Photograph Source: Ministry of Defense of Ukraine – CC BY-SA 2.0
The American disaster in Vietnam was supposed to have put to rest the folly of US military interventions to shore up tottering regimes abroad. The so-called Vietnam “syndrome” held that America might make quick “surgical” strikes without the use of ground troops – with pinpoint air attacks, or rapidly-deployed special operations forces, for example – but the cost to blood and treasure of prolonged invasions with regular military units was deemed too high to be contemplated again. And yet in Iraq, and then Afghanistan, the United States did just that – with predictably disastrous results. Given this well-worn track record, the Biden administration’s overnight success in drumming up public support for a massive military campaign against Russia in Ukraine would seem surprising. In the tense weeks of failed diplomacy to avert a Russian invasion, and even more so after Putin decided to move forward, voices of dissent raised questions about the origins and history of the conflict and Western motives for intervention. They included venerable scholars and strategists like John Mearsheimer, and even the illustrious George Kennan of early Cold War fame, both of whom warned that the United States was overstating Russia’s aggressive intentions while underestimating Putin’s staying power.
If regime change was the secret objective, it wouldn’t work, they warned. Even worse, ignoring Russia’s legitimate need for a buffer zone on the edge of its European “sphere of influence,” and insisting on Ukraine’s entry into NATO, could threaten an all-out conflagration. They were right, of course. Biden & Co. missed opportunities to negotiate an accord to appease and deflect Russia’s concerns and in retrospect. seemed hell-bent on provoking Putin to invade – which he did, with disastrous results for Ukraine, and indeed, the United States.
We now know that Biden repeatedly lied to the American public about Ukraine’s alleged “progress” in the war and has consistently underestimated Russia’s resilience. Biden has also lied about the full extent of US involvement in support of Ukraine’s own defense forces. While publicly drawing the line against supplying US jet fighters to conduct air combat with Russia, the administration appears to have provided extensive satellite intelligence as well as clandestine paramilitary support to bolster – and in some cases – direct Ukraine’s ground campaign. Though the war appears at present to be a stalemate, voices in the West are continuing to insist, recklessly, that further pressure on Russia, perhaps fueled by a higher level US intervention, could push Putin to collapse.
We may one day learn – through the release of secret national intelligence estimates and other classified documents – why Biden & Co. decided to gamble on another unwinnable ground war at such an enormous human and fiscal cost. But there are other visible signs of the real stakes that might have driven the American gamble. One is the opportunity that the Ukraine war has provided to test out a brand new technology of warfare – military drones – that the Pentagon is clearly counting on as the fulcrum of its global war readiness and deployment. In its earliest stages, the Ukraine war may have resembled battlefields from the past, with both sides employing conventional weaponry, including tanks, artillery and mortars that allowed them to slog at a snail’s pace in ground offensives and pitched battles resembling World War II. But within a year, drones provided by Russia, the United States as well as by Turkey and Iran, have transformed the tactics and the pace of the war. Now, some 70-80% of the war casualties are due to aerial drone attacks. As the New York Times reported just last week: “The Ukrainians make use of a wide range of explosives to arm drones. They drop grenades, mortar rounds or mines on enemy positions. They repurpose anti-tank weapons and cluster munitions to fit onto drones, or they use anti-personnel fragmentation warheads and others with thermobaric charges to destroy buildings and bunkers.”
This is hardly new: Much the same dynamic unfolded during the Iraq War in the early 2000s. Once the invasion got underway, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon planners began deploying a panoply of new air weaponry that had yet to be tested in battle and also began experimenting with operational techniques on the ground for eventual use elsewhere. Of course, having the hapless Iraqi defense forces as adversaries was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel – but as always, making progress as a foreign invader – which naturally stokes nationalist resentment – still proved more difficult than expected. For a much larger war against a more formidable adversary – Russia or China – the odds would not be stacked so clearly in America’s favor. But in the Pentagon’s view, proxy wars involving regional powers like Iraq or Iran – or now Ukraine – are the most likely war-fighting scenarios America needs to prepare for. As In Iraq – and before in Vietnam – testing grounds — “living laboratories,” some planners call them — are needed to ensure that a new generation of military weaponry can actually do the job beyond mere training and mock warfare exercises.
And so it is with drones, which are now being envisioned as the centerpiece of future remotely-controlled electronic battlefields. While the American public’s overall awareness of drones remains low – and largely limited to periodic media reports about their role in delivering pizzas or aiding local law enforcement – drones are the focus of Pentagon planning for strategic and tactical surveillance and for combat and combat support nearly everywhere now – from the depths of the oceans to the far reaches and heights of outer space. These next-generation drones are not the controversial ones Americans may have first heard about during the Iraq War: the large “Predator” and “Reaper” drones that launched missile strikes on enemy command posts and secret meetings of rebel jihad commanders. Supposedly laser-like in their precision, they sometimes killed large numbers of civilians, including on a few occasions, US citizens, inspiring outrage from the likes of Sen, Rand Paul. President Obama massively escalated those strikes during the Afghan war, from an ever-expanding number of global bases. Arguably they helped keep Afghani forces in the game against the Taliban and allowed the United States to keep ISIS and its allies on the run, but in those conflicts, drones were still viewed as a critical tactical component of a larger strategic war effort – not its key fulcrum and means of execution, as the Ukraine effort now seems to foreshadow.
It’s worth considering, by official estimates, just how much the drone industry has grown over the past decade – and to appreciate projections for its growth through 2035 and beyond. As with civilian commercial aviation after World War II, military innovation – though much of it classified, and invisible – is largely driving the drone industry’s commercial expansion. The military drone marketwas valued at roughly $22 billion in 2024, but is expected to nearly triple to $57 billion by 2033. The commercial market – which includes drones for law enforcement, real estate infrastructure inspection, medical aid and consumer goods delivery and even conservation – is already larger, and also growing exponentially fast, reaching about $65 billion by 2032. But in the United States, there are lots of “dual use” federal contracts, usually beginning with military applications, that will fuel the growth of both markets. And in fact, official military estimates are misleading: much of the nation’s military drone development is highly classified and its budget remains hidden in other “official” appropriations – for the CIA and other agencies – that may be reported to selected congressional subcommittees, but are never acknowledged publicly.
The Ukraine war is not the only spur to the ever escalating worldwide drone arms race. China, Russia and North Korea are all pushing forward with major drone space war initiatives, including the positioning of permanent drone satellites in deep space, as well as new drone technologies for fighting AI-driven ground wars completely autonomously – that is, without the need for remote pilots directing their operations. The US air force is also experimenting with autonomous unmanned jet aircraft that can engage enemy fighters without remote pilots. In theory, within 20 years or more, the Pentagon envisions waging wars – or threatening them – on completely autonomous battlefields – in space, on land, at sea, and even underwater. It’s a Brave New World, where ground troops are no longer needed even for tactical support operations, and in theory, the cost of these wars will also be greatly reduced.
Presently, though, the Ukraine war remains the center of drone development – with Russia, Turkey, Iran, Israel and other countries using the country as a testing ground – and ever expanding market – for their own drone industry development. No one probably expected this dynamic to unfold in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion, but it’s an inevitable one. As in the past, the Ukraine war has become – and not just for the US – a crucible and laboratory for weapons innovation, and once that dynamic takes hold, it’s self-perpetuating, and more importantly, without policy restraint, it can easily become an impediment to achieving peace. Ukraine, in fact, is fashioning a fledgling drone industry of its own, and not just for domestic use. The country’s up-and-coming native suppliers want to export not just their technology but also their expertise fighting against one of the world’s great superpowers, which will soon place them in demand on the world market. In short, the more the Ukraine war is allowed to gurgle on – and indeed to escalate to more reckless heights – the more difficult it will be to end. Trump, for all his “America First” bombast, is right about one thing: this war should end now, and not be prolonged indefinitely, a goal that Zelensky and his neocon allies – and the ever burgeoning arms industry – seem intent on promoting for reasons of their own.
Ukraine’s Untapped Mineral Wealth
Trump’s support for “peace now” – as self-serving ads it is – exposes another key strategic motive that has driven this senseless war from the start: access to Ukraine’s untapped mineral wealth, including huge deposits of uranium (the largest in Europe, critical for nuclear reactors) and lithium but also rare earth metals that could prove vital to the future of the electronics and defense industry. Trump, ever the rapacious and unabashed capitalist, has made no secret of America’s desire to covet these resources for US-based companies and to keep them out of Russian and Chinese hands – which makes him something of a national security truth teller, in fact. It seems to be one of the long-standing semi-secret codicils of US foreign and defense policy to downplay and gaslight the US public about the venal economic motives that so often underlie America’s foreign adventurism. Iraq had abundantreserves of oil and natural gas – which made it a prime target for US intervention– and Afghanistan – scene of another bloody American quagmire – is one of the world’s leading sources of untapped lithium reserves as well as diamonds, rubies and emeralds. Libya, whose oil has long fueled European industrial production, and which contains one of the world’s largest supplies of oil reserves, was another coveted prize which led France to beg the Obama administration to launch an ill-advised intervention to help topple the regime of Moammar Ghadafi.
But here’s the rub: These lucrative mineral reserves remain almost completely untapped and for the foreseeable future at least, untappable. All of these countries – and now including Ukraine – have virtually no extractive infrastructure of their own to exploit their natural wealth. Which leaves a host of greedy foreign powers looking to get their hooks into them, with war and political instability the perfect pretext to intervene to try to arrange things to their own advantage – in the US case, of course, under the rubric of establishing “peace” and a friendly, pro-Western “democracy.”
It’s not quite clear just how extensive Ukraine’s various mineral resources might be, but the magnitude of its mineral “prize” may be one of the greatest of all. Now that Trump, in his own inimitable fashion, has decided to “break the code” on this issue by openly discussing the negotiation of US mineral rights as a condition for possible American security guarantees, the media, in a spate of stories published over the past two weeks, seems intent on gaslighting the American public and downplaying what is widely known about the extent of these reserves. In fact, Ukraine has long been celebrated for them, with some experts calling the country a strategic minerals “powerhouse.” According to an authoritative report produced by the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD): “Prior to the 2022 Russian invasion, Ukraine registered 20,000 deposits of ore-bearing minerals, including 117 of the 120 most globally used metals and minerals. Ukrainian and international authorities reported that the country was home to the world’s top recoverable coal, gas, iron, manganese, nickel, ore, titanium, and uranium reserves. Before the war, Ukraine was among the largest suppliers of noble gasses such as neon (for microchip-making) and boasted the most significant known lithium and rare earth deposits in Europe.”
The way the minerals issue plays – or could play – in the future of the Ukraine war could be tricky, however. For Trump and global multinationals, it’s a major reason for seeking a favorable peace settlement that could force Russia to cede part of the occupied areas of Ukraine that contain some of those vast mineral deposits – freeing up Western access – in exchange for a demilitarized zone that protects Russian security interests. But for Zelensky and the current regime, guaranteeing Western – or even Russian– access to those same mineral resources is a bargaining chip to keep his regime afloat and generous US aid flowing, thus prolonging the war. Zelensky and his backers still think they can force Putin to concede – against all evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, even some Western companies are hedging their bet – by providing backdoor satellite intelligence to Russia to improve Putin’s war-fighting operations. In this fashion, a war seemingly without end may be destined to sputter on still further.
The upshot? It’s still not clear whether the powerful, though largely hidden, or at least hushed-up, economic drivers of the Ukraine war will ultimately lead all powers involved to arrive at something resembling “peace.” The outlines of a settlement are abundantly clear – a cease-fire, a Russian pull-back, a mineral rights deal, a treaty over still-contested territory, and the exclusion of Ukraine from NATO. But getting there requires a shift from the reckless neo-conservative paradigm that sees the United States promoting democracy and regime change everywhere in the world to the more old-fashioned “realist” paradigm that places primary emphasis on regional balances of power and the achievement of regional peace and stability. Biden, ever the ardent neocon, aided and abetted by aides addicted to liberal regime-change fantasies, managed to whip up the nation’s patriotic fervor to cast the battle in Ukraine as one of “good versus evil,” depicting Putin as a latter-day Hitler bent on European territorial conquest, and the United States as the heroic defender of world freedom. We’ve seen this movie before – though on this scale, not since World War II perhaps, and certainly not since the heyday of the Cold War. While no one should have any illusions about the venality of the Putin regime, there are other strategic concerns here – namely, containing China, which by any reasonable standard is America’s – and the West’s – chief adversary, and is already implementing its own plan for global expansion and ultimately, hegemony. The real issue for peace-loving people isn’t whether Putin will be overthrown and tried for war crimes and punished for his “naked aggression” – which, with proper strategic judgment, might have been forestalled all along It’s whether Ukrainians will ever manage to achieve something for themselves, including a viable economy that can provide for self-sustaining development and a political system free of foreign manipulation.
Biden and the West never had clean hands here – and neither did his predecessors. The US-backed coup approved by the Obama administration in 2014 ushered in the very regime that now insists on fighting an endless Holy War that is anything but holy. The intense spotlight focused on the inevitable carnage of this war is partly a reflection of the deliberate psychological operations devised by national security planners – and justified as a response to Russia’s own “disinformation” – to whip up patriotic fervor in support of an enormous military expenditure– about $300 billion, and counting – that might have been avoided at the outset. These operations also serve to distract the public from the war’s less obvious – and unseemly – economic stakes and motives. But beneath the frothings of patriotic gore and the crocodile tears shed daily by war planners over the bloody toll they’ve helped sponsor, their venality and naked greed – and that of the bigger corporate players standing behind them – isn’t that hard to find. You just just have to be willing to look. The mainstream “liberal”: media – schooled in the high-minded rationales for this war and so many others – probably never will.
Right now, war economics – short- and long-term – is driving the prolongation of the bloody conflict in Ukraine. But it may well be that some version of capitalist “peace” economics will also drive it to a more rapid conclusion – or at least a significant cessation – so that Ukraine’s great prize” – the country’s largely untapped mineral wealth – can finally be plundered. Carving up Ukraine, like carving up Africa in a bygone era – is what superpowers do when they want to divvy up their shares of global influence. What will the people of Ukraine receive in return? Probably not much more than what Africa or other nations of the one-time “Third World” received. A subordinate position in the global division of labor and trade and a form of “development” conducted at the behest of and for the benefit of foreign-owned multinationals. Maybe Ukraine, with Europe’s assistance, can establish extractive industries that cede more significant domestic control to Ukraine– and not just to the country’s notoriously corrupt elites. One can hope and the world must indeed insist. It’s the least we can do after all the bloody slaughter and destruction its people have suffered these past three years. There’s an old African proverb: “When the elephants play, the grass gets trampled.” Isn’t it time for everyone involved – including so many still parading their false “humanitarian” piety – to simply end this grotesque trampling of Ukraine? That’s not Russian propaganda – it’s a plea for peace amid the collective madness that is war.
