23 February 2024

Ukraine in the Balance: A Battlefield Update on the War in Ukraine

  


HERE'S A NOTE ABOUT ONE OF THE PANEL PARTICIPANTS:MICHAEL VICKERS

". . .His military strategy reduces to a single imperative: the pursuit of “escalation dominance.” 
When embarking upon war, “go in on the offense and with what it takes to win.” 
Don’t pussyfoot. 
Don’t worry about costs. 
A well-endowed nation like the United States always has another log to throw on the fire. . ."

His keys to victory were a plentiful supply of advanced arms — especially U.S.-manufactured Stinger antiaircraft missiles — plus “the indomitable fighting spirit, toughness and resilience of the Afghan people” along with the “wildly unrealistic” Soviet expectations of creating in Kabul a “foreign-dominated, centrally directed, secular, cohesive” state.

Vickers’s C.I.A. training included disguise work and not-quite-simulated torture survival tests. But he was not into spycraft. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the Aaron Sorkin-scripted 2007 film about covert ops in Afghanistan, presents Vickers as a wiry, hyperconfident wunderkind with a deep knowledge of military weaponry 

What is the reputation of CSIS?

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