Some Off The Cuff Remarks.

Regarding some news today. Just finished the podcast with PolitWera and Vladimir Trukhan. We spoke about this too. 

1. Snake Island: purely political decision to remove Ukie "argument" about grain "blockade". Now Ukies started to de-mine approaches to Odessa and it will be very difficult for them to use the silly argument of Snake Island as an excuse. Militarily, VSU will not be able to place there anything because it will be immediately annihilated. The distance between Snake Island and Sevastopol is 260 kilometers--peanuts for P-800 Onix or any of the Kalibrs. VSU knows it and already stated that they have no intent to place anything there. They can't, even if they wanted to. I will omit here purely operational issue of Snake Island affair, which weakened the Odessa grouping of VSU dramatically. 

2. Per this (thanks to Larch who pointed this out):

(Bloomberg) -- A flight test of a hypersonic missile system in Hawaii ended in failure due to a problem that took place after ignition, the Department of Defense said, delivering a fresh blow to a program that has suffered stumbles. ... It didn’t provide further details of what took place in the Wednesday test, but said in a statement sent by email “the Department remains confident that it is on track to field offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities on target dates beginning in the early 2020s.” “An anomaly occurred following ignition of the test asset,” Pentagon spokesman Navy Lieutenant Commander Tim Gorman said in the statement. “Program officials have initiated a review to determine the cause to inform future tests.” he said. “While the Department was unable to collect data on the entirety of the planned flight profile, the information gathered from this event will provide vital insights.”

But the funnies part is this. They cannot even hide the fact of being sore losers. 

Russia debuted a hypersonic air-to-ground missile in its attack on Ukraine. Adversaries don’t have to meet the rigorous standards set under the US defense acquisition system or face public scrutiny over delays and failure.

Obviously no normal people work for most US establishment media, but can they at least hire the ass-holes who have a clue, instead of the full o'shit ignoramuses? Don't hold your breath. But I am on record and I repeat:

a. Eventually the United States will be able to create a some sort of quasi ballistic (air-ballistic) hypersonic weapon akin to Russian Kinzhal. When? Who knows. Relatively soon--a few years. 

b. The US is nowhere near a hypersonic cruise-missiles such as 3M22 and it is not even at the start. Those technologies are deployed as fully functional weapon systems ONLY by Russia. 

c. US media, full of shit as always, continue to obfuscate the issue of hypersonics throwing into the mix two very different technologies: hypersonic air-ballistic missiles like Kinzhal and fully powered in flight surface launched anti-shipping and land attack 3M22 Zircon. There is a chance they simply do not understand a difference. 

3. Here are poor poor dears from the West crying about the SMO. The video is still full o' shit, including pseudo-"tactical" baloney spewed by all those "veterans". 

But as I already stated--these guys thought that learning how to shoot and read couple of combat and field manuals makes them such "professionals" in war. Right. 99% of them never heard of how operations are planned and why people attend military academies. Here is a simple explanation (I did it in one of my videos) from the US Naval War College:

None of those "soldiers of fortune" has any clue what operational and strategic level is and how wars are fought. But sure, they know how to do "tactical shit" and because of that think (or, at least, thought) that they know the war. Right and I am Mother Theresa. Which brings me to this issue:

4. For those who continue to refer to all those Colonel Cassads and their ilk: there is a reason I do not take them seriously. They are NOT military professionals, never were and will never become ones. Most of them are into this whole thing for personal reasons, much of which are related to self-realization and money. I also get paid for what I do, but at least I served almost 11 years in the Armed Forces, including at the Brigade Staff position. Just keep this in mind. 

Operational and Strategic level of war are very complex and require a very serious background not just knowledge of "tactical shit" and ability to read maps and knowing how to use ballistic tables (smart phones' apps, here we come) or understanding what mil is. 

In related news: 

Electricity prices in Europe are soaring again as the market starts to fear that energy shortages this winter would be much larger than expected a few weeks ago. The German power prices for next year, a benchmark in the European electricity market, have surged by 12 percent so far this week and were rising by 2 percent early on Thursday, according to Bloomberg estimates. Europe is grappling with filling gas storage in time for the winter, after Russia slashed supply to major EU consumers, including Germany and Italy, citing “technical reasons.” Germany and Italy dismissed Gazprom’s reasons for the lower flows and said the move was politically motivated.At any rate, the low Russian gas deliveries and the two-week maintenance on Nord Stream which will halt supply via the pipeline in July are making European governments and electricity market traders and participants nervous about gas and power supply.

That is a strategic level and as BTO sang: you ain't seen nothing yet. 

P.S. Somebody on interwebs "accused" me of "loving BTO". I never experienced more severe attack on my character than that. I never even liked sons of bitches, I abhor their sound. What I said was: they surely can play. And they can--great musicians. Just wanted to clear this blemish on my musical tastes. Same goes for Molly Hatchet--horrible sound, awesome musicians. 

Larry's Thoughts On Ukraine.

Not military ones, but economic ones.  

Until Joe Biden took office I thought that George W Bush had dibs on the “stupidest foreign policy blunder in history” award. His decision to invade Iraq rather than eliminate Al Qaeda hurt the United States and fueled international terrorism. But leave it to Joe Biden to one-up W by imposing sanctions on Russia that are inflicting an economic holocaust on the United States and Europe. Heck of a job, Joe. The ostensible reason for “punishing” Russia with sanctions that actually pummel the west was Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Now we all know that Ukraine was/is the poorest nation in Europe

Truth is, in 1991 Ukraine was left with the second economy in Europe (after unified Germany) and with a massive Soviet industrial, technological and scientific heritage. Ukraine was supposed to be a massive success. But it didn't happen and a major factor in this utter failure was not just the mutually exclusive cultural mix of the country, but the mentality of people, many of who are still stuck in a village and farm (khutor) paradigm (recall onion and potato "farming" at Maidan in Kiev in 2014). It is the world-view which has been so distorted away from the reality, that the term "ukrainization" begins to sound appropriate when applied even to the American political life both figuratively and literally. Not to mention, of course, as Larry correctly states, 404 becoming both a laundromat and a good "income source" for crooked US politicos and a source of a political machinations for the benefit of primarily (not exclusively, though) Democratic Party. That is why the title of Larry's piece is so correct: Why the West Lusts After Ukraine. Read this excellent write-up by Larry.

But, it seems, it all becomes a moot point because I read somewhere (don't remember where) that even NPR had to admit that Ukraine lied about the real state of the affairs on the fronts of SMO. Well, when you have NPR, which still promotes Russiagate as a factual story, admitting this, it goes without saying that the jury is in for Ukraine and, indeed, Stoltenberg's "formula"--meaning Ukraine ceding territory for peace--begins to preoccupy Western world. But that too is a moot point, because we don't know Russia's plans for Ukraine and something tells me that Russia may not be inclined to let Ukraine exist at all. But we'll see. I could be wrong, because, obviously, I don't have any access to the information Kremlin has about intricacies of present 404's "politics" and if there are enough (if any) political forces in Kiev which could serve as a ruling class for newly reconstituted Ukraine--a fully demilitarized and denazified rump fully dependent on Russia economically. I think we'll know soon enough. 

In related news, there is a hilarious article from the Defense News (a rather comical "military" publication) which states:

WASHINGTON ― Russia’s war in Ukraine is making clear to the U.S. Department of Defense that it must get logistics and sustainment right in the Pacific theater, the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian said Monday. Russia’s logistics and sustainment failures during its three-month-old invasion of Ukraine are a “very hard lesson” for Moscow, and the U.S. as well, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said at a DefenseOne event. “The Russians are operating on their own border, and yet we saw [their] substantial logistics challenges. For the United States to be effective in the Pacific, we already have a significant logistics challenge [to overcome], worsened by the reliance that we have on fuel,” Hicks said. “Making sure we understand how to go after that logistics challenge is one lesson that we can extrapolate, if you will, from what we see today.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine almost immediately faced challenges with logistics and difficulties getting food, water and supplies to troops. It failed in its early objective of taking Kyiv and occupying a large swath of Ukraine, and has now concentrated most its forces in eastern Ukraine. Hicks on Monday praised U.S. “logistics and information sharing” in coordinating allies to arm and equip Ukrainian forces. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is set this week to convene a third meeting of the U.S.-led Ukraine contact group, which has more than 40 member nations.

Apart from Kathleen Hicks being utterly unqualified for her job (and you guessed it, her Ph.D is in a political "science"), she also operates in alternative reality, because she continues to operate with pure BS and, obviously, she never learned real war history and didn't attend this Academy, where they actually teach how to supply modern armed forces in real wars. But then again, whatever it takes to hide oneself from being recognized as a sore loser and incompetent hack. In related news for Hicks, did she write anything on the issue of  logistics security in the war with a peer competitor which leverages its advantage in a targeting and stand-off high precision weapons, including long range hypersonic ones, when interdicting lines of communications in the ocean? I talk, of course, about China. Nah, I am being facetious. Those who want to see Hicks' "scientific contribution", you can easily read (if you have a few hours of your life to waste on a steaming pile of pseudo-academic BS) her "dissertation" here:

Change Agents: Who Leads and Why in the Execution of US National Security Policy

With such "specialists", no wonder the US finds itself in present predicament. 

What's The Deal With The US Four-Star Generals?

I don't know. One, certainly, cannot suspect General Barry McCaffrey in cowardice. He is a distinguished combat officer, but this...

Don't they care at all about their professional integrity and honor? And he is not the only one, here is another guy:

  

Petraeus cannot possibly know what the real cost of taking Mariupol is, because only Russia's General Staff knows it. US main-stream media military "experts" long ago chose using Ukie non-stop propaganda BS and their sublimation of a severe professional jealousy and butt-hurt over professional integrity and this parade of military losers, who didn't win shit in their life, and who are still reeling from Afghanistan humiliation, continues non-stop. 

They know what the US Army record of the last 50+ years looks like, they also know what military failures they are and they cannot contain their rage from experiencing the contrast between the two very different militaries and how they fight their respective wars. Even their "very own SOBs" in VSU are nothing more than Nazi war criminals who are singing like birds now both about NATO involvement in crimes against humanity in Donbass and about biolabs. Worst of all for them is well-documented fact of the US (and some NATO) military being directly involved in C4ISR for VSU which reflects extremely poorly on Pentagon's (always grossly exaggerated) reputation.  Hence this:

It would be really difficult to believe that the United States is not in a proxy war with Russia if reports that it plans to send anti-ship missiles to Ukraine are true. In fact, the State Department did not exactly deny this exclusive report from Reuters that Washington was readying to share the weapons capability to help “defeat Russia’s naval blockade…amid concerns more powerful weapons that could sink Russian warships would intensify the conflict.” “As the conflict is changing, so too is our military assistance to deliver the critical capabilities Ukraine needs for today’s fight as Russia’s forces engage in a renewed offensive in eastern Ukraine,” a State spokesperson said on Friday. The only thing that is being directly denied are assertions by the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs adviser, who tweeted Friday that “the US is preparing a plan to destroy the [Russian] Black Sea Fleet. The effective work of the Ukrainians on [Russian] warships convinced [the US] to prepare a plan to unblock the [Ukrainian] ports. Deliveries of powerful anti-ship weapons are being discussed.” 

Well, Vlahos has been around D.C. for a long time and she surely should know that those "decisions" are not anymore dictated by some military necessity--not to mention the fact that those missiles will not change much militarily for Russia, and Ukraine--but that ANY US Administration in the last 20 years was in a full blown crusade mode against not just Russia, but Russians as people and it is driven by racial and cultural hatred and deeply hidden but not well contained complex of inferiority which exacerbates with the economic decline of the US (and combined West) and Russia taking the lead in forming new geopolitical reality. So, a lot of impetus behind desperate steps by D.C. is simply irrational. There are rumors now that the US considers supplying Patriot AD complexes to 404. The immediate question is who is going to be manning them when they will be annihilated? 

It has to be understood clearly that the US, not taking anything from the entrepreneurial, industrial, creative and scientific genius of the American people, was a main beneficiary of once in a lifetime pure luck in WW II. But the same as you cannot substitute actual annihilation of the most of Ukrainian Air Force with many shots from the video-games, you also cannot buy military history. And no US general ever fought in defense of his motherland against the best of the best, defeating them time after time. You just cannot buy it, even if you want to convince yourself that General Lee was "equal" of Napoleon (he never was even in the same universe) or that Patton fought REAL Wehrmacht at the zenith of its power, Russians did and defeated it. The United States was supposed to be this savior, a providential blessing upon the world, but the immediate benefits of the post-WW II restoration pretty much ran out by the year 2000 and the wobbling then finally resulted in the economic calamity which is only now begins to be felt, slightly. It is getting to number 11 pretty fast. 

For the United States the struggle is existential, it is also with its own chimeras of the past. I am on record, reality is a bitch, it eventually bites and it hurts like hell if you are not ready. Plus, you cannot fight it even with the most elaborate BS narratives, but that, it seems, is the only thing in which the US four-star generals are good at. Fighting real wars and not parading themselves as sore-losers, not much. Unless, of course, one begins to move goal posts and redefine all known truisms of military science. I know, I can only only imagine how it hurts to understand that after the 8 years of US training and support those who the CIA and Pentagon hoped to kill so many actual Russians (killing children and raping women was accepted as collateral damage) have had their ass kicked and humiliated by grossly numerically inferior Russian force. That's gotta hurt a lot. Here are some other "skills" US and NATO "taught" those animals. Here is incomparable Eva Bartlett.

In conclusion, Here is Larry's yesterday's take:

Mariupol’s Final Ukrainian Chapter, Russia Writes New book

Pay close attention to a video of good ol' Russian BM-21 MLRS doing its job. That is how the real war looks like. But I am sure General Petraeus knows all about it, right? Nah, I am being facetious.