The wages of hubris are dear. Four months into Ukraine’s vaunted counteroffensive—which, at a massive cost in men and materiel, has made minimal territorial gain—support for Kyiv is openly eroding. Frustration flows from the growing economic burden of war and continuing corruption scandals in Ukraine. But it is aggravated by the backlash against the overconfidence and arrogance of the Western, especially American, foreign-policy establishment. For months, skeptical voices were sidelined while the media contrasted Western military-technological prowess with Russian backwardness and disarray. NATO brains would defeat Russian brawn, experts confidently predicted in June, thus making the disillusion and distrust of October all the greater. […]
The brutality of war sparks passions—admiration for Ukraine, hatred and derision of Russia—that inflame public debate and impede objective analysis. The latter, by definition, must be dispassionate. If think tanks become partisan and the media act as cheerleaders, then we see only what we want to see. With Ukraine, the cheerleading mirrors that of our Iraq and Afghanistan debacles. As a result, we underestimated the adversary, leading to flawed tactics, failed operations, and now flagging public support. What next? As always, the default choice is escalation—providing Kyiv with more armaments and munitions. But will a few squadrons of F-16s and a few hundred ATACMS be enough to defeat Russia? […]
“Russia is running out of ammunition.” A Google search of this phrase yields almost ten million hits, as versions of it appeared in Western headlines for a year. CNN, Newsweek, The Economist, Forbes, and Foreign Policy all joined the chorus, echoing assessments from U.S. and UK defense officials. In June 2022, the Washington Post predicted that Russian munitions would soon be depleted and Russia would “exhaust its combat capability” within months. Yet by June of 2023, all of these outlets reported that it was actually Ukraine that was critically low on missiles and artillery. How low? Russia now fires over 10,000 artillery rounds per day, while Ukraine manages just 5,000. It takes the United States weeks to produce what Ukraine expends in a few days, while NATO allies have reached “the bottom of the barrel” in donating their reserves to Kyiv. Meanwhile, Russia is still outproducing the West despite “crippling” sanctions that were supposed to strangle its war effort. Läs artikel