... when I speak about the US (NATO) de facto not having real air defense. Random AD complexes such as Patriot PAC3 here and there the real air defense is not. So, Ben Hodges suddenly arrives (on his hilarious YT channel) to the conclusion of which I write for decades really:
As I repeat ad nauseam, US Armed Forces TOE is that of the force from 1990s designed to fight "fairy tales" wars against supremely backward, corrupt and incompetent opponent. This IS NOT just technological problem, it is a cultural one and because of that it cannot be fixed by applying band aid here and there. Doctrine is a system of the views, the US has views but not the system.
Per NATO (inspired by British) on Sevastopol's Panorama, as it turned out the magnificent Roubaud's painting of 30 000 square meters is generally safe. The building will be restored. Not the first time, Nazis destroyed it before.
NATO, being impotent and seeing its own demise lashes out at kindergartens, schools, hospitals and museums. British cannot rest while this magnificent historic art piece, depicting 349 day defense of Sevastopol during Crimean War where British-French-Turkish forces have been bled white, stands.
Yes, this was supposed to be Europe of normal people. Not anymore. Western ruling class has something else in store for Europeans. Here is the news of a similar nature but ...
This is a great point for Russia's ice-breakers ship-builders and only buttresses Russia's "more is better" ice-breaking ideology. That is why coming of this:
Do you see the pattern emerging? Recall--ah, hypersonic weapons are overrated. Ah, global warning will melt the ice soon. Ah ... That's what happens when your societies are run by lawyers, politicians with "degrees" in journalism and political "science", you know, by those know-it-alls who are dumb as stumps and have "egos larger than cathedral"(c). Hey, look at this guy.
Yes, this is American general. And here is another clown:
You cannot explain to him what REAL integrated and networked air defense is. Remember closing sequence of first Matrix? It is all about OODA loop and the speed of decisions, their frequency which defines how you defeat an enemy.
But yes, Ben Hodges needs to stay the hell away from AC in any transportation, because ... well, you know.
These guys are constantly on prowl ... Boo!
"history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce"(c) Karl Marx.
Why only 800,000? No, why not go full Monty and claim that Russians suffered 2 million, nay--20 million casualties. US generals completely discredited the US Army and paraded themselves as low league amateurs who cannot even grasp the basic dynamics of attrition in modern war. Since Ben Hodges' times things got even worse in the US military. Much worse. They are outsiders who can only observe in disbelief the scale and complexity of operations they never could and cannot conduct. Professional envy and ignorance are powerful drivers towards hatred which removes last remnants of professionalism and integrity.
"I think the Russian Federation is collapsing now. It's not in a straight line, but it is happening," he declared. "We should be thinking about what will happen. There will be refugees. There will be concern about nuclear weapons." "There will be people concerned about control of oil and gas and all the other resources." "And some parts of the federation will want to become independent, others will choose to remain affiliated with Moscow." "We should be thinking about how we want that to end up."
What can I say--it is a terminal case of impotent delusion. As Larry correctly points out:
Those reports are " confidential" only for Western public, in Russia the performance of NATO (and Russian) weaponry is generally well covered in terms of generalities and Russia's EW capabilities have been characterized as "eye-watering" 7 years ago by none other... than Ben Hodges (before his brain completely melted and he turned into a clown).
As it is a rule in Pentagon, they discarded those warnings in favor of Hollywood military porn which teaches us that capabilities will stay the same forever, while glorious US SMART munitions will continue to perform as brilliantly as they did on Iraqi outhouses in the desert. Well, life is a bit more complicated than that, and Russia's immense surge capability both industrially and scientifically is still dawning on Washington planners since they simply have no experience whatsoever with what they are observing. Hey, I was on record about this for a while, and here is Lavrov today:
Translation:Talk by US officials about the need to allow Kyiv to hit targets on Russian territory reflects the despair of the West and is similar to agony, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
Who am I to contradict Lavrov. Read my lips: the US lost the arms race(c).
Well, according to Pentagon Russia lost the war. Remember now retired Mark Milley? We are dealing with the acute case of professional envy or, as some call it, a small penis envy, from people who wrote field manuals which killed more VSU cannon fodder than Russians planned.
It couldn't have been otherwise. The SMO exposed the shaky facade of the NATO military "science" and a dismal effectiveness of its hardware in a real fight. This fits extremely well with Macgregor's recent statements about Russia, Great Patriotic War "myths" et al. I know, it is excruciating for many to see not just the whole American military mythology being blown up, but see the country circling the drain. Me too, I cannot recognize the United States and what it turned into, and this is just the start.
Translation:Brussels.“Ukraine’s nightmare scenario is becoming a reality,” said Ben Hodges, former commander of the US Army in Europe.“Ukraine has almost run out of ammunition, and Europe and the USA are not willing to take their ammunition production to a new level,” said the retired US general.D. in conversation with the Editorial Network Germany (RND).While Russia is massively expanding its attacks from the air and on land, the Ukrainian soldiers on the front are running out of ammunition.Anti-aircraft missiles are in short supply and artillery shells are being rationed, leaving Ukrainian troops unable to cancel planned attacks and hold defensive positions.According to the Ukrainian military, some units have already had to reduce their rate of fire by 90 percent compared to the summer.Everything is missing - and in many places on the front the commanders don't know how long they can hold their positions.
The problem, of course, for such people as Ben Hodges, Petraeus, Keane and likes, is that you cannot spew propaganda BS for 22 months, referencing the tired Gulf Wars and predicting the collapse of Russia, and then on the 23rd month say--nah, we just BSed you, we knew the deal all along. Nope, doesn't work like this--firstly, they never knew the deal and secondly, they have no professional reputation left. Well, maybe for CNN military "expert" positions, but as I get tired quoting my friend Colonel Vladimir Trukhan: "They cannot out-think us." Well, facts on the ground as well as strategic reality speak volumes. And even Ben Hodges have to look the truth in the eye.
Meanwhile, an interesting rumor I heard--VSU continue to send scores of 404 cannon fodder to Krynki, on the left bank of Dnepr, is because they simply cannot stop doing this, because the picture there is from horror movies and they cannot allow Russians to start collecting bodies--literally, every square meter is covered in bodies and body parts. As is true pretty much along the whole frontline which slowly moves to the West. But now this:
Make no mistake, sewers get overwhelmed sometimes everywhere, but in Kiev--here is the largest spill of shit, well, in Europe. More are happening and check out what happened with Kiev metro--yes, it is sinking or, rather, flooding. There is an upside though for this lake of shit--Russians WILL 100% avoid this street when entering Kiev, so, tactically, it makes total sense to organize a battalion Command Post of VSU there. The new slogan in Russia today: Shoigu, Gerasimov, please, bomb Kiev with yeast. Yak, disgusting--I love it;) Talk about shit hitting streets, big time.
You see, here is a classic example of a person (I spoke about him in one of my last videos) who drank the Kool Aid of military history as it is taught in the USMA at West Point and US Army War College, much of which, as we all know, is built around Wehrmacht's fairy tales and a-historical BS by Russian dissidents. Akin to a "million Red Army soldiers executed at the front"--a BS made up and promoted by Victor Astafiev at the end of his career because he wanted to get Nobel Prize for literature. Akin to the same idea of 2.5 million raped by the Red Army German women. For people who graduated Sandhurst, such as Anthony Beavor, where they don't teach mathematics above middle school level. That is why Beavor became a main perpetuator of this BS inveneted by a couple of German feminists who started this propaganda--difficult to explain the statistical impossibility to a person of the same intellectual level as Ben Hodges. Whatever remaining reputation of the US military which existed before has been completely destroyed by US generals who paraded themselves ignorant, uncultured and uneducated hacks.
I don't know who said to Hanny Cokelaere and Joshua Posaner who penned this piece, that NATO has "better Army", but neither author has even remotest qualifications to pass the judgement on any military issue and the problem here is that while European NATO armies are a joke, the US Army is the last army in the world which has a record worthy of self-proclaimed (well, by many, Obama included) of a "finest fighting force in history"(c). The fact that the US Army can use sensor fusion, satellite imagery and stand-off munitions to blow Afghan weddings to smithereens, children and women included into "package", or can demolish Faluja, doesn't make one "better" at anything. Especially when compared to Russians and their record of military victories which make NATO military "accomplishments" look rather very insignificant.
But never mind this constant self-aggrandizing which does betray a huge complex of inferiority and immediately after intro posted above from this Politco military psychobabble, authors introduce us to Mr. Ben Hodges.
“The further east you go, the infrastructure does not support the heavy
weight of U.S., German, British and Dutch tanks, it’s the bridges,” said
retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army
Europe and now affiliated to think tank CEPA. “We’ve got to show we can
move as fast or faster than the Russian Federation in the Suwałki Gap
[between Poland and Lithuania] or in Romania.”
The immediate question which one has to ask is why Ben Hodges thinks that "we've got to show" those damn Roosskies. I don't know what Ben Hodges thinks, and he left a rather impressive record of spewing BS, while on the job as the US Army Commander Europe, but he has to really update himself on what Russians do and how they study militarily. Suffice it to say that Russia's General Staff was formed fully in 1763 by order of Catherine the Great (no, not in 1812 as English-language WiKi tells us) and the history of this General Staff goes back to 1711 to Peter the Great's order of the Staff Positions of General Staff (in Russian). So, it is not like Russians need to run around constantly repeating mantras about how great they are, but the United States didn't exist as a nation, when Russians already had their General Staff, and the good one at that. Yes, this little "skirmish" in 1812 in which Russian Army defeated the greatest Army assembled at that time and led by a genuine military genius Napoleon. Obviously, nothing to look at, against the background of the "American war against Napoleon", but these were Russians who actually entered Paris in 1814.
So, there is no necessity for Russians "be shown" anything, because studying the enemy (and the United States Armed Forces are "potential enemy" of Russia) is on the level which the United States can only dream about and that has a lot to do with both military history and general education of the military cadres. So, Russians know and have been preparing to fight combined NATO forces since WW II and in doing so they developed doctrine and weapons which suit this purpose perfectly. Russians, who also have all this C4ISR mambo-jumbo, from intel satellites and anti-sat weapons to computers and signint, they know how the US Army fights and what are the limitations (sometimes severe) of any combined NATO force if it decides to fight Russian Armed Forces conventionally in the Eastern Europe.
Ben Hodges has to know this--the first thing NATO (US that is) will lose will be its ISR, starting from removal of crucial US space-based assets from their orbits, and then jamming of NATO communications. That in itself removes the crucial advantage NATO always had over its third-rate backward enemies. Obviously, the issue, which I write about non-stop, is the issue of air defense is what NATO simply doesn't have against Russia's stand-off weapons and this is the thing which many (not all) US generals cannot wrap their brains around--any Command and Control structure of NATO--staffs, command posts, communications facilities, what have you--are absolutely defenseless and the level of this vulnerability continues to grow as I type this. So, it is not that Russians will throw their T-90s and T-14s at Suwalki Gap to face off with NATO's tanks. No, Russians will demolish Command and Control system of NATO, including it "decision making centers" and airfields. NATO navies also will be sunk.
After that, NATO will start escalating towards nuclear threshold because it will be denied most of its tentative advantages which Russians are very well aware of, because they usually don't waste time on PR BS and self-aggrandizing but study wars and operations by the "potential enemy" and do it extremely seriously. Unless, of course, one considers Russians, coldly narrating their well-known military achievements in the last 800 or so years, as self-aggrandizing, but those who do should see a good psychologist specializing in complex of inferiority. So, even if to imagine that Ben Hodges would be able "to show" those damn Rooskies that NATO can move as fast or faster it makes no difference whatsoever because the US Armed Forces never faced the enemy like this and never fought the war like that.
On a more metaphysical level, of which Patriarch of All Russia spoke recently in his sermon, Ben Hodges should understand a simple fact that Russia-West breakup is for real and Russians will never forget nor forgive US support for this:
The US supports admirers of SS Division Galizien (Calicina) and, in general, de facto Nazi regime in Kiev which is mired in war crimes and crimes against humanity. What can I say, good that most of Russian WW II veterans who viewed Americans as good allies are not with us anymore. I can only imagine what they would feel, knowing that former Allies turned out this way. But then again, if Ben Hodges or Petraeus are the "best" what the US can produce, then there should be no surprise. I will reiterate--NO US servicemen ever fought in defense of his country, all modern wars the US Armed Forces fought are expeditionary wars, the wars of conquest far away from own shores. No US servicemen ever knew what it means to lose own family and property to real war. This is the cultural difference which cannot be bridged--any Russian family has more real military pedigree than Ben Hodges ever would, because in Russia any family has somebody who fought and died in WW II.
We all are into the new territory, where the REAL face of the West and the US has been exposed. Sadly, most of the public in the West will not know what is happening. They are kept oblivious by Western media and by the realities of every day survival in the midst of a massive economic calamity which unfolds before all of us. Here is Andrei Raevsky providing a glimpse into who the US is supporting.
Few honest common sense voices barely register in the background of deafening lies and propaganda and that drives further Russians' disgust with the combined West. I cannot blame them, in fact--it is a normal reaction of any normal human. These are reactions which lead to consequences which neither Ben Hodges nor White House, nor CIA, can calculate--they simply have no instruments for that. That is why they do not have a grasp of what is happening here, in Russian villages and towns with Russian Army moving to the front lines.
But then again, they do not know what real war is. Ben Hodges certainly doesn't.
Russian fairy tales contain such personage as Koschei Bessmertnyi (Koschei the Immortal). He hides his soul inside nested objects to protect it. For example, the
soul may be hidden in the needle that is hidden inside the egg which is
carried by the duck that flies away whenever anyone tries to catch it. Why nested objects? Because once the needle is broken Koschei dies. But the metaphor here is even deeper--this nesting "of the soul" is akin to deeply hidden and suppressed psychological complexes, which is a part of the soul, apart from the obvious security measures (nesting) to guard one's life which is in the needle. The needle is a representation of something we all guard as the utmost personal secret we take to the gave with us. We all have our needles, which are hidden in some eggs, inside the duck. Ben Hodges' needle, however, is not in the egg--it is deep in his ass and there is nothing secret about it, since it reveals Ben Hodges' most important and domineering complex--complex of inferiority. It is also a very relatable issue for the modern United States whose ascendance to superpowerdom happened because of the incredible combination of geopolitical factors which preserved the US from a devastation of Europe and Asia in WW II.
This is a very American idiosyncrasy--an extreme sensitivity to the fact that without sacrifices by historic Russia, known then as the Soviet Union, who did 80% of fighting and annihilating the cream of the cream of the Axis, there would have been no American (or Allies) victory. Ben Hodges is not Dinesh Souza who is an ignorant propagandist selling lubok of American exceptionalism both retail and wholesale in order to tickle American rah-rah and own ambitions. No, Ben Hodges is a graduate of the USMA in West-Point and of the Army War College, he also had under his command serious forces in Europe. So, it is reasonable to ask the question--who and how taught Ben Hodges military history, a mandatory subject in any military academy in the world, that this guy not only blatantly lies but parades himself as a jackass?
The answer to this is very simple: apart from being a paid shill for Banderite (crypto-Nazi) lobby in the US, Ben Hodges is butt-hurt with the needle of his "soul" (or complexes) protruding from his behind because he himself knows damn well that on the scale of military accomplishments he is nothing but a loser despite his senior general level officer paraphernalia. Ben Hodges never fought in defense of his country (as no American servicemen ever did starting from the times of America's founding), he never achieved any tangible military-strategic success and he knows that the United States didn't win any wars (except in Grenada) even against the third-rate opponents, never mind Russia who even in her disassembled state in 1990s could still wipe the United States off the map. Not to mention today, when Russia can do this conventionally against any combination of the forces in European theater.
Latest Russian military successes, from shocking disposal of the Georgian Army under 120 hours in 2008 and Russians do not even brag about it, to effectively demolishing a bulk of ISIS in Syria, while preserving successfully Syrian State and its legitimate government, to unveiling revolutionary weapon systems and changing geopolitical balance--this bothers, irritates and drives Ben Hodges. He feels that he is merely a footnote, an insignificant word, a pronoun, in the book of Russia's military history which saw military-political figures many orders of magnitude larger than Ben Hodges ever was or will be defeated by Russians in a scale of operations which simply have no analogues in the US military history. The Ben Hodges' Koschei Needle is his envy and jealousy which no amount of spin and outright lies can allay and he resorted to lowering himself to a level of part-time crypto-Nazi propagandist capable only of smearing someone who is simply better than him.
There are no respected academics that support Hodges’ assertion that
millions of Russians did not die, but he received no pushback from the
other speakers taking part in the talk. The Zoom call was part of the
12th annual US-Ukraine Security Dialogue, a conference organized by the
Center for US-Ukrainian Relations, a lobby group accused by some of
having ties to OUN-B, an offshoot of the far-right Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists.
But then again, this is the level of the modern American "elites" and it is too bad that Ben Hodges just happened to be a man who wore the officer uniform. These "elites" will lie, they will cheat they will steal. It is one thing when this activity is performed by spies and politicians--one would expect this from them. It is totally another when a former very high rank American officer loses any sense of professionalism, honor and propriety, let alone of elementary respect for tens of millions of Russian people, civilians and soldiers alike, who went through hell, which Ben Hodges cannot even grasp, to defeat the deadliest enemy in history. Leningrad alone lost more people from 1941 through 1944 than the United States lost throughout its whole military history combined. One cannot compensate for the lack of class which Ben Hodges, once one reviews the history of his statements, never had to start with. But then again, try sitting still on your butt with a needle in it--an impossible task and Ben Hodges demonstrated this extremely well.
So called "realists" in the US have no real chance to change US foreign policy no matter what they do and no matter how they try to convince themselves that they have a shot at it without addressing a fundamental issue of the American nationhood and economic system. To start with: large portions of the American "realists" are beholden primarily, not exclusively, to GOP, which is a party of cowards well entrenched with the military-industrial complex and values of Washington Consensus. So, do bees hate honey? Moreover, American "realists" have no real narrative, because they cannot have one in the only framework they know--and this one, yet again, assumes America's primacy in economy and military matters. This is not to say that "realists" do not understand a simple fact that the United States simply cannot fight and win modern wars against even mildly competent enemy--some of them do understand that--it is just that any appeals to "restrain" or attempts to engage overwhelmingly dominant neocon interventionist D.C. establishment in some "scholarly", presumed to be "rational", discussion is a waste of time. This is not to say that "realists" do not try.
A week or so ago there was a tempest in the ideological teacup of America's "strategizing" circles when utterly neocon and incompetent Foundation for Defense of Democracies (I know, I know--it is hilarious) released yet another, in the long list of the US geopolitical wet dreams, "strategy" on how to "defend" the US by means of "forward defense", which is, when translated from pseudo-academic lingo of "specialists" in US security means simply--more money and more interventions. This whole collection of essays is duly noted by Daniel Larison who writes:
This is all true but how about we follow my advice from a long time ago and concentrate not on the same old, regurgitated constantly, America' "strategies" which simply do not work--US military record in the last 20 years is abysmal across the board--from technological dimension to operational and strategic ones--but on personalities. Show me any tangible result, any attainment of serious political objective by the United States anywhere, under any conditions, including having sometimes overwhelming material preponderance over American "enemies", many of who are not enemies at all. Right. But then Larison makes a crucial mistake--he begins to "negotiate" with such characters as former national Security Advisor H.R. McMaster or other sinecures' abusers such as Jonathan Schazner or shady pro-Israeli "venture capitalist" as Mark Dubowitz. Larison engages:
Not surprisingly, the consistent misreadings and distortions of history
are some of the biggest flaws in the report. Bradley Bowman and Clifford
May rattle off historical “facts” about wars throughout history that
elide far more than they reveal. For instance, they speak of
“Persian-Roman wars” running from the battle of Carrhae between the
Roman Republic and the Parthians to the battle of Nineveh in the seventh
century between the Byzantines and the Sasanians. That lumps together
many different regimes and dynasties in very crude fashion, and it also
misleads the reader into thinking that conflict was incessant when it
was not.
This is a mistake. Or, rather several mistakes by Larison.
1. You cannot argue with neocons, or, for that matter with majority of US punditry, but especially neocons, based on the merit of historic facts because:
a) History is not a valid "science", because often it barely can present even a limited number of causalities, which can still be challenged by opponents. If that wouldn't be the case, we wouldn't have had a vibrant and, actually, prospering field of gross revisionism, some of it reaching a full blown grotesque.
b) For any person with a mildly decent education and being an avid reader it would be not difficult to produce even on the bases of exhaustive research several mutually contradicting narratives on the single event.
2. So, when even very recent history, well documented and archived, including using modern means of movie documentaries, photographs etc. produces this:
It is down right risible trying to argue about the realities of the events which took place 2000+ years ago with the technologies of spears and bows and arrows and the economy of Roman Empire. Boy, talk about being (ir)relevant in a discussion with people from FDD most of who never saw modern weapon up-close, or, if military as McMaster or Ben Hodges, have a whopping record of military and national security failures.
If the United States "history" field saw it as totally normal and natural to steal valor from USSR in WW II, I guess even most recent events in which the United States claimed "victory" over ISIS, merely prove my point. Remember? Two years ago:
What "history" are we talking about here? And WHO are those "historians"? McMaster who still cannot resign himself to the fact that the United States sustained humiliating defeat in Vietnam and still tries to "replay" the war? Does he, or Ben Hodges even have a clue on what it means to be under sustained fire impact in real war? I don't think so, as I repeat ad nauseam--no American soldier fought in defense of his motherland. None, zilch, nada. McMaster is altogether a comical figure who apart from commanding a tank regiment against supremely incompetent Iraqi military, has no serious operational experience commanding a division, corps, let alone army or army group. These people are losers primarily on the merit which only matters in issues of polices and actual strategies which work--being a true statesman. Many of them, actually, know or sense this about themselves and that is why they are dealing in Bullshit, not reality. I remind you again--remember my advice? Do not argue with them on the merit, especially of such a propaganda-driven "history" as it is taught in the US--go for ad hominem. Yes, question human, academic and other relevant qualities of people most of who wouldn't qualify in normal country to run a gas station or maintain an apartment block. None of them have any grasp of what will happen to them when their families and livelihood, their country will come under fire. Let's face it--all of them are a small league doctrine-mongers. As I wrote more than three years ago:
There is no point whatsoever in arguing with those people. Only pointing out to a pathetic state in which the United States resides today, as well as constantly proving those people ignorant on the account of the modern warfare to which US Armed Forces are utterly unprepared and exposing those people's incompetence and corruption, not discussing with them some irrelevant ancient history's minutiae, only then some effect could be achieved. But I don't hold my breath: for starters most of "realist" people in the US suffer from the same historic and military ignorance and, finally, very few of them have courage to admit to themselves that the United States is not this irresistible hegemonic superpower but a country which is in a dramatic, precipitous decline, across the board and no amount of attempts to draw grossly inaccurate parallels to ancient history, not to speak of learning all the wrong lessons, will change the dynamics of global military and economic balance in which the United States finds itself increasingly marginalized, not to speak of being laughed at. The United States got lucky in 1945, it blew it. As for "forward defense", boy--same shit just the view from a different angle.
In related news, Shaposhnikov, meanwhile undergoes trials and shoots good ol' X-35 Uran in the Sea of Japan. Kalibrs, I guess, are next.
But it is a New Year time and Shoigu opened yesterday a Winter Festival in the park Patriot. It is a joyful and very symbolic occasion against the background of the magnificent main cathedral of Russian Armed Forces.
I cannot emphasize enough the powerful symbolism behind all that. Life continues and it is well defended in spirit and weapons.
