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Ukraine Invasion Day 660: air-launched ballistic missiles [1]

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Date: 2023-12-14  

The US has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think. As Americans consider the costs of continuing to help Ukraine fight the Russians in the coming years, they deserve a careful consideration of the costs of allowing Russia to win.

Russia has launched at least 9 Kinzhal Air-Launched Ballistic Missiles in the past two hours at Ukraine 🇺🇦 5 on Starokostyantyniv 2 on Rivne 1-2 on Kyiv 0-1 more on the Khmelnytskyi Region Russia has 80-90 Kinzhals in stock and is estimated to make 5 per month pic.twitter.com/DbvVIcYbz8

The United States has a much higher stake in Russia's war on Ukraine than most people think. A Russian conquest of all of Ukraine is by no means impossible if the United States cuts off all military assistance and Europe follows suit. Such an outcome would bring a battered but triumphant Russian army right up to NATO’s border from the Black Sea to the Arctic Ocean. The Ukrainian military with Western support has destroyed nearly 90% of the Russian army that invaded in February 2022 according to US intelligence sources, but the Russians have replaced those manpower losses and are ramping up their industrial base to make good their material losses at a rate much faster than their pre-war capacity had permitted.[1]

A victorious Russian army at the end of this war will be combat experienced and considerably larger than the pre-2022 Russian land forces. The Russian economy will gradually recover as sanctions inevitably erode and Moscow develops ways to circumvent or mitigate those that remain. Over time it will replace its equipment and rebuild its coherence, drawing on a wealth of hard-won experience fighting mechanized warfare. It will bring with it advanced air defense systems that only American stealth aircraft—badly needed to deter and confront China—can reliably penetrate. Russia can pose a major conventional military threat to NATO for the first time since the 1990s in a timeframe set to a considerable extent by how much the Kremlin invests in its military. Since Moscow has already committed to an ambitious post-war military expansion program the US cannot be confident that the timeframe will be very long.[2]

The overall military potential of the United States and its NATO allies is so much greater than that of Russia that there is no reason to doubt the West’s ability to defeat any conceivable Russian military even assuming that Russia fully absorbs Ukraine and Belarus. But as Americans consider the costs of continuing to help Ukraine fight the Russians in the coming years, they deserve a careful consideration of the costs of allowing Russia to win. Those costs are much higher than most people imagine.

understandingwar.org/...

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