Moscow
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
By Philip Wegmann & Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Politics
When war in Europe was likely, though not yet inevitable, late last year, an idea began bubbling in the blob, that ill-defined but very real foreign policy space in Washington that is occupied by the likes of wonks, war hawks, and shadowy military contractors.
What if President Biden sent soon-to-be-decommissioned attack aircraft and fighter jets to Ukraine as a deterrent? And, as Russia massed troops on the border, what if those war planes were piloted by retired American airmen who showed up in Ukraine to defend the skies and who were, at least officially, unaffiliated with the United States government?
It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, but there was a real business proposal – a mashup of Lend-Lease, the World War II program providing U.S. military materiel to Great Britain as it stood alone against Hitler, and the American Volunteer Group, an unaffiliated air corps later nicknamed the Flying Tigers who fought the Axis before the United States entered the war.
The proposal reviewed by RealClearPolitics was drafted late last year, circulated among a close-knit group, and allegedly forwarded to the White House through back channels rather than to the Pentagon for fear it would get bogged down in red tape. The initial idea belonged to Erik Prince, a controversial former Navy SEAL-turned CIA contractor. And it never got off the ground.
The National Security Council would not say whether such a proposal really existed. An NSC spokesperson declined to comment, other than to refer RCP to previous statements made by the White House about existing military aid to Kyiv and the administration’s desire to avoid military conflict with Moscow.
The Biden administration has already committed $1 billion in military aid to Ukraine this year, and while the idea of using surplus military aircraft piloted by former U.S. servicemen as a deterrent is no longer possible, Ukraine still needs help bolstering its air defenses. “If you don't have the strength to close the sky,” Ukrainian President Zelenskyy recently said, “then give me planes.”
The White House press secretary didn’t rule that out completely. “I'm not going to get into more details of what the Department of Defense may or may not consider,” Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday, noting that the United States was in the process of shipping defensive assistance to Zelenskyy. “But,” she added, emphasizing the line repeated again and again by this White House, “we are not considering taking steps that would put us in direct conflict with Russia.”
The Ukrainians have made the most of the gifted military equipment so far, especially the Javelin anti-tank missiles. And the Russian forces have not yet achieved complete air supremacy, a failure that complicates their ground advance. Reports circulated that Poland, Bulgaria, and Slovakia would donate fighter jets, mostly old MiG-29s, to Kyiv so that the Ukrainians could further blunt the invasion. Those rumors, however, were swiftly denied by each government. They also come as the U.S. and NATO reject Ukrainian pleas to enforce a “no-fly” zone for fear it may draw them into conflict with Russia.
This drives Stephen Blank mad. “If a no-fly zone is not going to be the answer,” he told RCP, “what is?”
For years, Blank, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, has called for the United States to use a lend-lease approach to bolster the Ukrainian Air Force. Before Russian tanks even started rolling, Blank wrote in an op-ed for the Atlantic Council last April that “100 or more F-15s, six to eight E-2C-2000 Hawkeyes, and eight to 12 KC-135R tankers” could do the trick and deter Russian President Vladimir Putin. The fact that the shooting has started has not changed his mind. “Lend-Lease was critical to victory in World War II,” he told RCP, insisting that leased fighter planes would “not commit American forces to anything,” only American “assets that we are not using.”
“And in return we get Ukrainian assets that are of value not only to us, but the Ukraine, namely a demonstration that we are not going to let Putin win the war,” he added.
Republicans and Democrats support Biden sending military aid to Ukraine, and a bipartisan coalition led by Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Ben Cardin of Maryland introduced legislation to revive Lend-Lease in January, but a Cornyn aide told RCP that the bill is “silent” on the kind weaponry to be released. The legislation does not mention airplanes, leaving all decisions about what to send to the executive branch.
Everett Pyatt would put the A-10 Warthog at the top of that list. An assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy for shipbuilding and logistics for much of the Cold War, Pyatt argued in an op-ed for Defense News that three squadrons of the “tank-busters” could put Putin on his heels. The U.S. Air Force has plenty of them already, he wrote, plus “the airplane was designed to operate in Europe from ill-prepared facilities” and pilot training would be “minimal.” All that’s needed in his estimation: new paint to put Ukrainian insignia over the American flag. “This could be done in days.”
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is not convinced that lending the Ukrainians F-16s and other fighting aircraft would make a difference at this point. “It takes years to set up the training and maintenance systems that allow these countries to operate equipment like that,” he told RCP. “So handing them F-16s in December would have done no good except to give Russians more targets.”
How about supplying the plane and the pilot? “The Flying Tigers are celebrated as this heroic American effort to support the Chinese, so it does give some deniability,” he told RCP. “I like it a lot better than sending in NATO and U.S. aircraft into Ukraine and all the attendant dangers that go along with that.”
“If the United States or NATO wanted to take another step towards confronting Russia,” he added, “that would be a good half step before getting our own forces involved.”
In a fast-moving conflict like the one in Ukraine, even the most measured half-steps would risk provoking a nuclear power. “That is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard,” said Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the U.S. Air Force School of Strategic Force Studies. “Not only is it an invitation to the Russians to identify such aircraft as some sort of secret NATO intervention,” Nichols told RCP of the initial Prince plan, “but if an American pilot is shot down over Ukraine, it will open an entirely new dimension of the crisis, and all for a money-making stunt that wouldn't help Ukraine.”
These kinds of entrepreneurial, if perilous, ideas don’t emerge from a vacuum, countered Stephen Yates. “The Biden Administration seems to have run repeatedly into a fork in the road with regard to which way to go on Ukraine, delaying decision until after invasion, and then shoved down this blind alley of ‘standing’ with Ukraine while ‘defending’ NATO but not Ukraine,” Yates, a former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, told RCP. “It shows the U.S. government’s normal processes were not up to the task – too slow and unclear guidance – so people who operate in ‘the gray zone’ appear to have put some entrepreneurial ideas out there, coming from War, Inc.”
Long lines of Russian tanks and trucks backed up on Ukrainian highways, meanwhile, have already whetted the appetites of war hawks. The right military hardware at the right place could change the course of the conflict. But good luck getting those planes into the right hands.
A Washington-based lawyer familiar with bureaucratic intricacies and speaking on condition of anonymity told RCP that “for good reasons, U.S. laws on sales, export control, and the transfer of defense materiel impose requirements that take time to fulfill on both the U.S.-end and on the recipient nation's end.” That kind of built-in complexity undermines the utility of lend-lease “in a fast-moving calamity of this magnitude,” the lawyer said, and “those processes could be irreversibly overtaken by events.”
Don’t bother rewinding the clock and playing Monday morning quarterback either, said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow and director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. He was succinct, brushing aside any notion that a private air force, or even a no-fly zone, would have prevented a Russian invasion. “Putin was so arrogant here, and overconfident,” O’Hanlon told RCP, “he couldn’t have easily been deterred by some planes.”
Prince still remains convinced that Americans in arms, but not in American uniforms, and flying independently of the U.S. government, could have prevented the Russian invasion. “Trust me,” the military contractor told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson last Thursday, “If 140 ex-American combat aircraft showed up by well-flown, aggressive, carnivore pilots, believe me, Putin would not have invaded.”
Prince told Carlson that he pitched the idea to the administration but “they just don’t want to think outside the box. It’s really frustrating.” Now the White House faces unwelcome potential “permutations” from a conflict that he said, “should have been stopped before it ever started.”
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
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