Thursday
To stay up to date on Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian, I follow several military experts on twitter, including Mick Ryan, a retired Army Major General from Australia. Ryan’s observations about the Russian army’s lack of discipline and professional ethics match something that a character (ironically, a Russian) says in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I’m currently listening to. For his part, Ryan says that, all else being equal, “ethically corrupt and criminal armies” are more likely to lose wars than those who follow a strict code of ethics.
I find Ryan’s twitter thread on this matter so interesting that I quote from it at length before turning to Hemingway. Commenting on Russia’s war crimes, Ryan observes,
Bucha shows the Russian Army is not “professional” nor do they deserve the term “soldiers.” The Russian military transformation since 2008 has clearly not transformed anything at a human level. Beneath the shine of fancy equipment and clever slogans (like ‘active defense’) lies a rotten core of a sloppy and corrupt Russian military culture. But, as the saying goes, fish rot from the head. If the military serves a self-interested class of corrupt authoritarians, why would its military culture be any different?
Ryan elaborates on the importance of the military having a healthy relationship with both society and with the military profession. First, society:
It is important that democracies have a theory of how military organizations interact with elected governments and with the people they defend…This theory of civil-military relations will vary slightly from country to country, and there is more to it than I can put in one thread. But each nation will need their own that they can educate their military (as well as politicians, public servants and citizens) about.
Then, the military profession:
The second issue is that military institutions must see themselves as part of the profession of arms. Only this mindset can prepare large organizations, the sole elements of society legally able to kill, maim and destroy at scale, for the responsible use of those powers.
Understanding that “one is part of the profession of arms,” Ryan writes,
imposes the responsibility to lead people ethically and with purpose, to use force responsibly, to protect those who can’t protect themselves, and live the values of the society they serve.
And he adds,
All of these characteristics are conspicuously absent from the Russian military, given its performance over the past 6 weeks. They lack the vital mindset of a professional, which is very clear from the appalling leadership and behavior on display throughout their campaign.
Ryan concludes that,
at heart, the best and most successful military forces are built on smart, connected, ethical and well-led humans. This is the core of military advantage in this century, and every other age.
Protagonist Robert Jordan’s mentor as he fights for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War is a Russian journalist named Karkov. Unlike those who surround Vladimir Putin, Karkov tells the truth as he sees it, even when it’s bad. One cannot win a war, he says, when you have to rely on undisciplined conscripts, especially when (as is the case with Russia’s current army) they don’t understand why they are fighting. Jordan has just asked how bad Karkov thinks the situation is:
It is better now than it was. We are getting rid of some of the worst. But it is very rotten. We are building a huge army now and some of the elements, those of Modesto, of El Campesino, of Lister and of Durán, are reliable. They are more than reliable. They are magnificent. You will see that. Also we still have the Brigades although their role is changing. But an army that is made up of good and bad elements cannot win a war. All must be brought to a certain level of political development; all must know why they are fighting, and its importance. All must believe in the fight they are to make and all must accept discipline. We are making a huge conscript army without the time to implant the discipline that a conscript army must have, to behave properly under fire. We call it a people’s army but it will not have the assets of a true people’s army and it will not have the iron discipline that a conscript army needs. You will see. It is a very dangerous procedure.
We see, earlier in the novel, what lack of discipline looks like. Pablo, a peasant leader, captures a fascist-held town and then enrolls the peasants in the execution of the fascists. The men are to line up in two lines with flails, at the end of which is the edge of a cliff, and their fascist prisoners are to walk between them, beaten before being tossed off the cliff. In this way Pablo hopes to implicate every town resident in the rebellion, with the intention of ensuring their loyalty when the fascists counterattack.
Instead, the whole affair spirals out of control and becomes a frenzied blood bath. There is no sign of the iron discipline that will be required to fight off the fascists when they counterattack. I’m not far enough into the novel to know if the town experiences fascist payback, but it’s not difficult to imagine something horrific, with the peasants unable to effectively defend themselves.
In his twitter feed, Ryan notes that those Russian soldiers who are raping, pillaging and murdering will not stand firm when the Ukrainians counterattack. Thus, although they are currently making incremental advances in Eastern Ukraine—in large part because Russia is now concentrating all its firepower there—those advances may be temporary. For one thing, according to a recent New York Times article, Russian pilots are exhibiting
the same risk-averse behavior they did in the early weeks of the war: darting across the border to launch strikes and then quickly returning to Russian territory, instead of staying in Ukrainian air space to deny access to their foes. The result is that Russia still has not established any kind of air superiority, officials said.
The article quotes Frederick W. Kagan, a senior fellow and director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, who observes that the invasion is not
proceeding particularly differently in the east than in the west because they haven’t been able to change the character of the Russian army. There are some deep flaws in the Russian army that they could not have repaired in the last few weeks even if they had tried. The flaws are deep and fundamental.”
We have yet to know how the war will turn out. But unlike the Russians, who declare victory in towns and cities they have reduced to rubble, the Ukrainians know what they’re fighting for.