About Obvious.

Now, that the hysteria with "losing" Balakleya and Izyum (quotation marks are deliberate) due to this famous VSU "offensive" has subsided, and once the issue of the Kherson catastrophe for VSU is considered, we may confidently state that the whole thing was very deliberate on Russian side. Fast backward to the start of SMO--this is for those who already forgot--and recall what was the main issue then? Right, if you recall--it was the question of how Russian Army will be "taking" urban centers, such as Kiev or Kharkov. This was also the issue of both Pentagon planners and Western propaganda which was build prior to SMO on the assumptions (wrong ones) that Russians will go for jugular and start taking down regime by means of taking its main cities. Naive (and incompetent) people, what can one say. They thought that prodding Russia to get into the cities where they prepared (for Pentagon and British General Staff it means hiding behind civilians) "defenses" Russians would bleed and provide a copious amount of propaganda fodder. 

There was one issue with that--Neither US nor UK ever fought real defensive battles on a strategic level, Russians wrote a book on them. They didn't read this book in D.C. and in London. Apart from inevitable peeling off VSU "defenses" in Donbass, with all those towns and hamlets turned into one huge fortified area (укрепрайон) where VSU could and did hide behind the backs of civilians, Russian Army never went INTO any large urban center as Western planners hoped for using a primitive cliche thinking that if Russians took Grozny, Russians and SAA took Aleppo, Russians took Crimea, then they surely would take Kharkov, Kiev etc. So, for Pentagon "thinkers" who do think in cliches, the fact that every Soviet and Russian officer was and is taught to apply historic military lessons CREATIVELY (творчески применять уроки военной истории к современной войне) to the modern war, was and is unknown. After all, the image of Russian automatons with arithmometers who cannot think beyond the framework of instructions... 

...is what has been imprinted in the American military mind for ages by, ironically, right... Germans. Namely former Wehrmacht and SS military leaders who were forced by the US military to write their memoirs on how they won... pardon... lost to Russians in WW II. And don't you dare to think that Red Army defeated the best of Europe in 1941-45. Ah yes, those studies. They did warn, though:

This study was prepared for the Historical Division, European Command, by a group of former German generals and general staff officers. The names of the contributors are not announced at this time. The principal author, who by the end of the war had attained the rank of full general (Generaloberst), served on the Eastern Front throughout the Russian campaign and the subsequent retreat into the northern plains of Germany. He was successively commander of an infantry brigade, of a panzer division from November 1941 to February 1943, and of two different corps in the battles for Kharkov and Belgorod during 1943. Appointed commander of a panzer army on 1 December 1943, he participated in the withdrawal in the south until the Germans reached the Carpathians. In August 1944 he was transferred to Army Group Center, and his last assignment was with Army Group Weichsel. During this final phase of his military career he played an important part in the retreat from Lithuania, East Prussia, and Pomerania.

The reader is reminded that all publications in the GERMAN REPORT SERIES were written by Germans from the German point of view and that the procedures of the German Army differed considerably from those of the United States Army. Authorized German tables of organization and equipment, official German combat doctrine, or standard German staff methods form the basis for improvisations throughout this study. As prepared by the authors, this study consisted of a collection of 157 examples of improvisations which were screened by the editors for pertinence, clarity, and interest to the American reader. Moreover, an attempt was made to establish common denominators for the great variety of examples. Although the manuscript was completely reorganized during this editorial process, every effort was made to retain the point of view, the expressions, and even the prejudices of the authors.

But who heeds those warnings? The idol of the US armored force, General George S. Patton was considered by Germans themselves to be the most "German" American general, not to speak, of course, about Patton's attitude towards Russians as untermensch. So, no matter how one plays it, the US Army was mightily influenced by Germans not only in a shape of the US Army helmets which look very much as good ol' Stahl Helmets of Wehrmacht but, most importantly, what was UNDER those helmets and those are brains. Obviously the truism of learning from the best does not apply to modern US ground forces and, as the result, the whole plan for Ukraine went belly up first when Russian allied forces managed to wipe out  the initial army of several hundred thousands of VSU and their Nazi formations, and are now in the phase of annihilating the second iteration of VSU, which, finally, was lured out into the open first at around Kherson starting from August 27, and now with this "famed" VSU "offensive" drowned in blood and largely extinguished around Kharkov--all in the OPEN terrain, mind you. They were lured out of their safe havens behind civilians in urban centers. 

Now, elaborations start on if those suicidal offensives were done for the internal PR purposes in the US, for the benefit of the DNC, or was it a perfectly timed bait by Russians? Here is something to consider. Larry notes today:

Did You Know that Ukrainian soldiers are “routing Russian forces and collapsing Russia’s northern Donbas axis?” Nope, I did not know that. But thank God we have retired General Dave Petraeus to clue us in.

After that he proceeds to demolish the whole "establishment" narrative (a euphemism for BS) and he starts with a phrase because of which I had to wipe my monitors after me spewing my coffee. 

Turns out that General Dave experienced premature military orgasm.

LOL. But apart from obvious slavery to narrative, can we state that most of those retired and serving US generals who "consulted", a euphemism for Command and Control, VSU on those offensives got caught or, rather, bought the strategic "picture" constructed by Russians hook, line and sinker? I say, all signs in favor of this conclusion are there. I reiterate: the US doesn't have real operational experience with strategic, theater wide, defensive operations at all. Mind you, the length of the front in Ukraine is around 1,200 kilometers. After that, ask yourself a question why Russians are content with physical annihilation of the different iterations of VSU and scores of foreign "mercenaries", many of who are merely cadre NATO personnel with a shallow undercover "legend" of a volunteer. 

They are learning about real war with the peer on the job, those who survive. But, as I already stated, the US simply has NO experience since 1950 of developing a national strategy which is fully integrated with political, economic and military aims of the state (nation) globally. And here is the reason: not only we can observe a dramatic decline in competence and expertise of the America's top brass, but US political system prevents this in the most radical way by both sacrificing everything at the altar of partizan politics and sheer incompetence and corruption of America's political "elites" who are in the pockets of different interest groups. Moreover, no American military leader ever fought a peer, who, incidentally, if someone decides to do the unthinkable, can psychically annihilate a combination of enemies by wiping their countries off the map. Nor, as empirical evidence shows, did the United States produce a serious geopolitical and military thinker in ages, resorting to promoting sophomoric geopolitical and military BS as some serious scholarly achievement in "strategy". Laughable, who are those "strategists"? Fukuyama? Brzezinski? Kissinger? Petraeus? Ben Hodges? Seriously? What, did they ever win anything?

As the events of the last three + weeks demonstrated so well, US military exists primarily for laundering huge budgets and in the state of a perpetual self-praise against the background of its best ever peer which is not only ran by NATO but now also is manned with NATO personnel, being obliterated on the scale which NO NATO military can take without disintegrating. It is the issue of REAL operations and of REAL strategy as executed militarily for the benefit of a national strategy as defined by political top which is working for the benefit of the nation, the notion which is unknown for the United States in the last 60 years, because in the end the United States failed to coalesce into the real nation and I wrote three books on that. Everything starts from there. But then again, what do I know? 

In related news:

China is entirely capable of imposing a naval blockade on Taiwan, commander of the US Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral Karl Thomas, acknowledged in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published on Monday. “They have a very large navy, and if they want to bully and put ships around Taiwan, they very much can do that,” the admiral said. China has already created a large and modern navy, Thomas stated, with the number of military vessels at Beijing’s disposal continuing to grow rapidly. The admiral said that he did not, however, know whether China is seeking to take any actual action against Taiwan, which Beijing regards as an integral part of its territory, whether through an all-out invasion or a naval blockade. “Clearly, if they do something that’s non-kinetic, which, you know, a blockade is less kinetic, then that allows the international community to weigh in and to work together on how we’re going to solve that challenge,” he explained.

I am telling you, there are still a few competent and realist people in the US and if one would expect the place where they are, that surely has to be the US Navy and nobody questions its pedigree, for all its problems. So, this is your primer for late Monday. My root canal went really easy, especially comparing to one a few months ago.

That's The Way You Do It(c).

And even this way is still misleading (e.g. Russian energy bill is... 40 times smaller than European one, in Russian), but at least it is a good start for British tabloids to look at the prices' dynamics.  The Sun laments:

WELCOME to sanctions-hit Russia – where heating bills and fuel prices are a fraction of those in Britain. Food costs are also coming down every month and Vladimir Putin’s people are partying as if there is no war.

Then it proceeds to tabulate things which DO matter in real life. 

The reason I have a smug smile on my face is not because I am smug, by nature I am not, but because I like to be proven right once in a while, because in 200 years, if we survive as humanity, very few people will remember the capitalization of Apple or Facebook if they will even exist then, which I doubt, but historians will be very interested in the price of things which matter. Right, energy, cabbage, potatoes and things of this nature, which our civilized and moderately comfortable lives depend on. 

Of course, British tabloid wouldn't be British tabloid if it still wouldn't produce a pile of steaming shit from some professor of astrology, pardon me, economics who stated this:

Explaining how Russia had managed to buck the trend, strategy specialist Professor Michael Clarke said: “Their government has the cash right now to subsidise food, and as long as they have oil and energy money, they can keep subsiding. “But what the price of energy will be next year is anybody’s guess. It will get a lot harder for them from next year onwards. “At some point I believe their economy will be in very bad shape, either next year or the year after. “But that depends on the price of energy. “The rouble is doing OK because they are making people only buy and sell using the ruble. That will keep the currency strong for a while.”

Generally speaking, and I am on record here, economics departments in the West, together with a bulk of "liberal arts" departments should simply be disbanded while "professors" in economics, sociology, literary criticism and Queer studies should be stripped off their "degrees" and forbidden to "teach" because they peddle a pseudo-academic BS as a legitimate knowledge. Professor Michael Clarke of the University of Exeter  certainly qualifies for academic defenestration, because he, same as his former employer of RUSI, have no clue what they are talking about. This also applies to British military and intel establishment populated with barely educated hacks, as the events of the last several days with VSU "counter-offensive" and NPP attacks have demonstrated so dramatically. Not only they have no idea what modern war is, they cannot run their own country. Studying Russia would have helped but there are no real scholars on Russia in the combined West. 

Speaking of which. Peskov stated today that Russia is "ready to talk to Ukraine... on how Ukraine will fulfill Russia's conditions" (in Russian). This is a euphemism for capitulation, of course. And here is one piece of news of note. You should remember that starting from 2014 I am constantly on record that Ukraine has coalesced into the political nation distinct from Russia. These ARE different people. Putin and others from Russia political top were forced by political decorum and public mood to constantly stress that Ukrainians and Russians are "brotherly nations". Of course, it was only partially true and it takes a couple of generations to completely reprogram any kind of limitrophes into believing all kinds of pseudo-historic BS and this is what happened in Ukraine in the last 30 years. Here is proof. As whatever is left of the VSU 35th Brigade of Naval Infantry cries from the front lines:

«Это никакая не война, нас просто истребляют... Сколько еще наши матери и жены прольют слез? Сколько детей останутся без отцов? Сколько еще будет братских могил? Братья, кто не пережил эту ночь, вы навсегда в наших сердцах... Где мобилизованные? Всех на фронт! Всех на защиту Украины! У нас батальоны остались только на бумаге, а они гуляют себе!» – сообщают разгромленные морпехи в своем Telegram-канале.

Translation: “This is not a war, we are simply being exterminated ... How many more tears will our mothers and wives shed? How many children will be left without fathers? How many more mass graves will there be? Brothers, who did not survive this night, you are forever in our hearts... Where are the mobilized? Everyone to the front! All--to the defense of Ukraine! We have battalions left only on paper, while they (in the rear) are partying!” - the defeated marines report in their Telegram channel.     

You see, they still want to defend the avatar of a country, known in Russia as country 404 and its Nazi puppet regime in Kiev. So, I want to stress again--war, and SMO is war, albeit a very peculiar one, is never about re-educating local civilians only. No, war, quoting our good ol' friend Carl von Clausewitz, is about "compelling the enemy to do our will." In order to do so, you destroy its armies and that means physical annihilation of enemy's war material economy and, yes, extermination of those military personnel who still want to fight. 

You see how it works? Peskov articulates Russia's will (conditions), Russian Armed Forces do this proverbial clausewitzian "compelling". Until Kiev is compelled to do Russia's will. But, of course, and that IS the main issue--many Ukrainians are so brainwashed and so banderized that they still do not understand that and continue to go to the slaughterhouse on the East to be denazified and demilitarized in the most radical manner--physical extermination. Arestovich admitted today that he lies about the real state of the affairs on the front (in Russian), but, unlike MI6 and (Royal) General Staff, we knew it all along. And the cycle of disposal of the most stubborn believers in Ukraine's "history", concocted and financed by the US State Department and CIA (and London), continues until mobilization potential of Ukraine is completely annihilated to a dismay of military "planners" in Pentagon and London. I know, I know--real military history, Theory of Operations, math, physics are hard, much harder than learning "proper" gender pronouns.  

Which, in conclusion, brings us to this: the starboard shaft is a goner on HMS Prince of Wales and I wonder what this major "failure" was precipitated by? Was this purely navigational--a euphemism for striking the ground--or was this independent failure? We should know soon. In any case, it is an embarrassment for the Royal Navy and its hapless program of aircraft carriers. I will, for now, abstain from commenting too much on this issue, precisely because I am not a rocketry specialist:

NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System likely won’t fly in September. After a fuel leak forced the agency to scrub its second attempt to launch Artemis 1, there had been some hope the mission could get underway before its current launch window ended on September 6th. That won’t be the case. "We will not be launching in this launch period," Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems development, told a room full of journalists after the events of Saturday morning. “This was not a manageable leak,” Artemis Mission Manager Michael Sarafin added, referring to the “quick disconnect” fitting that gave NASA so much trouble yesterday. Ground crew at Kennedy Space Center attempted to troubleshoot the issue three times before recommending a “no go” for Saturday’s launch. According to Sarafin, the leak began after one of the fuel lines to Artemis 1’s core booster went through a brief and “inadvertent” overpressurization. An “errant” manual command from Mission Control triggered the incident. As of Saturday, Sarafin said it was too early to know if that was the cause of the fuel leak, but there was enough flammable hydrogen gas near the rocket that it would not have been safe to launch. "We want to be deliberate and careful about drawing conclusions here, because correlation does not equal causation," he added.

But as many in Russian space program circles started to talk after yet another delay, one of those being rocket systems engineer Dmitry Konanykhin (in Russian), Artemis-1 is nothing more than same ol' slightly modified Shuttle Launch System which, naturally, inherited most problems this system had to start with. Sticking some brand new orbital module on the top of essentially the same tank which was responsible for destroying both Challenger and Columbia and killing their crews is not a way to do it. Dmitry is very gracious towards NASA engineers because he constantly stresses that as engineers they are good, but they are constantly under pressure to "deliver" including by bypassing safety procedures. We heard this story before, didn't we? We know how it all ends. And that is your primer for Sunday.

What's The Deal With Ben Hodges?

Politico waxes strategic: 

Europe’s roads and railways aren’t fit for a fight with Russia. EU struggles to reverse years of neglect on spending to improve road and rail to shift troops and tanks. Having a better army doesn't much matter if you can't get it moving.

I don't know who said to Hanny Cokelaere and Joshua Posaner who penned this piece, that NATO has "better Army", but neither author has even remotest qualifications to pass the judgement on any military issue and the problem here is that while European NATO armies are a joke, the US Army is the last army in the world which has a record worthy of self-proclaimed (well, by many, Obama included) of a "finest fighting force in history"(c). The fact that the US Army can use sensor fusion, satellite imagery and stand-off munitions to blow Afghan weddings to smithereens, children and women included into "package", or can demolish Faluja, doesn't make one "better" at anything. Especially when compared to Russians and their record of military victories which make NATO military "accomplishments" look rather very insignificant. 

 

But never mind this constant self-aggrandizing which does betray a huge complex of inferiority and immediately after intro posted above from this Politco military psychobabble, authors introduce us to Mr. Ben Hodges.    

“The further east you go, the infrastructure does not support the heavy weight of U.S., German, British and Dutch tanks, it’s the bridges,” said retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe and now affiliated to think tank CEPA. “We’ve got to show we can move as fast or faster than the Russian Federation in the Suwałki Gap [between Poland and Lithuania] or in Romania.”

The immediate question which one has to ask is why Ben Hodges thinks that "we've got to show" those damn Roosskies. I don't know what Ben Hodges thinks, and he left a rather impressive record of spewing BS, while on the job as the US Army Commander Europe, but he has to really update himself on what Russians do and how they study militarily. Suffice it to say that Russia's General Staff was formed fully in 1763 by order of Catherine the Great (no, not in 1812 as English-language WiKi tells us) and the history of this General Staff goes back to 1711 to Peter the Great's order of the Staff Positions of General Staff (in Russian). So, it is not like Russians need to run around constantly repeating mantras about how great they are, but the United States didn't exist as a nation, when Russians already had their General Staff, and the good one at that. Yes, this little "skirmish" in 1812 in which Russian Army defeated the greatest Army assembled at that time and led by a genuine military genius Napoleon. Obviously, nothing to look at, against the background of the "American war against Napoleon", but these were Russians who actually entered Paris in 1814. 

So, there is no necessity for Russians "be shown" anything, because studying the enemy (and the United States Armed Forces are "potential enemy" of Russia) is on the level which the United States can only dream about and that has a lot to do with both military history and general education of the military cadres. So, Russians know and have been preparing to fight combined NATO forces since WW II and in doing so they developed doctrine and weapons which suit this purpose perfectly. Russians, who also have all this C4ISR mambo-jumbo, from intel satellites and anti-sat weapons to computers and signint, they know how the US Army fights and what are the limitations (sometimes severe) of any combined NATO force if it decides to fight Russian Armed Forces conventionally in the Eastern Europe. 

 

Ben Hodges has to know this--the first thing NATO (US that is) will lose will be its ISR, starting from removal of crucial US space-based assets from their orbits, and then jamming of NATO communications. That in itself removes the crucial advantage NATO always had over its third-rate backward enemies. Obviously, the issue, which I write about non-stop, is the issue of air defense is what NATO simply doesn't have against Russia's stand-off weapons and this is the thing which many (not all) US generals cannot wrap their brains around--any Command and Control structure of NATO--staffs, command posts, communications facilities, what have you--are absolutely defenseless and the level of this vulnerability continues to grow as I type this. So, it is not that Russians will throw their T-90s and T-14s at Suwalki Gap to face off with NATO's tanks. No, Russians will demolish Command and Control system of NATO, including it "decision making centers" and airfields. NATO navies also will be sunk.

After that, NATO will start escalating towards nuclear threshold because it will be denied most of its tentative advantages which Russians are very well aware of, because they usually don't waste time on PR BS and self-aggrandizing but study wars and operations by the "potential enemy" and do it extremely seriously. Unless, of course, one considers Russians, coldly narrating their well-known military achievements in the last 800 or so years, as self-aggrandizing, but those who do should see a good psychologist specializing in complex of inferiority.  So, even if to imagine that Ben Hodges would be able "to show" those damn Rooskies that NATO can move as fast or faster it makes no difference whatsoever because the US Armed Forces never faced the enemy like this and never fought the war like that. 

On a more metaphysical level, of which Patriarch of All Russia spoke recently in his sermon, Ben Hodges should understand a simple fact that Russia-West breakup is for real and Russians will never forget nor forgive US support for this:

The US supports admirers of SS Division Galizien (Calicina) and, in general, de facto Nazi regime in Kiev which is mired in war crimes and crimes against humanity. What can I say, good that most of Russian WW II veterans who viewed Americans as good allies are not with us anymore. I can only imagine what they would feel, knowing that former Allies turned out this way. But then again, if Ben Hodges or Petraeus are the "best" what the US can produce, then there should be no surprise. I will reiterate--NO US servicemen ever fought in defense of his country, all modern wars the US Armed Forces fought are expeditionary wars, the wars of conquest far away from own shores. No US servicemen ever knew what it means to lose own family and property to real war. This is the cultural difference which cannot be bridged--any Russian family has more real military pedigree than Ben Hodges ever would, because in Russia any family has somebody who fought and died in WW II.

 

We all are into the new territory, where the REAL face of the West and the US has been exposed. Sadly, most of the public in the West will not know what is happening. They are kept oblivious by Western media and by the realities of every day survival in the midst of a massive economic calamity which unfolds before all of us. Here is Andrei Raevsky providing a glimpse into who the US is supporting.

This article provides an overview into a deeply disturbing trend in Ukraine, one that started in 2014, that has accelerated and intensified since 24 February 2022. Extrajudicial killings, harassment, arbitrary detentions by men in camouflaged uniforms, beatings and disappearances continue to take place on a regular basis in Ukraine.  Most of the detentions and disappearances are often carried out by the Ukrainian Security service, (SBU), under a sweeping repression.

Few honest common sense voices barely register in the background of deafening lies and propaganda and that drives further Russians' disgust with the combined West. I cannot blame them, in fact--it is a normal reaction of any normal human. These are reactions which lead to consequences which neither Ben Hodges nor White House, nor CIA, can calculate--they simply have no instruments for that. That is why they do not have a grasp of what is happening here, in Russian villages and towns with Russian Army moving to the front lines. 

But then again, they do not know what real war is. Ben Hodges certainly doesn't.