Biden’s ‘as long as it takes’ approach in Ukraine has failed. Here’s why

As the conflict in Ukraine is approaching its second anniversary, President Biden’s “as long as it takes” approach to save the former Soviet nation clearly has failed. The commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, recently admitted in an interview in The Economist that “there will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” speaking about the conflict’s stalemate.

Indeed, despite a whopping $113 billion appropriated by Congress for Ukraine in 2022 alone and 19 months of nonstop bloody fighting, Russia continues to control roughly 20% of Ukraine’s territory. Less than 500 square miles of land have changed hands since the beginning of this year, according to analysis conducted by the distinctly pro-Ukraine New York Times, which relied on data from the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute.

It is not a coincidence that Washington’s pouring billions of dollars in cash and weaponry into Kyiv has not translated into Ukraine’s victory and Russia’s defeat. Money and technology do not win wars. We learned it most recently in Afghanistan. Strategy does, and President Biden never devised one. That is, despite the fact that he almost certainly had the necessary intelligence to do it, at least seven years prior to Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

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As a former senior official in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and one of the top three analysts on Russian doctrine and strategy in the intelligence community, I personally briefed President Obama’s White House national security staff on Putin’s plans and Russia’s war-fighting strategy multiple times. I also briefed countless top U.S. military commanders and Pentagon officials, as well as NATO ministers and military leaders.

As vice president at the time, the go-to person on Ukraine policy, and the architect of the failed Russia “reset” strategy, Joe Biden had to be made aware of those briefings. President Biden and his team, many members of which, including his then-national security adviser and current Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, joined him in his administration, must have received similar briefings prior to and during his presidency, given Russia’s ranking as a Tier 1 threat to U.S. security. The president had ample time to act to deter Putin, prevent the invasion of Ukraine, and avoid the exorbitant spending of U.S. taxpayers’ earnings on what has become an unwinnable war.

To devise a viable plan to beat Putin, team Biden had to first understand the Kremlin’s anti-U.S. strategy, or what I call Putin’s Playbook. I described it, at the unclassified level, in my book, “Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America.” The centerpiece of Russia’s strategy in Ukraine – or in a conflict with any other post-Soviet state aspiring to join the West – has nothing to do with Ukraine. It has everything to do with the United States though.

Putin’s main goal has been to prevent Washington from entering a conflict by holding the U.S. homeland at risk. What Biden should have done was neutralize or at least minimize that risk.

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Here are the top three areas that Biden’s team failed to secure, thus provoking Putin’s invasion. No former Soviet nation can possibly win a war with Russia, whose military, despite all the tactical mishaps in Ukraine, is designated by the Pentagon as a “near peer” competitor to the U.S. military, the world’s best, albeit in terms of tactics only, and not strategy. 

The only possible way for these smaller countries to win against Russia would be for the U.S. armed forces to intervene on their behalf. To make sure it doesn’t happen, Russian military strategists developed a top-secret war plan – “Plan for Strategic Containment and Conflict Prevention,” which Putin approved on July 23, 2013.

This plan seeks to deter Washington from entering conflicts in Russia’s perceived sphere of influence in Eurasia by threatening to bring the war to the U.S. homeland. The plan envisions exploiting U.S. vulnerabilities in the key warfare domains – cyber, space and nuclear – and striking the U.S. homeland kinetically, if need be. It is for this reason that Biden has authorized just enough weapons to Ukraine to virtue signal that he is doing something even though it’s insufficient to win. Biden understands that Ukraine’s victory is unattainable without putting the U.S. homeland at risk.

First, cybersecurity should have been at the top of Biden’s priorities as a counter-strategy to Russia’s cyber warfare doctrine. Putin has at his disposal the most sophisticated and destructive arsenal of cyber weapons of any foreign nation. And he is not afraid to use it. Yet, our networks remain vulnerable. 

The Russians have compromised the networks of many sectors of the economy, critical infrastructure, including nuclear facilities, and countless government agencies, including the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.

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Russia’s ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline in May 2021, a critical part of U.S. petroleum infrastructure, supplying around half of the East Coast’s fuel, demonstrated the kind of damage Russia could do. The six-day shutdown of the pipeline, which transports 2.5 million barrels per day of gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil and jet fuel, resulted in gas shortages, outages at gas stations, price hikes, long lines and panicked consumers. 

Similarly, Russia’s ransomware attack on JBS, which processes one-fifth of the nation’s meat supply, raised the issue of food security and affordability. In wartime, Russia’s cyberattacks would be much more crippling and could cause a catastrophic power outage.

Even our weapons arsenal, including the advanced Patriot missile system, the littoral combat ship, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – capabilities that the United States would be reliant on in the event of a kinetic war with Russia – are vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office audit.

Second, securing U.S. satellites, on which U.S. forces depend for every aspect of war-fighting, would help mitigate our vulnerability to Russia’s space warfare doctrine. Having found American space superiority is also our Achilles’ heel, Russian strategists set out to deafen and blind U.S. forces in a conflict. 

Moscow believes that in an all-out space war, America – whose entire society, from ATMs to gas pumps, is wired up through space – stands to lose more than Russia. And yet, our satellites remain attractive sitting ducks for Russia (and China), which have developed advanced space and counter-space capabilities. 

Gen. John Hyten, then commander of the U.S. Strategic Command which is in charge of nuclear weapons, expressed his concern for the U.S. military’s ability to protect these critical assets by describing them in 2017 as “big, fat, juicy targets.”

And third, augmenting the U.S. nuclear arsenal with a low-yield nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile would have been a smart move if Washington were to take a direct aim at Putin’s “escalate-to-de-escalate” post-Cold War nuclear strategy. 

This weapon had been part of the U.S. arsenal until it was retired by the Obama administration. President Trump ordered to reinstate this capability as part of his modernization plan for U.S. nuclear weapons, but Biden canceled the program when he became president. 

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While Congress seeks to fund the program, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to end it, it’s too little and too late to deter Putin. “A spoon is handy to have before lunch, not after,” as a famous Russian saying goes. Putin has already invaded Ukraine, threatening periodically to launch a limited nuclear war in Europe to keep U.S. forces out of the battlefield. 

Evidently, Biden is acutely aware of the danger of a nuclear Armageddon. “He [Putin] is not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons,” Biden told his donors in October of last year.

None of these security measures are simple to implement. They are even harder to integrate into a coherent multipronged strategy. Closing, or at least significantly reducing, gaps in U.S. cyber, space and nuclear security requires years of work. The truth is that years are what Biden had at his disposal. And he failed to act. 

With the China threat looming, Washington must learn its lesson in Ukraine. The lesson is not to keep emptying the U.S. weapons stockpile and throwing good money after bad at Kyiv. It is to plan ahead and formulate a viable deterrence strategy, before, not after Xi Jinping invades Taiwan.

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