War with Russia

Preface

THE WAR WITH Russia began in the Ukraine in March 2014.

At that time I was a four-star British General and the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (DSACEUR), deputy to NATO’s American Strategic Commander (SACEUR), himself double-hatted as commander of America’s European Command. We followed in illustrious footseps: General Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first SACEUR with Field Marshal Montgomery the first DSACEUR. Based at NATO’s strategic headquarters (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe or SHAPE in the NATO vernacular) situated just north of Mons in Belgium, I was an experienced NATO man having previously commanded NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps.

I had been in post as DSACEUR for three years and I confess that, along with my senior military colleagues, I accepted the received wisdom that, despite the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, NATO should aim to foster a strategic partnership with Russia. I visited Moscow on several occasions to build relationships with the senior Russian military leadership and happily welcomed General Valeri Gerasimov, now Chief of the Russian General Staff and Commander of Russian Armed Forces, into my home.

However, the invasion of Crimea, Russia’s support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, its invasion of that country, and Putin’s self-proclaimed intention in March 2014 of reuniting ethnic Russian speakers under the banner of Mother Russia, has changed my view of Russia’s intentions fundamentally. Russia is now our strategic adversary and has set itself on a collision course with the West. It has built up, and is enhancing, its military capability. It has thrown away the rulebook on which the post–Cold War security settlement of Europe was based. The Russian president has started a dynamic that can only be halted if the West wakes up to the real possibility of war and takes urgent action.

This book is that wake-up call—before it is too late.

Back in March 2014, there was a sense of incredulity among us western military leaders when it became increasingly clear that the “annexation” of Crimea was no less than a Russian invasion. Put bluntly and in context, this was the first attempt to change the boundaries of Europe by force since Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

Not only were we witnessing a brutal return to the power politics of “iron and blood” in Europe, but we were also seeing a new form of state-on-state warfare. Rather than merely applying brute force, Russia instead undermined the integrity of Crimea from within and without the need for a conventional attack. I watched the clips on CNN and BBC News 24 on the widescreen TV in my office in SHAPE. It showed soldiers in green uniforms, with no identifying unit insignia, faces obscured with balaclava helmets, driving similarly unidentified vehicles. As my fellow commanders and I watched, we all knew who those vehicles belonged to and who was operating them—but proving it was another thing. It was highly professional and expertly implemented and we couldn’t even consider doing anything to counter it as Ukraine was not a member of NATO.

In the days that followed we received regular updates from NATO’s Intelligence Fusion Centre, as they listed the Russian tank armies and airborne divisions now preparing to invade the rest of Ukraine. At the same time, we witnessed an unprecedented buildup of Russian forces on the borders of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Now this was very much our concern, as “the Baltics”—as NATO refers to them—had been NATO members since 2004.

Then President Putin spoke in the Kremlin on 18 March 2014 and formally admitted Crimea into the Russian Federation.

The next morning I sat with my direct boss General Phil Breedlove, US Air Force and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the SACEUR, for the daily operational update in the Comprehensive Crisis Operations Management Centre at the heart of SHAPE, which is NATO’s strategic military headquarters. This newly refurbished, state-of-the-art command center was built to replace an old-style Cold War bunker. It is NATO’s strategic nerve center and it is specifically designed for the challenges of twenty-first century conflict. Manned by its mixed military and civilian staff from the twenty-eight nations of the Alliance, it is also able to integrate its planning with the multitude of different international organizations and other agencies with whom NATO does its essential business. With its banks of computers, multiple media feeds from different 24-hour news channels and social media, and its real time satellite and drone surveillance imagery, it allows SHAPE’s Command Group to think, plan, and act strategically.

The glass walls and open-plan architecture of the brightly lit conference room made the atmosphere more like the trading floor of a New York investment bank than a traditional military headquarters, as successive “briefers” outlined the developing situation on the ground to the Command Group and its supporting staff.

Despite the shock of the Russian invasion, the tone was measured and matter of fact. There was a sense of purpose, a recognition that this could be, if the opportunity was taken, NATO’s moment to show how relevant it still was. After all, this was the very sort of scenario that the Alliance had been formed to confront sixty-five years earlier. Conversely, fail to match the moment and there was a real risk that this might be the point that NATO’s inherent weakness—the requirement for all twenty-eight member states to agree on a course of action—was laid bare for all to see.

Which was it to be?

I remember well the air of unreality as the detailed contents of Putin’s Kremlin speech were analyzed for us by the Operations Chief, a US airborne forces major general, a veteran of America’s wars of the past decade and a man not given to hyperbole. He quoted the sometimes bizarre, always hyper-nationalistic, words of the President: “We have all the reasons to believe that the policy of containment of Russia which was happening in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is still going on.” Followed by Putin’s chilling warning to the West: “If you press the spring, it will release at some point; something you should remember.” It ended with the unequivocal statement that Russia and the Ukraine were “one nation” and “Kiev is the mother of Russian cities.”

As I listened, the implications were clear. The annexation of Crimea, and the President’s vow to reunite “Russian speakers” in the former republics of the Soviet Union under the banner of Mother Russia, was little different from Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. Would future historians judge this as our generation’s Rhineland and Sudetenland moment? And to continue the analogy to its logical conclusion, would an implicit Russian attempt to reincorporate the Baltic States—with their significant Russian-speaking minorities—into a new Russian empire in a couple of years’ time be our Poland? My answer was an emphatic “yes.”—if NATO, under US leadership, failed to step up to the mark.

In the following days we watched the continued Russian build-up of troops on both the borders of Ukraine and the Baltic States. This was not in the modern NATO script or the way “the West”—meaning broadly the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand—viewed the world either.

Eminent western military thinkers were even now proclaiming the end of state-on-state industrial war. But if my passionate study of history has taught me anything, it is to take no apparent certainty for granted, together with our inability to learn the lessons of the past. I felt as if I were back at the British Army Staff College in the Cold War days of the late 1980s. We were once again talking of Russian tank armies and airborne divisions and calculating where and when they might attack across the border into Ukraine.

My first concern was for the Baltic States and what this display of Russian aggression would mean for them. I recalled, with some discomfort, my interview in September 2013 on Latvian TV, in which I had said so confidently, in response to some sharp questions from my interviewer, that I saw no threat to the Baltic States from this Russian government. How wrong I had been. All the Chiefs of Defense of these freedom-loving, western European–oriented countries were my friends. All had family members who had been deported to Siberia or liquidated in the purges of the Soviet era. The previous Estonian Chief of Defense had himself been deported to the Russian Gulags with his entire family as a child, aged nine. All had experienced the brutality of conscription into the Soviet military and, as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992, all had put their lives on the line and answered their country’s call to break away from the Soviet empire. They understood the horror of what might be coming around the corner in a way that I as a Brit, or SACEUR as an American, could not even begin to do. These were men who really understood the meaning of the word “freedom.”

I phoned them all in turn: Riho Terras, Raimonds Graube, and Arvydas Pocius. They were calm, but utterly realistic. They reported unprecedented levels of Russian military activity in their airspace, seaspace, and along their land borders with Russia. These, they reported, were clearly designed to intimidate them. This was the way the old Soviet Union did business and they were under no illusions as to what they were witnessing now.

It turned out that the Americans had been there before me, a sign of America’s historical commitment to the Baltic States which had never wavered, even during the years of Soviet occupation. General Marty Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had conference-called them earlier that day. In the face of their concern he had ordered the immediate deployment of a squadron of F-16 fighter-bombers to the Baltics. With that one gesture, I knew that America was continuing to underpin and guarantee the freedom of Europe; if Russia attacked, however far-fetched that might seem, it would mean engaging those aircraft. And that would mean America was also being attacked. Nevertheless, my friends expressed disappointment, some bitterness, but no surprise, that none of the major European NATO powers—Britain, France or Germany—had shown any solidarity with them. They could have said to me, “I told you so.” But none did. They didn’t need to.

Back at SHAPE, our daily lives quickly became dominated by the crisis in Ukraine and how NATO should respond. At the end of one briefing, SACEUR, NATO’s strategic commander, a genial, Harley Davidson–riding, US Air Force fighter pilot from the Deep South, asked me for my thoughts as a land commander. “Phil,” I replied, “the NATO nations won’t like it, but now is the time to deploy a brigade to the Baltic States to show the Russians that we’re serious about defending them.”

Sadly, and in the course of this book you will see why, this was a political bridge too far for the North Atlantic Council. But militarily and, I would argue, politically, it was the right thing to do. An all-arms brigade of 5,000 men with tanks, armored infantry, attack helicopters, and artillery would have sent a powerful message to the President: “Thus far perhaps, but no further.” It would also have irrevocably bound all NATO nations into the defense of the Baltic States.

I quickly made two more phone calls, to Air Chief Marshal Stu Peach, the UK’s Vice Chief of Defense Staff, in the Ministry of Defense in London, and to Mariot Leslie, the UK’s Ambassador to NATO in Brussels. I suggested that now was the time for Britain to show solidarity with the Baltic States and particularly with Estonia, whose lion-hearted soldiers had fought and died alongside American and British soldiers in faraway Afghanistan. That America’s battle-hardened troops would be there, ready and willing to defend the values of individual freedom, democracy, and the rule of law which had made the USA such a beacon of hope for the world, I had little doubt. The wheels of government turned and, shortly afterwards, to his credit, the British prime minister authorized the deployment of four RAF Typhoons to Estonia. But the question remained: would the effort be sustained?

And then, at the end of March, my thirty-seven-year military career was over and I left SHAPE to start a new civilian life. I was, however, interested to note that, in May 2015, just over a year after I had first suggested it, the Estonian Chief of Defense called for NATO to deploy a brigade to the Baltic States to show its solidarity with those small and vulnerable countries, as its massive and ever more aggressive neighbor continued to ramp up its military activity on their borders. Sadly that request fell on deaf ears until, under American leadership, the NATO alliance agreed to forward base four battalions in the Baltic States and eastern Poland.

How had it come to this? How was it that Russia, whom NATO considered its most important strategic partner as late as 2014, was ripping up the post–Cold War settlement of Europe in our collective and shocked faces? And how had we been taken so much by surprise?

We have only to look at ourselves to find most of the answers. NATO itself set the scene for what followed in Ukraine. Back in 2008 it gave Ukraine its naive promise of NATO membership; a promise of collective defense that could never have been implemented militarily. The logistical challenge of assembling sufficient NATO combat power to protect Ukraine’s eastern border should have been blindingly obvious, even to politicians who had grown up in a time of peace and knew nothing about war fighting. Put simply, Ukraine is just too far away to defend if attacked by Russia.

Furthermore, this posturing by the West only fed a deep-seated Russian paranoia about a perceived NATO strategy of ever-increasing containment. After all, during the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc countries had stood as a buffer between the borders of Mother Russia and democratic Europe. And be under no illusions, the Russians know all about being attacked from the West. This promise to Ukraine of NATO membership would have put yet another NATO country right on the Russian border. So, add to this Russian fear of encirclement the sense of profound dishonor following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent chaos in Russia in the 1990s, and the result for proud Russians was a toxic brew.

We in the West might struggle to understand that real sense of personal dishonor felt so deeply by patriotic young officers who had served in the military and KGB at the apogee of Soviet power—men like the President—but that sense of dishonor is real and we need to accept it and factor it into our calculations.

Of course, Putin had already shown himself to be a ruthless opportunist when he took the cool and brutal decision to invade Georgia back in 2008, at the exact moment the world’s attention was focused on the Beijing Olympic Games. Despite this, after some perfunctory initial protests, the West quickly returned to business as usual. After all, Georgia was so far beyond NATO’s sphere of influence and so deep in Russia’s, there was little we could do. So an initial Russian toe in the invasion waters had shown Putin what he could get away with; Hitler and the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 came strongly to my mind, even as far back as 2008.

If this were not bad enough, there were other political and military blunders which, compounded together, gave an impression of growing Western weakness to the ever-watching Russians.

There was President Barack Obama’s much-vaunted new “Asia–Pacific pivot,” which demonstrated Europe’s reduced strategic importance to the United States. It was signalled by the massive reduction in American forces stationed in Germany. How ironic it was that, a month after Putin invaded Crimea, the last American tanks left German soil after sixty-nine years. Once there were over 6,000 NATO tanks in Germany, most of them American: a massive statement of America’s determination to protect Europe. It is a simple fact of military life that, once you cut capability, it requires a superhuman effort to regenerate it. Storing mothballed tanks and other vehicles of war in Eastern Europe, as the Americans first did in 2015, does not by itself create a credible military capability. That requires manpower, training, logistics, and commitment and, equally important, enough time to pull everything together so they can operate as an effective team.

The impression of America’s decreasing interest in Europe was further reinforced by Obama’s abdication of diplomatic efforts to contain Russia in Ukraine in 2014. Don’t forget that America, together with Russia and the UK, were signatories of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, under which Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in return for US and Russian guarantees of its territorial integrity. Russia had torn up the Budapest Memorandum and Obama had chosen to forget American promises. I have served under the finest American generals and admirals in peace and war and know only too well that American leadership remains crucial to the defense and security of the free world—so this was not a good signal to send Russia, or the world.

The United Kingdom, Europe’s premier military power since the Second World War, was led, from 2010, by a coalition Prime Minister, David Cameron, who appeared increasingly backward-leaning on the international scene. His Defense Review of 2010 was nothing more than a gamble based on an assumption that the international scene would remain benign. Wars and conflicts that threatened the security of the United Kingdom were declared a thing of the past. The UK’s national strategy proclaimed that there was no existential threat to these shores. How irresponsibly naive that sounds, as I write these words today.

Having unilaterally decided that this was the way the world would be for the foreseeable future, the 2010 Review then emasculated British military capability. The consequences are far-reaching and difficult, if not near impossible, to reverse: 20,000 experienced regular soldiers were axed from the Army, nearly a quarter of its strength. Royal Navy frigate and destroyer numbers—the work horses of any fleet—were cut right back. Some ships came off station from the Libyan maritime embargo in 2011 and sailed direct to the breaker’s yard. It seemed quite extraordinary to me at the time to see our warships being broken up at the very moment they were most needed. The unraveling of Libya and the deepening turmoil of the Arab Spring ought to have told any politician with any sense that the world was not as safe and predictable as they were busy assuring us it was. Not only were Royal Air Force fast-jet numbers removed from the inventory, but that essential capability for a proud maritime nation, maritime patrol aircraft, was also disbanded. It would be difficult to overstate the disbelief of our allies or delight of our enemies at this shortsighted decision.

When I said in London’s Sunday Times at the end of March 2014, as I stepped down as DSACEUR, that this was a “hell of a gamble,” the Defense Secretary was so infuriated at being questioned in public that I was summoned by General Sir Peter Wall, the head of the British Army, and told that the Defense Secretary had wanted “formal action” taken against me. However, formal action would have involved a court-martial and, fortunately for the latter’s political reputation—it also seems he had not appreciated that I reported to NATO and not to him—wiser counsel had prevailed. But the damage to our armed forces and, through them, our ability to defend our national interests—the first duty of any government—had already been done.

This failure to understand the realities of dealing with bullies was further reinforced during Britain’s response to the crisis in the Middle East, caused by the eruption on the scene of the so-called Islamic State in the summer of 2014. Both the Prime Minister and the new Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, recently moved into post from Defense Minister (where, after threatening me, he had continued to oversee the rundown of British forces) waxed apocalyptic on the threat IS posed and yet did nothing credible to confront that threat. Foreign Secretary Hammond’s hubristic boast that “Britain defined itself by the extent to which it punched above its weight” was proved hollow.

So, when the former British Prime Minister himself wrote in a Sunday paper in 2014 that “Britain should avoid sending armies to fight”—strongly implying that the Army’s primary task was now humanitarian relief—I saw how the impact on the thinking of our allies and potential adversaries was profound. This pronouncement signalled that Britain was led by a government terrified of being seen to commit, but nevertheless yearning to be seen as bold and resolute. A country famous for once “walking softly and carrying a big stick”—meaning that British governments did not make threats they did not fully intend to implement—now had a leadership that shouted loudly but, thanks to ongoing defense cuts, carried an increasingly tiny and impotent stick. And be in no doubt, nobody in the military was fooled by the UK’s 2015 Strategic Defense and Security Review with its creative accounting to maintain the Defense budget at two per cent of GDP and the “jam tomorrow”—and most of these are many, many years in the future—of its big-ticket equipment items.

Since I wrote the preface for the UK hardback edition of this book in May 2016, everything I predicted has come to pass and we are now in an even more perilous situation. Russia has been ramping up its so-called “snap” exercises with up to 40,000 troops at a time, suddenly and without prior warning, practicing the overthrow and occupation of the Baltic States. American naval ships have been buzzed at low level by Russian fighters in the Baltic Sea and there has been a massive buildup of Russian military force in the vicinity of the Baltic States with three Motor Rifle divisions (around 60,000 personnel) since January 2016. In the words of Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, the Kremlin has been in a state of war with the West since 2014. While not yet in the Baltic chicken coop, the wolf is prowling around the still very flimsy fence. We are, de facto, in a new, and much more dangerous, form of Cold War.

Meanwhile, the international institutions on which the US and Europe’s transatlantic defense and security depends, NATO and the EU, are coming under increasing pressure. Yes, NATO has now agreed to send four individual battalions from the USA, Canada, Germany, and Britain to the Baltic States and eastern Poland. While this is a start, no one should be under any illusions that this is anything but a political token. First, it will take some time to deploy those battalions, which may itself encourage the Russian president to conduct a preemptive strike before they are in position. Second, without proper command and control and the artillery, engineers, attack helicopters, and logistics to turn individual battalions into an effective fighting brigade, and spread out over four countries, those four battalions would be picked off piecemeal should Russia attack. At the same time, NATO is itself unexpectedly weakened by the fallout from the attempted military coup in Turkey, which threatens to emasculate its second largest military power and render it ineffective and increasingly unstable as a result of the swinging purges against its armed forces.

Most recently, in July 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, in an interview with the New York Times, cast doubt on America’s willingness to come to the aid of a NATO ally under attack. At a stroke, this comment has undermined the notion of NATO’s founding principle of collective defense. NATO is totally dependent on strong US leadership and peace in Europe will only be maintained if there is absolute certainty that the US will always be there to defend its allies. Trump’s comments will embolden the Russian president and make the nightmare scenario in this book more likely.

At the same time, the EU is itself faced with an existential crisis following the British vote to leave in the June 2016 referendum. Britain itself not only faces a potential breakup of the Union following the resounding Scottish vote to remain in the EU, to say nothing of the risk to the Northern Ireland peace process, but also has been plunged into political and economic turmoil with inevitable implications for its international standing and its armed forces as the full fiscal impact of BREXIT is felt. At the very least, maintaining defense spending at even a creatively accounted 2% of GDP will be little comfort if GDP shrinks as a result of the economic consequences of BREXIT.

Meanwhile, the one man doubtless rubbing his hands together in glee at this turmoil has been the Russian president sitting in his office in the Kremlin. Britain, once Europe’s premier military power, seemed set on a course of moral and physical disarmament. As a young KGB officer in East Germany during the Cold War, Putin recalled the respect in which Britain, under its “Iron Lady” prime minister, was held by Russia for its bold recapture of the Falkland Islands in 1982. Britain had said they would do what seemed near impossible and had gone ahead and done it. That combination of a show of arms and quiet but grim political resolve had given Britain huge political capital. Clearly that stubborn resolve, so respected and admired across the world, had evaporated. Britain was now becoming little different from any other semi-pacifist, European social democracy; more interested in protecting welfare and benefits than maintaining adequate defenses.

If Britain’s enemies concluded that it was fast losing the will to fight for what it believed in, much of Europe never had the will to start with. Moreover, the US was now looking to the threats and opportunities of the East, instead of the old world of the West.

This is the story of how the West failed to heed the warning signals from Russia, unwittingly emboldened its president, and, through a succession of disastrous policy decisions, blundered over the edge of the precipice to war.

“So what?” you may say. Of course, it will be grim for the people of the Baltic States and Poland, “faraway countries of which we know little”—to paraphrase the UK’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 when shying away from facing up to Nazi aggression towards those countries. But will it really affect us in the US and Western Europe if NATO is rendered impotent and we are unable to protect the Baltic States and Poland from Russia?

The answer to that is a resounding, “Yes.”

First, the most terrifying scenario is that, without strong conventional deterrence—tanks, planes, artillery, ships, and boots on the ground—the only remaining line of defense for a NATO facing imminent military defeat is nuclear weapons.

The growing weakness of the West’s conventional forces means that the only way Russia can be deterred or defeated is by the threat or use of nuclear weapons. However, the consequence of the release of intercontinental ballistic missiles on Russia would be Armageddon; a result so terrible that the Russian president will calculate that the US, UK (despite the strong statement of intent from UK’s new Prime Minister Theresa May that she would have no hesitation ordering the use of nuclear weapons), and France—the only nuclear-armed states of NATO—would never risk the near total destruction of human civilization in the US and Europe for the sake of three small Baltic states.

And he is probably right. Which is why he would get away with it.

This is why maintaining an effective conventional deterrent—military forces that can fight and hold off the Russians if they attack, but above all to persuade them not to attack in the first place—is critical. It is only by having strong conventional forces that we can hope to ensure there is never a need to use that final option: nuclear weapons. Put another way, weak conventional forces make the use of nuclear weapons as a last, desperate line of defense very much more likely.

Even without the release of nuclear weapons, if we do have to fight a conventional war, prepare yourself for appalling casualties. These would be infinitely greater than anything suffered in recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There could well be casualties on a Second World War level of horror. Be under no illusion whatsoever: war has a grim and uncontrollable logic of its own. Once the first bombs and missiles are launched, who can say where the next lot will end up landing? If we are hitting Russians, why should New York, Washington, London, Berlin, Paris, or Warsaw not end up being targeted in return?

It does not need Russian soldiers marching though Berlin and Paris for the world as we know it to cease to exist. A militarily victorious Russia, able to dictate to a defeated Europe and NATO from the end of a barrel as to exactly what will and what will not be acceptable to them, will be enough for life as we now know it in the West to come to a very abrupt end. NATO will collapse and transatlantic, and therefore American, security will be threatened. The President will have achieved his aim of destroying NATO, the alliance of free, democratic countries he sees as standing between him and a return to Russian great power status.

“To the victor the spoils.” Always.

As Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the DSACEUR, I sat in the council meetings with defense ministers and the decision makers of NATO; I was part of the discussions and decisions on how force should be deployed, and I walked the corridors of power in NATO HQ Brussels, the White House, No. 10 Downing Street, and the Pentagon. In this book I will take you into those corridors as the politicians agonize over whether to send in Special Forces, order air strikes, or deploy armies and navies.

I will show you, based on my personal experience of NATO’s campaigns in Afghanistan and Libya, the posturing, the vanity, the political cynicism, and the moral cowardice which all too often characterize those decisions. I will also highlight the occasional statesmanship and how the leadership and moral courage of one individual of stature can change the course of history. I know, too, the reality of combat, so I will show you how decisions taken at the highest levels affect the men and women who fight the battles and who, together with innocent civilians, pay the price of war.

When I was DSACEUR, I led exercises in which we war-gamed these scenarios, based on our own capabilities and what we knew about our enemies. What follows in this book represents one such, entirely feasible, scenario, however unimaginably awful it may seem. But just because something is unimaginably awful to Western political leaders, that does not mean it is not considered a viable option by the Russians.

This is fiction, but it is fact-based, entirely plausible, and very closely modeled on what I know, based on my position as a very senior military insider at the highest and best-informed level. Why write it as a future, fact-based fiction rather than a polemic? The answer is simple. I have contributed to at least three think tank papers, including one highly respected US think tank, in the last six months highlighting the threat from Russia. But who reads think tank papers but other think tankers? My aim has been to explain the very real danger we face to the general reader with no particular interest in defense and to make it accessible. At every stage I have shown how the political and military decisions we are currently making, and have already made, are now propelling us into a future war with Russia. However, this is a war that could yet be avoided, if we act right now.

That is why this story needs to be told before it is too late. Because, in Trotsky’s chilling words, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Of one thing I am absolutely certain: the President in the Kremlin knows all this and, even as you read these words, his admirals and generals are also war-gaming these very scenarios. And they have every intention of winning the war.