Yeah, Yeah, Autocracy ...

 ... my ass. For cretins from the butt-hurt Atlantic. 

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

Foer, go to your office, take your degree from Columbia University off the wall and place it in the nearest public restroom as a last resort toilet paper for a person with a sudden onset of diarrhea, because this is the only worth of all of the American "liberal" journalists'--in fact, totalitarian fanatics--degrees which provide zero awareness about pretty much anything. Do not write about something you have no clue about. Find a decent McDonald's near you--they may take you there as a janitor and even that could be too much for your "expertise" level.   

An Interesting Quip...

... from Douglas Macgregor.  Same ol' issue of SLOCs and sustainability of any US force in Europe. 

RFK JR is spot on regarding Washington’s poorly disguised attempt to drag us into war with Russia, but the situation in Ukraine is very different and we have no ground troops to send. The European peoples don’t want a war and neither do Americans. In 1965 the mood in America was very supportive of intervention in SE Asia to fight communism. I know. I was there. It would take four years for American support to collapse.  In addition, for reasons of geography, Ukraine cannot become another Vietnam. In 1965 no one could or would interdict us on the way to Vietnam. Today, Russian subs would immediately shut down the Atlantic and all of our staging areas in Eastern Europe would utterly demolished in a hail of missiles. Worse, US-NATO air and missile defenses are only capable of defending 5% of NATO’s European territory. In the space of 5-7 daisy our missile supply would be exhausted. I could go on, but you get the point. It’s a dead end. Any attempt to mimic the approach to Vietnam will end abruptly and badly for the US and Europe. That was the point that Orban tried to make.

Well. Technological and operational reality is a bitch, you cannot escape it, no matter how you try and any shipping through Atlantic Ocean will be ground to a halt in a matter of days. Naval warfare changed dramatically and you can not defend SLOCs from technology which is several generations ahead of whatever Houthis have, plus add here massive quantities of it. We all know what Houthis did and how they paralyzed marine traffic in the Red Sea. Combined NATO navies couldn't a thing about it other than barely defending themselves. Now imagine when a couple of Yasens (pr. 885) and several Akulas (pr. 971M) go out to hunt--good luck trying finding them without risking own aircraft carries. Just classic escort by something like Arleigh Burke class DDGs is a death trap, because no US asset has the ability to deal with salvos of newest anti-shipping missiles. So, no good options. Those escorts will be sunk and "convoy" or dispersed group of strategic lift vessels will be found out and sunk too. It is 2024, Ladies and Gentleman, not 1943.

But in the end, let's imagine that the US somehow manages to put some force into Europe--it will not be sustainable in the serious war no matter what. Have you seen the US "force protection" capabilities? Patriot PAC3, NASAMS et al--seriously? That's you answer. I'll remind you--estimates for US casualties in such a war will average for the US Army on 3,600 KIAs and WIAs daily. US Army is incapable to fight such a war even if to imagine that SLOCs somehow will be relatively safe. Neither is American society.

A Little Bit Of News...

 ... which seems insignificant but which has everything to do with Douglas Macgregor opening statement in his conversation with Daniel Davies. 

Ah, yes, this Atlantic Ocean thingy and prepositioning of forces. Here is this teeny-weeny news. 

Zvezda shipyard floats overhauled Ikrutsk nuclear submarine. The upgraded Irkutsk will carry over 30 hypersonic Zircon missiles and over 30 Phisik-2 torpedoes. MOSCOW, February 7. /TASS/. The Zvezda Shipyard in the Far East has floated the Irkutsk nuclear submarine of project 949AM of the Pacific fleet, which it overhauled and upgraded, a defense industry source told TASS. "The modernization continues at the berth," he said adding the submarine was floated in 2023.

SSGN K-132 Irkutsk is a Pacific Fleet asset, but being nuclear sub she is limited only by the endurance of her crew and food supplies. Usually multi-purpose subs in Russia spend around 90 days at combat patrols--more than enough to deploy anywhere in the world. But that is not it--Irkutsk is a pilot in the program of modernizing this giants into 3M22 Zircon, 3M14M Kalibr and P-800 Onyx carriers. The next in line, is another Pacific Fleet boat K-442 Chelyabinsk, which will be turned into the Zircon carrier. And then there is recently repaired and updated active duty K-266 Orel and K-410 Smolensk of the Northern Fleet and other active hulls. 

Russian Navy is mum on which of them will be turned into Poseidon carriers and which will be modernized to pr. 949AM, but when combined with the firepower of Yasen-class SSGNs, five of them for Northern Fleet (three are active or getting ready), one can correctly assume, that prepositioning of the US forces in Europe for fighting Russia is a very hazardous business already now, not to mention the fact that the US Army simply has no TOE to fight Russia. It is TOE for 1990s "victories" over armies such as Iraqi one, which is not a very high bar, to put it mildly. And even current US advantage in primarily space-based ISR in real war will be reset within a very short period of time. Boy, what I wouldn't give to get to the hull of the newly modernized Irkutsk and look inside.

Some Fast Thoughts On 2nd Fleet.

In the news since last week is the revival of the US Navy's 2nd Fleet, as reported by Fox. 

NORFOLK, Va. –  The U.S. Navy formally re-established its 2nd Fleet on Friday, intensifying its focus on the North Atlantic Ocean where the Russian military is operating at a pace not seen since the end of the Cold War. The change is mostly organizational. It revives an Admiral-level command dedicated to overseeing American warships as they deploy between the U.S. East Coast and the Barents Sea, off of the coasts of Norway and Russia. The revived fleet also reflects a broader change in U.S. military strategy. The nation's primary concern is shifting from terrorism in the Middle East to America's growing competition with Russia and China.

Putting all this BS mambo-jumbo about "democracy" and values aside here we may all come together in admitting that in one assessment US Navy is absolutely correct--the era of a great power competition is back. Speaking in purely military, not ideological terms, the 2nd Fleet will have to, as was stated:

Having a 2nd Fleet allows the U.S. to work more closely and effectively with its NATO allies, retired U.S. Navy Admiral Gary Roughead said in an interview. And they will be better prepared to respond to potential Russian aggression.

So, what this "potential Russian aggression" is? Very simple, and hear me out, unlike US Army or USAF which are known to be "defending" the United States anywhere but near the United States, the US Navy IS an actual defender of the nation and North America. It doesn't mean that US Navy doesn't participate in good ol' American business of bombing weak nations into the stone age, but operationally and strategically US Navy is, indeed, the force which is tasked with defense of US proper, including from this hypothetical Russian aggression. 

The potential "Russian aggression" has a very specific name--Russia's submarine forces, ranging from upgraded project 949A (Oscar II-class SSGN) capable of carrying up to 72 Kalibr-family missiles, to the Project 885 (Yasen-class SSGN) capable of another 32 missile mix, including Oniks, which is also capable of TLAM function but with a shorter range than 3M14. 2nd Fleet will have a gigantic area of responsibility if it wants to counter Russian subs which, inevitably, will go into the areas suitable for launch at targets inside the US and, knowing those ranges, one can easily imagine where a line going parallel in roughly 2400 kilometers from the US East Coast will be. It is a very large area and it will require a rather impressive operational sweep to keep it under some control against very silent Russian subs. 

While there is a lot of talk about Sea Control, the funny thing here is that in this particular case 2nd Fleet will be more in a Sea Denial, rather than Sea Control, mode. One of the reasons for that being the fact that famous GIUK Gap, a proverbial choke point of the Cold War 1.0 and of late Tom Clancy's wet dreams, loses all of its appeal for a number of key reasons most important of them being:

1. Russia is not fighting this "Fourth Battle of Atlantic" as some top brass in US Navy declared. It is a load of propagandist contrived crap. As the crow flies, the distance from Murmansk to the East Coast of Iceland is about 1,200 miles. 1,200 x 1.6=1920 kilometers. Do you get my drift? Now ask yourself a question why suddenly Norway came into focus. 

2. This means NO serious surface NATO component (in case of, God forbids, things going "hot") will survive the "breaking through" salvo of Kinzhals, X-32s and, well--you get the picture...

3. That means a much freer passage of Russian subs into the Atlantic Ocean than it was the case during the Cold War 1.0 when massive NATO ASW and other surface and submarine forces were operating in this Gap. 

4. Russia is not really fighting this war because Gorshkov Soviet Navy's Flank Strategy (Med in the South and Baltic and Atlantic  in the North) is not necessary anymore--Russia is not intent on "invading" Europe nor support her "socialist" (nowadays all NATO members) flanks by means of interdicting Atlantic SLOCs, considered crucial for Western Europe to resist those nasty Russkies about to invade (from 1945 through 1989) Western Europe. 

Russian subs are needed in Atlantic to keep a revolver to the temple in case of not hypothetical but a very real aggression from the US. Obviously all kinds of combinations are possible here, including (who knows--I just speculate, don't take it too seriously) a possibility of Avangard being deployed on some of Russian Navy's strategic missile subs, together with a growing fleet of strategic bombers capable of carrying a very long range missiles. So, from this point of view US Navy does face an actual strategic task to hunt down those Russkies to prevent, at least from the ocean, a very probable retaliatory salvo if someone in Washington will go completely mad. Russia is not going to attack unless attacked first. That means a lot of ASW and a lot of other operational and, most importantly, psychological adjustments for US Navy, which in this case finds itself in a very unusual role--facing real no-go exclusion zones and a range of missile threats inconceivable even 10 years ago. Will 2nd Fleet be up to the task? I guess we'll see. I hope good movies will come out of it, if we all survive...