A thousand klicks
On psychological resistance to bad news, home-grown industries, and what Ukraine's successful long-range attack on Russian St. Petersburg suggests about the future of warfare
It seems plainly evident that the Kremlin had no idea it was entering into a four-year war when it started its full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022. It’s a war that could stop at any moment upon the Kremlin’s command to its own forces to stand down and withdraw. But as with so many other cases of human misjudgment, deeply pathological forces of psychology stand in the way of the admission of failure that remains so long overdue.
■ People have an astonishing capacity to ignore or even deny the obvious when it requires them to admit unpleasant realities. (Recall that it took decades for hand-washing to catch on with doctors because it was simply too unpleasant to countenance the idea that their unclean hands might have been causing avoidable death.)
■ An unpleasant reality forced upon us by Russia’s war on Ukraine is that we have been launched directly into a complex world of warfare where the ideas of battlefields and front lines have been rendered far less important. If Ukraine -- not on anyone’s radar as a leader in warfighting technology five years ago -- can launch thousand-kilometer drone attacks deep into Russia, then “defense” needs to be rethought.
■ 1,000 kilometers is a long, long way: It’s like someone launching a drone from Washington, DC, and having it land in Chicago. Only, what landed in St. Petersburg wasn’t just a fleet of flying machines. If war can be projected over distances that great at relatively low cost by a country that has built a domestic drone industry essentially from scratch, then it’s time not to ignore the obvious but instead to get serious about realizing that a whole new era of warfare is likely afoot.