McNamara and Bundy had reams and reams of useless data about Vietnam, but the wrong premise about how to interpret it. It was GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. Milley and all those who thought Ukraine would fall in 3-4 days or a few weeks started from the wrong premises:
1. The neo-imperial prejudice that Ukraine was a weak, corrupt and failed state and totally missed what my colleague Glen Grant and his Ukrainian colleagues had accomplished after 2014: created a bottom up disruptive startup model of networked warfare that the top down hypercentralized Russian military could not cope with.
2. They fell for the illusory premise that Russia's Potemkin military had really modernized and was capable of combined arms operations when it hadn't and wasn't.
If there's no feasible western guarantee for peace, then Ukraine has all the more reason to fight until total victory. The war is existential for Ukraine, as it was for Israel in 1948-49 and Britain in 1940. You still remain deaf to Russia's openly genocidal war aims. What is required to get you to take them at face value is beyond me.
Retired General Ben Hodges, the former commander of NATO forces, disagrees with Milley because he starts from different premises. Hodges forecasts the liberation of Crimea by next summer. Based on Ukrainians pressure on the only land bridge from Donetsk to Crimea, Melitopol, Hodges' forecast is credible. Hodges sees Ukraine as having achieved "irreversible momentum", which would make negotiating under the terms Putin wants to end the war utterly foolish. How do we know what Putin's terms and "red lines" are? He told Elon Musk, who told the Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer:
"Elon Musk has denied a report that he spoke to Vladimir Putin, including about the potential for using nuclear weapons, before floating a peace plan that suggested that Ukraine cede territory to Russia.
The head of the Eurasia Group political risk consultancy, who made the original claim, had insisted that his source was Musk himself. “Elon Musk told me he had spoken with Putin and the Kremlin directly about Ukraine,” Ian Bremmer said in a tweet after Musk’s tweeted denial. “He also told me what the kremlin’s red lines were.
“I have been writing my weekly newsletter on geopolitics for 24 yrs. I write honestly without fear or favor and this week’s update was no different.”
In a newsletter for Eurasia Group subscribers, Bremmer wrote that the Tesla CEO told him Putin was “prepared to negotiate”, but only if Crimea remained Russian, if Ukraine accepted a form of permanent neutrality, and Ukraine recognised Russia’s annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Such conditions would represent near-total Ukrainian capitulation at a time when their forces are on the offensive.
In the newsletter, first reported by Vice News, Bremmer said Musk claimed to have been told by Putin that those war aims would be achieved “no matter what”, including the potential use of a nuclear weapon if Ukraine retook territory in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. Bremmer said Musk told him that “everything needed to be done to avoid that outcome”. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/11/elon-musk-denies-report-he-spoke-to-putin-about-use-of-nuclear-weapons?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other)
In any case, the western guarantees for peace that Ukraine would insist on to sign an agreement would not include boots on the ground from NATO. I don't know where you got that idea from. The Ukrainians don't want ANY foreign troops in Ukraine and have repeatedly said they can fight and defeat Russia on their own if given the tools.
