Why They Are Laughed At.

Soros-funded Quincy Institute for allegedly Responsible Statecraft continues to exhibit a complete lack of self-awareness and sheer illiteracy in military affairs. Hey, I get it that Colonel Macgregor had some conversation with some Russian "general" who told him about 40+ million losses of USSR in WW II, but here is another guy who has no clue but warns about not using "bad history". This is the type of people who run America and America's dazzling failure as serious continental power. 

Bad history makes for bad policy on Ukraine. The West needs better historical analogies for understanding Russia’s war and how to counter it.

And the moment the author makes this statement he does, guess what? Exactly, spews propaganda BS about Great Patriotic War. 

Soviet Marshal Zhukov absorbed 860,000 casualties to the Germans’ 200,000 at the Battle of Kursk in World War II. He also lost 1,500 tanks to the Germans’ 500, yet Kursk is remembered as a great triumph that crushed Hitler’s final hopes of victory. Can one imagine Germany celebrating its superior casualty ratio while being defeated by Stalin’s hordes? However shocking this tactic may be, it is a resource that Moscow has and Kyiv does not. Consider the battle for Bakhmut and the daily bulletins trumpeting Ukraine’s success in killing thousands of Russians, right up to the moment that Bakhmut fell to Wagner Group mercenaries — weirdly reminiscent of the Pentagon’s body-count bulletins in the Vietnam war. 

The historic "knowledge" of this former Pentagon "analyst" with the background in humanities ("politics" no less) evidently dictates him to avoid any serious WW II documents, because if he followed best Russian military historians, such as Krivosheev, a real general incidentally,  he would have known that TOTAL casualties for Kursk Strategic Defensive Operation (July 5-23, 1943) amounted to 177,847 with KIAs and MIAs count being: 70, 330. After that, Strategic Offensive Operation Kutuzov started (July 23-August 18, 1943), with TOTAL casualties resulting in 429,890, with KIAs and MIAs count being: 112, 529. So, in all, from July 5 to August 18 1943, Red Army sustained 177,847 + 429,890 = 607,737 casualties, with total of KIAs and MIAs equaling 70,330 + 112, 529= 182,859. Where the number of 860,000 came from only this guy knows, but I have a clue. 

But then again, US perception of war, especially of WW II was shaped by Wehrmacht which, in the end, had its ass handed to it by the Red Army. Obviously, most of Anglo-American historiography on Wehrmacht cannot be taken seriously, precisely because of known manipulation with data with a strong bias toward German figures. But even if to accept that Wehrmacht lost 203,000 at Kursk. One still has to consider the fact that West needs not "better historical analogies" but basic education in military history with serious revision of sources, it also needs serious military science education and good schooling in strategy. I omit here operational art because NATO needs to start from the clean slate. If you want to learn something, you better learn it from the best, NATO learned from losers who confabulated the whole history in order to save their wounded pride and war crimes. That is why they are in shock and awe at Pentagon. As is the author--Robert English. And don't tell me that I didn't warn--I did, last 9 years I did non-stop.