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. 

150th Motor Rifle Division And Much Much More Military Power Related-IIII

In 1995 the world saw the first edition of When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler by David Glantz and Jonathan House, both senior officers of US Army. With a single book these military historians rendered useless and inconsequential pretty much the whole army of Western historians such as Anthony Beavor who was left to write on Red Army "raping" 2 million, or 20 or 1.5 billion German women in 1945. A phenomenon of Glantz' and House's book was not in employing at that time the latest data from Soviet Archives and data provided in famous General Krivosheev's treatise Grif Sekretnosti Snyat (The Seal Of Secrecy Is Removed), later updated and reissued as Russia And USSR In The XX Century Wars, Armed Forces Losses. In the end, even before the book, despite Soviet, somewhat whitewashed, version of the events of the Great Patriotic War it was clear to many professionals that classic narrative of the First Period of that war, when Red Army was sustaining catastrophic losses can not be explained just by Stalin's purges of the Red Army or, what Shlykov called hiding "from complex and incomprehensible for them variety of qualitative characteristics of the military might of states with different social structures behind the thick wall of numerical superiority over the enemy". (c)  
           

 
While one may or may not agree with Glantz' and House's conclusions (European "elites" of the time are directly culpable in precipitating WW II), there is no denial of the fact that they were able to struck a necessary balance between purely political and military narratives. They, in the end, correctly attributed initial failures of the Red Army to a much more comprehensive set of factors than some inability or purges. It is there, where Glantz and House make an extremely important statement, which is relevant to our discussion:       

Omitting here a newly revealed facts of, indeed, a possibility of military coup in the midst of Red Army's top brass, which precipitated  purges, taking this (framed in red) military constant to heart is what we will do here. Size does matter but only insofar as this size is effective and properly deployed--pure quantitative comparison does not work and it shouldn't. Argumentation based on comparison of sheer numbers of personnel and equipment of the Red Army and Wehrmacht prior to the start of hostilities in June 1941 without comprehensive analysis of their respective effectiveness is a waste of time. Obviously, it is possible to measure dyadic (that is mano o mano) technological advantage of one force over the other:             

From Stephen Biddle's Book

But, as you can see, mere addition of weighted averages of tanks and aircraft doesn't tell us much. In the end, Saddam's army had many tanks and not all of them were old, by far more important was the fact that all of them were monkey models. Overwhelming technological advantage of the US and coalition in both Gulf Wars was never in question.

I elaborated slightly on an extremely simplified form of Osipov-Lanchester model, where I removed numerical coefficients of combat effectiveness. Once those combat effectiveness numbers are introduced the picture changes dramatically. We must ask ourselves several important questions when trying, using an example of, say First Gulf War, to get a grasp of this combat effectiveness. Will start with a simple question:

Was US average soldier better than Saddam's average soldier in that war? The answer is evident--yes. US soldier was more educated, had more tactical acumen, was better trained than Saddam's soldier. By how much? That is yet to be discussed, but US average soldier's advantage over Saddam's soldier was also in the very military system which the US soldier was part of, that is the way US forces were not only armed but how they were deployed. It is possible to imagine this same war without overwhelming US (and allies) air superiority and, while paying much steeper price in KIAs and time, US Army would still have overcome Saddam's Army purely on a vast superiority, apart from quality of soldiers, of its Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance capabilities, known to all as C4ISR. It is a fusion of human and technological factors which defines the "betterness" or otherwise of a soldier. Now, going back to Great Patriotic War. The question of comparison of the average Red Army and Wehrmacht soldiers is not even a fair one. 

On the morning of 22 June, 1941 Wehrmacht was still fresh from its triumphant demolition of the best West European armies in a matter of weeks. The morale was extremely high, combat cohesion of units was high, many Wehrmacht soldiers and generals were battle tested and confident in their command. On 22 June of 1941, Wehrmacht was the best Army in the world history since Napoleon's Grandee Armee'. Wehrmacht in general, and its average soldier in particular, simply had an overwhelming advantage in this combat effectiveness department. Simple measure of a dyadic technological advantage (see illustration above) completely breaks down here when only quantities (slightly "enhanced" with the maturity of technology) are considered. Numbers still matter a great deal, but in the end, these are Alpha and Betta (reduced to a simple number very complex metrics) which are as important! But many in the "reformer's" club decided to merely list the numbers of tanks, aircraft and artillery pieces, where USSR had a noticeable advantage, as Shlykov did not on one occasion, to come to  conclusions, which almost cost Russian Armed Forces in 2000s their ability to fight a serious war. Remember, memorize this:

                                               dA/dt = -βB

                                   dB/dt = -αA

  

Alexey Isaev in one of his books on Great Patriotic War makes an excellent reference to Jack London's famous short story The Mexican. 

"It was not a fight. It was a slaughter, a massacre. Any audience, save a prize fighting one, would have exhausted its emotions in that first minute. Danny was certainly showing what he could do--a splendid exhibition. Such was the certainty of the audience, as well as its excitement and favoritism, that it failed to take notice that the Mexican still stayed on his feet. It forgot Rivera. It rarely saw him, so closely was he enveloped in Danny's man-eating attack. A minute of this went by, and two minutes. Then, in a separation, it caught a clear glimpse of the Mexican. His lip was cut, his nose was bleeding. As he turned and staggered into a clinch, the welts of oozing blood, from his contacts with the ropes, showed in red bars. across his back. But what the audience did not notice was that his chest was not heaving and that his eyes were coldly burning as ever. Too many aspiring champions, in the cruel welter of the training camps, had practiced this man-eating attack on him. He had learned to live through for a compensation of from half a dollar a go up to fifteen dollars a week--a hard school, and he was schooled hard.

Then happened the amazing thing. The whirling, blurring mix-up ceased suddenly. Rivera stood alone. Danny, the redoubtable Danny, lay on his back. His body quivered as consciousness strove to return to it. He had not staggered and sunk down, nor had he gone over in a long slumping fall. The right hook of Rivera had dropped him in midair with the abruptness of death. The referee shoved Rivera back with one hand, and stood over the fallen gladiator counting the seconds. It is the custom of prize-fighting audiences to cheer a clean knock-down blow. But this audience did not cheer. The thing had been too unexpected. It watched the toll of the seconds in tense silence, and through this silence the voice of Roberts rose exultantly: 

"I told you he was a two-handed fighter!"

 To be continued.....