President Joe Biden touted on Thursday several new major U.S. commitments for Ukraine that were announced this week, including a 10-year bilateral security agreement, sanctions to disrupt Russia’s war machine, and a sign-off from the G7 on a $50 billion loan backed by frozen Russian assets.
Biden, in during a press conference in Italy with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the collective efforts by the G7 show that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot wait us out, he cannot divide us, and we’ll be with Ukraine until they prevail this war.”
On the bilateral agreement, Biden said the goal is to “strengthen Ukraine’s credible defense and deterrence capabilities for the long term.”
He reiterated his position that American troops will not fight in Ukraine, but the United States would provide them with weapons.
Zelenskyy called it a “historic day” after signing the “strongest agreement between Ukraine and the U.S. since our independence.”
Ukraine needs two things, and as many of these two things as possible: artillery shells, and drones. That’s what this entire war has hinged upon, that’s what’s causing the vast majority of equipment and personnel losses, and that’s what Ukraine is lacking.
The US and EU somehow cannot scale artillery shell production as fast as Russia despite Russia being sanctioned to hell and back, meanwhile, they’re antagonizing the world’s leading supplier of drones with trade war bullshit instead of buying up Chinese drones to give to Ukraine. Chinese companies don’t give a fuck who uses their products.
The US and EU need to dump money into their MIC, and they need to do it yesterday. They’re not, because they’re convinced that a NATO war with Russia would not go the same way, but them believing that is them not recognizing that Ukraine is exactly how modern warfare will go.
You can’t move troops in secret. You can’t mass large formations for attack. You can’t gain air superiority with perfect SEAD. The future of warfare is knowing that everything you do can be watched by a drone operator tens of kilometers away. It’s knowing that air defence systems are absurdly mobile, absurdly distributed, and that random units can launch SAMs at you to deny you CAS capability. Meanwhile, you don’t need A-10 style CAS capability because glide bombs and advanced targeting mean you can drop your bombs from tens of kilometers away as well, where there was never any risk of you being targeted.
Drones, smart munitions, and advanced communications have made Cold War doctrine obsolete. Russia took a ton of losses learning that at the start of the war. Armoured columns get blown up by cheap drones you buy off of Alibaba. CAS helicopters and aircraft get blown out of the sky by cheap MANPADS that every unit has. Masses of troops get a grenade dropped on them from nowhere. The entire principle behind Cold War doctrine was that you needed something expensive to take out something expensive. You need your trillion dollar stealth fighter. You need hundreds of tanks. You need massive combined arms pushes organized through a 300-step carefully choreographed plan. That’s simply no longer true. Back in previous conflicts, drones were something expensive, not something every script-kiddie with access to their parents credit card can buy and every 14 year old with an Internet link can build with parts off of Digikey.
Sending troops is a PR stunt. It won’t help the fact that Ukraine is running out of artillery shells (again) and the trade war (with Ukraine getting caught in the crossfire) has made access to Chinese drones with Chinese semiconductors increasingly challenging.
Putting it more simply: one guy with a drone can knock out a tank. One guy with a drone and an artillery team can suppress an entire sector. Seems to me like the solution should be to give Ukraine more drones and more artillery.