... in summer. They say it is Madrid. This might as well be Paris or Rome.
And you all know by now what is happening in Ceuta. Here it is.
In Spain they voted for that. This is civilization in a process of decomposition and it cannot be changed. In France it cannot be changed because a huge portion of French population is like that, but much of it was born in France and you can do nothing about it--they will vote for globalists. Euro militaries are emasculated and impotent and they cannot save their countries. Euromales have been also emasculated and care only about sports.
So, you see--this is how Pentagon generals "fight"--they don't know any other way. As Gevorg Mirzoyan concludes (correctly) what is happening right now with Trump and Iran, where the US is stuck like that proverbial porn actress in a couch or a dryer, if you know what I mean, and why US cannot leave, is this:
It has to be understood--"near peer" moniker today applies to the US Armed Forces, not to the counterpart they have in mind. Any talk about "readiness" is useless against the background of many centuries-long continental warfare. Per The Pacific. Enough to take a look at butcher's bill issued daily in SMO--even Pacific War pales in comparison with 111,000 KIAs in over 3 years and 8 months. But even ALL US casualties in WW II on all theaters pale in comparison to SMO and VSU losses alone prorated for time and adjusted for proper projection.
The only danger to the "American way of life" is IN America. And "readiness" is not the answer--the US has no experience with such scale of continental war in new technological paradigm anyway. But it is commendable that the man makes a distinction, and it is the first step in understanding the scale of things unfolding for the US, which are of the American making precisely because nobody in the US ever experienced the REAL continental war.
Thirty months of SMO and Russia's incredibly conservative estimates:
Pentagon people better open their military history books and look up Eastern Front in WW II, before going back to class and relearning Operational Planning and Operational Art.
The real one, which is already in a preoperational stage, because a bunch of Kiev Regime Nazis have been charged and sentenced for their crimes in Russia. I spoke about the issue of justice for war crimes of 404 and its curators today with Ania. And here we are today:
What does it mean, then, "to be held accountable" in relation to "Western sponsors"? Very simply, many their names and positions either in West's military or intel orgs are well known. Their identities are also well known. Here Nebenzya elaborates:
“These are conscious and cynical crimes that have no statute of limitation,” the Russian diplomat said, adding that Moscow will hold responsible not just the “Kiev regime” but also “Western countries who flood Ukraine with weapons and – as we are well aware – also approve targets of the strikes.”
Cannot get any clearer than that--for starters they will be charged with war crimes in absentia. Unlike BS of ICC in Hague, the names, the identities of those charged will be announced and charge will be not just of being responsible for killing, torturing, abusing, ethnically cleansing of Russophone population of 404, including torture and execution of Russian POWs, but in crimes against humanity. Now, once one considers that Washington and London's "war planning" and "command and control" are directly responsible for the deaths of between half-a-million and a million of VSU personnel, with one million of them maimed--guess from three times, how many of those people and their relatives and friends would want to settle accounts with those who are directly responsible for this horror?
Well, for starters those whose identities will be disclosed and charged, will have to tread very carefully beyond the borders of their respective countries. But, considering the fact that neither the US nor EU know the meaning of national borders and how to defend those, even confining oneself to a what seems as safe location will do very little when one will have a number people who will be after them and, remarkably, will require no additional stimuli to settle accounts. FSB or SVR with G(R)U wouldn't need to move a finger, disclosure of identities by Ukraine War Crimes Tribunal and charging in absentia will be enough.
As I am on record, most of those who "advised" Kiev Nazis--primarily from UK and the US, but not exclusively--do not have an appropriate organ, the mental and moral tool kit--to grasp the scale and the gravity of their crimes. It is one thing to kill Skripal's cat and do the false flag with chemical weapons somewhere in Syria or Iraq, totally another to be responsible for the largest war in Europe since WW II with millions of casualties. It is one thing to ran from Afghanistan, totally another losing the largest war since WW II to a country which is a nuclear military and economic superpower with wherewithal to do what it considers necessary. Or as Mr. Lavrov conveyed it today:
Some people in this blog asked if it is wise for Hezbollah to disclose that they have, unlike HAMAS, BTW, serious weapon systems such as anti-shipping missiles. There is no secret in it, just recall this:
INS Hanitwhich was struck in 2006 with C-701 AshM, while much heavier and deadlier C-802 failed to lock on Hanit and struck some other vessel. So, it is nothing new for Hezbollah to be armed with much heavier weapons, including unconfirmed full blown missile air-defense complexes, than HAMAS--after all, Iran has a very advanced military industry. So, it is getting curioser and curioser(c) out there.
Colonel Larry Wilkerson, speaking to a couple of people on the video-conference in April this year--around the time regime in Kiev decided to play games grown-ups play--and Wilkerson, who is a D.C. insider didn't mince words about real situation. Watch, and listen, what he says between 7:00 and 16:00 in the interview and mind you, the guy was Chief of Staff of then Secretary of the State Colin Powell.
He doesn't really say anything new for anyone who read me (this blog and books) for the last 7 years, but he reiterates one point which I try to stress non-stop for many years and this is, as Larry says, verbatim: "we don't know anything about that." That being, of course, a real war. Then he proceeds with his (or article he read) estimate on the number of casualties the United States will sustain in case of the war with someone like Russia or China and the reaction of Larry's partners speaks volumes. Wilkerson's number is at 40,000 in the first week. Compare this to Douglas Macgregor's estimate of the US casualties, say in war in Europe, which he puts around 300,000+ in total, with 110,000 of them KIAs in the first 110 days in WW I.
Many forget that Vietnam, for all of its turmoil, was a protracted, 10-year long, war in which US casualties were accumulating over significant periods of time--many months and years. Wilkerson is correct asking what I call a Zumwalt question--what would D.C. do, how will it react, when it will be getting that kind of numbers killed and wounded, not to mention losses in high value and prestigious assets, such as combat aircraft, let alone combat ships, not to speak of aircraft carriers. Is the United States ready to take this in? Absolutely not, this is not even a theorem, it is an axiom. Wilkerson's story about Obama asking both Powell and Wilkerson during the meeting in the White House on how to get out of this Washington's "bias toward war" is remarkable in a sense that it shows a complete helplessness, in Obama case aggravated by Obama's overall mediocrity (not that anyone before him or after are better) and lack of principles, of the US political "elite" to do anything, even if to imagine that they want to do so, about not fighting wars.
The system is wound this way, you cannot do anything about it unless you change the system on a fundamental level or provide a massive shock to it. If not, you will continue to get people like Lindsey Graham dominating a political discourse and driving country into the ground, granted very little is left of it.
But then again, what "democracy"? Who buys this shit anymore? The United States has just elected and sworn to the highest office the guy who barely remembers his name and who has to be pumped with a cocktail of drugs to keep him focused for a few minutes. What do you expect from all that? I largely sat out this whole Afghanistan debacle because I don't kick those who are already on the floor, but political consequences of what we all observed in the last couple of months, from abandoning Bagram to a clusterfuck in Kabul with images which make Saigon imagery pale in comparison, did not even start to arrive in earnest, this all is still ahead of us and, boy, I can tell you--we are in for a ride which this country never experienced before. Remarkably, Biden's (or whoever makes decision for him) decision to escape Afghanistan was strategically correct, it was executed piss poor, but no matter the imagery from Kabul, any withdrawal, even more-or-less orderly one, would have been a declaration of a departure of the United States from its largely self-proclaimed status of hegemon. These are obvious conclusions anyone with IQ slightly higher than room temperature could have arrived to. But the main reason I started to write today, is the fact that I stumbled on this lecture on Mahan and I was perfectly OK with changing my perspective on Mahan from this professor of strategy in Naval War College until, in his Q&A, he gets to what he says on 1:19:00.
And he gets into this trope about America being "still the biggest economic power in the world." I turned this off. This is the guy who teaches strategy, alright, but he still waxes "service industry" and the myth of Chinese "stealing" shit because "we are so open". Surely, Chinese do steal shit, as does anyone else--it is called an industrial espionage, but did this John Kuehn guy ever heard about House Resolution #4444, or NAFTA, or any other legislative of fiscal instrument developed for the transfer of the US real economy, especially manufacturing, abroad? I understand the United States lies, many countries do, but it is one thing to BS the world for the sake of PR, nowadays met with sarcastic humiliating smiles, but to continue to lie to oneself--when was the last time this "strategy" Doctor Kuehn opened economic statistics, ANY economic statistics?
Now you see my point, lie and BSing permeates America's political discourse, media and academe. John Kuhn is a former naval aviator and I am damn sure that Boyd's fundamentals of OODA Loop are well known to him, but if this former naval officer convinces himself at the point of the first "O" (Observe) that some redundant, if not harmful, US "service industries", such as a financial one, count for anything towards China producing almost 15 times more steel than the United States (Russia produces almost the same amount as the US) or Chinese shipbuilding industry dwarfing that of the US. Or Chinese car-making, or pretty much anything, with the exception of commercial aerospace, but Russia is helping China on this one. So, a good start for the United States in terms of beating this bias toward war is to stop lying to themselves. Especially so on the level of an elite officer graduate and post graduate school such as Naval War College. In the end, Kuhn himself can follow Mahan's wise advice and admit that the nation should have a naval force commensurate with its economic capability and there is a reason the United States is de facto a bankrupt nation--it continues to maintain a military force and, especially the Navy, which it simply cannot afford. Not even close.
And then, of course, there is this teeny-weeny issue of revolution in military affairs and the fact that you cannot apply strategic naval wisdom of the 19th century, no matter how tantalizing this may feel, to technological and operational realities of the 21st one. You just cannot, because neither Mahan, not Corbett, nor Fischer could have foresaw fleets engagement envelopes measured in many thousand kilometers, space travel, hyper-sonic weapons, computers and ISR which would make Arleigh Burke and Chester Nimitz teary. Stop lying to yourself and face the facts that the United States failed as a military power, and it will be a real tragedy if it fails as a political entity, which either will slide toward a third-worlddom, a process which was underway for quite some time now, or will disintegrate completely. How about people of South Carolina vote this neocon SOB Lindsey Graham out of the office? I am sure people of South Carolina are smarter than Arizona voters who kept in office late war criminal and supporter of Islamic terrorists John McCain. Hey, one has to start somewhere, right?
China's English language Global Times is viewed as a tabloid under the "roof" of CCP, but being a "communist" tabloid does not mean that even this tabloid is free from good thoughts and valuable opinions. Such as this from former US Marine Corps officer and now civilian employee of Pentagon Franz Gayl who penned and interesting piece in Global Times about possible war between China and the United States around Taiwan. Gayl opens with a broadside.
And I happen to agree militarily with Gayl in terms of a possible hostilities around Taiwan, especially when Gayl goes into the neck of the woods and addresses what is commonly known as "fundamentals".
Many Americans assume China's citizenry longs for a liberal democracy
like that on the island of Taiwan, and that war will trigger popular
revolt. But the Taiwan question is not an ideological dispute. Rather it
is a raw and painful open wound in China's civilizational identity.
Today, US othering of Chinese only fuels a fierce nationalism in its 1.4
billion citizens. China has a traditional self-narrative wherein the
preservation of face and enforcement of sovereignty are inseparable. All
the while the balance of power has shifted fundamentally. The US would
be wise to regard China as a peer superpower, if only due to her
casualty-tolerance - China's decisive advantage in any fight with the
US. China also shares a binding mutual defense treaty with North Korea,
and the depths of its friendship and security bonds with Russia should
never be underestimated.
This is an excellent point. Nationalism is not the thing the United States, which still operates with a primitive two-dimensional picture of the world (unsurprisingly, considering a "level" of US "elites") and turned the term "communism" into the euphemism for everything the United States doesn't like, encountered since Vietnam where the war was lost not just to Vietnamese "communists" but to Vietnamese nationalism, especially when one considers the historic age of Vietnamese, whose antiquity goes back as far as 2000+ years BC. American "elites" have no concept of profound and long history and we all know how the War in Vietnam ended. But Gayl makes the most important observation here:
The US has never paid an existential price for violating another
nation's sovereignty, leading to our smug sense of military
invincibility. However, with Taiwan being a core Chinese priority, that
would be a fatal miscalculation. Still, the US counts on regional allies
to share the pain. Yet some will have blood debts to pay if they engage
in China's civil war. For example, India was bloodied badly in the
1960s for testing China's territorial resolve. Japan's humiliating
50-year occupation of Taiwan and the Rape of Nanjing also remain fresh,
unforgettable wounds for China. The US allies will definitely think
twice before militarily intervening in China's unresolved civil war and
internal affairs.
Yes, I am on record for years that the expeditionary warfare--the only warfare the United States knows--is not a continental warfare which shapes nation-states and national awareness. Vietnamese lost in the war with the United States millions of people--numbers incomprehensible for the average American, while China is even more casualties tolerant and, unlike Vietnam of 1960s, which was dependent on Soviet support, has own armed forces which are capable to both defend China proper and project power into Taiwan. Recall what I wrote four years ago:
Now let us recall that China's loses in the WW II were second only to the Soviet Union. And visuals, sometimes, are very important in terms of demonstrating what REAL loses in real wars are and that in case of war around Taiwan the United States may expect not only a completely different dynamics of losses than it ever encountered, but also has its bases in the region under the threat of annihilation by Chinese medium and long-range missiles.
This video should be shown to every member of US Congress and every US government employee with the explanation that the United States is a newcomer to the world of real war in which fates of nations are at stake and that modern weapon systems make not only any US force vulnerable to what it never experienced in its history--its strategic and operational depth being attacked by the opposition--but the US proper being under very real threat of attack. And it is a very good sign that American military professionals understand that and speak out about this increasingly loud. I touch here purely military and humanitarian aspect of this issue. I have no idea how the China-Taiwan issue could be settled in a peaceful way, I am sure it can be, but I am no professional Sinologist to offer any prescriptions.
In related news, yesterday Kiev "celebrated" the anniversary of the SS Division Galicina--a kind of people US and EU support. You know, "democratic" Ukraine et al.
So, you may enjoy "Western values" which were streamed on Ukrainian TV. But we all know that there are no Nazis in Ukraine, yes, yes, ask Vicki Nuland, she'll tell you.
Truth is, there is no "crisis of national security" in the US--nobody is intent on attacking the US or cut vital for the US Shipping Lanes Of Communications (SLOC), other than some terrorists, but FBI can handle that; US Navy, despite all of its very real problems, is still a very potent navy, especially its submarine component, to do the job of keeping SLOCs open. Neither Russia nor China are intent to interdict these SLOCs unless the United States decides to start a war on them, then, of course, if the US, say, tries to attack Russia, things change. Other than that--there is no crisis. Russia can obliterate the US today, she could do it yesterday, and she will be able to do it tomorrow, the same goes the other way--this is MAD, folks. But Russia explicitly doesn't want to attack the US. So, what's the fuss is all about?
The fuss is about this (from the article):
But the authors worry that the department, as it is structured both
strategically and financially right now, would not be able to
successfully manage two conflicts at once – or be guaranteed victory in
even one, should it come down to a fight with Russia or China.
Talk about folie de grandeur of unimaginable scale (see Report). One may ask the question on how those people in National Defense Strategy Commission really envision, say war against Russia alone. It is really a fascinating, for all the wrong reasons, scenario since, I am sure, these guys (such as former CNO Admiral Gary Roughead among other 11 members of this Commission) try to play this scenario strictly in conventional framework, because otherwise the United States as a state will cease to exist.
I was thinking about this, not to mention getting tired of reading all kinds of alarmist, justified and not, as in this case, "reports" and here is my simple take.
1. United States never fought against first-rate, well-trained, equipped and determined adversary which can match US capabilities across the whole spectrum of modern warfare. US fought in Vietnam where it lost to determined but largely peasant force with only some very few capabilities of a first world army, it fought in Korea where it ended with bloody stalemate and, of course, US had its turkey shoot against grossly incompetent Saddam's Army. US armed forces never fought in their modern history against the adversary capable to strike (conventionally) to the strategic depth. That means under no conditions were US troops, their rear services, bases, strategic command and control assets, ammunition stocks etc. subjected to a serious (and sustained) fire impact since one day Pearl Harbor affair. Of course, we do not even talk about US proper.
2. United States doesn't have effective battle field air defense capable to prevent such a (stand-off) impact--no US AD complex is capable to reliably intercept most Russia's stand-off weapons thus exposing every single US combat asset on the theater of operations.
3. A painful issue of US air assets--good luck dealing with the best air-defense in the world. A single regiment of S-300 PMU2 in Syria shut down Israeli Air Force (equipped with much vaunted F-35) operations over coastal Syria.
4. Ground forces? Another wowser since nobody knows how US ground forces will fare against steady and fast attrition of its assets against arguably best anti-armor and area-impact weapons in the world. US simply has no historic experience with that under the conditions of very limited resources and manufacturing base being destroyed (conventionally) domestically.
So, how this Commission envisions such a war is a really funny question. They do state, however:
We recommend that DOD more clearly answer the question of how it intends to accomplish a core theme of the NDS—defeating major power rivals in competition and war. Without a credible approach to winning a war against China or Russia, DOD’s efforts will befor naught
Apart from fluffy (and expected) pseudo-military BS, I have question to this Commission--do they have any idea how it will feel, if they imagine a set-piece (totally unrealistic scenario) battle at Russia's borders in purely conventional way, to lose, say, 150,000 KIAs alone just within one-two months of "fighting"? You say impossible? I would say I am being way too cautious. After all, this is US Army Colonel speaking in 2012 BEFORE certain events unfolded:
This should be emblazoned on every wall of any US military-related "think-tank" or "commission" because reality will be even grimmer once one understands that in order for US (NATO) to fight Russia they will need to come into Russia's backyard (Russia is not going to occupy or attack anyone unless attacked first) and people way more capable strategically and tactically than those in Pentagon tried it, not for once, and ended losing not only wars but their armies and states. US military "thinkers" evidently have no grasp of what even conventional war with Russia may bring to the American side--the scale of attrition which will make Vietnam an easy stroll in the park in comparison, albeit Americans who fought there were tough soldiers and good leaders on tactical level. This is not the case today. But General Van Riper's lessons still must be studied to avoid a catastrophe which expects any adversary deciding to fight Russia in her vicinity.
But what is this "crisis" really about? It is actually about not willing to face reality and fight a real war (it is scary and is pregnant with major political consequences), as opposed to comfortable rolling over grossly inferior adversaries. It is about constantly diminishing military capability margin, which was grossly inflated to start with in the wake of the Soviet collapse, and which now is getting to be more proportional to the Empire which is being "cut to size" by geopolitical, economic, military, technological and human reality. So, no--United States is not capable to fight either Russia or China separately, let alone those two simultaneously--this delusional idea was born out of ignorance, hubris and, frankly, lack of knowledge of the real warfare with capable adversaries. Projecting (lack of) "lessons" from Iraq or Afghanistan occupations and (not)fighting there in what is a medium to low intensity conventional (COIN) conflicts onto modern 21st century warfare against nuclear superpowers--it is either, indeed, folie de grandeur or a sign of a mental disorder among those who have to face reality of American very real economic and, with it, military decline. United States either learns to live within its by far not limitless means and accepts the new geopolitical reality, thus preserving own status as one of the few true global superpowers, or it will destroy itself completely trying to retain which it thinks, wrongly, a providence-bestowed crown of hegemon. I feel it is time to address some issues of possible casualties in a conventional conflict. I will do it later.
