By Tom Squitieri
Red Snow News
BRUSSELS — When Lloyd Austin was a general dealing with the morass in Iraq in 2008, he was given the unenviable task of bringing order and victory to military operations in Basra and Sadr City.
He managed to accomplish both over a period of four weeks, surprising many and feeding a legend among some of his admirers. As one journalist wrote, “having visited Baghdad barely a month later, the turnaround was dramatic.”
Now Defense Secretary Austin is looking at another four-week timetable as he seeks another dramatic turnaround — the great challenge of somehow getting Ukraine’s battle against the Russians into a higher gear again before winter begins to grip the battlefield and provide succor to Moscow, and aid flowing to Ukraine slows down.
This time he cannot directly command or implement his strategy. His forces are suppled by those who speak different languages, have different politics, and do not respond well to direct orders.
It will be a test for his oft-stated belief in “strategic patience.”
Adding to the challenge: at this crucial juncture, Austin has been stripped of the usual fortitude of U.S. military largess to bestow upon Ukraine, after Congress failed to pass new funding for Kiev. His usual bromide of urging others nations to ‘dig deeper” did not resonate this time, as he arrived at NATO and the Ukraine Contact Group with an empty wallet that had no immediate suggestions of being refilled.
Austin acknowledged, on the plane ride to Brussels, that his job had been complicated by the fact that the House didn’t pass the extra money for Ukraine.
“Certainly. And certainly hope to have all bodies functioning and all branches functioning. So, we hope to resolve that quickly and we also hope that we’ll get our leaders confirmed so that we can make sure that all of our senior guys are in their seats,” he said.
A lack of new money, changing governments in partner nations, unease among some front-line nations, and the coming of winter has made the legendary four-week timetable a tough one.
Austin’s new takeaway is the formation of “capability coalitions” to let some nations hover and focus on a particularly area — such a developing an air fore for Ukraine — as a way to get enthusiasm high, support still churning, when funds get lower or nations get stingy.
“That’s going to make our security assistance more nimble,” Austin said during one session. “And it will help us to more powerfully marshal the resources to help secure Ukraine’s future.”
As one cliche goes, time — not an ally at the moment — will tell.
Here is another cliche: War is uncertain, Austin has repeatedly said.
“Anybody that thinks they can accurately produce any type of outcome in a war, … have another thing coming to them, because … it doesn’t happen that way,” the secretary said to reporters earlier this year. “There will be stops and starts. There will be things that happen that [the] Ukrainians didn’t anticipate. There will be opportunities for the Ukrainians to exploit.”
Austin has yet to be able to nudge the Ukrainians to tactics that may work, while using the calendar to an advantage. Neither he nor Pentagon officials want to even hint they disagree with Ukrainian military decisions – one of the topics that defense ministers from other NATO nations at the conference more freely buzzed and mused about.
“I don’t want to judge them. And I won’t,” Austin said in an interview with PBS in Brussels. “It’s my intent to support them as best we can. And I think they’re putting that support to get use. And they’re learning as I go along. So it has evolved, it will continue to evolve.”
Keeping those ministers in support was one reason Ukraine President Zelensky showed up at the NATO meeting here for the first time — to look each in the eye, thank them, and say how their support is critical and helping.
“That is just something that really strikes this profound chord. And it was, you know, it was a message from the heart and you could just see you could just see the ministers responding,” one senior defense official said.
Austin said Ukraine’s troops “face this key moment on the battlefield” and that the United States “must ensure that America’s indispensable assistance to Ukraine continues to flow without disruption.”
And then he did ask everyone to “continue to dig deep.”
