Now About "Swedish" Case.

I mentioned it in my today's video. Yes, this is 100% confirmed info by people who command the Russian formation which did this. How do I know? Well, I know many things which sometimes are not for public disclosure until they are mentioned by "holders of information". So, on one operational axis Russians took this Swedish Commander (an equivalent of Lieutenant-Colonel) POW. He was guarded by one of the Baltic states security detail--easy-peasy for the level of Russian guys who disposed of them. So, this officer, staff officer for VSU (AFU) exhibited a level of tactical and operational "ability" which, for the lack of a better word, is not even rudimentary--it is fairy taleish. He really believed that if his formation attacked in a designated sector Russians were supposed to retreat, nay, run and that this guy's troops would reach objective no problem. Ooops, but for some unknown, incomprehensible reasons, not only Russians defended their objective, but, damn, they unloaded a firestorm and then, would you believe it, they counterattacked. This is not what they teach them in NATO's military academies. 

When I say that NATO officer corps is utterly unprepared for modern war, I mean it. Remarkably, you can sort of address this on a tactical level in a sense that you can teach them to maneuver and consider the opponent--and even that is useless under modern conditions. But the problem is both on tactical and operational level is that Russians outrange and outfire ANYTHING NATO can bring to bear. I am on record--Iraq War experience counts for nothing and, in fact, is a huge obstacle. This also explains a bunch of the American loser generals (like Ben Hodges) suffering form an acute case of butthurt and professional envy. It is now a confirmed fact--NATO doesn't understand the role of air defense in modern war. In their mind it was supposed to to be always this: 

When comparing our ability to find the enemy against a near-peer threat such as Russia (or an increasingly capable China), significant friendly capability disadvantages immediately become apparent and must be offset. FM 3-0 defines reconnaissance as “a mission undertaken to obtain, by visual observation or other detection methods, information about the activities and resources of an enemy or adversary, or to secure data concerning the meteorological, hydrographic, or geographic characteristics of a particular area.”4 By this definition, we must look at every capability, across all domains, to understand the existing disparities in our ability to collect information against current threats. 

This middle segment "Conduct large-scale ground combat" disappears. Technically, the US could (not will) "find the enemy", but that's about it, the doctrinal pivot of the US Armed Forces of bringing the long-range fires to bear disappears also. No, the US still has the lead in terms of satellite-based ISR (Russia is catching up), per pure signal recon--well, that's complicated. Russians jam better than anyone in the world and then there is this teeny-weeny detail of pre-positioning. So, you see-this Swedish commander was thinking that he would be facing those peasant Ivans with pitch-forks and hiding behind piles of Russian corpses and running away at the first glance of NATO equipment guided to battle with NATO (his) tactical and operational brilliance. But, but ... well, you know the story now. Doctrinal catastrophe is not visible to the average Joe, but it is the most profound catastrophe NATO faces when they have to understand how amateurish and militarily impotent they are. The cognitive dissonance is a bitch. 

So, somebody in the US Army (not Ben Hodges let alone Kellog) was thinking in the right direction in 2019. 

Russian integrated air defense systems (IADS) make sustained air superiority questionable, especially at the beginning of operations when geographical proximity to positioned Russian forces enables their deliberate emplacement. With our current systems, we will only be able to create temporary windows of superiority with great effort. The Russians employ IADS at every tactical level, from battalion to division, with a focus on finding and destroying U.S. fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. They are also steadily working toward overmatch in the field of counterfire radar, fielding a variety of systems across the depths of their formations and with varying levels of capability. This might enable the Russian fires complex to “out attrite” our own counterfire capabilities, leaving them with the only systems on the battlefield. 

Too bad, they didn't recognize the scale of the NATO tactical and operational rut which prevents the most important thing--internalization of the issue--guiding you to correct decisions. They wanted to try, they did. Somebody tell Trump--the US Army didn't produce a general the scale of Erich von Manstein or Georgi Zhukov, or Konstantin Rokossovsky in the last 80 years. Russia did, and that's what makes the world of difference. 

Alastair Crooke And Gaius Baltar. A Selection Of Sorts.

Excellent pieces. But before I proceed, here is me more than seven years ago, namely the end of 2016, warning: 

But the truth remained unchanged no matter how one would try to obfuscate it, and I quote myself: "For COIN crowd, yet again--Combined Arms Operations remain a principal method of the Continental Warfare".   No, not the warfare designed to fight some backward Afghani dekhans in the environment of a complete firepower dominance, not some large Arab military designed to mostly march on the parades, but the warfare which would put serious armed forces on the opposite sides of a conflict and it was here where the main pillar of Pax Americana could hardly put anything as a shining example of a success.

After that I wrote my first book. I was repeating this, essentially truism, ad nauseam even before 2016. Thanks Per Norway (classyglasses), for pointing to Crooke's piece The Fabric of Reality. Crooke makes a critical observation: 

It is a significant point: Ideas, conceptualisations and history may be shut down and cancelled by the command of the ‘masters of dogma’, but the space these intellectual vessels once occupied is still ethereally there -- to rise again in challenge to dogma. The massive polarization occurring today in the world is not simply geopolitical. It is not simply a competition over resources, or even simply a rivalry based on trade relationships. The conflict between Western élites and the rest of humanity, as Emmanuel Todd has suggested in La Défaite, is the result of the West “falling into nihilism and the deification of nothing”. Todd defined this nihilism as “the desire for destruction, but also of the negation of reality. There are no longer any traces of religion, but the human being is still there.”

As you all know, I always look at the world through military prism, but I also am on record that the conflict is metaphysical in nature, it transcends pure politics or even economics. Yet, as Bronislaw Malinowski stated “Another interesting point in the study of aggression is that, like charity, it begins at home.” We can say today that even here West failed, since Vietnam substituting the meaning of war with semantic equivalent of beating the crap from brown people with impunity. But they never read Tolstoy:

On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. 

War, real war, not blowing up Afghan weddings from the sky, is a horror and it is conventionally a combined arms, or its earlier iteration, that is how it has been for the last three centuries. But Western "elites" have no grasp of it, albeit this is slowly changing. I plan tomorrow to talk about how they maybe are nearing realization that they cannot stop anything if it comes to the ultimate outcome. They have no reason and their nature is that of an animal. They do, however, feel the fear and that is how they will live their days out--in fear. The man they would rather not talk about yesterday issued a warning to them. They have a barrel at their temple. 

Which brings us to an excellent piece by Gaius Baltar at Larry's Blog:

Things are bleak in Europe these days. European leaders are caught in a “fight or flight” response, deciding whether they should run and hide or send troops into Ukraine to fight the Menace from the East. However, the existential terror of Emmanuel Macron and his toxic-narcissist accomplices in the EU will have to wait for a dedicated article because this one will focus on the European economy. It has puzzled many how the EU has been managing its economy since the beginning of the Ukraine war. There have been two distinct shocks inflicted upon the Eurozone economy since then. The third shock, which may be the worst, is on the way. All of them are direct results of European policies.

Read it, it is a good reminder of reality being a bitch. Europe is over. It is in panic, but no one is coming to save it and it must be quarantined. The US? 

CNN  —Nearly a third, or 28%, of Gen Z adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer, a larger share than older generations, according to a new report by PRRI, a nonprofit that conducts research on religion, values and public policy. The report, titled “A political and cultural glimpse into America’s future,” sought to highlight the cultural and political views of Gen Z adults, compared with older Americans. Researchers surveyed more than 6,600 people ages 13 to over 65, with oversamples of Gen Z adults and teens between August 21 to September 15, 2023. The report found about 16% of Millennials and 7% of Baby Boomers identify as LGBTQ. But among Gen Z adults ages 18–25, 72% identified as straight, 15% as bisexual, 5% as gay or lesbian and 8% as “something else,” according to the report. About 20% of Americans are Gen Z, according to PRRI. 

This is how the end looks like. Combined arms you say?

If True...

...which I believe it is, it merely confirms what I increasingly begin to state openly--combined arms operations incompetence:

American officials helped prepare the Ukrainian military for its counteroffensive against Russian forces in the south of the country, CNN claimed on Thursday, citing anonymous sources. In its article, the US outlet alleged that this assistance included joint “war-gaming” analytical exercises designed to help the Ukrainians get a clear picture of how much personnel and hardware they would need in different scenarios. US officials, meanwhile, reportedly were able to better understand what kind of equipment, munitions or intelligence Washington could offer to Kiev. According to the report, which cites multiple US and Western officials and also Ukrainian sources, Washington had suggested that Kiev should keep its counteroffensive focused solely on the Kherson region in the south of the country as opposed to trying to strike on multiple fronts, which had supposedly been the Ukrainians’ initial plan.

I don't know who "calculated" this ever important and defining thing--a required force (наряд сил)--for this "counter-offensive", but whoever it was, or were, they have huge issues with operational planning and with math, in terms of stating conception, objectives (task) and criteria of effectiveness by which to judge the outcome, which, now we all know. Evidently, as it follows from CNN report, the unnamed (of course) US "sources" still think that:

Among the factors that have allegedly tipped the scale more in Ukraine’s favor recently, the anonymous officials named the delivery of sophisticated Western weaponry, including the US-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), as well as supposed hostility toward Russian troops among large swaths of the population in Russia-controlled regions of the country. The latter, according to CNN, has been translating into guerilla-style attacks, assassinations and sabotage efforts behind Russian lines.

You cannot fix stupid and amateur, and that is how US (and Western, in general) "aid" to Kiev regime increasingly looks like. But I have been at it for such a long time that there is no need to dwell on this yet again. The conclusion is simple and self-evident--those who "plan" these "operations" for VSU are the same people who ended up having lied and, finally, had their ass handed to them by a ragtag Taliban in Afghanistan and elsewhere. You cannot expect a serious combined arms operations of scale and scope of SMO ability from the military which primarily fought COIN throughout its modern existence. Granted, that North Vietnamese were more than just very skillful guerrillas, those guys also knew how to fight a good fight with serious weapons. 

I am sure that this whole FUBAR with this "counter-offensive" which ended in a disaster, and pathetic attempts to sabotage IAEA visit to Zaprorozhie by trying to insert there two saboteur groups, which now have been annihilated, bear all hallmarks of the American "combined arms" planning which is primarily based around PR for the domestic consumption provided by pliable US media and have very little practical output in reality. In the end, even WaPo had enough with this "planning".  Now add here a procurement failure by Pentagon ranging from losing its industrial base to a perverted practices of R&D ranging from disasters with LCS, F-35 to a dismal performance of the US-made battlefield weapons, and one begins to get the impression about what constantly goes wrong. This also explains a desperation from seeing West's best proxy ever being annihilated in industrial quantities by a fraction of Russian Armed Forces. 

For the environment of America's top political echelon over-saturated with political "scientists", climate "experts" and lawyers it is impossible to explain, to get across the realities of real warfare and views of the nation whose military history simply dwarfs whatever the United States can present as a counter or alternative experience. This is not the reality "the finest fighting force in history" can easily accept, nor, possibly, judging by the spiraling out of control demoralization and declining quality of the force, even comprehend. 

So, I guess classic courses on mathematics, physics, tactics, operations theory and real military history can wait, because nothing "improves lethality" more than proper gender identification and controlling own microaggressions.  

In related news from the real world:

Amid the extreme heat that began on Wednesday and is expected to last until early next week, Californian electricity consumers have been urged not to charge their electric vehicles during peak demand hours to help ease the strain on the state’s electricity grid. Temperatures in California and the West started rising to above 110 degrees F on Wednesday, with the heatwave expected to intensify through the holiday weekend and extend into early next week, the American Public Power Association, which represents public utilities, said.Californians are thus expected to be asked via Flex alerts for voluntary energy conservation during the long weekend, the association added. 

While Russia flatly responded to Washington:

Russia will embargo countries that support the Washington-proposed price cap on its oil, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Thursday. “In my opinion, this is a complete absurdity… To those companies or countries that will impose restrictions, we will not supply our oil and oil products, because we are not going to work under non-market conditions,” he told reporters, commenting on a plan to limit prices on Russian oil currently being discussed by the Group of Seven (G7) countries.

This is the only language combined West understands, this and a credible threat of force. This is why Russia speaks now in broadsides and we ain't seen nothing yet(c).