The Reason Putin's Indiscriminate Ukraine Bombing Is Bad Strategy

Some experts think Putin's increasingly brutal, vicious attacks on Ukraine are because he believes they will wear down both the population and its western allies. Others say that Putin feels if he can't have Ukraine then he'd just as soon destroy it. 

But history suggests that there are diminishing returns to increased bombardment. And Putin's savagery has not only united Ukraine and NATO, it has driven previously neutral states like Sweden and Finland to join NATO while encouraging historically neutral Switzerland to cooperate more closely with the western alliance. It is understood that in Putin's world, any sign of conciliation is considered a sign of weakness that will end in his death, but his refusal to accept results so far may achieve the same unwelcome result faster. JL

David Von Drehle reports in the Washington Post:

Putin will continue bombing so refugees from Ukraine strain Western resources. Others (say) he seeks to destroy the country if he cannot rule it. But don’t underestimate the inertia of a gambler deeply into a bad bet. The loss is too heavy to admit, and so the gambler  doubles down. “The American Air Force dropped more bombs in Vietnam than in WWII, in the belief that if they kept dropping bombs this would bring about North Vietnam’s collapse." This did not work. Luftwaffe bombing of London and Stalingrad did not break the will of the British or the Soviets. “There are diminishing returns so far as the morale effects of increased magnitude of air attacks are concerned.”

Among the best of all newspaper columnists, the late Russell Baker of the New York Times outdid even himself with a lacerating piece of satire published May 12, 1973, under the headline “Bomb Math.”

No summary can do justice to the piece, which mixes revulsion and guffaws in measures reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s “modest proposal” to serve Irish babies to English diners. Baker uses testimony by the then-secretary of defense concerning the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and Laos to devise a mathematical formula for saving the “hearts and minds” — a popular Vietnam-era construction — of people by showering them with bombs.

Doggedly estimating the average weight of the bombed civilians (i.e., the “body containing the heart and mind to be saved”) and relating that figure to the tonnage of bombs dropped in the previous quarter, as reported by the sanguine bureaucrat, Baker suggested an equation applicable to any country.

 

“To save the hearts and minds of Italy,” he ventured for example, “we would have to drop 148 pounds per year per Italian, of whom there are about 55 million. This means we would have to drop 8.14 billion pounds of bombs or, to put it more manageably, about four million tons.”

“ ‘All very well,’ the taxpayer will say, ‘but what will it cost me?’ ”

Opinion: Putin should know: There’s more than one way for a bloody siege to end

To the humanitarian, “Bomb Math” is a brilliant indictment of the savagery of indiscriminate bombing. To the strategist, this little essay is a master class in the fecklessness of bombing populations. Though Russian dictator Vladimir Putin shows no sign of a humane side, he does fancy himself strategic. Therefore, he might want to take Baker’s insights under advisement.

Putin’s blind destruction of Ukrainian cities, through bombing and shelling, will not bring the population to heel, any more than dropping 100-plus pounds of bombs per year for every Laotian redeemed the U.S. war in Vietnam. But don’t take a satirist’s word for it. Here is the considered judgment of one of the foremost historians of 20th-century warfare, Richard Overy of the University of Exeter in England.

“The American Air Force dropped more bombs in Vietnam than in WWII, in the belief that if they kept on dropping bombs and napalm, then somehow, this would prevent North Vietnam from taking over South Vietnam, or even bring about North Vietnam’s collapse and open the way for a ‘democratic’ Vietnam,” Overy noted several years ago in an interview with the International Review of the Red Cross. “This did not work, and Vietnam became a communist State. I think, of all the examples of the twentieth century, this is probably the most striking one. Huge quantities of bombs were dropped on a developing society, in the expectation that it would produce some kind of political dividend. And in the end, the dividend went to the enemy.”

 

Vietnam was not the only example Overy might have offered. Luftwaffe bombing of London and Stalingrad did not break the will of the British or the Soviets. Japanese generals were ready to keep fighting even after atomic bombs decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Putin has his own hearts-and-minds problem in Syria, where anti-government Islamist militants continue to fight in the countryside even after the Russia-backed regime bombed rebel-held cities to smithereens.

As a young man, the eminent psychologist Irving L. Janis — who later coined the phrase “groupthink” — was commissioned by the Rand Corporation to study the effects of massive bombing campaigns on civilian populations during World War II. He found that people can endure all sorts of danger and privation indefinitely, provided they have faith their own government is fighting to protect them.

 

Citizens of Ukraine have reason to trust. A well-motivated, well-led combination of trained soldiers and furious civilians has broken Putin’s multipronged attack. Therefore, there’s no reason to believe that launching more missiles or hurling more shells into the cities will achieve anything more than pointless slaughter. “Apparently,” Janis wrote, “there are diminishing returns so far as the morale effects of increased magnitude of air attacks are concerned.”

 

One wishes that Putin and his lackeys would look at the history of the past century and conclude that further bombing of Ukraine is a pointless exercise in bloody-mindedness. That seems unlikely — at least for now. Some speculate that Putin will continue bombing so that refugees from Ukraine continue to strain Western resources. Others imagine that he seeks to destroy the country if he cannot rule it.

Both might be true. But don’t underestimate the powerful inertia of a gambler gone deeply into a bad bet. The loss is too heavy to admit, and so the gambler presses on, doubling down, in hopes that fickle fate or blind luck will intervene to bail him out. The United States tried that in Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Laos, and it just didn’t add up.