All About the Missiles
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I'm Andrew Schwartz, and you're listening to The Truth of the Matter, a podcast by CSIS where we break down the top policy issues of the day and talk with the people that can help us best understand what's really going on. To get to the truth of the matter about American-made ballistic missiles in Ukraine and Russia's response to them, we're going to talk about the truth of the matter.

We have the best guy in the world to talk about this. This is my colleague Tom Carrico at CSIS, who heads our missile defense project. Tom, couldn't be a more timely discussion. We're talking on Monday, November 25th, the week of Thanksgiving. And who knows what we're going to expect this week other than you? Maybe.

Right. So like, what is this? I mean, this is all of a sudden we've got the Biden administration giving the Ukrainians attackums. We've got a revised nuclear doctrine from Vladimir Putin in response and some ICBMs that he's now sending. So can you set this up for us and explain the context and the landscape that we're now dealing with? Yeah, well, first of all, Andrew, I think you have strung together a handful of data points there. And it's just...

Just to state the obvious, you know, it's all about the missiles, right? And missiles mean standoff capability. It's a heavy, heavy global supply and demand signals for lots and lots of standoff missile capability by us, by our adversaries, by our friends and partners.

And you see that every single time Zelensky opens his mouth, right, in terms of he wants longer range strike. He wants the approval to do longer range strike back at Russia and stop fighting with one hand behind his back. And, you know, look, we are almost at three years into this conflict. It's about time that the Biden administration did approve the Ukrainians' ability to go and shoot back against the Russians and with the attack on us, presumably. And I would say

You know, that's probably the context. I think understanding this big missile wasn't technically an ICBM, but this big rocket that carried lots of reentry vehicles into Ukraine over late last week. It was probably all about the messaging and probably all about the context. A little bit of a, I would say a little bit of a temper tantrum or some saber rattling relative to this political approval about authorizing strikes into territorial Russia. Yeah.

And so what's the message that Putin is trying to send here? Don't mess with me. It is. But keep in mind, this is not the first time he's done this nuclear saber rattling. And if you believe the reporting, I think it's probably a reasonable thing to do, that the Biden administration has taken a pretty relatively cautious approach.

in terms of responding to that kind of saber-rattling low over these past three years. The concern, I would say perhaps an excess of concern relative to the threat of escalation. Admittedly, you know, Russia has only so many cards to play, and so they do play that card, that threat,

perhaps a little more frequently than we'd like. Look, the RS-26, the reason I say that this is, it is carrying along with it the baggage of this message is that that's kind of what it was built for. It's a shorter flight, very big, heavy payload missile that was probably built for,

for targeting NATO Europe and to do so with nuclear weapons. And this was kind of something in the conversation with the INF Treaty unwinding. And it is, you'll think the Pershings of the 1980s when we had fast flyers to get into Moscow and they had their fast flyers to get into Germany. And so it's kind of in that vein generally to use that thing against Ukraine. They didn't need that. They got plenty of Iskanders. They got plenty of cruise missiles. They didn't need to do that. They did that to send a message.

And why, Tom, do the Ukrainians need ATACMS? ATACMS, the acronym is A-T-A-C-M-S. Americans have been hearing this for the last couple weeks. Many probably don't know exactly what an ATACM actually is. So can you tell us who don't really know what it is? What is it? And why is this now so important? So ATACMS is a delightful acronym for the Army Tactical Missile System. It's got that ATACM phraseology. And

And it's, you know, there's a couple different versions of it, but this is still very much a short-range ballistic missile. It's important that the Ukrainians have this, and they've had it now for a little while. The United States was cautious about transferring these to the Ukrainians this last year because, frankly, we didn't have a whole lot in production. We didn't have excess lying around. And I was very upfront about the fact that we did not have excess ATACMS lying around. You would have to have...

wrestled some combatant commanders to the ground globally to get them away from him. This goes back to the CSIS report, empty bins, that underscored how few of these we actually have. The goodness is that now we have the replacement for the ATACMS coming onto the line. It's called the PRISM, the Precision Strike Missile.

And so now that that's kind of coming online, we can afford to give more of these to the Ukrainians to let them shoot back. But again, in the scheme of things, in the scheme of things, these are still relatively short range targets.

There's some cruise missiles, I think some European-made cruise missiles that I hope in the wake of the Biden administration's, again, much belated approval to strike back, hopefully some of our French and German friends will muster the courage of their convictions to allow their missiles to shoot back as well. So...

What are the Ukrainians using these for? And, you know, now that they've been given, do they expect to keep getting them? And how quickly can we give them? And, you know, how effective are they? So there's a couple of, I mean, there's been a number of stars of the Ukraine conflict in the early days. It was the Javelin anti-tank. It was the

The Stinger surface-to-air short-range missile. But, of course, the need for long-range fires translated to especially Army missiles. First, the Gimlers, the guided MLRS, guided multiple-launch rocket system, and then the ATACMS. It goes in the same launcher, the HIMARS launcher.

And so this is short and then kind of less short fires. They have them. They've been using them. We've also given them what's called the Ground Launch Small Diameter Bomb, or GLSDB. And that gives them some benefit as well. They need large quantities, though. And so that's why the much shorter range things, the 155 artillery, that's been getting so much of the attention. I remember Jake Sullivan once said that he spends 15 minutes a day. This was

It was about a year ago. He spent 15 minutes a day trying to scrounge up 155 artillery from around the world. That's a lot of time for the National Security Advisor to spend on anything. And so the day in and day out, unfortunately, it's a lot of the really short range artillery. These other things give them longer range to get to the supply depots, to get to, you know, we still haven't been able to take out that bridge in Crimea. But do you want to be able to reach out and strike deep again to have that standoff capability? Deep into Russia.

Deep into occupied Ukraine and, yes, into Russia. And it's all completely fair to go into Russian territory when they are invading you and attacking you.

Okay. So there's been some reporting that talks about what finally prompted the Biden administration to deliver the attack on them was the presence of and the continued presence of North Korean forces entering the conflict. Is that what you think really provoked this? That does seem to be what the reporting was. It is a bit of a head scratcher as to why the specter of defeat at the hands of North Koreans is such a worse outcome than the specter of defeat at the hands of

ordinary Russian conscripts. I think it's probably the fact that as Winston Churchill said of democracies, generally they always do the right thing, but only after they've tried everything else. And in this case, you know, the Biden administration really tried everything else. Right. Didn't want to escalate too much, but wanted the Ukrainians to be able to defend themselves. They have...

The war grinds on. More and more Ukrainians are on the casualty list, if not the death list. Russia's losing an enormous amount of soldiers, but they're replacing them, as we just discussed, with North Korean soldiers and others. This conflict really, really just grinds on, doesn't it? But, you know, that's not how the United States of America fights a war. That's not how we would fight a war. We would fight a war. We would look for it to be sharp.

And to be decisive. And overwhelming. And overwhelming and not fair. And, you know, the fact that you have attrition...

I mean, if there's one thing you scratch an army officer long enough, they will say, "We don't fight wars of attrition. We fight wars of maneuvering. We fight wars of long-range fires." That's the new army operating, war fighting concept that's coming out. You go in there to win, you have to have a winning strategy overall as opposed to a bleeding them dry strategy. And the problem is that this is, I would say, a problem is that it has a bit too much of that over-concern about escalation.

And that kind of conflict management kind of approach as opposed to a killer instinct to have a winning strategy. Tom, let's talk about Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin stepping up the threat of nuclear weapons being used. And, you know, also against the backdrop we haven't talked about yet, but there's a new sheriff in town. President-elect Trump will take office in about six weeks.

here in Washington. He's had some different views that he's expressed on the campaign trail and otherwise about the U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has also expressed misgivings about U.S. support for Ukraine. How does that all figure into this?

So I think there's reason to have misgivings about the strategy that we've been pursuing, which is not a winning strategy. I think that everybody, including the Ukrainians, there's a lot of folks that are expecting in 2025 for there to be negotiations in some capacity. Whether Ukraine and whether Ukraine and Ukraine's friends are negotiating from a position of strength –

or from a position of weakness, that's going to depend upon some political decisions. And so I think there is, on the basis of what's been said and the campaign, there's plenty of room to come to what I would say is the right decision, which is to help Ukraine get to a position of strength and to win. And that's why we can't...

And the Ukrainians, I believe, should not overreact to things like this RS-26 strike. Like, oh my goodness, we have to completely, you know, pack up and go home and surrender even more territory to Russia. That just plays into what is, you know, frankly, Russia's weak hand already. So fight to win and give them a strategy to win and the means to win. I will also stipulate that we don't want to be doing this forever. And so you need to do it decisively and sharply.

Precisely because we want to steward our own resources. I mentioned the ATACOMs. I don't want us to be handing over Patriots until the end of time catching Russian missiles. No, we need to bring this to a close so that we can stop doing that. When the White House suspended Patriot and AMRAAM sales globally—

earlier this year, there's 17 countries that operate the Patriot family globally. A lot of them have paid for this stuff, and they're now being told, no, you can't have what you paid for because those Patriots have to go to Ukraine. So is it a good thing to do? Is it a necessary thing to do? Yes, but it has to be accompanied by that overall strategy.

Air defenses, missile defenses are not going to win the war. A couple of rockets and ATACMs are not going to win the conflict. It all has to be done together. Yeah. So this leaves us in a really difficult position here with the new administration coming in, an old one going out, and the old one trying to maybe make up for some of the past strategy that you've talked about. What do the next six weeks look like?

So, you know, look, if I'm Russia, I'm going to be looking to capitalize on what I can given this is going to be the winter and there's going to be probably some limited operations. The fact that the North Koreans are there, you know, yes, they're probably there to be – some of them are there to be cannon fodder. But some of them are there to get training and to get experience and get learning.

And so presumably the officers from North Korea are going to take that home. And maybe there's other observers from other third countries that might be sticking around and kind of observing what's going on. And so, you know, if you stipulate at least the proposition that Ukraine is a testing ground for battles to come, right, including in the Indo-Pacific,

then you've got to connect the dots. And so I push back against those who say, oh, we've got to just let Ukraine burn because we've got to steward our 155 for Indo-Pacific. No, they are connected. And if you're interested in munitions production for the Indo-Pacific, you...

should be thanking the galvanization of the industrial base that has come out of the Ukraine conflict. I do not believe for one nanosecond that we would have anything like the increased production to the extent that we have it. And we need more, if not for the Ukraine conflict. Tom, I just want to ask you really directly. President-elect Trump says he plans to put a quick stop to the war in Ukraine. Is that actually possible? Look, I think it's conceivable that there could be some kind of hasty,

deliberate, some other version of a suspension of arms. Whether it would be advisable under all circumstances is doubtful. You know, there are different kinds of peace. There is the peace of the victor, but there is also the peace of the prisoner and of the grave. And those are our peace as well. And so if you just want to let Ukraine burn, yes, you can do that. But

But I do believe that it is, and I would say consistent with the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States, that we are in a world of great power competition. And that includes Russia. And so the strength and the benefit of the United States, the national security interest of the United States includes degrading the heck out of the Russian military and the intelligence bonanza and all these other things that

that are unfortunately too easy kind of put aside and forgotten about. If you care about China, if you care about great power competition, as articulated in the Trump administration's last national security and last national defense strategy, then I believe there's enormous benefit to staying the course to win, not to a threat, not indefinitely, but to win.

Interesting. Let's not forget, the United States is involved, not directly, but it's certainly involved in other conflicts around the world, particularly in the Middle East. Can you give us a sense on that front what your thinking is? I know you've been looking at this pretty closely. So I would say the same kind of a strategy is

The dribs and drabs strategy that we've been talking about with respect to Ukraine echoes in terms of how this administration has unfortunately approached a lot of what's been going on in CENTCOM. And so think about the sitting and playing catch in the Red Sea since October 7. We've expanded a lot of U.S. Navy air and missile defense interceptors. And by the way, some ships, some destroyers have come

way too close to getting struck on a number of occasions. Our ships. Our ships, U.S. ships, yes. And any time that a Navy destroyer has to use its CWIS machine gun to take out incoming threats, that's a bad day. Something has gone wrong. And so there's been, I would say, dribs and drabs of plagiarism

playing catch in the Red Sea as opposed to bringing or taking the pain to the decision makers. And so it took a long time to actually, you know, strike back, to fire back, even to the proxies, the Houthis and the other, you know, quote unquote, Houthis, the proxies in that region. It has been the attacks of April 14 and the attacks of October 11. Those were the attacks by the Iranians against Israel.

And in both cases, what did the Biden administration do? They leaned on the Israelis and said, take the win. Don't shoot back.

Now, the Israelis did a really surgical strike after April 14 and then a less surgical attack after October 11, but still very limited. And I would say you can have an excess of limitation. You can have an abundance of – an overabundance of modesty on these fronts because unless and until the pain is brought between the ears of the decision makers, not the proxies, but the decision makers, and that means the Iranians, and I'm not – it's not just about –

bombing around. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about getting the message to where the deterrence calculus is made, and that is in the gray matter between their ears. That's what matters. And so that's, look at how the Israelis escalated to win in terms of like totally taking out the Hezbollah leadership. Stroke of genius. They took the pain not to sitting and playing catch with rockets from Hezbollah. No, no, no. They took the pain to the decision makers. And so, but that's a strategy to win, right? The Israeli says, we're

This isn't funny. We're not going to play this game. We're going to win. And so you got to take that kind of seriousness and that kind of gravitas to all these problems and think of them as games to win and not games to just sit there like playing Monopoly indefinitely.

Well, so I have no doubt that the Israelis are in it to win, all in it to win. But what about the United States? Like we're, as you said, we're kind of hovering. We're giving drips and drabs both in Ukraine and in Israel. We have a common enemy in both. Iran is terrorizing the region through the proxies, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. What next?

So those things do need to be brought to a close, right? So that we can focus on, I'll just go back to the 2018 formulation of great power competition with China, of course, as the leading or pacing problem. So

We do have to wrap those up, but the threat gets a vote, and I do believe we have to contend with those things. Back to the munitions thing, I was somewhat sanguine about the THAAD deployment to Israel because I don't want that THAAD battery in Israel sitting and playing catch and expending all its rounds indefinitely. So far, thankfully, it hasn't had to do that. But that's a strategic asset. It is, at this point, the highest op tempo of any weaponry.

certainly in the Army air defense world, we don't have just a whole lot of those in garrison left anymore. We do need to stewards our fads and our patriot and all this kind of stuff for the big fight. So we got to find the ways to, I would say ruthlessly and expeditiously bring these things to a close. And by ruthlessly, I mean, not by selling out our friends, the Ukrainians, but by ruthlessly giving them a strategy to win.

You don't believe, do you, that the next administration is going to sell out either the Israelis or the Ukrainians, do you? I don't think so. I think it would be contrary to the stated principles, the fundamental principles of peace through strength, the fundamental principles of winning the great power competition challenge. But there are certainly flirtations with that.

Tom, incredibly helpful. I know we're going to be talking about this in months to come. So thank you very much for stopping in and happy Thanksgiving. Hey, lots to be thankful for. Not the least of which reason is the exquisite capability of those ATACOMs and Patriots performing on a weekly basis in Ukraine. No question.

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