 Good morning. I am Dr. Michael Lynch professor of national security affairs at the strategic studies Institute On behalf of Dr. Carol Evans director of the strategic studies Institute at the US Army War College I would like to thank New America for the opportunity to present this panel today a Quick disclaimer The views expressed here are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect us army war college us army or Department of Defense policy I'll first introduce our speakers our first speaker is dr. Robert Hamilton Research professor of Eurasian studies at the strategic studies Institute of the US Army War College Dr. Hamilton will address three questions today How did each side formulate its strategy for the war? How did it translate that strategy into a war plan and how has each side adjusted its strategy over the course of the war so far? Our second speaker is dr. Entulio J. Atcheveria who's the editor-in-chief of the US Army War College Press which includes parameters the US Army War College Journal Dr. Atcheveria will talk about how observations from Ukraine's total defense concept can provide the basis for building an integrated defense Which can in turn help us enhance integrated deterrence? Our final speaker is dr. John Denny research professor of security studies at the strategic studies Institute of the US Army War College Dr. Denny will address the role of US allies in supporting Ukraine The observations and lessons learned from that support and the implications for US strategy and competition with China and Russia And with that I'll hand the mic over to dr. Hamlet Thanks, Mike and good morning everybody. So as Mike said, I'm gonna talk a little bit about strategy and planning During the war and how each side adjusted the strategy based on conditions in the war Cavi added up front by saying we actually know or at least I know a lot more about The Russian side than I do the Ukrainian side I think that's true for many researchers in the war part of the reason for that is this there are more people studying the Russian strategy and planning process strategic aims in the war and how those have been adjusted over the war over the course of the war because Russia is a great power and a competitor and Also part of the reason is the Ukrainian Franklin from the Ukrainian side, frankly has been so tight-lipped their opsec has been so good They tell us only what we need to know to help them And so I feel like at least for me my understanding of the Russian side is actually better than the Ukrainian side but what we've seen Over the course of the war from Russia is a contraction of war aims and a more realistic Set of assumptions that their strategy and plans are based on and that's based on the failure of their initial strategy And what we've seen from Ukraine. I think is an expansion of war aims based on The incremental success that they've been having in blunting the initial Russian assault and then going on the counter offensive so We teach strategy here at the US Army War College as the relationship among ends or objectives ways or concepts things you do means or resources And so I'll go through what I what I see is the initial strategy and then a couple of adjustments by by both sides I'll say that from my assessment Russia's ends or its objectives in the war have remained the same throughout the war and those are to prevent Ukraine from escaping Russia's geopolitical orbit Re-establish what they see as a zone of privilege interests In over the former Soviet Union outside of the Baltics for a lot of reasons the Baltics have always been seen differently in Moscow than the other Republics of the former Soviet Union And I think some of the evidence for this is if you look at the pre-war demands the Lavrov the Russian foreign ministries The the draft treaty they put forward Putin's article that he wrote the summer before the war started those demands were all directed at the west Over the heads of the Ukrainians right so that the whole denotification Demilitarization justification for the war is clearly not what it's about. It's about It has very little to do with things going on inside of Ukraine. It has to do with Russia's view of the geopolitical space that it inhabits and its prerogatives and rights within that space So again the ends were and still are to prevent Ukraine from escaping Russia's geopolitical orbit and reestablish its own It self-declared zone of privilege interest interests the ways in the initial strategy were sort of classic coup d'etat, right? It was quick seizure of Kiev killed capture Zelensky and other key government officials and install the pro-Russian government That was the plan The means primarily the military means were primarily airborne special operations forces and then some of the other irregular forces that could Get up to see from from Chechnya Wagner and others The conventional force the idea for the conventional forces was they could clean up pockets of resistance from the armed forces of Ukraine after Kiev had been seized the government had been toppled and replaced with a more pro-Russian government Some of the assumptions. I think that guided this this strategy the initial Russian strategy was that Zelensky the government in Kiev were the center of gravity, and I think that was actually correct a One assumption that was wildly incorrect was that Russia could repeat Crimea 2014 on a national scale essentially that the armed forces Ukraine would not put up significant resistance That the Ukrainian people would be passive or welcoming to Russian invaders or liberators in the Kremlin's view And I think this is evidence that this was not a plan not a strategy that was developed or a plan that was written Primarily by the Russian armed forces and the general staff this came out of the Kremlin and the security services There's been a lot of evidence for that But one of the inferences we can make just from the assumptions that guided the plan were this was not a classic military plan It had heavy heavy fingerprints from the Kremlin and the security services So that failed and that failed by May of 2022 and so the first revision and very remembers the withdrawal from most of the four axes the two that were directed toward Kiev And and really the one that was directed from the south out of Crimea and a focus on on the Donbass on mostly Donetsk and Luchansk provinces But also to an extent Zaporizhia and Harrison and it was the establishment of a Russian protectorate over Eastern Ukraine, but the end was still the same the end was prevent Ukraine from escaping Russia's geopolitical orbit the way they were They were gonna do this Was seized control of Eastern Ukraine essentially try to try to freeze the conflict conflict and and make Ukraine a Failed state or a state that was so unpalatable and attractive to the EU and NATO That it's its membership in those organizations would become an impossibility The other thing Russia did as part of the ways of this strategy was it stepped up attacks on on civilian targets The idea was to terrorize and demoralize the Ukrainian population And again as I said freeze the conflict to allow Russia to escalate it at its discretion and make Ukraine an unattractive member of Western institutions The means were an expanded conventional force through the partial mobilization that happened in August in September of 2022 and then The aircraft and missile attacks on strategic targets or civilian targets The assumption here, I think was a center of gravity was Ukrainian will which would falter after Russia seized large parts of Eastern Ukraine essentially Cut off Ukraine's access to the sea outside of the far west in Odessa and the population eventually after being subjected to these strikes on civilian targets Would would push the government to end the war that also proved to be false that those assumptions failed that strategy failed So I think the second revision in Russian strategy, which which we see now and it started probably early this year again The ends are the same The ways what they're trying to do I think is freeze the conflict retain leverage in the ability to escalate operationally go on the defense Strategic strikes over the winter you saw an energy infrastructure after Russia pulled out of the grain deal this summer You saw strikes on trade infrastructure and grain storage facilities And again, the idea here is to spread the cost of the war to countries dependent on Ukrainian ports from from the Black Sea from this part of the world Many in the global south by the way, and I'm sure everyone in the audience knows this Don't really blame Russia for the war. They see it as it's it's on the one hand on the other And but the idea here one of the ideas is to spread the cost of the war outside of the region So that there is more incentive for countries outside of the region to freeze the conflict And and for Russia to retain what it is gained. So I think we're seeing Russia on the operational defense The means it's pursuing the strategy again UAVs unmanned aerial vehicles missiles Diplomacy and information war to erode international support for Ukraine I think the key the change in assumptions here and the key assumption here from Russia is the center of gravity is no longer Ukrainian will its Western will And Russia can outlast Western will will degrade it will falter As Russia continues this war the Russia strategy I read a recent report that said Russia strategy now is not not to outlast Kiev It's to outlast Washington And I actually think that's the most that's that's probably Unfortunately the most realistic Assumption in the Russian strategy that we've seen today To keep fighting to freeze the war on the grounds of it. There are no major changes in territorial control I think Russia is incapable of major changes in territorial control I think we're seeing Ukraine is is gaining territory, but slowly and incrementally And I think the you know Putin's theory of victory now is to outlast us not to outlast the Ukrainians So what we've seen with the Russians is over time the strategy is improved better alignment of ends ways and means more realistic assumptions a better understanding of the true center of gravity of the Ukrainians or of the the Ukrainians and their partners that are facing Russia on Ukrainian side, I think The ends the initially in the war the ends were survival It was retained control of Kiev preserve the functioning of the government. This is You know two key moments in this or you know president Zelensky's I need ammunition not a ride In other words, I'm not leaving if we can retain control of the capital and the government can continue to function We can survive the initial the stage of this war And that's really I think at the beginning that those were the ends those are the objectives of Ukrainian strategy The other the other I think key moment here is the video that Zelensky and some of his key leaders made a day or two into the war You know literally a cell phone video that was posted. Hey, the president's here the minister of defense is here. We're here We're still functioning. We're still fighting and I think that was key to not only Ukrainian will but to Convincing Ukraine's Western partners that they had a moment They had some time to martial support rally support and keep Ukraine in the war because the Ukrainians were gonna survive at least the initial attack the initial initial shock The ways are total offense So mobilization of the entire government the entire society to the extent it could be the territorial reserve Sort of an interesting sidebar to this is some of the interviews I've done And some of the things I've read from people in the country Have made the point that the territorial reserve was a critical component of Ukraine's ability to initially Survive and blunt the Russian offensive that that these were forces that were appearing in places and at times that the Russians had not expected And they weren't all that well trained or all that well armed, but they were well trained and well armed enough to cause confusion in the Russian in the Russian ranks and in the Russian plan and to blunt the initial Russian offensive so The the means I think Ukraine used early on in the war obviously Total offense but also high-volta multi-channel communications, especially in English coming out of Kiev And this was directed at us at Ukraine's partners to convince us. This was not gonna be 2008 in Georgia This was not gonna be a five-day war where the Russians could present the world with the fate of complete This was gonna be a longer war Ukraine was gonna stay in the war and we had time To to marshal support essentially to get our act together and to step up the the Assistance to Ukraine because that assistance would go to good use it would not be It would not it would not be lost or captured by the Russians within a week Key assumptions I think for Ukraine initially were surviving the initial week were key to gaining and maintaining foreign support Again lessons of 2008 you've got to fight for more than four or five days Ukraine obviously has natural advantages in terms of size that Georgia didn't have both sides of its military and size of the country and that foreign support was key to surviving long-term and Initially there was a thinking I think in Ukrainian government if you go back to some of their initial statements at land concessions and Neutrality might be the cost of preserving independence some of Zelensky's initial statements and initial offers talked about those things as they survived and as they continued to fight and as I think they realized that the Russian plan would had some fatal false fatally false assumptions Ukraine's ends Expanded to and I think you started to see this around May around the time that the Russians gave up the drive on Kiev and Started to focus on East Ukraine's objectives began Switched to a return to the pre-February of 2022 status quo to pushing Russians out of all the new area that they had occupied since February 22 how They were gonna reverse Russia's proposed 22 February 22 military gains stabilized the situation through limited counter offensive These are the counter offenses. We saw in Kharkiv and Harrison and then once Haimar showed up Strikes on key Russian command and control and logistics nodes that continued to have to be pushed farther and farther back and Complicated Russia's command and control and logistical support and I think the key assumption in this phase of the Ukrainian strategy was that the center of gravity were was Russia's ground forces and their ability to hold Ground and then I think you saw a second revision in Ukrainian strategy About a year ago about the end of the summer after early fall after the the offensive's in Kharkiv and Harrison Had succeeded and that was a return to the pre 2214 status quo so ejection of all Russian Russian forces from inside of Ukraine's internationally recognized borders And war crimes prosecutions and NATO membership So if you talk to and I'm sure many in the room have if you talk to Ukrainians now, especially military and political leaders They will say Hey, we don't fear a long conflict. We fear an inconclusive conflict And we know that that's Russia's strategy is to make this a frozen conflict because a frozen conflict I think in the Russian mind and the fear is in Ukrainian mind will keep Ukraine out of NATO and in many Ukrainians believe the only way to keep this war from occurring in five years or ten years when Russia is ready for it to start again Is NATO membership and the article five? deterrent that it would provide Provide Russia so the ways how are the Ukrainians doing this break the will of the Russian military in crime in Ukraine counter-offensives to liberate Luhansk and that's a pretty good person isolate Crimea. I think I and again, this is just me I I don't think the Ukrainians have in mind a conventional military operation to liberate Crimea I think for a lot of reasons they understand it would be extremely difficult would invite a Radical escalation on the Russian side. I think the plan is to isolate it convince the Russians It's untenable and then go into some sort of negotiated settlement where its status is determined over time Maybe with some international support and intervention What we're seeing another thing we're seeing in Ukrainian strategy changing a little bit is these long-range UAV and drone strikes on symbolic and defense industrial targets in Russian occupied parts of Ukraine and in Russia itself To degrade war making capability of Russia to erode the confidence of the military Maybe to to send the the message to the Russian people that the kremlin started a war of choice that it now cannot protect Russia from They've been very careful not to strike civilian targets like the Russians have in Ukraine because that That could actually bolster support for the war right by by giving the kremlin and the Russian people Amiditions say the Ukrainians are committing war crimes. So the strikes have been very targeted on symbolic government and defense industrial targets The means are the expanded ground conventional capability that all the tanks all the armor personnel carriers Air and sea drones western provided a long range artillery missiles storm shadow Obviously, we think was used in the in the recent attack in Sevastopol last week The question now of course is attack arms because that would put everything in Crimea within range of Ukrainian long range artillery um So I think I'll I'll end here with the key assumptions on the Ukrainian Side now one of the key assumptions is will Russian will is the center of gravity not necessarily the the will of the military but the will of the kremlin And the Ukrainians believe that the will to fight comes from fear compensation for the military because people are very well compensated if they're killed and that provides almost a perverse incentive For for people to sign up because the death benefits are significant And then the propaganda the propaganda effort from the kremlin and and it's it's surrogates Directed not only to the Russian military, but the Russian people. So I'll stop here Turn it over to tony and look forward to your questions morning everyone All right, so I'm going to talk this morning a little bit about Why deterrence failed in february 2022? six main answers for that There are others out there. I'm sure And none of these is mutually exclusive necessarily um, and then the west strategic challenge one of the things I think we have to address if we want deterrence to have better prospects for success moving forward And then a way to achieve integrated deterrence through an integrated defense using Roughly the Ukrainian model of comprehensive defense or total defense Bob alluded to that and even though it was underfunded and um, not as tightly organized as it might have been It did just enough. It seems to me and to others Other analysts they prevent the fate of complete And so I think that's uh, again part of the speedy challenge. We need to address and so on. So okay next slide, please So okay, six major Answers as to why deterrence failed, um in february of 2022 First one miscalculation or overconfidence on part of uh, the russians And part of that goes to I mean NATO's intelligence gathering was really good Often that's not the case But in this particular case it was and we revealed to the kremlin that we knew Part of the plan if you recall we were a step ahead When the russians were planning a false flag operations or so on we announced that and we announced those So we were a step ahead, uh, almost the entire way And yet the russians came anyway So this would have been a form of deterrence by denial had it actually succeeded. It was an attempt And I'll get into a little more about deterrence by denial and strengths that it might offer for us But so that's one that you got to expect obviously your adversaries might miscalculate When you don't want them to especially but Second one time not on putin's side. So this goes back to some of the social science literature on deterrence all the way back to the 1950s and 60s and especially in the 80s Um, we're richard ned labose writing And he says that it seems to him most of deterrence failures were not because your adversaries saw a target of opportunity or window of opportunity and lunged um, but more that the Adversary perceived time to be running out that the previous measures Uh, he or she had taken To achieve their objectives were not working and at the balance of military power was shifting away from it Was not going to be in his favor. So Waiting was not an option. So the strike now or, uh, the situation would be even worse. Perhaps you wouldn't Uh, be able to strike at all. So that does tie into Uh, one of these strategic goals, uh that bob mentioned which is Previous efforts to keep ukraine from sliding away from russia's orbit into the western orbit had apparently failed um, and so Is the situation looked like it was getting worse from the point of view of the kremlin third lack of will As demonstrated by use of sanctions instead of military force Uh, nor is freedom sure everyone's afraid are, uh, sorry aware of his name But uh, and a lot of literature on sanctions and more and more the most recent literature coming out Says they are essentially becoming less and less effective Uh, probably because they've been overused, but um So that's a separate issue we can get into that's going to be probably a separate chapter in the report that I Put together at the end of all of this in any case and then not using military force So the other part of it is that usually military force if used properly it can be a strong deterrent Um, we took that off the table. We the west I think for good reasons initially Uh, and for some other reasons that were probably not necessarily as as good but made sense in any case Um, do no reason for us to necessarily jump into a major conflict That nobody in the west really wanted in any case, so But anyway, that's uh answer number three special case Um, I'm joining a lot here from bob. I apologize for paraphrasing a lot of the things he said, but um We're the russian to see ukraine is a different sort of thing. So it would have taken us probably more Uh efforts And maybe cost us more to try to deter russia and we did not necessarily appreciate That you know, so the point of reference for russia For prudent for the kremlin was different than the point of reference for the west and we didn't fail to appreciate that going into it So a lack of focus is the fifth in jimoy nan Um says look, we didn't we forgot to really include a larger picture the grand strategic goals of russia ukraine being only the first step here and without That larger context Our deterrence efforts were not going to necessarily succeed supply perhaps coincidence or chance or luck or something Um And then patina rents The inconsistency argument so the last native especially has been really inconsistent its approach to trying to deter russia in recent history and So why should we expect our deterrence all of a sudden to have succeeded in february where We were just not sending really strong messages To the kremlin earlier on And uh, so on soon Next slide, please Okay, so none of those answers direct directly addresses the west strategic challenge in my view Which is part of what you know, all of those six answers combined with a I'll call the seventh one is looking at this from a strategic and military sort of problem Whereas the west is always challenged by feta complete That happens within the first four or five days or so of a conflict think of the sarams invasion of kuwait Back in the 18 or 1989 90 And the west eventual response to that So we're normally out of position to really deter effectively prevent that feta complete And then we like the in the middle part of the conflict spectrum The west has advantage there are troops with better training or doctrines Really good equipment is Superior to pretty much anything that's out there We're not as good in the protracted conflict phase for very various reasons. It's not just the political will that Our election cycles change every four or eight years or so are larger Grand strategic or foreign Policy goals might also change Radically perhaps 180 degrees Because of that cycle But also because and I think the russians and others had some intelligence on this but our defense industrial base It just was not there anymore to support The massive production The numbers and everything ammunition of all types and so on to sustain a protracted conflict We're taking the steps now to address some of that We need I think a more concerted effort to do that. We're doing some look at some of the do d traffic and everything Contracts have been let to try to close some of the gaps But we still have gaps if we're going to deter In a pacific you know, china korea and so on elsewhere And we just haven't we didn't have reliable data from a major large-scale combat operation as such as this to To channel into industry leaders and to really shape the production the capacity And production part of the equation and then we have supply chain issues also that are becoming more and more complex That we have to address to give you one example One javelin round uses something like 200 semi conductors, which I found astounding when I discovered that and we all knew that the supply chain challenges for Semiconductors and you know for procuring them acquiring them and so forth are Require some serious thinking in order to to solve so The west is normally out of position in order to prevent a fate of complete and this one You know almost worked really at the roost reports and some of the others The russian came pretty close Remember the russians had similar assumptions To the west as far as how long the ukrainians were actually going to be able to hold out So it was not really unreasonable for them to have tried this approach And this is the thing that beats Your other deterrence efforts that they think they can get what they want to get within the first four or five days While natus sorting out what his response is going to be And if you haven't addressed that in your deterrence efforts Um, then you aren't really going to your chances of deterring your adversary Or diminished a bit so Um, but we like that we're out of position But we like the idea of trying to deter through punishment as opposed to deterring by denial By afflicting cost sanctions and so on We are not directly involved in the conflict We can influence it to some degree We can manage the escalation side of the of the equation By not triggering The radical escalation in the part of our adversary by not introducing your own military forces and so forth and that sort of thing So we are comfortable With deterrence by punishment But historically we can see that the deterrence by punishment is really less effective overall than deterrence by denial By a factor of like seven or eight Even though it's difficult to prove whether deterrence works Proving a negative is is a hard thing to do It's also by the way difficult to prove that coercion or a compelence actually works as well Or what part of the your compelence effort was the key in getting your adversary to do what you wanted Who heard to do So it's part it's more art than science here But we're able to deduce by historical record the use of Alliances strong alliances that are not so strong that they are provocative but strong enough They actually can deter conflict It seems to a safe a safe bet to make you know, it's not exclusive again. It's not a science So Next slide please And just flip over to the pacific For a second to give you a picture of the strategic problem on a larger scale Um lots of literature out there on the taiwan scenarios and so on But I wanted you to get a feel for the missile belts the first second third order Defensive belts. They're fairly significant. I think Getting worse over time worse from a western perspective Better from a you know, a prc or beijing perspective obviously um, and then according to the land pack Uh Conference back in middle of may lots of important folks. I think we're talking about the situation Um Not necessarily Getting you know Aggregiously worse for the west at this stage, but there are some concerns and there are lots of Voices out there saying deterrence is beginning to erode in the pacific Uh, obis Colby famous for his book strategy denial. Maybe you have many of you have read it. I hope um That essentially we are losing the window of being able to move Forces in any number into the theater without incurring more risk sure freedom of navigation operations other um are occurring Routinely, but that's not the same as introducing additional forces Um Hardware and so forth that might tip the balance away from china even further And they fear to be according to some of the Intelligent reports that are now open source fear to be worried more and more about What richard nedlebow pointed to is the balance tipping away from china and that That sooner rather than later. Um is what we don't have to act so Just wanted to provide that perspective because whatever we talk about here for ukraine Ideally Part of it ought to be transferable to other theaters But the challenges are even greater than many of those other theaters. So next slide, please So the uh getting back to the fated complete. I think um The ukrain approach when they uh, essentially rationalized all of their territorial defense forces. I'll call them that loose later lots of You just fell then underneath the IDF the And a tdf sorry Territory defense forces as of one january, but there were no funding streams set up yet They had some veterans from previous conflicts with the Russian, but they didn't really have Wide-scale Organized collective training Nobody was really read into the journal defense plan They cooperated with some soft units and so forth But overall they appeared to have done just enough to blunt slow down surprised the russian fated complete attempt Um, and you can see some of the pictures there. We know, uh, national garbatein or parts of that Retain national garbatein at posthumal airport seemed to have done just enough knock out the first Aircraft russian aircraft that attempted to land there Um, and roadblocks that were set up in some ways They did enough to free up regular creative forces to do their missions as well. So that's important Had they been, uh, had that system been more routinized? Had there been funding streams? Had the training been, uh, integrated Um, and I think they could have probably even accomplished more uh others, uh The the fins have a similar concept Uh, the poles and some of the Baltic states have a similar total defense Or a comprehensive defense concept Um, however and so do the taiwanese however in many cases These are they just really want paper more than Uh, and in reality and they're not training. They're not rolled into Uh, a coherent defensive plan, but they could be So the defeat of feta complete in some ways you already have to be there You have to be in position the west can't push any more hardware into position Without, uh, increasing risk as we saw But it can help those forces that are there it can help train It can help supply and it can help, uh, in other ways with intelligence, especially I think nato us intelligence and the early stages of the conflict were key Not only strategic level, but all the way down a tactical level down to targeting and so on We're very very important. Um, and in some ways that sharing of intelligence I think could be the glue that holds together and integrate defense concept in various places and it will maybe do just enough Again to slow down any aggressor And uh and to buy time for the west to come up with a more coherent and a stronger response so so Some other problems though with the tdf and Again, I'm using that term very broadly even though tdf with a specific organization, but the volunteer forces Uh, the volunteer battalions running around, uh with in some cases, uh, loyalties that were Uh And a constitution that is not necessarily democratic We wouldn't necessarily go an hour away to support them But they were doing enough to To fight against the russian aggression Some of them farther to the right than we would like them to be But so I think part of making this a successful concept is a professional education and training program that Teach them your love on conflict Ethical decision making and more time and so on which is important in the long term and loyalty to the state ikeev As opposed to loyalty to their own particular Individual agendas and so forth so And next slide please So to kind of wrap it up, um The uh intelligence sharing we need uh Really hammering out concrete policies of how we're going to do this. We have a tendency In the u.s. Sometimes for perhaps good reason to protect our sources, but Overclassifying things and being really really stingy about sharing intelligence almost to the point that That the value of that intelligence once it is shared is not as useful as it might have been had have been shared in more timely manner So we need to figure that out and we need to work out With whom and what we're going to share when we know it and so on And that that'll be again the glue the industrial capacity problem. We need to fix that. That's a separate chapter But I just need to mention that as part of how we're going to approach the turing to protract the conflict And there are some other things there the integration of territorial defense forces and those total defense concept or comprehensive defense concept is you know translated Both ways it's not going to be as effective if The poles aren't cross training cross border training with Baltic states and Ukraine is at some point when their status is resolved the alliance question is resolved Should also be training cross border with poles and so on And they should be trained at both the regular and the airbender forces Integrated air defense networks will be key. I am sure moving forward Pretty obvious. I think everyone would agree with that point a couple army implications at the bottom there We are seeing evidence that our approach to training Ukrainians to fight like us is not as productive as we would like and we have to remember that Learning air land battle we started doing that in the 1980s We didn't really took this about a decade to kind of get it cycling units through national training center and Building a culture doesn't happen in just two or three months. So we can't really have expected The Ukrainians to have picked it up As quickly as we would like them. So we need to be able to train Approaches and help them fight the way they already are organized and a culture to fighting and we have to So we have to figure out ways to adjust our doctrine according to so that we can do that more effectively moving forward so Consumption rates for less go I think I mentioned already And scalable 88 long range fires, etc training on those So I will end there. There's some caveats The security dilemma problem. You don't want to Increase your defensive capability too quickly And be too strong to the point that it provokes your adversary into attacking and you end up with the very thing You want it to deter in first place And the threat of militarizing your civil society by having Irregular units well armed out there and everything who decide to start following your own agenda rather than yours All right. Thanks. That's uh My last slide is just to say hey Any follow-on question everything please get in touch with us and please follow The press and its podcasts and SSI so we'll turn it over to john now Thanks, Tony Well, I await my slides to come up Again, my name is john denny. I'm a research professor here at the army ward college and Let me do a little bit of context setting before I launch into my slides And that uh as you can gather from our approach to this issue And the panel we put together here. We're working on a multi author Study really it's going to be a series of studies what we're calling a federated approach And uh, there are groups of us or individuals examining different parts of the puzzle You heard bob and tony with their portions Mike is going to be tackling at least one bit of this including u.s security cooperation With the ukrainians as well as history of relations In that part of the world the bit that i'm working on is uh allied support for ukraine and primarily here We're focused on european allies and i'll note that even though my name is The only one on that lead slide there i'm writing mine in collaboration with the co-author Dr. Lisa aronson Lisa is my counterparts at national defense university down in washington dc She's a research professor there studies european nato as i do And so the two of us are tackling this issue of allies In support of ukraine all right next slide please Here's what i'll be uh briefly Offering to you i'll start broadly talking about the role of allies and american strategy Why we think we need allies and then i'll take a dive into Some of the details of of what we are observing right now and just a brief note on the Uh on the methodology that lisa and i are employing We're doing a lot of uh a lot of travel frankly for this research project including a lot of personal interviews We began in washington dc with desk officers at our state department and defense department But then grew that to include the foreign embassies in washington of key allies that we're examining in europe We've got a group of about eight or nine that we're looking at You can probably guess at the countries that are in that group including germany france the uk poland romania finland etc And then we've done some extensive overseas travel visiting the capitals to speak to both government officials As well as academic and think tank experts and we've also had the opportunity to visit Maintenance and material transfer locations in eastern europe including in poland So let's go to the next slide, please Now starting again most broadly You're going to see unfolding before you here a series of american defense strategies quadrennial defense review reports or q dr's security strategies etc stretching back almost 30 years The remarkable consistency of all of these documents that you see unfolding before you From the presidency of bill clinton who was kind of a reluctant frankly transatlanticist given what brought him into office in 1992 Through even donald trump who had what could only be described as a challenging relationship with with europe The remarkable consistency among all of these documents is they all have One form or another of this notion and that is that we americans prefer to work in the world with allies And by the way, we prefer to work with europeans Among them so this has been a remarkable consistency of post cold war I mean you could even draw this back into the cold war perhaps But it's it's a clear thread through all of these strategies these documents Going back nearly the last 30 years next slide, please Now why is this the case i mean some of these reasons are going to be obvious to those of you in the room right We clearly believe we get more legitimacy internationally, but also domestically when we have allies by our side The third bullet there is is the one that is often most surprising especially when i Brief this topic in europe europeans many of them frankly don't believe that the american military Which uh, you know is so large and capable We really need european allies with their some of called them bonsai armies bonsai militaries By our side. I I think from an american perspective. In fact, we do We need their capability. We need their capacity. Remember that redundancy is no sin When it comes to national security and military affairs in particular And so you can think back to the surge in iraq the surge in afghanistan Those frankly would not have been possible Without allies by america's side. So this is a very interesting irony of the post world war two era Certainly the post cold war era and that is namely that the one country in the world With the ability and often the will to change political outcomes anywhere on the globe Perfers and feels like it needs allies by its side to do those things And then finally there the last bullet We have historical relationships Based upon uh historical practice, but also culture in some cases common language Working with our european allies. So these are all the reasons why All those document documents you saw piling up on the last slide Preach this gospel of allies by our side So now let's take a dive into what we've seen unfolding now in the ukraine war And again a lot of this is based on research over the last eight months next slide, please And much of it most of it based upon interviews First let's start here with the strategic approach. So what's driving the allies european allies in particular again To do what they're doing in Or with regard to aiding and assisting ukraine It shouldn't surprise you, you know, we americans have a strategy for just about everything In part that's thanks to the large defense establishment that we have We've got the personnel and the resources to do that kind of work Most of our european allies do not and so many of them most of them do not have formal strategies for their approach to the war Instead they're driven by what we're calling some strategic Imperatives or rationales and they vary depending upon where you go across the continent Some countries obviously, uh those closest to the problem set you can think of lithuania, estonia, latvia Maybe even the poles fear that if they don't help they're next Others particularly the germans the fins very concerned with the rule-based order And maintaining this especially in europe Others are very eager to impose a strategic defeat on russia A very small number particularly the lithuanians and the poles have a cultural affinity for the ukranians And then finally several allies feel a need to be To be good partners for washington they feel a sense of responsibility And so they're doing what they can so there in sum is a variety of rationales that are driving What the allies are doing next slide please Now how are they doing what they're doing? The patches you see unfolding on the right of the slide are those of uh some not all Of the nato rapid deployment cores the gradual Uh readiness cores graduated readiness cores That nato has its disposal at its disposal most interestingly these command and control entities are not being used Why is that? Well, it won't surprise you all to know that you know nato doesn't want to pitch this and the west doesn't want to pitch their effort as Contributing to some sort of a nato-russia conflict right they're trying to frankly in some cases downplay the role of nato So despite the fact that nato has the ability To uh command and control the assistance effort These entities have not been tapped at all Instead what we have seen is a more of an ad hoc approach It began first with the american 18th airborne core, which was sent over to europe initially to help handle refugee flows into poland When it was seen that the poles had most of that effort in hand The 18th airborne core's mission changed rather quickly to facilitating the delivery of materiel to the ukrainians After that after the first few months an ad an ad hoc organization called the security assistance group in ukraine was formed it was initially uh it still is based in germany but initially in stuttgart and It was really based upon borrowed manpower from both u.s army europe and u.s european command In conjunction with that a uk led international donor coordination center focused primarily on training coordination Uh, but again these were largely ad hoc what we were seeing unfold now and which should be uh Officially stood up by the end of this calendar year is a new sag you entity. It's got its own formal manning document It'll now instead of being around 150 140 personnel. It's going to be as large as 430 450 or so and uh Its purpose will be to coordinate all of the materiel and training assistance that is flowing into ukraine We had the opportunity lisa and i to go visit with sag you personnel there and we've got a quote there from one of our interviews It's really a it remains really a spider web of coordination a unique bureaucracy Uh, and so this raises the question on what good is nato in this context then Even though nato command and control Entities have not been used We still detect in our research that nato has nonetheless provided the framework necessary It's sort of greased the skids of coordination if you will Uh and enabled a lot of the cooperation to unfold even through these ad hoc entities But without us and a lesser degree uk leadership Uh it it's really unclear whether the scale and The the organization could have unfolded in the way that it did at least initially in the first year and a half Next slide please Now let's turn to the material assistance and what we're seeing unfold there It won't surprise those of you who've been following this issue that many of our allies in europe are They've reached the end of their ability to do more on this front In fact, they've many of them have been very public about this Joseph borrell the Really person thought of as the eu foreign minister spoke rather openly about this about a year ago Saying that european Inventories were largely tapped out However, what we've uncovered in some of our research is really a attention In the civ mill terms in some of these countries that we were focused on I won't go into too much detail here But we've seen examples a couple of cases in which The military bureaucracies or military entities in some of our allies are unwilling to tone over more Now in some cases that's for good operational reasons. They're concerned about Maintaining an inventory in case the russians come across the border in their countries But in some cases it takes more of a bureaucratic overtone They're concerned that if they give away some of these resources from their inventories That their civilian counterparts in capitals simply won't provide the funding To replenish those inventories And so there's a tension here some of the civilians fearing that the military counterparts are inflating the threat And some of the civilians frankly telling us that they've got the capacity to do more even though their militaries are reluctant to do that In any case what we've seen across the continent is an unwillingness to put their economies on a wartime footing Now we're not at that point here in the u.s. Either But the russians certainly are And what we have in the u.s. In the form of a defense production act is at least the ability to Incentivize even with only the threat of employing the dpa We can sometimes get industry to react a little more Quickly than they might otherwise These kinds of tools largely do not exist among our european allies And so they have a hard time for example Getting their orders with their defense manufacturers to the top of the queue So this is a problem that we've identified and you'll you'll see this in our recommendations when our our reports Eventually hits the street next slide please In terms of training assistance many of the european allies including the u.s. Have had long-standing training efforts underway already with the ukrainians prior to february of 22 Most of the european allies have been eager to continue this The challenge that we've seen unfolding though is that there are multiple training efforts going on There's certainly coordination Happening and in large part that's thanks again to the uk led effort to Try to corral some of this or at least provide a clearing house for that coordination But there is no standardization yet That we've seen in those training efforts One of the challenges of course here is that the more training provided by western militaries for ukrainian forces It means necessarily less range time less opportunities for our own western forces And that is a challenge for our readiness And then finally there's lots of training it seems at the individual and a small unit level We see far less training occurring at the collective level in part This is due to a lack of range time at those ranges and those maneuver facilities that have the capacity For a battalion and brigade maneuver Next slide please In terms of operational assistance for classification reasons, I can't go into much detail here I'll note as an aside that lisa and i and i believe my colleagues are probably operating under the same constraints We're going to publish of course an open source I should say an unclassified study, but we will also have a classified annex And much of the information we're uncovering here under operational assistance as you can imagine falls in the classified domain However, I can note there's been some open source reporting regarding non us intel support being provided at both the multilateral and bilateral levels Next slide please In terms of a logistical assistance the access basing authority and overflight rights Provided by the allies for the effort to assist the ukrainians has really been frankly outstanding It's at a level at which we've been told by our american interlocutors in europe And in the pentagon it contrasts pretty strongly with what we often see in the indopacific theater Nonetheless, there are some concerns Regarding opsec and I provide two open source examples there There are several more in the classified realm, but there are two in the open source there We saw back this past spring the the polls uncovered a spy ring of russians Or russian affiliates that were intent on sabotaging some of the rail lines that provide material to the ukrainians And then finally there was a very suspicious Explosion at a bulgarian ammunition storage warehouse in july That bulgarian authorities believe was tied to the effort to provide resources to the ukrainians So, uh, nonetheless the logistical assistance is really a highlight so far That is notwithstanding news just overnight That the polls may be slowing down their efforts Perhaps only on a bilateral level hopefully, but slowing down their efforts to the ukrainians in um, what may be a growing Conflict over the grains trade next line, please When it comes to measures of effectiveness The allies across the board lack really any robust measures To determine whether and how uh, they're being successful Really the the only measure that was cited to us over and over again Is yards or kilometers gained on the battlefield now? That's pretty rudimentary It's pretty blunt doesn't provide us the The specificity we need to refine the training and perhaps even the material and operational support that we're providing to the ukrainians Now there in some cases there's lots of anecdotal feedback for example from their embassies in kiv Or in some cases from personal contacts between Soldiers who happen to know each other in the ukrainian military and in counterpart militaries And then finally we're beginning to see Some anecdotal evidence of moes filter out from the contractors that are sometimes on site in ukraine Next slide please Now what's the the so what of all of this? For the allies and especially for the us and our strategy First and foremost there is a risk we detect And in terms of escalation Some allies are leaning very far forward In doing what they're doing either in terms of the material or especially in the operational realm That creates some risks for escalation But the fact is that in some cases the american perspective is almost a little schizophrenic here We benefit to some degree by the by some allies that have a little more operational freedom a little more Permissive authority to engage in some activities in ukraine that we are preventing our military From doing and we gained frankly some intel benefit from that On the flip side, we also see a risk of a burden sharing for the americans I mentioned earlier several of our allies in europe running out of key capabilities In some cases capacity and they'll need to be backfilled primarily by the americans Overall we also see key capabilities us capabilities In europe are therefore critical in the short run It's very clear that if If there is a contingency in the end of pacific that the americans must respond to The allies in europe are going to be challenged to a great degree to try to fill some of the key gaps That might be withdrawn from europe. You can think about long range fires Um and other enablers that would have utility not simply in a europe land-centric theater But also in the end of pacific a more maritime or maybe even air domain centered theater And then finally the implication there i talked about the command and control You know, it's really unclear to us and i think we're really dubious about whether there's any substitute For us organization command and control or scale when it comes to assisting ukraine In doing what we're doing For them And and i'll end there. Thank you very much. You could go to the last slide if you'd like, but that's the end of my My content. I look forward to your questions and thoughts. Thanks Once again, I'd like to thank new america for the opportunity to present here today and contribute to the conversation And look forward to additional conversations going forward