Unleashing Ukraine

Fath-360 missile test in Iran Photo: Kyiv Independent

There is a late report this afternoon that President Biden may soon allow Ukraine to use U.S. made MGM-140 tactical ballistic missiles to strike targets in Russian territory.  The U.S. has previously shipped MGM-140 missiles to Ukraine, but they have been limited to use against Russian targets within Ukraine, although it has been reported that several have been used to hit targets in Crimea, previously Ukrainian territory before Russia invaded the peninsula and annexed it in the early months of 2014.

The MGM-140 is a medium-range missile that is fired from the same truck-based platform that HIMARS rockets use.  The truck platform can hold six short-range HIMARS rockets or two larger MGM-140 missiles.  HIMARS rockets are guided munitions weighing 700 pounds that can strike targets up to 60 miles away.  MGM-140 missiles are guided supersonic ballistic weapons weighing up to 3,700 pounds that can accurately hit targets as far away as 190 miles.

Ukraine has been at war with Russia for 31 months.  That the U.S. has just now considered allowing Ukraine to use its medium-range ballistic missiles is another one of those conundrums that military experts who follow the war have puzzled over.  It has been reported that the White House has been reluctant to allow the use of MGM-140 missiles because that would cross some kind of Russian “red line.”  That is presumably a red line the U.S. has respected out of fear that Russia might use its tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine on the battlefield. 

It's bullshit.  If Russia used battlefield tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine, Russian forces would suffer an immediate overwhelming NATO conventional response that would wipe out the entire Russian military presence in eastern and southern Ukraine.  Vladimir Putin knows this as well as he knows the name of the current mistress he has squirrelled away in his 200,000 square foot $1.4 billion palace that he had built on the coast of Crimea.

While we have been dithering about whether to allow Ukraine to use our medium range ballistic missiles against targets within Russia, Putin’s military has rained down every kind of ballistic missile, drone, and cruise missile in their arsenal on targets in Ukraine including civilian targets in population centers such as Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Lviv, not to mention all the smaller towns and villages that haven wiped by the Russian military during this war.  Russia has fired so many missiles at Ukraine, they have had to import missiles from North Korea and Iran.  There was a report in the New York Times this week that Ukrainian officials have uncovered debris from North Korean Hwasong-11 short-range ballistic missiles that were used recently in a mass-attack on Kyiv.  Markings on at least one piece of a North Korean missile show that it was manufactured earlier this year, indicating that it was recently shipped to Russia by the outlaw state.   The Hwasong-11 missile has a maximum range of about 430 miles, according to the Times, meaning that it can be fired from positions inside Russia that cannot be hit by Ukrainian counter-fire.  The North Korean missile is capable of maneuvering during its downward trajectory just before impact, making it a very difficult target for anti-missile systems such as the U.S. Patriot, which has been supplied to Ukraine but has been in such heavy use against Russian missile attacks that Ukraine is running low on Patriot missile stocks.

Forbes reported on Tuesday that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has confirmed that Iran has supplied at least 200 of its Fath-360 ballistic missiles to Russia, which has been using them in attacks on Ukrainian forces along the eastern and southern fronts.  The Fath-360 is comparable to U.S. HIMARS rockets but is considerably larger and has a longer effective range.  It is a guided munition with a 75-mile range that weighs about 1,700 pounds and can be truck-mounted, making it a mobile weapon that is difficult to locate and engage with counter-missile fire.  Iran has previously supplied smaller Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar short range missiles to Russia as well as large stocks of its Shahed Kamikaze drones. 

Is any of this looking lop-sided to you?  It should.  The U.S., for reasons I have never been able to figure out, has been slow to turtle-like in supplying weapons of war to Ukraine.  In the first months of the war, the U.S. was not even shipping its 155 mm howitzers to Ukraine, instead supplying it with shorter-range, less-deadly 105 mm howitzers.  It took months for the U.S. to send HIMARS mobile rocket launchers to Ukraine, and more months to supply the beleaguered country with Bradley Fighting Vehicle armored personnel carriers, and still more months to send Ukraine small numbers of U.S. Abrams main battle tanks.

To say that this has resulted in a classic case of Ukraine fighting a much larger, richer, and more powerful enemy with the proverbial one-hand-tied-behind-its-back is to minimize the situation considerably.  Probably the only military aid the U.S. has supplied Ukraine without restriction is intelligence on Russian military forces provided by our extensive network of military intelligence satellites.  But what good is knowing where Russia has positioned its reserve forces and missile batteries if Ukraine has been forbidden from hitting those targets with U.S. missiles?

Ukraine broke the don’t-go-there logjam with its ground invasion of Russian territory in the Kursk region in early August.  Ukraine reportedly did not ask “permission” from U.S. authorities before crossing the border, at least in part because the operation was ultra-top secret and Kyiv wanted to limit the number of people who knew about it in advance so Ukrainian forces would benefit from the element of surprise.

That’s another military advantage that has been taken from Ukraine with all the U.S. dithering over allowing Ukraine to use its MGM-140 medium range missiles.  There were reports today, alongside news about the North Korean and Iranian missiles Russia is now using, that Russia has moved its rocket launchers and stocks of missile munitions beyond the range of the U.S. MGM-140 missiles. 

Duh.  We do everything out in the open.  We have lengthy debates in Congress over how much military hardware and munitions we should supply to Ukraine.  When those debates conclude and budgets are set, Russia knows exactly how much military aid Ukraine will be getting from the U.S. and when.

Although we can blame Trump and his hold on congressional Republicans for the delays in sending military aid to Ukraine, we can’t blame them for the outrageous mistakes and delays the White House and Pentagon have made since Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.  It was the Biden White House and the Biden Pentagon that dragged their feet over shipping 155 mm artillery and HIMARS mobile rockets to Ukraine in the first year of the war, severely hampering Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.  To the Biden administration’s credit, it hasn’t been as stingy with intelligence, and highly accurate U.S. intelligence about Russian troop movements in the early stages of the war was probably the reason Ukraine was able to beat back the attack on Kyiv and hold as much of eastern and southern Ukraine that they have.

At some point, the U.S. is going to have to take the gloves off and allow NATO and the Pentagon to fully equip the Ukrainian military with everything it needs to defend itself.  If I were to guess, if that moment arrives at all, it will happen after the election when and if Kamala Harris wins.  But even then, it will be contingent on who controls the House of Representatives and the Senate.  If Putin-buddies like JD Vance and the so-called “Freedom Caucus” are in the majority in the Senate and the House, it’s anybody’s guess when and if Ukraine will be allowed to fight Vladimir Putin without idiotic restrictions.