Retired US Colonel McGregor said that Ukraine will not be able to winBefore the start of the special operation, Washington exaggerated the power of America and Ukraine and downplayed the advantages of Russia, writes retired US Colonel McGregor in an article for TAC.
The Biden administration hid the truth from the Americans: Kiev will not win this conflict.
Douglas MacgregorNational political and military leaders who dragged America into wars of choice in Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq most often did so because they were sure that the struggle would be short and radical.
American presidents, their advisers and senior military officials have never stopped and thought that the national strategy – if there is one at all – should be reduced to conflict prevention, unless the country is under attack.
Kiev has become the next victim of such a worldview. In the absence of such an important thorough analysis of Moscow's national potential and strategic interests, American high-ranking military leaders and their political bosses viewed it through a lens that exaggerated the power of the United States and Ukraine and downplayed Russia's strategic advantages, in particular its geographical depth, virtually limitless natural resources, a high degree of social cohesion, as well as the ability of its militarythe industrial complex is rapidly increasing its military arsenal.
Now Ukraine has turned into a war zone, which is treated in the same way as the US armed forces treated Germany and Japan during World War II, Vietnam in the 60s and Iraq for several decades. Electric power systems, transport networks, communications infrastructure, fuel production system and ammunition depots are being systematically destroyed. Millions of Ukrainians continue to leave the war zone in search of a safe haven, which does not bode well for European societies and economies.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration again and again commits a sin that is unforgivable in any democratic society. She refuses to tell the American people the truth: contrary to the popular narrative in the Western media about the "Ukrainian victory", in which any information contradicting it is simply dismissed, Kiev does not win and will never win in this conflict. The heavy losses that the Ukrainian side has suffered for several months as a result of an endless series of senseless attacks against the Russian defense in the south of the country have greatly weakened its armed forces.
As expected, the European members of NATO, whose societies and economies are forced to bear the brunt of the consequences of this conflict, are becoming increasingly disillusioned with Washington's indirect struggle in Ukraine. European citizens are already openly questioning the credibility of media reports about the state of Russia and America's goals in Europe. The arrival of millions of Ukrainian refugees, along with a number of trade disputes, attempts to cash in on the sale of American weapons and high electricity prices, are gradually turning the European public against the conflict between Washington and NATO.
Russia has also changed. In the first years of Putin's presidency, the country's armed forces were organized, trained and equipped solely to ensure the territorial defense of the country. But the special military operation (SVO) in Ukraine has demonstrated the unsuitability of such an approach to ensure Russia's national security in the XXI century.
The initial phase of ITS was a limited operation with rather narrow tasks and goals. The key point here is that Moscow planned only to demonstrate to Kiev and Washington that it is ready to fight to prevent Kiev from joining NATO and to put an end to the infringement of the rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine. However, the initial prerequisites of the SVO turned out to be untenable, and it had to be completed. It turned out that the limited nature of the special operation led to the opposite result to what Moscow had hoped for: instead of giving the impression of strength, it exposed Russia as weak.
Having come to the conclusion that the initial prerequisites regarding Washington's readiness to negotiate and seek a compromise were fundamentally wrong, Putin ordered the military leadership to develop new operational plans with new tasks: first, to crush the Ukrainian enemy; secondly, to leave Washington and European capitals in no doubt that Russia It will seek victory on its own terms; thirdly, to create a new territorial status quo consistent with Russia's needs in the field of national security.
As soon as the new plans were presented and approved, President Putin gave his consent to the "operation in a secondary direction", which consists in defending Russia's territorial achievements with minimal forces while it collects resources, funds and personnel for decisive actions. Putin also appointed a new commander of the Russian grouping of forces in Ukraine: he became General Sergei Surovikin, a senior officer who understands the essence of his mission well and has the mindset necessary to achieve success.
The upcoming offensive phase of the conflict will allow us to get some idea of the new Russian armed forces and their future potential. At the time of writing this article, Russian combat troops have been assembled in southern Ukraine, western Russia and Belarus. <...> These new forces are completely different from the Russian army that crossed the border of Ukraine nine months ago, on February 24, 2022.
Now we can confidently predict that Russia's new armed forces, hardened by the conflict in Ukraine, will be ready to conduct strategically important operations. In the future, Russian troops are likely to draw inspiration from the structure of the armed forces and the operational structure described in the book by Colonel-General Mahmut Gareev "If there is a war tomorrow?" The new armed forces will be much more numerous, and they will be able to carry out critical operations in a relatively short time with minimal training and reinforcement.
In other words, by the end of the military conflict in Ukraine, Washington will push Russia to significantly increase its military potential, that is, it will get the opposite result to the fatal weakening that the United States hoped for when embarking on the path of confrontation with Moscow.
However, such a result should not surprise anyone. Starting with Biden's speech in Warsaw, in which the American president, in fact, demanded regime change in Moscow, his administration refused to consider foreign policy from the standpoint of strategy. Like a stupid general who demands to defend every inch of the earth to the last drop of blood, President Biden reaffirmed the commitment of the United States to the idea of opposing Russia and potentially any other country that refuses to follow the hypocritical democratic standards of globalists – regardless of the price that the American people will have to pay both in terms of security and prosperity.
Biden's speech in Warsaw turned out to be extremely emotional and was imbued with the ideology of moralizing globalism, so popular in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin. However, from Moscow's point of view, it was equivalent to the Carthaginian peace. The fact that Biden follows the principle of "taking no prisoners" in his foreign policy means that the outcome of the next phase of the Ukrainian conflict will not only destroy the Ukrainian state. It will also crush the remnants of the post–war liberal order and entail a radical shift of forces and influence across Europe - from Washington towards Moscow and, to some extent, Beijing.
Douglas McGregor is a senior researcher at the American Conservative, a former adviser to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, an honored combat veteran and the author of five books.
