When not to follow the leader...

Here's an addendum to my previous post about Phillips P. O'Brien's The Strategists: in the introduction to that 2024 book, O'Brien muses about what Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine might reveal about the Russian's capacities as a war leader.

... As this book is being completed, the greatest example of this reality of personal grand-strategy-making is playing out before us.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an attempt to create a greater, more powerful Russia, shows once again that grand strategy can be hijacked by deeply flawed individuals over bureaucracies or structures. In no rational world could the Russian invasion of Ukraine be seen as something well thought out or in the Russian national interest. It was poorly conceived, based on a hopeless misreading of Ukrainian intentions and capabilities. The Russian Army was also constructed in such a way that it was far less than the sum of its parts.

While Putin might have had an ends-ways-means plan in his own mind, we can say now that he had poorly constructed means, which he employed in wholly unrealistic ways in a vain attempt to achieve completely unrealistic ends. Yet just before the invasion he was considered perhaps the most savvy and intelligent leader of a major power in the world.

Putin’s grand-strategic performance has in many ways combined the worst strategic traits of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In a rational world, with a sober evaluation of the Russian Army, one would have imagined a state’s decision-making bureaucracy would have tried to halt his invasion of Ukraine—as one would have imagined the Italian state might have restrained Mussolini from invading Greece, or German influences might have kept Hitler from attacking the Soviet Union with Britain still fighting.

Like the Axis leaders of the 1940s, Putin made war on the Ukraine of his imagination with a military greatly debilitated by corruption and incompetence of which he was either ignorant or unconcerned. Russia ran into something unanticipated in Ukraine. O'Brien's substack chronicles the consequences. It's my go-to source on the Ukraine war and seems honest, though not objective. He knows who he supports.

Of course, Putin is not the only contemporary leader of a powerful military and country who ignorantly substitutes his fantasies for any coherent plan or strategy.