Is Biden Aid to Ukraine Too Little, Too Late?

By Douglas E. Lute

Ambassador Douglas E. Lute is Chair of the International and Defense Practices, BGR Group; CEO of Cambridge Global Advisors, LLC; and Distinguished Chair of Social Sciences, U.S. Military Academy, West Point. He is the former United States Ambassador to NATO, 2013-2017. From 2007-2013, he served in the White House, coordinating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A career Army officer, in 2010 he retired from active duty as a lieutenant general after 35 years of service. He holds degrees from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and United States Military Academy at West Point, which named him a Distinguished Graduate in 2018.

EXPERT INTERVIEW — With less than two months before President-elect Donald Trump returns to office, the Biden administration is working on a range of last-ditch efforts to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. That rush is a result of fears that Trump may negotiate a quick end to the war that cements in place Russian territorial gains in Ukraine, and that his administration may put the brakes on U.S. aid to Kyiv. Most prominent among the Biden efforts is its recent authorization for Ukraine to use long-range ATACMS missiles for strikes on targets inside Russia. 

Meanwhile, NATO is also preparing for a second Trump term, grappling with how the president-elect may engage with the alliance amid heightened threats from Russia and the need for reform in NATO’s own defense and intelligence. 

Cipher Brief CEO Suzanne Kelly spoke with former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Doug Lute for The World Deciphered about these dynamics, and what to watch for in Ukraine, Russia and NATO as Trump returns to office.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kelly: Do you think that there is enough time between now and Inauguration Day for any of the Biden administration’s “last-ditch” efforts to make a difference in the outcome of this war?

Lute: The question starts with a tone of regret. Why didn’t we do this nearly three years ago? Why have we placed ourselves under the constraints of what you might call incrementalism regarding our support to Ukraine?

It’s true that we’ve provided an enormous amount of security assistance to Ukraine alongside our European allies, who actually have surpassed us in terms of the dollar amount of what they’ve provided. But it’s also true that we’ve done so in a very bureaucratic, incremental, step-by-step approach, which I think has been a major contributor to the battlefield situation today, which can be summed up as “rough stalemate” or maybe “slowly eroding stalemate” in favor of Russia, largely because attrition warfare plays to the hand of the stronger, larger side.

The American ATACMs have been in the hands of the Ukrainians for some months now, but only recently has the Biden administration taken the decision to remove the restrictions on the Ukrainians to actually use this missile system where it could be perhaps most effective, which is on the vulnerable military targets inside Russia itself. Ukraine has used ATACMs over the last months on Ukrainian occupied territory, Ukrainian sovereign territory with pretty significant effect, especially on the Crimea peninsula because of the extended range of the system. But now they can use it on Russian territory itself.

So the question is, is it too little too late? It’s very difficult to imagine that the Ukrainians have a sufficient number of ATACMs to actually make a significant battlefield difference in the next two months. I nonetheless applaud the Biden administration decision to remove this restriction and let the Ukrainians target the Russian vulnerabilities that I think are very meaningful from an operational perspective.

Let me unpack why I think removing these restrictions could change the momentum over time, provided that we give a sufficient number of ATACMs to Ukraine. First of all is the relative low quality of the occupying Russian force in Ukraine. There are some 500,000 Russian soldiers on sovereign Ukrainian territory. But when you look behind that number, behind the quantitative factor, the quality indicators of those Russian occupying troops are very low. This is a low-quality, low-grade army. Low morale, poorly equipped, poorly trained, poorly led, sometimes pressed into combat at bayonet point and operating largely under a coercive leadership regime. That’s the nature of the occupying army.

The second factor I’d cite is that low-grade army depends on logistics from inside Russia. By Russian military convention and doctrine, Russian ground logistics are railroad based. They don’t have, as the U.S. Army has, air, ground, sea – multiple chains of logistics options. They have rail. And this has been a historical factor because of the great distances inside Russia itself, and the fact that the Russian Army conventionally relies on mass, which means it needs masses of munitions and manpower. So those factors have caused the Russians to rely on rail for resupply. And rail resupply is vulnerable, because railroads are fixed. You have switching yards, engine yards, diesel fuel depots that fuel the engines, bridges, tunnels, and so forth — all of which could be struck if you had a sufficient number of long-range strike systems to do so.

If you could significantly impede Russian logistics, combined with the low-grade occupying army, you might have an equation for internal dissension and potentially even collapse of the Russian occupying force. But again, you’d have to do this over time. It would be a question of attack and re-attack. You’d have to have patience. And you’d have to have a sufficient quantity of systems like ATACMs in order to do this. 

Kelly: Russia is also extremely good at information operations. How important are Russian disinformation operations during this critical period? And how are you seeing that play into the overall war?

Lute: You’re right, first of all, to cite that one of Russia’s long standing historical strengths has been operating in the gray zone, or as NATO refers to it, in the use of hybrid tactics, and hybrid meaning sort of sub-conventional. That is in the realm of disinformation, misinformation campaigns, energy intimidation, non-attributable or difficult-to-attribute attacks like cyberattacks and so forth.

We’ve seen this play out beyond the Ukrainian theater itself, onto the territory of NATO allies. We should appreciate that it’s been happening here in the United States as well. We’ve had Russian sponsored cyberattacks in the United States. We’ve had Russian sponsored attempts to interfere with our election campaigns by way of disinformation, misinformation and so forth. And of course, we’ve seen a report of a potential Russian attempt to disrupt undersea Baltic Sea communications cables. These are all very much in the Russian playbook.

When Russia views itself at a disadvantage in the conventional realm, especially now over the last several years where the Russian army has largely suffered heavy attrition in the war in Ukraine, it will revert to sub-conventional means because they’re available, they’re difficult to attribute, and Russia’s actually quite good at these. It’s a natural option.

In NATO language, these are referred to as sub-Article 5 tactics, because Article 5 of the NATO treaty pledges all ally support to any ally which is attacked in the event of an armed attack. And these are designed to subvert that definition and to offer options short of armed attack. On September 12th, 2001, the day after 9-11, NATO actually debated if the attacks on the U.S. on 9-11 constituted armed attack. Eventually they said yes; within 12 hours or so, they got it straight. 

And of course, it’s not the way the treaty was written. The treaty imagined tank armies flowing across the North German plain in an attack on Europe. I think these sub-conventional or hybrid attacks really are the wave of the future, especially as Russia is constrained in the conventional arena.

Kelly: How is NATO uniquely positioned to identify these attacks, to call them out and to counter them?

Lute: NATO is both ill-equipped and well-equipped at the same time. The nature of these attacks makes NATO action difficult because if they’re well-designed and well-executed, they are difficult to attribute. Attribution to the attacker is an important part of trying to gain consensus in the alliance to actually do something about it. This difficulty in attributing somewhat impedes NATO decision making. On the other hand, NATO is well positioned to share information about these attacks because the attacks in one country on election infrastructure or electoral processes, for example, is likely to replay and appear in other countries as well.

The first defensive measure should be information sharing among the 32 NATO allies. And here, NATO is well positioned. You must try to drag these aggressive actions into broad daylight, and attribute them clearly and convincingly in the public arena. You’ve got to compile a narrative that says here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know, and what we know is that these attacks were sponsored by opponent X. Here are the tactics that this opponent has used and here are his aims. That goes a long way to defusing the power of these sub-conventional attacks. And that’s the sort of thing NATO needs to get better at.

NATO needs to do this alongside its most natural partner, the European Union, because many of these attacks are on political structures, political systems, economic marketplaces, and so forth, many of which reside much more logically in the E.U. arena than in the NATO arena. This is a case where NATO and the EU need to be the closest of partners.

Kelly: When you’re looking ahead at the next four years, what do you see as some of the leading opportunities for NATO and some of the leading challenges for NATO? How will NATO look at the end of the next presidential term?

Lute: The first thing NATO’s got to do is contend with another four years of Donald Trump. Trump’s first administration posed an unusual challenge to the alliance because for the first time in NATO’s 70 years, America was led by a president who had serious doubts about the alliance, and in turn, imposed doubts among the allies on U.S. commitment to the alliance. It was as though President Trump didn’t appreciate the fundamental value of NATO in service of American national interests. There was the sense that rather than being firmly founded on the Article 5 collective defense clause, U.S. relations with NATO allies would be much more bilateral and much more transactional, on a case-by-case, episode-by-episode basis, with the primary case being defense spending. You’re either with us or you’re against us. You’re either at 2 percent or you’re not.

It became a sort of binary standard, which the Alliance weathered quite well under the leadership of former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Part of the experience of the first Trump administration was that you had people like Tillerson and Pompeo and Mattis and Kelly and McMaster inside the Trump cabinet who were fundamentally aware of and supportive of the transatlantic relationship. They all appreciated it wasn’t perfect, and they all appreciated that yes, NATO’s European allies needed to step up and do more. But they understood the fundamentals, which is that this is in America’s interest. This is not altruism. This is not charity. This is fundamentally in the American national interest.

My concern as we go into the second Trump administration is that we may not have the same supporting cast who have that same fundamental view. Therefore, we may be less positioned to weather the storm with a president who values bilateral deal making, maybe by way of unpredictability as his most typical tactical move. Bilateralism, transactional relationships and unpredictability don’t play well in NATO headquarters.

Now we also have a new NATO secretary general, (Mark) Rutte, who knows President Trump, because Rutte was prime minister in the Netherlands when Trump was president. He’s not new to this setting, but seeing how he navigates will be an important part of the equation.

Kelly: When you think about how serious Putin might be with his threats or how much this really is just saber-rattling, are you concerned about getting to a point of escalation where a nuclear weapon may be used?

Lute: The short answer is no, but here’s why. First of all, in the early days of the war, it certainly was prudent and completely understandable that the Biden administration raised this concern about the potential for escalation. For the first time since World War II, you’ve got a ground war in Europe with Russia, a nuclear superpower. There’s always looming in the background this potential of nuclear escalation. But we now have almost three years of empirical evidence that at each stage where Putin threatened escalation, he essentially drew a rhetorical red line and said, if this, then that. But then once the line was crossed, nothing extraordinary happened. Certainly, we have not crossed the nuclear threshold.

Beginning with the early weeks of the war, we’ve seen that battlefield setbacks or even collapse by the Russian conventional forces have not been sufficient to trigger a nuclear response. I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. First of all, I believe that nuclear deterrence fundamentally still works. I give the Biden administration credit early on for reissuing the nuclear deterrent equation with Moscow and essentially saying, don’t cross the nuclear threshold. And if you do, here are the consequences you can expect. Now this has been kept quiet in the background, but there was a senior-level engagement refreshing the nuclear deterrence equation with Russia.

That was then amplified by Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi’s and (Chinese) President Xi (Jinping’s) public and private commitment to Putin that he should not cross the nuclear threshold. So, you’ve got not only the U.S., but Putin’s two key partners who have reinforced the nuclear deterrence equation. I think that’s been effective.

What we’ve seen on the ground is that every time we imagine that Putin might be tempted to use a tactical nuclear weapon, or perhaps a dirty bomb, or perhaps a so-called accident at a nuclear power plant on Ukrainian territory — things short of a nuclear weapon, but a radioactive event — he has not done so. 

I don’t believe this most recent threat, having to do with the use of ATACMs by the Ukrainians on military targets inside Russia. I believe it falls into this pattern of a threat that is not backed up. And short of crossing the nuclear line, I’m not sure what else is in Putin’s arsenal. He’s using every conventional weapon in the inventory. What more can he do except cross the nuclear line? I don’t believe he will do that.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. 

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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