The first casualty in war is the truth, and now the New York Times has revealed how true that was.

While the U.S. public under the Biden administration was told, via Congress, that the U.S. was supplying arms to Ukraine, actually, the U.S. was pretty much running the whole show.

Its long and interesting report begins this way:

One of the men, Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, remembers being led up a flight of stairs to a walkway overlooking the cavernous main hall of the garrison’s Tony Bass Auditorium. Before the war, it had been a gym, used for all-hands meetings, Army band performances and Cub Scout pinewood derbies. Now General Zabrodskyi peered down on officers from coalition nations, in a warren of makeshift cubicles, organizing the first Western shipments to Ukraine of M777 artillery batteries and 155-millimeter shells.

Then he was ushered into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, who proposed a partnership.

Its evolution and inner workings visible to only a small circle of American and allied officials, that partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order.

The U.S., during the time of Gen. Mark Milley, was pretty much calling the shots on all aspects of the war -- targets, intelligence, trainings, logistics and all kinds of sneaky pete inside Russia itself, ostensibly to keep the information out of Putin's hands, the idea being to let him think Ukraine was putting up a ferocious fight on its own, without more than U.S. arms sales buttressing it.

But that isn't what was happening. The Times summed it with:

But for nearly three years before Mr. Trump’s return to power, the United States and Ukraine were joined in an extraordinary partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology whose evolution and inner workings have been known only to a small circle of American and allied officials.

With remarkable transparency, the Pentagon has offered a public accounting of the $66.5 billion in weaponry it has supplied to Ukraine. But a New York Times investigation reveals that America’s involvement in the war was far deeper than previously understood. The secret partnership both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.

They supplied coordinates to the Ukrainians on Russian targets from a base in Wiesbaden. They supplied mobile artillery units called HIMARS for satellite-guided rockets on Russian targets with American troops calling every shot. They put boots on the ground, and more boots on the ground, calling them "subject matter experts." They dispatched the U.S. Navy to share targeting information on Russian warships beyond Ukrainian waters -- when Ukraine sank Russia's flagship battleship without a navy, through drones, that was what was going on. They targeted Crimea and through sustained firepower chased the Russians out.

Then mission creep came calling, and soon enough, the U.S. was handing out intelligence on Russian locations for military strikes.

There were arguments, and in 2023, they were bad enough that the Ukrainian army split into two directions and won nothing. The Ukrainians complained that the U.S. role bogged it down, which sounds about right with Milley, who is a bureaucrat who may have viewed the Vietnam war as a model, not a warning.

There's an intriguing detail about one Ukrainian general using then 29-year-old Confederate Gen. J.E.B Stuart's daring 1862 cavalry end run around Union Gen. George McClellan's Army of the Potomac as a successful model. (So much for political correctness, better not let that get out, might mean bringing back more Confederate statues and place names.)  

The Times compares it to the U.S. sending military advisors into Vietnam and consequently getting drawn more and more into that war, enmired. One recent operation they didn't bring up, but leaped out to me was the U.S. involvement in the Colombia rescue mission of three American and many more Colombian hostages held by FARC Marxist narcoterrorists in 2007.

The problem with this whole mission-creep approach in Ukraine is less that it happened (and apparently the U.S. ground general, named Lt. Gen. Christopher Donohue was pretty good) than that it amounted to an undeclared war that the public wasn't aware of. That's not good in a democracy.

Putin may or may not have been fooled, and I am going to guess that at a certain point he wasn't, but for sure, the U.S. public had no idea.

It was being drawn closer and closer into a world war without its consent, and became itself a military target, and had no idea it was happening.

The other problematic part is that all this help and assistance prolonged the war and increased the casualty count on both sides without succeeding, the calls for more and more bottomless-pits of money simply increasing.

Had it not happened this way, there might have been negotiations starting sooner. A simple agreement to not join NATO and perhaps a referendum on the eastern part of Ukraine as to which country they'd like to be part of might have saved a lot of lives and destruction.

That's Milley for you, though -- he got us into deep involvement in a war Joe Biden was unwilling to ask the public to go along with because he suspected the answer would be 'no,' but he wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. One day he's sneaking around with the Chinese, telling them to trust him on keeping Trump engaging in any military action, the next day, he's making the U.S. a bigger target.

Now President Trump is there to clean up the mess and try to bring peace to Ukraine and bring Putin back into the family of normal nations if possible. I do find it interesting that this story got out -- the Times said, from doing considerable interviews with different sources. If Putin was as fooled as the American public, he won't be fooled now.

So chalk it up as another failure from the worst general in American history, Mark Milley, again.

Image: U.S. Secretary of Defense, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed