I understand your affiliation with Germany, but Germany's economic reality is such that it will be reduced to a second world (already in progress) status at best, at worst--it will cease to exist if Berlin will continue with its policies. The "roaring back" has no foundation in real life and indicators are all over the place.
Secondly, these were not "wrong weapons", these were the ONLY weapons the US has and they are not only wrong, they are utterly ineffective. So are strategies and operational concepts of the US Armed Forces. Media PR campaigns never produced impression on Russian military with beating third rate Iraq and especially "operations" in 2003--largely due to, and you guessed it, buying out corrupt Iraqi generals by CIA. Real wars are fought differently, on a completely different bases of real productive economy and serious approach to war planning. This is completely absent from the US military machine since Vietnam. But I agree, it is a tectonic shift which started once the bluff has been called.
NATO doesn't do strategy, in fact--most in it do not have even a fleeting grasp of what strategy is and how to match critical resources to political aims--you know, the reason why wars are fought.
Pentagon (I omit here amateurs from European armies) doesn't do strategy--one cannot do strategy based on own military fairy tales and Wall Street "economic" indices. But that is what they teach in NATO's military academies. So, Trump is free to sign on whatever it wants, but it gives me a great pleasure to point out, despite our irreconcilable differences on Russian history of the the 20th century, our almost word in word assessment of the Western militaries.
You cannot overcome this cultural and mental block, period. And let's state very clearly, in fact, stress it--a MAJOR factor driving speeches and actions of such people like Stavridis or Keane is an insufferable professional jealousy and envy. Just to demonstrate another one fairy tales narrator from the US military--now Army Europe Chief General Donahue:
Somebody has to explain to him, that everything he was taught and knows about "war" (he never saw one) is largely police operations' mangled pseudo-strategic BS. I guess he still doesn't understand that the pivot of all US Army Field Manuals those proverbial "long-range fires" are not even in the same universe with what Russian Army fields today. And if he wants to "take" Kaliningrad, Russia will take out first any column of NATO troops moving towards Kaliningrad and if that will not help, she will take out Washington and most US bases around the world. But then again, this is the simple truth I try to convey for the last decade--choose your own league. Roger Waters gets it when explains that the US doesn't understand who did it get itself entangled with, but he is a musician--granted, a genius one--evidently US generals don't.
But I am sure this came as a surprise for Washington, not! And the "horror" doesn't stop here:
In addition, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told Russian daily
Vedomosti that BRICS Bridge could provide member states an opportunity
to make settlements using digital assets of central banks linked to
national currencies.
You see, that is what happens when one begins to think that the it (in case of a nation) is a measure of everything and everyone, while being rather oblivious to a lucky coincidence of circumstances which provided the US with a winning lottery ticket in 1945. Now, the winnings have been completely squandered on self-aggrandizing and cultural suicide. Which brings us to this.
People, rightly, point out that Colonel Macgregor continues to perpetuate fairy tales about USSR/Russia and WW II. Keep in mind, Macgregor is a product of the American military education and cultural milieu whose foundation is a a set of confabulated (in reality--stolen valor) military history and primitive propaganda, which in Colonel's case is exacerbated by him being subjected in Germany to German "version" of history, that is to say a complete crap. Colonel doesn't speak Russian, he has zero understanding of Russian idiosyncrasies and, of course, he has never been to Podolsk (Main Archive of Russian Armed Forces) and doesn't know real history of Russia and Russian military. The result is predictable, his continuous repetition of the primitive propaganda (GULAG, one million "executed" RKKA soldiers et al) most likely is a defensive reaction to the exposure of the United States and its Army as an obsolete force with a dismal war record.
Being a man of honor, he tries to be objective admitting West's decline, but he remains an American exceptionalist and will continue to be such sinking deeper into the cognitive dissonance and disregarding real historians and real Russia scholars. Hence his recent book is a complete military scholarship catastrophe, which included dear to him Battle of 73 Easting, which he included, together with inconsequential Battle of Mons into the list of "Five battles that changed the face of modern war". I can only reproduce the diagnosis by great Michael Brenner:
Americanism provides a Unified Field Theory of self-identity, collective enterprise, and the Republic’s enduring meaning. When one element is felt to be in jeopardy, the integrity of the whole edifice becomes vulnerable. In the past, American mythology energized the country in ways that helped it to thrive. Today, it is a dangerous hallucinogen that traps Americans in a time warp more and more distant from reality. There is a muted reflection of this strained condition in the evident truth that Americans have become an insecure people. They grow increasingly anxious about who they are, what they are worth and what life will be like down the road.
You can see manifestations of this insecurity all over the place, and Macgregor is not an exception. So, in his imagination, more Russians must be executed personally by Stalin for him to grasp at the last straw of America's "high moral ground" trying to defend indefensible.
P.S. How Brusilov's Offensive which dwarfs Battle of Mons in every single respect and laid the foundation for Deep Operations didn't make Colonel's list is a sheer mystery... not.
