On a recent trip to Ukraine, we walked through the rubble of a children’s hospital in Kyiv targeted by the Russians, toured an apartment building in Kharkiv where floor after floor had been destroyed by Russian missiles, and visited the front lines to meet with soldiers who spoke of the brutality of Russian human-wave tactics. But the most unsettling thing we saw was the American strategy in Ukraine, one that gives the Ukrainian people just enough military aid not to lose their war but not enough to win it. This strategy is slowly bleeding Ukraine, and its people, to death.
Our visit was facilitated by With Honor, a bipartisan political-action committee that supports veterans in Congress, and we toured Ukraine alongside Republican and Democratic lawmakers. We are both Marine Corps veterans. We have a combined 60-year breadth of combat experience between us, including Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The horrors of war are not unfamiliar to us. Yet both of us felt deeply disturbed as we finished our trip.
In Kharkiv, we met with a group of Ukrainian combat veterans. Before the war, Victoria Honcharuk, a 24-year-old medic, lived in the United States, where she’d been accepted to a graduate program at Harvard while working in New York City in investment banking. When war broke out in February 2022, she left that life behind and returned home to defend her country. Her unit of medics, composed entirely of volunteers, draws no pay. Approximately half of the friends she began service with have been killed or wounded. When she enumerated her concerns for the future, they included the safety of her family and her friends but also how she would make payments on her U.S. student loans while fighting a war for her country’s survival. When a member of our group observed that Ukraine’s future would involve young people, like her, leading and rebuilding her country, she paused and politely reminded us that they could rebuild it only if they survived.
After, we drove into the nearby countryside to a field a few miles back from the front lines, where we met up with the drone unit from the 92nd Assault Brigade. It had parked tactical vehicles and an assortment of drones beneath camouflage nets to avoid aerial observation. The unit’s commander, nicknamed Achilles, walked us through a presentation of the soldiers’ capabilities. This included a live-fire demonstration of one of their first-person-view drones destroying a target. Lethal drones and reconnaissance drones alike are reshaping the battlefield at an unprecedented pace. The U.S. military has yet to reckon with this. The current family of low-cost, highly effective drones used by the Ukrainians are all manufactured in China. No U.S. equivalent exists in the marketplace, as the efforts of several American companies have stalled.
Achilles presented us with an elaborate series of slides that broke down by cost each drone in his arsenal. While lethal U.S. drones such as the Switchblade cost approximately $60,000 to $80,000 a unit, the drones employed by the Ukrainians are a bargain, most costing in the low four figures. That is cheaper than a single artillery shell. The briefing given by Achilles wasn’t simply a summary of capabilities; it was a sales pitch. If an ideological argument for supporting Ukraine wasn’t sufficient, Achilles was willing to make an argument around the numbers and America’s potential return on investment. If the United States wants to keep Vladimir Putin in check and halt the advance of China and Iran, he suggested, Ukraine offers a bargain. His presentation ended with a slide that broke down how, for about $100 million, a drone unit like his could sustain itself in the field for an entire year, conducting approximately 5,000 lethal strikes. The rate of return: one dead Russian for every $20,000 spent.
Achilles made his appeal with an urgency that American policy makers don’t seem to share. The speed of innovation on the battlefield has made some long-awaited Western weapons systems all but obsolete by the time they were delivered. Two weeks before our trip, yet another M1A1 Abrams main battle tank was destroyed in a top-down attack by a kamikaze drone. Only 20 of the 31 Abrams tanks delivered by the U.S. in February remain. Ukrainian soldiers at the front told us that any innovation they develop is countered by a Russian response within weeks. Both armies are innovating at a pace that is leaving the sclerotic U.S. and NATO defense industries behind.
An example of this is HIMARS, the long-range rocket artillery that the U.S. has provided at a maddeningly slow pace. A year ago, HIMARS was the most in-demand system on the battlefield. Now it has a success rate of less than 10 percent because of Russian innovation in electronic warfare. Each rocket fired by HIMARS costs roughly $100,000. Because of the rapid decrease in HIMARS’s effectiveness, the Ukrainians have developed a drone that has a similar impact of the early HIMARS and costs about $1,000. The Ukrainians, however, are rightfully worried that, within a few weeks, the Russians will develop countermeasures that bring the effectiveness of this kind of drone down to that of the current HIMARS. It is, literally, an arms race.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has spent a great deal of time pleading with his allies for weapons and permission to use them to their full capabilities. But his administration is now pleading simply for the delivery of weapons that have already been pledged. Currently, these delays are the result of U.S. Department of Defense protocols that affect the drawdown rates of U.S. stockpiles. Each of the services is required to keep certain quantities of weapons and ammunition in reserve in case of war, and they are not allowed to dip below these levels. Such concerns are not without precedent. In the Second World War, during the German invasion of France in 1940, Winston Churchill had to deny French requests for Royal Air Force support. Churchill knew that every British plane would be required for the upcoming Battle of Britain. However, the United States is nowhere near such a crisis. If anything, and ironically, we keep our weapons in reserve for a crisis exactly like the one playing out in Ukraine. We must make those weapons available to those who would use them in our shared defense.
The war in Ukraine is at risk of being lost—not because the Russians are winning but because Ukraine’s allies have not allowed them to win. If we encourage the Ukrainians to fight while failing to give them the tools they need for victory, history will surely conclude that the Russians weren’t the only ones who committed crimes against Ukraine.
