Assessing the Russian Military Campaign in Ukraine

welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online welcome to the center for strategic international studies on a discussion on russia and ukraine i have the great honor of welcoming three experts on uh intelligence and uh military issues and strategy uh the first is elliott cohen he's the he's a professor at the johns hopkins uh university school of advanced international studies or seis and the arleigh burke chair in strategy at csis i also have mike vickers mike is the former under secretary of defense for intelligence former assistant secretary of defense for special operations and also a former cia operations officer who is involved in the afghan war against soviet forces and then finally emily harding who's a senior fellow at csis is also deputy director of the international security program former deputy staff director at the senate select committee on intelligence and also a former analyst at the central intelligence agency so welcome to all of you glad to have you here and elliot let me start with you um can you walk us through uh vladimir putin's uh political objectives i mean obviously we're seeing the use of military force but how would you characterize his political objectives here so i think probably the best way to think of them is uh in a series of stages or ranging from minimal to maximal the the minimal objective was quite clearly regime change in kiev the replacement of the zelinski regime by what we would consider a quizling regime if you look at how they launched their attacks that's they clearly expected that to happen through a quick and pretty bloodless campaign um i think beyond that what he was looking for was either immediately or ultimately the the reduction of ukraine and i and i would suspect belarus as well to something like the status that they had in the previous soviet union that is maybe main nominally independent or autonomous but really part of a larger entity control from moscow and then finally um you know he he has had two other broader environmental objectives one is to limit the spread of democratic contagion i think that's the thing that has scared him most about ukraine uh and he wanted to both get one of the sources of infection but also to kind of scare other people off that and then finally i think to chip away at nato's unity and sense of purpose and he might have expected that he'd go into ukraine some people would stand up for the ukrainians the germans would say no no no nordstrom 2 and he would have fatally weakened in the lines he thinks doesn't exist and the main point i would make is he has not only failed at each of those objectives thus far i think he has set up the conditions for in a permanent defeat on all of those and in many respects what he has done has been counterproductive in particular there is no way that ukraine will ever go back to being in any way comfortable as part of a larger russian empire and he sowed the seeds of enmity that will undoubtedly last forever um and and change their orientation permanently towards the west and he has been the greatest thing to happen to nato uh in many ways since its founding there's a sense of purpose and unity and commitment there which frankly astonished me and undoubtedly astonished him so uh mike um if i could turn to you ellie talked a little bit about the political objectives can you talk a little about russian military operations so far uh and how would you characterize the russian military strategy i'll go up to the map in a second and and show some of the invasion routes and the build-up but how would you characterize russian military operations so far the strategy and any any tactics uh that you think are noteworthy sure so if there's a bigger strategic blunder in modern military history i can't think of it offhand i mean this is a colossal intelligence failure in vastly underestimating ukrainian resistance and military execution has been terrible you know this so-called shock and awe campaign as eliot rightly noted has shocked the rest of the world into rallying against russia causing previously unthinkable uh changes in defense policy in in europe and rallying the world to crater the russian russian economy um the uh ukrainian resistance in turn has awed the world and rallied it further so you know this is just hard to describe the magnitude of this blunder you know as elliott said the main effort was assault on cave to topple the government uh and then with uh a uh assault in the south and then in the northeast on harcue you know all this talk about the donbass and stuff that was really designed just to fix ukrainian forces most of which were were in the east his attack has been his main attack has been underweighted it's been piecemeal began with a bunch of missile strikes and and some air bombardment his reconnaissance elements have been captured columns have been um destroyed um it's just you know a disaster i'm throwing through so i wonder if i can just step up here um mike talked a little about the military operations uh we'll get into a little bit more detail also on kind of the current state because we're seeing massing of uh russian forces around kyiv and as well as the pounding of kharkiv and other other cities but i think the interesting thing for us and we'll get to this emily with you a little bit later as we certainly saw the build up here in the black sea and then a build-up of forces in crimea and then also the buildup essentially of forces around the ukrainian border including in areas like yelnia which will show imagery of and then we saw the joint exercises between russia and belarus which pushed forces up along the border and obviously the key element i think as we've all watched and the most important one is overthrow of the government here in kiev which is where a big chunk of that assault is we saw those forces interestingly coming through the chernobyl exclusion zone we're also seeing a big focus of the russians on kharkiv here so we saw them cross the border we've seen heavy focus on kharkiv and then we've seen them operate out of uh out of crimea into uh into the country and then out of the donetsk and luhansk area so interestingly just to highlight this one of the things actually we didn't see the russians do and mike i want to get to this a little bit later is we didn't see a major move of russian forces down south on the western flank of ukraine which means i can just change colors for a moment which means that this area here is a prime location for moving weapons and people and equipment in the russians haven't blocked any of that right now so we'll see how i mean uh how long this lasts to see if the russians attempt to interdict anything coming down but it's a free flow of anybody that wants to join the fight ukrainian truck drivers in poland we're seeing are moving into the country so i mean in that sense it's kind of an interesting development i wanted to turn to you emily and just um get a sense from you um your basic view of the ukrainians we've talked a little bit about that but what is your general sense right now about how the ukrainians including not just the military but civilians have responded well i think to mike's point to the extent that the russians have dramatically underperformed expectations the ukrainians have dramatically overperformed expectations they have fought very hard they have showed extreme bravery and some of the stories that are coming out of the fighting are inspiring you see this this mass of people in the streets to do some of the same things just all on their own the story of the the snake island sailors who were assaulted by the russian ship and the russians told them to surrender they had some choice words in response that i will not repeat here in this very formal setting but that seems to have very much inspired the ukrainian people there are stories of a lot of women stepping up to fight there was a wonderful picture the other day of a woman with an ak and you could see her beautifully painted nails with excellent trigger discipline holding holding her ak and going into the fight i think zielinski's role cannot be underestimated here we've seen real leadership true profile and courage with the things that he's done he came out i believe just yesterday and said no one will break us because we are ukrainians and that is the i think the ethos that he's trying to inspire in his people right now his initial foray here when he said uh i need ammunition not a ride to the the western offer to pull him out that i think inspired a lot of ukrainians to pick up arms and join the fight we're seeing a lot of people flow as you mentioned into ukraine to join the fight just as much as we're seeing refugees move out the latest numbers that i saw and granted these are from the ukrainian perspective and are not verified but 5700 russian personnel 29 destroyed or damaged aircraft and 198 destroyed tanks i mean that's astonishing for a military that you know is way smaller than a very determined adversary here i'm looking forward to hearing some of my colleagues talk about the the force ratios that are required to hold a piece of territory this big and whether or not an insurgency is in fact going to develop later so elliot can you take us a little bit to how we got to where we are right now particularly kind of from your perspective putin's calculations here in what ways was russia do you think emboldened by the 2000 or did it learn from the 2008 invasion of georgia 2014 activities in both crimea and then eastern ukraine the russians actually performed reasonably well in syria helping helping bashar al-assad retake most territory in the country other than idlib i mean obviously russian ground forces were not involved in any meaningful way there that was just air and maritime uh which may be actually a problem for them here but um in what ways was you know how did that influence from your perspective the russian decision now and and how was the you know what explains the timing for for why now then so i think uh first in terms of of the history i think you know he's basically gotten away with something like this uh as you've pointed out georgia crimea uh and elsewhere but where i think he there was a just a fundamental misjudgment is the scale is completely different ukraine we're talking about a country that's the size of france with 42 million people you know georgia's a small place that particular dumbass region is a lot smaller than that um and and furthermore let's remember that the previous applications of force were under conditions that were completely advantageous to the russians so in syria yes a lot of experience firing missiles but as you just pointed out they didn't have to commit substantial ground forces the the interesting question i i think they're they're probably two big explanations for why they've gotten it so wrong one is let's remember he's living in this bubble he has very very few people who dare contradict him i think when you know the historians finally get at this we'll find out that he hasn't gotten anything remotely like the kind of warnings from either the intelligence community or or indeed the military community that an american president would get um and i think he you know secondly there's a an element of intoxication with raw military power you know he's he's been building up the russian military for 20 years now and you've seen lots of pictures of him with all this advanced looking technology uh he is not a military man he's not a historic military historian so you know i think with that background you could be intoxicated by the sight of all those machines and all that technology the way governor abdel nasser was before the six day war and not realize that actually the most important thing is the will to fight as to the question why now i i suspect that uh there again several pieces to it he he certainly seems to me to have been preparing for this for a while i think we now understand better why he really has made sure to crush every civil society organization out there even things like memorial which deals with history made sure that navalny ended up in jail and and i think he felt he had to get that stuff out of the way i think he also saw both a window of opportunity and a window of danger ukraine has been moving closer and closer to the west uh he may even though he despises zelinski he may have sensed that this might be a leader who could really permanently pulled the ukraine ukraine rather off to the west and he wanted to stop that so there was a window that was closing and then i suspect he may also look he he probably feels a window closing because of his age because of other developments in the world which you know might make it less a less favorable favorable occasion to do this kind of thing and so he bided his time and launched this and you know made some spectacular misjudgments i'll just say one other thing though which is so did a lot of other people um you know he didn't anticipate the european reaction frankly i don't think most europeans anticipated the european reaction uh either yeah one other factor i'd add to that too is the departure of angela merkel he really didn't like angela merkel uh but i think he respected her and as much as she had defended the creation of nordstrom 2 she was also the kind of leader that could really rally europe he may have seen her departure as an opportunity to split europe and to split europe and us so uh i wonder if we can pull up the yelnia image for a moment uh this is uh this is an image of yelnia so um i want to turn to mike for a moment um and get his perspective on whether the us and western partners could have prevented the war but let me just talk for a second here so we watched this build up over the last couple of months this was in january uh we were looking at yelnia images in in the spring of 2021 we were looking at them over the course of the fall of 2021 as well so we've been seeing this campaign building over time and you know these weren't just defensive types of forces the armored personnel carriers as folks can see here main battle tanks towed artillery these were these were military platforms and systems that you would use for an offensive invasion force but it does raise the question uh and and and elliott made some comments that sort of got to this too is as we look back at how uh the u.s has responded to various aspects of um putin whether it's in crimea or eastern ukraine or other places or even over the last year with a build up is it your sense that that anything could have prevented this war yeah so there's a number of things we could have done going back to at least 2008 to respond more forcefully he's had a string of wins very modest wins but he has he intervened in u.s presidential elections and essentially got away with it and so and then you know he and xi jinping look at the u.s decision to withdraw from afghanistan and the way it was botched and think that we're weak and then and then you know unfortunately in my view president biden came out very early during this build up and said and ruled out any use of military force something we wouldn't have done during the cold war and uh so you know might this have been prevented and i emphasize the word might possibly but we would have had to have done a couple of things in the last few months we would have had to match his build up that you pointed out to with one of our own in eastern europe particularly combat aircraft where we have enormous advantage and then we would have had to signal to him and remind him that russia in the united states and the uk are signatories to a thing called the budapest memorandum of 1994 when ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for some form of security assurances from from the parties to respect its territorial integrity and and political sovereignty now that wasn't a collective defense treaty it didn't obligate uh any of the parties to come to ukraine's defense but the word of the united states ought to mean something when you give someone insurances and we didn't use that card at all i think um just in that point i'm i'm um i may have a slight disagreement with mike in that i'm not sure we could have deterred him at this point that is within a couple of months of the invasion and that's partly because of all the things that uh that might uh describe but it's it's also because it does seem to me his psychology has changed it's quite possibly he is maybe physiologically in a different place you know this bizarre distancing from anybody who comes to visit him you know what's that all about um you know these rambling speeches that he's given i i'm one of those people who thinks this is not really quite the same vladimir putin that we were dealing with 10 years ago i think it's somebody very different who would be much more difficult to deter because he's living in his own world and it's a it's a very dark world and he's going to act on some pretty dark impulses and you know to elliot's point there um you know russian military doctrine nato being the main enemy in the united states is a thing called escalate to de-escalate which take the territory you want and then knowing your conventional military inferiority to the west and particularly the united states threatened to escalate the conflict to end to terminate the war on your terms putin started doing that at the beginning of the conflict warning any power that intervened in any way would face consequences unlike anything in history you know a couple days later he does this theatrical thing at this table to put nuclear russia's nuclear forces on the somewhat higher level of alert and you know so he's either very concerned about his position or something else is going on as well so i agree with elliott there so i want to turn to to emily on the intelligence community and and i think this is certainly the administration as well um there has been a clear decision uh over the course of the build up and then the invasion to uh to be quite open about uh russian activity intentions uh a declassification of information including information about dates of potential russian invasion about uh targeting of kiev the capital so what strategic value do you think that transparency had and were there any drawbacks to that yeah so first to the extent that mike said that for from the russian side it was an intelligence failure it seems like from our side it was an intelligent success they've been tracking this all the way through they've been making some really tough calls and apparently informing the policy makers very well and that's the goal of any good intelligence analyst um on the point of the trade-offs and the release of intelligence to the public you know this is a challenging one because as a member of the public you're never going to see the downside and there is always a downside when you declassify a piece of intelligence and you release it what happens is the adversary looks very closely at that takes it apart piece by piece and tries to figure out where you got it from now there can be an upside to that which is that in this case i guarantee the russians were all looking at each other going who leaked who was doing bad security practices and there might have been an internal mole hunt of sorts which could work to your advantage as well if you're trying to cause chaos and disruption in moscow but usually what happens is that some insight you had into the government and their plans goes away and no policy maker is ever going to come out in public and say well you know that thing we released it turns out you know that lost us this piece of access or that piece of access looking at the things that they released they were doing it smartly they were doing it in ways that it obfuscated a little bit where it came from or it was general enough that you couldn't tell specifically where the piece of intelligence came from and i would say that in this case the upside was significant there was quite a bit of pre-bunking of what the russian plans were going to be they got information out into the public saying they're going to try this piece of disinformation they're going to try this potential false flag operation and that led the europeans in particular to get to a place where they were assuming the russians were lying and that i think was very strong for the alliance to try to get us all in the same place where there wasn't this questioning of what is true or what is not before there's a policy to answer it the old adage about a lie can make it halfway around the world what the truth is still getting its boots on this was an attempt to flip that's on its head so that the truth gets out there at the same time as the lie or maybe even before the lie um and then that leads to a stronger alliance more skepticism of what the russians are saying and i think in this case it worked out um but like i said we're never going to know what the downside actually was if i could you know one thing that that strikes me apparently i said something controversial this is fun well no it's not it's not controversial um it seems to me they're really two big advantages to this one is you get inside their heads yeah they're wondering how the hell did the americans know all that but the other thing is this helps restore american leadership you know we're still living under the shadow of uh iraq and the nuclear weapons that weren't there and uh on this one people you know saying well the americans said there's going to be an all-out invasion not a nibble here and a nibble there and they gave us the date and guess what they would tell them the truth well it also i think made it much more difficult for vladimir putin to control the narrative at that point so there's so much disinformation coming out of the kremlin and out of the svr and out of the gru and their their various uh uh social media platforms and russian propaganda russian press that this was a way of getting out ahead of where that was headed but mike you wanted to comment on that yeah so i i think the u.s intelligence community performed extraordinarily but not perfectly as you know we're all we're all human and the reason i say that is uh our intelligence on russia was obviously fantastic and used to some advantage i don't think our intelligence on uh which is much harder problem sometimes assessing the friendly side uh on the ukrainian resistance was perfect and you know if i could wish one thing i would wish these administration spokespeople would stop saying okay he was going to fall within 24 hours when it hasn't and i see no purpose to that other than you know helping putin and demoralizing the resistance that's fighting 5000 miles away while we're making these statements but so other than that i think they've been they've been perfect the intelligence challenge though is going to get tougher in a sense for the reasons elliot mentioned which is putin's wrecking russian power i don't see how he can win here at all it now becomes more dangerous but also a more intractable intelligence problem there's not a real secret you can steal there that will will give you that answer mike if i could come back and just ask you one question before going to elliot you mentioned this a little bit but i wonder if you could unpack it you mentioned earlier that we've been talking about u.s intelligence generally successes but certainly probably an inability to entirely see how the ukrainians would respond can you talk about what your senses were key at least at this point key russian intelligence failures yes so one it's the strategic failure of the cost of this early on and what would have you know just across the board ukrainian resistance the world reaction uh et cetera i mean it just i i can't think of more disastrous analysis and whoever provided it if anyone provided it um you know it's it's terrible um russian tactical military intelligence hasn't been very good as well on the battlefield their targeting is is is is not not very good and so i just think across the board from strategic to tactical they haven't done well at all yeah and i think as we all recognize uh this thing is still in the early stages so much will change over the next couple of days and weeks and months and potentially years we'll see if i can go just to one of the images the russian convoy near kiev this is the build up over the last couple of days this is that 40 plus mile convoy that is uh that has been headed toward kiev um and i wanted to turn to elliot just uh i think as many of us reacted the same way we should be nice to hit this thing targets i see mike sees targets here um elliott i wonder what your thoughts are about what is is next in store for ukrainian cities uh based on this and then more broadly and you've been tweeting about this too is what what's surprised you so far how things have gone so the first thing is uh i'd like to register a protest at the use of the word convoy a convoy is an escorted group of vehicles yes and some kind of i should have said traffic jam this is a traffic jam yeah a traffic jam is not a convoy um and you you know and there are reports of people running out of fuel and i'm sure that there are ambushes and so on going on so look i think um that you know we've been talking about the upsides which which there are but the the truth is what what has already occurred and what depends in uh in ukrainian cities and not just cities is horrific uh and i think in you know it's pretty clear that the russians will double down and they will inflict massive damage on these cities and they'll probably come close to doing to harkive which is a russian-speaking city by the way and kiev supposedly the homeland of uh you know of of russia the the kind of damage that they inflicted on aleppo and grozny and the the human suffering will be enormous and these are war crimes um and i would be completely in favor of you know having a nuremberg trials kind of response to this when when the time comes uh many surprises here um uh including some positive ones i think you know emily you mentioned the um the leadership of uh vladimir zelinski i think for me the biggest surprise is the incompetence of the russian military thus far and even if they succeed in occupying the country which i doubt they can control but even they succeed in occupying if they succeed in killing zelinski and everybody in his government and it still just will be through massive firepower but if you look at everything in logistics and intelligence as mike uh pointed out it kind of tactical competence on the battlefield that combat motivation on the part of their soldiers at combined arms at the use of air power you know their initial airstrikes against ukrainian air force were pathetic and the result is today the ukrainian air force is still flying and gaining victories you add all that up and it feels like incompetence and you know even in your field seth hybrid warfare you know we've talked about general garasimov the chief of the general staff is this master of hybrid warfare you know in every dimension they've been losing including information warfare so i i think one of the things we probably should not come out of this doing is readjusting our estimate of the russian military understanding it's very dangerous because they have a lot of firepower but that's about it that i don't know if that feels a little bit too extreme to you guys but well i mean one of the things that'll be actually interesting to me i mean we know because the soviet archives have been declassified now we can see the debates actually within the soviet military and the pull-up bureau about going into afghanistan and there were big debates within um even the soviet military about the pros and cons of sending soviet conventional forces across the border into afghanistan it'd be interesting to see now where the defense minister shoigu where gerasimov sat on the pros and cons of the invasion at least as it has played out we we don't entirely know we don't know how much of this was putin how much support he had within his inner circle but that will be interesting to watch but i wonder if i could turn to mike and just ask you know we saw the convoys we've seen the the videos uh and the uh imagery of the current attacks on kharkiv and on kiev and on other other ukrainian cities what factors are likely to lead to the survival or the collapse of the ukrainian army and then sort of what happens after that you know so the ukrainian armed forces are a couple hundred thousand of active forces and then they've mobilized this what they call territorial defense forces which are militias and volunteers of all sorts you know women making molotov cocktails and everything so they have to varying degrees now several hundred thousand people under arms of one kind or another you know michael howard talked about the forgotten dimensions of strategy a long time ago and one of the ones we didn't pay enough attention to was this social dimension or societal dimension this is showing that in in in spades i think so you know as elliott said through indiscriminate killing of civilians and and leveling cities russia might eventually russian armed forces might eventually prevail but they'll have a lot of trouble in the urban areas trying to root out these these many fighters but much of that force will survive and um and they they have no prospects of being able to occupy the country putin has said he has again you can't believe him but he said he has no intention of occupying and so you think the destruction that's already happened if we support an insurgency and i know we'll get to this in a minute russian casualties will be through the roof this will be this could be an insurgency that is bigger than our afghan one in the 1980s in terms of things we could provide them that that would really hurt russians and then if he pulls out if he installs the puppet government that government's not going to last hours i don't see how they could control the territory so again we can talk about this more in a minute but uh the transition from rig you know somewhat regular irregular hybrid warfare this is your hybrid warfare ukrainian style which has a nice uh irony to it uh and then shifting uh more toward the irregular camp but it will still have elements you know the ukrainian air forces can be reconstituted with aircraft from eastern europe is already underway turkey can supply more of these drones that are killing russian vehicles uh et cetera one of the things that struck me well there have been two things that have struck me one is the uh ukrainian use of shoulder-fired mobile launchers for um surface-air missiles which the russians aren't able to take out in part because when you can move them and hide them pretty quickly they are much more difficult for the russians to take out service-to-air missile capabilities which is an interesting lesson actually uh from from what we've seen so far the other and this gets to your point is when you look at the force to population ratios that the russians have right now in ukraine they are assuming a russian force even even even if belarus invades you're still talking about a forced population ratio of somewhere between three and four soldiers per thousand inhabitants which is really low i mean it's terrible the the numbers that the u.s had in germany around the end of the war which were critical for the post-war occupation were about 90. the numbers in the balkans were around 20 or so soldiers per thousand inhabitants this is tiny even if you're talking about some selective areas of the country so it strikes me the russians are going to have a serious problem in uh in not having enough forces once they seize areas to control them for any length of time which will get us into the insurgency discussion but before we do that we haven't really talked much about cyber emily so i'm wondering if you can talk us about how we've seen things unfold in the cyber domain and where you think things could actually go right so um setting aside the the tremendous human cost to this particular conflict it is going to be really interesting to see how cyber plays out this could be the first real conflict where cyber leads we saw the russians do some pretty concerted attacks on ukrainian critical infrastructure there was the attack on the banks that made it harder for ukrainians to pull a bunch of money out and then perhaps exit the country there was the attempt to the ddos attempts on the ukrainian government there were all kinds of efforts to undermine the ukrainians ability to function before the fight really started and i think that that is the future of warfare that you're going to see the cyber attacks leading you try to sun tzu esque subdue the enemy without fighting and then you start the actual shooting war i think phase two of this though is going to be even more interesting and is where it might actually hit home here in the united states and that is if this insurgency develops or if the sanctions on russia's economy really start to bite particularly on the banks they might see it as a proportional response to try to disrupt european and united states infrastructure including bank infrastructure critical infrastructure our fuel supplies that sort of thing their tool of choice has been cyber attacks and putin has loved the deniability of using either a independent cyber crime organization in order to carry out some of these attacks or to have a very hidden svr or gru hand so if you see the russians attempt to come after the united states or the europeans with these kind of cyber disruptions then what i think that our european allies and the biden administration are very well within their rights to hit back and then i think you will see a real test of how cyber escalation is going to work and to what extent it happens at what point does cyber escalation turn from you know a tit-for-tat against critical infrastructure to something that actually causes injury or harm to human life hospitals fuel supplies for emergency services that sort of thing and then what happens after that i think that this this is going to be um a fascinating test case that could also have some very dangerous real world effects mike do you want to come in on this i agree with everything emily said and i would just add a couple of other things you know some have been surprised that there hasn't been more cyber uh you know and cyber's a bit of a fickle thing that sometimes you just don't have the access you'd like to destroy a critical target but you do have options all the time and so a couple things i think could play out one is emily mentioned russia would likely turn to cyber in its as a weapon of first choice in its escalate to de-escalate strategy to inflict economic pain on the west and the u.s they can't you know counter the economic sanctions that are hurting russia but they can achieve economic pain through cyber means and and they may well do that and it's important that one we do our best to deter it and warn them but then hit them back if they do it's not like russia's oil and gas industry is this bastion of cyber security or other things the second thing that i think will be interesting and you know so there's a tendency to see sanctions as this free lunch that you can hurt some other power and they can't hit back that's true in some cases even though iran and others respond with terrorism or others putin will see it as an act of war the tougher the sanctions are and i hope they're as tough as possible he will respond and so you know and we have to be prepared for that the other interesting aspect is you know ukraine is a pretty sophisticated cyber actor in itself and it's mobilizing an i.t army as they call it and private hackers as well as other parts of the private sector joining in on this conflict too russia may face a global cyber war of lots of folks attacking them uh ukraine ukrainians and europeans and others and so cyber will be likely to be a big dimension of this conflict going forward so that an interesting point on that one these these independent organizations i think anonymous tried to go after yeah so putin thinks that everything we do mirrors what he does so if we have american organizations or perceived to be western organizations like anonymous take down some big piece of critical infrastructure in russia putin's going to assume that that was orchestrated by the united states government even though it wasn't i can say that very clearly to the public it wasn't right so that that escalation dynamic makes this even more unpredictable yeah well i want to turn to the the future including what to do next um and elliott one of the interesting questions for you is what your sense is of the longer term geopolitical consequences of this war globally including in europe so i guess uh you know that it all depends on what people do and uh you know you can't forecast anything but the current indications are that this leaves not only nato a lot stronger it also actually leaves the european union a lot stronger that i think is going to be one of the more interesting geopolitical uh consequences um if the germans follow through on the amount of money that they're going to pour into defense and uh chancellor uh schultz said uh 100 billion euros which is about twice the size of their annual defense budget they're going to throw that into rear armament um that's a very big deal for germany to come back as what in effect would be the major provider of armed forces on the continent that takes us to a very different world and it presumably it's accompanied by germany playing a different a different kind of role but in general you're going to see a much stronger nato you're going to see we may very well see the finns and the swedes um joining there was i think there was a poll that was done before the invasion with the majority of finns saying they wanted to join nato which was unprecedented and the swedes are talking the same way so i think you end up with a russia that is uh really becomes a pariah state we haven't really talked about that that's another thing that he's gotten and and is something of an economic wreck uh that seems to be likely as well and a much stronger nato now that the only downside to that all that i think is good uh the only downside is if it you know causes the russian government to do something really desperate and dangerous the possible upside is that is such an adverse outcome for russia that it really brings the putin era to an end and i think that's conceivable do you want to jump in on this yeah i would just underscore that that last point this is a small war with potentially major strategic consequences not only is western power increasing but russian power is being destroyed then the longer this gets goes on the more russian power will be destroyed um and then the outcome of course is still uncertain you know it depends as eliot rightly said on what we do and what others do but if you look at this new era of great power competition china is watching this closely and that's why it's so imperative that putin fail in ukraine there may be ways to terminate this quickly if he comes to his senses and cuts his losses because the losses are only going to grow but if he were to succeed it will embolden china to do more down the road and if he fails miserably it will have a deterrent effect i think that the same could happen to them and so i think there's huge geopolitical consequences then i would add the final point that putin for the first time in 22 years has really placed his continued rule at risk and that's where if he's got any rationality left before he loses this grip on this police state that he's created you better find a way out of this if i could add just one more thing to that um there's a historical pattern as well and that is the russian state doesn't do well when it has unsuccessful unpopular wars so you think the rest of the japanese war which led to a kind of a quasi-democratic revolution the afghan war which our friend mike orchestrated which which we'll get to in a moment um you know in some ways brought down the soviet union uh as well as uh you know ending communism uh more broadly it's a pattern that goes back you can say similar things about the crimean war and so forth so and i'm sure that putin is aware of that and i think russians are aware of that and it may very well be a pattern that gets played out again elliot do you see this possibility of the war expanding into nato or you see what what does that look like for you i think um you know as you as you pointed out in your introduction you know that western border particularly with poland but also there's romania slovakia and hungary but particularly with poland that's the conduit for really very substantial quantities of arms uh and volunteers flowing into uh ukraine they'll probably also they'll be wounded you know insurgents coming back in the other direction there'll be all sorts of things going on a desperate putin may very well decide okay i'm going to once again roll the iron dice not invade poland because i don't think they would actually do all that well against the polish army but what they might do is okay we'll launch a cruise missile strike at a transshipment point for javelins and stingers and things of that nature and and the calculation would be not that you could physically interdict it would be just one case but that the polls would say article five uh attack against one is an attack against all they invoke nato support and the hope on putin's side would be that other nato members would go well not so fast maybe we should be less forward-leaning and so on that would not i think be the reaction i think actually article 5 would would work but i think that's one of the ways in which i can very much imagine this um expanding yeah and to add to that um the you know we we basically have two approaches here to support the ukrainians an indirect approach insurgency and sanctions or a direct approach if things got too horrific where we would actually use u.s and allied air power to stop the slaughter seems like we're going down the indirect path right now just as with sanctions that really have teeth with if this insurgency has teeth which all prospects looks like it will putin is very likely to strike out against that and maybe combine it with cyber or something else to try to escalate to de-escalate again and the challenge for us will be you know as elliott said that okay you take one loss you don't get cowed into um into continuing uh um to support so mike and then i want to go to emily after this because she's written on this as well but i'll start with you you have the unusual experience here of having been involved in orchestrating one of the most successful anti-soviet we can have anti-russian insurgencies ever in afghanistan so based on that um how do you assess the prospects for the ukrainians against occupying russian and even bella russian if they come across the border forces and what is that what does that insurgency look like sure so one you have enormous advantages early on in terms of uh the mobilization of the ukrainian population and the will to fight and you know for the successful conditions for an insurgency much as we had in afghanistan you know you need nearby states as we had in pakistan that will provide safe haven areas they may not be perfectly safe but where you can resupply train uh uh et cetera recover um you nee an insurgency does much better when it has an external sponsor behind it you have the united states and the west doing that when it has favorable terrain you have the carpathian mountains as elia talked about from poland down to romania most nationalist part of ukraine is western ukraine in that area so that ukraine has all the conditions going for it and we can supply them with weapons much faster we're already you know in afghanistan for the first five years of the war we responded very rapidly within 10 days we had weapons in the afghan resistance hands after the soviet invasion but for the first five years of the war our policy goal was just to impose as much of a cost on the soviets as we could with no prospect that we thought we could win that changed at the beginning of president reagan's second term where we decided to escalate rather dramatically with a lot of help from congress who gave us money we didn't ask for originally and then asked for more after that when we came to our senses and within a year of this dual escalation between gorbachev going for broke in 1985 one final push for victory and we were escalating at the same time we won that battle of the surges and by february 1986 gorbachev was looking for the exit uh in in terms of just the quantity of weapons and the sophistication of weapons and and everything else and that same thing can be done again in ukraine and more we're already seeing lots of stinger missiles we didn't do that until 1986. so what lessons would i take from that other than the conditions are very ripe first when your opponent makes a major blunder like this take advantage of it you know that's what we did in reagan's second term with very good strategic consequences and then if they want a way out help them get out but the second is is as in any war don't prolong it unnecessarily don't do gradual gradualism is a bad idea in almost any dimension of strategy whether it's air power or sanctions or insurgency so get to the get to the point right away insurgents get war weary when i took over the afghan program in 1984 one of my first challenges was to resuscitate them to some extent after five years of war and really get them back into the fight in a in a bigger fight a third lesson is that if we go down the covert action route rather than the overt route which i suspect we would um the important part of covert action is the action part not the covert part right the most successful programs we have in our history afghanistan being one our counterterrorism campaigns against al qaeda being another are the largest the most overt and why is that because you get economies of scale you're you know and you still have a veneer of covertness but it's you're not emphasizing secrecy over action uh and that's that's the important part here so emily this brings me to you and then we'll wrap up in a second um uh you've written about insurgency as well you've got the interesting perspective of working at cia you've worked on the hill you've actually worked at the white house on the national security council so what is your sense about what what the u.s should be doing right now along the lines of what mike has outlined what should we be thinking strategically operationally tactically providing assistance what should we be doing right so from the intelligence perspective what mike said earlier about how it's only going to get harder to collect intelligence in this circumstance we have to prepare for that we need to be developing networks throughout ukraine that can reliably report on what's actually going on on the ground we need to be mapping the human terrain figuring out you know if there is an insurgency that develops who's going to be leading it it might not be the same people who are in charge of the ukrainian army it might be people who are just local leaders of some ilk who are able to inspire their people to fight who are those people we need to know right now right now before the ukrainian army starts to get cut off before lots of territory gets lost we need to be pre-positioning a lot of supplies when it's easy to get it in and it's not escalatory to get it in things that you know from medical supplies to weaponry to secure calms this particular conflict secure comms is going to be absolutely critical so those are those are some of the tactical things that i would be recommending we do from an intelligence standpoint and also from a insurgency slash covert action standpoint which by the way i could listen to my talk about all day because his work was in my head of course when i was writing these pieces um from a strategic point though i would really be looking at the long-term messaging strategy and what that means for the nato alliance what that means for the eu what that means for the american people in the first and we're we're on day what seven six you know the upsurge of support for the ukrainians has been absolutely tremendous it's not gonna last at this high level forever and i suspect i hate to say it but i suspect that this war is going to grind on at some point the biden administration is going to run out of sanctions that it can feasibly put on russia so then what do you do do you message that you're done and you're just going to hold what you got or do you message that you're going to be looking for other ways to exert pressure on putin and start coming up with some very creative options but either way it's not going to continue at the same pace and the sanctions that we've put in place on russia are unprecedented they're gonna have global economic effects that we can't anticipate right now so how do you communicate to the european alliance and to the american people that this may come back at us and we need to be ready for that and we need to hold our ground if we're going to push back against a tyrant who may very well not be completely within his senses so thinking about what the strategy is for nato for six months from now for a year from now for two years from now and thinking about how we can support the ukrainian people in what very well could be an eight to ten year fight is what we need to be thinking about next yeah i was going to give you the last question on the subject elliot so although mike can two figure it if he wants but um i mean what what should we be doing uh so i first you know i've agreed with everything i've uh heard which is uh unusual but i think the you know the two points that were just made first by uh by emily and then before that by mike are so essential one is that this will be a long haul and we have to be prepared for the long haul we have to be thinking that way but the other thing is mike's point about moving out with at scale and with a sense of urgency you know if you are are we doing that right now i don't have that sense yet i mean i think who knows who who knows what's happening covertly and so on but i think it would be really helpful if you had some really big aid packages passed by congress if you know among nothing's just for everybody's morale we said yeah we're going to be in this big time supporting the ukrainian military supporting the ukrainian people to include giving people a sense of long-term prospects for reconstruction aid and thing things of that nature that the if there is a danger here it is the danger that our attention will shift and the people say well everything is all about china so yeah maybe some low level of aid to these guys but really what's important is the indo-pacific i um i think that would be misplaced or or the president's domestic agenda um you know his state of the union speech tonight is going to be very important and i very much hope that he he signals duration scale and urgency those strike me as the most important things we can be doing yeah and if we could you know for one thing if we could just stop importing 600 000 barrels a day of russian gas or oil that would be a good start yeah yeah well uh we have covered a lot of terrain um thanks to everyone for great questions that that you uh put in i really appreciate the thoughts here uh from elliot from mike and from emily uh and thanks to you for for for the questions that uh that you asked along the way this one is not over i think we can safely say but i think we've laid out a range of issues on how we got here where we are and where we need to go so thanks for for joining us today thank you sir thank you [Music] you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

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Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics

Id: pLWYN1jkmXc

Length: 57min 33sec (3453 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022