For today’s newsletter I was torn between two stories. The first was written by former colleague Steve Beyon, a breaking story about how the Army is addressing its recruiting crisis: by demoralizing 800 NCOs who just came down on extremely short-notice orders, upending their and their families’ plans and likely setting them (and the Army) up for another embarrassing failure. Recruiting is not a thing that you just “get done,” any more than COIN, or patrolling, or really anything other than standing in a trench and trying not to die as your unit hangs onto territory for dear life.

The second story, a much broader thing that is unfolding across a number of publications, is what I ultimately decided to write about. That story is about the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive, and the prospect of “stalemate,” an idea invented by people who need ways to talk about a thing they do not understand and don’t want to bother understanding — war.

THE BIG STORY

So You’ve Been Stalemated in a War. What’s Next?

There is no such thing as a stalemate in war, so what's next is really up to you!

Two articles in the past week cover the same subject: stalemate in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The first, an Economist piece that focuses on Ukrainian top general and Zviagel native Valerii Zaluzhny, claims from a military’s perspective that Ukraine has reached a stalemate with Russia. The second, published in Time, claims the same from a political perspective, focusing instead on President Zelenskyy.

On the surface, the idea of “stalemate” in war makes sense. You have two sides in a war. When neither can move forward without taking unacceptable casualties and cannot build or sustain any kind of momentum, does that not qualify as “stalemate” or “deadlock?” Is this not the moment, ethically but also practically to find peace?

Dig a little deeper, though, and the idea of stalemate in war immediately begins to evaporate until one is left with something less tangible than morning dew in a hot afternoon sun. How many wars have ended with stalemate? In modern history, that would be precisely one — the Korean War, involving two sides (but many countries on each side), a quiet WWIII — in which the end of the war corresponded with a return to the status quo at the war’s beginning, albeit one with a heavily fortified line on both sides of a formally demilitarized zone. North Korea and South Korea remain in a state of cease fire to this day; not quite at war, but definitely not at peace.

And not for any great reason, either; human reasons on the South Korean side, human reasons on the North Korean side, which added up to bad reasons. The countries have gone their separate ways over the decades, tragically for the families who live in each, separated against their will by a largely arbitrary line in the sand and a piece of paper saying “we agree not to reignite a big war against each other.”

That war has not ended in stalemate, it is “frozen,” or in a perpetual state off pause, as the result of a diplomatic agreement — and not because the South Koreans or North Koreans were done with fighting. On the contrary, after a back-and-forth shoving match, in which a great deal of Chinese combat power was exhausted, and somewhat less American power, technology was beginning to turn the tide. At the same time that the U.S. was becoming exhausted socially and politically with the war, Western militaries were finding ways to attack the North Korean side’s numerical superiority. One rarely hears that the Korean War was ended for political rather than military reasons — but it is actually the case that left to run its course, the UN coalition would likely have prevailed. And without employing nuclear weapons, by purely conventional means!

No other war has ended with stalemate in the modern era.

This is in part because that’s not really how war works, and in part because the term is an analogy drawn from a potential outcome in the game of chess. For chess to really make sense as an analogy for war, both sides would have to be able to use multiple people to play, and various actors could add or remove chess pieces from the board, and the board itself would be subject to change and modification, as would the rules themselves. In chess, there are two sides, and firm rules, and an immutable board, and for all of those reasons it is possible to get to a point in chess where no resolution is possible save “stalemate.”

“Stalemate” is a very bad analogy for the point in war where neither side can move forward — there are really no rules governing war, there are suggestions, and constraining factors, but at the so-called zero-line, the place where two groups of humans are trying to kill each other by any means possible, no real “law” exists, only violence. This is what war is, an attempt to impose some form of law on that space where law and rules have become contested. And it is always moving toward some violent resolution in which one side wins. War is, from that perspective, very little like chess, and the chess board.

In fact, the game of chess is originally an attempt to make an analogy for war — a way to teach someone how to think about war, and pursue it, in war’s absence. Stalemate is a byproduct of the rules governing chess and the chess board, and for anyone who has played it, something a weak but clever opponent can use to escape defeat.

Returning to the subject at hand, which is not stalemate, or chess, or any other analogy or metaphor for war, but the war itself — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — where do we find ourselves? At a position where, both sides having taken great casualties — not even a tenth of which each country claims it is prepared to bear (though, to be fair, it is the Ukrainians who have more to lose, and are therefore almost certainly willing to bear more than the Russians) — but great nevertheless — there is no clear path for either to victory on the terms they want. Putin started out his invasion of Ukraine hoping to take Kyiv and Odesa at a minimum, and perhaps more, maybe the whole country; Ukraine’s military stopped his ambitions cold. Next, he scaled back his ambitions to annexing four more Ukrainian oblasts in order to create a land bridge to Crimea: this is where the war stands now, with Putin’s armies unable to take more territory from Ukraine without extraordinary losses on their side, tens of thousands for communities the size of my home town in Connecticut, and Ukraine’s armies unable to liberate more territory without spilling oceans of blood.

The word we are using to describe this, stalemate, is a cop-out. It’s people taking a board game that was itself designed as an analogy for war and using a quirk of its rules to describe a moment in time — not a true measure of the scope of war, not a useful way to think about the moment Ukraine is in today, or Russia: a moment of danger, and exhaustion, and instability — instead of making a sincere effort to see war in its proper context, and to say what is necessary to bring about its successful conclusion. A moment, in other words, in which some enterprising and visionary leader can find the opportunity his side needs for success, and, in this war, victory. That would not be possible were this a true stalemate. Of course, Russia and Ukraine are not at stalemate. They aren’t playing chess!

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