Why Scott's Article Is Importnat...

... in illustrating a delusion NATO planners exercise. As was stated ad nauseam--your software is good only as the information, or data sets, you feed it. If it is Garbage In, Garbage Out is inevitable. As Scott points out about Bundeswehr's KORA:

When one examines the structure of a KORA-based simulation, it becomes clear that the system is completely dependent upon the various inputs which define the simulation as a whole. Every aspect of the simulation is derived from the parameters programmed by those responsible for overseeing the training. While one would hope that the training overseers would conduct the simulation with a modicum of professional integrity, unless both the NATO trainers and their Ukrainian students were infused with Lemming-like suicidal qualities, there had to be significant modification and alteration of critical data points to generate an outcome capable of motivating the Ukrainian forces to agree to the attack. ...The Orekhov axis of advance was designed to exploit a seam between the 291st and 70th Motorized Rifle Regiments of the Russian 42nd Motorized Rifle Division. The “behavior agents” programmed by the NATO trainers appeared to treat the Russians – especially those from the 70th Regiment – as poorly trained, poorly led, poorly equipped, and poorly motivated troops. In short, NATO trainers compensated for the inability of Ukraine to assemble forces capable of performing even the most basic of suppression tasks by predicting the inevitable collapse of the will on the part of the Russian soldiers to resist.

I am on record--NATO militaries operate based on propaganda, top-bottom. Rare islands of tactical and operational competence are isolated and have no influence on the parade of military illiteracy, shoddy intelligence and a complete lack of understanding modern warfare on part of NATO. Many of those Western "military experts" derive their conclusions often based on computer simulations and war-gaming which often operates in GIGO mode--Garbage In-Garbage Out. Moreover, as was stated not for once, many Russian front-line officers and NCOs speak about recognition of NATO training of VSU units but immediately state that it is subpar. No surprise here--one cannot learn anything of value from Gulf Wars or from losing in Afghanistan and elsewhere insofar as the combined arms operations of scale go. SMO is gigantic in its scale and is beyond NATO experiences. 

This is not the first time, already in early 1990s computer simulation of the war in US Naval War College delivered an astonishing result when "predicted" that Soviet Navy's MAIN strike force of pr. 949A Oscar-II SSGNs will manage only ONE successful launch of its P-700 Granit ASMs at US naval asset, while giving much more credence to Soviet.. torpedo only subs. Evidently the idea that M=2 supersonic, 500 kilometer range salvo of missiles with reliable targeting provided by MKRC Legenda was so alien to US naval strategists that they couldn't recognize the coming of new technological paradigm in naval warfare, until late Captain Wayne Hughes declared, brilliantly, the arrival of it in 2000--40 years after Russians deployed first serious anti-shipping missiles. By that time it was too late for the US Navy which is faced with overwhelming power of missile salvos which it cannot reliably defend against. 

Bad basic education, starting from Western public schools, especially in STEM, shoddy academic level in military educational institutions, a complete myth-based curricula in tactics, operations, weak STEM backgrounds, historical illiteracy and hidden, suppressed complex of inferiority--these are the traits of modern NATO "planners" and military leaders who are utterly unqualified to fight at the modern battlefield. So, no surprise then that they live in a virtual world of primitive Rooskies, badly trained, badly educated, with low morale. We saw it all paraded for the whole world to see in the last two weeks of VSU "counteroffensive" which turned into the slaughter of VSU personnel and NATO equipment. They still cannot wrap their brains around this simple idea that they are in the lower league. 

Speaking of which:

German energy prices have skyrocketed over the past year, leading several companies to consider relocating to cheaper locations. Siegfried Russwurm, the head of the German Industry Federation (BDI), stated that the energy situation is bad enough for companies to seriously consider relocating their operations. Russwurm explained “A lot of family-owned companies... have very operational plans to relocate” due to the plethora of obstacles they are facing in Germany.  While a lot of Germany-headquartered businesses are seeing success on a global scale, many are finding it difficult to operate within Germany. The slow and complex German bureaucracy has further exacerbated the challenges. This week, Economy Minister Robert Habeck discussed the issue of companies looking to relocate. Habeck stated: “In my view, Germany is an attractive location for both new and existing companies… Of course, materials industries are under pressure as a result of higher energy prices, but there are political decisions to be made.” 

This is just the start. It will accelerate dramatically in coming months.  "Germany is an attractive location"? Really? What is he smoking? But then again, for uneducated and uncultured hacks who infest modern Western political and military "elites"--war is peace, black is white and vice-versa, and Rooskies are backward people. In related news, I doubt most Western cadets of military officer schools in NATO countries will survive programs of Russian military academies with their grueling engineering and tactical-operational training. In related news, Germany is not welcome in Russia anymore.

German exports to Russia fell sharply in May 2023 compared to last year figures, data from the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) showed on Thursday. According to the calculations, exports dropped by 36.7% to €700 million ($760 million). Russia slid to 16th place among Germany’s major export partners outside the EU (third countries). In February 2022, prior to the conflict in Ukraine and the ensuing EU sanctions on Moscow, Russia ranked fifth.

And as it was 82 years ago, German Panzers are burning again in the fields of Russia.

OK, Babylon Bee...

... are funny. I mean it.  

U.S. Tanks In Ukraine Already Destroyed After Being Easily Recognized By Their Rainbow Camouflage "These tanks are state of the art, boasting the latest and greatest in firepower, mobility, and of course LGBTQ-affirming camouflage," said Biden's Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Like this:

OK, jokes aside. But many people do get anxious about the situation and the anxiety is strategic, not tactical. 80 or 81 promised tanks for 404 will change absolutely nothing but many naturally are worried about real WW III which evolves into the full blown nuclear exchange. Even Irina Alksnis, writing about the West getting caught in its own trap, notes:

На что пойдет Запад, чтобы удержать, продлить привычный статус-кво? Есть подозрение, что на все.Он выбрал инструментом своего спасения военную победу над Россией. Сейчас Запад катится по выбранной колее и все сильнее нервничает, потому что события разворачиваются не так, как он ждал, планировал и хотел. Уже в скором времени ему придется отвечать на вопрос, готов ли он к встрече лицом к лицу на украинском поле боя вермахта, то есть, простите, бундесвера, и других вооруженных сил НАТО с российской армией.

Translation: What will the West do to keep and prolong the usual status quo? There is a suspicion that everything. It chose a military victory over Russia as an instrument of its salvation. Now the West is rolling along the chosen track and is getting more and more nervous, because events are not unfolding the way they expected, planned and wanted. Soon he will have to answer the question of whether he is ready for a face-to-face meeting on the Ukrainian battlefield of the Wehrmacht, that is, excuse me, the Bundeswehr, and other NATO armed forces with the Russian army.

 

I have the answer, which I spelled out for many months now--NATO doesn't have a required force to go in and fight Russia conventionally without sustaining catastrophic losses and, thus, defeat. The challenges of even assembling such a force are so immense that the only tool the US (the rest of NATO are merely lapdogs) has left at its disposal is nuclear arsenal. But we discussed this before, but even most possessed hawks in the US have a desire to live. Is there serious "underground" in the US among military, intel and other relevant communities who keep an eye on those homicidal maniacs, just in case? I don't know, but at least some people in Pentagon have an idea, unlike ti is the case with civilian "strategists" abusing their sinecures in State Department, think-tankdom and other decision making and "influencer" orgs. 

 

As the intermediate results of SMO and 404 debacle for the combined West have shown, we can now confidently state that West and its military cannot do serious strategic and operational planning. Evidently, explaining to many graduates of the USMA at West Point a colossal difference in terms of scale, scope and severity between Patton's 3rd Army Lorraine Campaign and, say, tank battles on the Eastern Front is a tall order. But I spoke on the issue of military schools of thought and how they are formed on very many occasions. We also can confidently state that Western intelligence on a strategic level is simply inadequate, to put it mildly. After all, it is manned by people who are products of primarily humanities field of higher education in the West and we all know what an academic disaster and fraud it is today. So, no wonder we are talking about the same level of miscalculation as was done by Napoleon, Hitler and his planners and now, naturally, the same song sang into the ears of uncultured and unsophisticated US "specialists" by Kiev Regime's propagandists, such as this, from Jamestown Foundation.

Colossus With Feet of Clay

So, when looking at all this today and taking it all in, ine begins to suspect that even the brightest of the brightest from the West's "intellectual" class, including very many from the top brass have no clue about the meaning of the big words they use. Evidently, the meaning of strategy, operational art, operational planning, combined arms, echeloning, calculation of required force, political and military objectives et al, are things most in the West simply have no grasp of. It is a terrifying discovery until one gets everything into proper perspective. Recall this again:

Washington Post in a rare, albeit politically sanctioned, feat of actual journalism provided us with an astonishing insight into military, diplomatic, intelligence and economic incompetence of Washington.

The Lessons Learned interviews contradict years of public statements by presidents, generals and diplomats. The interviews make clear that officials issued rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. Several of those interviewed described explicit efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public and a culture of willful ignorance, where bad news and critiques were unwelcome.  

We are talking about the country stuck in the middle ages and its mujaheddin armed with AK-47s, RPG-7s and IEDs. How these losers in Washington thought they can take on the nuclear, military and economic superpower defies imagination. Washington is afflicted with learning disability, forget plain simple incompetence across the board. Does this sound familiar?

Dozens of U.S. and Afghan officials told interviewers that many of the U.S. policies and initiatives — from training Afghan forces to fighting the thriving opium trade — were destined to fail because they were based on flawed assumptions about a country they didn’t understand. 

Washington doesn't have government and academic mechanisms for understanding. Those, always subpar, have been completely hollowed out in the last 20 years by shysters from Military-Industrial Complex, think-tanks and grievance industry. We see the results today. It is not that Washington operates in the Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) paradigm, while the model is correct. Nope, the model itself is garbage because is built around the only thing Western elites are capable of and that is PR. You know, in layman's lingo--bullshit.

OO From OODA In Relation To GIGO.

As in Colonel Boyd's Loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Our brilliant artist Veritas Semper Vincit summarized two "Os" (Observe and Orient) brilliantly in one painting: 

We observe the financial Black Hole which consumes the United States, and huge parts of the world tied directly to US "finances", and the information from the fronts is getting, as is expected, even worse:

The U.S. Labor Department released fresh data on Thursday morning that showed the effect of the novel coronavirus on employment in the U.S. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits spiked to a record-breaking 6.648 million for the week ending March 28. Consensus expectations were for 3.76 million claims. The prior week’s figure was revised higher to 3.307 million claims from 3.283 million. Prior to the week ending March 21, the previous record was 695,000 claims filed the week ended October 2, 1982. 

My only question is this: how the heck did they manage to miscalculate that badly? What is consensus, anyway? Economics is not a precise science, nor is statistics related to such issues as unemployment, pandemic, political preferences or, for that matter, climate change. The attempts to stick all those processes into some mathematical models are merely feeble attempts to move beyond Observe into the Orient stage in the Boyd's Loop, aka the intelligent decision making framework. In this particular case, transition from Observe to Orient is very difficult, because most of those "models" do not really work. In fact, they never did. E.g. how many people in this statistics are really unemployed? Did anyone count people who simply dropped out of job search even BEFORE this shitstorm, and who never were counted in order to create an illusion that unemployment was relatively low. Here is how the dry percentage numbers of people who simply gave up on jobs translates into a number of actual human lives BEFORE the shitstorm, in 2019:

From about the late 1980s until 2008, the participation rate fluctuated around 66% to 67%. But after the Great Recession, the rate dropped more 3 percentage points over the next seven years and has barely budged since. The latest jobs report shows it’s at 62.8%.The 3 percentage points decline in participation translates to over 6 million people no longer in the labor force. 

When taken into consideration, the actual unemployment rate before Covid-19 was very high, but corrupt US media wouldn't even try to communicate in facts in order to cover for Obama's disastrous economic and social policies. But when OODA is substituted with GIGO (Garbage In-Garbage Out) one would expect a disastrous outcome . In a statistical alternative universe of US exceptionalism across the board, from "low" unemployment numbers, to Trump losing out to Hillary in most "opinion" polls, to America's defeating Nazism almost single-handedly, there is a constant flavor of Voodoo about American statistical reality. This Voodoo constantly keeps people off balance, because they begin to exist simultaneously in several realities, akin to a bizarre and, I admit, addictive world of David Lynch's 3rd Season of Twin Peaks. I will yet to write on this cinematographic masterpiece. 

Models in US "economy" do not work, they never did because they failed to account for a stochastic black hole of "irrational exuberance" which sucked into its event horizon last vestiges of common sense and rational behavior which insured that:

“Economic data in the near future will be not just bad, but unrecognizable,” Credit Suisse economists led by James Sweeney wrote last week. “Anomalies will be ubiquitous and old statistical relationships within economic data or between market and macro data might not always hold... There is no blueprint for the current shock, and uncertainty about the extent of contagion and the economic consequences is overwhelming.”

"Might not always hold"? Really? When did they hold? Can this "economist" even grasp the fact that most statistics and "models" Western neo-liberal economists worshiped are in the foundation in the West's dramatic decline? Covid-19 merely lifted the curtain hiding the ugly reality of the financial gang-rape of the productive forces and the wealth transfer from so many in the disappearing middle class into the hands of so few. And we didn't deal with the REAL inflation yet. When this tsunami hits, expect the unexpected...albeit, what am I talking about--"the unexpected", "the sudden", "not anticipated" have been wrecking havoc with US domestic and foreign policies for too long now to expect fast, hopefully, recovery. I do not even want to go into the worst case scenario:

GIGO.

Ah, now, some interesting facts about Italy's pandemic begin to emerge. As Russians say--it doesn't matter how many, it matters who (pun is unintended) counts. As Ria reports (in Russian) there is a teeny-weeny "issue" with the high mortality rate (emphasis on "rate") in Italy because, as it is worded, of the "method of testing" (in Russian). Namely, the issue I am writing about non-stop and appeal to everyone to wait for the larger data set. Well, guess what: as deputy director of WHO stated today, Italy changed the method of testing, due to, get this, shortage of test kits and counts only "confirmed" cases against deaths and here is the direct quote of this WHO deputy director: if the mortality rate would have been calculated against the number of actually infected, which, and I quote, would raise the number of infected many times--the mortality rate would have been much lower. Pardon my French, no shit! 

As was predicted (well, by me) we are dealing with a classic GIGO--Garbage In, Garbage Out. It absolutely doesn't mean that serious measures against Covid-19 shouldn't be taken, they should. But as it is always the case in operational assessments in military, one thing you always need is a reliable verifiable data. One cannot base decision on unconfirmed and un-weighted, that is processed for their probability of being accurate, reports based on opinions of limited number of observers (sensors), military people invented Sensor-Data Fusion for that and have well-agreed upon mathematical apparatus which accounts for probabilistic assessment. I can report that my forces destroyed 50% of enemy's forces based on observations of the front line, but they will tell me nothing (unless I am aware by means of ISR) about the state of reserves which are moving and, once reserves are counted, by percentages describing super-pooper "victory" will drop dramatically from 50% to much lower number.  Even in the old times of steam when navigating oceans, when using Sextant to get a position line form individual celestial body, navigators would take usually five-six measurements within equal short intervals of time to average (that is partially resolve uncertainty) the measurement before applying it. Similar algorithms today are realized in optronic means of navigation and targeting--non-stop measuring, with constant averaging. Of course, today it is done by modern processors. 

This all doesn't mean that Italy is not in danger, but it does raise the issue which I raised few days ago: we are yet to learn (hopefully) how WHO arrived to a decision to declare a pandemic globally. There ARE questions about this decision and the panic which ensued. Russia, meanwhile, is operating the air bridge to Italy, the tenth military cargo landed just very recently near Rome, and efforts to contain and prevent will continue in earnest.  But after all is done and over with, we must ask ourselves a question even maroons in NYT are beginning to ask themselves--didn't we all go a "bit" too far? Meanwhile in good ol' USA Congress, as is expected, cannot do anything of value, being embroiled in.... normal political process. 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate's drive to pass a $1-trillion-plus coronavirus response bill remained stymied late on Sunday, as Democrats held out for more money to help state and local governments and hospitals, while Republicans urged quick action to give financial markets a sign of encouragement. Earlier on Sunday, the Senate failed to get the necessary 60 votes in the 100-member chamber to get the Republican plan over a procedural hurdle after days of negotiations, with 47 senators voting in favor and 47 opposed. Later on Sunday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, announced he would hold a repeat vote early on Monday, only to be blocked by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

Isn't it wonderful? I guess that is how it is supposed to work. Right? It is finally raining today around Seattle, after two very dry weeks. One of the main ways Covid-19, or any other virus, spreads, apart from direct contact, is a an air-droplet way. Rain is a welcome relief from early Spring allergies and raising humidity to levels which help blocking all kind of airborne shit. I am in the mood for the melody.