Pentagon Leaks about the Ukraine War Do Not Justify All the Hysteria

By Noah Rothman

Monday, April 17, 2023

 

The leak of over 100 classified documents pertaining to America’s national-security strategy in theaters ranging from Europe to Asia to the Middle East was immediately deemed a “nightmare” by unnamed intelligence officials. The documents that pertain to U.S. efforts to assist Ukraine’s resistance against a Russian invasion prompted some particularly apoplectic commentary about how that mission is going.

 

Did the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who leaked these files — only, apparently, to show off to online acquaintances — “blow up Ukraine’s war effort?” asked the Toronto Star. The documents tell a “chilling story” about the direction in which Russia’s war might be headed according to Washington Post analyst David Ignatius. Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson alleged that the documents reveal both that the tide has turned against Kyiv and, as a result, the U.S. is engaged in direct “fighting” with Russian forces, rendering America’s support for Ukraine both a criminal enterprise and a worthless one. “Ukraine is losing,” he declared.

 

So, what exactly did we learn from the Pentagon intelligence-briefing slides that prompted a bout of hysteria from voices on all sides of the debate over the virtue of continuing to support Ukraine’s war effort?

 

We learned that Ukrainian forces need more ordnance — artillery shells, in particular. That’s not much of a secret. Ukrainian officials will eagerly say as much to anyone willing to listen. We also learned that the Biden administration has sought to make up for America’s moribund defense-industrial capacity (also no big secret) by seeking the release of U.S. ammunition from stocks in places such as South Korea. Though the South Korean government’s reluctance to deplete its own domestically located stockpiles was not previously known, that reaction shouldn’t have been hard to anticipate given Seoul’s policy of opposition to the provision of lethal aid to Ukraine. Moreover, the U.S. effort to open up these stockpiles was broken by the New York Times in January.

 

The leaks also revealed the extent to which the U.S. is providing precision targeting data to Ukrainian forces trading on its intelligence intercepts. Again, the revelation here is in the scope but not the existence of this initiative, which had been the subject of reporting as far back as September 2022. Moreover, in the week since these leaks became international news, there has been “no indication that the Kremlin has taken steps to block the United States from penetrating Russia’s security and intelligence services” and no signs that Russian commanders are changing tactics in response to the leaks, according to the Times. If that’s not indicative only of Russian lethargy, it might suggest that Moscow is nonplused by these unauthorized disclosures.

 

Nor do the leaked documents purport to suggest or even imply that U.S. forces are engaged in combat with their Russian counterparts. They show only that a small presence of U.S. special forces are attached to U.S. personnel working at the American embassy in Kyiv, which was disclosed by the Pentagon last November.

 

What is new in these leaks is one intelligence assessment that presupposes that Ukraine is locked in a “grinding campaign of attrition” against Russia that is “likely heading toward a stalemate.” Also new, the leaked intelligence quantifies Ukrainian losses at around 120,000 killed and wounded. Most troublingly, estimates suggest that some of Ukraine’s Soviet-era air-defense systems will run out of ammunition likely by mid May. That would be a real threat to the Ukrainian war effort insofar as it might finally allow Russia to claim air superiority and conduct regular tactical sorties against Ukrainian positions and even conduct a campaign of terror bombing against Ukrainian civilian targets.

 

In the weeks that have passed since these leaked documents were prepared, however, Western officials have behaved as though they were aware of this risk. “A broad mix of air-defense systems have been promised, and they will protect the skies over Kyiv and the free cities of Ukraine,” General Mark Milley said at a March 15 meeting of the 50 nations participating in the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. Likewise, the U.S. announced a $2.6 billion backage of aid on April 4 for Ukrainian forces including ammunition for Patriot anti-air defenses, as well as surface-to-air batteries, anti-drone weapons, and radar-surveillance systems. The urgency of this effort appears in line with what the leaked documents alleged was a small three- to six-month window to compensate for Ukraine’s anticipated deficiencies.

 

If the West cannot act in time to prevent the depletion of Ukrainian air-defense capabilities, it would be a major setback for the Ukrainian cause. It does not, however, follow that the war’s momentum would shift entirely in Moscow’s favor. If Russia finally managed to gain total control of the skies, one analyst fretted that the Kremlin would use “its air force to devastate Kyiv once the counteroffensive starts.” Ask General Curtis LeMay how effective area bombardment is at breaking a population’s will to fight. Heck, ask the Ukrainians, who have been on the receiving end of attacks on civilian infrastructure for months.

 

Air power compliments ground forces, and the leaked documents suggest that Russia has more to worry about on that score than Ukraine. For whatever they’re worth, the documents estimate that Russian ground forces operate at just 63 percent combat sustainability compared with Ukraine’s 83 percent. Moscow has lost over 2,000 armor units to the fighting. The Kremlin has sacrificed 78 combat aircraft to the conflict and 80 attack helicopters. Acute shortages of Russian ordnance have forced the Kremlin to repurpose anti-ship and air-to-air missiles for use in ground operations. Even during its winter offensive — a historic failure in which neither Russian regular forces nor the Wagner Group mercenaries struggling to dislodge Ukrainian defenders from Bakhmut broke through Ukraine’s defensive lines — Russia was compelled to triage ammunition.

 

Indeed, those who are quick to conclude from any Ukrainian setback that their war is lost tend to rely on slippery-slope arguments, in part because they cannot demonstrate how Russia secures its victory through military means. Moscow has yet to engineer any significant offensive victory since its forces began to be pushed back from the positions they secured in February and March of 2022. In fact, Russian forces have regularly retrenched to more defensible positions after Ukrainian forces punctured their lines. Another familiar retreat when Ukraine receives the full complement of promised Western weapons platforms isn’t hard to imagine. Already, Kyiv is receiving British Challenger 2 tanks, German-made Leopard 2s, Soviet-era MiG-29 aircraft and Mi-8 helicopters, and a fleet of Western armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles.

 

Russia has more military hardware that it can bring to bear against Ukraine than Kyiv can mobilize. Moreover, Russia has a significant advantage in the number of personnel it can devote to the fight. But that was always the case. Those advantages failed to prevent Ukraine from imposing some rather spectacular battlefield setbacks on the Russian invaders. That surely shocked NATO officials, some of whom were predicting that the war would settle into a protracted “stalemate” as early as March 2022.

 

These leaks have damaged America’s credibility and presented Ukraine with unnecessary challenges. And yet the national prestige these leaks sacrifice pales in comparison with the world-historic humiliation the West would endure if the Ukrainian cause were to falter for lack of support. Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be in the immediate offing.