What Ukraine has given to America

Some opponents of American aid for Ukraine have complained about the cost. House Speaker Mike Johnson has suggested restructuring the bipartisan Senate aid package as loans. Missing from these arguments is an appreciation of all that Ukraine has done and is doing for the United States.

Most obviously, Ukraine is providing priceless insight into the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. weapons and military doctrines. America has not fought a sustained conventional war in six decades. Our experience crushing an outmatched Grenada or Iraq, or our extended counter-insurgency efforts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, can teach us little about how to battle an enemy with a large military and modern weapons. We study, we plan and we simulate, but we cannot know. Every year, we spend tens of billions of dollars on weapons systems that we hope will prove effective with little direct evidence.

Wars invariably embarrass the best military planners. In World War II, advances in tanks and paratroopers proved France’s investment in the Maginot Line worthless. Similarly, aircraft carriers demonstrated that many nations’ investments in battleships were largely pointless. Argentina’s Exocet missiles proved NATO naval doctrine dangerously obsolete when they sunk two British ships during the Falklands War.

Ukrainians are discovering first-hand how sound our investments have been — and the results have been mixed. HIMARS rockets, Javelin anti-tank missiles and Bradley fighting vehicles have all performed admirably. Indeed, our systems’ superior accuracy has proven more than sufficient to offset Russia’s numerical advantage, driven primarily by inferior Soviet-era systems. Our de-mining systems, on the other hand, have failed badly. The Abrams tanks that President Joe Biden agonized over for so long before providing have had little impact so far.

Patriot air defense systems have worked up to a point, but Russia has shown they may be exhausted and rendered ineffectual with cheap but destructive drones. After months in which Patriots shot down the great majority of Russian missiles and drones, the Ukrainians started running low on missiles, so that now civilians in Kharkiv and other cities are again facing a reign of terror while Ukrainian power plants are destroyed. We were not ready for an environment in which defenses can be depleted by offensive weapons of only a fraction of the cost. The Ukrainians’ hard-won experience alerts us to the need for a more sustainable approach.

Ukraine has shown that virtually all drones are vulnerable to enemy radio jamming. Their ingenious solution has been to use many different kinds of drones at each part of the front so that no one jamming strategy will protect Russian forces. This is a valuable lesson for the U.S., which tends to emphasize standardization and a few large defense procurement contracts.

Russia recently has proven that glide bombs provide a cheaper, more powerful and harder to defend alternative to cruise missiles. We now have time to design countermeasures before our own forces ever face something similar.

American officials repeatedly urged Ukrainians to concentrate their armored vehicles in powerful columns to slash into enemy lines like those of WWII. Whenever Ukrainians tried this, Russian drones immediately spotted the columns, fed the coordinates to Russian artillery and destroyed many of the tanks before they could get started. Even when armored columns approached enemy lines, they had to wait for time-consuming de-mining work, making them sitting ducks. This should limit U.S. doctrine’s future reliance on massed armored columns and, in the process, save countless American lives.

An even bigger gift from Ukrainians to our country is allowing us to stop Russian aggression without jeopardizing our servicemembers’ lives. Russian President Vladimir Putin has invaded and occupied several other countries, each time more blatantly violating Russia’s treaty obligations. He has shown that his peace commitments are worthless. Putin, senior government officials and state TV have continually declared determination to seize lands they claim are historically Russian, including those of several NATO members.

The GOP House’s abandonment of Ukrainians has signaled a weakness that only emboldens Putin and other aggressive autocrats. The cost of stopping aggression will be much higher in Taiwan, higher still if Iran invades its neighbors or Putin starts “reclaiming” more of Europe. And the risk of a tragic miscalculation will rise exponentially when we are facing Russia or China directly, rather than merely arming Ukrainians by spending money in U.S. factories.

When Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936 in violation of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler had ordered his army to withdraw peacefully if Britain or France mobilized their forces. Showing such weakness when it was virtually costless emboldened Hitler. When those nations finally responded a few years later, the cost was more than a million of their people, and tens of millions elsewhere.

We should not repeat that blunder. Although Britain and France in the mid-1930s were foolish and cowardly, they at least faced the considerable might of Nazi Germany. Today, naysayers want us to concede to Russia, which increasingly depends on Soviet-era tanks and artillery and whose economy is smaller than that of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The United Kingdom was far more heavily outmatched in the Battle of Britain but prevailed handily.

But the Ukrainians’ greatest gift to Americans has been the example of their commitment to democracy. Too often we take our freedoms for granted, forgetting our forebears’ sacrifices to make our lives possible. We become so embroiled in our squabbles that we forget how many people remain under the boots of authoritarians. If Ukrainians can rekindle Americans’ passion for democracy and freedom, we will owe them a debt we can never repay.

David A. Super is a professor of law at Georgetown Law. He also served for several years as the general counsel for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Follow him @DavidASuper1.