Just as the House of Representatives sends a continuing resolution to the Senate to keep the federal government from shutting down, a CR which maintains the current, hideous level of spending, but strips out money for Ukraine, we get this news from across the pond:
Saturday, September 30, 2023 | 5:51 PM EDT
LONDON, Sept 30 (Reuters) – Britain’s government wants to deploy military instructors to Ukraine, in addition to training Ukrainian armed forces in Britain or other Western countries as at present, British defence minister Grant Shapps said in a newspaper interview.
To date, Britain and its allies have avoided a formal military presence in Ukraine to reduce the risk of a direct conflict with Russia.
Britain has provided five-week military training courses to around 20,000 Ukrainians over the past year, and intends to train a similar number going forward.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, Shapps said there was scope to offer military training within Ukraine after a discussion on Friday with British military chiefs.
“I was talking today about eventually getting the training brought closer and actually into Ukraine as well,” he was quoted as saying. “Particularly in the west of the country, I think the opportunity now is to bring more things ‘in country’,” he added.
Sending American troops to train the South Vietnamese, but not to fight their battles for them; how did that work out? By November 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, there were at least 16,000 US military ‘advisors’ in Vietnam.
Wars tend to be unpredictable things, but one thing is certain: British soldiers, who are quite literally NATO soldiers, actually in Ukraine, become targets. I’d like to think that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would be sensible enough to tell his army not to target the Brits, but even if he does precisely that, poor intelligence, rotten guidance, lousy communications, and just the plain misfortunes of war could lead to some British troops being blasted away.
And what happens then? Such would not technically be an attack on NATO nations, since the British troops would be in Ukraine, but this looks a whole lot like the stupidity which led to over 58,000 names on the Vietnam War memorial wall, all for a war we just plain lost.
Losing the war in Vietnam was a tragedy, but it wasn’t an existential one. We didn’t lose our freedom, we were not conquered by the Communists. It was a loss at distance, a loss which cost us a lot of money and a lot of blood, but we survived just fine, thank you very much.
Ukraine is not the same thing. For Ukraine to win, Russia has to lose, and a Russia that is losing, especially if Vladimir Vladimirovich sees himself as possibly losing his hold on power, might react in ways which we would not like at all.
There are perhaps some who have thought that my concerns have been overblown in my World War III watch articles, especially when so much of the advocacy comes from those who never wore our country’s uniform, but the hits keep coming and coming.