Daily Archives: 17 March 2022

Logistics and Transfers

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A retired USAF Captain, in his Letter in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, laid out a long list of logistical impediments to Poland transferring “up to” 28 of its MiG-29s to Ukraine for the latter’s defense against the invading Russian barbarians.

The 35-year-old Soviet aircraft will need a staging area, a quality fuel supply, Ukrainian-compatible communications, compatible ordinance hard mounts and supporting electronics, spares for battle damage and routine mechanical failures, forward air controllers, IFF (identify friend or foe) interrogation, electronic warfare to combat surface-to-air missiles, and a secure radar and GPS to get around and defeat jamming efforts. The Ukrainian pilots already qualified on the NATO Fulcrum MiG-29 will also need differences training….

That is indeed a valid set of impediments to transferring Poland’s MiGs to Ukraine. But those impediments are surmountable.

The political impediments—Biden’s backing away from Putin’s blandishments—are not valid. Sadly for Ukraine’s welfare, they’re also not surmountable until Biden is removed from the White House, and that won’t come until far more Ukrainians are butchered by the barbarian invaders.

But Maybe a Different Response

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John Deni, of the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, speculated in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal about whether a coup to overthrow Russian President Vladimir Putin would improve much. He opened with

Some Western observers hope Vladimir Putin will be overthrown in a coup. While the likelihood of such an event is debatable, one thing is certain: if Mr Putin were removed in a coup, whoever replaces him would face the same domestic political incentives and disincentives, which would likely lead to a continuation of Russia’s confrontational approach to the West.

He concluded with

So although a coup in Moscow could bring an end to Russia’s disastrous war in Ukraine, a new ruler or regime would face the same domestic political incentives and would likely end up behaving in similar ways.

Were a coup to bring that end to Ukraine’s misery, that alone would make the coup worth the cost.

Beyond that, though, a new Russian government might be able to recognize that no one in the West has any designs on Russia, no one in the West is any security threat to Russia. That lack stems from a single incontrovertible fact that plays on what Adam Smith termed the invisible hand: our own self-interest.

Russia has absolutely nothing that anyone in the West wants that can’t be gotten far more cheaply and far more beneficially to us in the West—and by the way, for the Russian people, too—through free and open trade.

It’s a long shot that a replacement crop of Russians at the top of that government would recognize that, but that replacement crop is unlikely to be worse than the Putin-led syndicate that is, empirically, bent on war and conquest.