The terrible equations of war
Both chambers of Congress, including the Republican-led and disarrayed House of Representatives, just passed a supplemental foreign aid bill that includes $61 billion for Ukraine. Passage of the bill came after months of Republican stalling on aid for the besieged nation, largely at the behest of House Republicans’ Dear Leader, Donald Trump. The immediate media analysis is already questioning if the aid will be enough for Ukraine to stave off an expected offensive push by Russia expected to begin sometime in June.
That is equation number one: Take the sum total of the U.S. aid bound for Ukraine and divide it by the per-unit cost of weapons such as ammunition for 155 mm howitzers that has been in short supply since last fall. That equation is intended to produce the number of shells Ukraine will reap from the aid package, at which point there will be yet another spate of news analysis asking if that number is enough.
The same sort of equation will be done with the rest of the weapons in Ukraine’s wish-basket – Patriot missiles to replace those that have been fired over the past two years in defense of Kyiv and Ukraine’s other population centers, as well as its energy infrastructure which has been underdefended since new anti-aircraft munitions and anti-missile missiles stopped being shipped over due to Republicans stalling aid funding. A massive drone and missile attack heavily damaged the Trypilska power plant on April 12, one of Ukraine’s largest. Trypilska serves the Kyiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions. The Associated Press quoted Andrii Gota, chairman of Centrenergo, one of the largest of Ukraine’s state energy companies, as saying, “there’s nothing left to shoot down” incoming missiles.
So there’s another equation: If Ukraine receives “X” amount of aid in the form of air defenses, what percentage of Ukraine’s power grid will survive Russian attacks and the pressures of supplying electricity to the rest of the country during the increased temperatures Summer will bring?
Measuring billions in aid and ammunition stocks against the number of Russian soldiers expected to take part in the summer offensive isn’t enough. How Ukraine will use that ammunition and against whom is the unknown in that equation, as it is in every other calculation in this war and all wars.
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Salon. To read the rest of the column, follow this link:
This does not make me think “when will the ‘ask’ end?”
It makes me think “what were the PoS Republican House members thinking for the past 9 months?”
They will never take the blame for the destruction and death that their posturing delay has cost in lives and suffering. But they will hopefully all be judged on how they treated the victims as pawns in their sick game to appease the delusional Orange lunatic.
It was probably inevitable, sooner or later, that a democracy like ours would be caught with its figurative pants down. Our system, our freedoms, our Constitution and courts and laws, and our perpetual songs of self praise, have likely
made us a bit complacent. “It can’t happen here.” Yes, it can. It happened in cultured, literate Germany and it can happen here. Even we, the wonderful US of A, can elect a leader (you should pardon the word) of towering ignorance and greed, a loathsome, cowering bully-psychopath, a grifter, a cheat, a traitor. We are all watching, with hope and no small degree of trepidation, as this tawdry, disgusting person sits (and sleeps, and passes gas) as a defendant in the first of possibly four trials. Think of it: a former president indicted as a criminal. We all hope that our system of courts and laws is strong and resilient enough to bring this horrible person to heel. Shame on us if we learn nothing from the Trump experience. His corrosive presence in public life should make us sharpen our wits and tighten our laws, remove ambiguities in the Constitution, and retire the word “unprecedented.” It has happened, folks. We elected a criminal as president. Let’s hope, as the military services always try to do, that we learn from our mistakes.