Ukraine: Time for a Ceasefire?

In an interesting development the Commander in Chief of the Ukrainian Army (the Ukrainian equivalent to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) released an essay last week, just as an interview was published in The Economist. In the essay and interview it was reported that Gen Zaluzhnyi said the war was "at a stalemate." That was later corrected to say that the war was at "a dead end." That was later corrected to say there there was a “technological dead end.”

Whatever he actually said (I don’t read Ukrainian) it was close enough  to “stalemate” that President Zelenskyy felt the need to make a statement that the war was “not at a stalemate,” and added that “Ukraine has no right to even think about giving up,” and insisted there are no secret negotiations.

Some well known analysts also issued an explanation of the General’s paper that sought to explain that what the General really discussing was how to win the war. In a sense he did; Zaluzhnyi talked about the need for a host of improvements, to include:

Modern command and control that has the ability to respond across the entire county while operating in a hostile cyber warfare environment.

Gaining air superiority - in particular improved drones, flooding Russian air defenses, neutralizing Russian attack drones, better anti-drone capabilities, but this also includes manned aircraft (150 F-16s) and surface to air missiles. There has been repeated talk about the ability to defend the entire country from drones and cruise missiles. That would require a nation-wide integrated air defense.

He also mentioned: 

More and better mine clearing as well as integration with drones to allow clearing mine fields while concealed

More effective counter-battery fire - more and better reconnaissance drones, more assets, more artillery, and better integration of artillery with the reconnaissance and command and control

Creating and training reserve forces - a nationwide registry, training facilities to increase the quantity and quality of reserve training

Improving Electronic Warfare - employing complex EW across the front, and a nationwide integrated command and control capability

There is more, to include getting ahead of and staying ahead of Russia in establishing and maintaining situational awareness, and establishing a single, integrated information environment.

He also called on Ukraine to develop its own arms industry.

These are all worthy goals. The problem is that none of them are easy or cheap. Ukraine had a pre-war defense budget of less than $4.5 billion, with total national security spending (to include intelligence and national police) totaling less that $7.5 billion. 

Then consider that a single Patriot battery costs, per Wikipedia, about $1 billion for the US. Exports are more expensive. How many batteries will they need to cover the major cities and industrial facilities (power plants) across Ukraine?

Said differently, the force described above cannot be afforded by Ukraine; NATO and the US would need to pay for it, and sustain it.

And, even with the equipment on hand, the manpower problem is serious. Ukraine has a shrinking population, one that is likely to shrink even more as the war drags on. And the military he describes is one that will require a large cadre of professionals plus a constant churn of reservists. And professional soldiers are expensive to create both in time and money.

He finished with a statement that there’s need for technological breakthroughs - which sounds a lot like “wonder weapons.” 

But Gen Zaluzhnyi isn't stupid, he knows all this; all the pieces that he discussed have been discussed before in the press and by various figures in the Ukrainian government. So, what was the point?

As one of my smart correspondents noted: this is Zaluzhnyi subtly telling the chain of command - President Zelensky and the senior civilians - that the country is hurting and that the country not only may not have enough to win, but it may not have enough to sustain a stalemate.

None of us knows the real casualty counts on either side, both sides have striven mightily to hide their own casualties while spreading rumors about the other side. But there are snippets of data which suggest that the total number of casualties is staggering, with each side losing well over 100,000 killed in action and perhaps 400,000 wounded. It’s worth mentioning that there are some estimates that triple each of those numbers.

Another one of my smart correspondents noted a strange echo from the past: as World War I dragged on, the political leadership in London and Paris began to develop skepticism about the course of the war, while the generals kept saying that “this is not time to stop, we’re going to break through on the next push.” Now the roles might be reversed, but the grind on the front line appears to be very similar.

So, maybe there are no secret negotiations, as President Zelensky insists. But perhaps Gen, Zaluzhnyi is telling him that there should be.

 Ship’s Surgeon

I recall thinking he looked old and frail. I was 14, it was my freshman year in high school and I remember him sitting there, on one of the love seats that my mom and dad had in the den, between the dining room and the living room, in that beautiful house we lived in on Centre Street… He sat facing the windows, I think there might have been a fire in the fireplace to his right, but it had faded, he sat with his hands in his lap and talked, almost no emotion, speaking quietly, in very close control of his emotions, as if to let the littlest hint of his feeling out would be to lose it all, and he would burst. I was only 14 and yet I understood that, it was that clear.

He was a man of “ferocious intellect.” In fact, they were all men of “ferocious intellect.” I steal that line from Richard Dreyfuss, a fantastic actor who used it to describe another fabulous actor: Robert Shaw. I bring them up because the two men are, oddly,  connected to the men I remember. 

As virtually the entire world knows - or at least that part that watches movies - the two men were, along with Roy Scheider - the central figures in one of the great movies: JAWS. It is in one of the most gripping scenes in movie-making history that they connect to the subject I want to write about today. The scene, of course, is the moment when Quint, the cranky and slightly crazy shark-hunter, played to perfection by Shaw, tells Hooper (Dreyfuss) and the Sheriff (Scheider) about the scar on his forearm - where he had removed a tattoo that read: USS INDIANAPOLIS.

The man that I recall is Captain Lewis “Lew” Haynes, who in 1945 was a Lieutenant Commander and ship’s surgeon onboard the USS INDIANAPOLIS.

There is too much to tell the whole story, and much of it has been written down over the years as the survivors were all interviewed, and I encourage you to read the books, search for the stories on line. As it turned out, eventually, Capt. McVay, the commanding officer, court martialed by the Navy, was exonerated, but none of that changes the story itself, and the horror that nearly 900 sailors faced in the sea. 

Capt. Haynes and my dad and a few of their friends were a core of perhaps a dozen surgeons in the Navy, there was another similar group into the Army, who in the the years between the end of WWII and Vietnam helped develop the treatment protocols for burns. They were all men of ferocious intellect.

Three of them served on cruisers as ship’s surgeon during World War II, as lieutenants or lieutenant commanders, though all retired as captains: Ted Starzynski, Lew Haynes and Roger O’Neil. O’Neil also survived a sinking: he was the assistant ship’s surgeon aboard USS JUNEAU and on 13 November 1942, after night action off Guadalcanal, found himself sent by small boat to USS SAN FRANCISCO. SAN FRANCISCO was barely afloat, her keel had been broken, and the bridge had been hit by enemy fire, which had killed Rear Admiral Callaghan and mortally wounded the captain of the ship, Captain Cassin Young, the man O’Neil was operating on in the admiral’s cabin. And at that point JUNEAU was hit by a torpedo and blew up, resulting in the death of all but 10 of the 690 man crew; O’Neil lived.

As for Capt. Haynes and INDIANAPOLIS, they had, as you will recall, just delivered “Little Boy” - the bomb dropped on Hiroshima - to Tinian, and were returning to Leyte in the Philippines when they were torpedoed. The ship was struck by two torpedoes, forward of the bridge, on the starboard side, about 15 minutes past midnight on July 30th. The ship sank in 12 minutes, but still some 900 men, of a crew of 1,196 ended up in the sea, about 720 miles west-south-west of Guam, and 560 miles east-north-east of the Philippines, in about 18,000 feet of water, in 12 foot swells, the moon ducking in and out of clouds, the water they were in covered in several thousand tons of fuel oil.

He had been sleeping when the torpedo hit and it threw him out of his bunk. Fire chased him out of his stateroom, the second torpedo threw him to the floor and he burned his hands. He stumbled around in the smoke and fire, looking for a way out. I recall him saying that he ended up in the wardroom and fell into an easy chair and said that it felt very comfortable and for just an instant he thought about remaining there. He knew he would die but “that was okay.” Then someone fell on him and he “woke up” and stood and began to find his way out. He crawled through a porthole on the starboard side (the ship was listing to starboard and the water was getting closer), climbed a ladder up onto the deck, then as the ship continued to list and sink bow first he simply walked into the water and began to swim away in the darkness.

He ended up as the senior officer in what turned out to be the largest group of men, perhaps 200 or more. Many were wounded, most of those died in the first 24 hours. As he told the story, he went from being a doctor to a coroner, swimming around, testing to see if someone had died - he would gently tap the eyes - if the eyeball itself didn’t respond, the man was dead. He would pull off the dog-tags and slide the chain over his arm. Other men would then pull the life vest off and push the body away.

Eventually, he had so many dog-tags on chains hanging around his arm they began to pull him down. The other sailors had to wrestle them off his arm, and he fought them, trying to keep the dog-tags, and he spoke of the trauma of letting that last little bit of his shipmates slip into the sea.

Perhaps the most remarkable piece of the story was when they were finally picked up, after 4-and-a-half days in open ocean, and they ended up in and around large rubber rafts dropped out by the seaplane. Several dozen men were huddled on and around the rafts. There was a large container of fresh water, but just one small cup to drink from. So, he began passing out drinks, one at a time, passing the water past men who hadn’t had any fresh water for, at that point 110 hours. He noted that each man passed the cup along, waiting his turn, that not one man cheated.

Eventually, 317 men were pulled from the sea, though one sailor died shortly after being rescued. Only 316 survived the ordeal.

The next time you watch JAWS, remember Capt. Haynes, and remember the others, those ferocious intellects; Haynes, Starzynski, O’Neil, Stephen Ryan et al, who went on to save the lives of literally thousands of wounded Sailors and Marines and Soldiers and Airmen…