[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 112 (Monday, July 8, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4224-S4226]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                UKRAINE

  Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the attached 
article entitled ``Lessons from Ukraine'' by Alan W. Dowd in the 
American Legion Magazine be printed in the Congressional Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                          Lessons From Ukraine

                           (By Alan W. Dowd)

       Russia's war on Ukraine serves as a preview of what a 21st-
     century great-power war might look like. The glimmer of 
     hopeful news amid the grim cruelties of Putin's war is that 
     we have a chance to prevent the next great-power war--but 
     only if we learn lessons from this one.
       Modern warfare between industrially developed countries 
     devours personnel and resources. The Russian military has 
     lost approximately 120,000 killed in action in two years of 
     war. By way of comparison, the USSR lost 15,000 in 
     Afghanistan in a decade. Russia has lost 2,742 tanks, 5,031 
     armored vehicles/APCs/IFVs, 135 helicopters, 103 fixed-wing 
     aircraft, 20 surface ships and one submarine.
       Ukraine's losses are more appalling: some 70,000 troops and 
     100,000 civilians killed. Ukraine has lost 742 tanks, 1,603 
     armored vehicles/APCs/ IFVs, 80 fixed-wing aircraft and 28 
     warships. Europe hasn't seen this kind of war in 80 years. 
     The United States hasn't endured such a war since Korea. To 
     be sure, America engaged in costly operations during the 
     postwar era. Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts of the war on 
     terrorism claimed more than 7,000 American lives--over a span 
     of 20 years. Vietnam claimed more than 58,000 Americans--
     again, over a span of 20 years. Korea claimed 37,900 
     Americans in just 37 months.
       Yet none of those conflicts and none of America's 
     battlefield foes since World War II--not Kim Il-Sung or Ho 
     Chi Minh, not Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, not 
     Taliban terrorists or Hezbollah's henchmen, not Osama bin 
     Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi--represented the military-
     technological-industrial threat of a peer-adversary.
       Put another way, the war in Ukraine offers a glimpse of 
     what a PRC assault on Taiwan, Russian attack on NATO or 
     Korean War II would unleash. Such a conflict would produce 
     massive front line combat losses. But it wouldn't be neatly 
     quarantined ``over there.'' It would scar the U.S. homeland 
     through cyber, missile, drone, nuclear, biological and/or 
     satellite attacks. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall 
     describes it as the ``kind of war we have no modern 
     experience with''--which is why America must return to the 
     time-tested principle of deterrence.
       Deterring war is far less costly than waging war. ``Freedom 
     must be armed better than tyranny,'' President Volodymyr 
     Zelensky of Ukraine observes. When it's not, the result is 
     Ukraine 2022, Korea 1950, Pearl Harbor 1941. With Russia on 
     the march, China on the rise, North Korea setting the free 
     world on edge, and Iran and its Hamas-Hezbollah-Houthi 
     proxies setting the Middle East on fire, larger investments 
     in defense are desperately needed. The good news is that 27 
     NATO members have increased defense spending. Poland is 
     devoting 4% of GDP to the common defense. Germany is nearly 
     doubling defense spending. Japan will soon boast the world's 
     third-largest defense budget. South Korea's defense budget 
     has jumped 37% in recent years, Australia's 47%.
       The bad news is that, even as threats metastasize, U.S. 
     defense spending hovers in the 3%-of GDP range. As a result, 
     the Army is trying to deter war in Europe with one third the 
     soldiers it deployed during the Cold War. Navy leaders say 
     they need 500 ships; they have 296. Only 14% of the Air Force 
     bomber fleet could survive peer-adversary air defenses.
       These numbers call to mind Winston Churchill's warning that 
     ``we cannot afford . . . to work on narrow margins, offering 
     temptations to a trial of strength.'' Churchill understood 
     the benefits of deterrence and the dangers of shortchanging 
     defense. So should Americans. In the eight years before 
     entering World War I, the United States devoted an average of 
     0.7% of GDP to defense. Waging war swallowed up an average of 
     16.1% of GDP--and 116,516 Americans. In the decade before 
     entering World War II, America devoted an average of 1.1% of 
     GDP to defense. Waging war devoured an average of 27% of 
     GDP--and 405,399 Americans. During the Cold War, America 
     invested an average of 7% of GDP on defense. That didn't end 
     all wars, but it did deter Moscow from starting World War 
     III.
       Political leadership matters. As the Russian army rumbled 
     toward Kiev, Zelensky was offered a chance to evacuate. His 
     defiant response--``I need ammunition, not a ride''--
     galvanized Ukraine and rallied the free world. It's no 
     exaggeration to say that Ukraine remains free because 
     Zelensky remained in Ukraine. He serves as a reminder of a 
     truth too many in our postmodern age never learn: Individuals 
     make a difference, especially in a time of war--from Judah 
     Maccabee and Abraham Lincoln to Churchill and Zelensky.
       America is highly effective at helping those willing to 
     help themselves. U.S. anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons 
     helped Ukraine thwart Russia's initial assault. U.S. anti-
     missile systems helped Kiev weather Putin's rocket attacks. 
     U.S. artillery and intelligence helped Ukraine liberate 
     occupied territory. This effort is very much in America's 
     wheelhouse. From Britain (World War II) to Israel (1973 and 
     today) to the mujahideen (1980s) to the Balkans (1990s) to 
     Iraqi Kurdistan (2010s) to Ukraine, America excels at 
     assisting people willing to fight for their freedom and 
     territory. That phrase ``willing to fight'' is key. The 
     difference between Ukraine's political leadership in 2022

[[Page S4225]]

     and Afghanistan's in 2021 is captured in the images of Kabul 
     and Kiev today. In Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and South Korea, 
     America must continue helping those willing to defend their 
     freedom and territory. U.S. leaders have espoused this idea 
     for generations: ``Support for freedom-fighters is self-
     defense'' and ``tied to our own security,'' President Ronald 
     Reagan explained.
       ``It must be the policy of the United States to support 
     free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed 
     minorities or by outside pressures,'' President Harry Truman 
     declared.
       ``A free man contending for liberty on his own ground is 
     superior to any slavish mercenary on earth,'' President 
     George Washington observed.
       Resiliency is essential. Russia has targeted Ukraine's 
     government, cities, food supply, transportation system, 
     electric grid, internet and communications. Thanks in part to 
     foreign assistance and in part to a national ethos of 
     resiliency, Ukraine has withstood the onslaught.
       During the Cold War, America grafted resiliency into 
     national-security strategy. The highway system would serve a 
     dual purpose in a time of war. Civil-defense programs were at 
     the ready. Continuity-of government protocols were rehearsed. 
     Mountain hideaways, ships and planes were on call to serve as 
     command-and-control nodes. Signaling to Moscow that the 
     United States was prepared to soldier on--even amid nuclear 
     attack--reinforced U.S. deterrent strategy. Twenty first-
     century equivalents to that sort of resiliency--mechanical-
     analog backups for digital systems, critical infrastructure 
     hardened against EMP attack, vaccines and therapeutics 
     prepositioned for emergency distribution, updated continuity-
     of-government procedures, systems to identify and counter 
     deepfakes, backup power generation and water purification--
     are lacking.
       One step in the right direction is the Space Force's Victus 
     Nox Initiative, which allows the Pentagon to rapidly 
     reconstitute the U.S. satellite fleet. Another is the 
     Pentagon's investment in dispersed regional microchip-
     manufacturing hubs. Other government agencies--along with 
     industry--should follow these examples and devote resources 
     to resiliency.
       Unmanned systems are integral to modern warfare. Ukraine 
     purchased or produced 200,000 drones in 2023--some as big as 
     planes, some as small as lunchboxes, some made of plastic or 
     cardboard.
       Ukraine's military includes the Achilles Company, which 
     deploys drone swarms to overwhelm Russian targets. In 
     addition, there's Aerorozvidka, an organization that builds 
     killer drones. Ukraine has deployed drones as loitering 
     airborne artillery, in long-range attacks on Moscow and 
     longer-range attacks against Russian targets in Sudan, and in 
     numerous seaborne operations. Indeed, Ukraine has made 
     history with torpedo-like unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) 
     and uncrewed sea vehicles (USV). With a 600-mile range, 
     Ukraine's UUVs bring most of the Black Sea within reach.
       Ukraine's unmanned air force and remote-control missiles 
     are changing the arithmetic of war. At $250,000, Ukraine's 
     USVs are a tiny fraction of the cost of the warships, cargo 
     ships and bridges they have destroyed. By modifying off-the 
     shelf airborne drones into mortar-dropping systems--at an 
     estimated cost of $2,000 per unit--Ukraine's military has 
     eliminated scores of multi-million-dollar Russian tanks and 
     taken hundreds of Russian troops off the battlefield. 
     According to Aerorozvidka, every dollar spent on one of its 
     R18 octocopter drones delivers $670 in Russian losses.
       America's military is taking notes. The Pentagon has an 
     office devoted to countering uncrewed systems. The Pentagon 
     is testing microdrones that can independently attack targets, 
     swarm targets and lie in wait for targets. The Pentagon's new 
     Replicator initiative will field ``attritable autonomous 
     systems at scale of multiple thousands,'' military officials 
     report. The Navy just received its first Orca uncrewed mine-
     laying submarine.
       Creativity is crucial. ``History books will show,'' says 
     Adm. Rob Bauer, Norway's defense chief, ``Ukraine has 
     transformed modern warfare.'' Ukraine's creative warriors 
     have re-engineered Soviet-designed rockets into high-
     precision anti-ship missiles (which sank Russia's Black Sea 
     flagship). They've utilized 3-D printing to produce RPG-like 
     bombs light enough to air-drop from off-the-shelf drones but 
     lethal enough to cripple tanks. They've reconfigured Western 
     missiles to fire from Soviet-era warplanes, turned jet skis 
     into kamikaze-drones, strapped rockets onto unmanned 
     speedboats, retrofitted Russian anti-aircraft missiles into 
     ground-attack rockets and masterfully leveraged digital 
     technologies.
       Ukraine's wireless warriors have hacked into Russian 
     government agencies and television stations, weaponized video 
     of Russian war crimes, shaped how the world views the war, 
     crowdsourced weapons procurement, and used text-messaging and 
     psyops to encourage Russian surrenders/desertions 
     (bloodlessly sweeping 17,000 Russians from the battlefield). 
     Ukraine's tech-savvy troops even developed a smartphone 
     application that enables soldiers to order an artillery 
     strike like a civilian would order an Uber.
       America must be equally creative--but also capable of 
     combining the stamina of a superpower with the agility of a 
     startup: nimble industry-military collaborations to reshape 
     the battlespace, Army artillery and Marine rockets affixed to 
     Navy ships, manned-unmanned teaming in the skies and on the 
     seas, cargo planes refashioned into airborne arsenal-ships, 
     F-35Bs crammed onto amphibs, U.S. fighter-jets flying off 
     allied carriers, hot-pit bomber deployments and lily pad 
     bases, left-of-launch cyberstrikes against missile threats 
     and allied islands sprinkled with antiship missiles, 
     reminding Beijing two can play the anti-access/area-denial 
     game.
       Nuclear weapons cast a long shadow across today's 
     battlefield. Putin's nuclear saberrattling has understandably 
     given the West pause Recall that Putin promulgated a doctrine 
     declaring nuclear weapons can be used to--somehow--de-
     escalate conflict, and recently deployed nuclear weapons into 
     Belarus.
       Recall that Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal in 
     exchange for Russia's 1994 commitment to ``refrain from the 
     threat or use of force'' and respect Ukraine's ``sovereignty 
     and . . . existing borders.'' The free world's failure to 
     back up those words after Putin's 2014 lunge into eastern 
     Ukraine not only set the stage for 2022; it crippled the 
     cause of nonproliferation. Ukraine serves as an object lesson 
     of the deterrent power of nuclear weapons--and the danger of 
     not having them. Allies like South Korea and adversaries like 
     Iran are pondering that lesson.
       Putin's war reminds us state-to-state proliferation isn't 
     our only nuclear nightmare. During its mutiny, Wagner's army 
     of warlords came within a whisker of seizing a facility where 
     Russia stores nuclear weapons.
       NATO is the solution, not the problem. Putin and his 
     apologists say Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 because Ukraine 
     wanted to join NATO, but they have it precisely backwards: 
     Ukraine wanted to join NATO because Putin had invaded Ukraine 
     in 2014. Blaming NATO for this war is akin to blaming me for 
     offering my neighbor a garden hose to extinguish fires--
     rather than the serial-arsonist for starting fires.
       Sovereign nations seek NATO membership because they 
     distrust Moscow and recognize that NATO is the only source of 
     security in Europe. That distrust has been validated 
     repeatedly--from the Baltics and Poland during World War II, 
     to Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, to Georgia 
     and Ukraine today. NATO grows not by conquest but by consent, 
     not by the force of arms of its members but by the desire for 
     security of its aspirants.
       Russia's rampage through Ukraine reminds us that helping 
     free nations harden their territory against invasion--as NATO 
     has done since 1949--is wiser than scrambling to help them 
     claw it back. As Reagan declared at Normandy, ``It is better 
     to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind 
     shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom 
     is lost.''
       Missile defense is essential. With Moscow launching 7,400 
     missiles and 3,700 kamikazedrones, Kiev has used Soviet-era 
     S-300s, domestically produced electronic-warfare jammers, and 
     Western-supplied Patriot, IRIS-T, NASAMS, Hawk and Stinger 
     systems (the Pentagon calls Ukraine's patchwork air defense 
     ``FrankenSAM'') to intercept thousands of inbound threats, 
     including 78% of the kamikaze-drones. The lesson: A layered 
     missile-defense system is not only feasible but essential.
       U.S. intelligence still works. Rebounding from its 9/11-era 
     woes, the intelligence community used a mix of signals 
     intercepts, satellite imagery and assets inside Russia to 
     forewarn policymakers about Putin's plans. The Biden 
     administration released that intelligence to alert Ukraine, 
     brace Europe and prevent Russian false-flag operations. This 
     preemptive use of intelligence enabled allies to rush 
     defensive systems into Ukraine, giving it a chance to thwart 
     Russia's kill-shot thrust at Kiev.
       In the months since, U.S. intelligence has helped Ukraine 
     eliminate Russian generals, strike munitions depots, degrade 
     Russian forces in occupied Crimea and develop 
     counteroffensives. Plus, U.S. Cyber Command--whose commander 
     serves as director of the NSA, a key piece of the 
     intelligence community--``bolstered the resilience of 
     Ukraine'' by conducting ``offensive, defensive, information 
     operations, Gen. Paul Nakasone cryptically reports.
       There's a democratic community committed to defending the 
     free world. At $46.6 billion in military assistance--and 
     another $30.3 billion in humanitarian financial assistance--
     the United States has sent more aid than any single country. 
     But America isn't alone. Fifty nations are sending aid to 
     Ukraine. The European Union (EU) has sent more total aid and 
     (with Britain) more military aid than the United States. EU 
     nations planned to deliver a million rounds of 155mm 
     ammunition between last spring and this spring. South Korea 
     is sending artillery rounds to Ukraine, howitzers to Estonia, 
     tanks to Poland. Australia has sent anti-armor weapons and 
     drones to Ukraine. Israel is sharing missile-warning systems 
     with Ukraine and missile-defense systems with Germany. Japan 
     recently approved reforms that will allow it to ship arms to 
     freeworld allies and partners.
       There's an axis of autocrats committed to rolling back the 
     free world. Russia is trying to erase Ukraine, occupies parts 
     of Georgia and Moldova, and props up tyrants in Belarus, 
     Syria, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Africa. It spews 
     military threats against NATO's democracies, is arming 
     Hezbollah, and has attacked U.S. and British aircraft in 
     international airspace.
       China has absorbed Hong Kong, threatens to seize Taiwan, is 
     building militarized islands in the South China Sea, boasts 
     the

[[Page S4226]]

     world's largest navy, is tripling its nuclear arsenal and is 
     conducting a cyber siege of the free world.
       Nuclear-armed North Korea is sending ammunition to Moscow 
     and constantly threatens to attack America, South Korea and 
     Japan.
       Iran supplies Moscow with kamikaze-drones, has unleashed 
     Hamas and the Houthis, bankrolls Hezbollah, harbors al-
     Qaida's leader and is building a nuclear bomb.
       The impact of war is never limited to the war zone. Putin's 
     war has spawned energy-price spikes, refugee flows and food 
     scarcity around the world. But it exposed his weakness, 
     triggering a 40% devaluing of the ruble, military mutinies, 
     fratricides, mass desertions, mass emigration and anti-regime 
     guerrilla movements. He may not lose his grip on the Kremlin 
     or Crimea, but by his own measure of the war's objectives he 
     has lost.
       Putin's war has cemented Moscow's position as Beijing's 
     junior partner, galvanized Ukraine as an independent nation 
     and reinvigorated NATO.
       A planned three-day blitzkrieg that devolved into a 
     disaster has given Xi pause as he gazes across the Taiwan 
     Strait. Ukraine's tactics and tenacity have given Taiwan a 
     roadmap for deterring and, if necessary, repelling an 
     invasion.
       Indeed. Putin's war reminds us that the world is connected. 
     Just as the defense of West Berlin and South Korea were 
     linked during the Cold War, the defense of Ukraine and Taiwan 
     and Israel, the Baltics and the Philippines, the Red Sea and 
     Black Sea and South China Sea are linked today.

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