Strategic Mistakes Live Forever: Ukraine's Strategic Lessons for the Pacific
Article 2 in this series explores a key strategic lesson of the past 27 months in Ukraine about the importance of strategy, and why good strategic assumptions are vital in modern strategy and warfare.
The threats from and to Asia and the threats to and from Europe cannot be decoupled. They are part of a new nexus of authoritarian and revisionist states seeking to upend the current world order. Angela Stent, Brookings Institution.
This is the second article in what will be a comprehensive series that explores the lessons from the war in Ukraine since 2022, and translates them for their applicability in the Pacific region. In the introduction to this series, I examined the rationale for this translation exercise, and noted that:
Context matters in the further examination of lessons from the Ukraine War. The relevance of a given lesson from the Ukraine war for other theatres will depend on a range of different geographic, technological or political factors. My observation of the many, many articles on the lessons from Ukraine in the past 26 months is that the vast majority suffer from a lack of contextual translation.
In the introduction to this series, I also listed the strategic and battlefield lessons that I intend translating for the Pacific region. These might be viewed as the primary lessons but not the only ones.
The western and southwestern pacific regions are very different politically, economically, ethnically and socially from Europe. There is no EU nor is there an Asian version of NATO. The scale of China dwarfs all other nations in the Pacific region.
The military and economic relationships between different Asian nations, and with countries outside the region, are very different from the context that eastern European nations such as Ukraine operate within. These differences in context need to be considered in the translation of strategic lessons from Ukraine.
This examination of strategic lessons from the Russo-Ukraine War, and their application in the Pacific region, will span multiple articles. Subsequently I will explore the battlefield lessons from Ukraine for their applicability to nations in the Pacific region. This article covers the first strategic lesson from the war in Ukraine and its applicability in the Pacific region: the importanance of strategy and strategic assumptions.
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