The 'hard sell' for long-range MLRS systems for Ukraine
Or, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the rashist
This isn't really the hard sell to make here on MLRS systems for Ukraine, that we’re hearing lately. It's good info, though.
The hard sell to make is, you point out that anywhere that Russia takes, there is a very good risk that they will massacre the people who live there and lie about it, rape the women and kill some of them, dump the bodies in mass graves, and then open up an ATM (in rubles-only, naturally) after seizing the banks.
In some cases, they will literally, outright, tell you “We are now taking your things have a nice day”.
There is literally not figuratively a genocide report detailing all of this; here is a non-paywalled source (Axios) discussing it.
It is thorough, well-evidenced, and damning.
If you want Russia not to take things - if you want Ukrainians not to get massacred, raped, have their houses destroyed and their property expropriated by a billion-dollar-scale kleptostate... this is how. The quibbling over whether Ukraine's army will get missiles capable of reaching the border (this means, in practice, 300-km range ATACMS) or not is a detail.
It's something called A2/AD, or "anti-air/area-denial"; it's a capability that Russia embeds deeply in its strategic thinking, actually. The longer-range the spatial exclusion zone that Ukraine can create by threatening Russian units with precision artillery, the more pressure they can put on Russian ground lines of communication, and supply trains, and rear-echelon command-and-control and logistical centers. That, in turn, means they can better prevent Russia from taking things and committing atrocities against civilians - against women and children.
When people say that it's a rockets and artillery war, what they really mean is, it's an A2/AD war right now, except the stakes aren't just artillery units and military forces on a map; it's the life or death of civilians.
If you want to stop the war crimes and rape, this is it. Your answer is A2/AD capabilities.
It's not pretty or nice; it's actually quite ugly, downright horrific, what these weapons do. Our government tends to shroud them in bureaucratic language and "selective patriotism" that highlights the nice aspects of what we do while hiding the ugly parts.
This type of self-deception practice is not available to an activist. I'm not going to tell you weapons are beautiful and good in one breath, and that their sheer availability is killing American children in the other breath (the other news of the day). We should not make any kind of mistake about what it is we're advocating for here.
These weapons disintegrate flesh, or pierce people, sometimes bisecting them, with slivers of molten metal, or else sow the ground with area-denial mines; they cave in buildings and tear people apart. I'd prefer, quite frankly, that there was some kind of indirect intervention we could apply, but the scholarly study of genocidal practices and specifically sexual violence in war say that there really aren't any. Short of like, rape prevention seminars in the Russian army (I'm sure that'll work), this is what we have.
This is why, ideally, you handle fascism with the democratic process, even if you need to go unreasonably hard at the tools available to you as a citizen in order to keep the fascists in check.
It's because once it gets to the point that it's controlling a nation state, like "rashists" (Russian fascists) are, tools like this are the last recourse you have, and they are not a good recourse; and that's where we are now, as a human race, with regard to the Ukraine war.
The time for thinking about nice ways to avoid a genocide aimed at extinguishing Ukraine as a nation-state and as a people was February. We are at the stopping-genocide part now. It's all ugly now. And when it gets to that point... empirically, nothing solves fascism like fire and American steel.
I say give 'em 300km-range ATACMS and check how their supplies of EXCALIBURs are doing for good measure. If Russia doesn’t like that, drop a sanction or two and then see what kind of noise they make; that seems like a fine trade-off to me, maybe we can even get Russia’s port blockade ended in the bargain.
For all of us, as citizens of an interconnected world… the sooner that fascism is defeated (again), the better for everyone involved.