by Jeff Childers
This week we narrowly survived a near-nuclear showdown. On Monday, the Russians urgently started unscheduled nuclear drills after several NATO officials plus one moronic democrat House Minority Leader (Hakeem Jeffries) escalated tensions by stupidly threatening to send Western troops into Ukraine. Fortunately, NATO backed down, and by way of apology, everyone including Biden expressly recognized Putin as Russia’s legitimate leader.
Putin was inaugurated for his sixth term as President yesterday. His inauguration, plus the widespread recognition of his legitimacy, frames a pending crisis as the official end of Zelensky’s term looms on May 21st — yet no new president has been elected in Ukraine.
But the current state of the Proxy War can perhaps be best illustrated through two contrasting articles. The first ran under this Associated Press headline, now two weeks old: “Ukraine pulls US-provided Abrams tanks from the front lines over Russian drone threats.” Whoopsies.
Named for heroic World War II General Creighton Abrams, the M1 Abrams is the United States’ premier battle tank. Each high-tech tank comes with a hefty $10 million price tag, weighs in at a whopping eighty tons, and needs between four and eight hours of regular maintenance downtime after every single hour of runtime. Last year, we gifted the Ukrainians with over thirty fabulously expensive Abrams tanks.
At the time, Ukrainian warbloggers celebrated receiving the massive metal fighting machines as a sign the war’s tide would soon change.
But unexpectedly, as the AP’s headline made clear, the $10 million dollar Abrams tank has been beaten by $200 Russian drones. Not only that, but Russia has so far managed to capture at least six of the thirty-one American super-tanks. The problem seems to be that the eighty-ton beasts easily get mired in Ukraine’s thick rasputitsa — “mud” in the English — stranding hapless tank crews and making them into sitting kachky (i.e., ducks).
Meanwhile, creative Russian tank crews — allowed authority to jury rig their own experimental solutions to battlefield problems — ingeniously developed a cheap, ugly, but simple workaround to Ukraine’s drones: the turtle shield. In fact, the day before the AP published its swan song for the Abrams, Forbes ran a counterpointing story headlined, “The Russian Turtle Tank Is The Weirdest Armored Vehicle Of The Ukraine War. The Craziest Thing Is, It Might Actually Work.”
The official narrative would have us believe that Ukraine’s real problem is lack of money to buy ammunition. But setting aside the crisis that Ukraine is getting down to the last Ukrainian, these two tank stories provide a stark metaphorical contrast between the two sides in the Proxy War. The scrappy Russian soldiers are demonstrating good old-fashioned American ingenuity and adaptability. But the Ukrainian/NATO War-by-Committee is mired in the slough of despond, bogged down in the sticky rasputitsa by unwieldy, morbidly obese, maintenance-heavy, finicky, non-interoperable, too-clever-by-half donated gear that isn’t practical.
The two articles highlighted the two modern philosophical problems that dog our political class the worst. The first one is the unshakeable belief in the long-discredited theory that more money can cure any conceivable problem: drug addiction, homelessness, and failing educational institutions all spring to mind. The second chronic philosophical failure is the equally mistaken belief that bigger, more ambitious, higher-tech solutions are always better than cheap, practical answers.
These two philosophical mistakes bog down the West — and its proxy warrior, Ukraine — in impractical, unaffordably-expensive thinking thicker than the Ukrainian rasputitsa. That’s the real problem.
