RT Continues on Course ...

China has shown some technology demonstrators which most military porn masturbators called "6th generation" whatever. Those are not 6th generation anything, nor are they fifth generation, whatever they are--for that one must have 5th generation (forget about sixth generation) engine to start with. China doesn't have one. But guess what, RT invited an "expert" to comment on this. 

The images of China’s brand new warplanes, which appeared online this week, is a bold “invitation” to an arms race for a next-generation fighter, Dmitry Stefanovich,  a military researcher at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has told RT.  

The whole assertion here about "invitation to an arms race" which HAS never stopped and in which (as far as the combat air is concerned) China lags doesn't bother either RT crew or Stefanovich who is pivotal for the whole drivel in article about "arms race" in RT. But guess what, if that hasn't been enough, Stefanovich produces a wowser of a statement in the end: 

Beijing will have to compete with American next-generation fighter programs, Stefanovich said. “While there are no game-changers on the horizon, China is explicitly inviting to participate in an arms race, at least in terms of quality,” he said. “We should not forget, however, that the US is the only country with an advanced-stage program for a new strategic bomber – the B-21 – which can be adapted for some of what we would call sixth-generation capabilities. The Chinese and Russian planes of comparable type have not taken off the ground yet,” Stefanovich said.  

So, who is Mr. Stefanovich? I guess you already know where it all goes. Let's review the pedigree of this "military expert". 

But, of course, he is a good ol' boy from MGIMO with humanities degree and zero STEM and military background. He is a classic representative of an unemployable class of people who are not suited for any serious productive labor (per Schumpeter) be it physical or intellectual one. Yet, somehow, the guy who wouldn't understand the first thing about anything serious military goes to state that B-21 is a "new strategic bomber". Well, should Stefanovich or his employer Vatfor (a collection of journos and likes) have been around real military professionals, they would have learned that B-21 is something what real US naval aviators with immense carrier and aggressor squadron experience wrote about US naval (and in general) combat aviation 24 years ago:

"Money spent furthering manned aircraft technologies and programs—the CVNX (proposed Nimitz-class carrier replacement) being one of them—is like polishing cannonballs so they will fly a little farther."

It applies broadly to B-21 which may have one-two of the so-called "6th generation" features such as being capable of unmanned missions and allegedly "stealthier" than its parent B-2 while featuring ... 4th generation weapons which the US is simply incapable to develop and is stuck with legacy systems such as TLAM and, at best, 1,900 km range AGM-158 B2 JASSM-ER. This is pathetic compared with 3rd-4th generation of Russian bomber platforms capable of carrying and launching Kh-101 with the range of 5,500 km and Kh-BD with 8,000 + km range. But here we ran immediately into operational matters which are not easily understood by people with zero military background and who, like Stefanovich, will not even understand what they are looking at right in a front of their faces. 

It is a bomber conundrum today, because of the immense range of stand-off weaponry those (only Russian) bombers carry, it seems that the priority is given to TU-160M which is supersonic, fully netcentric and has state-of-the-art avionics (navigation-targeting complex). Every one of these weapons can be launched without leaving the safety of Russia's air space and imposes a completely different technological requirements on Russian bomber force. In this case, B-21 actually looks like an anachronism birthed within the obsolete US combat air doctrine which no insanely expensive and dubiously effective bomber such as B-21 can save. In the end, this "6th generation" weaponry and systems have seen a real combat already in SMO, including the use of drones (one of the S-70 Okhotniks malfunctioned and was shot down by the Su-57 pilot), including swarms (Su-35S has similar netcentric and swarm control capabilities as Su-57 and now latest Su-30SM2s). And we know that Tu-160Ms have full similar capability. 

Per "new strategic bomber"--it seems like it is almost impossible to explain to pseudo-experts that in the end it is a COMPLEX, or weapon SYSTEM, which consists of a platform and weapons it carries--one doesn't exist without another. The United States has lost missile arms race (well, the arms race, period) by a knockout and we may only guess what a truly new strategic bomber Russia works on currently will be and what weapons it will carry. One can extrapolate the strike capability which will include new generation of hypersonic weapons with enormous range, as well as other stand-off weapons which will have a truly global reach. As per "game-changers", Stefanovich needs to try harder, because hypersonic weapons and weapons such as R-37 AAM and Russian AD changed the air war completely, they didn't just change the game, they created a completely new one, making the whole USAF obsolete. But Stefanovich wouldn't know that--one must be a professional and even that is not a guarantee against continuing playing a Hollywoodesque shell game by believing military porn. But then again ... unemployable. 

When even these morons started to suspect something ... 

While Inevitable Unfolds...

... for 404 and NATO, Nikolai Patrushev visits Borei A-class boomer Emperor Alexander the Third. She is for now at the North, but it is a Pacific Fleet SSBN. 

Next in line, this time for Northern Fleet, is Prince Pozharsky, which should be commissioned this year. 

I want to stress, Russia's strategic missile submarines production is impressive, to put it mildly and is increasing the gap with the US not just in state-of-the-art platforms but with latest versions of Bulava SLBMs capable of delivering of hypersonic gliding blocks. This is a generational loss, against the background of the delays of both Sentinel ICBM and Columbia-class SSBN. Hence the leak from uber "classified" (LOL) nuclear weapons guidance form the White House. 

Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat. In a classified document approved in March, the president ordered U.S. forces to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea.

It is a classic approach to "do something", which is nothing but PR and simulation of meaningful activity, when initial conditions are clear and no matter what one does they cannot change anymore. Here is GAO giving some heads up:

All six offensive hypersonic weapon efforts GAO identified have placed a high priority on delivering quickly, with all intending to deliver a “minimum viable product”—one with the initial capabilities needed for users to recognize value. Four of the efforts, however, are not soliciting user feedback to determine what capabilities to include in their minimum viable product, a leading practice for product development identified by GAO in July 2023. In addition, four efforts have not adopted leading practices for using digital engineering tools, another leading practice for product development. These tools include virtual representations of physical products. Employing modern digital engineering tools and directly soliciting user feedback both have the potential to speed up the design process, reduce costs, and develop a more usable product. While DOD has identified and analyzed cost risks, the cost of these weapons is difficult to estimate. This is in part due to DOD's limited experience developing and fielding hypersonic weapons. For example, the Navy's estimate for Conventional Prompt Strike—among the most mature cost estimates available—compensates for the lack of quality historical data by relying heavily on the views of subject matter experts. Expert views are best used sparingly, as they can be prone to bias, unless estimators analyze and account for that bias. Addressing this and other issues in accordance with GAO leading practices for cost estimates could provide Navy decision-makers a more accurate estimate.

As I already stated--you cannot buy technical expertise based on technological and engineering culture which is utterly alien to the United States and its weaponry. Absolutely the same goes for operational and strategic experiences of Russia, which are also beyond reach now. It is all about "limited experiences". If that hasn't been enough, the shit accumulates on ISS:

Notably, NASA's Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich obliquely referenced this during his most recent press availability on July 25. Stich was asked whether NASA would certify Starliner for operational missions if the vehicle returned to Earth autonomously but ultimately safely. "There are a lot of good reasons to complete this mission and bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner," he said. "Starliner was designed as a spacecraft to have the crew in the cockpit. The crew is integral to the spacecraft."

Port concerns

The International Space Station has two docking ports for crew vehicles, and these must accommodate both Crew Dragon and Starliner. At present, one of these ports is occupied by the Crew-8 spacecraft, which is due to return to Earth fairly soon. The other port is occupied by Starliner. One source at Johnson Space Center said the concern is that NASA cannot afford to "brick" one of its two crew docking ports. For this reason, if NASA decides to return Starliner autonomously, it must be certain the undocking software update will work.

This is becoming ridiculous. Wait until they will tell us (it is already known) that undocking may create problems and the damn thing can damage the port, in the best case scenario, in the worst... well, let's not go there. 

Meanwhile, somebody begins to suspect something. 

It is called Operational Art, that even a setback could be turned into operational-strategic success.

America Doesn't Do Real War...

 ... period. The reason it doesn't do real war is because she doesn't know what it is. Because she doesn't know what real defense is, apart from tropes of "national interests", "we need to fight them there, to not fight them here", "democracy" and other bullshit to cover up expeditionary and imperialistic nature of the US military.  So, Gregory Daddis asks a reasonable question and raises a proper issue:

While much of the book is heavy with dense, analytical prose, “How Much Is Enough?” still asks useful questions that remain relevant for us today. How well are DoD budget practices aligned to U.S. foreign policy objectives? Are spending ceilings logical or “arbitrary”? Are some military services “entitled” to a certain percentage of the defense budget, and, if so, why? What is the relationship between spending on social programs versus national security? Perhaps most importantly, Enthoven and Smith argued for a “central plan” to drive resource requests and avoid duplication of effort. Once more, they encouraged spending criteria that supported the “national interest.” In evaluating forces structures and strategic mobility, weapons systems and nuclear stockpiles, analysts always had to keep in mind a central question: “for what purpose?”

Well, the issue, of course, is WHAT IS American nation and how its "national interests" are formulated? I agree--US "defense budget" is nothing but a jobs program and defrauding of the US economy. Moreover, I agree, that for all this spending the US continues to fall behind technologically and is incapable of REAL, as in large scale combined arms operations. Condescending references to "peer" or "near peer" warfare is an absolute BS. What is not a BS--it is inability, especially at the political level to grasp what COFM is. 

Senator Roger Wicker--a lawyer and a journo who was JAG, who penned this somnambulic BS in NYT in May...

America’s Military Is Not Prepared for War — or Peace

... has about zero grasp on how wars are planned and executed. JAGs, especially with "degree" in journalism are not educated on the virtues of Combat Effectiveness, Combat Stability and Force Designs. But these are crucial in order for him to understand why the United States lost the arms race and why the "rebuilding of the US Armed Forces" as he puts it this way will be mostly about "more cowbell"--same BS about replicating the TOE from 1990-s, the attempt to repeat the halcyon days of beating the crap from people who cannot shoot straight. And Daddies concludes the piece with seemingly common sense: 

In 1971, Enthoven and Smith were asking similarly hard questions because they believed it served the nation’s best interests. Undoubtedly, Senator Wicker feels similarly. But it’s worth voters engaging in this moment when the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East seemingly demand more, more, more. Of course, we shouldn’t underestimate the threats we face. But surely now is the time to ask both our presidential candidates, “how much is enough?”

What can I say, the whole US military thinking is not about real wars, it is about who gets what domestically. It is a gravy train, for now. But changes are coming. In fact, they are already here.

But, Of Course...

 ... I was mistaken, damn it--no "breakthroughs" from North Korean "scientists". It will be done (already?) in the open. 

Since the West claims it has the right to arm Ukraine with impunity, Russia reserves the same right and might send long-range precision weapons to the DPRK and other countries, President Vladimir Putin has said. Putin spoke with reporters in Hanoi following his meetings with the leadership of Vietnam on Thursday. One of the questions related to his previous suggestion of sending missiles to adversaries of the West, in response to the US and its allies greenlighting Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia. ”We do not rule out supplying weapons to other countries, including the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Putin said. “Let the West think where they might end up.”

West, a euphemism for the US primarily, doesn't think--enough to take a look at a boy Jake Sullivan whose "national security" background is in running Hillary's campaign and... well, that's about it, or at the present crop of Pentagon generals and one gets the idea about "intellectual level" of these people. But for those who really want to get the idea--draw two circles--one 800 km radius (P-800 Onyx) and another 2,500 km (Iskander with cruise missiles)--with the center somewhere in North Korea  and what you get is the full coverage of the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan and well into the South China Sea. With that North Korea begins to cover the whole theater of operation of the US Navy (its bases in Japan included) and we all understand what it all means. Yes, it is a dramatic shift in the balance of power in South-East Asia. 

You see, in real strategy--not in election cycle "strategy" nowadays it is all about ranges and accuracy. Russia was patient with the West for a long time. And this is just North Korea, who knows what Iran will decide to do and with what, if you know what I mean, wink, wink. 

Per changes in Nuclear Doctrine, as I already stated--it is about more and better weapon systems beyond stated "sufficiency", especially in hypersonic delivery systems to completely discredit any remnants of NATO anti-missile defense and push it into debilitating expensive arms race which it already lost. Keep in mind--with dedollarization reaching now an incredible speed and the USD de facto losing its reserve currency status, the US simply has no resources to sustain this race both economically and scientifically. I am sure more free-falling nuclear bombs scared Russians, right? Nah, I am screwing with you. But the US "rethinking" its nuclear posture gave Russia an excuse to break all shackles of pretense and free itself for showing a bunch of globalist cowards that the real game begins. The greatest of those shackles was Russian belief till 2022 that you still can reason with the West. You cannot. Washington and its euro-poodles understand only the cold hard barrel of the gun at their temple.  

P.S. Russia and North Korea have a direct railway link and a lot could be delivered by trains.

Good Piece From Scott.

This is precisely the point number of us, recall mine and Larry's statements on this matter, made constantly. I described the new paradigm on strategic weapons for years--here is one of those. Similarly, Scott concludes:

When New START expires in 2026, Russia is positioning itself to pursue its current nuclear modernization programs free of any treaty constraints. This will complicate the nuclear modernization efforts of both the U.S. and U.K., whose follow-on capabilities, being developed at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, will be inferior to the systems Russia is in the process of deploying. Russia will not entertain any negotiating process which seeks to nullify its strategic advantage, especially so long as the U.S. and its Western allies embrace policies which paint Russia as a strategic enemy and seek the strategic defeat of Russia.

If there is to be any hope for a revival of nuclear arms control between the U.S. and Russia, it will not be through a vehicle which sustains the legacy of the Cold War.Instead, a new strategic relationship will have to emerge based upon modern realities, where the U.S. either must spend huge amounts of money to reach nuclear parity with Russia or negotiate from a position of strategic inferiority. The day and age of unquestioned American nuclear superiority has passed.

Keep also in mind a dramatically accelerating gap between the US and Russia in anti air/missile defense, especially against the background of astonishing performance of air defense systems in SMO, which provides crucial boost in the development of already vastly superior Russian AD/ABM systems with S-500 and S-550 being in serial production. Those systems are also the part of the equation because now they are beginning to have a massive mitigating effect on any plans on first decapitating strike by the US on Russia. In simple words, these system and those which are coming soon can blunt dramatically effect of any attack on Russia. The US has nothing comparable to that and is, obviously, lagging dramatically in hypersonic weapons. Read the whole piece by Scott, it is excellent, and this growing gap may open a possibility for a suicidal act from the US when it finally grasps what I am on record for years--the arms race is lost and the technological gap is absolutely massive.  

Oh, Please!

The US Army studied armored warfare based on Patton's "advances" against virtually non-existent Wehrmacht's armor in Lorraine, and from the fairy tales by Manstein and Guderian, who had to confabulate in order to explain how, in the end, they got beaten by Katukov and Rotmistrov tank armies. The turkey shoot in the Gulf added very little, in fact--detracted, from the combined arms, and all attempts by honorable David Glantz and Jonathan House to change the perspective on the Red Army and WW II made a huge splash, but still failed. This was inevitable, when one operated on correlates of war, this ever valuable war statistics, lifted directly from Nazi sources. GIGO--Garbage In, Garbage Out. 

Now, as RT notices, they want to train based on... drum roll--"lessons from Ukraine". 

The US is preparing its troops for future wars by examining the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine and fielding its own experiments based on experience gained from that battlefield, Defense One reported on Thursday. The National Training Center (NTC) in California and the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) are training US service members to use drones, electronic surveillance, and satellites and combine them with artillery strikes, according to commanders who spoke with the outlet. At the same time, troops are learning to conceal themselves from enemy drones and surveillance. “The thing we struggle the most with is this business of a transparent battlefield,” Brigadier General Curtis Taylor, the head of the NTC, told the outlet. He explained that his center has been teaching soldiers to hide from UAVs in buildings and minimize the use of communication equipment. Meanwhile, the JRTC has reportedly been pushing units to simplify their command posts to be put up and taken down quickly. 

Ah, poor-poor lads, tactics is important and all--surely one needs to conceal oneself but tactical, let alone operational, manuals--the level at which outcomes of wars are decided--are written very differently than a collection of anecdotal evidence from grunts on the ground, however important those are. In order for one to understand, as the original from Defense One piece describes:

Drones, electronic surveillance, and satellites allow adversaries to easily identify U.S. formations, Taylor said—and combining that data with artillery or missiles means the enemy can strike anywhere, anytime. At JRTC, forces playing the “opposing force,” called OPFOR, have learned to fly drones that use apps to scan for Bluetooth or WiFi signals, Gardner said. 

While EMCON is just a teeny-weeny part of a much larger picture of massive scale combined arms and multi-domain operations one needs what the US never got from her wars starting from Korea, because one cannot interrogate the enemy which is not a loser but quite the opposite--has beaten the US. That means an extremely limited access to viable combat statistics, especially in terms of crucial correlates between combat effectiveness of formations and weapons' arsenal they use. Now, add here a complete caricature 404 provides in terms of combat data to NATO and you will get the idea. No number of the US Army officers on the ground in 404 will change the paradigm, even with 24/7 work of US ISR complex. One still NEEDS those huge arrays of combat information for systematization and generalization in order to develop operational and strategic models for victory on the battlefield. And bar some SIGINT and localized data at the locations of already utterly demolished VSU, US Army and Intel is not getting access to the most important data sets. 

And then, of course, there is the issue of hardware, or, speaking in more learned language--procurement policies. It is as simple as 2 x 4 piece of lumber:

1. If you don't have AD which even remotely is as capable as that of Russia--you are left only to despair (or salivate) at the element of war which you cannot change, because the impact of your air forces and long range fires is diminished dramatically. Suddenly, it becomes the issue of strategy and even politics. 

2. If you don't have hypersonic weapons, let alone integrate them into your TOE, what is that you gonna do? Train for what? Right, just conceal yourself and your HQ which still is NOT going to help since HQs and Comm. Posts by definition are C4 units and will be detected and annihilated. So, how are you going "to train" for that. Surely, the Parameters prescription is dubious at best: 

The Army must focus on developing command-and-control systems and mobile command posts that enable continuous movement, allow distributed collaboration, and synchronize across all warfighting functions to minimize electronic signature.  

You can minimize, you cannot eliminate it.

3. You CANNOT train the US Army for 3,600 casualties a day. Most importantly, you CANNOT train American public to accept such a price, especially being paid fighting who knows where for who knows what objectives, unless one turns the US into Orwellian prison-state, which is in progress as I type this. But even then...

At this stage the VSU lost half-a-million KIAs and at least twice this number of wounded. And this is the lower-end estimates. These numbers are much higher than US Army's all KIAs in WW II and Vietnam combined. 

But in the end, you cannot turn expeditionary colonial army into continental juggernaut--you simply cannot. Sheer economics and weapons enter the set of considerations here, which cannot be properly discussed within one short post. So, they can train whatever they want, but no training, however important on human-professional level, can substitute tools of 21st century war. But then again, I repeat ad nauseam--the West lost the arms race. To demonstrate, here is one such butt-hurt imbecile: 

The dismal performance of Russia’s conventional forces in the early days of the war in Ukraine risks convincing some in NATO that the future Russian threat to the Alliance can be deterred primarily via NATO’s conventional superiority, and that enhancing deterrence of Russian nuclear use in a future conflict is therefore no longer a high priority. This is a dangerous fallacy. 

The guy is full of shit, with "degree" in... international relations and is completely lost in his pseudo-expertise, but he is REPRESENTATIVE  of the "intellectual" level of current US military-political top which is NOT trainable or is capable of learning, and this is a grim reality of the defeat of the combined West. You cannot win when the only thing you know is how to operate in GIGO mode.

TOE As Military Bible.

Thanks to Larch who pointed my nose to the article by Lt.Colonel John Dolan at the Task and Purpose site. The title of article leaves no secret what is it all about: The Army is getting leaders ready for a war unlike any the US has ever seen. The service is moving away from the past and training for future operations against China and Russia. There, Nolan makes some assertions which need to be elaborated upon. Nolan opens with this:

For several years, the U.S. Army has been considering how to better prepare its leaders and formations for large-scale combat operations (LSCO) against peer and near-peer threats. As an Army officer with over four years in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader Middle East, I appreciate the challenges of transitioning a force well-trained and educated in counter-insurgency operations (COIN) to one capable of fighting and prevailing against threats like Russia and/or China. The Maneuver Captains Career Course (MCCC) at Fort Benning, Georgia, the Army’s premier school for educating its officers in tactics and planning, has made revising its course curriculum to fully teach LSCO and competition with China and Russia its top priority. MCCC is building a fully-aligned LSCO curriculum by redefining our operational environment, focusing on the division (DIV) as the unit of action, and considering expansion opportunities within multi-domain operations (MDO) to develop the Army’s next generation of maneuver leaders to fight and win in LSCO.

There is absolutely no doubt that Pentagon (and CIA) have been looking at Russia's Wars very attentively. It is true for both Syrian Campaign and, of course, events in Ukraine since 2014 and, especially, now with SMO. Nolan's article is not a very tacit admission of an utter failure of the Pentagon's fighting doctrine and of the return, as is perceived in the US, of the massive scale combined arms warfare. Of course, in reality it never went away and Russians never abandoned this view of war, even despite the reign, primarily in the information environment, of the concepts such as Revolution in Military Affairs, Counter-insurgency and other similar concepts which were the extension of the overall American view on the warfare which none other than a fanatical Russophobe Richard Pipes (which makes it even more valuable under circumstances) noted in 1977: 

The United States wants to win its wars quickly and with the smallest losses in American lives. It is disinclined, therefore, to act on protracted and indirect strategies, or to engage in limited wars and wars of attrition. Once it it resorts to arms, it prefers to mobilize the great might of its industrial plant to produce vast quantities of the means of destruction with which in the shortest possible time to undermine the enemy's will and ability to continue the struggle. Extreme reliance on technological superiority, characteristic of US warfare is the obverse side of America's extreme sensitivity to its own casualties; so is indifference to the casualties inflicted on enemy. 

This quote from Pipes' otherwise loony and, naturally, incompetent piece Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War, should have been used by Nolan as a preamble to his piece, because it covers immediately the foundation on which US warfare was built and it answers immediately the question WHY the United States Army Couldn't Fight and Win a Massive Scale Combined Arms War in Eastern Europe. Nolan goes to a great length trying to frame a discussion by reviewing the operational environment and manuals which the United States Army tries to adapt to the realities of the possible war, titled in Pentagonese LSCO (Large Scale Combat Operations) with Russia or China. It is all fine and dandy, and, in fact, necessary. Nolan adds here a personal touch:

As a platoon leader in Iraq, I credit two Apache attack helicopters with saving my life, and I knew I could always rely on air support being close by and highly responsive. In an LSCO environment, the days of helicopters loitering over small units, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) soaking targets uncontested for 48 hours, and firing mortars and artillery without regard for their proximity to command posts, assembly areas, and logistics nodes are gone. Similarly, our expectation of complete air supremacy and not worrying about more than a small UAS dropping a 40mm grenade on top of us is unrealistic. This revised operational environment that MCCC is building into its scenarios is intended to teach students to account for a threat with accurate and even overmatched fires, air defense assets at nearly every echelon, aircraft capable of striking friendly units, near-constant observation by enemy UAS, and the capabilities to broadly disrupt our communications systems. We are trying to impart to our students that the resources they will receive are 1) more finite in terms of time allocation and quantity, 2) susceptible to many forms of enemy contact, and 3) must be employed thoughtfully to prevent easy enemy predation and enable preservation for future friendly use. 

Well, that is a good start and it is the duty of professionals to view things in proper perspective and framework but the reason the United States Army couldn't win LSCO in Eastern Europe against Russia is already answered by... Pipes and it is very simple:

1. The United States as a country is incapable to face the number of casualties, especially in KIAs, which will amount, roughly, to 1,000-1,500 KIAS per day alone. This is not a theorem, it is an axiom. In other words, what Nolan admits as shortcomings are, even when one has the ability to adapt somewhat tactically and operationally, what Nolan terms as to be "employed thoughtfully", to the realities of European LSCO, one still is reduced to this proverbial:

2.TOE: Table of Organization and Equipment. Like this relic of the Cold War 1.0. 

And here is the thing which SMO demonstrated perfectly and which the US Army NEVER experienced in its history. 

A) Classic truism of the 3rd Generation Wars (per Soviet Military thinkers) of stand off and SMART munitions and increasing accuracy of the targeting which is known since 1980s: If I see you, I can kill you. Obviously a bunch (in thousands) of the annihilated NATO "volunteers" in Ukraine cannot testify to this tactical and operational truism, but some, who had enough IQ to save their asses by running, will--it is true. Russia, as the US, has a superb and constantly improving ISR complex and, unlike any other potential enemy of the US, can deny the US the same, including removing or disabling most of the US space based recon assets both physically and by a "soft kill". 

B) This all comes down to this TOE, especially its "Equipment" part since Russia not only deploys megawatt class combat lasers but builds specially designed systems capable to "kill" any number of enemy satellites, including whatever Elon Musk wants to put into orbit. One of the unpleasant, for the NATO, things here is that these systems are capable not only to "remove" NATO's space-based assets but are capable of fighting US' counter-measures, thus ensuring a continuous operation of crucial parts of Recon and Targeting systems such as Liana, as an example. Once you lose situational awareness--you lose. The United States Army never fought under such conditions. 

C) Maneuver: here comes this back to TOE, its "Equipment" part, issue: maneuver with WHAT? Putting aside a few hundred French and German Main Battle Tanks, M1 Abrams with its monstrous weight and dimensions is not a very effective platform in the environment where it will have to face hundreds of T-90M Proryv (all Netcentric and capable to even provide targeting to Russian Air Force assets) and now serially produced T-14 Armatas, while classic US battlefield strength in Close Air Support most likely will be either mitigated or removed altogether. Because, and you may have guessed it, and I wrote about it many times--the United States simply has no concept of advanced Troops Air Defense, unless one wants to impress Russians with this:

Which sounds like a bad joke with Russian ground forces deploying organic air defense systems which include this: 

Or this: 

And many other things which proved their very high effectiveness on the battlefield in serious conflicts both in Syria and in SMO. And these are just some of them. Not least in the ECM field, that even US specialists in the matter, surprisingly, are going public explaining why Russia "doesn't actively jam GPS".

Saving the best to use against U.S. and NATO. Despite the location of the conflict, Ukraine is not the enemy Vladimir Putin is really worried about. His concerns focus on the U.S. and NATO. Deploying Russia’s most sophisticated and powerful electronic weapons in Ukraine would enable adversaries to study technologies and tactics. This would lead to the development of countermeasures and make the weapons less effective in future conflicts. Better for Russia to keep its best tools and tricks for interfering with GPS in reserve for use later against larger forces and more important targets.

Nolan is correct in his conclusion that:

Competition with China and Russia is here to stay for the foreseeable future, and this requires an institutional shift towards better understanding and training for LSCO. As I write this, Russia continues its war in Ukraine, and the United States continues to push more troops and arms to Eastern Europe to bolster our Allies. While transitioning our Army to a fighting force more capable of prevailing in an LSCO contest will not happen overnight, MCoE and MCCC play a vital role in preparing future generations of Army leaders to fight and win the next war. Our key is to remain agile and dynamic in our curriculum and instructional approach, with our foot on the gas – willing to adjust and adapt for the future fight. 

But here is the issue--in order to have this "E" in TOE you need a national military-industrial capability which was lost by the United States long time ago and I was probably one of the first, may be even first, people who by 2017 started to point out to the United States losing Arms Race to Russia. Today the improvement in capabilities for the United States Army rests not just with, however important, combat training or new curriculum and instructional approach, knowing an academic catastrophe unfolding, as an example, in the USMA in West Point. It rests with the ability of the United States to produce effective and competitive weapons for the modern war, but I don't see this happening any time soon because the issue is systemic and it straddles the whole spectrum of political, economic and military activities in the United States today. The prognosis is not good. 

But Nolan is not the only one who begins to ask some hard questions. As some at West Point asked two years ago:

What If It Doesn’t End Quickly? Reconsidering US Preparedness for Protracted Conventional War

The answer is very simple, there is no "If", in case of, God forbids, the United States deciding to commit suicide by Russia, the US Army will have to deal not just with own technological inferiority but fighting people who for millennium fought off the best both Orient and combined West could throw at them, while the US Army trying to "defeat" Russia will be the force which never fought in defense of own country directly and, apart from this disparity in TOE, it is this moral factor which the US Army lacks and will continue to lack if it decides to go the way of Teutonic Knights, Mongol-Tatars, Polish invaders, Napoleon or Hitler. These experiences cannot be bought by money or internalized on the level of nation and its armed forces, but this is the factor which matters above all. In the end, the United States doesn't have this:

It is simply beyond American cultural and military experiences. And that, in the end, is what wins wars.

Pyotr Akopov Raises (Correctly) The Issue.

Pyotr Akopov of Ria published today a good piece (in Russian) titled: How Fukuyama Has Become Putin's Useful Idiot. Use Google translate to read this essay. But while describing Fukuyama's pseudo-academic "activity", characteristic of most of political "science" academe in the West, Akopov raises this issue, thus reinforcing my long time position. Fukuyama and Western intellectual class' idiocy is the two edged sword:

И это одновременно очень плохой и очень хороший признак. Плохой, потому что показывает степень слабой адекватности управленческого и интеллектуального центра принятия решений атлантического мира. Силы — и огромные — еще есть, но ума уже явно не хватает. В ситуации повышенной конфликтности и тревожности это сочетание не понижает, а повышает риски перерастания конфронтационного сценария в конфликтный. Хороший же признак состоит в том, что плохое понимание России, наших реалий и наших целей, как и ставка на наше поражение, работает в целом на нас. Поэтому настоящие "полезные идиоты Путина" (как на Западе любят называть сторонников честного диалога с Россией) это, конечно, никакие не Шредер с Берлускони, а Сорос и Фукуямой.

Translation:  And this is both a very bad and a very good sign. Bad, because it shows the degree of weak adequacy of the managerial and intellectual decision-making center of the Atlantic world. Forces - and huge ones - are still there, but the mind is clearly not adequate. In a situation of increased probability of a conflict and anxiety, this combination does not reduce, but increases the risks of the confrontation scenario developing into a conflict one. A good sign is that a poor understanding of Russia, our realities and our goals, as well as a bet on our defeat, is generally working for us. Therefore, the real "useful idiots of Putin" (as the West likes to call supporters of an honest dialogue with Russia) are, of course, not Schroeder and Berlusconi, but Soros and Fukuyama.

 

Those who follow my writing should know that often I stress the fact that understanding of Russia is crucial for avoiding a war, but only if one deals with rational people in the combined West who can properly assess the costs of such a confrontation, which will be catastrophic and deadly for the combined West. But then again, once you see, as is precisely the case, a collective Fukuyama (a euphemism for ignorant and under-educated demagogues) being in charge of the West, the issue becomes almost unsolvable, because you cannot explain to an idiot that he is an idiot because he is an idiot--this is almost a complete characteristic of the combined West's political class and academe. Some exceptions, which, certainly, do exist, merely confirm the rule. 

 

Akopov properly notes: 

Удивительные дискуссии идут на Западе — там спорят с призывом Макрона не унижать Россию. Дело тут не в том, что нелепа сама постановка вопроса — нынешний Запад в принципе не может унизить нашу страну. Потому что унизить можно только того, кто от вас зависит (и с кем у вас если не общие ценности, то хотя бы одна система координат), но ничего подобного про отношения в паре Запад и Россия сказать нельзя. Нет, отповедь Макрону — а последней возразила ему Хиллари Клинтон, заявившая, что это уже "пройденный этап", — показательна тем, что возражающие ему люди живут в какой-то параллельной вселенной. 

Translation: Amazing discussions are going on in the West - they are arguing with Macron's call not to humiliate Russia. The point here is not that the very formulation of the question is ridiculous - the current West, in principle, cannot humiliate our country. Because you can only humiliate someone who depends on you (and with whom you have, if not common values, then at least one system of coordinates), but nothing of the kind can be said about relations between the West and Russia. No, the rebuff to Macron - and Hillary Clinton was the last to object to him, saying that this was already a "passed stage" - is indicative of the fact that the people who object to him live in some kind of parallel universe.

Evidently even these obvious facts of human and states' behavior are beyond the grasp of the modern West's ruling class and academe which "consults" it and that brings us to not only warranted, but irresistible conclusion that far from providing useful idiots, modern West is producing only pure distilled idiots of all varieties who know not what they are doing. Like such: 

US officials are “quietly” urging agricultural firms to boost Russian fertilizer imports amid growing shortages and a looming international food crisis, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the discussions. Companies fearful of US sanctions had apparently all but ceased purchases, despite loopholes built into the penalties. The US and most EU countries have imposed tough trade restrictions on Moscow since its attack on Ukraine in late February, and are now facing a dilemma as shipping firms seek to avoid carrying Russian fertilizer. The penalties make exemptions for the product – of which Moscow is a key global exporter – but companies have nonetheless been reluctant to buy, helping to drive a 24% drop in Russian fertilizer sales this year.

Not only those are idiots, incapable to calculate consequences, but they are also unprincipled ones (surprise, surprise) because now they have to forego their own sanctions, they so enthusiastically imposed just a few months ago. And that brings us to this Russian dilemma of the last 20+ years--how do you even deal with these people? Well, you don't and that is why Russia won the arms race--another fragment of reality which begins to slowly dawn upon this collective Fukuyama in the West. After all, how else can one explain a desire to limit Russia's procurement of RS-28 Sarmat and Poseidon, among many other things which leave the United States proper and its military forces completely exposed and indefensible. Hey, maybe they are not complete idiots there yet? Maybe there is some basic instinct of survival which still fires those few remaining neurons in otherwise completely atrophied brains? Who knows.

Gaps and Preventive Wars of Desperation.

More than four years ago I wrote my first piece for Unz Review and in it I advanced the thesis that extremely tense situation around Russia could be viewed as an approach to a preventive war of sorts.

for Washington, whose political discourse is based on American exceptionalism and foreign policy now is defined completely in terms of military power, emergence of a “peer” military power is absolutely unacceptable. While China is an economic giant and is now arguably the largest economy in the world, she still has a long way to go until she becomes a true “peer” to the United States militarily. This is not the case with Russia. It becomes also true when one begins to look at doctrinal and technological developments both in the US and Russia. The contrast is startling, even if one considers a very dubious US intelligence on Russia.

Many things have changed since then but the thesis of a preventive war against Russia by the combined West, led by the United States, not only didn’t lose much of its relevance but, in fact, increasingly accentuates the only framework the United States, as a formal leader of a combined West, uses when dealing with Russia and, increasingly, China. Preventive war, in all of its known  manifestations ranging from sabotage and  propaganda to various levels of military violence, is the only method of conducting foreign relations the United States knows precisely because the United States doesn’t know what real war is, nor is it abreast of a profound technological and operational change which is taking place in the warfare of the 21^st century.

The obverse side of this de facto loss of the arms race by the United States is astonishing in its volume, in the last thirty years, stream of military and geopolitical concepts, doctrines, theories and ideas most of which never panned out and, in fact, played a baneful role in preventing the United States from facing a global reality described not in US establishment and academe platitudes but in tangibles. But, of course, you already know all that because that is what I do—I try to describe the world in tangibles. But here is the thing—the indicator of any loss or, otherwise, victory is always a gap. This is how we describe the state of play, in gaps—how large they are and what are the dynamics of these gaps. Recall how gaps factor in all that:

You see the gap, you see gap's dynamics and you pretty much know who the winner of this particular race is. Easy. But that's sports, where the means of objective control are the deciders of the outcome. While one can debate the validity of one or another referee call, such as shameless dive by Raheem Sterling against Denmark two days ago (not to mention two balls simultaneously of the field), which got England to Euro-2020 finals, in games, in races--it is more difficult. 

In the end, time and finish strip are irrefutable proofs of a victory. But that is not the case with international relations, geopolitics and military power. Especially military power. For starters they are infinitely more complex than any sports competition, hence their "rules books" are not books per se, but a gigantic variety of those and require years and years of a professional study. A layman can, and does, understand soccer or ice-hockey rules and tactics, a layman will have a really hard time understanding basic principles of Search Theory, as an example, and why the probability of detection (PD) of the target in search is: 

                                    PD=1- exp (-z(t))

Where z(t) is: 

Which is, actually, pretty straight-forward with U being the speed of the search object (e.g. submarine), p(rho) is a search area coverage rate (search productivity) and tau is a delay time (time late). Mathematically it is extremely simple but it is a physical essence of this whole "Search" thingy which requires many years of study and experience to grasp it and start thinking in images and concepts which describe all that. This applies to anything military be it basic use of ballistic tables for artillery to ships' maneuvers on a tactical level to thinking in probabilities, required forces and combat effectiveness on the operational and strategic levels. How it is all related to the subject of this post, preventive war that is, you may ask. Here is a straight answer after this fairly long introduction. 

 

Ask yourself a question how the blob in D.C. thinks. I can tell you how: Washington never denounced the preemptive nuclear strike option and I don't mean doctrinal statements about using nukes when there is a danger to the existence of the state, such as Russia's military doctrine explicitly states, same as it is written in many US Nuclear Posture Reviews throughout the last 10 years. I am talking about loosening criteria for a preventive nuclear strike including obfuscated by the military lingo simple military expediency in killing the enemy just because it could be killed with a minimal own costs. Just recall a simple fact that the US is the only country which actually used nuclear weapons. Then recall such things as this in 2008:

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new NATO by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists. Calling for root-and-branch reform of NATO and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world". The manifesto has been written following discussions with active commanders and policymakers, many of whom are unable or unwilling to publicly air their views. It has been presented to the Pentagon in Washington and to NATO's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, over the past 10 days.  

Or, let's recall immediate post-WWII plans for nuking USSR which were prevented not by non-existent then Soviet nuclear deterrent but by dubious effectiveness of American nuclear weapons in case of a large scale war in Europe with the Soviet Union. But the United States was always a nuclear-biased nation and even 2018 (Trump's) Nuclear Posture Review included some bizarre things:

Really? We’re Gonna Nuke Russia for a Cyberattack? The Trump administration’s new nuclear strategy includes a provision that is truly bonkers.

In general, Russians were always aware of the US nuclear views and knew that any situation in which USSR/Russia would fall below a certain second (response) strike in nuclear capabilities had a serious probability of initiation of a decapitating American nuclear strike which would, in theory, settle the issue of the American economic and military hegemony once and for all, by means of destroying USSR/Russia. This is not an insane scenario, these things are constantly on the mind of a large portion of the American military-political elite and this is how it views the world. Russians know this and Russia was developing a second strike capability (response-headon, or otvetno-vstrechnyi udar) like there was no tomorrow. Well, Russians succeeded immensely in this field and, in fact, doing so redefined not only the rules for nuclear deterrent but for any type of the war as a whole. 

Let me explain. Just a few days ago the news about S-500 passing combat missile launches and of A-235 Nudol, evidently, being developed also in mobile variant, went largely in a matter-of-factly mode but there are some things which need to be understood in their ramifications. S-500 has a range of around 600 kilometers for aerial targets. That, as I already stated before, means that any NATO combat aircraft flying around Berlin, or more generally, over East Germany will be shot down. Same goes for any aerial target over Romania once S-500 are deployed in Crimea. Once one considers the fact that Russians are talking now about "one missile--one target", it becomes clear that targeting for S-500 could be obtained from any source which allows higher uncertainties in targeting of aircraft and that means targeting from such radar complexes as Container, which can see the commercial and combat planes on runway in Netherlands. 

This capability alone has strategic ramifications because the only viable instrument in NATO's war plans against Russia was its air-power which was considered "sophisticated" and numerous enough to fight Russia including delivering nuclear weapons. If S-400 wasn't bad enough, S-500 effectively denies NATO air forces any crucial command and control function because any aircraft carrying this mission out will be shot down even before it will be able to detect anything and vector fighter aircraft towards any threat. Obviously, the fact that S-500 is designed to shoot down any hypersonic and ballistic targets with the speed of up to 7 kilometers per second, and low orbit satellites and is integrated with the rest of Russia's AD is a strategic factor in itself which dramatically reduces probabilities of delivering a nuclear, not to speak of conventional, strike against Russia. With S-500 and A-235 Nudol coming on-line and both performing well in tests, Russia continues to develop not only always impressive air defense but the air defense of an immense power, including full blown anti-missile capability, including ICBMs.  

This is a gap and the dynamic of this gap is very simple--it is not static, it is widening. In fact, the speed of this widening only increases. At this stage, Russia has an overwhelming edge over the United States both in quality, quantity and combat experience with her air-defense systems and this has become a strategic problem for the United States. American conventional logic of SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) operations of throwing a bunch of TLAMs and turning on ECM against some outdated and not realistically integrated third world AD doesn't apply here. In fact, Russia can do her own ECM suppressing and, as RAND's big air operations honcho David Ochmanek admitted in 2019: 

“We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary. In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it.”

This was two years ago, since then any mentioning of F-35 "being unmatched in the skies" can cause a hysterical laughter among air-defense and serious Air Forces professionals and even flag-waiving ignorant fanboys such as David Axe have to report that:

The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed

So, how do you fight Russia in the skies? Well, you cannot do that around Russia and in Eastern Europe without losing most of your air force. I omit here extensively discussed reasons for Biden Administration sudden urge to seek summit with Putin. But I have to advance the thesis here that Russia's military edge over the US (and NATO) is much larger than most in the West would admit. There are gaps everywhere and they continue to widen. What are those gaps?

1. We already briefly discussed Air Defense capabilities--Russia's technological lead here is gigantic;

2. Combined Arms capabilities, especially Russia's mobilization and deployment capability, are significantly greater than those of NATO;

3. Missile gap is real and the United States is nowhere near Russia in terms of missile technology. It is not even fair to compare. In fact, it is down right ridiculous. US lag here is counted in generations, not years.

4. Surface fleets--this is the whole other story;

5. Lastly, nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Avangard, Sarmat, Poseidon, Burevestnik... do I need to say more? 

So, if you are in D.C. today and you are one of the representatives of a powerful school of thought that Russia delenda est by any means and anything, including preventive nuclear strike, must be considered to achieve this objective, and you see the dynamics of the so called "arms race" which is being lost and not by slight margin but by "50 lengths", ask yourself a question what military options do you have? Right, only a massive nuclear preventive strike which will be three decades late and, in fact, the more time passes by, even this strike may fail to achieve objective of physical elimination of Russia other than triggering a second strike response which will destroy the United States.  

Am I overstating my case? Not necessarily, we can only guess the stakes in the power struggle in D.C. As the events of the last few years demonstrated, Washington is packed with insane people ready to go to any length in their lust for power and quenching their thirst for exceptionalism kool-aid in their delusional state. This insanity may metastasize into the very military-political top who in their desperation from recognizing America's weakness may try to unleash unthinkable, especially knowing that the time is running out and that they will never be able to narrow, let alone close, any gap before America's nuclear strategic arsenal begins to dramatically lose its deterrent effect and Russia will transition into the new military-technological reality as she did last decade with what can only be described as the REAL revolution in military affairs. The Pax Americana is already dead and these are Russia's highly advanced weapons which for now keep relative peace on the globe. They are the guarantee against the preventive war. But will they be enough to prevent a desperation war which may originate inside increasingly chaotic, delusional and irrational American military-political establishment? These are the chaotic thoughts which visited me in the last couple of days.