Ukrainian soldiers who left Debaltseve yesterday prepare to return to support the further withdrawal of troops on February 19, 2015 in Artemivsk, Ukraine. (Photo by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)
While fears that Vladimir Putin would order a Christmastime invasion of Ukraine appear to have been misplaced, Western consternation over Russia’s plans have hardly gone away. In the op-ed below, Joshua Huminsky of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs argues that the forward positioning of Russian forces proves that in the digital age, the raw power of conventional arms remains a military (and political) force to be reckoned with.
Russia’s mobilization on the border of Ukraine should signal to observers that the utility of conventional forces and the realities of hard power have never left the geopolitical discourse. For much of recent history, many pundits, politicians and policymakers alike have fixated on cyberspace as a new domain, and the possibilities of space and the information space as battlefields, often to the exclusion of investment of critical conventional assets.
On the extreme end of the scale, there are those that have argued that warfare will simply be a function of ones and zeroes, conducted neatly behind keyboards or, at worst, via drone proxy. To be sure, cyberspace, space and the information domains will be areas in which battles will be fought and through which campaigns will be waged. But as Russia is demonstrating, raw, hard power and conventional assets still matter, not only as lethal warfighting materiel, but as powerful chips in the poker game of geostrategic politics.
Russia’s present behavior is, at least thus far, a return to coercive diplomacy. While it remains to be seen whethe ..
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