Saker Posted Fred Reed's Piece...

... about:  

Pleasurable excitement ripples through the usual boredom of Washington, and the resident curiosities enjoy exquisite frissons, over the possibility of nuclear war over the Ukraine. Some official of the EU, or maybe it was the mediocrity in the White House with the truculence problem, but anyway one of the geniuses ruling the planet’s fate has said that if Russia used nukes, the Russian army would be destroyed, grrr, bowwow, woof. Exactly how it would be destroyed, the sayer didn’t say. Anyway, the threats and counterthreats swirl around the idea that a nuke war between Russia and the West might occur. Maybe, with tactical nukes in the Ukraine, about which nobody gives a rat’s nether region. The world is full of damned fools. But: The general staffs of both Russia and China are, whatever else you may think of them, sane. They know of America’s massive nuclear forces. They are not going to launch an atomic war. Sane behavior cannot be relied on with Washington’s second-rate lawyers, but the generals in the Pentagon are not crazy. They like hobbyist wars and big budgets, but if Biden ordered a nuclear strike, they would be likely to suddenly remember that Congress has to declare war and, seeing that their radar screens were empty of incoming missiles, and say, “Mr. President, we are not authorized to do that.” And recommend a committee. what would such a war be like? Let’s guess.

After that Fred elaborates on how such a war may unfold. It is typical Fred who uses his words as swords and it is a delight. A great piece. However, one small detail which needs to be pointed out. It is all about accuracy and CEP, or Circular Error Probable, and how this accuracy was growing, while CEP was shrinking over decades from Counter-value posture of strategic nuclear forces of USSR and the US--meaning blowing the shit out of well-sized targets easy to hit, such as cities--to Counter-force when accuracy of the delivery systems increased dramatically and the necessity to strike large area targets (to trade effect for low accuracy), which cities naturally are, diminished. Today modern ICBMs can deliver MIRVs with accuracy measured in tens of meters and that is enough to hit a specific military formation's camp, production plant or the area of the ICBM silo. So, suddenly, the collapse of such a country as the US hinges not on wiping out a number of urban areas such as NYC or Chicago--that is easy and counter-value weapons such as Poseidon do exist and are being perfected, but on something much more sinister. 

Today, the misery and collapse on any country could be visited upon by merely shutting down its electric grid, blowing all of its nuclear power stations up, with all what it entails, and taking out key bridges and dams with few other key command and control installations and the country will collapse. Civilians still will die, but not in high tens or hundreds of millions, but something on the scale of 10-20 millions at the start and after that... well, enter what Fred describes. So, it is still debatable what is the best way to die--by being counter-valued upfront or through horrors of famine, urban warfare, lawlessness, cold and illnesses, many of them incurable, which will follow a counter-force scenario. So, it is an interesting question to ponder. Or, as Comrade Sukhov, from the immortal Soviet Eastern White Sun of The Desert, answered the question on own death:  

Q: So, do you want to be finished off right now or do you want to suffer first?

Sukhov Answers: It is preferable, of course, to suffer first. 

So, these are our options and Fred excellently described Sukhov's choice--to suffer first. Meanwhile new generation chooses Pepsi or whatever the fvck the "current thing" is. Who knows what is better.  

Thinking Alike.

I recorded my video this morning in response to Senator Wicker's "proposal" to bomb Russia with nukes. 

Tucker and Tulsi also didn't sit this one out and pretty much arrived to the same conclusions as I did.

 

So, what can I say--there is a mental breakdown in D.C. and while this was going on for a while (and now reached grotesque forms) I, as always, want to point out how illiterate militarily those people are, I mean Senator Wicker and another "veteran", Adam Kizinger.  It is also a testimony to the US' weakness--a fact which too many in Washington still refuse to acknowledge. So, make your own conclusions, and do not forget to support me on Patreon.

Lavrov, Help! Again!

In the kingdom run by imbeciles this is possible, in fact it increasingly becomes not only highly probable but reaches a finite probability of happening of 1, or of 100%. 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers of both parties are pressuring the White House to extend the last remaining restraints on U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons deployments by demanding intelligence assessments on the costs of allowing the New START treaty to lapse. The demands, contained in three bills that may be harmonized this week, reflect doubts about whether the Trump administration has done sufficient analytical work on how China and Russia may respond to the 2010 treaty's expiration in February 2021. New START restricted the United States and Russia to deploying no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads, the lowest level in decades, and limited the land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers that deliver them. It can be renewed for up to five years if both sides agree. Moscow has offered to immediately extend the treaty. Washington still is considering the issue. U.S. President Donald Trump and his aides have argued that New START does not cover all Russian nuclear weapons and said they want to bring China, which they increasingly view as the primary, long-term threat, into a wider arms control framework. Some lawmakers and arms control experts view the proposal as a "poison pill" to kill New START, ending restraints on U.S. strategic nuclear weapons deployments, because China rejects the idea.

Firstly, these cretins do all they can to sabotage any kind of cooperation with Russia, including by means of national treason, accusing already incompetent POTUS of being Putin's personal asset, no less. Then they accuse Russia of some absolutely bizarre Orwellian shit, they insult Russia and Russian people non-stop and now, all of a sudden it dawns on at least some of them that you need to talk to Russia on START issues and you need to do it soon. La-dee-fvcking-da. Secondly, China is not interested and rightly so, she is nowhere near Russian and American levels of strategic weapons and any attempts to include China into START are foolhardy at best. Trump and his infested with neocons and chicken-hawks administration might have been more-or-less flexible and reasonable on this issue if not  the position POTUS was put into thanks to House's own crowd of psychopaths who do sincerely believe that Russia is evil incarnate. Any attempts by POTUS to find sensible strategic weapons accommodations with Russia will inevitably be interpreted as an impeachable offense. 

But thirdly, some "revelations", Putin did offer inclusion of Kinzhal and Poseidon into discussion on extension of START. It is obvious that Russia is not going to refuse these programs, especially when Kinzhal is already in its full combat capability and is operationally deployed. But Russia will be willing to discuss some limitations on these systems in numbers and a mode of deployment, What Russia is NOT going to negotiate is her brand new Sarmat and, such technologies as Peresvet. And here is one interesting speculative (read attentively--spe-cu-la-ti-ve) point I want to make. I seldom speculate but here it is, from the news piece:

Lawmakers, congressional aides and former officials say they are unaware of the administration conducting any formal intelligence estimates of the implications of New START's expiration either before or after Trump unveiled the idea. Nor are they aware of extensive inter-agency deliberations on devising a negotiating stance with China, or even whether any negotiations with China have occurred.

I am positive there are some estimates but they are not released because this will create a massive political crisis (not that this Impeachment catastrophe is not bad enough) when it will be disclosed that the United States lost any edge in strategic weapons and lost arms race and are absolutely not defended from any strike. Russia's interest in START is purely security driven--the fewer nuclear weapons the United States have smaller is the probability of this technology going "rogue". Economic consideration is the important secondary one--Russia simply doesn't want to spent more money than necessary on matters of defense, while maintaining a serious technological edge. Ah yes, Peresvet. This month, Peresvet is officially combat deployed (in Russian). As Valery Gerasimov described this system when talking to military attaches from many nations:

«С начала декабря месяца осуществляется боевое дежурство лазерных комплексов "Пересвет" в позиционных районах подвижных грунтовых ракетных комплексов с задачей прикрытия их маневренных действий»

Translation: since the beginning of December laser combat complexes Peresvet are combat deployed in the positional areas of the mobile ground missile complexes (ICBMs) in order to cover for their maneuvers. 

This is a very "loaded" statement for a reasons which pull very slightly the veil of secrecy over Peresvet's capabilities. There was very little doubt, once Peresvet was unveiled, that it would be more than capable to "blind" just about anything out there and, very likely, even recon satellites. But here is a trick--positional areas of mobile missile complexes such as RS-24 Yars, are a highest priority targets for US counter-force strategic weapons in first strike (Russia is not going to attack first). One can totally conceive here that in case of (God forbids) exchange when the US will lose targeting data from her recon satellite it wouldn't take much to launch at the positional area into the "last known" position of such system as Yars. Take the best case scenario of Yars' vehicles immediately reaching (not likely in real life) their maximum speed of 45 km/hr and having a map of possible roads of area, plus around 25-30 minutes of flight time by missile, so we are looking at a sector of the circle with the radius of 20 kilometers which could easily be "forked" by a few MIRVs from Trident-II D single missile. Do you get my drift? Yes, Peresvet is there to not just fight satellites, it is to allow all those mobile Topols and Yarses to launch undisturbed by means of not allowing MIRVs to get to them. How? Don't ask me. Russians, however, already announced that modernized and much more compact Peresvet will be paraded at the Red Square on May 9, very soon (in Russian). And this statement is also loaded. 

Ask yourself a question now, how can one present US political top with an intelligence "assessment" which blows out of the water the whole notion of the American technological superiority, especially in the field which all those war-mongering creatures who never served a day in military uniform love to masturbate to--modern warfare. It is not Russia's capabilities, now generally well-known, and discussed million times in US media, in a feeble attempt to self-medicate, which matter, it is the lack of such in the US. Yes, of course, the United States still can annihilate the world several times over, the US Navy can still wreck havoc on the geographic fringe of any continent but that doesn't change the fact that if such a calamity visits upon the humanity, the United States will be annihilated with 100% probability under any existing scenario of global conflict, that is when the United States initiates it. Others will not do such a thing globally, certainly not Russia. In this particular case it becomes clear that it is both in US and world's interests to see START extended, if not--I write about "Revelation Mode" non-stop for the last couple of years. 

Just to add to this topic. US News And World Report just recently published (yet another) power ranking of the nations. Russia came in second, obviously, behind the US. I just want to say--imbeciles: nations with GDP of $1.6 trillion do not make what Russia makes, especially in military field, and, yes, China's GDP is not $12.2 trillions, China's real economy dwarfs that of the US. But that just underscores my point--US elites are incompetent, ignorant and are not fit to run the country which they continue to push into the abyss. As long as the stock market driven by buybacks grows, I am sure, everything will be OK, right?

Oh, Not Again.

Another one of those pieces by some Pentagon's big honcho about this and that. Pentagon's R&D Chief Mike Griffin waxes exceptional and writes another, in a row of now tiresome, platitudes about how US Armed Forces are great... sort of. He starts with a predictable fodder of Berlin Wall:

Nov. 9 marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event followed within a couple of years by the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the freeing of the Eastern European vassal states. Francis Fukuyama thought we had reached “the end of history,” that global great power conflict was at its end and that the ascendancy of the Western liberal concept was the permanent future. “We won the Cold War” — it says so in all the history books. Winning is great, except for the part where the losers retreat, rethink, retrain and try again; while the winner thinks the race is won once and for all — which is why the United States now finds itself running from behind in certain aspects of today’s great power rivalry. How did we get here, and what should we do about it?

I have news for Griffin: Fukuyama is a classic representative of the American so called political pseudo-science class and could serve only as an Exhibit A of sheer ignorance, expected from the guy with no particular education or coherent analytical skills. Obviously, neither Fukuyama nor Griffin are good scholars of Clausewitz who is explicit in that: in war the outcome is never final. (c) Oh boy, was Clausewitz a Marxist? I though in a 200 years since Vom Kriege was penned we all should have developed some degree of recognition of what works and what doesn't in Western Civilization's most important work on war. No wonder Lenin was a huge fan of good ol' Carl. But that simple fact aside, there is one thing which Griffin, himself a superb engineer with a stunning array of STEM degrees and former NASA chief must know that his this statement is trivial at best:

Equally critical was the ability to prevail against a larger force in a conventional fight. The U.S. seized the advantage with precision, with a precise conventional strike, enabled by pattern-matching seekers. With a global positioning system to guide force projection to the right place, stealth technology to hide our aircraft from enemy radar, encrypted high-rate communications to enable superior command and control, electronic warfare to deny that advantage to our enemies, unmanned aerial vehicles for both reconnaissance and force projection, and the uncontested dominance of the space domain to tie it all together, we prevailed.

It is becoming downright nauseating reading these Clanciesque pop-warfare narratives since most of them are not true. I don't know if Griffin's tenure at NASA taught him anything but NASA being a paying customer of Russian rocketry for years now, he surely must know that the age of precision guided weapons originally was started by Nazi Germans in WW II when they sunk Italian battleship Roma with radio-guided Fritz-X bomb. But these were Soviet who developed an astonishing array of anti-ship missiles in post-WW II period and I am sure Griffin should know that those by definition are precision guided weapons. It just happened so that the United States was not even a competitor in this field from the inception, lagging badly in development of combat missile technologies in which Soviet Union and Russia had and have a dramatic technological lead, which today may have become insurmountable for the United States. In terms of air defenses the United States military is not even a competitor having nothing even remotely comparable to S-3XX-4XX-5XX systems, not to mention systems of A-235 Nudol. I will skip talking about hyper-sonic weapons here altogether. I will just add that Russians were involved with satellite-based navigation since the same time US got involved with GPS--early 1970s, such as Parus. GLONASS followed in 1982. Griffin surely must know about TU-143 Reis or even ancient LA-17R too. You know, drones.

My question is not even with Griffin's statement such as this:

In brief, the United States no longer possesses the unquestioned technical superiority to dominate a future fight.

Because most of "unquestioned" was primarily, up to late 1970s, in processing power and electronics, but in the fact that Griffin narrates totally made up history of US weaponry which, bar few limited fields, was neither "unquestioned" nor dominant. Even US jewel of a true technological excellence, it's world-class superb nuclear submarine force experienced a serious technological push-back since late 1970s which resulted in at least technological parity by 1990s. My quarrel is with this "creative" history of the warfare as a narrative of only American ingenuity and pioneering--this is absolutely false. Those challenges Griffin talks about--and they ARE challenges in every sense from technological to doctrinal--they didn't appear out of nowhere in an instant. All those challenges gestated and grew out of these very Russians understanding the nature of the warfare and doing their due diligence in R&D and fighting doctrine field. The roots of those "challenges" are in 1970s and 1980s, not in 2010s. Well, what do you know--I just wrote a book on the nature of real revolution in military affairs. It is precisely about what Griffin talks. But in the end, these ad nauseam trivialities, such as this:

What near-term risks are we willing to take, and what current systems are we willing to let go, so that we can invest in capabilities that will impose costs on our adversaries and deter them from starting a fight because they know they cannot win? This is the critical national security challenge of our time.

Invoke only one question--under what stone did Mr.Griffin spend last 20 years in order to not recognize the fact that it is the United States who unleashed non-stop violent wars and coups all over the globe and made sure that people will start the fight once they recognize that their livelihood and sovereignty is under attack by the United States. Luckily, the instruments to defend themselves against American military aggression are better than those of the aggressor and that what saddens US establishment, which has no idea what real war is. Or maybe they do? And that is why they are sad.

This brings me to another point, of Michail Khodaryonok today making a statement to RT:

An attack by NATO on Russia’s westernmost exclave Kaliningrad – a scenario that’s been speculated about in the media lately – would lead to a nuclear apocalypse and affect even countries not involved in a hypothetical conflict.International media have recently made regular publications on how Kaliningrad – the Russian outpost in Europe – could be ‘captured’.Such publications serve the interests of NATO members’ military and industrial complex, according to Kaliningrad’s governor Anton Alikhanov.

What Khodaryonok forgets to mention is that Russia has enough conventional deterrent to not go for the nukes. I may understand (I think) where Khodaryonok is coming from but he, as a graduate of the Academy of General Staff, should know that conventional step in the escalation process in case NATO wants to commit suicide, is, in fact, an additional deterrent and adds robustness to Kaliningrad's defense. Khodaryonok writes:

Now, a few remarks on the message posted by China’s Eastday.com. It says that if NATO and Russia went to war, the bloc could seize the Russian region in a matter of two days. Our Chinese comrades are a little off with their timeline. The operation would not actually take this long, and the result would be very different. It would take Russia no longer than 40-45 minutes to launch a nuclear strike, and after that we would be able to do only one thing – discuss the peculiar aspects of the modern nuclear apocalypse. To sum it up, the battle for Kaliningrad would under no circumstances remain an isolated military conflict. It would become just an episode of a global nuclear war. And even the countries not involved in this conflict would suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, these are the effects of using strategic nuclear weapons.

While Khodaryonok is absolutely correct in stating that such a conflict will not stay local, I don't know if he missed Valery Gerasimov's statement (in Russian) couple of years ago that already then Russia had enough cruise missiles deployed on critical strategic directions for a complex deterrence by means of high precision weapons. A lot of time passed since then and when even RAND admits impossibility of involving NATO in a conventional conflict with Russia:

“We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary,” RAND analyst David Ochmanek told a security conference on Thursday. “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it.”

Khodaryonok  retired from the Armed Forces in 2000. 19 years ago. Since then one could observe a dramatic change in Russia's doctrinal thinking with introduction of "strategic force deterrence by high-precision weapons" already in 2010 Military Doctrine. One couldn't fail to notice that these were primarily conventional forces that Russia was improving and updating since early 2000s. This was done primarily to be able to fight a conventional, not a nuclear, conflict. So, if Mikhail Khodaryonok thinks that in case of NATO attacking Kaliningrad, Russia is going to go for nuclear jugular immediately, I have a bit of disagreement with him, because the first thing which will be done will be a conventional strike on NATO's infrastructure and for that Russia has enough force to disrupt NATO's C4ISR architecture and inflict major losses. That is precisely what is called a "strategic force deterrence" by means of stand-off, precision-guided weaponry. In the end, rearranging stones in D.C., Brussels or London in purely conventional way is nothing that 3M14 or X-101 cannot do. It is also a good way to avoid apocalyptic scenario by inflicting a lot of pain for aggressor to have second thought about escalation. It is so self-evident from Russia's military development since mid-2000s, that it is strange that Khodaryonok had to reply in this manner to some strategic delusions by some butt-hurt "strategists" who lost every single war they were involved in since 2000 and who still are dreaming of some revenge out of desperation after seeing the myth of their conventional military power blown to smithereens. In the end, even R.D. Hooker's "opus" is about "defending" Baltics and cannot be taken seriously from any professional point of view. Khodaryonok, evidently, forgot Macron begging not to sink French frigate or harm any forces in April 2018. They are not complete idiots there, yet. They can calculate and know, as an example, that NATO's fleet combat life in case of attacking Kaliningrad will be counted in tens of minutes before Kinzhals or P-800s arriving. Khodaryonok MUST know these things. As for nuclear war. Well, no special commentary is needed here.