Too Little, Too Late

One suspects, as a general rule, that when the Biden administration engages in tough talk, it is mostly just talk.

Such is the case of the president’s declaration that he is going to send some serious tanks to Ukraine. As Stephen Green points out, it is too little, too late. Besides, we do not even have the Abrams tanks that we are going to send-- it will take months to manufacture them.

It’s big news when Western tanks like the mighty American M1 Abrams, the German Leopard 2, and the British Challenger 2 will be sent to Ukraine to bolster that country’s defending armored forces.

But is this a case of too little, too late? It very well might be.

The numbers of heavily armored, high-firepower vehicles being made available to Kyiv are hardly impressive.

As for NATO allies, the story is not any better:

You can excuse the British for sending only 14, even though that’s only enough to arm a single tank company with zero replacements. The Brits were never able to find a significant export market for the Challenger 2, despite its impressive features and performance. So only around 450 were ever built, mostly for use by the British Army.

Berlin, despite having manufactured thousands of highly regarded Leopard 2s for domestic and export use, has also promised to deliver a mere company’s worth of tanks. Ditto Poland. They’ll send another company’s worth of Leopards they purchased to replace many of their Soviet-era tanks left over from when they were still a Soviet client state.

The Leopards will hopefully arrive this summer, complete with all the munitions, spares, training, etc. that turn a collection of men and gear into a real fighting force.

Poland is also sending its much-upgraded T-72s — called the PT-91 Twardy — in much greater numbers. Warsaw announced Kyiv would receive 60 of them, and in relatively short order.

Spain, Finland, and Norway have also announced they’re open to joining in, but have been coy about how many tanks or when.

Most curious is the United States. The Biden Administration announced a gift of 31 M1A2 Abrams, which sounds like a more generous donation than any other country — but they might not arrive for a year.

As for America, we are not sending our best tanks:

Biden chose not to deliver the most modern version of the M1 — the M1A3 — for legitimate concerns that the Russians would capture at least one and learn some of our most sensitive technologies and other secrets. But instead of sending older M1A1s out of our retired stocks (which are plentiful), Biden decided to send the in-between M1A2.

Those will have to be manufactured fresh, minus the super-hard depleted uranium armor, just for Ukraine. This decision seems stupid, so very stupid, to me.

Apparently, the war is not going very well for the Ukrainians. What would it take to improve circumstances?

To make a real difference — to turn the Ukraine Army into a genuine armored maneuver force capable of rousting the Russians — experts estimate the country would need 300-500 Western tanks. That’s enough to equip a reinforced armored division, but the qualitative edge over Russian numbers would likely prove decisive.

Of course, many foreign policy hands are lauding the Biden administration approach, even if it more show than substance.

Instead, Western indecision has allowed Moscow to determine the terms and pace of the war, and to define what counts as “escalation.”

So, it looks like a great failure accompanied by a cover-up. Besides, don't you get the impression that people are getting a little tired of Ukraine and its president, who appears more and more to be a beggar?