But Why?

I want to immediately state that I am no tank officer, but I am also not as dumb in ground warfare as I come across, if you know what I mean. So, before commenting on The National Interest tanks' rankings, I want to remind you what one of their contributors ... from Israel and ties to IDF wrote this in early 2025:

While the latest T-72 and T-90 MBT variants may be more sophisticated than earlier models, they really have not performed well in Ukraine. The rate at which these tanks have been destroyed by Ukrainian weaponry is alarming. To make matters worse, it is doubtful that Moscow will be able to replenish its MBT stockpiles anytime soon.

Here is her CV and you may have already guessed she--she is a militant ignoramus and hack which spreads 404 propaganda. Judge for yourself--a classic degree mill product with no clue about combined arms operations and operational planning. Judging by the "performance" of IDF (mind you--they are allegedly "professionals") which has its ass handed to it in the most humiliating fashion in Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah, Israel is not that good, to put it mildly, in anything which doesn't involve atrocity, bombing with impunity and, generally, they are nothing more than a collection of punitive battalions (and brigades) whose main training is in genocide. Real war? Not so much. 

So, The National Interest comes up with this recent rating of world's tanks. And puts T-72 at the first place as the best tank in the world. Well, that's fine and here TNI staff makes this assertion:

1. T-72 (Soviet Union / Russia) This old Soviet tank may be seen as an odd choice for “best in the world.” But the fact remains that it checks all the boxes for an effective tank. It is used by dozens of countries, making its supply chains redundant and durable. It is easy to operate. And it is very cheap. The Russians have found that their war in Ukraine has not gone well by using either its T-90M MBT or its aforementioned T14 Armata. The T-72 has kept the Russians in the fight. What’s more, these systems are easy to mass produce and when they’re lost (so many have been lost in combat), it doesn’t really matter, because Russia can quite easily produce many more. 

The immediate question which arises is where the hell did the staff of this magazine, which continues to regurgitate CIA and Pentagon's fairy tales about SMO, get this idea highlighted in yellow? Who told them that? Ukies? Sure, Washington is dumb enough to believe any kind of shit, but how about the fact of basic (forget about serious expanded) attrition modelling of (armor) combat which requires a set of verified serious inputs? That is to say--requires PROFESSIONAL qualifications for assessment of the data sets which ARE critical in 24/7 modelling of the combat, which is in the foundation of the operational work of, say, Main Operational Directorate (GOU) of Russian General Staff? 

We, of course, cannot discount a fever pitch coping ongoing across the US media and military-political circles after yet another military humiliation for the US and Israel, but words do not provide anymore the palliative they used to and, obviously, statements about Russian tank losses (not that Russians do not sustain losses, they surely do) and especially about T-90M Proryv, which IS the best MBT in the world now, are nothing more than trying to shape narrative which has nothing in common with the reality. For starters, Russians use primarily (not exclusively) three types of MBTs: T-72B and its iteration T-72B3, T-90M Proryv and a few T-80BVM. Of course, Russians used even T-54 when necessary as self-propelled guns from ZOP (Defended Firing Position) and as a moving mine with devastating results for VSU strong points. And here is a clue from TNI. Highlighted in yellow is data for T-72 (whatever that means) and in green, of course, M1 Abrams.

The question--what T-72 are they talking about, because T-72B3 and T-72B3M, a mainstay of Russian tank forces, have this:

First batches were upgraded to T-72B3 standard, also known as T-72B3 obr (obrazets--model) 2011 in Russia. Many vehicles retained their V-84 engine. The T-72B3 upgrade includes the 2A46M-5 gun, Kontakt-5 era on glacis and turret front, improved autoloader, Sosna-U gunner's day and thermal sight with monitor for commander and various other upgrades. Easily recognizable by the Sosna-U sight while retaining the rubber side skirts. T-72B3M Further improved upgrade package, also known as T-72B3 obr 2016 in Russia. This adds the large and distinctive new side skirts, slat armor and Relikt ERA to the turret sides. There is also a PK PAN sight for the commander with day and thermal optics. All T-72B3M include the more powerful V-92S2F engine and drivetrain upgrades.

Note: T-72B3 has been produced since 2011 (11 years before SMO) while T-72B3M since 2016 (6 years before SMO). So, how many altogether of this tanks did Russia have--over 1,700. No, not some conservation (reserve) assets--all moving and fighting tanks. But as you can see yourself all of them have a very good and modern sight and fire-control systems. Did Russians use simply T-72Bs? Absolutely, remember the one which blew away Abrams' turret from the first shot? Yep, that's T-72B. 

Hm, why do I see thermal sight, but, back to our goats, so to speak, because, obviously, Russians produced thousands upon thousands (9,000 by different estimates) of T-72Bs and how many have been upgraded to B3? A lot. And then comes another 1,500 or so of T-90s and, its latest iteration of T-90M Proryv. This one is a state-of-the-art fully netcentric machine and it has real and positive combat experience ... yes, look at Abrams' "experience" "Iraq/Afghanistan", while for some reason omitting M1 Abrams "experiences" in 404. Those have been very painful "experiences" both against Russian tanks and against loitering munitions, so much so that whatever the advantages M1 might have had (not really) have been completely annulled and ... 

Nobody gives a shit how much M1 Abrams costs--neither it, nor vaunted Merkava are tanks designed for modern warfare and, pardon my Russian rah-rah and military background, but for people trying to come up with all kinds of rankings--try for starters internalize what COFM (Correlation Of Forces and Means) is and why one may start from this point.

In reality, however, three best tanks in the world today are 1. T-90M Proryv, 2. T-72B3M and 3. T-72B3. The rest is for consumers of Kool Aid provided by Kiev regime. 

This is from yesterday. And yes--one T-90M Proryv took ...47 (Forty Seven!) drone strikes and stopped only when hit the anti-tank mine. 

This Is Why The US...

 ... is in deep trouble. People posted here hilarious rankings by Ray Dalio (whose actual degree from Harvard is obscured). 

I want to stress here, that if we discount a hard copium and butt-hurt behind this sheer delirium, it exposes the main problem--Dalio has no clue what he is talking about, as do most people at Wall Street and US financial industry, namely the products of the US Ivy League degree mills for "economists" and other useless humanities credentialed morons. These are precisely the types who, apart from lobbies such as AIPAC, buy US Congress and influence US foreign and domestic policies. 

I have no reasons to like Heritage Foundation--these are themselves a bunch of ideologues and BSers--but the state of the US education, as is the case with economy, is a complete collapse in progress. 

And here they are certainly correct. Especially when it comes down to educational backgrounds required for running actual economies and states well. Needless to say--most of those backgrounds are in the STEM, natural science and medical fields, and those are hard. Very hard. Stand alone here is the issue of geopolitical analysis (real one, not BS such as Dalio's "rankings") which REQUIRES military-intelligence backgrounds, especially so for the 21st century, and, even more so, for the technological paradigm of the 21st century warfare. If not, we have Russia barely topping Singapore in "strength", while the US with its exemplary dismal war record being number one. Hey, what do I know, I don't run hedge funds. Somebody somehow also loved Bernie Madoff's returns. We know how it all ended. Dalio should think really hard what he is going to do when the whole bubble bursts and it is about to. 

I Hate To Do Rankings.

But Chris called for it;) 

In terms of submarine technology, how would you rank countries?
1. Russia with the U.S. being a close second (or maybe first). I doubt that there is a close second
2. China
3. Germany
4. France
4. Iran

Submarines must be difficult to build because very few countries do it. I didn't bother to rank the U.K.

OK. Here it is. Agree--subs are the most complex systems humanity builds, even more complex than ISS. So, here are my rankings:

Nuclear-powered subs. 

SSBNs (Strategic Missile Submarines). 

1.Russia

2.US

3. France

4.UK (doesn't have own SLBMs)

5. China.

SSNs (fast attack nukes).

1. US

2. Russia

3. UK

4. France

5. China

SSGNs (cruise missile nukes).

1. Russia

2. US

3. The rest of the world. 

SSKs, Non-nuclear subs.

w/o AIP. 

1. Russia

2. Japan

3. China

4. Germany

5. The rest of the world.

SSKs with AIP.

1. Sweden

2. Germany

3. Japan

4. Reportedly China

5. The rest of the world. 

Also, keep in mind--submarine, no matter how good, it is still a platform. These are the weapons which it carries which make it into a complete weapon system. In terms of weapons on subs Russia simply crushes competition.

Weekend Is Coming.

So I decided to try to say something coherent in the first day when I don't have to eat pain-killers in the industrial amounts.  So, here is my slightly disfigured (after root canal and several rounds of lidocaine due to resistance to numbing in this particular case on Wednesday, lucky me) face. 

In related news, Andrei Raevsky (The Saker) sent me this: 

@Saker the numbers are from SimilarWeb, a 3rd party traffic estimation agency. I run a SEO agency myself as one of my businesses, and generally their numbers are fairly reliable (though sometimes they can differ from real ones as provided by G Analytics or similar on-site counters by a factor of 0.5..2). comparing Similarweb numbers between different sites is almost always objective, though. you can check them all out for yourself if you install the free Chrome/Firefox Similarweb extension. BTW, Andrei Martyanov blog’s numbers are: 662k monthly visits, 43% bounce, 02:35 avg visit. which is only slightly less than thesaker.is.

The reason this came into focus is the fact that The Saker's famous blog is doing very well beating in rankings many prominent sites and blogs. You can see Andrei's rank here. I am not specialist in all those rankings but I certainly can see the numbers of daily visits to this blog and they grow, no doubt about it. Hey, good that my opinion seems to matter. I am just trying to do my job and, incidentally, am in a transition to a full time writing and making videos. In this case those numbers have an impact through Patreon, however indirectly. So, these are the news. I will post later a wonderful piece of music by incomparable Chrysta Bell--Agent Tammy Preston in Twin Peaks: The Return and real life muse of David Lynch--an incredible art those people make. It requires a separate post.

Color Me Surprised, Not.

Oh, please! As if primarily Western economic "science" and banking establishment are not utterly corrupt. The whole thing is the institutionalized BS for the consumption of yuppies with BS (or BA, whatever) in "economics" from Ivy League madrasas. 

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer said the current head of the International Monetary Fund, in her previous senior role at the World Bank, engineered a "whitewash" of his concerns surrounding the bank's flagship report. In an interview with AFP on Thursday (Sept 16), Dr Romer said there was a "lack of integrity" among the World Bank leadership, including then chief executive Kristalina Georgieva. Earlier in the day, the World Bank announced it was immediately discontinuing its Doing Business report after an independent investigation commissioned by its board found irregularities in the 2018 and 2020 editions and concluded that Ms Georgieva pressed staff for alterations to avoid angering China.

There is absolutely nothing, zilch, nada unexpected about this whole thing. The report continues:

But "I had some suspicions that things like this might be going on". Dr Romer resigned from his post as chief economist in January 2018 after he went public with his concerns about how the bank made "arbitrary" alterations to the methodology that drastically changed rankings for some countries, notably Chile. He said the changes lowered the rankings under Chile's socialist leader Michelle Bachelet, but raised them under her more conservative successor President Sebastian Pinera.

Well, duh! Just to demonstrate what a contrived piece of shit Western economic "science" is, here is an example--the mental excrement from yuppies from Harvard, their "laboratory" where those ignoramuses analyze, strategize, conceptualize and drinkalize their lattes. Behold, rankings of "economic complexity" concocted by "economists" from the US "leading" university: 

You may ask what is in common between this and World Bank ratings? The answer is everything--this is West's school of economic (lack of)thought which has zero relation to any reality. If China's or Chile's "ratings" of ease of doing business could be altered (which most likely they have been), then why should anyone be surprised that a genuinely lovely nation of Slovenia, whose population is about the size of one of the smaller Moscow' boroughs, and whose primarily agricultural and tourist economy is the size of one of the smaller St.Petersburg's industrial districts some of which produce, as an example 10% of world's power turbines, can have economic complexity of the nation which produces literally everything ranked higher by 38 positions? Don't believe me? Here is good ol' CIA, not that one has to believe them anyway, judging by the "level" of their analysts it is no surprise that the US finds itself where it finds itself today. Still, for the lack of better options, here is CIA. 

complete range of mining and extractive industries producing coal, oil, gas, chemicals, and metals; all forms of machine building from rolling mills to high-performance aircraft and space vehicles; defense industries (including radar, missile production, advanced electronic components), shipbuilding; road and rail transportation equipment; communications equipment; agricultural machinery, tractors, and construction equipment; electric power generating and transmitting equipment; medical and scientific instruments; consumer durables, textiles, foodstuffs, handicrafts.

Yes, the country which produces spaceships, nuclear ice-breakers and pretty much everything else has "economic complexity" less complex than that of Slovenia (again, nothing personal against this fine and lovely country), or lovely (sincerely) Slovakia. Remarkably, these cretins from Harvard placed even the United States, in terms of complexity, below Slovenia. Yes, these agonizing and deindustrializng United States of America which still produce a lot of complex machinery, commercial aircraft (some of them outstanding), electronics and cars. Yes, these United States, and yet the US still fails to beat Slovenia in terms of economic complexity. Moreover, lest we forget--IMF, World Bank, Harvard, CIA, America's think-tankdom et all are ALL American organizations, founded and funded by the US and it is on America's dime that these "reputable" (among yuppies) organizations, decade after decade, produce statistics and "analysis" which has to be studied by psychiatrists as acute cases of clinical delusion. It is this delusion which is behind America's precipitous (in historic terms) decline.

But in the end, the rule is as old as humanity itself: the one who dines and wines the girl, this one also dances this girl. Simple as that. Pay me enough money and I can prove with numbers that the United States won in Vietnam. In fact, such school of thought does exist and prospers. There is school of thought which states that Wehrmacht actually defeated the Red Army in WW II. These are mental constructs which are very close, in fact adjacent to the Western economic "science" and "scientists" who wouldn't know the difference between steal and steel, and can barely know shit from shinola. I would suggest the introduction of a new category for such a useless BS Nobel Prize, such as in literature and economics--the most useless economic index of them all. And, indeed, why not write some Ph.D thesis on correlation between Walmart shoppers weirdness and credit rating of Spain. Introducing this very weirdness index. I am sure you can measure it. 

I am absolutely positive, there is a pattern and with some effort this whole thing can be tied into a tidy theory which, with a creative use of statistics, game theory and differential equations, can produce a valuable addition to a host of other discredited, useless and down right imbecilic economic theories which do not work and never did. Hey, Harvard, or World Bank, send the royalties from Nobel Prize in economics for my wonderful idea to my address: Solar System, Mars, 2.71 Bonneville Crater Pl., 314159, Martyanov Andrei. I need to go, I have a phone call with the US President Hillary Clinton, I have some ideas on sociology and statistics too, but about this later.