Strategy

For a century, the way to measure a military was to count. Count the tanks, the hulls, the airframes, the warheads; add up the budgets; weigh the tonnage; and from that arithmetic of mass deduce who would win. The bigger arsenal beat the smaller one. The richer state, able to buy more and heavier machines, dictated terms to the poorer. It was a comfortable assumption, because it was simple, and because for a long time it was roughly true. It is now false. A revolution in the character of war has already happened — not on a drawing board, but in the field, in front of everyone — and most of the world’s arsenals have not yet understood that they are obsolete. The cheap, mass-produced drone has quietly dethroned the expensive legacy platform. A machine that costs a few hundred dollars now routinely destroys a machine that costs millions, and the side that can out-produce and out-think its enemy in cheap precision is the side that wins. War has stopped being a contest of brute mass. It has become a contest of technologies and of production arithmetic — and a great many generals, ministries and states are still preparing, at enormous expense, for the last war. ...

Notice what is never on the table. Every Western discussion of how this war ends circles the same small set of options — arm Ukraine a little more, tighten sanctions a little further, wait for the front to shift, or, in the worst version, lean on Kyiv to trade away land for a pause. What is never proposed, never even uttered as a thought experiment in the serious rooms, is the most obvious thing of all: that the war could be ended from inside Russia, by Russians, with Western help. The assumption that arming Russians against their own regime is unthinkable has hardened into a reflex so deep that no one notices it is a choice. It is a choice. And it is the wrong one. ...

Two opposite illusions have grown up around the sanctions imposed on Russia, and the strange thing is that the same people often hold both at once. The first illusion is that sanctions are useless theatre — a way for Western governments to look busy, a press release that hurts no one, a gesture that the Kremlin shrugs off while the oil keeps flowing and the missiles keep falling. The second illusion is the mirror image: that sanctions are a kind of secret weapon, that if only they were tightened enough they would strangle the dictatorship into collapse, turn the population against the war, and bring peace without anyone having to fight for it. Both of these are wrong, and they are wrong in instructive ways. The truth lies in the uncomfortable middle, where most true things live. Sanctions cannot end this war by themselves. But they are very far from nothing. Understanding exactly what they can and cannot do is not an academic exercise; it is the difference between spending Western leverage where it bites and squandering it on fantasies. ...