Free tip for Putin: “Make peace, fool”

As Vladimir Putin embarks on his Plan B — a massive military operation to try to seize at least one small mouthful of eastern Ukraine to justify his ill-fated war — I thought: Who could give him the best advice right now? I decided on one of the leading professors of great strategy in the United States, John Arquilla, recently retired as a distinguished professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Graduate School. When I called Arquilla and asked him what he would say to Putin today, he didn't hesitate: “I would say, 'Make peace, you fool. '”

This is also known as the first rule of holes: when you're in one, stop digging.

Arquilla didn't get his phrase out of nowhere. After the D-Day landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944, it quickly became clear that the Germans could not contain the Allied beachhead. So after a German counterattack near Caen failed on 1 July, the top German commander on that front, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, telephoned Berlin to report the debacle to Army Chief of Staff Wilhelm Keitel, who asked him: “What do we do? ” - to which von Rundstedt famously replied: “Make peace, you fools! What else can you do? ”

The next day, von Rundstedt was removed from office — not unlike what Putin just did, bringing in a new high-ranking general, one who helped crush the opposition movement in Syria with unbridled brutality — to lead Phase 2 of his war. This did not work for the Germans, and without making any predictions, Arquilla explained why he believed that Putin's army could also encounter very tough resistance from the underequipped and unarmed Ukrainians in this new phase.

It begins, he argued, with everything that is new in this war between Ukraine and Russia: “In many respects, this war is the Spanish Civil War of our era. In that war, many weapons - such as the Stuka dive bombers and the Panzer tanks - were tested by the Germans, and the Allies also learned things, before World War II. The same thing is being done in Ukraine as far as the new generation war is concerned.”

Arquilla recently published a book on the next-generation war, “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare”.

“In that book, I outline the three new rules of war, which I am seeing being used by Ukrainians,” he explained. “The first is that many and little ones beat big and heavy. Ukrainians are operating in squadron units armed with intelligent weapons, and they are capable of breaking up much larger formations and attacking slow, noisy helicopters and so on. So, although they are outnumbered by the Russians, Ukrainians have many, many more units of action, usually between eight and ten soldiers.”

Arquilla said that these small Ukrainian units armed with precision intelligent weapons, such as killer drones, anti-aircraft weapons and anti-tank light weapons, “can wipe out the much larger and better-armed Russians' tank units.”

The second rule of modern warfare taking place in Ukraine, he said, “is that finding always surpasses flanking. If you can locate the enemy first, you can eliminate them. And especially if the enemy is made up of a few large units, such as a 40-mile-long convoy of tanks and armored personnel carriers, you are going to crush them with your small squadrons, without having to flank them with a force of equal size.”

I asked Arquilla why Ukrainians are so good at finding. (I guess they're getting some recognition aid from NATO.)

“Ukrainians are making very good use of small drones, particularly the Turks, which are tremendous,” Arquilla said. But it is their human sensors - the informal body of Ukrainian observers - that are devastating the Russians. Grandmothers with iPhones can outperform satellites.

“The Ukrainian observer corps is made up of babushkas and children and anyone else who has a smartphone,” he said. “And they've been calling to find out where the Russian units are and where they're moving. So Ukrainian forces have this great advantage to find the Russians in this great country, and that is giving their small units with “smart weapons” actionable intelligence in real time.

The third rule of the new age war being fought in Ukraine, Arquilla said, is that “the swarm always beats the wave.” He explained: “War is no longer just a numbers game. You don't need big numbers to swarm your opponent with a bunch of small smart weapons. I am sure you have seen some of the videos of those Russian tanks and columns, in which suddenly one tank is removed in the front and another in the rear, so that the Russians cannot maneuver, and then they are simply eliminated.”

Since this is the next phase of the war and the Russians are not stupid, they will surely adjust in phase 2, right?

The Russians will continue to use some massive bombardments, Arquilla argued, “and they will be even less restrained in doing so in eastern Ukraine than they have been on their western territory. But the debris makes it more difficult to conquer. Let's remember Stalingrad.” The Nazis bombed Stalingrad until it was left in the Stone Age in World War II, but then they had to try to move through the rubble in small units to secure it and were unable to do so.

So he expects the Russians to adjust some tactics. “The Russians have demonstrated a great ability to learn and adapt,” Arquilla said. “In the first winter war against the Finns - from 1939 to 1940 - the same thing happened to the Russians when they first invaded Finland. The Finns beat them up using these small-team tactics. The Russians retreated, reorganized and then came back smarter and ended up overwhelming the opponent. I understand that the Russians have been activating their naval infantry units more, which are used to operating in smaller teams.” Therefore, it is to be expected that in the next phase they will be more loaded with infantry and fewer tanks.

That said, he added, Ukrainians “should continue to have an advantage when it comes to searching, and they are already used to operating in such small units. The Russians are much more centralized. One of the reasons why so many generals have been killed is that, on a tactical level, they don't have people trained to make those quick decisions in a shootout; only general officers can do it, so they had to come to the front and do things that lieutenants and sergeants in the army American do habitually.”

One of the most intriguing aspects of the conflict in Ukraine is Russia's apparent absence of cyberwar. “The Russians used cyberspace-based attack tools to disrupt Ukrainian command and control, but they had little global effect due to the highly decentralized operations of the regular defense forces and the Ukrainian militia,” Arquilla explained.

At the same time, the Russians seem reluctant to launch a major cyberattack on the US infrastructure, and against the other NATO countries that help Ukraine, for fear that doing so now will allow NATO to learn about Russia's most advanced cyber tools and create defenses against them. Russia needs to save its cyberweapons for a great war with the West. So, Arquilla observed, “it may be that when it comes to strategic cyberwarfare, the prospect of all parties of facing assured mutual interruption may actually produce a kind of cyberdeterrence.”

As for Russia's vaunted air superiority, Arquilla said, “We have already seen how vulnerable its planes and helicopters are to the Stingers. This will not change in the next phase of the war.”

In short, Arquilla said, “I am not saying that the Russians are going to be expelled from eastern Ukraine. I am trying to answer the question: Why have Ukrainians done so well? And it's because they have applied all these new rules of modern warfare.”

And as they will surely continue to do so, a new round of long, terrible and mutually destructive war is predicted, in which neither side is likely to be able to deliver a coup de grace. After that, who knows?

I keep hoping that Putin's fool will finally seek a dirty, face-saving agreement, involving a Russian withdrawal, some kind of independent status for the more pro-Russian eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk and that Ukraine will not be allowed to enter NATO, but that Kiev will be given the green light to enter the European Union, together with security guarantees against another Russian invasion.

I hope it happens soon.

“The longer the fighting lasts, the tougher the Ukrainian resistance, thanks to the forms of war in which they pioneer, the greater the risk of escalation,” says Arquilla. “But Putin has cowed Russian civil society into subjugation. And it is unlikely that the Russian military, so embarrassed by his relative bad performance, will turn against him. Therefore, you probably think that you are not under time pressure to descale.”

And so, ladies and gentlemen, is how small wars turn into big wars.

“I recently reread Barbara Tuchman's 'The Arms of August'” -about how the great powers stumbled in World War I- said Arquilla. “It's a cautionary story that is still relevant.”

(C) The New York Times.-

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