Ukraine deserves our support—now more than ever
We revisit a reader favorite post with a fresh (and sobering) world view.
Welcome back to the Two Navy Guys Debrief, the (mostly) weekly forum where we offer perspective on a national security issue and how we have explored that topic in our fiction.
This post was originally published under the title Did you see the gorilla? The title, which referred to a previous post, was meant to be clever and draw curious readers in. It did neither, so we changed it to say what the post is about: Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War in Ukraine and why we should be offering the Ukrainians as much support as we can right now.
Sincerely -
David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
PS - We’ll try not to overthink our titles in the future, but no promises.
One of our most popular posts was from March 2023 entitled, Did you see the gorilla? We’ll quote ourselves here to explain the backstory to the title:
Psychologist Dan Simons does work in an area he calls change blindness. You might have seen some of his experiments. In one, you watch a 60-second movie of six people passing a basketball and you are instructed to count the number of times the people wearing white shirts pass the ball.
Since the people are constantly moving, you need to focus to count the passes. At the end, you give your correct answer: 15 passes. Then the video prompts:
Did you see the gorilla?
Wait, whaaat? Halfway through the video, a man in a gorilla suit strolls through the weaving players passing basketballs. Most people who take the test never see it. (Now that you know the real test, it won’t work on you.)
We used this anecdote as a jumping off point to talk about how we saw Mr. Putin's Unnecessary War in Ukraine distracting the world’s attention from recent and nefarious Chinese gray zone attacks on Taiwan’s undersea communications cables.
Time passes, things change, and it’s time to flip that discussion on its head. While the world watches the Middle East conflict with increasing concern/horror, we’re sending up a red flare about Ukraine.
The news these days is fast, furious, and frequently bloody, so let’s recap what happened in Ukraine:
Over two years ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded the sovereign country of Ukraine. It was a disaster for Mr. Putin. Against all expectations, not only did the Ukrainians not collapse, but they fought back in ways that astonished the world. To date, Russian casualties (killed and wounded) are estimated at over 450,000.1 According to Mediazona, which tracks Russian deaths based on publicly available sources, “more than 85,000 Russian military members have died based on the number of inheritance settlements for slain soldiers.”2
Now, over two years in, after relentless attacks on civilians and infrastructure, Mr. Putin has achieved exactly zero of his goals: he has not captured the capital of Kyiv, he has not taken over the democratically elected government of Ukraine, and he has not broken the spirit of the country.
It’s actually worse than that for Mr. Putin. He expected his invasion to cause a rift between the US and her allies. In fact, the exact opposite happened. The allies banded together and supported Ukraine against the Russian aggressors. Finland, which has maintained a strict neutrality policy toward Russia since World War Two, has since joined NATO, as has Sweden.
The Ukrainians had a lot of support from NATO, including the United States and our allies. But isn’t that the point of allies? An ally is a backstop against disaster, someone you can depend on in times of great need. It’s ironic that any American would question the value of NATO or the concept of allies. In the 70-year history of NATO, Article 5 (an attack on one is an attack on all) has been invoked ONCE, by the United States after 9-11.
We get it. It’s a lot. We are living through a historical inflection point and no one knows how all this will turn out. The only guiding lights we have are our values and our allies.
Mr. Putin, and autocrats like him, are a threat to both.
Ukraine is at a critical point. They need and deserve our help. Not just because it’s the right thing to do—which it is—but because it is in our national interest.
Anyone who believes that Mr. Putin will be satisfied with Ukraine is either naive, not paying attention, or being willfully ignorant. The only thing worse than an autocrat who has lost is an autocrat who thinks he’s won. To autocrats like Mr. Putin, the world is a transactional, zero-sum game. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.
So, this is our ask. Look away from the horrors of the Middle East and consider anew the conflict in Ukraine. For over two years, the Ukrainian people have withstood the attack of a much larger, much richer autocratic neighbor. They’ve demonstrated resilience that is nothing short of inspiring and they deserve all the support we can give them.
As always, thanks for being a supporter –
David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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We discussed payouts for slain Russian soldiers in this post, The Russian Split Screen.
I am enjoying your books, and I share your concern about the importance of winning the Ukraine fight. However, I disagree somewhat with your view that the US should be supporting Ukraine in this. I feel like the world is in a similar situation to that of 1939-1941. There's a shooting war in Europe that has the full attention of the press in the US and Europe, while we have an imperialistic nation in Asia that is bullying its neighbors but is being largely ignored by the press. I also believe the lack of a robust US military capability in the western Pacific (along with that of our allies in the region) invites Chinese aggression in East Asia and Taiwan just as with Japan in 1939-41. Unfortunately, just as before and during the early part of WWII, European leaders have been persuasive and have convinced the US administration that we should be providing money and resources to their fight at the expense of the Pacific. On top of this, the EU, with an economy nearly as large as that of the US, has been underfunding its defense, while the US finds itself in a dire need to prioritize its spending, with a national debt more that 100% of GDP for only the second time in our history (the first time was after WWII). I believe we should tell the Europeans to scale back their social spending slightly, contribute more to defense, and, in particular, provide the bulk of the support to Ukraine. This would allow the US to scale back its funding for Ukraine and instead spend that money on a deterrent force structure in the Pacific. Instead of delaying the John F. Kennedy, as was recently announced, we should instead be laying the keel for another Ford-class carrier, adding to B-21 planned production, and plusing up spending in other defense areas needed to ensure a robust deterrent to Chinese ambitions in the western Pacific. Without this deterrent, I think it's likely we'll experience another Pearl Harbor type event in the next few years.