Edward Luttwalk doesn’t seem to grasp that NATO will be defeated even faster, and more catastrophically, than its Ukrainian proxies were. Because it won’t be a restrained special military operation limited to the front, but rather full-blown war.
NATO nations can only forestall an inevitable loss to Russian forces in Ukraine by deploying their troops to the former Soviet republic, a former adviser to the US military has claimed.
“The arithmetic of this is inescapable: NATO countries will soon have to send soldiers to Ukraine, or else accept catastrophic defeat,” military strategist Edward Luttwak wrote in an oped published on Thursday by the British online media outlet UnHerd. “The British and French, along with the Nordic countries, are already quietly preparing to send troops – both small elite units and logistics and support personnel – who can remain far from the front.”
The conflict can’t be won without direct troop deployments because regardless of the quantity and quality of weapons sent to Kiev, Ukrainian forces are too outnumbered by the Russians, Luttwak argued.
These older military strategists simply don’t understand the ways in which technology has changed the operational and logistical elements. Any NATO troops entering Ukraine will be very nearly as vulnerable “far from the front” as they are on the front itself, especially since Russia will be free to fully utilize its air superiority, the first consequences of which have only recently begun to make themselves felt.