We need Afghanistan 1989, not D-Day 1944, in Ukraine today, contrary to Wes Clark’s op-ed

Wes Clark has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal saying that Ukraine needs to do a D-Day invasion against Russian-occupied Ukraine.

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When I was a freshman at West Point, Wes, then a junior, was my table commandant for a time. There were ten cadets to a table. The table commandant sat at the southern end of the table; other cadets in descending classes toward the other, north end. I thought he was movie-star handsome—not the only such cadet—and really smart.

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He commanded the NATO Bosnia war which we won with just air power—a feat that armies and navies had long denied could ever happen.

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He notes D-Day was the second allied amphibious invasion attempt. The first was at Dieppe and a disaster.

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His op-ed seems to acknowledge that D-Day involved massive all-of-the-above, every trick in the book. But I do not think he adequately addressed the near infinite gap between the allies’ manpower and materiel in England in 1944 and Ukraine in 2024—80 years later. He acknowledges that the allies on D-Day had air superiority and that Ukraine must have it now. How?
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We achieved it in 1944 in large measure from years of bombing and thousands of dog fights most of which we won killing German pilots and destroying their planes.

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We also had a massive fleet of navy ships whose unscheduled, impromptu close-range naval gunfire arguably led to the D-Day break out. No such fleet exists today plus it would need to enter the Black Sea through the Dardanelles strait. Turkey might not allow that. Plus, that would be like a barroom brawl in a hot tub. The D-Day fleet got ready to jump off from British shores protected from German attack.

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The US sent mind-boggling quantities of men and military materiel to England. My Uncle Jack was a quartermaster there then working on the D-Day logistics.
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They had a thing called a barrage balloon then. Those were tethered small blimps all over the place to prevent low flying German planes from precision bombing or strafing allied men or materiel. The Brits joked that the only thing keeping the island from sinking into the Atlantic were the barrage balloons.

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Today, the capacity to replicate that probably does not exist anywhere on earth. Such a build-up in Ukraine now would probably intimidate Russia into a settlement, but it would be hard to protect such a build-up if Russia attacked it as the Germans did from day one of WW II. The only way Russia could fight NATO would be with nukes.

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We did not learn how to deal with those on D-Day. If the Nazis had nuked England and/or our convoys with nukes, the concentration of men and materiel would have been impossible to gather.

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I think that Wes’s suggestion would have to take the form of a NATO eviction notice: Ukraine applied for NATO membership. NATO rejected them. NATO has now decided they will now grant membership to Ukraine as defined by its pre-2014 borders.

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Russia has 30 days to vacate those Ukraine territories. If they have not, NATO will attack Russian force in Ukraine with whichever weapons are necessary to destroy the Russian force including nuclear explosives.

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Essentially, Russia would then have to withdraw. They have nukes, but they would lose that nuclear war, which should turn conventional after about a week. A conventional war against NATO would be like the 82nd Airborne Division versus a battalion of a third-world army. Putin has admitted that.

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Putin’s only hope would be to intimidate NATO into abject fear of Russian nukes—which has worked quite well for Russians in Korea, Vietnam, Ukraine thus far.

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If NATO said convincingly, “We are going to do this notwithstanding your nuclear threat,” Russia would retreat without a shot. To do otherwise would be national suicide. The Russian people seem mildly pleased by the Ukraine takeover, but they are not going to have all  Russians commit 140 million person hari kari in a futile gesture of the type that Emperor Hirohito refused to order in August 1945.

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I think what is more likely in a continuation of the current situation with the Ukraine and the West gradually demonstrating that they will never stop providing enough support and the Ukraines slowly figuring out which incremental improvements in cheap tactics work.

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Basically, Biden’s statement “as long as it takes” is essentially the right strategy. It has not worked yet because the West has sent mixed signals again and again and again. Biden is responsible for that, too.

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We use the phrase “coalition of the willing” in one recent war. That is what would work in Ukraine and the willing refers to endlessly work to force Russia back out of pre-2014 boundaries. Putin only remains there today because he thinks the West will get tired of it. When he believes we won’t, he or his successor, will leave.

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D-Day 1944 is not the model. Afghanistan stinger missiles 1989 is.