Top secret Pentagon documents posted on several social media sites last week reveal a critical shortage of air defense weapons in the Ukrainian military that, unless reversed, could see the Ukrainian ground forces left wide open to air attacks by early summer.
The Biden administration is rushing $2.6 billion in top-of-the-line American-made air defense weaponry to Ukraine, but it may arrive too late. Ukraine uses Russian-made SA-10s and SA-11s for 89% of its air defense over 20,000 feet. The SA-11s have already been depleted, and Ukraine will run out of SA-10s by early May. David Ignatius quotes the documents, writing that other systems “are unable to match the Russian volume” of attacks, and the shortage is so severe that “multiple mitigating options must be simultaneously pursued.”
If Ukraine can’t fill the gap, its ground forces will be at the mercy of Russian air attacks, which would make it nearly impossible to mass forces for any kind of offense this spring.
Since the documents were posted last week, the question of who leaked them and for what purpose have been the most critical queries to answer. Ignatius reports that a consensus is forming around the idea that the leaks were a Russian intelligence operation to expose Ukrainian weakness to the American and European public.
Were these documents disclosed by the Russians to expose Ukrainian weakness and shatter morale, as seems most likely to the analysts I contacted? Or were they actually disseminated by Ukraine, as some Russian bloggers appear to believe, in a plot to make the Kremlin think that Ukraine is weak and thereby disguise its true strengths in advance of a planned spring counteroffensive?
We’re in Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors” here. What matters, as he observed, is that you know what’s accurate and what is a manipulated reflection. Though a few documents appear to have been doctored, an administration official told me Monday: “We’re still examining them, but at first glance, this appears to be real.”
The documents certainly show that the war is not going as well as the Biden administration has been claiming. Losses are extremely heavy on both sides, and, while Russia, as the attacking force, is suffering more casualties, neither side will be able to maintain this level of casualties for long.
And as much weaponry the West has been shoveling to Ukraine, the startling fact is that it’s not nearly enough.
Second, the West’s “arsenal of democracy” isn’t close to matching Ukraine’s needs. In theory, logistics should be Ukraine’s great advantage against a Russia facing what were supposed to be “crippling” sanctions. But there’s a bad mismatch between Ukraine’s expenditure of missiles and ammunition and the West’s supplies. Partly that’s a result of the Ukrainians firing too much ammunition, but the documents describe desperate efforts to persuade nations such as South Korea and Israel to sell lethal weapons to Ukraine.
This ought to be the trump card for the United States. In World War II, the United States converted manufacturing plants across the country to make tanks, planes and aircraft carriers that simply overwhelmed Japan and Germany. No similar mobilization has taken place this time. Why not? Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has met several times with defense contractors, but why hasn’t President Biden appointed the equivalent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board?
Ignatius is a little behind the times. American industries are globalized, and the idea that manufacturing plants across the country can be refit to make modern jet fighters or tanks is just not possible. But even if it was, Biden doesn’t want to alarm American voters — or Russian generals — by bringing the U.S. to a total war footing.
Biden is at least smart enough to know that the American people would take a dim view of the president doing much more than he is now in Ukraine. For that reason — and the fact that Republicans are readying investigations into where all this Ukraine aid has been going — Biden will be forced to reduce the U.S. commitment to Ukraine over the next few months.
