I See, It Didn't Go As Planned...

 ... but didn't war criminals from the US MSM were trying to convince us that Israel's economy and Army are just the finest thing ever? They sure did. And now...

Israeli Army Economizing on Weapons Use Amid Arms Embargoes, Sources Say. To better prioritize use of weaponry, the Israeli army raised the rank of officers allowed to approve use of mortars and other weaponry as ammunition inventories dwindle. 

Hey, it's Haaretz today, not me. You see, the real war is a bitch. As many pointed out--Nixon had to take the US off gold standard precisely because otherwise he wouldn't be able to finance the war in Vietnam. You see, this is the USA of 1971--still the largest and most advanced industrial economy in the world at a time. Yet, even the US couldn't do it against Vietnamese, who, while supported by the Soviet Union primarily, and China, had one thing which the US didn't have--love for their nation and heroism while fighting on their land. Now, consider the issue of the Middle East--as I repeat ad nauseam, Israel's economy depends on many critical supplies on Israrl's slap bitch, the US. Once war gets into protracted attrition mode, Israel has no real resources. Especially so human ones. 

London CNN  — In late September, as Israel’s nearly year-long war widened and its credit rating was downgraded yet again, the country’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said that, while Israel’s economy was under strain, it was resilient. “Israel’s economy bears the burden of the longest and most expensive war in the country’s history,” Smotrich said on September 28, a day after Israeli airstrikes killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon’s capital Beirut, ratcheting fears that tensions with the militant group would turn into a full-blown conflict. “The Israeli economy is a strong economy that even today attracts investments.” 

While even the imbeciles from all kinds of "rating agencies" get it, reality is--Israel is the country with a population of around 9-9.5 million, that is to say around the size of population of Hungary, which means no matter how they BS everybody about their "hi-tech" and shit, Israel simply has no (zilch, zero) population-industrial base to survive on its own, especially against the enemy which is highly motivated and is ready for the long haul. Period. I omit here extremely low tactical literacy and combat qualities of IDF. One cannot fight physics and math, it is impossible. In the end, Iran alone dwarfs Israel economically in real terms, not in those BS GDP numbers. Remember, CINC--Combined Index of National Capability? Please, find me Israel here... I can see Iran clearly, though. 

Military Power (Cont'd 5)

So, here we are, with economics or, rather, economy which is the foundation of it all. I, however, want to warn  those who still believe that Wall Street  or Goldman Sachs is real economy--you may really not like what you will be reading here. So, for those of you who believe in all this FIRE (Finances, Insurance, Real Estate) "economy", before reading this, you may want to conduct a mental forensic experiment. Imagine what will happen if money would disappear. Of course, there will be chaos, but here is the thing, of which Russians, and I mean modern day Russians, who lived through 1990s, like me, know well--eventually people will barter. As long as any manufacturing still exists, people, under the most difficult conditions, will barter. They will find the market place and they will go with their burlap sacks of potatoes or carrots and will barter them for tires, cigarettes or diesel generators. Eventually the chains of distributors will develop and money will re-appear. The cycle will re-start. 

Now, imagine what happens if the manufacturing is gone. Well, finances as we know them, will not exist, period. So, the issue of chicken and egg, that is what is a primer, is solved. After all, most economic schools agree on this fact--no production, no money. If Boeing goes down, the real impact of that is difficult to comprehend, but if tomorrow some shitty brokerage firm goes down, well..it may hurt a bit but life will go on. And it will also recover even if Wall Street goes down. In fact, the damage this condemned place, where crooks and the so called "economists" congregate, dealt and continues to deal to the world is so huge, that it is, in fact, desirable that this bastion of the corruption and selling of the air and phantoms, goes down at some point of time. Commodities exchanges can stay, though, and even then under some serious regulations.

So, now we can briefly, yet again, return to the expenditure. Let's draw a simple analogy: if I lived in the neighborhood where I had my house broken in constantly, including by armed robbers, under the condition that I cannot move away from this hood, guess, what I would do? Right, I would invest in weapons. I would buy several firearms, ranging from 9mm  hand guns to 12-gauge Mossberg, I would place them strategically (or, rather, tactically) inside my house and will hope that I will meet any son of a bitch trying to get into my house and harm my family with the barrel of my gun to his forehead, not the other way around. Here, I just described my personal military doctrine. Will this expenditure hurt finances of my household? Somewhat, but those expenses are all worth it, since they keep all kinds of scoundrels away from my home. What is most important here, with my very moderate income, just because I understand the value of a good round penetrating the knees or, in the worst case scenario, the forehead of some creep, my existence will be fairly safe, as opposed to some metro-sexual, and way more richer than me patsy, who can not stand small firearms or NRA. Will his money help him when he has armed robbers breaking into his house? Well, you all know the answer. All this analogies' drawing is very relevant to a discussion on the economic aspect of the war and military power. 

It matters most what nation produces, period. Sure, Steel/Iron Production and Energy Consumption are the backbone of it all, but so much more goes into that. Energy Consumption is a key in understanding how economy works. No doubt,  MBAs working in Goldman Sachs do consume a lot of energy: from using their computers and lights in the office to charging their Teslas overnight, plus a lot of energy is spent hauling those important asses all over the world in the private jets, mostly for golf courses and their wives (lov...I mean sluts) cosmopolitan shopping. But this consumption of energy by those, mostly self-centered, a-holes pales in comparison to what a single middle sized manufacturing company consumes. In fact, to maintain a steady stream of useless iPhones and other, superficially "needed", consumer goods, enormous number of British Thermal Units (Btus) (or Joules) is consumed. It is difficult to explain to some "programmer" (and I know way too many of those) that iPhones do not grow on the trees and that even this (as any other smart(dumb)-phone) requires metals, plastics, silicon and other huge nomenclature of elements to be produced. This is a colossal consumption of energy. But don't rush to the conclusion that the more the energy, the more is production. It doesn't work quite like that. Consider this, consumption is not enough to "measure" energy, it is production of energy which gives a better perspective. Here is some info on actual production of energy:

Top 3 producing countries by resource worldwide 

Why it is so important to emphasize production as opposed to mere consumption? Well, this is military-political blog and we are talking here about military power. Let us recall what father, or, rather, one of, of economic liberalism Herbert Spencer had to say about economy. In his The Military And The Industrial Society in 1896 he states: "Whence it follows that the desire "not to be dependent on foreigners" is one appropriate to the militant type of society. So long as there is constant danger that the supplies of needful things derived from other countries will be cut off by the breaking out of hostilities, it is imperative that there shall be maintained a power of producing these supplies at home and that to this end the required structure shall be maintained. Hence there is a manifest direct relation between militant activities and a protectionist policy..." Surely, Spenser, should he live today, would be eating his words in regards to "militant activities" and a "protectionist policy", but, in general, he correctly identified the approach. In modern history NO real military power emerged without a first most important condition--an industrial capacity. Energy Production, in this case, is a crucial parameter, especially when one considers that weapons' production consumes an enormous amount of energy. Electricity is a key. Here is the wiki's list of electricity generation by countries.

Here is per capita generation by the country. 

 

The first thing which jumps out immediately is the fact (remember, this is military blog?) of Russia generating net and per capita electricity which are the levels of a very developed industrial nations. Let's not stop here, let's review actually a Consumption as CINC model emphasizes. Yet again, Russia is in the top cluster of highly industrially developed nations.

List of countries by electricity consumption 

One may say that Qatar and Saudi Arabia consume per capita more than Russia, in fact they consume more than EU and even US. But the trick here is in the fact that their consumption is driven by....well, nothing but oil extraction and air conditioning of their malls and houses. Truth is, they produce nothing other than oil. Electricity generation/consumption, when considered together with other resources, gives us a good insight into the path to being a real military power. 

Steel/Iron Production? Absolutely, there are no weapons without it. Guns are made of it, tanks, ships and submarines. Shells and bullets, armor and...you name it--all this is steel and iron. But is it enough again? No. Same as electricity, iron and steel are produced, that is extracted, processed and produced, by many nations but even that is not enough to become a military power. Here is the list of steel production by nation in 2015.

List of countries by steel production

But here is the trick again. China produces almost 10 times the amount of steel USA produces, and almost 12 times the amount Russia produces. Yet, while being a world's largest economy, China, while, certainly emerging, is not yet a global military power. Will just steel/iron production metric define China's emergence as military superpower? No. Neither will the full list of CINC. CINC fails us completely here, since Brazil, which produces a respectable 40% of Russia's steel output is hardly a military power, let alone a global one. Not even close. As we can see, while CINC model gives us SOME important metrics which cannot be disregarded, it fails to answer to the question of what really constitutes a military power. But we already are creeping closer and closer to the answer. So, let's not procrastinate. CINC criteria are just a small part of the answer which is, following Herbert Spenser's logic, in the number of the enclosed technological (industrial) cycles nation possesses. It is quite obvious for any common sense and mildly educated person, with the exception of course of "liberal" so called economists and all other "expert" types who propagate their rubbish constantly in MSM. Yet, none other than late Samuel Huntington mentions what it takes. Remember?

Can US Still Save Itself? 

What defined "West's" domination was reduced to 14 points. West's domination (expiring as I am typing this) was achieved largely through military force. That's how it looks like.

1. Owns and operates the international banking system;

2. Controls all hard currencies;

3. Is the world's principal customer;

4. Provides the majority of the worlds finished goods;

5. Dominates international capital markets;

6. Exerts considerable moral leadership within many societies;

7. Is capable of massive military intervention;

8. Controls the sea lanes;

9. Conducts most advanced technical research and development;

10. Controls leading edge technical education;

11. Dominates access to space;

12. Dominates aerospace industry;

13. Dominates international communications;

14. Dominates the high-tech weapons industry. 

Out of those 14 points, highlighted 11, that is 78.6%, are directly connected to a very serious manufacturing or, in modern lingo, "real economy". If one throws away BS about "considerable moral leadership" (a delusion still propagated by Huntington's founded Foreign Policy magazine) and the point about control of all hard currencies, this share increases to 11 out of 12, that is roughly 92%.  It is also what makes one a military power. And even this list is still incomplete....

To Be Continued.....      

Military Power (Cont'd-2)

So, what is a "framework" for comparison? Speaking in a very broad terms, and here I am not writing an academic thesis, but rather a popular explanation on military power, a framework is a taxonomy (or set of taxonomies) of sorts which allows to relate military powers. Since even the American, usually highly globalist, set of doctrines emphasizes a nation-state as a primary player in global politics, we can refer ourselves to a popular metric known as the Composite Index Of National Capability (CINC) which is a measure of nation-state's six resources which are considered to be most important (or as Stephen Biddle defines them as "most consequential") for military (power). They are:

1. Military Personnel;

2. Military Expenditure;

3. Steel/Iron Production;

4. Energy Consumption;

5. Total Population;

6. Urban Population. 

This, oh, hell yes, taxonomy is a favorite "predictor" of victory and defeat for proponents of the Material Preponderance Theory of military power. The higher is the nation state's global share of those totals, the theory goes, the higher is the score and, consequently, the more it is militarily powerful. It is, obviously, calculated as an arithmetic average (mean). You can review those basic, 5th grade level, formulas in Wiki, as well as review the ranking of nations in according to CINC. 

    Composite Index Of National Capability

Even after the brief review of both: "math" behind this theory and the table, granted it is from 2007, it becomes painfully clear that the theory is either wrong or incomplete, which is a "softer" version of wrong. I would suggest the latter, while Stephen Biddle went further and altogether discounted (or even rejected) all available "military power" theories in favor of his own (in reality, not) "theory" of forces deployment as a main predictor of victory or defeat. He wrote a good book on this issue, which is worthy of reading, but Biddle's "predictors" are still NOT ENOUGH, nor his "sample space" creates enthusiasm among true aficionados of military history:

         

WORTH READING.

Here we encounter couple of terms, which are the part of any military doctrine--Victory and Defeat. Doctrines, of course, are not written for achieving a defeat but are developed for the opposite objective--achieving a victory. We will review what defeat and victory are later, but for now, we should ask ourselves a question of how much is missing in those, obviously incomplete, 6 points of the CINC. This brings us back to the square one--WHAT FOR military power.We also have to define Superpower or fairly trendy Hyperpower. This hyperpower term is very popular in the midst of neocon Parnassus which is well known for its outlandish military and geopolitical "theories" but, since the term exists, we may as well define what is behind it.  

We start with defensive posture in CINC framework in order not to become overly general and not to reduce the argument to platitudes. 


1. Military Personnel.

This refers to numbers and quality of armed forces' personnel and mobilization resources of the nation (remember, we are talking about nation-states?). In general, it is about how good nation's actual military people are and how good (and large) are its mobilization resources. Couple of the major metrics of the military personnel quality are its educational and intellectual capabilities. They, those capabilities, translate directly into combat capability, especially on the modern battlefield which started to emerge during WW II. Sensors' and computers' paradigm shift happened already on the battlefields of WW II and by 1960s satellites, radar, modern communications, advanced sonar, new materials, new ammunition, gyro-inertial navigation complexes and advanced weapon systems became  every-day reality of modern armed forces. That meant only one thing--a requirement for modern soldier and, especially, sailor to be prepared and educated well enough to operate a very complex military technology. 

Enter Admiral Rickover, who, as early as 1950s, recognized the importance of this "personnel' issue and, as he usually did with anything, created a lot of commotion. So much so that US educational establishment was forced to publicly debate him, especially in regards to what Rickover defined as...."Russian educational menace" (c)

 Russian Educational Menace.

While Western Cold War propaganda was portraying Soviets as backward and robot-like, the shocker of Sputnik forced Life Magazine to seriously re-evaluate the reality and when it did:

Life Magazine 


it turned out that average Soviet public school graduate was receiving three times more instructions in math, physics, chemistry and biology than it was stipulated for the entrance to....Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT). That fact had a major strategic ramifications. Rickover got the message. Yet, the myth of educational (that is qualitative) superiority of the US military personnel endured, and continues to endure, despite the fact that even today, after two decades of debilitating and criminal reforms, Russian (forget Soviet) public school education, especially when it comes down to STEM instructions is far superior to the American one. Obviously, it absolutely doesn't mean that every military man of Soviet/Russian Armed Forces was or is Einstein reincarnate,  absolutely not. Both yesterday and today Russian Armed Forces continue to have a substantial number of the dumbest sons of bitches who would make Three Stooges look like geniuses. What it all means, is that on average intellectually Soviet/Russian enlisted military personnel was at least on par with the best (read American, as it is a popular point, at least in US) military personnel and thus was capable always (as 75 years of recent history proved beyond the shadow of a doubt) to be very adaptive to the modern battlefield and capable of operating most complex weapon systems effectively. It also means that in terms of trainability, that is ability to obtain and hone most complex combat skills, Russian average military man is....well, pretty good. In Soviet/Russian combat training methodology those are still known as Complex of ZNU (Znaniya, Navyki and Umenia--Knowledge, Skills and, ahem, Skills again). I would leave elaborations on IQ and its distribution issue to Anatoly Karlin, after all, if not for his post on military power, I, probably, wouldn't write anything dedicated to this specific issue for a long-long while. As per officer corps, I will touch upon it later. 

The question here is: can this complex of skills or, more generally, educational-intellectual capability to fight modern war be quantified? Yes, it can. In fact it was quantified long ago. For anyone, even remotely acquainted with combat training, it is known that most of the tasks carried out by military personnel are split into the set of constituent elements which are described by numbers. From the time it takes a soldier (sailor) to get his personal weapon ready to be used and standard deviations while shooting targets (or enemy) to the times of changing damaged block in radar or dealing with any issue of ship's or sub's damage control--everything was quantified. Hence the regimented  and, frankly, quite uncomfortable existence of military professionals the world over. Once we get those numbers, we can, theoretically, compare the quality of military personnel, by going number by number of every conceivable element of combat training and operations, granted, of course, that those numbers will become available after being declassified. Hell, we can always  play games with some functionality and use exponential function as a descriptive tool of the military personnel's quality. How about this:

  Quality= Ce^(quality of shooting+quality of eating+quality of running + quality of whatever)


As long as we assign numerical coefficient to any quality, speaking in a very generalized manner, we can always concoct some sort of the metric. This metric can give us some insight into what is going on. As an example, after Royal Navy's disastrous acquaintance with Exoset missiles during Falkland's War in 1982 and the loss of HMS Sheffield, US Navy made correct conclusions and when USS Stark got hit by two Exocets in 1987 the crew of Stark have, certainly, given an excellent account of themselves while fighting for ship's survival. The ship survived and, eventually, returned to the fleet. In this respect, that is damage control, Stark's crew exhibited an excellent capability or quality. The problem of this metric, however, is in this coefficient C in our:

                 Ce^(whatever the hell we want to put here)

We can quantify whatever we want and, if we have too much time on our hands, we can delve even deeper into the fascinating world of mathematics. After all, there are numerical expressions of even geopolitics, such as Vladimir Potehin's Theorems of Strategic Advantages Of Central Localities. If anyone wants to see how our world could be quantified, you can see it here:

     Potehin, Theorems Of Geopolitics (In Russian)

 

This looks about right;-) I am being facetious, of course. We are not going to go  deep into the math, with the exception of Lanchester-Osipov's differential equations, really simple ones, and some Salvo Modelling, which is even simpler. The problem with this coefficient C is in fact that it is realistically not quantifiable. After all, wars are fought by PEOPLE, humans and we are very complex machines, especially so under duress which what military service actually is--cascading stages of constant duress.  Remember Napoleon's maxim that in war "The moral is to the physical as three to one".

Napoleon Maxims 

How can we give number to this "C"?  How can we quantify morale? The trick is, we still can do it but we have to consider a culture. As Brereton Greenhouse recites in his The Israeli Experience when speaking about Arab and Israeli pilots: "Courage they had in abundance, but they lacked "the high degree of our (Israeli) pilots' personal identification with their assignments...." ...There also was the unquantifiable psychological element explained by the Israeli flight leader who reported on the combat. "A good pilot", he said, "is not merely a mixture of skill, resourcefulness, discipline and good judgement, but also, even primarily, an outgrowth of the spiritual values and the cultural level which have nurtured him..." 
"Case Studies In The Achievement Of Air Superiority", Editor Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Center For Air Force History, Washington, D.C., 1994, page 580.

Here we are getting into the field of factors which produced things of the magnitude of Brest Fortress, USS Samuel Roberts (DE 413), Cruiser Varyag and Stalingrad. That will require very serious elaborations and we are not even half-way through discussion of the Military Personnel factor. 

To be continued..........