Newspeak.

Thanks to Thermobarbaric for pointing this out.

A new academic report on efforts to integrate Marine Corps boot camp recommends dropping gender-specific salutations for drill instructors, but service leaders are not convinced they want to take that step. The lengthy report, commissioned by the Corps from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020 and completed in 2022, points out that half of the military services already have done away with gendered identifiers for training staff.

I briefly looked over the gist of this report as well as visited the site of this Lab in Pittsburgh and can confidently state that pseudo-sciences are increasingly present in American and Western universities and, obviously, the issue of combat training long ago became in the US Armed Forces the matter of voodoo-dancing, bad spirits exorcism rituals and developing a newspeak for already demoralized force. It has nothing to do with real combat training, cohesion of sub and units and tradition. 

Tucker and Candace speak about this issue a day ago. 

In general, at this stage any humanities "degree" obtained in the last 10 years from any US university should be viewed as disqualifying factor in any discussion on matters concerning history, politics, national security and real economy. The imposition of totalitarian (non)thinking is in full swing in the West and, eventually, this will also completely corrupt even STEM and natural sciences field. In fact, this is also in progress as I type it. 

Physicists Need to Be More Careful with How They Name Things. The popular term “quantum supremacy,” which refers to quantum computers outperforming classical ones, is uncomfortably reminiscent of “white supremacy”

I wrote about this insanity before. We observe a complete societal collapse, one institution after another, US military is in progress, STEM and free scientific inquiry are next. This is how civilizations die.

Beth Van Schaak Lies...

... which is absolutely normal for her kind who are into whitewashing crimes against humanity and war crimes for State Department. And lying for the top US bureaucrats, especially from neocon infested State Department, is absolutely normal. Not to mention the fact, that many of them themselves are war criminals. In general, Ben Schaak is typical for American political shyster lawyer.  

While acknowledging concern over videos that showed Ukrainian forces executing captured Russian soldiers, the US war crimes envoy has argued that allegations against Kiev’s forces pale in comparison to Moscow’s alleged atrocities. “We are obviously tracking that quite closely,” Beth Van Schaack, US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, told reporters in a telephone briefing on Monday. “It’s really important to emphasize that the laws of war apply to all parties equally, both the aggressor state and the defender state, and this is in equal measure.” However, Van Schaack added, “when it comes to the war in Ukraine, that’s really where the equivalency ends. When we’re looking at the sheer scale of criminality exhibited by Russian forces, it’s enormous compared to the allegations that we have seen against Ukrainian forces.” The envoy also claimed that Kiev has dealt with allegations of wrongdoing more responsibly. “Russia inevitably responds with propaganda, denial, mis- and disinformation, whereas the Ukrainian authorities have generally acknowledged abuses and have denounced them and have pledged to investigate them,” she said.

Of course, being a shyster from organization which produced time after time one genocidal maniac after another--Madeline Albright and 50 US "diplomats" come to mind immediately--Van Schaak wouldn't last a minute under serious scrutiny against real war crimes lawyers from Russia, because she has nothing but PR BS and never opened in her life any Combat Manual of Russian Armed Forces (she wouldn't know the difference). But then again, for anyone with the pedigree in ICC on Yugoslavia, this must automatically disqualify them as, in best case scenario, liars or, in worst for them, war criminals themselves. But I digress.  

While Russian Combat Manuals (E.G. CM 2005) stress strict following of International Humanitarian Law (Article 24):

This creature, obviously, misses something larger than her pseudo-humanitarian activity and this is the fact that not only the names of those who executed Russian POWs (as well as of many Nazis US State Department supports and who committed well documented atrocities on industrial scale) are well known to Russians. But here are some news for this creature: Russian POWs were executed (there are many incidents of torture, maiming etc.) by the members of the 80th Brigade of VSU, which, surprise-surprise, was "taught" by the members of the USMC, who "taught this brigade to hate everything Russian" and "brainwashed them" (in Russian). It is now reported by all major Russian media and for me, personally, will be very easy to explain to this lawyer where this visceral Russophobia, from what sources, originates among US establishment and part of the military.  

The fact that US Marines haven't fought any serious enemy since Vietnam, not to mention the fact of "stellar" performance against Taliban, among other opponents, explains extremely well a severe case of Kubler-Ross transitions, when the whole USMC is forced to recognize that it is simply not a competitor against serious combined arms force. Don't listen to me, listen to Colonel Douglas MacGregor who exactly 10 years ago called US Marines exactly what they are in relation to even semi-serious, forget real, war with real opponents. Get a load of that:

Marine Commandant James Amos’ recent remarks on the future of the corps can be summed up as: nothing new. In shorthand, “Rah, rah, the Marine Corps is awesome, and all we have to do is make sure they have the equipment & training & facilities they need so they can always be awesome Marines, rah, rah!” Wrong. The Marines as currently organized and equipped are about as relevant as the Army’s horse cavalry in the 1930s and the Marines are not alone. They have company in the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps.

Yeah, rah, rah and BSing is what the United States institutions have been involved since the collapse of the Soviet Union with. And it is one thing when some obscure Russian dude says it--totally another when former senior advisor of the Chief of Pentagon and decorated combat senior America officers says it. And says he does.

The capability to come ashore where the enemy is not present, then, move quickly with sustainable combat power great distances over land to operational objectives in the interior, is essential. The Marines cannot do it in any strategic setting where the opponent is capable (neither can the XVIII Airborne Corps!). The Marines cannot confront or defeat armored forces or heavy weapons in the hands of capable opponents. Nor can the Marines hold any contested battle space for more than a very short amount of time, after which the Marine raid or short stay ashore is completed. ... Clinging to the misguided, wasteful and self-defeating policies of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan as justification for no change in the Army and Marine forces is not an argument. The policies, strategy and tactics were flawed, if not disastrous. Reenacting these operations is about as stupid as reenacting Tarawa, Market Garden or the airborne assault on Crete. In 110 days of fighting the German army in France during 1918, the U.S. Army Expeditionary Force sustained 318,000 casualties, including 110,000 killed in action. That’s the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a future war with real armies, air forces, air defenses and naval power.

Moreover, this was published in the US premier magazine, Time. As SMO demonstrated perfectly well, to the astonishment of Pentagon's top brass, what Russian force, initially three times smaller than VSU and its NATO "volunteer" corps, did is simply beyond fighting capabilities of not just USMC, but the US ground forces as such. The issue of facing a serious war, unlike the US experienced only in Korea, exacerbated by the not only Pentagon's (NATO) operational rigidness but a dramatic technological lag in some of the key aspects of the large combined arms operations, especially when stand off weaponry and air defense, among few other important things, are concerned, created a severe case of professional jealousy and one of those Kubler-Ross stages--a stage of anger. While US "diplomacy" today, as it exists, is primarily a butt of jokes around the world due to America's "diplomats" ignorance, incompetence and lack of general culture, militarily the United States continues to fall behind Russia in the arms race and already is ultimately incapable to take on either Russia or China, let alone both.

I can only imagine what toxic Russophobic atmosphere exists in some parts of the US Armed Forces, who, by the nature of their service, have to be aware and content with what is being done to the force as a whole turning it into the woke circus, and, of course, being aware of many myths of American military superiority being destroyed time after time by those damn sub-human Rooskies. It is not a healthy atmosphere and it is bound to manifest itself both deliberately and subconsciously in growing hatred for everything Russian, including Russian civilians. It is, in some bizarre sense, normal reaction, which does not make it right nonetheless. Russians just keep the score. And a huge arsenal of state-of-the-art stand-off weapons, together with increasing production of Air Defense systems and other military toys which, as I predicted years ago, completely devalued both technological and operational dimensions of the "American Way of War", which failed time after time even against weak opponents and which is not designed for real modern war against first rate enemy. Not to speak of the titanic existential struggle against the nation which is much older than the US and saw and defeated enemies, when adjusted for the factoring out nuclear deterrents, who would make the "finest fighting force in history" a rather timid challenge. What's left, then? Yes, hatred. 

Ask tortured to death, castrated, beheaded, raped, sold into slavery even crucified Russian soldiers and civilians in Chechnya in 1990s, ask innocent children of Beslan slaughtered under tacit approval of Western media and establishment. Today it is Nazi regime in Kiev. It is metaphysical and spiritual problem of the declining West and its relation to historic Russia, and of which some second rate lawyer from State Department simply has no grasp, nor morality and ethics to admit to herself that she and her "colleagues", culpable in millions of deaths of innocent people around the world, are supporting Nazism and that it is they who will be judged as criminals not just by the cruel court of history but, under some fairly likely circumstances, by the real court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But then again, can you imagine trying to explain to a lawyer what the global balance of power is?

Douglas Macgregor Hits It Out Of The Ball Park.

Ahh, what a coincidence. The moment I write this two days ago: 

One of the very few reasons I read (as in past tense) this dumpster The National Interest was precisely for reasons that once in a while people like Douglas Macgregor or Daniel L. Davis, a cadre senior officers of the US Army, would publish their opinions. I do not always agree with them but their opinions are, which is expected from real professionals, head and shoulders above the amateur tripe the magazine's so called "military experts" (none of them military) continue to publish. Luckily, Lt. Colonel Davis' writing is beginning to appear more and more in such outlets as The American Conservative, which for all its major flaws, still tries to figure things out and still retains, despite Rod Dreher continuing to write about things he has no clue about, a degree of respectability and expertise. 

Colonel Douglas Macgregor is published in the American Conservative. And he starts with the bang:

The United States is primarily a global maritime and aerospace power, not a global land power. Washington is known for exaggerating threats, but is the notion of spending to fight a near-simultaneous war with Russia and China in 2030 a realistic goal? Wars with continental powers like Russia, China, or even Turkey or Iran, demand the persistent employment of large and powerful ground forces projected over thousands of miles. U.S. military advantages at sea and in the air are relegated to supporting roles as seen in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

It has been stated many times--American warfare is an expeditionary, or as I call it "not here", one. It is a situation which the United States must resign itself to, especially in the times of, as Macgregor quotes Under Secretary of the Navy, Robert Work:

The problem in the context of future amphibious operations: “The Navy-Marine team will never contemplate littoral maneuver until an enemy’s battle network, capable of firing dense salvos of guided weapons, is suppressed…Thus far we have only argued that some capability to conduct theater-entry operations and littoral maneuver must be retained. But it is fair to ask how much amphibious capacity is needed.”

The immediate question is--WHOSE network and suppressed how? In case, say, of Iran I can see that--eventually the pure mass of US Navy and Air Force, operating from bases near Iran may do the trick, which still doesn't mean much in case of land invasion--we can only imagine attrition rates in this case, they will be huge. Macgregor, however, uses a Chinese "scenario":

In other words, the Marine Corps’ slow, soft-skinned, virtually defenseless amphibious carriers, auxiliaries, and VTOL/STOL airlift with their fragile cargoes of Marines cannot operate against the Chinese until the U.S. Air Force and Navy eliminate China’s air and naval forces from most of the Pacific. It’s not realistic, and building more amphibious carriers won’t help. The proliferation of persistent surveillance, air defense, and precision strike technologies consign amphibious operations to the ash heap of history.

Ranges and velocities of weapons today is what drives this very real Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) sweeping away whole scores of obsolete technologies and operational concepts and the process only accelerates--it is inevitable, we are deep in the process of crossing into new combat physics reality. Macgregor was always a persistent reality-based military thinker not afraid of making his, validated not for once, views publicly known since the times of his seminal Breaking the Phalanx, which foretold many issues the United States faces today with her increasingly "top heavy" and questionably effective military power. 

I can not see as of today US forces capable of fighting a peer without sustaining catastrophic losses which may change the dynamics of the conflict dramatically and push the US  to the nuclear threshold. As I spoke for years now, the United States is nuclear-biased since roughly 2008 when the reality of a new combined arms and naval warfare started to trickle down slowly to people who actually have a clue. Not a "four-stars", as Macgregor calls them, of course. In the end, one must ask a question--what happens when the US loses a whole CBG and an amphibious group, or begins to lose 5-10 combat aircraft a day? What will be a reaction? Macgregor doesn't mince his words and is blunt and realistic as ever when concludes:

Back in Washington, deferring to the Four Stars who collectively have never fought a major battle against a capable opponent, is the wrong answer. The service bureaucracies’ insatiable appetite for money and missions to justify their structures inclines them to advocate for U.S. military engagement in lesser conflicts and regions of marginal or no strategic importance to the American people. President Donald Trump must overrule his generals and abandon the financially destructive spending strategy that Congress, industry, and the Four Stars want. If the president does not act, the dismal record of post–World War II U.S. military fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with Vietnam and Korea, will persist into the future with far more serious strategic consequences than anything seen since the first battle of Bull Run.

This is real American patriot and warfare realist speaking--but being a realist, he should understand that Trump is not going to overrule his generals, even if to assume, for a minute, an unimaginable--that Trump is not a militarist. So what is in store then. Macgregor makes one key remark:

The budget of the U.S. Army is currently larger than Russia’s entire defense budget. Yet, the Russian State extracts “more capability for less” from its army than the American taxpayer does. The reason is that Putin removed most of the senior military officers in his first term of office. Putin then demanded and eventually received new plans for the reorganization of Russia’s army into a smaller, more lethal force structure.

Russia IS driving this RMA today and will continue to do so precisely because of the United States and its current position in the larger, global that is, scheme of things. As I continuously write:

For a nation with such a military history as Russia’s the issue of military technology is an issue of survival. As such, weapons in Russia are sacralized because behind them are generations of Russians who shed blood to make those weapons what they are. They have become a part of the culture to such a degree that commercial considerations take a very distant second place to a main purpose of these weapons—to actually defend the nation. This is absolutely not the case in the United States, with some exception for its Navy, with Americans having no knowledge or recollection of what real war is and what instruments for fighting and winning it are needed. Those things cannot be paid for in money, they are paid for in blood.

I guess this also answers the questions posited in the title to Macgregor's excellent piece: Why Do We Fight? How Do We Fight?  

P.S. The conclusion of my new book answers this question too.  

On A Lighter Note. No, Really.

I seldom do such things but once in a while it is good to giggle. This is famous Russian meme--it reads: Two Superpowers. Stand-Off Continues on Mental Level. 

Everybody can read what word US servicemen "wrote", their Russian counterparts (with obviously about the same level of intellectual refinement as their American colleagues) "wrote" a famous Russian word Zhopa--THE ASS. Bender cries sentimentally. 

But US Marine Corps refuses to be outdone. So, USMC aviators went full blown Penis Maneuver. 

Hilarious comments followed:

“It was surgical,” one user wrote. “Attention to detail is critical in naval aviation,” another chimed in. “God Bless America,” said another.

I think Marine Corps Times summarized it brilliantly:

But this was no holding pattern. This was a calculated maneuver designed to bring joy to an increasingly divided world in dire need of unifying laughter and fellowship.

They sure as hell  achieved their goal, Russians report this with joy and I am sure some preparations are on the way in RuAF to do some aerial ASS or...well, use you imagination. LOL.  

On Events In Germany (And in Europe). A Rant.

When German Olympic national team emerged from the ramp into the lights of Sochi Olympic Stadium during opening ceremony, all my family burst in Homeric laughter. You can watch Germans march starting from 43rd minute here:

It was a bitter-sweet laughter. Initially, we, jokingly, were asking the question:"Why, oh, why did they put on these ridiculous outfits?" But eventually the laughter subsided and it became painfully clear that once great nation was being paraded as a bearer of the multicolored, "diversified" to the point of idiocy, all-inclusive ideology of tolerasty. Rainbow colors of German uniforms screamed the statement of German self-hate and self-humiliation. Russians DO have the right to pass these judgements. In fact, no two nations in the world are tied together, in a bizarre historical twist, so profoundly by blood and a bad one at that. Yet, this strange and painful bond produced an unexpected result of post-WW II Ostpolitik, with FRG becoming Soviet Union's main trade partner in the capitalist camp, while DDR being the largest one within the Warsaw Pact (also known in economic terms as SEV). But the roots of Russo-German love (and hate) relations go deeper, much deeper, to the times of Catherine The Great (a German herself) to vast numbers of Germans who got russified and settled in Russia, while contributing immensely to Russian culture, science, industry. Russian-German bond is cultural and for vast swaths of Russians names of Bach, Schiller, Kant and, yes, of course, Hegel, among many, are as important as the names of Lomonosov, Tchaikovsky or Tolstoy. Vast armies of Soviet, and now Russian, football fans admired and rooted for Bundesmachine of Franz Beckenbauer then, and for Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund of then Borussia's coach Jurgen Klopp today. Despite horrendous history between both, there was always a significant degree of Russian admiration for this distinct Germanness, which, in the end, was a sublimation of Russia's European aspirations.

There is a deeper meaning in Russo-German relations--it is the only AXIS capable of preserving Europe's independence and culture. It is also the possible economic powerhouse capable of dominating many crucial markets of manufactured goods. And that is why this nation, whose grim Teutonic genius once defined the face of Europe, was reduced today to the sheeple ready to continue with suicidal promotion of "European values" which are nothing more than the tool of eradication of, first, true European, and then, in sequence, of national identities of culturally shrinking continent. For any normal Russian, seeing Germany being reduced to a multi-cultural, sexually-deviant emasculated cloaca, whose elites are treasonous to German people and to true Europe, which grew out of the cradle of Christianity, is painful. Today, once proud people of Germany are represented by THIS (Green Party POS):

               

Mayor of Cologne. Busy with writing instructions on how to stop being a European

 

Or that:

A collection of imbeciles, as it is, in general, the case with European "academe" and Parnassus, and "power elite" cowards who have no loyalty to anyone but to their pathetic political careers and suicidal ideologies which spell doom to European civilization. Yes, they will blame the victim instead of facing to the catastrophe they caused on their Continent. They would rather dress themselves in hijab and submit than stand up and state the truth--THERE WILL BE NO "INTEGRATION", as it never was in the first place, of the Muslim "population" into what is viewed as merely a collection of kuffar. Islam and European secular culture, which still breeds on the soil of Christianity are INCOMPATIBLE on the most fundamental level. For Anglo-sphere, the book by Christopher Caldwell should have served as a warning in 2008. It, of course, hasn't. 
              

The war is on in Europe and the "West" is not ready. It was emasculated to the point of no return, which Elena Chudinova brilliantly summarized in her best-selling dystopian The Mosque Of Notre-Dame de Paris, accidentally, written decade before the much talked about Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission.  

                             

              
The tragedy of Germany and, as a consequence, of Europe is not in the lack of military power, it is in the lack of will, based upon clear understanding of the difference between right and wrong and of treason committed by its so called "elites", who still think that they will seat out what is unfolding on the Continent in their gated communities. They will not. Even they, those "elites", will be culturally "enriched" by means of robbery, rape and murder. As Eduard Limonov succinctly observed  couple of days ago:

   Get Ready For Pogroms, Stupid Germans 

And these will not be Germans who will be doing those pogroms, they are the ones who will be on the receiving end. Hell, they already are. Refresh your notes on multi-cultural "enrichment" before being raped, or murdered in the name of "European values". After all, what's not to "admire" in those "values": 

                     

  That is where the European culture "landed".

                

Hey, Germany, are you still there? Are you still alive? I want to believe so. At least people of Dusseldorf are:

Anti-immigrant Militia Formed By Düsseldorf Residents 

I hope to be wrong, but what is unfolding in Europe is just the start, it will get worse--much, much worse.

In related news:

Navy Sec Orders Marine Corps To Remove ‘Man’ From Job Titles, Integrate Women Into Boot Camp 

The madness continues.