Did General Milley talk out of turn? Did Milley speculation influence White House thinking? Or was this just the opening bid to send a message to the Ukraine?
February 2023:
The above raises speculation that US support has changed.
In his State of the Union Address on February 7, President Biden once again promised Ukraine that “America . . . will stand with you as long as it takes.”
But, privately, one year into the war, the Biden administration appears to be telling Ukraine that “as long as it takes” may be running out.
One week after the State of the Union, The Washington Post quoted a senior administration official as saying that “we will continue to try to impress upon them that we can’t do anything and everything forever.”
The senior official said “continue” because in January CIA Director William Burns met secretly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and told him, according to a Washington Post account, that “at some point assistance would be harder to come by.” People familiar with the meeting said Zelensky walked away from the meeting with the impression that he could rely on U.S. assistance through the summer but that he was “less certain about the prospects of Congress passing another multibillion-dollar supplemental assistance package as it did last spring.”
I think we should remember that the current occupant of the Oval Office was the one that FINALLY pulled the plug on Afghanistan. Yeah yeah the withdrawal could have been much better. But he ended that perpetual war. An action for which I am grateful.
I am hopeful he is signaling that Ukraine will not become another Afghanistan.
We’ll see.
General Milley said those words over 3 months ago. Lots of changes have occurred since then. Ukraine is getting tanks, better missiles, and more weapons than ever. Milley supports Ukraine defending itself against lawless Russian military and mercenaries. There are no cracks in the military support of NATO to defend Ukraine.
Afghanistan has no parallels with Ukraine. Ukraine has been a neighbor of EU countries that highly respect and support Ukrainians. This war is in the backyard of EU countries and they are taking in millions of refugees. They will never give into Russian demands. Many of these countries have lived under Russian rule and they never ever want to be under Russian rule again. Russia is horrible to all its neighbors. My family and my close relatives have been witness to Russian atrocities during WWI, WWII and Cold War. The EU countries will continue to support Ukraine as long as it takes.
And they have taken in millions of refugees from US interventionist foreign policy during the last 20 years. There must be a limit to what they are able to absorb.
US & NATO munitions supply is limited unless they build more factories. And corporations are reluctant to build such facilities if future orders will drop off. Yes they add shifts to existing factories but the supply is still deficient. Taiwan can’t get purchased howitzers and stingers:
They will be waiting for years.
NATO cannot supply enough munitions either.
From the captain’s post “The most realistic review of the war in the Ukraine” has an interview with Steve Kotkin.
Mr Kotkin criticizes US strategy in the Ukraine war of attrition. 1] The West is running out of munitions. 2]The West is not building new munition production facilities. Though I suspect the current facilities are running 24/7. Apparently that extra still is not enough. 3]The West sanctions have not had the intended affect of crippling the Russian economy and ability to produce munitions. “So how do you win a war of attrition where you are not attriting?” So the chance of victory is diminished.
His definition of success is Ukraine acceptance into the EU rather than specific territorial gain.
He is worried about the US willingness/ability to provide munitions.
As offered before, the Shiniest of Shiny-landers are calling for support to be cut off and letting Ukraine fall to Putin, dressed up as “America first”. If Ukraine is pressured into a “negotiated” settlement with the Russians holding everything they have now, I figure it is a cinch Putin will resupply, retrain, and be back for another slice of Ukraine in a couple years.
I floated, some weeks ago, that, while the UK and EU members are trying to get material into Ukraine in a matter of weeks, the US’s recent gifts, M1 tanks and missiles, will be delayed for a year, because the tanks are new build, and in the queue behind orders from other countries that are not in a shooting war, and the missiles were designed for launch from aircraft and new, ground launchers, need to be designed and built. As offered at the time, it smells like the US is purposefully dragging it’s feet in the hope the situation goes away before this new hardware is ready for delivery.
NATO is having difficulty rounding up the required number of tanks. https://archive.is/EcPo7 German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius indicated that western allies are struggling to put together two full battalions of Leopard 2 tanks to send to Ukraine as promised.
And the Ukrainians need them now as the Russia offensive seems to have begun.
Germany and Portugal are the only two nations to commit to sending the A6 version of the Leopard 2, with 14 pledged by the government in Berlin and three from the Portuguese, Pistorius told reporters Wednesday after meeting NATO counterparts in Brussels. “We will not reach the size of a battalion,” he said.
Poland has assembled about 30 units of the older A4 version of the Leopard 2, which is almost enough for the standard Ukrainian battalion of 31, but many of them are in poor condition and need repairs before they can be deployed, Pistorius said. Those tanks will only get to Ukraine at the end of April, he added
vs the USian M1s, that might get there in April, of next year. Chancellor Scholz was on Amanpour last night. Another tidbit he added is some of the eastern European countries are looking into restarting production of Soviet ammo and spare parts to keep Ukraine’s old hardware in the fight longer. I know that, at one time, Poland built it’s own version of the T-72, which are still in service, so the supply chain may still be intact.
EU has a population that is more than that of America by 100 million. IIRC EU has had less refugees than America in the last 10 years. EU also has a declining birth rate which refugees can blunt. Ukrainians are very much like the EU citizens.
Any depletions of munitions for NATO (which includes US and Canada) is minor compared to the depletion of munitions in Russia. NATO countries can out produce Russian by an order of magnitude. NATO is not worried. Russia is worried.
In the US, the govt owned the facility and eqpt. The contractor did the actual building of the munitions. That can still happen. How long? Good question. The govt can speed things up by requiring that eqpt be built and delivered ASAP.
One way to do that would be to have an internal problem in Russia that required military intervention. How that gets done, I do not know. But being forced to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously would be a major blow to Putin. Thus, he would have to abandon Ukraine or else face even bigger problems of his own making.
Well, there is one difference. The Ukrainians seem to be pretty well motivated. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and 'Nam, the locals were not much interested in being killed defending a fake government set up by a foreign power.
The tanks may only count for a week at most. The life of a tank is about four days in combat. I forget which war that stat comes from. Tanks are sitting ducks for all the destruction they lay they are blown apart quickly.