Why Don't We Set Up a No-Fly Zone Already?!

I would not trust most of you to lead us through a nuclear crisis, and here is why.

Zelenskyy keeps begging the USA and NATO to set and enforce one, so why is nobody doing it?

Why NATO Said its a Non-Starter

A no-fly zone is not a magic bubble. Enforcing it means shooting Russian planes out of the sky. It is a recipe for military escalation and a guarantee the death toll will rise much higher, much faster. It is not a surprise that world leaders are wary of making that choice. The domestic appetite for another foreign war in the U.S. is especially low, and that certainly informs Biden’s proclivities here.

This is all especially salient when Putin has all but threatened nuclear war. This could potentially result in a literal doomsday scenario.

A No-Fly Zone Wouldn’t Do What You Think

Setting up a no-fly zone is a fence-sitting position precisely because it would allow Russia the option to decide when and how to attack NATO, which is a tactical blunder. Either commit to war and bring the fight to Putin on your own terms, or commit to avoiding war as best you can, but a no-fly zone is itself not a solution.

Why not? Because it is too much escalation for too little results. Most of the damage to Ukraine and her people aren’t coming from planes, nor does Russia in fact have air superiority in this conflict. The vast majority of damage being dealt is coming from ballistic missiles and other artillery launched from the ground. A no-fly zone simply wouldn’t affect that kind of ordinance.

If you wanted to really show Putin what’s what, you’d just send ground attack planes to destroy their material on the ground - which would be a declaration of war and give Putin the opening he needs to launch some nukes our way.

Once the war escalates to that level, even if nuclear conflict is avoided, there is no win condition for the West that does not involve regime change in Russia - and that is something the West simply has not committed to.

On top of all that, the Russian nuclear arsenal does not work like the U.S.’s, which demands two-man verification and permissive action links - a type of coded switch set up to counter rogue actors from arming the nukes when they are unauthorized to do so - in order to prevent anyone from going rogue and launching nukes, even the President. But the Russian system is mostly a Soviet-era handover called Dead Hand.

Also called Perimeter, Dead Hand can automatically launch intercontinental ballistic missiles with or without nuclear warheads via pre-entered orders. The system was designed to be automatic and be able to decide on its own whether a retaliatory nuclear strike was warranted or not with minimal human involvement. This means a Russian head of state could turn the system on and do nothing, assured that if everything went to hell, the system would nuke his enemies for him.

So a rogue American president cannot, by design, nuke the world, but a Russian president, by design, could.

That’s what we are dealing with here, and it is a major part of the calculus when NATO says, repeatedly, that a no-fly zone is a non-starter.

So the West is, instead, doing what we can while actively minimizing the risk of a nuclear holocaust.

If you want to know how you would have reacted during the Cuban Missile Crisis, now you know. And considering how some folks are acting on social media, I would not trust most to be a modern-day Kennedy about it.

So What Are We Doing?

That isn’t to say that the West is unsupportive of Ukraine. The Western nations have been sending tons of weapons, supplies, and lethal ordinance to Ukraine. The West has been passing on any scrap of intel and supporting any propaganda in favour of Ukraine.

There have been foreign soldiers from many nations rolling up to show up and fight. Poland and the USA cooperated to make sure Ukraine had more planes, as Ukraine needed MiGs, which Poland gave to them, in exchange for American F-16s.

Not to speak of the millions and billions of economic aid flowing to Ukraine, or the increasing and punishing sanctions on Russia that have cratered the Russian economy in lightning speed and also made it impossible for Putin to resupply his army, as factories are shut down and he literally cannot access state resources to get raw materials.

In addition, per CNN reporting, if Putin decides to yeet some ordinance into a NATO state (either deliberately or by accident), the U.S. is considering deploying the Patriot and the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) systems in nearby NATO states. These systems have been successfully used previously in Middle East conflicts to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. The US estimates that Russia has already fired some 600 missiles since the invasion began, and they are the primary vehicle of the misery of the Ukrainian people.

Special thanks to Lee Feinman, Steven Schwartz, and Donovan Carroll for their insight and conversation about this issue, which helped inform and structure this essay.