The GOP Is AWOL on Ukraine

By Robert Zubrin

Saturday, July 23, 2022

 

President Joe Biden’s Ukraine policy has been a disaster.

 

Months in advance, the United States knew with certainty that Putin was planning an all-out invasion of Ukraine. Biden did not use that intelligence to arm Ukraine (as this writer and others advised at the time), an action that might well have deterred the invasion and certainly would have prevented it from getting as far as it has. On the contrary, Biden refused to send Ukraine more than nominal aid. He further undermined deterrence by announcing publicly and repeatedly that the U.S. would not intervene with our own forces “under any scenario.”

 

Thus, reassured that, as far as America was concerned, Ukraine was open for invasion, Putin launched his war. In consequence, over 100,000 people are dead, 10 million have been made homeless, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of property has been destroyed in Ukraine, and trillions in damages have been inflicted on the world economy.

 

Then, responding to the catastrophe it invited, the administration belatedly began sending some arms. Congress stepped up to the challenge, passing the Ukraine Democracy Lend-Lease Act of 2022, and a $36 billion aid appropriation, including $20 billion for weapons. That gave Biden all the authority he needed to send Ukraine the arms to prevail.

 

But he is not doing any such thing. Instead, he is slow-walking deliveries of critical military aid.

 

Faced with a repetition of the Kremlin’s brutal programs of mass murder and genocide against their nation, the Ukrainians have mobilized a million men and women to fight, and they are doing so with great determination. But the Russians have the massive firepower of several thousand old-fashioned artillery pieces at their disposal and are employing them to roll forward in the Donbas, simply devastating one region or city after another.

 

To counter this, Ukraine needs artillery of its own. The best answer is the American truck-mounted HiMARS system, which outranges the Russian guns and, because it uses GPS-guided rockets as projectiles instead of dumb shells, can’t miss. In June, Biden sent four of these to Ukraine, and four more in July. Eight more are promised. These have gone into action on several fronts and proven amazingly effective. Using their GPS-guided rockets with unerring accuracy, Ukrainian forces have taken advantage of the HiMARS’s long reach to strike and destroy a score of ammunition depots well behind Russian lines.

 

Unfortunately, however, in war, numbers matter. However fine they may be, the eight precision-guided HiMARS units currently in use, plus the eight more now on the way, are simply not enough to fight a full-scale war raging across thousands of kilometers of front.

 

Ukraine doesn’t need thousands of HiMARS units to beat the Russian offensive. Because they use precision-guided munitions, the advanced American rocket artillery systems can score at least ten times as many hits per round fired as can Russia’s guns. Furthermore, since the HiMARS units outrange Russian artillery, they can hit it first. The few HiMARS units that the U.S. has sent so far are nowhere near what is needed, but a hundred would decide the war.

 

There is no valid military reason not to send them. The U.S. armed forces possess over 500 HiMARS units, as well as over 1,500 tracked-vehicle MLRS systems that use the same ammunition as the wheeled HiMARS units, but have twice the firepower, with each mounting twelve rocket tubes, compared with six on the HiMARS units. The 100 HiMARS units that Ukraine needs to win would amount to only 3 percent, approximately, of America’s total rocket artillery firepower.

 

Ammunition is available. Some 50,000 rounds of HiMARS/MLRS ammunition have been produced, and the U.S. currently has a capacity of producing 9,000 more per year.

 

Hundreds of HiMARS and MLRS units have already been delivered to many NATO allies as well as to Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and many Arab states, with 180 of them going to Saudi Arabia alone. There is no reason why they can’t be delivered to Ukraine in similar quantities, especially since Ukraine desperately needs them now and would put them to work immediately to destroy armed forces of the No. 1 military threat facing the West.

 

Neither money nor training is an issue. Each HiMARS unit costs $5.5 million, so the $550 million needed to pay for a hundred of them would be only a small fraction of the $20 billion that the U.S. Congress has authorized for arms aid to Ukraine. HiMARS units are designed to be operable by ordinary American soldiers, which is to say, 20-year-old high-school graduates. Ukrainians have shown they can use the weapons with great effect with just three weeks’ training, and 120 of them, sufficient to operate 40 HiMARS units, have already been trained.

 

So the question is Why aren’t the needed numbers of rocket artillery systems being sent?

 

From a military point of view, there is no answer. The number that Ukraine needs is only a small fraction of what we have, and the rest are not currently being used by us anywhere else anyway.

 

It’s possible that the administration is simply stupid. That can’t be entirely ruled out. But it’s not going too far out on a limb to suggest that the actions of a political gang might be motivated by political considerations.

 

The Biden administration was not concerned at the war’s outset about Ukrainian victory. In fact, it attempted to accelerate the collapse of Ukrainian resistance by very demonstrably abandoning our embassy in Kyiv and urging others, including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, to flee along with us. Clearly, the administration just wanted Ukraine to go away so it could get back to redesigning America’s society, economy, genders, weather, and so forth.

 

Contrary to the administration’s wishes, Ukraine did not just go away. Instead, it stood and fought, heroically. This has created a political problem for Biden, who has in the intervening months had to deal with a crisis he did little to prevent, may have in fact facilitated, and now must do his best to manage.

 

A few HiMARS sent to Ukraine won’t stop Putin. But they are more than enough to provide the action photographs needed to make it look like Biden is standing up to him.

 

This cynical ploy cannot be allowed to stand. If Ukraine is defeated, the radical revanchist regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will be massively strengthened, its strategic vulnerability at its southwestern border will be eliminated, and its forces will reach the borders of NATO countries that the U.S. is pledged to defend. Properly equipped, the million Ukrainians now under arms would represent a force that would completely preclude Russian aggression against NATO. But if they are written off the West’s order of battle, the U.S. will need to station hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe, and Americans would pay for that deployment with vast amounts of treasure for years, and possibly someday with many lives as well.

 

Where is the GOP critique of this massive policy failure? About 90 percent of the party’s congressional delegation are simply following Biden’s lead, while the remaining 10 percent, exemplified by the 18 hardcore isolationists who voted against allowing Sweden and Finland to join NATO last week, are essentially following Putin’s.

 

It’s time for the Republican Party to take a serious stand. The vital interests of the entire Western world are at stake. Putin needs to be defeated and discredited, and not only to save Ukraine and the Baltic states. Deterrence needs to be reestablished if there is to be any degree of peace in the world. Putin’s Russia is now economically dependent on China. If he remains in power, militarist Russia will become China’s sword, exhausting our efforts and resources while China proceeds methodically to achieve ever greater global dominance.

 

This axis of tyranny needs to be broken. The only way to do that is through decisive Ukrainian victory.

 

Biden is quite willing to let Ukraine lose, so long as he can appear to be trying. Are the Republicans okay with that? If so, they are betraying their trust.

 

History will not be kind to those who lead the West to defeat.