What's Next In Arms Race? Or, The Forms Must Be Obeyed.

Daniel Larison arrived three days ago to a conclusion that Donald Trump Doesn't Know How to Negotiate. Well, we have known that for quite some time now. As Larison notes:

As we have seen, Trump’s bullying, maximalist approach does not work with other governments, and this approach cannot work because the president sees everything as a zero-sum game and winning requires the other side’s capitulation. The result is that no government gives Trump anything and instead all of them retaliate in whatever way is available to them. He can’t agree to a mutually beneficial compromise because he rejects the idea that the other side might come away with something. Because every existing agreement negotiated in the past has required some compromise on our government’s part, he condemns all of them as “terrible” because they did not result in the other party’s surrender.  

Of course, the foundation of this lack of negotiating skills--yeah, let's say it is just that, for now--is common for pretty much majority of US power elite--it is a malignant belief in own exceptionalism. Trump is flesh and blood of this culture, it is just that not having any serious scholarly nourishment or life experiences beyond the NYC real estate hustling, he delivers the message in the most crude and risible form. So, Trump is merely a cruder, less sophisticated form of US elites. He, most likely after brainwashing by his very own so called national security team, simply finished off INF Treaty. He, quite naturally, blamed Russia for violating this Treaty and, in two weeks after INF Treaty's demise, the United States launched the missile outlawed by this very treaty, thus creating a variety, of mostly sarcastic, reactions in Moscow, who, as we all know from the ever truthful US media, was blatantly violating the said treaty. The whole situation could have been really comedic, if not for it being very serious and that was precisely the mood with which Vladimir Putin responded to, what we all knew for years now, inevitable deployment of American TLAMs in the Aegis Ashore installations and other places in Europe. 

Russia says it won’t sit idle after the US tested a missile that was banned by the INF. As a response, Moscow has an ace up its sleeves and it won’t need to enter into a Cold War-style arms race, military analysts have told RT.No longer bound by the milestone Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) – which the US unilaterally scrapped – Washington recently tested a ground-launched version of its Tomahawk cruise missile.On Friday, Russian president Vladimir Putin said he is not up for an all-out arms race, but ordered the military to evaluate and find reciprocal answers. So, what is Russia likely to have in store to counter the emerging threat?

First, let's recall what the INF Treaty was about and why the United States decided to kill it. As was stated not for once, INF Treaty was extremely favorable to the United States for a while because it didn't cover sea-launched intermediate range weapons--a precise domain in which in the end of 1980s the United States had a vast advantage over Soviet Union, whose main intermediate-range strike capabilities were land-based. Cretin Gorbachev and his "team", in the moment of utter insanity, unilaterally threw in, for a good measure, Operational-Tactical Missile complex (OTR-23) Oka to be eliminated. Then, the USSR collapsed and Russia has unilaterally, again, this time through the will of alcoholic Boris and his team of thieves and robber-barons turned herself into the door mat for the combined West. In fact, by the end of 1990s it was difficult to see how Russia's military could recover at all, granted it was sabotaged every step of the way by Russia's "liberal" political top. Yet, here we are in 2019 and one has to wonder if Russia is realistically sorry because of INF Treaty demise. I don't think she is. 

I kept my focus on this issue for years now. Recall my series of posts  titled The Perils of Mosquito. Or, for that matter, my prediction (even before Putin's historic speech to Federal Assembly on March 1, 2018) that, at that time (2017), Russia's existing cruise missile arsenal was more than enough to provide for what Russian Military Doctrine of 2014 called a "power (as in force) strategic containment by conventional high-precision stand-off weapons".  Remember this? 

Iran knows for sure that should the unthinkable but not improbable happen, such as an American attack on the Russian forces in Syria, Iran will not be left standing on the side—she gets immediately “involved” whether she wants it or not. So, the logic goes, why not make the best of it when all bets, other than nuclear, will be off. Iran may as well have Russian forces on her side and in her airspace, which, obviously helps significantly. But that also opens another serious operational possibility in case of a real conventional conflict in the area between Russia and the US—a scenario Neocons, due to their military illiteracy and overall detachment from the strategic reality, are dreaming about. Putting inevitable emotions aside and looking at the factual side of things, Russia’s Military Doctrine since 2010, reaffirmed in 2014 Edition, views the use of stand-off High Precision as a key in strategic force containment, as Article 26 of a doctrine clearly states. Russia doesn’t want war with the US, but if push comes to shove Russia is totally capable of not only reaching US ground assets, such as CENTCOM’s Qatar forward installation but, what is even more significant, also the naval ones in the Persian Gulf.  

Then came the Speech and a tectonic shift in the warfare which pushed warfare beyond present capabilities of the American military-industrial complex. One of many hints that (real) professionals in the US understand what they are facing now was this, four days ago:  

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon is pulling the plug on a billion-dollar, technically troubled project to build a better weapon that would destroy incoming missiles. The move is aimed in part at considering new approaches to missile defense at a time of rapid technological change. The announced reason for canceling the Boeing contract, effective Thursday, was that the project’s design problems were so significant as to be either insurmountable or too costly to correct. Beyond those immediate concerns, the Pentagon is considering whether it needs to start over with designing a defense against intercontinental-range ballistic missiles, such as those North Korea aspires to build, as well as newly emerging types of missiles.

Pay attention to text highlighted in yellow. Those "newly emerging types of the missiles" are precisely those hyper-sonic maneuvering quasi-ballistic and cruise missiles which Russia developed for all three domains (land, air, sea) for her armed forces and those are already deployed. The only "response" the United States has at its disposal is to go for quantity of good ol' subsonic iterations of venerable Tomahawk and all kinds of other slow variations of TLAMs such as JASSM or allegedly super-pooper "magical" weapon such as CHAMP. All this is fine and dandy, but the issue for the United States is two fold:

1. She doesn't have hyper-sonic weapons and is years, if not decades, away from fielding a working prototype, forget IOC or fully deployed weapon system. 

2. Unlike Russia, American anti-missile systems are....well...let's recall what Publius Tacitus wrote about that:

A friend of mine who has expertise in these matters wrote me: Any air defense engineer with a security clearance that isn't lying through his teeth will admit that Russia's air defense technology surpassed us in the 1950's and we've never been able to catch up. The systems thy have in place surrounding Moscow make our Patriot 3's look like fucking nerf guns.

S-500 is already in serial production. What's coming next is simply a matter of speculation but it has to be understood that Russia not only is capable to match and then over-match greatly any strike capability of NATO in Europe or in US proper, Russia has means to blunt if not to completely repulse a massive strike of slow subsonic or theater ballistic missiles on her territory.  Numbers should help. 


Putin and his advisers continue to express concern with TLAMs being loaded into the MK-41 cells of Aegis Ashore in Deveselu, Romania, and Redzikowo, Poland. Even the brief glance on the map allows to conclude that Polish site will be primarily a threat to Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, due to a relatively short flight time of about 15 minutes (140 miles between Redzikowo and Kaliningrad), while missiles launched from Deveselu would have to be airborne for at least 40 minutes, including half of a path over water, to strike Sevastopol. 40 minutes is a very good time to not only have anti-missile complexes completely engaged (well, 15 minutes is also fairly generous) but to have response delivered to European facilities and to launch at North America. Strategically, in military terms, for Russia very little changes in terms of ratio of forces. In fact, as I write non-stop for years, Russia has qualitative edge over the United States in missile technologies for at least a decade, if not more. Russia's protestations, expected as they are, and having in them a very sincere component of traditional Russian aversion towards any kind of hostilities and arms races, are, nevertheless, primarily of the Frank Herbert's Dune Landsraad's tradition of "The Forms Must be Obeyed". 

But, diplomatic and media-PR posturing apart, military balance sheet between Russia and NATO in Europe in case, God forbids, of the serious escalation is very clear. NATO (US that is) has a salvo and has no defense against the response to put it in layman's lingo. NATO can launch at Russia and hope that some of it's salvo, most of it subsonic and fairly easily defended against, will leak through multilayered state-of-the-art anti-missile defense. What comes in response against Europe and US cannot be defended against--US has nothing in its arsenal that can meet and blunt dramatically the salvo of supersonic weapons, against hyper-sonic weapons--zero defenses and this will stay such for a long while in this strategic tic-tac-toe game in Europe. Of course, this is European contingency, there is also a Chinese, of Far East, one, but Russian response will be about the same--new anti-missile complexes and new strike weapons on the Far East. 

Meanwhile, Russia continues to evolve as Eurasian primary military power pole and new massive military exercises Center-2019 are yet another proof of that:

Russia and seven of its allies, including China and India, will send 128,000 soldiers to train in mass anti-terrorism drills next month, the country’s Defense Ministry has announced. The upcoming maneuvers will take place a year after Russia and China staged 300,000-strong anti-missile exercises near the Chinese border. Those exercises, which were Russia's largest war games since the Cold War, took place amid heightened tension between the West and Moscow over NATO’s expansion in eastern Europe.Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that 20,000 pieces of equipment, 600 aircraft and up to 15 warships will be rolled out across eight Russian training grounds for the Tsentr-2019 (Center-2019) exercises in September.

These maneuvers will involve a wide use of Russian Armed Forces' combat internet and all those gizmos and gadgets of what came to be known as Net-centric Warfare. I guess Russia is getting ready to defend subcontinent after Mr. Trump declared that US defeated ISIS and it is now up to...well...read for yourself:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that other countries will need to take up the fight against Islamic State militants, citing Russia, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran as examples.Earlier this year, U.S.-backed forces reclaimed the last remaining territory once held by Islamic State militants in Syria. Since then, however, there has been concern about the militant group gaining new strength in Iraq and Syria."At a certain point Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, they're going to have to fight their battles," Trump told reporters at the White House, later saying India should also get involved."All of these other countries where ISIS is around ... all of these are going to have to fight," he said, adding that the United States did not want to spend "another 19 years" fighting the Afghan war.

Sure. United States wouldn't have spent those 19 years in Afghanistan if it wouldn't have aided those very mujaheddin in 1980s who, together with the remnants of a demolished Iraqi Army and other jihad-minded humanitarians, constituted the core of both Taliban and ISIS. But we all know that hindsight is a 20/20 vision and one has to think now how the new "arms race" initiated by the United States will be viewed in the hindsight twenty or so years down the road, granted we all survive Mr. Trump's lack of negotiating skills, including skills in recognizing that he surrounded himself with militarily incompetent neocon fanatics and Israeli-firsters who, together with Wall Street Neo-liberal economic fundamentalists, are behind America's demise in military, economic and geopolitical senses. One may add a mental one, too.

On Some Russian "Experts" And INF Treaty.

The urban dictionary defines Hussler as a person who gets money from other people. In general, a person who hussles. Of course there is another way to define operation of swindling, by using good ol' Hustling, which is:

The act of swindling by some fraudulent scheme; "that book is a fraud"

That's more like it. This is the issue I address on a regular bases when speaking about "expertdom" which both in US, Russia and elsewhere tries to present itself as the only voice of wisdom and which, most of the time has no real expertise in the subjects this "expertdom" tries to preach. Enter CAST, Moscow "Center of Analysis of Strategies and Technologies". The organization also known for maintaining a rather popular in some circles Blog BMPD which is an excellent platform for mutual insults and fanboys' exchanges on military toys. I communicated on some forums with one of the CAST "experts", Mikhail Barabanov, who among some people in Russia passes for "expert" in the navies, and who didn't serve a single day in uniform and has a degree from Moscow Institute of Culture, allegedly in either librarian or screenplay writing fields, something like that. Barabanov is known as a mindless and utterly incompetent herald of US Navy's "ideas" (without knowing anything of substance about them) and his main "expertise" is in memorizing types of weapons and some technical data and parroting mostly Western views on warfare. Just to give you some taste of his "expertise", here is his piece in...drum roll, where else, The National Interest. Generally, CAST is a classic hustler organization which shuffles among military people in Moscow, collects rumors and reads open press and after that calls itself an analytical organization. I read their views on Russian Navy once--a total strategic and operational delirium written by liberal amateurs.

But CAST's other big honchos, namely Kosnstantin Makienko, who is a graduate of famed MGIMO with specialty in...drum roll..."International Relations" and then of some French madras, also in some..something-something not really military, publishes yesterday a CAST's "manifesto" on the death of INF Treaty in Russian here. The article by Makienko, whose experience on a tactical, operational, weapons' design, integration and other relevant military issues is exactly zero (with the exception of reading open pop-military media), laments many things. I would have omitted addressing yet another "pearl" of strategic thinking by CAST but this one really interested me as a psychiatric case of utter ignoramuses firmly believing that they have capability to produce something sensible on a rather very complex issue of defense policy of Russia and America, this is not to mention the fact that Makienko, as well as all of CAST enterprise have a very vague idea about US economy and her military-industrial complex. 

Here is the opening wowser salvo of Makienko's "lament" from his symptomatically titled piece What is the Threat to the World from INF Treaty's Liquidation. 

Крах ДРСМД будет иметь для военной безопасности России чрезвычайно тяжелые последствия. Главную опасность представляет совершенно неминуемая разработка и развертывание Соединенными Штатами нового поколения баллистических ракет средней и меньшей дальности, в том числе с гиперзвуковыми блоками. Причем эта разработка может быть реализована в сжатые сроки. Не стоит впадать в прекраснодушное заблуждение относительно сегодняшнего предположительного американского отставания в области гиперзвука от России. Учитывая невероятную научную и технологическую мощь США, это отставание, если оно вообще существует, будет ликвидировано очень быстро. А принимая во внимание колоссальный американский индустриальный потенциал, необходимо исходить из того, что производство таких ракет легко может составить сотни и тысячи единиц.    

Translation: the crash of the INF Treaty will have an extraordinarily grave consequences for Russia's security. The main threat is inevitable development and deployment by the US of new generation of the intermediate range ballistic missiles, including with hyper-sonic blocks. Moreover, this development could be conducted within short time-frame. Do not fall for placid delusion regarding current US lagging behind Russia in hyper-sonic technology. Considering incredible scientific and technological power of the United States this gap, if it even exists, would be closed very fast. Moreover, considering colossal American industrial potential we need to assume that production of such missiles will easily number hundreds and thousands of units. 

I don't know where to start here, but I'll try. 

1. It is obvious that Mr. Makienko has a very vague idea of the genesis of INF Treaty and who and why signed it. Here, instead of me elaborating on this treaty, again, and again, I will only give the link to Dmitry Orlov's piece on this Treaty which will help.  

2. My real issue is this: there is very little doubt that the United States will develop new missiles and I stressed this simple fact non-stop whenever talking about hyper-sonic weapons for years. There is one little, teeny-weeny thing, though, of which Mr. Makienko--an obvious product of very "westernized" humanities education simply doesn't know--it is expected from experts in "international relations" who have zero military, industrial and technological background. Obviously, the horizon of Makienko's views on the United States is, at best, that of a tourist, at worst that of a consumer of American economic propaganda. I don't know if Makienko read this:

Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States.

If he didn't do this yet, I would strongly suggest he and his colleagues from CAST start studying this document in earnest. Because unlike them, I live and work (in real industry) in the United States and know this country quite well. Makienko uses rather outdated categories when speaking about American incredible scientific and technological power. United States still remains an industrial powerhouse but reality is such that it is nowhere near what it used to be in 1970s and 1980s. I'll quote for Mr. Makienko just one thing from Inter-agency Report to POTUS and if they do "analysis", as their title of CAST suggests, they better start learning real industrial economy and what serious manufacturing sector is.

Inadequate U.S. Skilled Labor Supply

The U.S. machine tools sector lacks assured access to a sufficiently large pool of skilled labor. Many skilled workers are exiting the workforce due to age, and there are too few technical educational programs to train those who could take their place. Without concerted action that provides both a ready workforce and a continuously-charged pipeline of new employees, the U.S. will not be able to maintain the large, vibrant, and diverse machine tools sector needed to produce the required number and types of products when needed. Market Forces Decreasing Domestic Capabilities The U.S. machine tools sector has been shrinking since at least the 1980s due to a number of primary and contributing factors with the U.S. standing dropping significantly since 2000.  In 2015, China's global machine tool production skyrocketed to $24.7B accounting for 28% of global production, while the U.S. accounted for only $4.6B, after China, Japan, Germany, Italy, and South Korea. According to the U.S. Census Bureau data, in 2015 there were 1,028 machine tool firms employing 27,919 people. 

I don't know if they taught them in MGIMO what this, among very many other debilitating factors, means but I'll give a hint, if one removes monetary comparison in US Dollars (inaccurate as it is), then the gap between US and others becomes even larger, once one considers high costs of US production, which, when combined with purely FIRE "economy" values inflate US GDP to the absurdity it is today. American economic and industrial reality today is such that it is much smaller than many (Russian western liberal cabal especially) think.   

3. But then, of course, there is purely military (and technological) aspect to all that, since Russia's real security is not limited by the intermediate range weapons only and it must be viewed as a complex of means and measures designed to prevent attack on Russia across the whole spectrum of modern warfare--from informational, to conventional combined arms to nuclear strategic. I thought that CAST which does "analyze strategies" should know that. Let me go out on a limb here and, shamefully, with my head down, assume that Chief Designer of strategic missile systems Yuri Solomonov, while having pathetic credentials of a creator of latest generation of strategic missiles not to mention his clearance, when compared to a monstrous academic and military experiences of Barabanov, or Makienko, still knows just teeny-weeny bit more about subject matter than Makienko. This is what Solomonov states:

Indeed, we lead Americans by 10-15 years. This doesn't mean that they will not be able to do the same. If they put their minds to it they can do the same.  

Q. Who is breathing down our necks? I mean us and Americans, I mean members of the nuclear club?

A. Nobody. From the point of view of our nuclear potential we are far ahead. This is not bravado, it is objective.

But then, there is another issue of CAST's members situational (un)awareness--it is the fact of failing to analyze that:

a) Russia's military and technological record of the last 15 years;

b) US military and technological record of the last 15 years;   

For a person with even rudimentary military background it becomes very clear that many Pentagon's military programs are nothing but a technological, hence tactical, and operational disaster. Of course, one may use good ol' examples of F-35, LCS or even new Columbia-class SSBN which even before being built already has some huge cost and technology issues. Sure, when one sub costs as much as the whole 8 hulls of Borei-class SSBNs one is bound to notice. But, the issue is with procurement practices which, being utterly corrupt on practically every level, increasingly fail to deliver any serious capability for even grossly inflated investment in dollars. But here we enter the field which CAST firm is simply unfamiliar with--it is system analysis, analysis of operations (aka Theory of Operations) and other things which require a lot of background in math, technology, physics, tactics etc.--exactly the fields in which CAST has zero competencies. In the end, knowing what Russia's current political and military leadership is, which navigates Russia for the last 5 years brilliantly from one geopolitical, economic, military triumph to another, I would say those guys in General Staff (especially its GOU) calculated a rather impressive number of contingencies before playing out INF Treaty's dismantling. Unlike CAST members who never commanded a single sailor, marine or soldier, those people have the lives of 148 million of their compatriots in their hands and they do not have luxury of going around proclaiming themselves "experts" while BSing, sorry, "consulting" those who are willing to listen and are dumb enough to pay (after all, CAST is very similarly constructed as famous frauds from STRATFOR). This is not how Soviet/Russian military works and it has, unlike CAST, an enormous record of success to back it up. In other words, those people know what they are doing, precisely because they are real experts.

In conclusion. I don't know what's the deal with these CAST people and navies, could it be the fact that they are attracted to a shiny beautiful objects such as ships and submarines? I don't know, I remember Mikhail Barabanov, a naval "expert", about 15 years ago BSing a whole military-historical forum about US Navy's cruise missile developments--mind you, the person saw sea or ocean mostly at the beaches and probably took a tourist tour on some ships--plus expressing some mind-boggling ideas on force requirements (using very peculiar "math"), effectiveness and other broad generalizations on the naval warfare. Now comes Barabanov's boss Makienko and delivers another naval "pearl":

Еще один теоретический профит для России состоит в возможности отказа от дорогостоящей политики «калибровизации» флота в виде строительства дорогих и нелепых «Буянов-М» и «Каракуртов» по цене в половину фрегата при техническом уровне малых ракетных кораблей 40-летней давности. Строительство дорогих морских платформ-носителей «Калибров» теряет смысл при отсутствии ограничений на их сухопутное развертывание.      

Translation: Another theoretical profit (yes, he says this in Russian) for Russia is the possibility of rejection of the expensive policy of Kalibralization of the navy by means of constructing of ridiculous and expensive Buyan-M and Karakurts with the price of the half of the frigate with the technical level of the Small Missile Ships of the 40 years ago. Construction of the expensive platforms-carriers of Kalibrs loses any sense with the loss of limitations for Kalibrs' land deployment. 

The level of ignorance of this statement by Makienko is such that it is simply difficult to even react properly. How to explain to him (he wouldn't know anyway) what could be the "profit" in the littoral, anti-access operations by the KUG of 3-4 Karakurts armed with 3M54 (forget coming Zircons for those types of ships) and shore based aviation against even the group of FREMMs or Burkes at the edge (range) of the launch of TLAMs. I know Makienko wouldn't know shit from shinola when dealing with augmented Salvo Equations, attrition models and combat effectiveness among other things required for professional rough assessment, but here you are. As I said not for once--for some reason these type of "experts" rush into the military field, instead of gynecology or open heart surgery, but it is zeitgeist--ignorance rules. My suggestion to CAST in this case, if they have no human, forget professional, integrity to recognize themselves ignorant pretentious hustlers and to try to get busy with something they actually were taught, be that librarian, "international relations", what have you, humanities-based field,  stop spewing an utter unprofessional BS on issues you have no clue about. Do you even understand what an embarrassment and fraud you are? I guess not. For failing to recognize that, one has to be Russia's urban liberal with "humanities" degree and this, I guess, is a diagnosis.