She is not alone, most of the Western political and military "elite" do not know. They are very good at demagoguery, and other verbiage, some of it derived from the rabbinical tradition greatly admired among "protestant" pastors. But reality is a bitch--and yes, it is about mathematical formulas and physics, which then translate into serious applied disciplines such as making the best submarine, creating hypersonic weapons or flying into space. But never mind, as long as it "is not only mathematical formulas", there are so many cretins buying Teslas, iPhones and Louis Vuitton with Rolex. A sucker is a foundation of the Wall Street "economy".
In related news. Do you know what this is?
This is Chrysler ME Four. They will not tell you that this magnificent American car was killed by ... Germans, Daimler, who owned Chrysler then and who didn't want a competition for their Mercedes, which looked like a second rate. So, this is just a hint to those who believe in economic "globalization".
There will be nobody to repel this insanity, because:
Firstly, population of the West Coast cities, where main voting power resides, are suffering from different kinds of mental abnormalities en masse and many of them, especially all those humanities "educated" do-gooders, have no a fucking clue about how real world operates outside their office spaces and coffee shops. Secondly, when allegedly "modern" country passes such legislation it is yet another sign of a severe regress, which is funny, since these destructive bills originate and are passed by a so called "progressive" community. There is nothing progressive about them and it seems that the United States is being rushed towards the abyss deliberately and it only accelerates. In normal country such a legislation would be considered a real threat to national security and counter-intel and investigative journalists would be all over the story and people who do this to the country. Not in the United States. The writing is on the wall, patients are in charge of the asylum.
Don't count on GOP, they will sell everyone out as they usually do. The United States needs a REAL conservative party, and what is real conservatism in the 21st century is yet to be properly defined. Most of the American so called contemporary "conservative" thought is regurgitation of the same pseudo-scholastic BS, which allowed GOP to be infested with Neo-cons, Christian Zionists and Bible thumping "right wing" fanatics. Is the United States doomed? It is, certainly in the form it used to exist prior to the collapse of the USSR. As our very own (and brilliant) Vietnamese friend Tuan Doan succinctly put it:
That is the engineering approach I like. Can you explain this to a Queer Studies or Political "Science" majors? They just never learned, and now they will forget even basics. Idiocracy IS upon us.
The world is a strange place and I am a pretty strange man in this world, all things considered, since I have a luxury (not afforded to many) to experience, as it turned out today, twice, two opposing sides in a huge geopolitical spectacle of the 20th and 21st centuries. Once one considers my background, this experience, or rather experiences, do look like a good place from which to start writing an interesting story. I am totally aware of this place and that is what I was doing since 2014 openly in public. For anyone who read my Runglish throughout the years they should (if they don't--then I failed them) get the whiff of my profound hatred for war and rejection of the military porn. I could write a good military porn fiction but I abhor the every minute of this writing, in fact, I abhor the very thought of me writing some military porn with fictional wars and all those big words such as "pincer movement", "armored columns", "close air support", "engagement envelope" and, God forbids, "attrition rates" or "fractional exchange rates".
I, however, wrote two years ago this book in which I explained why I am scared shitless by America's military hubris and incompetence of her political elites, because they may get us all killed because they have no fvcking clue about modern war and how it is fought. So, I had to suffer through simplification of math for people to understand that the math for the US is simply not there anymore and the US cannot win the conventional conflict with such powers as Russia or China and as a result will sustain conventional defeat and will escalate towards nuclear threshold. Remember?
Allow me to quote myself from page 22 of this book of mine:
Such avoidance starts with understanding the nature of military power and of its application. This becomes absolutely crucial in such cases as the demolition of Saddam Hussein’s Army by a coalition led by the U.S. Armed Forces in 1991. If whatever lessons of the Battle of Lepanto in the tactical and operational senses are inapplicable for the Battle of Midway or the Falkland War due to a massive technological gap, the same could be stated about the “lessons” of the First Gulf War which, generally, devolved into a turkey shoot of the vast undertrained Iraqi Army, which enjoyed no operational Air Force nor even a remotely capable Air Defense to speak of. In fact, any lessons from that war could and, in fact, did provide a baneful influence on the state of mind of many Western civilian and military leaders. Hubris and gross misinterpretation of the results occurred despite many professionals describing in depth the Iraqi Army’s dramatic lack of capability, ranging from low quality of leaders and personnel, over-centralization of command, lack of ability for strategic assessment, lack of modern battle management means, not to mention gross technological inferiority.
Any of you who read this book should remember this. You see, I used the word "hubris" eight times throughout the book, on other occasions in the same book I wanted to use words such as "utter bullshit", "pulling fingers" and "dumbfuckery" but was forced to use more civilized and appropriate terms such as "propaganda" (22 times), operational art (4 times) and operations (47 times) plus this horrible unholy profanity known as "Strategy". I used this whole book, and parts of previous one, and parts of the new one to explain that one doesn't go into Russia's sphere of interests, create mess the scale of a Ukrainian one and expects that it will not get punished by Russia which has an overwhelming escalation dominance in Europe.
As the latest events in Ukraine have shown the main danger for the United States could be America's desperate desire to get what it wanted since 2014. Namely seeing Russia getting involved in Ukraine openly big time. Always think twice what you wish for, especially for operatives in US State Department and organizations such as CIA, who only know how to handle a small fish and even that they cannot do right, those wishes may come true. As Russia has demonstrated it in April this year, if the US really wants Russia to get "involved" in Ukraine, she can have equivalent of two combined arms armies, two fleets and couple of VKS "fleets" ready to take on Ukraine within couple of weeks. While annihilating Ukrainian Armed Forces, together with neo-Nazi Kiev regime, Russia would do the unthinkable--she would parade both the United States and NATO as militarily impotent paper-tigers because they would be able to do exactly nothing to "help" Ukraine because everyone wants to live. This is precisely the reason Anthony Blinken visited Kiev this week and told Kiev behind the scene to "dial it down", amidst the fluffy tropes about US concern for Ukraine's "soverinity" and "security". As I say all the time since 2014 in this blog, math is not there for the US and NATO. It wasn't there in 2014, now it is not even close.
Enter Scott Ritter with his piece today in RT. I hate military porn, Scott managed to read it three times. He is certainly much tougher than me to endure this and not to get aneurysm. I would:
Scott writes about this book. It came out in March this year.
As I said, I cannot stand military fiction, but according to Ritter this book does indeed contain some ideas which are extremely important.
‘2034’, by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, takes us to a
world that is but 13 years removed from ours. It is one where the
United States no longer possesses military supremacy but continues to
act like it does. Where China’s economic and technological strengths
have been used to craft a military capable of strategic power
projection. Where Iran has emerged as a major regional power, and India
is positioning itself for a global leadership role. None of the
underpinning conditions that make ‘2034’ work as a novel exist today. But
when examined in terms of historical continuity, using 2008 as a
starting point, continuing through today, and then projecting into the
future, every scenario painted in ‘2034’ is not only plausible, but
probable. ‘2034’ depicts a world gripped by a multi-polar reality, where
an America still operating on unipolar assumptions struggles to find
its feet. Two terms appear often in the novel: ‘hubris’ and ‘overreach’.
Everything that happens in ‘2034’ is borne of those twin concepts,
where a former unilateral superpower finds itself challenged by regional
powers no longer willing to accept American hegemony, and the
overreaction to this challenge results in global catastrophe.
As you all may know, and I am on record for years, the United States is (always was) nuclear-biased country. It is the only country which used nuclear weapons, and it is the only country which came close to serious consideration of a use of such weapons in conventional conflict. Recall that Truman authorized moving nuclear weapons (without triggers, though) to Guam in 1950. "Just in case". So, it is totally conceivable for the US to go nuclear in case of sustaining serious losses in a conventional conflict even in a war with a nominally inferior conventional power. With global power? Russia doesn't need to "project" her power against US, she can defeat any conventional force in Eastern Europe purely conventionally and, God forbids, destroy human civilization with her nuclear arsenal. Ritter notes this:
None of the adversaries depicted in ‘2034’ had the ability to project
military power globally like the United States. But then again, none
needed to. All they needed to focus on was being able to project
superior military power into a defined region. In short, a multi-polar
world is beyond the ability of the United States to dominate militarily,
and any continued effort by the United States to do so can only lead to
conflicts which the United States is no longer guaranteed to win.
Well, today the "ability to project military power globally" against the background of the ongoing real revolution in military affairs means merely exposing your forces even in staging areas and rear to serious attrition. Here is how Iran did this.
As you may expect, even a single tactical nuke in the vicinity of a 0.5-2.0 kilotons yield would have rendered such bases completely inoperable. I know Vicki Nuland doesn't know this but Stavridis does. The United States hasn't been in a classic concentration of force paradigm in decades, and every single US military base today is a fat and easily acquired target. That is why he and his co-author wrote this book. Things changed. Stone-rearranging business advanced tremendously in the last decade, with it came a threat of a huge conventional miscalculation on the American part. And the only thing I disagree with Scott Ritter is the fact that America's unipolar world end is not in the nearest future, but it became a fait accompli in 2014, and since then we only observe the bubbles and whirlpools a huge sinking ship leaves on the surface after she is completely consumed by the water. Remember? Math is not there, neither is technology on the American side and it is NOW not in 2034. If, as Ritter states, Stavridis and Ackerman wrote this book as a warning, then it makes it an important book and we can only applaud approvingly the effort by these two authors.
Ritter concludes:
Thirteen years goes by in a blink of an eye. ‘2034’, the novel, explores
a plausible outcome should the United States continue to incorporate
hubris and overreach as the driving force behind its relationship with
the world. It is not an outcome any American should endorse, but it is
an outcome that is inevitable should America’s relationship with the
world not change.
If that is the point of the book, it is all for the better. I still will not read it, but I am grateful that Scott Ritter did it (three times) and the fact that this book is based around the same set of strategic ideas I write about for many years, makes me feel not so much vindicated as hopeful that people of such a rank try to be realistic and militarily reasonable and only add to the choir of voices which calls on the US to face a reality and adjust its behavior accordingly. In fact, it may even work for the US benefit. Obviously, the US State Department and US utterly incompetent think-tankdom never read Bismark about the art of possible and have no concept that real international relations are not always a zero-sum game. But who knows, maybe a sheer volume of voices will get through, especially when S-500, A-235 and 3M22 become fully operational, like this year.
This is the thing, which together with this thing:
And this thing:
Would have prevented this thing:
Should those things have been used by properly trained officers with serious background in navigation, maneuvering and ability to develop reliable information (tactical and situational awareness) autonomously just with the tools at hand--such as the navigational complex of the ship, maneuvering board, visual and radio (radar) means of navigation, instead of relying on GPS--a lot of sorrow could have been avoided. But it was not and results are what they are.
Now, suddenly Belgian armed forces wake up and recognize the fact that they may not have GPS at their disposal at all if shit hits the fan and war starts between NATO and those nasty Russkies who just sleep and dream about how to invade this damn Europe, which is so great (not really). So the Brussels' very own DeMorgen informs:
Translation:Belgian soldiers must again fully train with map and compass.Not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity: the army command is concerned about the vulnerability of GPS devices.Russia has proven that the signals are easy to disrupt.
No shit, pardon my French (or Flemish, if you will). How about we recall one peculiar US general, Van Riper is his name, who not only was a renown whistle-blower against all kinds of so called "augmented" military exercises in which the outcome was always rigged in favor of...., well, you can fill in the blank yourself. It is this very same general who kicked the ass of the so called "transformational" force during Millennium Challenge 2002 military exercises. He handed ass to "transformational force" back on a platter by means of employing all those good ol' war tools such as maintaining radio-silence, relying on good ol' topography, maps, compasses and so on. He was also an early critic of prematurely announced Revolution in Military Affairs--I write in depth on that in my last book.
So, will Russians during this hypothetical war shut down GPS? Absolutely, they will shut down huge chunks of NATO's communications networks also, most likely, and will wreck havoc with many NATO's sensors. This will prevent NATO from exercising any advantages Net-Centric Warfare would otherwise provide, such as when "fighting" people who still use Enfield rifles and pigeon and smoke communication networks, but not in the peer-to-peer scenario where peer will reduce the value of the networks dramatically and suddenly everything will be thrown back into the platform-centric scenarios where own positioning, developing of the awareness, conduct of reconnaissance, developing firing solutions and other military skills will be based not only on the platforms' own computers and sensors, but will depend greatly on the classic military skills of the second half of the XX century which required extremely strong mathematics (especially geometry and trigonometry) and physics background, ability to maneuver (on land, on sea and in the air) and to develop position and maneuvering elements of the opponent. Boy, this sounds complicated and so not hip. Do you get my drift now on why Russians love themselves radar systems with serious beyond-the-horizon capabilities?
But realistically, it is down right creepy to even consider to what level of arrogance and lack of awareness Western militaries "groomed" themselves when thought that their military toys will be judged on the merit of their paint and looks, and how they perform when meeting no serious opposition. Fundamental military skills required of modern officer or lower rank, same as it was 20 or 50 years ago, still require an extensive training in fundamental STEM subjects and classic military skills which start with compass, map, nautical chart, maneuvering board and ballistic tables, among other things; without those, without understanding how the real war is fought--there is no real military professional. Nobody needs GPS receiver's display readers. People who know how to use weapon systems--well, they are a precious commodity. But even diamonds start as the pieces of coal or carbon, for purists. Here is an example of how ships will calculate position in times of real war.
It is in human nature to quantify
things—nothing is wrong with that. Quantification allows us to see some order
in otherwise seemingly chaotic things, it also allows to predict the outcomes based
on those quantifications. Sometimes predictions pan out but often they do not.
As the events of the last 20 or so years showed us, no mathematical model, no
matter how sophisticated, can properly predict global strategic balance, even
despite availability of what became known as a "Big Data". Two things
do not allow to trust such a modeling fully:
1. It matters WHAT data
and WHO counts it. A famous meme of GIGO—Garbage In, Garbage Out did not appear
out of nowhere—recall a complete trash all US pollsters were providing prior to
the latest US Presidential Elections. This example alone is a good illustration
of a dreadful influence biases provide even in something as large politically
as electing POTUS. Then, of course, comes WW II and how it was "interpreted"
in the West.
2. Anything related to
strategy and military is inherently human at the very foundation, and as such
it is stochastic in nature, that is susceptible to the introduction of random
variables and those variables sometimes become this proverbial monkey wrench
which screws up all, even perfect, plans. In the end, the data itself MUST be
full and reliable—otherwise one gets Wall Street reports on the state of
economy, which are as reliable and are as connected to the actual reality as I
am a NASA astronaut.
For a former military
professional who had to deal with some operational issues and who survived the
collapse of the USSR, it was always fascinating for me how the outcomes may be
influenced by accumulation of sometimes really insignificant disruptors which
literally change the state of the affairs almost instantaneously and
dramatically—in global matters a decade or two is not that long, really. In
historic terms it is altogether—an instant. Dmitry
Orlov is very good in describing some of the factors which, in particular,
influence collapse on a societal level. But my point here is simpler—it is to
give some insight on how things go haywire in military-political field and how
they lead to a gigantic outcomes.
I am aware--people do not
like math. But hear me out here, the math presented herein is not really that
difficult. At least, I tried to exclude any kinds of even remote references to
differentiation (and integration) which necessarily accompany all kinds of
models—it will all be within very basic algebra of a middle school level, at
least I tried to keep it there. So, here it is: The Global Status of the Nation. One of the methods (models), which
is based on the body of works by all kinds of geopolitical thinkers from Mahan,
Morgenthau and, eventually, RAND Corporation. Some notable Russian thinkers
also contributed to it. It is, indeed, natural for people to have a number on
anything. So, many thought for more than a century about how to put "a
number" on the might of the nation. In my book I gave a brief review of
the CINC
(Composite Index of National Capability) and reviewed some of the
predictors for military victory as well as the components of the status of
nations.
So, here is the
(Nation's) Status Model developed within the framework of the massive project
titled Complex System Analysis and
Modelling of Global Dynamics, which was done on the base of the world-renown
Keldysh
Institute of Applied Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences. A lot in
this model also was taken from RAND's estimates of national might. Well, here
is this general formula.
Don't despair—this formula
is as simple as a toilet. To get to the value of Status at any given time you
have to merely multiply the values. In it, S(t) is a measure of a nations
global status. S(t) merely stands (as a function of time) for Status of the
nation in given time. In this formula FA(t) is a value (again—time dependent,
hence (t)) of a function of "influence" which is not related to geopolitical
factors and accounts for the product of values obtained for quality of
governance, economic and military independence, plus additional factor of being
in coalition etc. The formula for this is not difficult, albeit long, and with
a calculation of a factor of governance based on expertise. We will omit
reviewing this factor and go directly for G(t)—a geopolitical potential of the
nation. Here, we go for the formula and this is how it looks:
In this formula all Xs
with subscript stand for shares of the nation in global indices of: T-territory,
D-demography, E-economics, M-military. Numbers above are exponents or the power to which those indices must be raised. These ARE very easy indices to find
since all of this data is in the open. That is with a huge exception of the Military
index. But let's do some simple math exercise—let us compare G(t)s of say US
and China, accepting FA(t) for both of them as equal and thus easily disposed
of in our basic analysis. Let's see how the United States looks in its main Xs in
G(t) formula. For that we go to Internet and get data there, let's count things
for the US and China:
T--territory for the US will be almost
the same as China's, both have about the same size of territory, but let us be
anal about it and go for
9.147 million square km for the US (and, consequently—9.326 for China). Consequently
the SHARES in the global scheme of things are as follows: US—6.13% of global
land mass (I use round number of 149 million for the World's total land mass)
and China's-6.26%.
D--demography, easy. The United
States' population is 322
million, China's—1,404 million. Consequently the SHARES in the global population
are as follows: US—4.31% of total population (I use round number of 7,467
million for the World's total population) and China's-18.8%.
E—economy. Easy again, we
go for PPP as normal people do and here it is: US GDP is (per CIA)—19.36
trillion, China's—23.12. Consequently the SHARES in the global GDP are as
follows: US—15.24% of total GDP (I use CIA's round number of 127 trillion for
the World's total GDP) and China's-18.2%.
M—military. Before I
announce a train wreck here, ask yourself a question when looking at the
formula of G(t) why XM, that is military component not only has the largest
exponent (0.43) of them all, beating even Economy and why Military needs its
own formula for calculation? Here is the formula:
Where M1 is a Share of the nation in global military expenditures (I need to hear warning bells and sirens going off like crazy now) M2 is a military potential of the nation's Army, M3 is a military potential of nation's Navy and, finally, M4 is a potential of a strategic nuclear forces. The immediate question which arises here is HOW does one calculate PROPERLY all those indices. Let us calculate comparative G(t)s and, as a consequence, S(t)s for the US and China based on assumed military parity, that is American XM=Chinese XM=1. Just an example, not real indices. So, G(t) for the US will be, using basic scientific calculator:
0.5*(1+1^0.43)*6.13^0.11*4.31^0.19*15.24^0.27 =
0.5*(1+1)*1.22*1.32*2.09=3.366
For China this will look like this:
0.5*(1+1^0.43)*6.26^0.11*18.8^0.19*18.2^0.27 =
0.5*(1+1)*1.22*1.75*2.19=4.676
As you can see here, China squarely beats the United States for a title of the nation with the most geopolitical status, granted that we initially assumed that both nations have the same value of function of influence FA(t) and that their XMs are equal--but they are not and the main REAL, tangible, component which will define most of those status bids is precisely this very XM and how it is interpreted correctly by serious analysts. That I will review in the next post. Needless to say, however, any calculation of national power and status without serious review of doctrinal, strategic and operational issues is a complete baloney--but that is what Western so called "expertdom" was doing for the last few decades. We all know the (catastrophic) results...
