The following conversation has been edited for clarity. 

Robert Hamilton: After a delay of many months, US assistance to Ukraine is flowing again. However, Russian forces are making gains in Northeastern Ukraine, around Ukraine’s second largest city Kharkiv, and there are persistent rumors of a larger Russian offensive to come. What is the situation on the ground now, where is the war likely to head, and what does it all mean for the United States? 

To discuss these questions I’m joined today on Chain Reaction by retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges. General Hodges is the former Commanding General of US Army Europe from 2014 to 2017. He currently serves as NATO’s senior mentor for logistics. He is also a distinguished fellow with GLOBSEC and serves on the international advisory board of the New Strategy Center in Romania and the Warsaw Security Forum in Poland. 

General Ben Hodges, thank you for joining me today on Chain Reaction. 

Lieutenant General (retired) Ben Hodges: Bob, thank you very much for the privilege.

RH: We’re talking about Ukraine today and there’s a lot of Ukraine news but one of the most recent pieces of Ukraine news is the fact that the United States and many of Ukraine’s Western partners have begun lifting restrictions, allowing them to use their weapons to strike inside of Russia. What do you think will be the effect of this decision and why did it take so long?

BH: Well, of course it’s welcome. I’m glad that the US administration and other governments have made it clear that Ukraine can do what makes perfect military sense and there’s no legal or moral reason to have restricted Ukraine from using weapons to defend their citizens, and to destroy Russian capabilities even inside Russia. The problem is that there was even a policy to begin with that was so restrictive. Unfortunately, it reflects the fact that our administration, the German government, and several other governments have not yet fully committed to helping Ukraine win. 

The priority from the administration seems to be escalation management; that’s more important than anything else. And that’s why you end up with bad policy decisions or policies that just don’t make any sense, and they’re not connected to an end state. If you have a clearly defined end state, which I think should be to help Ukraine defeat Russia because it’s in our strategic interest. Then we would be providing them everything they need to defeat Russia and we would not have these kinds of restrictions. Now, to be fair and to answer the second part of your question: The reason it took so long is because the White House does prioritize escalation management. And they have an excessive fear, I think it’s excessive fear, that Russia might actually use a nuclear weapon if an American-provided ATACMS three hundred kilometer range weapon was to destroy a target three hundred kilometers inside of Russia regardless of the type target. I think this fear is excessive and it has caused us to be incremental and drip, drip, drip in our decision making and in the provision of aid to Ukraine.

RH: You mentioned  the end state. And both of us as retired military officers understand strategy as the relationship among ends, ways, and means with an assessment of risk. And you talked about the risk of escalation that the White House has been so fixated on. I think we need our end state to be a Ukrainian victory and sometimes we say that, but then sometimes we say we should put Ukraine in the best position for negotiation. So what do you think our actual end state for Ukraine is?

BH: I think they don’t know or they’re not willing to say it. Because if you say here’s our objective—which, by the way, for our civilian leaders is usually the hardest part, which is to clearly define the end state—then you have to have to commit to it. You have to put resources into it and you have to understand and accept the risk, and you have to explain it to the population and to the Congress: that’s hard. We didn’t have it for 20 years in Afghanistan through multiple administrations. So as I look at what the administration has done and not done, said and not said, I think that they hope that this thing finally just sort of comes to where neither side can knock out the other, and they agree to some sort of settlement and then they can move on to something else. So that’s why they are focused on trying to manage Russia’s reactions, which I think is naive. Yes, it can be that you can’t manage Russia; They only respect strength. You can deter them or you can defeat them, but you can’t manage them. Somehow the administration thinks they can do that now. I do want to be clear. The administration has done a superb job on keeping 50 nations focused on helping Ukraine. They have delivered a lot but you know that the same could have been done last year.

I believe if we had committed to helping Ukraine win, the administration’s end state I think really is something that just kind of settles into, I don’t want to say, but frozen conflict. Where Ukraine sort of finally gives in to some sort of negotiated settlement. The problem of course is that’s exactly what the Kremlin hopes. Their book on living up to agreements is a very short book. They just don’t do it unless they’re absolutely forced to do it, and I think they’re pretty confident that we won’t force them to live up to any agreement because we haven’t done it in the past thirty, forty years.

RH: You mentioned deterring Russia and that sort of piqued my interest because I remember you and I were at a conference a couple weeks ago in Bucharest, and you made the point that this is what deterrence failure looks like. So let’s unpack that a little bit. Why did we fail to deter Russia in late 2021 early 2022? And then looking forward, this war will end at some point. How can Russia be deterred from rearming, re-equipping, and re-attacking Ukraine at some point in the future?

BH: Thanks for that and that was a very good conference, I enjoyed being there with you in Bucharest. I think our failed deterrence really began back in 2008 when we did not do anything meaningful after Russia invaded Georgia. You still have the Republic of Georgia and you still have Russian troops occupying twenty percent of Georgia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, places with which you’re very familiar. The Russians saw that we didn’t have the will to do anything about it. And that’s not just the United States, that’s the collective West.  You’ll remember President Obama used the dreaded red line phrase, telling the Russians that if they helped the Assad regime use chemical weapons against the Syrian people, that would be a red line. And of course they immediately did it, and we did nothing. That’s we the US, Germany, UK, or France. Then in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine using their proxies in Donbas, and the seizure of Crimea, the US did nothing. Germany and France began this so-called Minsk process but that was a joke. 

It was the kind of negotiations that the Russians love, where they kind of sit on the side. They sort of act like they’re not really involved. But nobody else is willing or able to make any progress and Russia feels no pain from it. And they see that we are not willing to do what’s necessary. So for them that’s eight years since that happened, 2014 to 2022. In that span of eight years not only did no meaningful sanctions happen that would cause changes in behavior, Germany continued to build the North Stream until all the way up to the end of 2021. This was a powerful signal to the Russians that Germany was not willing to really do anything meaningful for the rest of us. Of course we had the terrible ending to the Afghan campaign which has several fathers responsible for that failure, but nonetheless it happened and the way it ended was a catastrophe. You have former President Trump talking about pulling the US out of NATO, you have French President Macron referring to NATO as “brain dead”. And then you had the chaos of January 6th and the first non-peaceful transition of power in American history. 

So you can imagine in the Kremlin, they’re looking at all this and they’re saying all right, the West is not going to do anything again. They might shake their fists. They might do a few more sanctions. But nothing that’s going to have any real effect. Frankly, the Ukrainians also were not really ready, so that’s what I mean by failed deterrence. The Russians looked at all those things and felt confident that they could roll on into Ukraine and finish the job from 2014.

RH: That’s a great rundown of everything that happened from 2008 through February 2022. We often forget, we don’t connect those things in our minds. We see them as sort of disparate discrete events but they do form a pattern right? A lot of the Russian crowd will say Russia is provoked more by weakness or irresolution than by resolve. It is an interesting discussion because a lot of the people who have not studied Russia are more worried about escalation than the people who have studied Russia, who were worried about escalation stemming from a lack of resolution or resolve on our part. So I do want to turn to the recent aid package the US passed, $61 billion supplemental, after many months of delay. What difference will that make in terms of Ukraine’s military capabilities? Is there anything new in here or is it just replenishing things that we have already given Ukraine?

BH: I don’t see that there was anything remarkable that’s due, but it was ammunition and some weapon systems. So really it was a replenishment that should be enough to get them through the end of the year, along with what is finally beginning to show up from European allies.   I don’t think we’re going to see ammunition or particularly artillery ammunition as a problem. And the reporting I see indicates that they seem to have quite a few attacks and other GMLR rockets for use. That’s encouraging. Of course there still is a terrible shortage of air and missile defense capabilities. But this package should help Ukraine stabilize the situation. 

I don’t see Russia having the ability to overrun or knock Ukraine out of the war. I don’t see them having the ability to capture Kharkiv; they’re able to keep killing innocent people there by launching glide bombs into the middle of the city. But in terms of actual maneuver and overwhelming Ukrainian defenders, I don’t see it. The Russians may have a lot of people but they’re still not well-trained. I just spoke this past weekend to a Ukrainian officer, a friend for many years, who said that they can feel that there is a decrease in the power of Russian attacks. They don’t have the same punch that they did previously, and I think this is a reflection of the impact on their own Russian logistics systems. When you don’t have trained people and most of your officers and NCOs or leaders are dead, you’re not going to have effective units. You can continue to push them as fodder into the fight and try to overwhelm defenders. But according to him, they have less concern now than they may have had a few weeks ago.

RH: That’s an interesting point, the lack of offensive punch. At  the risk maybe of diving down at the tactical level here, a lot of what I’ve read about the Russian offensives driving in the direction of Kharkiv and and then around Vovchansk have said that it has been mostly dismounted infantry results or assaults. Not a lot of BMPs, tanks, and things like that in the assault. Do you think that’s an adaptation of tactics that the Russians think is more successful or is it an indication of their lack of  logistical capability or lack of tracked armored vehicle capability?

BH: I think it’s some of both. Clearly we’ve all been watching for the last two years how tanks and armored vehicles that are not properly employed or supported are destroyed. There have been thousands of these armored vehicles that have been destroyed for the last couple of years, and you see more and more kind of bizarre, mad-Max looking vehicles that are out there, even golf carts or quads.

The whole point is to try and overwhelm Ukrainian defenders, so that’s why I think you see a mix of ground assaults, bizarre vehicles and different things trying to get close enough to the Ukrainian defenses to overwhelm them. Fortunately, now it looks like Ukraine is receiving enough artillery ammunition that they can not only destroy these attacks, but they can also, with effective counter-fire, knock out the Russian artillery that’s necessary to support these ground attacks.

RH: So I want to turn now to theories of victory on both sides. What does the situation look like on the ground right now, and is either side able to make significant advances on the ground? How do you think each side defines victory? What are the Ukrainians realistically hoping to achieve and that they can call a win? And conversely, what does this look like for the Russians?

BH: Well I think for the Russians, their theory of victory is that the West quits, that they just continue to grind down Ukrainians, kill civilians, and hope that their threats of escalation will keep us from committing to helping Ukraine win. And of course they know that the US has an election coming up, that there are elections all over Europe this year. So I think that they probably are watching the calendar in hopes that we will lose interest and not resume support after the US election. 

Now I don’t know that for a fact, but that’s what it looks like judging from their actions and knowing that there’s not going to be another big package from the US beyond what’s already been done. There’s just not enough legislative time to do that. So I think for the Russians they realize they cannot knock Ukraine out of war. For them it’s about attrition. On the other hand, I think the Russians have mortgaged their future in order to do what they’re doing now. I don’t believe that they can sustain what they’re doing now through the end of next year. So they’re on the clock in terms of manpower and industry. 

Just imagine if we were really serious about helping Ukraine win. If we had isolated Russia from China and Iran in such a way that Russia could not receive any sort of drones or parts, their defense industry would be on its knees right now. So number one, I think for the Ukrainians it is to stay in the fight. Number two, I think this year they’re going to focus on stabilizing the front, making sure that there’s not any sort of big breakthrough or something that changes the momentum. I think they’ve got to use this year to grow the size of the army to create some additional combat units so that they can rotate forces, get them out of the fight, allow for retraining, reconstitution, and they haven’t had much chance to do that yet. And reconstitution also includes retraining, integrating new equipment. For example, making sure that what they’ve learned about fighting against Russian electronic warfare is incorporated into their fighting capabilities. 

I think that this is also the year of industrial competition. The West is finally getting going on ammunition production and weapons production. The Ukrainians are also trying to rebuild or reestablish some of their own defense industry. So there’s an industrial competition that’s underway here as well and I think that’s really what this year is about. My sense is that Ukrainians are getting better and better on their long range drone program. The Black Sea Fleet in my view, seems like they’re not even really a factor anymore. So I’m bullish on Ukraine.

RH: So let me ask you as a retired US army senior leader: What are the lessons that Western militaries can be learning from this war? I mean we’re watching it very closely. I sometimes feel that the US army is serious about understanding what’s happening and drawing lessons and at other times I feel like we’re a little dismissive. I’ve heard senior leaders say, well these are two second-rate armies. We would never fight that way. I think that always makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up because the Russians didn’t expect to fight this way either. But what can we learn from what we’re watching happen in Ukraine?

BH: Number one, we better get Ukraine into NATO as fast as possible. I mean this is the best army on the continent of Europe. We’ll be lucky to have them as allies eventually. So whenever I hear somebody say what you just repeated, that, “Well we would never do that.” That kind of arrogance, you know, is what cost us dearly in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other wars as well. So I hope that’s not a widely held opinion. Now having said that, it is true that we would never send American soldiers into an attack without having achieved air superiority. It’s astounding to me that the Russians, despite a huge advantage in air power, failed to achieve air superiority. 

They’ve also failed job two, which is to cut the lines of communication. They have not interdicted any convoys or trains bringing weapons and ammunition from Poland and Ukraine. That’s incredible to me. But that’s a reflection of the failure of job one. They didn’t get their superiority and they don’t have the culture. They don’t do what our great air force does, which is practice all of these things. 

Air superiority is not about numerical superiority. It’s about destroying the enemy’s air defense, the enemy’s command and control, the enemy’s logistics for their air force, and then you can start knocking airplanes down. They never thought they’d have to do that and they had no experience doing it. Flying over Syria was a completely different thing for them. So I think that the three or four biggest takeaways for me are, air and missile defense. 

I’ve always been worried that we don’t have enough. When I look at the volume of rockets, missiles, and drones that Russia launches against civilian targets in Ukraine, we are not prepared for that in Central and Western Europe. We could not protect all of the key cities. The seaports, airports, and transportation infrastructure that’s needed for NATO rapid reinforcement. We absolutely don’t have enough to be able to do that. If the Russians have already made the decision, or when they make that decision to attack a NATO country, they will have already made the decision to launch missile strikes against our transportation infrastructure. So we’ve got to fix that. Number two, I think that everybody’s got drones now and everybody thinks about drones. That’s a good thing and I know that the army has been working on a counter-drone program for quite some time and I imagine that there’s a lot of progress being made, I just don’t know the full extent of it. But that’s clear and that’s something that’s got to be done. 

Our great Navy has been working on maritime unmanned systems for a while. I think it’s actually a pretty extensive program and we have seen the success that the Ukrainians had against the Russian Black Sea Fleet with their maritime unmanned systems. So I would expect that the Navy is paying close attention to that. But I would also say that our understanding of logistics has changed now as a result of the shift of sheer volume of ammunition, the volume of casualties.

You and I grew up with the concept of fix forward. You want to repair equipment as far forward as possible so you get it back in the fight. But that means you have to have mechanics in armored recovery vehicles and all you got to do is get the parts up there so you can fix things that have been damaged or or need maintenance. That’s probably not something that we’ve practiced a whole lot lately that we’ll have to relearn. 

But finally, and more important than anything that I just said, is the reminder of the importance of well-trained, fit, tough, disciplined women and men in your formations, with good leadership at the sergeant and junior officer level. Almost every video I’ve seen of a tank or convoy getting blown apart or troops getting hit, they were in the open, not properly protected, not practicing the good field-craft that’s needed. You have to have mean NCOs that make you do the right stuff. So I think we want to make sure we continue to invest in our leaders so that we have these good sergeants, good captains, and majors that can operate effectively in these terrible conditions.

RH: So what’s at stake for the US here in this war? What would a decisive Russian victory or a decisive Ukrainian victory mean for us?

BH: Failure of Ukraine will have devastating consequences for Europe and for the United States. If Ukraine fails, Russia will absorb tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops into their ranks. They’ll be forced into the service and then they’ll be used as cannon fodder on the next phase of what Russia attempts. This will most likely against Moldova, or against Lithuania or maybe even Poland. The Romanians have said that they will protect Moldova. So that means you’ve got a NATO country that will now be involved. The Poles are not going to sit behind the Vistula River and watch the Red army come closer and closer so they, in fact, would most likely in my estimate move into western Ukraine. So now you’ve got another NATO ally that’s going to be involved. So the consequence of Ukrainian failure is that NATO will end up being in this fight. 

And then, of course, there’s millions of Ukrainian refugees that will be heading into Central and Western Europe which will add to the already-disruptive effect of millions of refugees, not to mention the continued disruption of food shipments and oil shipments in and out of the region. So there are a lot of negative human consequences, strategic consequences, and economic consequences if Ukraine fails. The best way to keep NATO out of a conflict with Russia is to make sure that Ukraine wins. It’s to help them defeat Russia inside Ukraine. 

When Americans ask “Why do we care about Ukraine?”, well, it’s about helping Ukraine win so that NATO doesn’t get involved, so that American soldiers are not on the ground involved there. But it’s also in our own economic interests. America’s economic prosperity is tied directly to the prosperity of our biggest trading partner: Europe. And so, if you’ve got refugees and disruption to energy and food that affects the United States; it affects our prosperity. From a purely selfish, practical standpoint, it is to our benefit that Ukraine defeats Russia. 

It’s also about China. The Chinese are watching to see if we are serious about what we say when it comes to freedom of navigation, respect for sovereignty, respect for international law. All the things that make up the so-called international rules-based order, all the things that are under attack now by Russia, and which China also threatens. If the Chinese see that we don’t have the political will or the industrial capacity or the military capability to deal with this in Europe, where by the way it’s much simpler due to the geography than it will be in the Indo-Pacific region, I don’t think they’ll be too impressed with anything we say about Taiwan or the Phillipines or the South China Sea.

RH: I really like the way you ended there. You started with sort of the power, material security, and economic interest and then you went to the principle. There are principles, at least we claim there are in the United States, principles that govern international relations. There are norms, rules, and laws that ought to be respected. They aren’t always, but it sort of takes me back to George H.W. Bush on the White House lawn in August 1990 saying “This will not stand” referring to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. That war was at least as much about principle as power, and I think you’re absolutely right that this one is too. There are principles at stake here that if we mortgage them, or if we ignore them, they will eventually cause us to have to fight Russia in some form or another. Many of the people who watch Russia routinely have said this, so I was glad to hear you bring that up. So any final comments or what should we be looking for going forward in Ukraine?

BH: I think people still wait to see what happens in the United States. I encounter this every day here in Germany, or Romania or Finland and Poland. These are the different countries where I spend a lot of time. In the various jobs and work that I do, people want to know who’s going to win the election. What’s going to happen if it’s Trump? 

And the point is that America is still the country that people look up to. Nobody thinks that the United States is perfect. They know there’s always a degree of chaos in our politics going back to to the very beginning, but they always have high expectations that we will stand up for what’s right. They always have these high expectations that there is something about our system and the resilience of our people that we can suffer lot of damage and still generally get it right. That was the design and the nature of Americans. I say that not in a boasting or arrogant way, but I mean it is kind of who we are. It’s the reason tens of thousands of people try to get here all the time.  But it’s not a given that it’s going to stay that way. It requires positive leadership. It requires commitment at every level. Commitment by our population and by our leaders to make the hard decisions and to be a role model, but also to build and protect relationships with other countries, allies that share our values. 

We have the biggest defense budget. But the biggest defense budget in the history of the world is still not enough if you don’t have allies. We just don’t have enough capacity to do everything we need to do. We need allies. Part of maintaining a strong alliance like NATO or the relationship we have with countries out in the Indo-Pacific region, is based on confidence, trust, and those shared values. If we don’t protect those then it doesn’t matter how many F-35s or submarines or tanks we have. We will be alone.

RH: Yeah, it’s a great point about allies too. Two Winston Churchill quotes that come to mind. He said about allies “The only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them.” That’s one big advantage we have over China and Russia, we have a large network of alliances that bring a whole lot of capability and a lot of legitimacy to what we do. The other Winston Churchill quote that popped into my head as you were talking about how we’re imperfect and we make mistakes. He said “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they’ve exhausted the alternatives.”

BH: Every alternative! There’s one with a lot of accuracy in it. 

RH: General Hodges thank you so much for joining me on Chain Reaction today. I hope we can do this again soon; I enjoyed it.

BH: Thanks again for the privilege.

Image: President of Ukraine