Redefining the Battlefield

There has been a lot of commentary this week about Ukraine’s surprisingly effective drone attacks on enemy aircraft deep inside Russia and underwater sabotage of the Russia-Crimea bridge.

Military experts, political leaders and the news media’s armchair pundits seem taken simultaneously by Ukraine’s audaciousness, the extensive damage to expensive Russian armaments, its unintended slap against Donald Trump’s criticism that Ukraine “has no cards” on the battlefield, and what it all means for the future of warfare.

No one suggests that these two counterattacks on Russia will substantially alter the long-term battle, but they reflect well more than Ukrainian grit in this seemingly endless war, but they show Russia that failure to take Ukraine seriously at the futile ceasefire negotiation table will prove increasingly dear to Russians.

But the growing role of low-cost drones and sabotage as effective weapons — trends building over years now — comes into sharper focus just as we’re hearing our own government being pressed to spend trillions of dollars for more military hardware that may well be outdated for the emerging battlefields.

By any estimate, Ukraine’s investment in, say, a million dollars’ worth of drones, has wiped out billions of dollars’ worth of Russian tanks and armored vehicles in the occupied East, and now hundreds of billions’ worth of aircraft and bridge repairs.

Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are committed to whopping budget proposals for rebuilding Navy surface ships, a full remodel and reissue of our nuclear weapons, a giant conceptual “golden dome” defense system against incoming missiles and more. Along with adding to legally questionable military and paramilitary commitments to guard our borders and to hunt down, grab and deport millions of migrants within the United States, defense spending already has emerged as the White House’ biggest new spending demands from Congress.

It also comes as Trump is actively pushing European allies away and letting them know in no uncertain terms that Ukraine’s defense — and the NATO alliance — increasing is Europe’s problem, not America’s. And so, NATO nations are talking of the need to increase their armies and navies — just as Ukraine is showing that big military hardware may be as outdated as France’s Maginot Line proved to be in World War II.

Just maybe, recent events should prompt some deeper thought.

National Security and Rebels

Obviously, the politics of our national security and military readiness is riddled with disputed presumptions about an American presence in world affairs and the repeated goal of achieving peace through military strength.

Over time, we have debated the role of American “soft power” that comes with non-military economic strength, diplomacy and targeted foreign, humanitarian aid, and defense of democracy around the world.

Trump’s combined “America First” policy of U.S. isolationism, the DOGE-led erasures of foreign aid, his belligerence towards European allies and his insistence on American tariffs to force a global trade war are undercutting all the traditional policy assumptions.

Any number of recent serious articles have considered Trump’s constant insistence of personal power over the hard work of diplomacy to settle international matters and his apparent agreement that bigtime leaders ignore lines of national sovereignty to have global spheres of influence and control.  Nestled up to authoritarian power is the constant desire for more wealth, more profit-making as an international goal of its own.

But splintered or linked militias around the world have had other ideas, a lesson we thought we learned in Vietnam. In the spirit of Islamic jihadists, Houthi rebels in Yemen are firing missiles from trucks at international shipping, seemingly at will. In Gaza, south Lebanon, the West Bank, relatively small numbers of Palestinian militants prove a stubbornly effective threat to security of Israelis and U.S. forces in the region. The world quakes at the thought of even a single nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran.

Even if Congress blesses every last Trump request for what he thinks of national security and a military that he wants bristling but not used in war, ask yourself whether the Ukraine example shows that we will be safer or that the world will be more peaceful as a result.

Domestic Security Too

The same logic applies to our domestic violence issues, of course. Trump has mobilized an estimated 5,000 federal employees under Homeland Security to hunt down, arrest and quickly deport millions of migrants — well beyond the campaign promise of seeking expulsion of migrants with criminal records. The White House is reported to be working with states to make 20,000 National Guardsmen available as well, and Defense has sent 5,000 to 8,000 active-duty troops to the border for services that are never defined.

Trump’s Defense Department is committed to increasing “lethality,” without consideration for who’s supposed to do the fighting for American values that the commander-in-chief seems to want to snub. The Homeland Security folks see the goal of deportation as more important than upholding due process or having masked, unidentified enforcers lurking for individuals and families to capture.

And yet, we still have crime, occasionally involving suspects who are migrants.

Trump has launched widespread institutional damage against universities and states citing antisemitism, wokeism, unwarranted attention to diversity issues — treating culture as an actual battlefront with deployment of deportation as a weapon.

And yet, we still had a single nut job in Colorado this week attacking Jewish marchers seeking attention for Hamas-held hostages use a virtual flamethrower to injure or kill the group randomly.

Trump sees “enforcement” as a tool not matter the problem. The “lone wolves” in our midst see individual actions — the domestic equivalent of Ukrainian drones — as an answer that eludes the institutionalized deployment of Homeland Security enforcers.

Just maybe, somewhere in all this discussion about bigger and more deadly weaponry, we might just reconsider what we could achieve through getting to the root of problems, international or domestic, and proposed solutions that require listening.

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