraft guided missiles, the Russians never invested the money to make many. After all the vodka and yachts and alpine chalets, there wasn't much left. By early May, as Tara Copp was reporting for Defense One, the Russians had "blown through" most of their precision weaponry. Without precision weapons, those very expensive modern aircraft are of questionable economic value before defenses with anti-aircraft missiles. It is thus unsurprising that the Russian Air Force is actually not the main problem in the war, and that most of the destruction is being rained down, with little discrimination, by the cannons and rockets of the Russian Army, and with notably unguided munitions.

 

On the other hand, the Ukrainians report that the Russians have far more artillery, in both cannons and rocket launchers, and vast quantities of ammunition left over from the permanent war economy of the Soviet Union. As Jeff Shogol of Task & Purpose entitled his story on the issue, "Russia is hammering Ukraine with up to 60,000 artillery shells and rockets every day" (13 June 2022). It's all reminiscent of that scene in the 1992 film adaptation of James Fennimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, when Colonel Munro (Maurice Roëves), commander of Fort William Henry, is asked by the visiting Major Hayward as to "the situation"—

 

The situation is that his guns are bigger than mine and he has more of them. We keep our heads down while his troops dig 30 yards of trench a day. When those trenches are 200 yards from the fort and within range, he'll bring in his 15-inch mortars, lob explosive rounds over our walls, and pound us to dust.

 

From what we read, that's similar to the Donbas these days. What Vadym Skibitsky, head of Ukrainian Military Intelligence, called the "artillery war" is  entirely about the weight of shot: the Russian approach to taking towns is simply to blast all the buildings into rubble, and to then attempt to occupy the ruins with what little dismounting infantry they have. Remember all that yammering about the supposed genius of the "battalion tactical group" concept? As Michael Kofman and Rob Lee of the Center for Naval Analysis and Rob Lee of King’s College London have written, Russian motorized rifle battalions today generally have fewer than 300 soldiers. Now, the problem is not what one calls a unit of 300 soldiers. The problem, rather, is driving vehicles enough for 600, to the exclusion of dismounts. Those battalions have not many more troops than are needed to crew the vehicles and fire the small-caliber cannons. (On all this, see "Not Built for Purpose: The Russian Military's Ill-Fated Force Design," War On The Rocks, 2 June 2022.) The Russian Army is thus an artillery army for the Russian generals' artillery war.

 

In contrast, General Skibitsky pleads that the Ukrainians are "almost out of ammunition" (Isobel Koshiw, The Guardian, 10 June 2022). That may be the Ukrainians' greatest weakness, and it's a big one. At least they have thousands of smart, patriotic, and enthusiastic combatants staffing their armed forces, many of whom are remarkable resourceful with adapted, modern technology. That represents impressive progress in just the past few years. The first hundred days of this campaign have demonstrated that the Russian success in Crimea in was attained by small numbers of professionals, well-equipped with foreign technology, against opponents who were lamentably disorganized. That assessment in turn reveals the great weaknesses of today's Russian war machine: a shortage of skilled labor, and a paucity of information-age technology. Put precision on those, and the Russian fighting power may crumble.

 

The Ukrainians understand this. As my colleague Nico Lange at the Center for European Policy Analysis has just written, Ukrainian strategy seems "wisely driven by goals rather than territory," in an effort to "inflict massive losses on the Russians" ("War Update—And What Else Ukraine Needs," 10 June 2022). And while any knucklehead can be trained quickly to load 152 mm shells into a breech, not just any knucklehead can serve effectively as an artillery officer—even one asked only to prosecute area targets. The people behind the guns may be the weak link. The tyrant Putin greatly wishes to avoid a massive call-up of manpower, for fear of the unrest that could cause. His own cronies have acknowledged that training all that green cannon-cocking cannon-fodder would take many months. By killing the artillerists, and particularly their officers, the Ukrainians' remote-aviators and artillerists may be able to shut down much of the Muscovites' barbaric artillery offensive.

 

So what do the Ukrainians need? They have clearly and repeatedly told us: hundreds of tanks to retake ground, but also hundreds of cannons and rocket launchers, many thousands of precision munitions, and a thousand drones to find all the targets. The US has thousands of surplus tanks, all far superior to anything that the Russians can bring. The US has more cannons and rocket launchers to give. European allies have many fewer, but that is not the decision problem. Rather, the last two items on the shopping list are the problem. As Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners observed in a recent research note, even the US has become "an artisan, not an arsenal, of democracy" (8 May 2022). That must change, and quickly.

 

How the US and its allies collectively and seemingly massively under-estimated the requirements of wartime production of precision weaponry merits a serious political study. For now, the great task is expanding production, with wartime urgency. This means precision 155 millimeter shells and 227 mm rockets. It may also mean developing precision rounds that can fit the Ukrainian Army's existing stock of 152 mm howitzers, and even 130 mm howitzers and 122 mm rocket launchers. It certainly means equipping the Ukrainian Air Force with drones that can spot and prosecute Russian artillery batteries and headquarters units wherever they are found. It requires facilitizing armaments makers with production lines capable of much larger volumes than hitherto imagined. It certainly means spending a lot of money, but on the averages for past performance in procurement across the alliance, that shall be money well spent.

 

James Hasik is a senior research fellow at George Mason University, and a senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Send (lots of) JLTVs to Ukraine

I simply love the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV). Let me extol the virtues of the vehicle, and suggest that the Army Department be sent enough money to mobilize industry for its wartime production. After all, the US Defense Department's Under Secretariat for Acquisition and Sustainment has asked for ideas on what could be produced quickly to support the Ukrainian war effort. Call this idea mine, just to be fulfilled by the automotive industry.

 

Would the Ukrainians want JLTVs? The Defense or State Department should ask them, but I strongly suspect so. Before the war, the Ukrainian Army repeatedly asked for used Humvees. Today, the Ukrainian Army is finding Russian landmines all around the areas from which the Russian Army had withdrawn. No one should want to drive a Humvee, even an armored one, over a landmine.

 

In contrast, the essential awesomeness of the JLTV is that it offers the protection of a Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicle in a comparatively compact, off-road four-by-four truck. I can say something about this because I wrote my dissertation about the MRAP (and slightly on the JLTV). I then turned that into a book about the MRAP (and slightly on the JLTV). Therein, I showed how the MRAP was an excellent example of automotive-industrial mobilization for war in the 21st century. (I admit to having questioned the Army's procurement objective, at least once about ten years ago, as the business in Iraq and Afghanistan was once-and-again winding down, though in a news article that is probably now lost to even the web archives.) Now, I will explain why the JLTV is today a far better candidate around which to mobilize the US automotive industry, and particularly for the Russo-Ukrainian War.

 

That's because as military technology has changed,  the nature of war is now meaningfully different. In this context, the JLTV offers not just protection from land mines, small arms, and the endless artillery fragments of the Russian Army. On the offense, the JLTV can also carry lots of the lightweight instruments of the ongoing destruction of the Russian Army, Air Force, and Navy: Javelin anti-tank missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and in the Nemesis robotic configuration of the US Marine Corps, even Kongsberg's anti-ship Naval Strike Missiles. Alternatively, it can tow a large mortar or light howitzer, or its ammunition trailer.

 

Indeed, the US Marine Corps is effectively planning to rely on the four-wheeled JLTV and the eight-wheeled Amphibious Combat Vehicle (an evolution of IVECO's SuperAv) as the main conveyances for its missile-armed tank-killing teams. After shedding all its under-protected Humvees, two years ago the USMC shed all its tanks, figuring that what Turkish drones had done to Armenian tanks in 2020 was enough evidence that tanks could be countered without one's own tanks. That's a debatable point, but it's also possible that all of what's good enough for the Marines might just be some of what's good enough for the Ukrainians. All the same, as I acknowledge above, I'd let the latter decide, with their far greater combat experience of late.

 

How many JLTVs could be produced how fast? Even now, the US is buying about two thousand JLTVs annually, and as such, it could get these to Ukraine much more quickly than American tanks. (Though send the old M1A1 tanks too!) It could keep sending JLTVs long after NATO runs out of old Soviet-built tanks to send. The JLTVs also require no specialized driver training, and they run on mostly commercial parts, including a Duramax pickup-truck engine from General Motors.

 

That said, incumbent producer Oshkosh could do more, if asked. According to the US Army's recent budget justification documents for its fiscal year (FY) 2023 spending request, Oshkosh's "preferred minimum sustaining rate" is 2,880 JLTVs annually. That sounds precise, but the number is analytically problematic in two ways. The first problem is that the Defense Department's procurement people may not fully understand what this means. The department often asks contractors to state their minimum sustaining rates of production—even using the three letter acronym (TLA) "MSR" to describe that figure. Trouble is, Defense doesn't cleanly define MSR. The Defense Logistics Agency publishes a definition of MSR that's actually just that of a Break-Even Quantity (BEV), which isn't quite the same thing, unless one really thinks that the cost curves are completely flat.

 

Perhaps more readily understood in the budget book is the "1-8-5" rate—the number of JLTVs that Oshkosh could build using one shift per day, working an eight-hour day, five days each week. That's said to be 3,600 annually, which indicates slack capacity today. Oshkosh's claimed maximum rate annually is twice that (7,800), which suggests that the company would just add a second shift on the line. Since early in 2021, the JLTV has been built on a standalone line; before that, Oshkosh built JLTVs alongside other military vehicles on one of its famously flexible production lines.

 

Indeed, Oshkosh's whole production system is still quite flexible. The Army's budget book notes how the service ordered 2,039 JLTVs in FY 2021, but just 1,190 JLTVs in FY 2022. Remember that Oshkosh is currently the design agent and sole source of JLTVs. The average price of the JLTV in FY 2021 was $253,574, but in FY 2022 it was $268,164. The relevant inflation rate was about 4.7 percent across the year, at least according of the estimates of the Office of Management and Budget. This means that Oshkosh kept the real-dollar price of the JLTV to an increase of just about 1 percent even as its monopsonistic customer cut its purchases by about 42 percent. That's impressive.

 

Note, of course, that with a price curve that flat, the MSR could equal the BEV, but the preferred MSR—well, I have little idea what that means, except that prices should not increase up to that point, or it wouldn't be a minimum anything. Whatever it means, even the FY 2021 quantity is considerably less than that preferred number. So while we do not have an explicit word from the company, all this suggests that Oshkosh could increase its production greatly without encountering  scale diseconomies that would lead to serious unit price increases. Whether Oshkosh could do so quickly is another question, as all-too-little in military  seems to be moving quickly in military production these days. The MRAP experience suggests that great rate increases could be accomplished within a year, thought that came at a time in which the US automotive industry had recently laid off a great many skilled production workers. Could Oshkosh do more than adding another shift? What if we really wanted to equip the Ukrainians with many thousands of the best light armored vehicles available anywhere?

 

Here's the idea: to really increase production, bring on another manufacturer. The Army is already planning to announce the winner of its re-competition in September of this year. That re-competition seems to bring an unexpected and unwelcome change: an expected increase in price. Ethan Sterenfeld of Inside Defense recently asked me what to make of the Army's anticipation of higher prices for the JLTV next year ("JLTV costs could rise under follow-on contract," 22 April 2022), as stated in those budget books. It's understandable, I argued: the Army's program office is just conservatively assuming an upset of the incumbent later this year. In planning for that possibility, it should assume that initial prices could be higher, though descending a learning curve, with offers of lower prices in the out-years.

 

That's possible, though any challenger's Year Two on the contract would effectively be Oshkosh's Year Seven. Beating that learning curve would truly be impressive—though Oshkosh itself did just that in 2009, when it took the FMTV A1P2 rebuy production contract from BAE Systems. Possible is not assured, so it's not clear that every firm that has expressed interest in the next phase of JLTV will assuredly bid.

 

That's where enters my idea to intensify competition while mobilizing industry. Award two production contracts, both for the thousands of vehicles annually. Ask Oshkosh to move towards full rate production on 1 –8–5 scheduling. To be sure, the supply chain response will take time, so make that request now. Run that competition, but to select a second source from the best bidder that's not Oshkosh. That is, tell the prospective bidders—General Motors, Navistar Defense, AM General, and anyone else interested— that they're not competing against the formidable Oshkosh in the short run. At least one more might make the investment in competing that had been hitherto hesitating to make, guaranteeing a real competition. The result will be two lines at two firms building JLTVs, in continuing competition with one another, over five years, to produce war-winning vehicles faster and cheaper for Ukrainians who so need them.

 

James Hasik is a senior research fellow in the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University, and a senior fellow in the Defense Technology program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Lend Lease for the mid-term: on readying tanks, fighters, drones, and anti-ship missiles for Ukraine.

Last night, the US House of Representatives approved $13.6 billion in military spending for Ukraine. This is glorious, and in the short-term, the Ukrainians are getting the portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles they need, and from many countries. However, in the mid-term run—because this war could last many years—the Ukrainians will need tanks, aircraft, and heavier precision-guided weapons. The United States in particular has ample inventories of much of this, which can easily be provided for comparatively little cost. As others have discussed, the rough model is the Lend-Lease program of 1941. Practical planning and training of Ukrainians can start now, on lethal systems that the US military has mostly been trying to shed for years anyway. For this war, but the campaigns to come, I mean specifically M1A1 tanks, A-10Cs attack jets, MQ-1 Predator drones, and Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

 

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In his recent essay "Ukraine: The Case for a New Lend-Lease," Alan Riley, professor at City Law School, University of London, took note of just how big the Lend Lease program of the Second World War really was. The United States "provided largely for free $50 billion in 1941 dollars ($690 billion in 2020 dollars) of supplies and war materiel to Britain and other allies (later including the USSR) between 1941 and 1945." That's most of a year's military budget for the United States today ($782 billion in the House bill), but spent for others. In theory, all of this kit was supposed to come back, if it survived the war. In reality, we didn't care.

 

Supplying European democracies that would do the fighting for us have worked well, twice in the 20th century: access to the overseas economies of the British Empire and the United States is a large part of what won the First and Second World Wars. Even though the United States didn't mobilize for war before joining the effort in April 1917, its sales of raw materials to Britain and France kept both well-supplied and fighting. Both times, the Allies had all the ammunition and weapons they needed, while the Central Powers and the later the Axis found themselves running short of fuel and food. That's what to expect when one tries to fight the entire global economy.

 

Perhaps, as Richard Overy showed in Why the Allies Won (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), the victory in WW2 wasn't assured, but fascist economic hubris and incompetence made it a lot easier. The Japanese and the Germans had seized lots of extractable resources by the end of 1941. However, the Nazis really didn't consciously mobilize for war until 1942, figuring on a swift victory. At that point, corruption and mismanagement in the Nazi system seriously obstructed any legendary German genius for design and production. The Japanese did clearly mobilize in advance, but the imperialists in Tokyo planned a quick strike against a country with ten times its industrial output, and without a backup plan.

 

Sensing the parallels with today? At least Hitler had Albert Speer and Werner Von Braun. We've got Elon Musk. Last week, with his announcement about fighting Starlink through Russian jamming, he was starting to look like Henry Kaiser. Meanwhile, Putin has Dmitri Rogozin.

 

Indeed, the Russians will be facing an increasingly negative military-industrial correlation of forces, behind and on the battlefront. As I noted earlier this week, the Russian economy has long been calibrated for resource extraction. It hasn't been about autarkic industrial production for 30 years now. Frankly, it's highly dependent on industrial inputs from the west. Note how the vaunted Lada factory shut down yesterday, idling thousands of automotive workers, less than two weeks into the war and its sanctions. Rebuilding domestic supply chains for such sophisticated products would take years.

 

So how do we win this war? Make clear to all who watch that the Ukrainians will never run out of ammunition, tanks, and aircraft. That requires a program in three parts.

 

The near-term phase is well underway: massive transfers of expendable, easy-to-use, portable missiles from existing inventories. These have so far included Javelin, LAW, NLAW, Panzerfaust 3, and other types of anti-tank missiles; and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. Britain will likely be sending its well-regarded Starstreak anti-aircraft missiles. All of these are relatively easy to learn to use, particularly if the missileer is already familiar with something similar. The promised transfers of these precision-guided weapons count well into the tens of thousands. And, as one defense industry executive put it to me recently, "every one of our companies is getting calls" about how much faster we can make this stuff. (I'll have more to write later about why that's the expected state of affairs.)

 

However, no one should presume that this war will conclude quickly. Crushing the Nazis took six years. Lifting the Siege of Sarajevo took almost four years. Heavy equipment will be needed for the counteroffensives of 2023 and 2024. Planning for the duration means mobilization now for campaigns to come. That's the mid-term phase: provision of heavier equipment from existing stocks, and training of Ukrainian troops to take it. It's the modern equivalent of the Destroyers for Bases Deal of September 1940: sending fifty flush-deck, four-pipe destroyers left over from WW1 to the Royal Navy in return for some basing rights.

 

What's different this time is that the US Navy lacks those excess inventories, having scrapped almost its entire Cold War fleet, and having allowed the rest of it to rust at the piers. (I had an illuminating conversation with a Navy Supply Corps officer about that a few years ago.) The land and air forces of the US, however, have lots of leftover stuff, or not-so-wanted stuff, that can be soon made ready for action, pending training. Some of it requires modest engineering work, or depot-level refurbishment, and it should happen in parallel with the training. The embarrassing shuffle over the Polish MiG-29s this past week indicates just how well the bureaucrats can handle this, if given the chance, but there are plenty of other excellent candidates:

• The USMC's entire inventory of 403 M1A1 Abrams tanks. The "long rods," tungsten penetrators from their 120 mm guns, will go through Russian T-80s with ease. (Unless, of course, the Ukrainians actually want the depleted uranium rounds. The guys with Chernobyl in their front yard can tell us how they feel about that, either way.) The tanks were retired from service less than two years ago, in the Marines' great pivot to a littoral force structure, so they're likely in ready-to refurbish shape. General Dynamics is the go-to contractor for that sort of effort, and I predict that company will be happy for such an opportunity to support the war effort. The Ukrainians have lots of trained tank troops, and they're even taking captured Russian tanks into their service. Even so, they will need replacements eventually, so start sending cadres of Ukrainians to the US soon to learn how to fight with the Abrams. They can train their colleagues on the new tanks when they arrive later, by rail in Western Ukraine.
• The USAF's entire inventory of 356 A-10C ground-attack jets. Fairly, this idea has already been publicized by Everett Pyatt, who as an assistant secretary of the Navy under John Lehman, recalls a few things about fighting Russians. After all, the generals in the USAF today keep insisting that the A-10C isn't very useful against China, and isn't very survivable against Russia. If so, we can definitely junk every one of those planes now. Perhaps the Ukrainians can prove the USAF wrong; we should let them tell us whether they're willing to try. The last of those aircraft was manufactured in 1984, but they're supposed to be flyable until 2040, and even today, they're cheaper to keep flying than F-16s. Word is, at least a few Ukrainian pilots are already qualified in the A-10C, from an exchange program with the USAF. They'll need ground crews, so the maintenance training should also commence soon.
• The USAF's entire inventory of over 100 MQ-1 Predator drones. Several years ago, an Air Force general told me that all those hundreds of MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers bought for the campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, would be "irrelevant" against Russian and China. They simply couldn't survive against their air defenses. At the time, I had two thoughts. First, they're expendable, so why not find out? Second, I remembered how an old F-4 Phantom II pilot told me during the Bosnian War in 1995 that downing a Predator wouldn't be so easy for a fighter pilot over Europe. They're small radar targets, and they're hard to see against a gray sky from a distance. General Atomics (not Dynamics) built 268 MQ-1s for the USAF, and some were lost in service, but 100 were flying as of January 2018, so they're likely in good shape. General Atomics would similarly be the go-to contractor for that effort, and I also predict that the latter company will be happy for the comparable opportunity. Consider how those 20 or so Bayraktars from Turkey have been so lethal against the Russians. Now think about what 100 Predators with Hellfire missiles could do. Again, the Ukrainians already know the general contours of drone-attack operations; they just need to learn the specifics of the Predator.
• A least a few dozen truck-mounted Harpoon missiles. In another deal that was incomprehensibly delayed for years, but on as of last week, Boeing will be sending 100 truck-mobile launchers and 400 Harpoon missiles to Taiwan. Deliveries, however, will not be complete until 2028, so it's unclear how much could be reprioritized for the current fight. Let's be clear, though: were the full quantity available and in Ukraine today, it could sink that entire Russian Black Sea Fleet. (I'll be writing later about other, near-term ways to sink the entire Russian Black Sea Fleet.) The US Navy has been pivoting for its anti-ship work towards Kongsberg's Naval Strike Missile and Raytheon's SM-6 Standard Missile. Boeing should relish the opportunity to show that the Harpoon is still lethal. And honestly, with ample stocks of surface-launched Harpoons for the US Navy's surface squadrons, how hard is building the trucks? The Argentines did this in a matter of weeks in 1982. Other NATO countries have plenty of truck-mounted coastal defense missiles that they could provide as well.

The long-term phase is design and production of new weapons based on wartime experience. Feedback from the battlefield directly to American weapons designers and manufacturers will be helpful for not just Ukrainians, but the NATO alliance as well. (We'll talk another day about Ukraine joining NATO.) Recall how it was the British Purchasing Commission, looking for fighters for the RAF, that spurred North American Aviation to design the P-51 Mustang in April 1940. It was three and four years later when that fighter showed its greatest value, escorting bombers on daylight raids deep into Germany.

 

Finally, and critically there's the question of people—people on the American side. As badly as the State and Defense Department have handled this entire equipping and mobilizing business in the past, we should not rely on just whoever is in the chair today. No, it's time to get the band back together. Find the people who made the MRAP program happen, when most of the bureaucracy preferred to preserve existing programs, and charge them with putting this plan into action. In short, ask Paul Mann to take over again. He'll know what to do.

Economic warfare: why direct action may matter less in the short run.

For years, I have heard Russia described in the parlance of American officials,  think-tankers, and other hangers-on in the Blob as a "near-peer competitor." This is nonsense, on two counts. Russia is now an outright enemy, and it was never a near-peer anything. As I explain below, these two realizations should lead to a considered scheme of economic warfare against this enemy, and quickly.

 

Here, I follow a typology of economic statecraft warfare developed by Will Norris at Texas A&M University, highlighting two of his six components. I say warfare because it's now wartime, and the exertion of wartime measures is merited. Corrosive economic warfare is intended to weaken a national economy generally, hopefully with the secondary effect of harming its military power. Disarming economic warfare is meant to weaken military capability directly. Against Putin and his regime today, I expect the direct action to be far less important in the short run than a general assault on the Russian economy.

 

Weakening is rather the easier part. Embargo of high-technology exports to Russia will generally weaken the economy, and specifically harm its military. No one, after all, can seriously suggest selling the Russians guns these days, right? However, the problem is not just that it may not matter enough in the short run, but that it actually may never have mattered much at all.

 

To begin, note that the Russian Air Force (VKS) in particular seems to have benefited little from the general development over the past 50 years of what the old Soviets used to call the "reconnaissance-strike complex." Who bombs today from low altitude with unguided weaponry, particularly when your opponent's air defenses are mostly of the low-altitude type? Even if your target is an apartment building, the losses in aircraft—for an air force that's not so large in modern jets—aren't worth the cost. No, you do that if you have not trained for high-altitude precision delivery, because you actually don't have the precision-weapon inventories for a sustained campaign. Oops.

 

The emerging fact, contrary to the hand-wringing of so much of the press for years, is that the Russian Army and Air Force just suck. As Sean Spoontz of SOFREP recently wrote, this 'New' Russian Army showed up on the Ukrainian border with expired rations, 40-year-old rockets, rifles without optical sights, and a paucity of night vision gear, and apparently no clue of how to conduct combined-arms operations. This army is arguably little more than the Soviet Army of the 1980s, rebadged with those loathsome letters, and with shrunken divisions now described in autocratic puffery as "field armies." Its troops are foraging for food and water, and sabotaging their own vehicles to avoid fighting.

 

How did this happen? Exactly as you might imagine in a kleptocracy. As the inestimable Holman Jenkins wrote in theWall Street Journal last Friday, "from underlings whose chief motive perhaps was to get out of the room without a scene, [Putin] heard that billions gifted to the military were spent efficiently and without graft." As an ex-Soviet friend of mine put it to me that day more directly, "it was all spent on vodka." Maybe yachts too, but I don't have an inventory.

 

The trouble, though, is that this army and air force actually do suck, and on the material side of the matter. At this point, we're denying high-technology inputs to the inept, state-owned military-industrial complex that's supplying military forces that wouldn't know what to do with high-technology anything. Yes, they have some decent electronic warfare people, but mostly in comparison to the abject neglect that the US Army and some others showed that function for two decades. So, keeping commercial microchips from them is not actually going to blunt their murderous rampages in the short run. Indeed, having generally embargoed high-technology inputs two decades ago could actually have been counterproductive. Whatever the Russians paid for, they wouldn't have paid us for, and either way, they couldn't have used it.

 

Did our people know that at the time? No. Could they have known that? Doubtful. Recall just how bad the CIA really was at forecasting Soviet military and economic prowess during the Cold War. Theirs were not the reports you wanted decision-makers reading.

 

What we did know and now clearly know is that the Russians have an insurmountable short-term economic mobilization problem. No matter how much Vlad wants to unstick this mess, his national economy is not calibrated to produce useful weaponry in meaningful quantities. As Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners pointed to a Russian report on the matter, the VKS seems to have taken delivery of 11 fighter aircraft last year. Eleven. Eleven is the number of verified fighter losses for the Russians so far in the war, in eleven days. Think of how many they'll lose over a year, just to Ukrainian ground fire, if the war drags on that long. That doesn't mean, of course, that the Russians can't go fully Serbian, park their jets, and just endlessly fire artillery into Kharkiv and Kyiv.

 

Corrosion of that capability is far more difficult, and for the allied side, because so many countries that count are so invested in their imports from Russia. Economically, as the joke today goes, Russia is a big gas station with nuclear weapons. Fairly, it's also a huge exporter of wheat and specialty metals. That none of these relatively basic sectors—petroleum, agriculture, mining—worked much under the Soviets testifies that kleptocracy actually outperforms collectivism. (Note to Bernie about billionaires: even if they were thieves, we should probably prefer them to socialists.)

 

Now, fully crushing Russia's exports means an embargo of its petroleum products, which may well be nigh. This does also mean oil prices well above $140 per barrel, and a cold late winter in Germany. Embargoing more would mean that Boeing would need to find new suppliers for one-third of its titanium, and Airbus for fully half. With the disruption in shipping across the Black Sea, some parts of the world will face higher foods prices, regardless. The list of difficulties continues from there. The United States Congress is about to have the opportunity to show leadership around the world, to set the example for what others must do as well. For my part, I won't be buying fuel from anyone who loads cargos of oil in Russia.

 

The result could be a quick and yet tighter choke-hold on Vlad's gun money. Anders Åslund, a Swedish economist late of the Atlantic Council, expects the Russian economy to contract by 2.5 to 5 percent this year, just on the sanctions already in place. In just the first week of the war, the Russian Central Bank increased its interest rate to 20 percent, to prevent an even greater collapse of the value of the ruble. That's before any further sanctions, embargoes, or covert sabotage.

 

Building a commodities-dominated, export economy has exposed Russia's economic fate to the political tolerance of its customers. We're not talking about supply chains for bespoke microchips here; customers may find other sources of wheat, oil, and even titanium, and possibly on tolerable time frames. For any responsibly governed country, that's a perfectly reasonable policy. There's a reason, after all, that the Kim family enterprise in North Korea is so autarkic.

 

We will hear talk about the quite-reasonable "bathtub" theory of commodity prices: all that oil is going onto a world market, so the Russians merely need cut their prices (below $140!) and sell to customers willing to look away from the rubble of Kharkiv. That works only so far. The pipelines to China don't support the flow rates needed to make up for a loss of European customers, and huge pressure can be brought on shipping lines not to load Russian oil for other destination. If necessary, those cargos can be seized as contraband, and sold to support Ukrainian reconstruction. It's not as though the anemic Russian Navy could protect them.

 

Of course, if you think that funding Vlad Putin's war machine by buying his oil and gas and titanium is reasonable, then please try to make that argument on the ground in Kyiv. When you get back, we can discuss. This is a sacrifice worth making on behalf of the frontline soldiers that the governments to the west won't properly support. The task then becomes import substitution. What's stupid in peacetime suddenly become essential in wartime. And that's where this discussion of economic warfare, for every decent person in a position of economic power in the world, now needs to go.