What happens to higher education when institutions dedicated to critical thought increasingly align themselves with the logics of war, surveillance, and national security? Unless we mount an organized resistance, we may viscerally experience the answer to this question all too soon.

We are already watching this transformation play out in both the U.S. and Canada as universities face growing pressure to align their missions, research agendas, and pedagogical practices with the values, priorities, and imperatives of a society increasingly organized around the logic of war.

Militarized policies, values, identities, and modes of governance no longer merely creep into U.S. society. Under the Trump administration, they increasingly define it. Militarization now extends far beyond the battlefield, reshaping everyday life, public institutions, and the very meaning of citizenship. War is celebrated as a moral imperative, often wrapped in the language of religious righteousness and white Christian nationalism. Due process gives way to abductions and arbitrary detention, dissent is met with threats and repression, soldiers occupy U.S. cities, and political violence is normalized through a steady stream of incendiary rhetoric and state-sponsored spectacles that glorify force, exclusion, and domination. Democratic ideals are displaced by a culture of fear, manufactured insecurity, and the belief that the nation is besieged by enemies both within and beyond its borders — largely immigrants and people of color.

In this militarized landscape, critical thought is derided, informed judgment is replaced by ideological conformity, and institutions charged with nurturing democratic agency increasingly come under attack. This fusion of militarism, toxic masculinity, religious fundamentalism, and white nationalist politics functions as a powerful form of public pedagogy, producing the authoritarian values, identities, and modes of agency that have historically provided the cultural foundations for fascist politics.

The Dangers of the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex”

The late U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers posed by what he called the “military-industrial-academic complex.” In an earlier draft of his famous 1961 farewell address on the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower included the word “academic,” recognizing that universities could become deeply entangled with military power, corporate interests, and state security agendas in ways that threatened their intellectual independence and democratic mission.

This warning extends to countries that increasingly live in the shadow of the U.S.’s expanding warfare state and its militarized culture. For instance, against an increasingly militarized global order, the Canadian government has unveiled an expansive “Defence Industrial Strategy” backed by 81.8 billion Canadian dollars (around 60 billion in U.S. dollars) in new defense spending in Budget 2025, including 6.6 billion Canadian dollars devoted specifically to expanding the country’s defense-industrial infrastructure. The strategy marks the largest long-term expansion of Canada’s military economy since the Second World War.

What once appeared to be limited partnerships between North American universities and defense industries has evolved into a far broader transformation of higher education itself. As Canada dramatically expands military spending through its Defence Industrial Strategy, universities are increasingly being drawn into the orbit of defense priorities. Federal initiatives encourage partnerships between universities, defense contractors, and government agencies in fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, autonomous systems, and advanced surveillance technologies. Research funding is increasingly directed toward projects framed around national security, defense innovation, and military competitiveness. As these priorities gain influence, higher education is being reshaped by the social logics of militarization, technological control, and permanent security, altering not only what knowledge is produced but also the purposes to which it is put, raising urgent questions about the future of the university as a democratic public sphere.

Militarized knowledge production blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

The growing use of drones and AI-driven warfare systems is not simply a military development. It signals a broader transformation in how research and knowledge are produced, funded, and valued. As universities deepen their involvement in military research, fields ranging from artificial intelligence and data analytics to robotics and cybersecurity are increasingly organized around the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare. AI technologies are already being deployed by state agencies to monitor migrants, journalists, activists, and political dissidents, while drones have revolutionized warfare by making it cheaper, more remote, and less accountable. Under such conditions, knowledge is not viewed primarily as a public good serving democratic life. Instead, it is increasingly organized around military imperatives of prediction, control, targeting, and domination. The result is a form of militarized knowledge production that blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

Michael S. Sherry rightly argues that in an age in which state power is increasingly organized through militarized values and security logics, military culture now shapes not only state policy but “broad areas of national life.” As David Theo Goldberg argues, militarization no longer operates only through armies and weapons systems. It increasingly shapes culture, technology, modes of governance, and everyday life. As Goldberg observes:

The military is not just a fighting machine…. It serves and socializes. It hands down to society, as big brother might, its more or less perfected goods, from gunpowder to guns, computing to information management … In short, while militarily produced instruments might be retooled to other, broader social purposes, the military shapes pretty much the entire range of social production from commodities to culture, social goods to social theory.

The implications for higher education are profound. Militarization does not simply reshape culture, technology, and governance. It also reorganizes the production of knowledge itself, aligning university research with the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare while legitimating authoritarian forms of power. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence research tied to military and surveillance applications deepens these dangers. Universities are increasingly helping to develop technologies used for predictive policing, automated warfare, mass surveillance, and forms of digital authoritarianism that blur the line between security and repression. Such developments are routinely justified in the language of innovation, efficiency, and national security, yet they raise profound ethical questions about the role of higher education in designing technologies that deepen inequality, expand state violence, erode civil liberties, and facilitate the killing of civilians, including children, in conflicts largely removed from public scrutiny.

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political.

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political. Universities do more than train workers; they shape civic identities, ethical sensibilities, and the capacity for democratic agency itself. When higher education embraces military partnerships and military-driven research agendas, it legitimates a worldview in which security eclipses justice, technological efficiency displaces ethical reflection, and dissent is recast as a threat rather than a democratic necessity.

How Militarization Reorganizes the Production of Knowledge

As militarization becomes woven into the fabric of political culture, universities increasingly reorganize knowledge, research priorities, and technological innovation around the assumptions of permanent conflict, geopolitical competition, and security management. In doing so, higher education normalizes the belief that militarized knowledge and military solutions should govern everyday life. Yet militarization does not merely reshape research priorities and institutional culture. It also reorganizes historical memory, civic identity, and the very terms through which democracy is understood.

Militarization also bears heavily on the production of knowledge itself. As Fintan O’Toole observes, contemporary authoritarian movements do more than expand military power; they seek to reshape historical memory and civic consciousness. Shameful histories are recast as heroic achievements, while assaults on democracy are reimagined as acts of patriotism. The Confederate rebellion is transformed from a defense of slavery into a noble cause, much as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is increasingly celebrated by its defenders as a patriotic uprising rather than an assault on democratic institutions. Equally troubling are efforts to remake the military itself through demands that soldiers be trained for loyalty to political leaders rather than to constitutional principles. Here, power seeks not only to command institutions but also to militarize knowledge, memory, and civic identity. Universities have a crucial responsibility to resist such distortions by defending historical truth, critical inquiry, and the capacity to distinguish education from propaganda.

As Kevin Baker notes, military solutions increasingly displace diplomacy, democratic institutions, and other civic responses to social problems. Within a culture saturated by militarism, aggression is celebrated as prevention, repression is justified in the name of security, and military force is invoked to discipline dissent and erode democratic values. Under such conditions, education is organized less around the imperatives of democratic culture than around the demands of the arms industry, surveillance systems, technological acceleration, and the national security state.

These developments become even more troubling when they intersect with the ongoing marketization of higher education. At its best, higher education functions as a democratic public sphere, a place where students learn to think critically, question authority, engage history, and imagine alternative democratic futures. Yet under the pressures of neoliberalism, universities have increasingly abandoned this mission. Education is now often reduced to job training, students are treated as consumers, faculty are deskilled and casualized, and learning is defined largely in instrumental terms. Questions about how education might nurture civic courage, ethical imagination, social responsibility, and democratic agency are increasingly sidelined in a market-driven university culture.

Yet the assault on higher education is not only economic. It is also ideological and political. In recent years, a growing chorus of liberal and conservative critics has claimed that universities have lost their way, charging that the humanities and critical scholarship have corrupted higher education through ideology and activism. Under the seductive language of “reform,” “balance,” “civility,” “institutional trust,” and “neutrality,” these critics present themselves as defenders of academic integrity while advancing a profoundly reactionary project. In some cases, liberal critics go so far as to treat “social justice” as a threat to scholarship rather than asking how power, exclusion, race, gender, class, empire, and inequality have always shaped what counts as knowledge. Their calls for neutrality, which function as a cover for depoliticization, do not protect intellectual freedom; they align with a broader assault on critical thought, historical memory, and democratic culture. They are aghast at the notion put forward by Thomas Chatterton Williams that “For humanities departments [and higher education in general] to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.” In doing so, they obscure the far more dangerous attacks on higher education coming from the right: censorship, book bans, assaults on DEI programs, the repression of student protest, and efforts to align universities with corporate, state, and military interests.

Critical scholarship is condemned as ideological, while militarized research, donor influence, state-directed threats of defunding, and forms of ideological indoctrination are celebrated as common sense. The real danger is not that universities have become too political, but that they are being stripped of their democratic mission and transformed into institutions that normalize conformity, surveillance, militarization, and authoritarian power. Higher education is not under attack because it has been ruined by the left. On the contrary, it is under assault by the Trump administration and a broader network of far right forces precisely because it keeps alive a dangerous truth: education is not merely about credentials, careers, or conformity to the status quo. At its best, it cultivates the capacity for critical judgment, informed dissent, compassion, and democratic agency. What authoritarian movements fear most is not ideological indoctrination but an educated public capable of questioning power, holding authority accountable, and imagining a more just future.

Militarization deepens anti-democratic tendencies. Research is increasingly tied to military applications, geopolitical competition, and outside funding rather than to the public good. Universities adopt the language of security, risk management, efficiency, and competitiveness while corporate and military values increasingly shape institutional priorities. As a Simons Foundation policy briefing warns, militarization has increasingly become a “default response” to political instability and global insecurity, reinforcing a culture in which social problems are framed through the logics of surveillance, strategic competition, and military preparedness rather than diplomacy, public investment, and democratic cooperation. As Professor Catherine Lutz notes, such actions run the risk of eroding legal and moral boundaries. In such a climate, higher education loses its civic character and becomes subordinated to the interests of the warfare state and defense industries.

As universities become increasingly tied to military and security logics, they risk abandoning their civic purpose in favor of a pedagogy of permanent emergency, one that privileges surveillance, strategic competition, and technological domination over critical inquiry, civic imagination, ethical responsibility, and social solidarity. What disappears in this militarized vision of higher education is the conviction that universities should cultivate informed citizens capable of holding power accountable rather than simply servicing the imperatives of the national security state.

Equally troubling, militarization reshapes the culture of the university itself. Militarized institutions reward conformity, secrecy, technocratic thinking, and instrumental rationality. Ethical questions about violence, disposability, colonialism, and state power are pushed aside in favor of managerial efficiency and national competitiveness. Students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, settler colonialism, genocide, sexual violence, or war crimes are too often met not with dialogue but with surveillance, administrative repression, and policing.

The dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.”

In such instances, the university ceases to function as a space for critical engagement and becomes instead an extension of a broader authoritarian culture. As scholar John Gills notes, the dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.” In this way, universities risk becoming agents of militarized socialization rather than sites of democratic education. Such developments raise not only political and educational concerns but also urgent ethical questions about the kinds of institutions that universities are becoming and the values they choose to endorse.

The militarization of higher education raises a profound ethical question: What happens when universities enter into partnerships with military institutions while remaining silent about documented human rights abuses associated with those same institutions? Such silence is never politically neutral. It suggests that violations of human rights can be overlooked, rationalized, or normalized when carried out in the name of security, defense, or national interest.

This issue extends beyond universities themselves and raises broader questions about the responsibilities of democratic governments. As Canada, among other countries, deepens military cooperation with allies and expands investments in defense industries, it cannot exempt those relationships from ethical scrutiny. If credible allegations of war crimes, torture, collective punishment, or sexual violence are ignored in the name of strategic alliances or national security, democratic principles are hollowed out from within. Universities, precisely because they are charged with fostering critical inquiry and ethical judgment, have a responsibility to challenge such silences rather than reproduce them.

These ethical concerns become especially urgent when universities maintain relationships with institutions implicated in serious human rights abuses. The issue is particularly troubling in light of allegations regarding the use of sexual violence against Palestinians. Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof noted that while there is no evidence that Israeli leaders explicitly order rape, United Nations investigators have reported that sexual violence has become one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” in the mistreatment of Palestinians. Other human rights organizations have reached similarly disturbing conclusions.

Such allegations also raise broader concerns about how security regimes can be used not only against occupied populations but also against those who challenge state policies. Reuters reported that organizers of a flotilla attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza alleged that some activists detained by Israeli authorities experienced physical abuse and that at least 15 reported sexual assaults, including allegations of rape. Zeteo provided shocking and wrenching video testimonies from some of the activists, largely ignored by Western media. Whatever the final findings regarding these allegations, they underscore the need for independent scrutiny of security institutions and the dangers of granting them unquestioned legitimacy in the name of national defense. When accusations of abuse are met with silence rather than investigation, the boundaries between security, impunity, and state-sanctioned violence become increasingly blurred.

If universities claim to uphold principles of human rights, social responsibility, and ethical inquiry, they cannot selectively ignore such evidence when it implicates states or institutions with which they maintain research, military, or security partnerships. To do so risks transforming universities from spaces of critical inquiry into institutions that legitimate power while remaining silent about its abuses. At stake is more than the question of particular research contracts. It is the moral integrity of higher education itself.

These concerns are not confined to particular institutions or isolated abuses. They are symptomatic of a broader culture in which militarized values increasingly shape public life, political discourse, and social priorities. From sporting events and military recruitment in schools to popular films, social media spectacles, gun culture, and state-sponsored propaganda, aggression, domination, and war are normalized as features of everyday life.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the influence of Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who celebrates “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” and wraps militarism in the language of white Christian nationalism and religious righteousness. As Jasper Craven observes, Hegseth champions a form of “military manliness” stripped of any ethical center. Such a worldview elevates domination as a virtue, defines violence as a moral ideal, and transforms, in Craven’s words, “the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological religious crusade.” As these values circulate through culture and public institutions, they increasingly shape higher education itself, influencing not only what universities teach but also the forms of knowledge they produce, fund, and legitimate.

Universities cannot claim to defend democracy while simultaneously aligning themselves with industries and state policies organized for state violence, war, and imperial aggression.

At the same time, vast intellectual, scientific, and financial resources are being diverted from urgent public needs such as climate justice, public health, democratic education, and social welfare toward the expansion of military technologies and security infrastructures. In the process, the arms industry reaps enormous profits while universities increasingly risk becoming laboratories for aggression rather than institutions dedicated to civic responsibility, ethical imagination, and the common good.

Defenders of militarized partnerships insist that universities must remain pragmatic and “neutral” in securing funding and advancing national interests. But neutrality in such cases is largely a myth. Universities cannot claim to defend democracy while simultaneously aligning themselves with industries and state policies organized for state violence, war, and imperial aggression. Higher education has no legitimate ethical mandate to function as a research arm of militarized power.

Universities Must Refuse to Become Laboratories for War

The issue is not whether universities are political, but what kind of politics they embody and in whose interests they function. In an age marked by rising authoritarianism, widening inequality, climate catastrophe, and endless wars, universities cannot escape matters of power and values, and they must decide whether they will serve democracy or militarized power. Nor can educators retreat into the call for neutrality. At stake here is more than institutional policy. It is the fate of the university as a democratic institution. Few writers understood these dangers more clearly than Toni Morrison, who warned: “If the university does not take seriously and rigorously its role as a guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or menage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us.”

Higher education may be one of the few public spheres left where knowledge, values, and learning can nurture radical hope, civic responsibility, informed agency, critical thinking, and substantive democracy. The struggle against the militarization of Canadian universities is therefore not merely a fight over funding priorities. It is a struggle over whether education will serve democracy or become an extension of the warfare state. Activists from groups like World Beyond War Canada and the Canadian Federation of Students are right to insist that genuine security comes not from militarism and permanent war, but from investing in education, housing, public health, and the social good.

Universities must refuse their transformation into laboratories for war, surveillance, and technological domination. At stake is whether higher education will further accommodate militarized and authoritarian power or become a crucial site of resistance, critical consciousness, and democratic possibility, one that refuses to confuse security with fear, civic responsibility with obedience, and education with the demands of war and domination. In an age when militarism increasingly shapes culture, politics, and everyday life, universities must remain among the few institutions willing to defend critical inquiry, civic responsibility, and democratic freedom against the expanding reach of the warfare state.

The Middle East conflict has caused global stockpiles of oil to plummet to their lowest level since 2003 while petroleum prices have spiked, according to a new energy data report.

The Middle East conflict has caused global stockpiles of oil to plummet to their lowest level since 2003 while petroleum prices have spiked, according to a new energy data report.

Maybe it's the midlife crisis talking, but the racist purge of straight white men from arts and entertainment has degraded all books and films, says Nick Dixon, and left behind only meaningless, endless culture war.

The post Why Books and Movies and Life All Suck Now appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Key developments on June 9:

• Ukraine targets key Crimea crossing in broader day of strikes on Russian military logistics;
• Russia's Starlink rival loses one of its first operational satellites, Russian media reports;
• Ukraine strikes ammo depot in Russia's Belgorod Oblast, confirms fuel tank destruction near Mariupol;

In its latest update, the General Staff said Ukrainian forces struck targets across several regions in Russia and occupied Ukraine, including an ammunition depot, command posts, drone control centers, logistics hubs, supply warehouses, and concentrations of Russian troops.

Trump said in a social media post that military officials told him "the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters." He added that both service members "are safe and uninjured."

Since the onset of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian athletes and national teams have been widely excluded from international sport.

Yet the pressure to reintegrate them never really disappeared, and Russian athletes are increasingly allowed back into international competition. First, under neutral status in selected disciplines, following

In 189 BC, Ancient Greeks defending the city of Ambracia used an early form of chemical warfare against Roman forces during a siege, deploying a clay jar filled with burning chicken feathers.

At first, the story sounds almost absurd, but it becomes far more striking once the details are unpacked and we understand what was happening beneath the city walls—and, more importantly, why this moment even matters in the history of ancient warfare.

Ancient Greeks turn to chemical warfare and burning feathers as siege intensifies

The Romans arrived in Ambracia with overwhelming force. Consul Marcus Fulvius Nobilior deployed battering rams under a two-hundred-foot covered gallery, a massive mobile shed designed to protect his engineers from arrows and boiling pitch as they hammered away at the walls. The Ambraciot defenders held firm. The walls didn’t collapse.

Frustrated and running out of options above ground, the attackers eventually turned underground. Their plan was straightforward enough: tunnel beneath the city, collapse the foundations, and force the stubborn Greeks to surrender. For a while, the effort proceeded in silence. Then the Greeks noticed the piles of excavated earth building up outside the camp and understood exactly what was going on. Locating the tunnel was another matter. The Greeks solved it with one of the most clever pieces of field engineering in ancient history.

They placed thin bronze vessels against the ground at various points inside the city and then pressed their ears to them to listen. The vibrations traveling through the earth from the pickaxes told them exactly where the tunnel was heading. It functioned as an early acoustic detection system, and it worked brilliantly. They then dug a counter-tunnel and broke through into the mine. What followed was the kind of close-quarters underground fighting where normal weapons become useless. Spears are too long, shields too wide, and you can’t even see the man you’re fighting, so they built something new.

The Greeks took a large clay jar, a pithos, sized to precisely fit the tunnel, capped it with an iron lid drilled with holes, inserted an iron tube connected to a blacksmith’s bellows, and filled the jar with glowing charcoal covered in a dense layer of fine feathers, creating what can be described as an early chemical warfare device. When it was pushed into the tunnel and activated with the bellows, it produced a thick cloud of acrid, choking smoke that billowed forward into the darkness.

The Roman miners couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and had nowhere to go. They abandoned their tools and fled to the surface to escape the choking fumes. The Greeks had driven off a superior Roman force solely with clay, iron, fire, and feathers. Military historian Adrienne Mayor has pointed to this episode as evidence of just how sophisticated ancient weapons technology really was.

This deliberate act of chemical engineering would be remembered in later accounts of ancient warfare. The pithos was matched to the tunnel width specifically to prevent blowback. The feathers were chosen for the particular quality of smoke they produced when burned at high temperatures. Someone thought this through. The parallels to later warfare are hard to ignore. The same basic horror—an invisible, suffocating enemy in a dark enclosed space—would define trench warfare on the Western Front more than two thousand years later.

The psychology hasn’t changed even if the chemistry has. Ambracia ultimately surrendered. Cut off and outnumbered, the city eventually negotiated terms rather than fight on indefinitely, but the defenders had already shown what was possible. Historians now regard what happened in those tunnels as one of the earliest documented uses of asphyxiating chemical weaponry in a tactical military context—a genuine milestone in the history of warfare.

@timelinehistoryoffical

During the Roman siege of Ambracia in 189 BC, the defenders deployed what is one of the earliest recorded uses of a chemical weapon in history — and they used it underground. Rome was besieging the Greek city, held by the Aetolian League. When the walls held and the siege artillery failed, the Romans turned to mining — digging a tunnel beneath the walls, concealed behind a two-hundred-foot covered walkway, worked in relays day and night. For days the defenders didn’t notice. Then the pile of excavated earth grew too large to hide. Unable to see the tunnel, the defenders pressed bronze vessels against the ground to detect the vibration of digging, located the Roman mine, and dug a counter-tunnel straight toward it. The two tunnels met. Soldiers fought face to face in darkness too cramped to swing a sword. When direct combat failed, the defenders built a device described in detail by the historian Polybius: a clay jar fitted to the tunnel’s width, packed with feathers over burning coals, sealed with a perforated iron lid, and connected to a blacksmith’s bellows. They pumped the choking smoke directly into the Roman tunnel. The Romans were driven out of their own mine. According to Polybius, it was among the first uses of toxic smoke in the history of war. Further reading — Polybius, The Histories: https://amzn.to/4uWM9wN #AncientHistory #RomanEmpire #Ambracia #Shorts #HistoryShorts #ChemicalWarfare #TimelineHistory #history #shorts #ancientrome #education

♬ original sound – Timeline History

The core flaw of Washington's approach is the tendency to isolate conflicts that are fundamentally linked.

The core flaw of Washington's approach is the tendency to isolate conflicts that are fundamentally linked.

Half way through the fifth year of the war in Ukraine it is reasonable to ask why it has lasted so long. Why has Russia not crushed Ukraine quickly as expected, it is after all a much bigger country with a far greater population and industry to call on?

By Robert Harneis

It is standard for the Western Media to talk of deadlock and to say that the Russians are not advancing because their armies are incompetent, when they are not drunk or poorly equipped. At regular intervals Western media announces that the Russian side is running out of ammunition, missiles, drones, tanks or even men. In short they are not advancing in overwhelming force to capture Kiev because they are incapable of doing so. The latest fantasy in the US, UK and European media, is that the Russian economy is crumbling in the face of the problems created by the war and sanctions.

Russia’s self-imposed restrictions

President Putin imposed severe constraints on his generals from the start. They are, to an extent, fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. Contrary to the endless claims by the Western media, the Russian forces do everything they can to avoid civilian casualties. This in borne out by their low level throughout the war. In a recent massive attack involving 1500 missiles and drones right across Ukraine, only six civilians were reported killed. It is only natural that this should be so. Russia regards Ukrainians as brother Slavs. Approximately one fifth of Russian families have close relatives in Ukraine. The brother of the Ukrainian Commander in Chief is a colonel in the Russian army. They have no interest in killing them, if it can be avoided, especially as they will have to live with them after the war.
The second restriction is the requirement to avoid heavy casualties amongst their own forces. Wars are lost on the home front when the body bags start coming home in big numbers. The constant allegations in the Western media that Russians launch human wave attacks and suffer heavy casualties doing so, are false. This desire to restrict losses is reinforced by Russia’s demographic problems. Lives are precious.
The third restriction that Putin has imposed on his generals and ministers is that the war will not stop Russian economic progress, vital for political stability. Of course it goes without saying that it is not possible to fight a major war without financial and budgetary stress. An example is the necessity of delaying the naval building program as a result of which only sixteen corvettes have been built out of the forty planned. This has made it more difficult for Russia to protect its merchant fleet and stop the current harassment of oil tankers. On the other hand the management of the economy has been a classic case of successful military Keynesianism as with the United States in World War II. Throughout the war real wages have risen and economic growth has been maintained. Unemployment is at record low levels.

Tactical considerations

There are other less obvious reasons for hastening slowly. If Moscow’s war aims are denazification and demilitarization then the longer the fighting goes on the more of the Ukrainian military is eliminated, especially the elite ultra-nationalists who are Ukraine’s most committed soldiers. The effect of the manpower attrition is obvious from the many videos appearing on social media showing Ukrainian press gangs snatching citizens from the street, often with violent resistance.
Further by keeping the fighting in the Donbass, the invading Russians have short lines of communications, whilst Kiev’s main bases are over a thousand kilometers away in Poland, with supplies at risk of constant air attack on their way to the front. Paradoxically then, the invading force has better lines of communications than the defenders in their own country.
The wish to avoid destruction is another explanation for Russian circumspection. It is obvious that the retreating Ukrainian army is indifferent to the damage it causes to the cities it loses. The greater the area of the fighting the greater the destruction that Russia will likely have to rebuild after the war. Better to ground away the Ukrainian ability to resist and if an advance into the rest of the country is needed, to wait until effective military resistance has collapsed.
However an undoubted factor in the slow Russian progress is the nature of the great Donbas urban area, which was massively fortified with NATO assistance over eight years after the 2014 coup d’état when Ukraine moved definitively into the Western camp. Whatever plans the Russian government may have for the rest of Ukraine, especially the Black Sea Coast, the source of many missile attacks on Russia, they will not wish to make any major moves until the Donbass is firmly in their hands. Two important fortified towns remain to be captured Kramatorsk and Slavyansk. Russian forces are already approaching them. It remains to be seen how long it will take to break their resistance.
We cannot know what President Putin and the Russian High Command are thinking but it is also obvious that by not committing to a major offensive Russia not only avoids casualties but retains the strategic initiative. Hundreds of thousands of Russian troops are held in reserve. Uncommitted forces are a potential threat as well as being available for defense elsewhere if needed.
The Russians will also have learnt the bitter lessons of the US army that quickly smashed its way into Afghanistan and Iraq but was unable hold the territory conquered in the face of tough local resistance. Already, at the beginning of the war in March 2022, the Washington Post published an article that assumed a quick Russian advance and talked about the planned guerilla resistance. There is every reason for Russia to move gradually and consolidate as it goes.

The diplomatic front

There is also the diplomatic aspect, which is of vital importance to Russia. Moscow views the struggle in Ukraine as part of a world confrontation. It has been clear from the start of the war that whilst the West and Kiev worry about public opinion to get support for the war, Russia is concerned about what he world’s diplomats think. Good relations with India and BRICS countries and especially China dictate moderation at all times. A shock and awe approach, whilst it might get quicker results, would have offended much international opinion and unfavorably reminded the world’s diplomats of the Soviet Union, something Putin wishes to avoid at all costs. Similarly Russia is very patient with small countries on its borders that indulge in vexatious provocations, notably the Baltic States… so far. The contrast with the brazen bullying of Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland and Iran by the United States is striking and has had an effect on world public opinion. The recent humiliation of Merz’s new militaristic Germany in the recent United Nations General Assembly vote is a striking example of the success of this softly softly approach, as is Russia’ success in expanding its influence in Africa from Mali to Madagascar.
Also on the diplomatic front, with a long war, the Black Sea remains closed to the warships of outside countries under the Montreux Convention of 1936, which governs traffic through the Dardanelles strait. The convention allows Turkey to close the straits to all warships in times of war and to permit merchant ships free passage. This suits the Russians as NATO likes to flex its muscles by bringing warships into the Black Sea in times of international tension. For four and a half years they have not been able to do this. Once the war ends, Turkey will have to let them through again. Another reason why the Russian forces have taken their time.

The change in the nature of war

Every war is different and brings its surprises. The drone revolution has transformed this one. The omnipresence of drones is all the more deadly, given the absolute impossibility for both sides, of hiding concentrations of troops, thanks to satellites that see pretty much everything happening on the ground. So now advances are made by small groups of infantry that infiltrate defenses that are then taken out by artillery, drones and missiles. Slow work if casualties are to be kept to a minimum.

NATO intervention

NATO intervention, with a huge supply of arms, finance and electronic intelligence, after sabotaging the peace talks, has increased Russian difficulties in defeating the Ukrainian army,. It is this that definitively imposed the choice of a long slow war of attrition on the Russians – a war that Russia is clearly winning. Not only have Ukraine’s forces been degraded in this process but NATO’s as well. One reason the United States has reduced arms supplies to Kiev is that they are running short. This became very obvious when Washington’s priority turned to the defense of Israel. The Pentagon has had to search the globe, asking allies as far apart as South Korea and Germany to hand over any Patriot air defense missiles they might have. The US air force is seriously short of vital stand-off munitions to attack Iran. The result for Kiev is that it has little defense industry of its own left and NATO has completely failed to match Russian weapons production levels.

Russian rearmament

It is also obviously the case Russia needed time to build its army to its present strength, as well as arm and equip it. Russia has greatly increased its military production across the board. This has been possible because of the continued existence of much of the old Soviet military industrial infrastructure on Russian territory. Whilst the combined Western nominal GDP greatly exceeds Russia’s, when it comes to purely military industrial capacity Russia is well capable of holding its own. Tank production and reconditioning has increased from a few hundred to more than a thousand a year. The United States can barely produce one hundred new Abrams tanks each year. Russia alone now produces over five million drones each year. Importantly Russia is fourth in the world in the number of STEM students graduating annually after China, India and the United States.

Irreconcilable differences block peace talks

Putin’s latest statements indicate that the Russian government is not interested in a ceasefire that fails to solve its Europe wide security problems. The United States does not want to lose face in Ukraine, particularly after its recent military failures in Afghanistan and now Iran. It also wants to continually weaken Russia. Europe is determined to persevere in its support for Ukraine despite the major economic and energy problems they have created for themselves. The statement from the latest meeting of the leaders of France, Germany and the United Kingdom, on June 7, refers to the need for a peace treaty that leaves Ukrainian frontiers unchanged. Clearly something Russia will never accept. Brussels sees failure in Ukraine as a threat to its plans for ever greater union, even the institution itself. Against this background it is not surprising that there have been no meaningful peace talks. As Josep Borrell former EU High Representative for foreign affairs commented at the beginning of the war, it will have to be settled on the battle field and that takes time.
Finally in Ukraine, whilst the people would agree to negotiations with Russia, the regime and its ultra nationalist supporters know that if there is peace and Russia wins there is no future for them. Putin’s final phrase in his recent speech at St Petersburg Economic Conference “Keep on fighting my comrades” is ominous for Zelensky and his neo Nazi colleagues. It is a reference to a famous quotation, the last words of a Russian policeman knowing he was about to die at the hands of terrorists. It reflects the Russian leader’s determination to focus Russian society in a patriotic way and finally settle the Ukrainian problem for good. He has used the long war to encourage a new generation of Russian leaders based around distinguished war veterans. This has been accompanied by a determined anti-corruption drive. None of this would have been possible without a long war.

However that may be, the Russian President is coming under increasing pressure to move faster. Like the US, Russia has parliamentary elections approaching in the autumn, September of this year, and there are signs that the tempo is quickening all along the front line. The long war has had advantages for Russia but it may be time to bring it to a close, whatever the cost.

L’article Ukraine: Why the long war? est apparu en premier sur FrenchDailyNews.

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