Fifteen Years Ago...

... on this date: 080808.  

The date Russia has made first statement about her arriving back from the near death. I recall all those "military experts", especially a bunch of shysters from Russia, promising that Russians will be defeated because US "trained" Georgian Army. US learned absolutely nothing since then. We all know thee result of that 5-day war. US "trained" Army disintegrated when faced with real combined arms. 

This is the type of human trash the US views as its "allies". 

But today something begins to trickle down even into the sewer of American media and clueless politicos:

Read my lips, you also may quote me on that: there is NO understanding of modern war in the US across the board, including most of American military. There is also NO serious strategist in the US who has a clear view of the formation of balance of power and how serious militaries write their doctrines. That is why I see sincere attempts by Daniel Larison to challenge one of the leading American "strategists" as misplaced and having all signs of the Sisyphus Labor.

Walter Russell Mead sells a pack of lies:

President Barack Obama was the Great Denialist in geopolitics, temporizing and tap dancing, appeasing and apologizing as an axis of anti-American revisionist powers consisting of China, Russia, Iran and their satellites stepped up their resistance and began to coordinate policies.

If anyone is being a revisionist here, it’s Mead with his wildly distorted description of Obama’s foreign policy record. Obama got many things wrong as president from Libya to Yemen, but the idea that he spent his eight years “appeasing and apologizing” while an “axis” of revisionists emerged is nothing but lazy propaganda from a bad analyst. The old lie of Obama’s imaginary “apology tour” is still with us almost fifteen years later, and it is even more ridiculous now than it was then. 

The US has only a handful of people, who also are the exception to the rule of a wholesale sheer military illiteracy, who are capable of speaking on and understanding how actual strategy is developed and implemented. Walter Russel Mead is not one of them. 99% of America's "strategists" are people with NO systemic military education, knowledge of history and the only skill those people have as the result of their "degrees" in the so called "strategic studies" from Ivy League humanities degree mills is juxtaposing of carefully selected facts. Walter Russel Mead has degree in English Literature from Yale and never served a day in any military or intel capacity. So, the fact that he teaches Clausewitz and Sun Tzu's one-liners in the times of neural networks, space-based ISR and hyper-sonic weapons whose physics and math he cannot possibly understand, tells you everything you need to know about America's "Strategy" academe. It also explains why those are incapable of talking in anything but pseudo-strategic platitudes--a euphemism for BS. 

In other words, Mead has zero qualifications for speaking and writing on modern geopolitics and strategy, because to do so one has to have the tool kit of looking at strategy in conjunction with operational level--two levels at which wars are won or lost and which require the depth. And that's the point I make for years--one cannot continue to merely challenge the BS fountaining from the deep recesses of US "academia" and think-tankdom, one has to challenge qualifications, that is to say start operating in the ad hominem mode, when dealing with a cabal of uncultured, unread, illiterate Ph.D shysters who toil for the benefit of America's homicidal foreign policy and military adventurism. Yes, they lie, but many of them sincerely believe those lies. That is why the ONLY American real strategist of true international repute, Alfred Thayer Mahan, was a graduate of the US Naval Academy, has been a cadre naval officer with combat experience all his life, and retired in the rank of Admiral. 

Military degrees and experiences in and of themselves do not guarantee from stupidity and fraud, enough to look at US generals at the so called ISW, or read US "doctrinal" documents, but it is time to finally start calling all those white board "strategists", who wouldn't know how operations are planned or insulate themselves from inconvenient facts of the America's grossly exaggerated military history, for what they are--frauds and shysters who know only pseudo-military verbiage and have no clue about the real history of the last two centuries. And it was on this date fifteen years ago when they have been taught the first lesson in real continental combined arms warfare. 

Or, as quoting Lieutenant-General Klokotov, at the time of the Gulf War the chief of the Strategy Department of Academy of the General Staff (guess from three times if "strategist" Mead and ilk will be even able to pass entrance exams there): 

“I would like to emphasize here that the Persian Gulf war was taken as the standard in studying the strategic nature of possible war. It would appear that this position, adopted in the draft ‘Fundamentals of Russian Military Doctrine,’ is dangerous. The fact is that this war [was] ‘strange’ in all respects [and] cannot serve as a standard.”

On August 8th, 2008 Russian Armed Forces started their healing and return to their proper shape allowing them to fight and defeat  combined NATO forces. The rest is history, but they don't teach it in the US anymore.