Sunday shows: Biden keeps lagging behind with weapons help to Ukraine
Quin Hillyer
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Several exchanges on today’s Sunday morning news shows gave evidence of how the Biden administration has failed tactically in helping Ukraine repel Russia’s evil invasion.
To give credit where due, the administration has been good at providing rhetorical and diplomatic support for Ukraine and in helping rally international support. Still, the problems with its approach were evident in two interviews -[p0on Fox News Sunday and two others on ABC’s This Week.
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On Fox, retired rear admiral John Kirby, an impressive guy who is now the “coordinator for strategic communications” at the National Security Council, unintentionally gave voice to the mistake.
Our military assistance to Ukraine, he said, “evolves as the war evolves.”
Alas, what that means in practice is that rather than helping Ukraine get ahead of the fight and achieve decisive victory, it instead manages only a continuing stalemate as weapons delivery and training try to catch up with the latest warfare “evolution.” If Biden had provided weapons systems last April (for example) that he instead approved only in December, Ukraine’s soldiers might long ago have finished training on the equipment and instead begun using it to win. At almost every step, Biden has dithered about which system might be seen by Russia as too much of an “escalation,” only to decide belatedly that it would not be too escalatory after all.
Speaking after, but in reply, to Kirby, retired four-star general Jack Keane said on Fox that the administration needs to act “more with a sense of urgency.” He said the administration’s “piecemeal” approach is “a mistake.” Rather than try to calibrate how many weapons for Ukraine the Kremlin will bear, Keane said, “we have to give Ukraine what they need when they need it.”
Unfortunately, Secretary of State Blinken on ABC was echoing Kirby’s message, not Keane’s wisdom. “We have been providing Ukrainians with what we believe they need to defend themselves,” he said, to which interviewer Martha Raddatz rightly replied: “They say they need fighter jets, they say they need — they say they need longer-range missiles. So you say you’re sending them what you think, not what they think they need?”
Blinken demurred: “The weapon system itself, as important as it is, is not — is not sufficient. You have to make sure that Ukrainians are trained on the systems that are being provided. You have to make sure that they can maintain them. If they’re not trained on them, they can’t use them.”
Dammit, though, that’s the point: For the very reason that it takes time to train foreign soldiers how to use advanced weaponry, the weapons should have been approved earlier so the training could occur in time to do some good. If Patriot missiles had been approved last summer, Ukraine could be using them now instead of training on them. Likewise, with tanks.
The next guest on ABC, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), made the same point about the jets, on which training should have begun long ago.
“We’re talking about the vice president of United States declaring that Russia is involved in crimes against humanity … and she is correct — [yet] not giv[ing] the victim of the crime against humanity the defensive weapons they need to stop the crime? So we need to do two things quickly, make Russia a state sponsor of terrorism under U.S. law, which would make it harder for China to give weapons to Russia, and we need to start training Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 now.”
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Then Graham gave the most concise statement of the reality: “I’m not worried about provoking Putin. I want to beat him. And how do you beat him? You beat him by giving the Ukrainians the military capability to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.”
Bingo.