--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, some high-ranking members of the U.S. intelligence community made a prediction. Speaking anonymously, they told reporters that Kiev, Ukraine's capital, would fall within a few days. 96 hours, to be precise. It did not happen.
--:-- Noel King: I think from a Russian perspective, what we have here is a war that has gone off the rails. Russian troops are stuck in the mud. They're frostbit. They're sending panic texts to their parents back home.
--:-- Noel King: From the Ukrainian perspective, what we have is vindication, a demonstration of how a resolute population rises to the occasion and frankly overturns all the expectations of the experts who said that this was going to be a very short war, that the Russians were going to win very quickly.
--:-- Noel King: On Today Explained, a retired U.S. Army colonel tells us what happens when it seems like neither side can win a war.
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--:-- Noel King: Andrew Bacevich, retired U.S. Army colonel, now the president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank in D.C.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I remember before the invasion when Russia was surrounding Ukraine, satellite imagery suggested there were 150,000 soldiers. And the thinking was those numbers were so great, there was no way Ukraine could win.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Why hasn't the Russian invasion been successful? Well, I think that, you know, the numbers have not really been all that overwhelming.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I think I've seen numbers between 120,000 and 150,000, but they were not all massed in one point. There was not some single point of attack.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: When they first invaded nearly a month ago, the Russian forces came in broadly on three fronts from the north, from the south, and from the east.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And at each one of those locations, it was not 150,000 Russian troops gathered. It was probably more in the order of 20 or 30,000.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: 30,000 Russian troops now stationed in Belarus for joint military exercises, stoking fears of an invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So the Russian plan had the effect of dispersing the mass that might have worked to their advantage.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: That's one that reflects defective planning on the part of the Russian military.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Because the Russians are bogged down in so many places, the Ukrainians have been able to carry out those ambushes, those counterattacks.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: But that's only the first problem. I think what caught me by surprise and many others was the ineptitude of the Russian offensive.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: They haven't been able to maneuver their armor effectively.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: At the end of the Second World War, they were as good as that as anybody else.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: But these guys don't seem to have remembered that.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And this was nowhere more evident than in logistics.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: If you're going to drive and operate a main battle tank, then you are thinking all the time about fueling that beast.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: If you're not thinking about fueling that beast, then you're behind.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And they appear to have not taken those basic logistical considerations and trained as they move forward.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: This is a relatively modern heavy force.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Heavy means lots of armored vehicles that consume lots of fuel.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And the evidence appears to be quite clear that the Russian invaders have clearly had major problems with sustaining the force.
--:-- Noel King: I want to ask you about a tiny detail, one that seems very absurd and also very telling.
--:-- Noel King: We're hearing reports that Russian troops are suffering from frostbite.
--:-- Noel King: Now, presumably, smart enough military minds understand what the weather is like in Eastern Europe.
--:-- Noel King: How on earth would a fighting force not have things like gloves and boots to prevent frostbite?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Well, I guess the Russian commanders assumed the whole thing was going to be over in like three days.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And when the campaign became lengthy, I think the Russians have turned out to be totally unprepared.
--:-- Noel King: So you say, how could something like that happen?
--:-- Noel King: Here's a comparison.
--:-- Noel King: Summer of 1941, the Wehrmacht invades the Soviet Union.
--:-- Noel King: The Wehrmacht at that point was the biggest, baddest military in the world.
--:-- Noel King: And so the German plan for Operation Barbarossa assumed that the Wehrmacht was going to make short work of the Red Army.
--:-- Noel King: Bad assumption.
--:-- Noel King: The weather was bad, with heavy rain and snow that turned the roads into mud.
--:-- Noel King: German tanks, with their narrow tracks, struggled to cope.
--:-- Noel King: So what we ended up with on the Eastern Front was a long war between the Germans and the Soviets, in which guess what the German army turned out not to have anywhere near the equipment they needed to continue to wage war in the middle of a Russian winter.
--:-- Noel King: Something of the same thing is going on now I think.
--:-- Noel King: Again they anticipated a lengthy campaign and the assumptions turned out to be radically mistaken.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The assumptions turned out to be radically mistaken, in large part because of the way that the Ukrainians have resisted this invasion.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: It's key. It's crucial.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: We are ready to fight. We are ready to fight for our people, for our nation, for our territory, for our country.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Till the end, till the victory.
--:-- Noel King: And again, you would say, well, you know, not a particularly well-trained force.
--:-- Noel King: We don't think of the Ukrainian military as a global power.
--:-- Noel King: But certainly they have fought well.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Ukrainian forces have taken the shrewd approach of retreating to the cities, conserving their weaponry and focusing on defending their positions that have attacking.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: They've blown up bridges.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: They've lined the roads into the city with obstacles while still managing to keep corridors open for fleeing civilians.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And they say they are ready for any Russian advance that comes their way.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And to the vast credit of Ukraine's political leadership and credit to the Ukrainian people, that basically have rallied a people's resistance.
--:-- Noel King: So, you know, great credit to the Ukrainians.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Again, this is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Let's think about the American war in Iraq that began in 2003.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I know we assumed that it was going to be a conventional war against a conventional adversary.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I do want to say that our military is going at this with an extraordinary combination of information technology, telecommunications skill, intelligence, and, of course, the most skilled fighting men and women in the history of the world.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So we've got a lot going for us.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I'm proud and just grateful that we have the kind of fighting force that we have over there.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: We're going to win this.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: We assumed that because of our superiority in weapons, our superiority in basic competence and training, that we would make short work of that army.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: At the present time, there are U.S., British, Australian, and Polish forces that are on the ground.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: There are some 46 nations that are publicly, politically supporting this coalition effort.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: There is nothing that can happen that will change the ultimate outcome.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The outcome is certain.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And on the one hand, we did.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: You know, we got to Baghdad in a matter of a few weeks with relatively few U.S. casualties.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And then the whole thing fell apart.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: It fell apart because of resistance from Iraqis.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The Marines have been told to comb the mosque for weapons.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And as they do, the firing starts.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: It turns into a firefight.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The armored vehicle arrives with more ammunition because the houses around the mosque are full of fighters.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: But a resistance of entities that were determined to eject from Iraq an army that they viewed as foreign occupiers.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And so it looked like Iraq was going to be a short war ending in an easy victory.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: It turned out to be a very long war that didn't end particularly well for our team.
--:-- Noel King: Can you tell us a little bit about the foreign weapons that are in Ukraine, that are entering into Ukraine? What role they're playing.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I think the first point I would emphasize is the anti-tank weapons have apparently been very, very effective against Russian armored vehicles.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Those Javelins are American-made anti-tank missiles.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The Javelin and others like it, such as Stinger missiles, ManPads, and the British NLAW, have become a vital piece of military aid sent to the Ukrainian army.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And some of this stuff, even though it's modern, It's actually simple.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: These shoulder-mounted or handheld anti-tank weapons.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: They're actually weapons that you and I could learn how to use probably in a half an hour.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: They're tremendously capable, but they're not complicated.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I am speculating here, but I'm guessing that that plays a key role in being able to take an untrained people's army and in part to the People's Army capabilities where they can hold their own.
--:-- Noel King: Based on everything you're seeing now, can Russia win this war?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The answer is absolutely yes.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Okay. But that's not an answer that has any particular value.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: What I mean by that is predicting outcomes in wartime. It's kind of a fool's errand because in virtually any war, there is this element of uncertainty that I think makes that kind of forecasting very, very difficult.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I mean, this war illustrates that.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: All the smart people would have said, oh yeah, the Russians are going to make short work of the Ukrainians.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Well, guess what? Wrong.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So what we see now, I think, is a Russian army that no longer makes any pretense in fighting the way a modern army fights.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: What we now have is a Russian army that fights the way the Russian army of World War II did and the American army of World War II.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: It's not just the Russians. Relying on brute force to try to crush resistance.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Enough force can enable you to crush the resistance.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And whether this war is going to go on that long, whether the Russians can muster enough force to have that crushing effect, I think is very difficult for us to say.
--:-- Noel King: So the answer, I think, really is, yeah, they might win, but who knows?
--:-- Noel King: Thank you.
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--:-- Noel King: Andrew Bacevich, retired Army colonel, now with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I see the word stalemate being used a lot.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Russia gains some territory. Ukraine makes gains back.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: What is your best characterization of what's happening right now?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I have to say, I think the best characterization is who the heck knows.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So much of the information flow, some of it official from the Pentagon, it's frankly biased.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: We know who we're rooting for.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And so I think there is a tendency to accept reporting from the Ukrainian side, perhaps too willingly.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: We see the Ukrainian side. We don't particularly see what's going on the other side.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So I think we have to be very wary about claiming to really understand what's going on.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I suppose stalemate is as good a term as any in the sense that the conflict has lasted much longer than most people thought.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: But I would emphasize, on the other hand, the thing could end tomorrow.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The war continues because both sides wish the war to continue.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Because neither side has achieved its objectives.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: At the beginning of this invasion, Vladimir Putin said he would not target civilians.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Ukrainian reporters have pointed out to us on this show that, in fact, from the beginning, the Russian military was targeting civilians.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: But over time, as the Russian military has failed to win, they are targeting civilians more often.
--:-- Noel King: Is that something that you expect when you have a kind of stalemate in conflict, that civilians bear the brunt of it?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Yeah, I think so.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: First of all, and this is by no means to apologize for Russians murdering civilians, but we should not assume, I think we would be absolutely wrong to assume, that every time a missile or a bomb hits a target that we would call civilian target, an apartment building, a shopping mall, we would be wrong to assume that that was intentional.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: In any war, there are all kinds of mistakes made.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: We make mistakes.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: In Afghanistan, the number of wedding parties that we killed with airstrikes because the people identifying targets failed to realize that it was a wedding party.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: They thought it was some kind of Taliban convoy.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So to some degree, some degree, these things happen.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Now, I think in this particular case, the longer it goes on, the more frustrated the Russians become, the less concerned they come about who the heck it is they're killing.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And in many respects, the logic of the campaign shifts.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So that at the outset, the logic of the campaign, I'm speculating now, probably was a vigorous attack will unhinge Ukrainian resistance, and we will be able to drive into Kiev in no time flat.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Well, that didn't work out, to put it mildly.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And so as time goes by, I suspect, among Russian military planners, they're now saying unhinging the adversary isn't going to work.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: We're going to have to pummel the adversary into submission.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And we might note that there is a rich Russian tradition of approaching war that way.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And so we're now in the pummeling stage of this war.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And I suspect it's going to continue.
--:-- Noel King: Now, back there in the Russian staffs, do they think that pummeling is actually getting them closer to achieving their purposes?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I have no idea.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: But, you know, once the modern approach to war, this notion of unhinging the enemy, once that fails, pummeling is kind of an inevitable response.
--:-- Noel King: I wonder, is there any threat for Vladimir Putin here that his military realizes they have been sent to do a very difficult thing that they were unprepared for.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Some of them appear to be sending messages back home to parents and friends saying they were earnestly lied to.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: They did not know the reason they were going into Ukraine.
--:-- Noel King: I ask you this as somebody who served in the military.
--:-- Noel King: What happens when soldiers begin to lose faith in their leader?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Do you think there are troops fighting in Ukraine right now who are thinking, I don't believe in Vladimir Putin anymore. I'm done with this.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I would say this is pure speculation.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And I would say almost definitely.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: More immediately, I suspect they're losing faith in their own military leaders.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: You know, in their battalion commanders in their regimental commanders.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The people who are supposed to be overseeing the campaign and taking care of them making sure that they do have cold weather gear that somehow has not materialized.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So again, the reporting is coming mostly from our side, but there does seem to be evidence of morale slipping significantly among Russian committed forces.
--:-- Noel King: Now, where does that lead? Does that ultimately pose a threat to Putin's hold on power?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I certainly don't know, but I would say this one thing.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Putin comes from the KGB.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: He's a KGB professional officer.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And therefore, he is likely to have an acute awareness of the possibility of somebody trying to get rid of him.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So you can bet that he's got his antenna up trying to identify if there is anybody among the generals, anybody in Russian politics, anybody among the oligarchs who is thinking of turning against him, because he will certainly attempt to strike first.
--:-- Noel King: You make this very good point that I jumped from your average man serving on the ground all the way up to Vladimir Putin.
--:-- Noel King: And you said, wait, hang on a second. There are commanders standing between that man and Putin.
--:-- Noel King: What is the immediate danger of the ordinary troop fighting losing faith in his immediate commander?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The force disintegrates.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I'm very sorry to say since it was the war I participated in.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: The illustrative example is the American war in Vietnam where things went badly and good order discipline within the ranks eroded seriously.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And we experienced a lot of attacks by American soldiers directed at their own leaders.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: That's what happens, I think, can happen to an army.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Whether that's going to happen to the Russian army in Ukraine, I don't know.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: But if I were today a Russian commander, battalion commander, regimental commander, I would certainly try to be acutely aware of that kind of problem propping up in the ranks.
--:-- Noel King: What would you be looking for?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Combat refusals.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: We had that in Vietnam.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Desertions.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Attacks on leaders.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: In Vietnam, we called them fraggings.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Basically, assassination attempts by ordinary soldiers directed against sergeants or lieutenants or captains.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: All of that would be, from a Russian perspective, worrisome indicators of a military that is beginning to come apart.
--:-- Noel King: We hear about talks between Russia and Ukraine that have not made much progress so far.
--:-- Noel King: We know that the Western world is increasingly concerned by the deaths of civilians.
--:-- Noel King: We know that Russia is not retreating, nor are they winning.
--:-- Noel King: In your mind, how does this end?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I think there's no question that it's possible.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: This war is going to end with both sides being able to claim half a loaf.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: And what I suspect they're arguing about is how big is that half?
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I believe the Ukrainian president has offered to promise that Ukraine will not join NATO.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I don't know for sure that that offer is being made, but I'll tell you what, if it is being made, he's conceding one of the things that Putin was most concerned about.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: That could be the basis for a deal.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: We'll see.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: So I don't believe this is likely to end in one side or the other, being able to have victory parades through downtown.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: I suspect it's going to have a more ambiguous ending in which each side will be able to claim some amount of success.
--:-- Andrew Bacevich: Sadly, I would say, the death and destruction on a massive scale will greatly outweigh what either side is able to claim as a benefit.
--:-- Noel King: Andrew Bacevich, retired U.S. Army colonel, he's now the president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained.
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