Highlights from Foreign Affairs interview with General Mark Milley
Amazingly interesting stuff about military strategy, the Ukraine war and China/Russia/US relations
This is so good I decided to veer off my most common topics to bring you some highlights of a podcast interview I listened to today on military stuff, the Ukraine war and the tri-polar world we live in.
The full transcript (and a link to the episode) can be found here. The quotes were lightly edited for clarity and the most important point highlighted in bold by me, with no change in meaning.
On the Ukraine war
On what happened in the Ukraine war up to date:
... when the Russians decided to invade, they had strategic objectives: to collapse the Zelensky government; capture the capital of Kyiv, to do that relatively quickly; advance from the Russian border all the way to Dnipro River, do that in a short amount of time, four to six weeks, perhaps; and then also to cut off Ukraine’s access to the sea, to the Sea of Azov, by securing Kherson and Odessa... the invasion started on the 24th of February—in very short order, Russia fell short of their strategic objectives, really within about a month or so. And the Russians could not militarily achieve what they set out to do.
And then at the end of March, maybe beginning of April, Putin readjusts and resets his strategic objectives. And then he says, "I’m just going to limit my objectives to the southern border, the southern provinces of Ukraine, and to consolidate power in Donbas, secure the Crimea," and so on. So he takes his entire military, shifts them further to the south and to the east. And then he launches a second set of what I would call operational objectives—and he failed there as well.
So you’ve got essentially a situation along a frontline that extends [from] Washington, D.C. to Atlanta... It’s quite a ways. And that front line hasn’t changed hands. It’s essentially been stalemated. And then the Ukrainians asked us for help to build up their force so that they had the capability of conducting offensive operations with combined arms maneuver with heavy forces, mechanized armor and infantry. We’ve done that
Ukraine is now more prepared than ever to either defend against Russia or attack it:
What I will say is that over the last several months, the Ukrainians have asked us for assistance, military assistance, to help them, to train, to man, to equip their forces. Specifically about nine brigades worth of combined arms, armor, and infantry type forces. Also, there’s some light infantry, ranger type units, that we helped train. And I say we—I mean NATO, all of the European partners.
So I would tell you that the Ukrainians right now have a capability to attack and they also have a capability to defend that's significantly enhanced from what they were just a year ago for conventional operations. So they can either do attack or defense. So I don’t want to suggest that they may or may not conduct an offensive operation in the coming weeks. That’ll be up to them. They’ve got a significant amount of planning and coordination and all of that to do, if they were to do an offensive operation. But they’re prepared to do offense or defense.
On prognostics for the war:
How does it end? Let’s just say for the sake of argument that there is an offensive... I think that it’s fair to say, if there were an offensive, that there’s a possibility of a variety of outcomes. Clearly one of those outcomes could achieve significant success and collapse the Russian frontline across the board... Then there’s a possibility of partial success; There’s a possibility of limited success; There’s a possibility of no success. Then the opposite is true—maybe the Ukrainians are going to do a defensive operation, and the Russians would have a great challenge mounting an offensive operation.
I do think, though, that the probability of either side achieving their political objectives—war is about politics through the sole use of military means—I think that’s going to be very difficult, very challenging. And frankly, I don’t think the probability of that is likely in this year.
And I think that rational folks, as part of the Russian decision-making process, will conclude, I believe over either months or a year or two, that the cost exceeds the benefit, and it’ll be time to do something, at least from a negotiating standpoint. I don’t know when Putin will be ready to do that—but at a certain point, if he’s rational, he needs to do that... They’re going to have to figure out [what they need to do to realize they need to negotiate] because they’re not going to win.
Escalation (towards direct (and potentially nuclear) conflict):
I think that it’s in everyone’s interests not to escalate. Russia does not want a war with NATO or the United States, and NATO and the United States don’t want a war with Russia. So it’s in everyone’s interests in that regard, and Ukraine certainly doesn’t want that scale of war in its territory. So it’s in everyone’s interests not to escalate. Having said that, the possibility of escalation is very real. Wars are highly emotional; there’s a tremendous amount of fear, there’s pride, there’s interest, as Thucydides would tell us.
On the military consequences of a tri-polar world:
What we have to be conscious of, and careful of, is not to drive China and Russia close together in a military sense.
There’s going to be relations between countries, so competition’s not the issue here. The issue is conflict and war. So we want to make sure that Russia and China don’t form some sort of geostrategic, political, military alliance against the United States. We’ve seen some economic assistance; not strong in terms of the military piece of this. Whatever exercises they do are small, relatively inconsequential. In terms of military support and lethal support to Russia, nothing really significant yet. The Russians have asked, for sure; they’re asking a lot of countries for ammunition and so on...
President Xi, I would argue that he—very, very tough guy, hard guy, consummate realist. Very ruthless, very ruthless; but they’re very realist in the sense that they are keenly aware of cost, benefit, and risk, and they too do not want outright armed conflict with the United States. They recognize—the Chinese do—how powerful the United States is. Despite what people may say out there, the Chinese are fully aware of how powerful the United States is. And so they’re not looking for that kind of armed conflict either. They want to achieve their national objectives, but they want to actually do it without armed conflict.
On China and a potential attack on Taiwan:
An invasion of Taiwan by China is not going to look like an invasion, necessarily, of Ukraine by Russia. The fundamentals are different, in the sense that—just the terrain and the weather, it’s obvious. You’ve got a landlocked country of Ukraine, with a land border with Russia.
In order to attack Taiwan, they would have to mount an amphibious invasion combined with paratroopers and air assault, rotary wing helicopters, missiles, all the prep fires that would go into that; they’d have to isolate beachheads and then have to have the amphibious lift in order to do that; and cross basically a hundred miles of water, which is challenging in and of itself. Then they’d have to ensure that the subsurface of the water was secure, as well, from submarine attack. They’d have to clear mines, clear beaches, they’d have to go in and essentially attack and seize an urban area that’s about three and a half million people, in a country that’s very mountainous and lends itself to the defense.
Think about Normandy. At Normandy, the United States and Britain put about 120,000 troops ashore—plus they dropped in three airborne divisions the night before, and they put about 120,000 troops on the beach, I think before noon or by the afternoon; and then there were follow-on troops in the days afterward. That military that landed at Normandy had already done the invasions of North Africa, had done the invasion of Sicily, had done the amphibious operations in Italy, and they had the benefit of the lessons learned of, I don’t know, probably a hundred or so amphibious operations in the Pacific during World War II. And they were led by experienced, seasoned leaders that were hitting the beach, et cetera.
We need to deter armed conflict. And how do you deter? We know through history that the way to deter is to have a very, very strong, capable, multi-domain military, and ensure that your opponent knows that you have that capability, that that capability is overwhelming, knows that you have the will to use it, and you’ve communicated that to them. So what we need to do is make sure the United States military is not only just a little bit better, but a lot better, it’s overwhelmingly better than the Chinese military—to make sure that they know it and that we have the will to use it in the event of a crisis.
I kind of fall back to, you know, the old saying from Teddy Roosevelt’s time, right, Which is, you know, speak softly, carry a big stick, that sort of thing.
I think we should develop our military to such a—modernize our military to such a degree that it is overwhelmingly obvious to the Chinese that they cannot defeat it.
On contemporary warfare and the fact that we're at a pivotal moment
I think we’re in a pivot point in terms of what I’ve referred to in the past as the character of war. You’ve got the nature of war and you’ve got the character of war. The nature of war, arguably, is immutable. War is politics. That war involves fear and friction, uncertainty, chance—that’s the realm of the nature of war. And as long as humans are involved in war, then I would say those fundamentals about the nature of war—probably true. So the nature of war arguably doesn’t change. But the character of war changes frequently... it refers to the tactics, the techniques, the procedures, the organization, the weapons, et cetera. And the character of war changes often; every time you get a software upgrade, technically the character of war has changed somehow.
The character of war only changes fundamentally once in a while. Think the development of the wheel, and then all of a sudden you’ve got chariots. Think of putting a bit in a horse’s mouth, and now you have the development of cavalry. Think about putting lands and grooves inside a metal tube and you go from a musket to a rifle. The biggest fundamental change that is commonly cited historically is between World War I and War War II, where you get the introduction of three technologies—the airplane; mechanization, the wheeled and tracked vehicles; and then those are linked together through wireless communications, through radio.
I would argue that in today’s world, we are undergoing the most fundamental change in the character of war ever in recorded history, and it’s primarily being driven by technology. So what are some of those technologies? Well, first of all, you’ve got precision munitions and you’ve got ubiquitous sensors. So we can conduct long-range precision fires with greater accuracy, at greater range, than at any time in human history, period.
You’ve also got fundamental change happening in the ability to see. So anyone who wears a Fitbit or GPS watch or runs around an iPhone—that’s a sensor. You know, it’s a means of communication for most people, and some track your health, I guess. But for other people it might be a sensor, a tracker. So we have an ability to sense and see the environment, and to pick up signals because there’s so much electronic signals in the environment. We have the ability—not just we, Russians, Chinese, et cetera—have the ability to see and sense that environment like never before. You can go on Google Earth today and get mapped data and see satellite imagery that was only available to the world’s most advanced militaries as late as, like, five years ago, 10 years ago. So our ability to sense the environment is incredible.
So the ability to see, and the ability to shoot, and shoot at range with accuracy, never before like it is today—just those two fundamentals in and of themselves augur a change in the fundamental character of war.
You could potentially—potentially—see artificial intelligence and quantum computing combined with robotics, become a dominant factor in the conduct of war. Combine that with the domains of cyber and space. There’s a lot of things happening undersea, and there’s about 20 other technologies that I won’t go over. But you’ve got this convergence of technologies that is driving, fundamentally driving, significant change in civil society, in human relationship to work, for example, our relationship to each other.
And there’s zero doubt in my mind that that’s going to have a huge impact on the conduct of military operations in the future. And just like in the past, the country that optimizes those technologies for the conduct of warfare—that country is going to have a decisive advantage, at least at the beginning and the opening shots of the next war. I want that country to be the United States.