The White House confirmed on Wednesday that it will provide the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System to Ukraine.
The HIMARS is a multiple launch rocket system that allows for saturation rocket artillery fire at enemy targets. Based on reports that suggest the HIMARS will be range-limited to 50 miles, it is likely that the Ukrainians will be provided only with M30 rockets, albeit likely guided rockets, to load into the HIMARS. To placate Russian fears that Ukraine might use the HIMARS to hit Russian territory or command targets at long range, the United States will not provide more advanced surface-to-surface missiles that can be loaded into the HIMARS.
While the Biden administration is right to deliver this weapons system, as has typified its arms support to Ukraine during this war, this provision is long overdue. These delays reflect the White House’s and State Department’s excessive risk aversion in face of Russian aggression. As I noted in early April, the utility of multiple launch rocket systems for Ukraine’s defense was always apparent. At the time, however, national security adviser Jake Sullivan claimed these systems weren’t being provided to Ukraine — not so as to avoid aggravating Russia but because the U.S. “doesn’t have a version that could be effectively integrated into the fight.”
As Wednesday’s announcement proves, that claim was simply untrue. What’s frustrating about this delay and distraction is that it was clear from early April that the HIMARS would have been exceptionally well suited to the defensive campaign Ukraine is now waging in its east. Had the Biden administration acted two months ago, Ukraine may have been able to avoid some of the predictable tactical retreats it is now conducting.
Still, the HIMARS’s arrival will now provide two key benefits to Ukraine’s defensive action.
First, the systems will take advantage of inherent Russian military vulnerabilities. By vice of their poor logistics, lines of communication, and degraded equipment, Russian ground forces must operate in close proximity to one another in Ukraine. Using its exceptional intelligence and targeting capabilities, heavily enabled by the U.S. and the United Kingdom, Ukrainian drone and ground spotters will be able to guide massed HIMARS fire onto staging Russian forces. This will force front-line Russian units to maintain constant movement or constant distance to mitigate their vulnerability. That, in turn, will further jeopardize their equipment, morale, and supply challenges. It will slow them down.
Second, the HIMARS will allow Ukrainian forces to suck higher-value Russian assets into more vulnerable dispositions. Russian commanders will need to eliminate HIMARS units quickly if they are able to maintain their own offensive momentum. But because HIMARS is so maneuverable, Russia will have to throw an already-limited stock of ground attack aircraft, drones, special forces, intelligence, and counter-artillery units against Ukrainian HIMARS units. If, as it almost certainly will, Ukraine protects the HIMARS within bubbles of anti-air, anti-infantry, and other capabilities, it will be able to suck higher capability Russian forces into black holes of destruction.
Similar supply action is now likely from other nations. Reflecting the British government’s greater risk tolerance — it has endorsed Ukraine’s targeting of Russian forces on Russian soil — I understand that the U.K. will soon provide longer-range enabled M270 multiple launch rocket systems to Ukraine. At the strategic level, the supply of these systems reflects the U.K.’s U.S.’s correct understanding that the war in Ukraine will not end until Russia is forced into a credible suspension of operations. Albeit belated, what President Joe Biden is now doing thus assists in the pursuit of the ultimate moral objective: a lasting peace more favorable to Ukraine than to Russia.
