Putin and objectives

The power of understanding desired endstates

Sunday, 18 December 2022 began with a powerful expose’ from the New York Times on the missteps leading Russia into the morass it created in Ukraine. It is a scary, haunting, horrifying set of actions by an utterly corrupt modern-day Czar. Michael Schwirtz, Anton Troianovski, Yousur Al-Hlou, Masha Froliak, Adam Entous and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, ‘Putin’s War’, New York Times, 16 December 2022 The long, well-sourced work provides sickening accounts of corruption leading to utterly unachievable expectations for Russian conscripts with no training. Russia’s leadership, having invested billions in military modernisation since Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president twenty-two years ago, relies heavily on mercenaries to support these ill-prepared ground forces. The Russian military chain of command makes pitiful excuses for its failures and those of the wealthy civilian kleptocratic buddies of Putin enabled since the fall of the Soviet Union. They have been trying to govern under Eastern Orthodox Christian nationalist culture since.

Most powerfully, the expose’ illustrates that the endstate the chief behind this fiasco, Vladimir Putin, desires is his self-aggrandizement and virtual self-deification rather than simply eradicating what Putin repeatedly called an illegitimate state of Ukraine. His isolation due to both COVID (about which he shows paranoia) and his rarified position as longtime head of the Russian Federation feed a sense of invulnerability and hubris that is breathtaking yet warn of unintended vulnerability. As was so obvious of the Czars who ruled for hundreds of years under the Romanov Dynasty, Putin’s self-appointed ‘unique understanding’ of the needs of the Russian nation results from and feeds back into a closed loop of thinking not only of what is possible but also of what fuels the Russian adoration of himself and his desired outcomes. It is hard to find cases where this behaviour, so common among the most extreme of dictators, ends in anything other than horror for those involved. The question here is who all will be involved.

The Times’s piece notes multiple places Putin’s alleged underestimates of conditions his troops confront but also the world outside of the metaphorical walls of Russia. Infrequent meetings between Xi Jinping and his relatively small number of global interlocutors insufficiently challenge him to validate his deeply-held is assumptions. He falls prey to surrounding himself with fools terrified to bring him truth for fear they lose their access to him and the extended power they believe it will engender.

The remaining questions are so many but one rises to the top and is at present completely unanswerable: would Putin, unable to achieve his poorly articulated endstate of a world no longer containing a sovereign Ukraine, use nuclear weapons to save himself at the cost of millions of lives? The evidence seems obvious to me that he would.

Would those he charged to execute such a diabolical and deadly action in fact do so? That too is unknown. Nationalism is a hard ideology to measure when juxtaposed against literal national survival.

Part of the problem is that Putin sought an endstate with no serious appreciation of how he would achieve it. That sounds odd since he used a large, if underprepared, military. I confess I believed as did so many that Russia’s modernisation was in fact going to lead to a quick outcome. In retrospect, both my February 2022 assumptions about Russia and about Ukrainian political will were wildly wrong (I am happy to admit I was wrong here).

But, achieving a national security endstate also requires grasping how the use of any and all instrument of power will get from step a to step b to step n. The US military often ridicules those who don’t think about this part of the equation with a lovely phrase that shows how ignorant most of us are about the manner by which instruments do what they are supposed to do. That phrase is ‘Magic happens here’, meaning that an instrument is applied and it will somehow go from application to success without anyone truly explains why the success results. This is a difficult part of strategy, allowing others to see and truly understand the process of why things work as you intend (or why they don’t, either).

Putin thought he could skip that part. His kleptocratic friends thought their bank accounts mattered more than the Russian nation’s needs. Thank goodness for Ukraine their leadership has shown fidelity to the nation’s survival thus far. Russia could, of course, still persevere as Putin’s ego is so tied into this desired odutcome he will have a hard time letting go of the objective because it threatens himself, because of sunk costs, because because because. But, this is all much harder than it was a year ago before the failures became clear and national frustration with the Kremlin grows. It would be hard to see anyone act on that frustration to oust him biput no one thought in 1980 that the Russians could be forced out of Afghanistan, either, as they were later that decade.

A lesson for all the western allies and partners is the time they spend educating their armed forces, appropriate government civilians, and each other to go beyond ‘magic happens here’ insertions is valuable. None of us, however, should forget the importance of asking questions, demanding answers, forcing transparency, and participating in our system. Shedding light on objectives and endstates is one of the most important tools of preventing fiascos. Right along with that is understanding that no individual—none—has a monopoly on understanding how a society should work or where it goes in its objectives. That requires, demands greater participation to prevent dangerous desired ends. fIN