A small flock of drones descends on Moscow; Russian rebels raid over the border into their estranged motherland, mysterious fires break out in Russian cities, oil-storage depots experience explosions, and Russian trains suffer an unusual number of derailments. How does the White House react? “As a general matter, we do not support attacks inside of Russia.”

This is an administration that has done some things very well, including blowing the whistle on Russian invasion plans and building a coalition to support Ukraine. It has done other things moderately well: giving the Ukrainians high-end weapons, though only after repeated agonizing, delaying, and prevaricating. However, it often undermines its cause with speech that is strategically witless. Sometimes, this takes the form of leaks from officials to friendly journalists, who then report the officials’ fears of Russian escalation, hopes for negotiations, and doubts about Ukrainian abilities. More commonly, it appears in an unwillingness to say the obvious, which is that we want Ukraine to defeat Russian armies thoroughly and drive them from all of its territory.

And then there is this inane comment. It is politically dumb because it signals divisions between us and the Ukrainians, it casts a chill on European politicians (some more timid than ours), and it encourages Russian propagandists to go into fits of menacing fury that never amount to anything beyond the crimes their soldiers normally commit, but can still cause the blood to drain from a few pallid faces.

[Kori Schake: Biden is more fearful than the Ukrainians are]

The statement is, from a military historian’s point of view, ignorant of war to the point of illiteracy. What country has ever won a war by confining itself to homeland defense even when it was capable of much more? Ukraine was attacked in an extraordinarily brutal and unprovoked way; why should it not hit back? After December 7, 1941, did the United States limit itself to looking for the aircraft carriers that conducted the Pearl Harbor operation?

The comment is also operationally obtuse. Ukrainian raids into Russia demoralize its public (we know that from monitoring Russian Telegram channels) and divert Russian resources and attention away from the front lines. The more Russian troops guard the border, the fewer dig in outside Melitopol. The more resources diverted into missile and air defense, the less there are to support the occupying army. The more humiliating gaps there appear in the defenses of Moscow, the greater the likelihood of a regime that will claw at itself, as the likes of Yevgeny Prigozhin use this as a crowbar with which to torment their internal rivals.

Above all, the White House statement, and the undeniable angst that accompanies it, reflects two regrettable but common American flaws: naivete and arrogance. During a century and a half, the United States has witnessed only two substantial attacks on its territory, in 1941 and again in 2001. Both were one-off affairs. We have difficulty imagining what it would be like to have missiles rain down on our cities, smashing hospitals and schools, or to endure the wanton slaughter and rape of an invading army. Americans would not show anything like the restraint asked of Ukraine were something even remotely similar to befall not only Washington, but New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Miami. And if anyone asked them to do so, the responses would be short, sharp, and unprintable.

There is conceit here as well—the conceit of an exceptionally powerful country, to be sure, but one whose leaders have convinced themselves that they are expert on the processes of war. Biden-administration officials still insist that our flight from Afghanistan was a masterly move, executed in a masterly fashion. Worse yet, they believe it. They believe that they have titrated the flow of weapons to Ukraine in just the right quantities and amounts. They believe that they can control war, whose ends are driven by politics but whose means often take statesmen down unpredicted and unmarked paths.

Off the record, senior officials sometimes betray condescension toward minor powers—those brave but primitive Ukrainians, those feisty but irresponsible Poles, those endangered but deeply neurotic Balts—with whom they have imperfect empathy and to whom they give less respect than is their due. Some of that is in this statement, as it is in the patronizing assessments of Ukrainian warcraft compared with our own.

These officials would do better to recall that the United States lost the Vietnam and Afghan Wars, and, at best, pulled off far-too-costly draws in Iraq and Korea. They would do better, as well, to take a long pause to reflect on just how profoundly mistaken they were not only about the Ukrainian will to fight, but about Ukraine’s capacity to absorb modern weapons and defeat Russian forces. And they also might find it helpful to remember the failures of American statecraft in Syria and in Ukraine in 2014 that laid the groundwork for this war.

[Read: How Syria came to this]

Individually, those who issue statements such as the White House’s and share this approach to policy are (mostly) nice, decent people. They have, by and large, elegant educations at elite institutions; they are comfortable at meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations and have résumés of unusual academic or legal distinction. But there are things more easily learned in bar fights or repeated bouts with boxing gloves or pugil sticks (let alone infantry combat) than in lecture halls and seminar rooms. War is an elemental activity; it needs often to be waged in an elemental way, and it has to be understood with the viscera and not just the head.

The maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect, as the great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz observed. There is every reason to think that the Ukrainians are not merely lashing out (although there is probably some of that) but that these attacks on Russia are part of a larger preparation for the offensives on which their country’s future depends. They are distracting, demoralizing, and unbalancing their enemy. That is wise, because at the end of the day their resources, even with our help, are limited.

Still, a press spokesperson has to reply to a journalist’s question. So, too, for that matter, does a senior official caught at a fancy Washington dinner. There is a ready response.

In February 1946, shortly before giving his famous Iron Curtain speech, Winston Churchill was asked a question he did not wish to answer as he left Washington for Miami. “No comment,” he replied. “I think ‘No comment’ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.” An honorable if not a modest man, he thanked former Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles for teaching him its use and encouraging its application.

Reticence is one of the minor strategic virtues. The administration has, it bears repeating, done many of the right things. For whatever reason, Churchillian rhetoric is beyond it. Churchillian warcraft also seems a quality beyond its understanding or aspirations. But at the very least, it would do well to emulate Churchillian discretion as the next round of Ukrainian blows fall on their pitiless and brutal enemies.

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