Former Trump Pentagon Official Elbridge Colby Talks Ukraine

BUCK: We have Bridge Colby now with us, cofounder and principal of The Marathon Initiative, a policy initiative focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. He is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. Bridge, great to have you back.

COLBY: Great to be with you.

BUCK: What are you seeing right now in terms of the war from a purely military… We’ll get into the Biden response. He’s over in Europe and all that, in a moment, Bridge. But from a military assessment, order of battle, and how this is playing out perspective, how is this going from the Russian perspective, how is this going from defense from the Ukrainian perspective, based on defenses and troop losses and everything?

COLBY: Sure. As I think as you said, it’s the biggest war in the European continent since the Second World War, and it’s turned into something like a slugfest. I think a lot of us, including myself, have been surprised by how the Russians not only haven’t done as well, it would seem at this point — although there’s reason for skepticism about some of the war reporting. They haven’t done sort of as well as we expected in the beginning.

Part of that seems like probably — my guess is — it’s from the top, from Putin. They tried a coup de ‘tat. Take out/decapitate Zelensky, and the state would fall apart. And they’ve been surprised, as we all have, I think, by the ferocity and the vigor of the Ukrainians fighting for hearth and home. Fighting for their own country. And that has really led to…

And now they’re kind of devolved into a slugfest, which is kind of the traditional way of war which is artillery, clear the place out, and just win by mass saturation. That’s the way it seems to be going. That said, the Russians seem to have been having difficulties. There may be more difficulties coming out. They have been making some progress particularly in the south. So I think the jury is still out, and we don’t see the Russians relenting at this point. So it’s definitely too early for a victory lap.

CLAY: Bridge, appreciate you coming on with us. I was reading NATO estimates of Russian casualties particularly the dead. The report is pretty wide ranging in terms of its scope. They say between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers are dead, around 40,000 or so wounded. How accurate do you think these estimates might be and what sort of numbers would have to occur for Russian forces — due to losses — to decide not to continue their advance?

COLBY: Well, I think… It’s a pretty big range. It strikes me as plausible. This is high-intensity warfare. I mean, these are extremely lethal munitions that are being employed. And, you know, we’ve seen the Russian forces. We’ve seen these reports of general officers and senior field-grade officers get killed. So it strikes me in the right order of magnitude. I would be surprised if it’s substantially lower than 7,000. It’s a real beating on both sides.

You know, there’s a rule of thumb that maybe if a combat unit loses a third of its strength, it starts to fall apart. I would be surprised to find the Russians just kind of give up and go home. It’s possible. But the Russians, it appears that they’re bringing forces from other theaters. Even more. They had 190,000 or so, I believe, to start. So if you’re talking 50,000 total casualties, you’re really running against some significant numbers. But it doesn’t look like they’re giving up, giving up yet. They’re kind of going to their sort of familiar territory of just beating, trying to beat Ukraine into submission for probably a more partial victory than they had hoped for in the beginning.

BUCK: Speaking of Bridge Colby, Cofounder and principal to Marathon Initiative. Former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for strategy. Bridge, what does, in your estimation as somebody who has looked at the assessment, analysis that we do at the Pentagon on a whole range of issues? What do you think Putin wants here? What is the end state that he thinks is achievable? Because it would be important to know this so that we could at least try diplomatically and negotiation to get to that cease-fire and to the end of the conflict. What do you think would be what Putin would finally stop the bullets and the bombs for?

COLBY: Well, I think that’s the right way to think about it. It’s probably variable. I mean, he probably was looking for something much bigger at the beginning and hoping he could get it. And, you know, the key is that the battlefield is going to determine a lot of this. And my partner — brilliant strategist and former Trump State Department official Wes Mitchell — had a piece in Foreign Affairs laying out what this might look like, a kind of, what he calls a “fortified Ukrainian neutrality,” which I think is kind of what we want Putin to be forced to accept.

Which is probably a sort of a neutrality like Finland or Austria traditionally had, so not NATO membership is almost certainly be the case, but a very strong Ukrainian Army, not demilitarization, which is probably what Putin wants. Because at this point, I bet the Russians are thinking, “You know, this is going to be our first bite at the apple,” or at least they’re hoping. “It’s very bloody. We didn’t do as well as we wanted to.

“We want to get as much as we can. We’ll lick our wounds and come back at it in a few years,” might be what they’re thinking. We don’t want that to be an attractive option. We want Ukraine — I think Ukrainians, more importantly want — a strong, hearty, powerful army, that Putin will not be able to roll over or whoever Putin’s successor is.

So that’s probably the trade space, and I think we should… You know, the Ukrainians want to fight so we should encourage and supply them and make them capable of doing that. But also, there’s going to have to be a political solution, and we should not stand in the way of that. We should help the Ukrainians along that path where we can.

BUCK: Bridge, we’re one month in, officially right now. How much longer does this go, in your mind? If you were setting the range of how much longer the process, as we’ve seen it for the last month, is likely to continue, what to you makes sense?

COLBY: Well, I think there’s a couple of possibilities. I don’t think the intensity of the first month can be sustained. I mean, we’ve seen reports that the Russians are running out of key munitions very quickly, and they’re even using potentially hypersonic munitions, maybe even because they don’t have enough of the normal kind. So it’s gonna take time, even with Russian industry, to reconstitute/regenerate that.

So what we can see is either a ceasefire of some kind, which would be ideal on favorable terms for the Ukrainians. An alternative, though, might be a protracted conflict, where you might see a lull in the fighting for months or even a year and then a resurgence, a more intensified version of what we’ve seen in eastern Ukraine. That would be a bad outcome. It wouldn’t be the worst outcome. I think that’s probably the stakes we’re looking at.

BUCK: Bridge, how do you assess the Biden administration response to this invasion? I mean, I feel like there’s a failure in some sense that the invasion happened.

COLBY: Right.

BUCK: Outside forces, powers weren’t able to prevent that. But since the invasion started, what are they doing right, what are they doing wrong in this White House?

COLBY: Well, look, I think the fundamental thing — and I don’t think this is churlish; I think this is important. I mean, this is an epic failure of American policy and Western policy. Presumably — and I think it’s untoward to be sort of taking victory laps at this point in any respective. There are three million of refugees, tens of thousands of people are dead. This was not the goal of American policy.

It wasn’t the goal of American policy under the last administration, and not under this administration. This is a big failure. It’s the largest war in Europe, and there’s a very real chance of very serious escalation. We’re not at the end of this path by a long stretch. Since the invasion, I think the administration does deserve credit in some areas. Unlike some of my fellow Republicans, I do think we need to take seriously the fact that — Democrats too — that Putin has a very large and a sophisticated nuclear arsenal.

It’s larger and more sophisticated than ours, and the only thing standing between us and a Russian nuclear attack is Vladimir Putin’s incentive structure. So the administration does deserve credit on that front. They have been, I think, behind the curve — again, before the invasion — in supplying things like Javelins and other really important military equipment. You know, I would say the lesson here is not sanctions. It’s not allied unity.

What is stopping the Russians is Ukrainians fighting. It’s the title of my book, Strategy and Denial. This is the lesson. Is if you want to stop aggression, you have to be able to fight for it. It’s not sanctions. It’s not condemnations by the G7. Putin would be rolling all the way to the Western border if that’s all he faced, but he’s not. He’s facing these tough Ukrainians fighting for their country — not fighting, by the way, for the world-based international order. They’re fighting for their country.

They’re fighting for kind of popular nationalism. So great on them, and we should supply them. But, you know, I do think the administration could do more on supplying and moving quickly. But I also think they have been right not to push too far, because, you know, look, the Russians are not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; they’re not the Taliban. These guys can really hurt us. So we’ve gotta to be careful to thread that needle and achieve our goals and help the Ukrainians without precipitating, frankly, World War III.

BUCK: Bridge Colby. The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict is his book. Highly recommend it to you. Bridge, great to have you, my friend. Thanks for joining.

COLBY: Great to be with you.