No, the ATACMS strike is not the start of World War III. Ukraine’s forces hit six military targets inside Russia, behind the Russian lines where Ukraine is fighting over the border near Kursk.
The Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) has been used by Ukraine before, but this strike came after the Biden White House granted new permissions to hit on Russian soil.
President Biden has done President-elect Trump a favor with this U-turn decision on ATACMs. Striking Russian ammunition and troop concentrations feeding the battle against Ukraine applies pressure on Russia and makes a lot of sense. As secretary of state nominee Sen. Marco Rubio has said, Ukraine needs leverage. ATACMS helps.
"Those missiles clear a grid square, a square kilometer," then-Maj. Gen. David Petraeus said of ATACMS in 2003, when he was commanding the 101st Airborne Division on the march up to Baghdad. The U.S. Army V Corps ended up firing 414 ATACMs during Operation Iraqi Freedom, often packaged with Apache helicopters.
Petraeus said the ATACMS were "incredibly lethal and absolutely devastating" against a range of Iraqi infantry and air defense targets.
Russia has been piling up supplies and launching drone and missile strikes from sanctuaries just over its border. North Korean troops are there, too. Meanwhile, all of Ukraine is subject to random attack, and Russia’s drones have dropped into Latvia and Romania several times this year.
In a conflict where neither side has air superiority, ATACMS is a pointed message about the devastation Ukraine can unleash.
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As for the ATACMS strike upping the nuclear threat, I’m not buying it. I’ve lost count of the number of times Vladimir Putin has rattled his nuclear saber. Russia’s nuclear doctrine was updated weeks ago. Putin is milking it for all its worth, as he has few other options.
Rest assured Gen. C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others are keeping close tabs on whether Russia is actually moving around any nuclear forces. I bet they aren’t.
As Putin well knows, any use of a Russian tactical nuclear weapon will blow radiation back into Russia itself, due to prevailing weather patterns. Putin is a devil but probably not ready to nuke his own citizens. Don’t forget that Xi Jinping of China signaled in late 2022 that he disapproved of Russia’s nuclear threats.
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Nor was Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s response particularly worrying. "If the long-range missiles are used from the territory of Ukraine against the Russian territory, it will mean that they are controlled by American military experts and we will view that as a qualitatively new phase of the Western war against Russia and respond accordingly," moaned Lavrov at the G-20 in Brazil. (Putin had to stay home so as not to get arrested on war crimes charges.)
ATACMs is not new to the Ukraine war. Ukraine used ATACMs to strike a Russian air base in occupied Crimea – which is Ukraine’s territory – in April. To my mind, Russia’s claim that they shot down an ATACMS inside Russia is a signal, too. The ATACMS have been used, Russia has responded in kind by attempting to shoot them down, business as usual.
So, ATACMS is very useful pressure indeed. This short-range ballistic missile designed to provide tactical support to ground forces carries either a penetrating warhead, or a blast fragmentation warhead. ATACMS is satellite-guided, and highly precise. It’s fired from HIMARS or other launchers already in use by Ukraine. With a top range of 300 km, ATACMs won’t threaten Moscow.
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The ATACMS warhead also minimizes collateral damage. Gen. Brown, for one, has long experience from the Middle East in how to carry out highly precise, contained strikes, avoiding civilian areas and escalation. ATACMS is no different.
Globally, China will once again be taking notes on the missile’s effectiveness, since ATACMs is part of the arsenal for Army firepower in the Pacific. South Korea also operates the missile, as does Poland and several NATO partners.
Note the NATO allies are not complaining about ATACMS. Britain’s long-range Storm Shadow and France’s SCALP missiles may be next in line. With the war at 1,000 days, they are well aware of the need to keep up Ukraine’s defenses. For countries like Poland, huge chunks of their tanks and planes are already in Ukraine’s hands.
Given Ukraine’s situation, the tactical imperative is maintaining a strong defense as Biden hands off to Trump. Putting battlefield pressure on Russia is essential for any negotiation.
"We hope that when that time comes, there is more leverage on the Ukrainian side than on the Russian side," Rubio said in September. "That really is the goal here in my mind."
