Ukrainian brains are beating Russian brawn
Donald Trump’s plan for defending the coast from hurricanes like Ian was to nuke them. His plan for dealing with critics? “Knock the crap out of them.” Montana’s Greg Gianforte dealt with reporters he disliked by body slamming them. Gianforte, now the state’s governor, is Trump’s kind of guy. Fox News host Tucker Carlson believes real men tan their balls.
The Guardian’s Sam Wolfson observed:
It’s no surprise to see Fox News suggest that the answer to all of mankind’s problems are testosterone related. The channel is heavily invested in the idea that a decrease in testosterone is making men more liberal and less masculine, and many of its remaining advertisers sell pills that promise to increase men’s testosterone’s levels.
Is the answer to a complex world’s problems really less reasoning and more “knock the crap out of them”? For those who see it in black and white and cannot navigate subtlety, yes. But does that work worth a damn?
Phillips Payson O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, argues that Ukraine’s success against Russian invaders demonstrates brute force is not the answer. O’Brien is the author of “How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II.”
O’Brien derides Carlson’s take in The Atlantic:
By promoting diversity and inclusion, he insisted, military leaders were destroying American armed forces, supposedly the last great bastion of merit in the country. More recently, Carlson has complained that America’s armed forces are becoming “more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore,” just as China’s are “more masculine.”
Yet Ukraine manages to hold its own against what was thought, until recently, the second most powerful military in the world:
The success of the Ukrainian military over the past few months, along with the evolution of the Ukrainian state itself toward a more tolerant, more liberal norm, reveals what makes a better army in the modern world. Brains mean more than brawn, and adaptability means more than mindless aggression. Openness to new ideas and new equipment, along with the ability to learn quickly, is far more important than a simple desire to kill.
From the moment the Russian military crossed the border, the Ukrainians have outfought it, revealing it to be inflexible and intellectually vapid. Indeed when confronted with a Ukrainian military that was everything it was not—smart, adaptable, and willing to learn—the Russian army could only fall back on slow, massed firepower. The Battle of the Donbas, the war’s longest engagement, which started in late April and is still under way, exposed the Russian army at its worst. For months, it directed the bulk of personnel and equipment toward the center of a battle line running approximately from Izyum to Donetsk. Instead of breaking through Ukrainian lines and sending armored forces streaking forward rapidly, as many analysts had predicted, the Russian army opted to make painfully slow, incremental advances, by simply blasting the area directly in front of it. The plan seemed to be to render the area uninhabitable by Ukrainians, which would allow the Russians to advance intermittently into the vacuum. This was heavy-firepower, low-intelligence warfare on a grand scale, which resulted in strategically meaningless advances secured at the cost of unsustainably high Russian casualties. And in recent weeks, the Ukrainians have retaken much of the territory that Russia managed to seize at the start of the battle—and more.
I struggle to think of another case in the past 100 years when a major military power has performed as poorly against an adversary it was heavily favored to defeat. The supposedly second-strongest army in the world, with its martial spirit, brilliant doctrines, and advanced equipment, was thwarted and is now being pushed back by a Ukrainian military whose prospects most outsiders had dismissed before the war.
This phenomenon is not unfamiliar. I attended a small, upscale liberal arts university. They had a football program, fine, but not like more muscular ones in big schools. I recall one of our quarterbacks was a straight-A chemistry major. On occasion, we would play those larger teams, ones with players a head taller than our scholar-athletes. Ours held their own, sometimes even defeating teams with game plans based on brute force. Expected to lose and with nothing to prove, our guys played with their heads and performed over their heads.
This is what happened in Europe during World War II, argues O’Brien. English and U.S. forces “confronted with an overwhelming majority of German arms, planes, and ammunition” nonetheless “overcame brute force” by being “the most militarily skillful and adaptable.”
My late father-in-law was front-line infantry during that war. He remarked that German troops often abandoned their vehicles when they broke down. For Americans accustomed to tinkering with the family car or tractor back home, he said, it was a point of pride (masculine pride, if you like), to keep theirs running even if it took shoelaces, ballpoint pen springs, bubblegum, and ingenuity.
Brute force was not even the way to win a war back then:
The U.K., even though it fought around the world from 1939 to 1945, lost only 384,000 soldiers in combat. The U.S. lost even fewer, suffering approximately 290,000 battle deaths. The German armed forces, by contrast, lost more than 4 million soldiers.
Ukraine is proving the more adaptable force today, says O’Brien:
Just as the ability to absorb information is better than lunkhead hypermasculinity in a modern army, diversity and societal integration also bring major advantages. As Ukraine has become more diverse and tolerant, its army has benefited. In contrast with Putin’s homophobic military, the Ukrainian armed forces include LGBTQ soldiers who have incorporated “unicorn” insignia into their uniforms. The valor of these soldiers, and the rallying of the Ukrainian people around a vision of a tolerant and diverse society, have led to an overall increase in Ukrainian support for gay rights—and it underscores the belief that everyone has a role to play in the country’s defense.
The Russian experience could not be more different. Putin has made suppressing gay rights one of the hallmarks of his rule. Determined to capitalize on culture-war tropes of the American right, he has portrayed Russia as a victim of cancel culture. He has retained rigid control over Russian society. While the Ukrainians are opening up, he is clamping down—with what we are now seeing as rather extreme results.
O’Brien concludes, “Intelligence, technological savvy, and social integration are the assets that matter most on the modern battlefield.”
Or maybe Russians should tan their balls.
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