Larry Makes Good Points.

In his latest post titled: Understanding Why General Caine Cannot Guarantee a Slam-Dunk Success if the US Attacks Iran.  The issue here is not just geography, however important, but also the idea of Pentagon on how to conduct SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense). Even before China delivering her radar to Iran, during the 12-day exchange between Iran and Israel, IAF was rather "surprised" when one of Iran's radar "locked on" Israeli F-35. And here is the issue which many MUST understand--"stealth" myth is just that. In normal human parlance it is called "reduction of physical fields" of the platform or weapon and professionally is known as LO--low observability and even at that it totally depends on the rakurs (in Russian) which is essentially an angle to target where its LO diminishes radically once the frontal semisphere angles itself away from the source of radiation (radar). Add here modern advanced signal processing and voila'. In other words, your "stealth" counts for very little against serious modern and well-trained air defense. As USAF F-117 "stealth" bombers learned the hard-way during the aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999. 27 years passed since then.

I remind you that Iran has this:

This is Russian Over-The-Horizon (OTH) radar Resonanse (the range of 1,000 km), which Iran operates. This thing doesn't care if you have stealth, double or quadruple stealth. You will be seen and targeting data will be distributed to tactical AD units. Then, Iran has its own OTH. Here is the approximate coverage of Iran's OTH. 

And then there is Russian ISR which combined with China's Early Warning gives Iran a good time to prepare in case of a traditional first strike, primarily by stand-off weapons--yes, TLAMs and JASSMs. And here comes this critical issue--how deep are US stores and what are the chances that the US may lose a very expensive and reputation-heavy asset? The answer is known--those chances are very high while US stores for sustaining SEAD are not deep enough. Recall 1999 again, by the 50th-60th day of bombing the US started to run out of stand-off weapons. Comparison is not only inevitable but warranted. 

Serbia: area-88,000 sq.km. Population around 6.5 million. Older AD.

Iran: area 1,650,000 sq. km. Population 92.5 million. Modern air defense with combat experience. Support of allies. Critical strategic geographic location. A variety of strike means ranging from the ballistic to cruise missiles. Modern Electronic Warfare means.

Feel the difference? Yep, that's the difference. So, what's the plan? As always it is the same, as I repeat ad nauseam, hurl everything US got at Iran and then try to destabilize her from within. Regime Change trick. Always the same. Recall 2023 "counter-offensive" and instigation of Wagner mutiny. So, very few options for the US other than try to "shock and awe" the country which is in no mood to compromise and has wherewithal to stand her ground and shoot back. Iranians know what Patriots and THAAD's "capabilities" are--they are not impressed. Iranians are good engineers and better mathematicians, they know Operational Planning. So, here we are.

RT Continues on Course ...

China has shown some technology demonstrators which most military porn masturbators called "6th generation" whatever. Those are not 6th generation anything, nor are they fifth generation, whatever they are--for that one must have 5th generation (forget about sixth generation) engine to start with. China doesn't have one. But guess what, RT invited an "expert" to comment on this. 

The images of China’s brand new warplanes, which appeared online this week, is a bold “invitation” to an arms race for a next-generation fighter, Dmitry Stefanovich,  a military researcher at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has told RT.  

The whole assertion here about "invitation to an arms race" which HAS never stopped and in which (as far as the combat air is concerned) China lags doesn't bother either RT crew or Stefanovich who is pivotal for the whole drivel in article about "arms race" in RT. But guess what, if that hasn't been enough, Stefanovich produces a wowser of a statement in the end: 

Beijing will have to compete with American next-generation fighter programs, Stefanovich said. “While there are no game-changers on the horizon, China is explicitly inviting to participate in an arms race, at least in terms of quality,” he said. “We should not forget, however, that the US is the only country with an advanced-stage program for a new strategic bomber – the B-21 – which can be adapted for some of what we would call sixth-generation capabilities. The Chinese and Russian planes of comparable type have not taken off the ground yet,” Stefanovich said.  

So, who is Mr. Stefanovich? I guess you already know where it all goes. Let's review the pedigree of this "military expert". 

But, of course, he is a good ol' boy from MGIMO with humanities degree and zero STEM and military background. He is a classic representative of an unemployable class of people who are not suited for any serious productive labor (per Schumpeter) be it physical or intellectual one. Yet, somehow, the guy who wouldn't understand the first thing about anything serious military goes to state that B-21 is a "new strategic bomber". Well, should Stefanovich or his employer Vatfor (a collection of journos and likes) have been around real military professionals, they would have learned that B-21 is something what real US naval aviators with immense carrier and aggressor squadron experience wrote about US naval (and in general) combat aviation 24 years ago:

"Money spent furthering manned aircraft technologies and programs—the CVNX (proposed Nimitz-class carrier replacement) being one of them—is like polishing cannonballs so they will fly a little farther."

It applies broadly to B-21 which may have one-two of the so-called "6th generation" features such as being capable of unmanned missions and allegedly "stealthier" than its parent B-2 while featuring ... 4th generation weapons which the US is simply incapable to develop and is stuck with legacy systems such as TLAM and, at best, 1,900 km range AGM-158 B2 JASSM-ER. This is pathetic compared with 3rd-4th generation of Russian bomber platforms capable of carrying and launching Kh-101 with the range of 5,500 km and Kh-BD with 8,000 + km range. But here we ran immediately into operational matters which are not easily understood by people with zero military background and who, like Stefanovich, will not even understand what they are looking at right in a front of their faces. 

It is a bomber conundrum today, because of the immense range of stand-off weaponry those (only Russian) bombers carry, it seems that the priority is given to TU-160M which is supersonic, fully netcentric and has state-of-the-art avionics (navigation-targeting complex). Every one of these weapons can be launched without leaving the safety of Russia's air space and imposes a completely different technological requirements on Russian bomber force. In this case, B-21 actually looks like an anachronism birthed within the obsolete US combat air doctrine which no insanely expensive and dubiously effective bomber such as B-21 can save. In the end, this "6th generation" weaponry and systems have seen a real combat already in SMO, including the use of drones (one of the S-70 Okhotniks malfunctioned and was shot down by the Su-57 pilot), including swarms (Su-35S has similar netcentric and swarm control capabilities as Su-57 and now latest Su-30SM2s). And we know that Tu-160Ms have full similar capability. 

Per "new strategic bomber"--it seems like it is almost impossible to explain to pseudo-experts that in the end it is a COMPLEX, or weapon SYSTEM, which consists of a platform and weapons it carries--one doesn't exist without another. The United States has lost missile arms race (well, the arms race, period) by a knockout and we may only guess what a truly new strategic bomber Russia works on currently will be and what weapons it will carry. One can extrapolate the strike capability which will include new generation of hypersonic weapons with enormous range, as well as other stand-off weapons which will have a truly global reach. As per "game-changers", Stefanovich needs to try harder, because hypersonic weapons and weapons such as R-37 AAM and Russian AD changed the air war completely, they didn't just change the game, they created a completely new one, making the whole USAF obsolete. But Stefanovich wouldn't know that--one must be a professional and even that is not a guarantee against continuing playing a Hollywoodesque shell game by believing military porn. But then again ... unemployable. 

When even these morons started to suspect something ... 

People Are Talking About It. A Warning.

Let's recall what Colonel Douglas Macgregor, whose professional background is absolutely undeniable and he IS a real military expert, said about real war 8 years ago in his Time magazine piece. I quote:

In 110 days of fighting the German army in France during 1918, the U.S. Army Expeditionary Force sustained 318,000 casualties, including 110,000 killed in action. That’s the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a future war with real armies, air forces, air defenses and naval power. Ignoring this reality is the road to future defeats and American decline. It’s time to look beyond the stirring images of infantrymen storming machine-gun nests created by Hollywood and to see war for what it is and will be in the future: the ruthless extermination of the enemy with accurate, devastating firepower from the sea, from the air, from space and from mobile, armored firepower on land.

That, folks, is a real professional speaking, not some media clowns and self-proclaimed "experts" akin to permanently butt-hurt David Axe or his ilk. The reason I use Macgregor's quote is not because it tickles Russian rah-rah but because decision makers in the US, most of them with law and political science backgrounds, have no a faintest clue on how REAL war of the 21st century will look like between peers, let alone against power which is above peer level in some key technological issues of warfare. 

So, it is one thing when people with no academic and service military background sell military porn to teenagers, totally another when people, who usually stay behind the curtain, come out and say things which matter. So, couple of Ph.Ds in military science and associate professors (and senior officers) of Air Force Academy (Air War College) of Zhukovsky and Gagarin published the article in service magazine:

A war between Moscow and the West might start on the ground, but it would be settled in the air. That’s the verdict of two top Russian military strategists, published in a new analysis of how a putative conflict might play out.Writing in a new edition of the Air and Space Forces Journal, two associate professors at Russia’s pilot-training academy set out how any invasion launched against the country by NATO allies would depend on a massive aerial bombardment with warplanes and missiles. Vladilen Stuchinsky and Mikhail Korolkov say, however, that the approach isn’t foolproof.In order to disrupt the bombardment and frustrate ground-based operations, the analysts say, Russia should launch a colossal counter or pre-emptive strike to wipe out enemy hardware. This could be achieved, they argue, with the combined use of drones, missiles, cyber warfare and new weaponry, destroying Western equipment before it can even get airborne.

To understand what I am talking about, here is a link to a previous--free access--issues of this magazine and, yes, this is not some political BS or fashion rag. It is in Russian but has English summaries to many of its articles. People without physics and mathematics background may find the magazine intimidating. Here is December 2020 issue. This is a type of a magazine serious intelligence analysts are paid to read.  So, when these professors talk, we better listen. The summary of their article is rather simple: any NATO target will be detected, tracked and annihilated in case US and NATO decide to do a stupid thing. Hm, this is not the news, really, because when even RAND and its aerospace experts arrive to the same conclusion one has to think that, yeah, they have a point. Remember?

Of course, the US is not fighting on its own turf here. Neither do the RAND team explain exactly how America ended up fighting a hypothetical war thousands of miles from home. But defense money is defense money, and the researchers were keen to paint an apocalyptic picture, no doubt timed to coincide with the 2020 military budget, released on Monday. “We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary,” RAND analyst David Ochmanek told a security conference on Thursday. “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it.”

It is very reassuring that professionals on both sides arrive to the same conclusion and it is especially significant against today's statement by Russia's Defense Minister that:

МОСКВА, 9 февраля. /ТАСС/. Основу сил неядерного сдерживания составят гиперзвуковые комплексы различного базирования.

Translation: In the foundation of the Russian forces of non-nuclear containment will be hypersonic weapon complexes of different basing. 

This is what Shoigu told to the participants of the operational-mobilization meeting of the command corps in Moscow. Now, the mathematics of the conventional war in Europe (and against the US proper) in case US and NATO decide to suicide themselves was in place for years. And it changes non-stop towards dis-balancing constantly, because Russia's Armed Forces are in a perpetual technological and operational evolution, which is the first sign of a healthy and cutting edge military. So, can Russia deliver an Alpha-strike at any combination of NATO forces in Europe? Evidently she can, since stand-off high precision weapons are being delivered and deployed constantly and, given those systems very long ranges and very high probabilities of acquiring targets and "leaking" through NATO's air/missile defenses, one can, with a solid reliability predict that on the modern battlefield, survival of the stationary targets (such as airfields, troops assembly areas, field HQs etc.) without top level integrated air/missile defense is getting exceedingly low. 

NATO doesn't have air/missile defense which can handle massive cruise missiles salvo, let alone any hyper-sonic weapon. Even considering the inevitable degrading of the C4ISR, including low-orbit space recon assets, modern means of detection, air defense and targeting allow Russia to see aircraft at the runways as far away as Netherlands. What could be a result of such an "Alpha-strike"? It is easy to predict--a massive loss in personnel and hardware. How massive? Let me get out on a limb here and give the order of magnitude of personnel losses--many thousands from the first strike. Those air assets which will manage to get airborne will have to fight in the environment they never experienced before: aggressive ECM-ECCM, multilayered Air Defense, including AD ambushes and, in the end, facing off with a world-class RuAF operating from well defended airfields. Yes, folks, Russia is not Iraq. She is not even Iran. Moreover, she is not even China. That is a whole other level of military preparedness and firepower.  And then, of course, there are naval assets of NATO. What would NATO do if it loses a division-size force (across all domains) in a first strike? Your guess is a good as mine.

The importance of this article, however, is in fact that it is a warning, primarily. A very professional one, from people who are actual, active experts capable to speak from the background which involves also the highest level of clearance, which also tells us that by far not everything is articulated. But what is, is enough to give a pause to NATO and that is good enough for Russia. I go back to Elmo Zumwalt, again, and will continue to do so. As early as 1970 he was forced to contemplate the scale of the crisis if the US Navy lost one of its CVNs. Hence Project 60 and ideas on Sea Control Ships to screen US Navy's carriers from what already then was fast evolving anti-ship missile technology. Today? You all know what is today. Tomorrow? The end of a warfare as we know it by means of AI-driven, new sensors and combat networks equipped, delivery with precision of a massive conventional firepower to the ranges which ten years ago seemed inconceivable. Recall this? It is all in serial production. This also explains why China may really want to get into the military alliance with Russia. The tray of goodies is simply too tantalizing to bypass. But we knew this all along.         

Story, Never-Ending Story (c).

Ah, so now we hear... the same ol' song. 

The new U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff is warning his service it faces stiff competition in a future war, involving aircraft and personnel losses not seen for 80 years. General Charles Q. Brown, Jr. believes the Air Force must work to accelerate change, adapting to new technologies faster than its potential adversaries. Brown warns that “good enough today will fail tomorrow,” with grave implications for the entire country. 

He also goes as far as to predict WW II level loses for USAF against peers. This is really a classic "cry wolf" situation because Pentagon inflated threats so many times that when, actually, the statement has a ring of truth to it, few will publicly aknowledge its merit. USAF, of course, still blows the smoke up out asses because what the USAF wants is to fight some third-tier opponent with grossly inferior air-force in order to make such statements (famous "analyst" Mizokami does it for them):

The Air Force has essentially been the supreme air force on the planet since 1991. The destruction of the Yugoslav Air Force in 1999 marked the beginning of more than 20 years of virtually uncontested air operations for the service lasting to this day. Since then, combat operations over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere have largely been uncontested. 

For starters, Mizokami mixed two different things. "Uncontested" merely meant that the US was and is bombing the shit out of countries which didn't have viable air forces to start with. Yugoslav Air Force was barely a factor in NATO's gang-rape of Serbia, which didn't prevent the US from threatening Russia trying to ensure that no S-300 AD complexes ever made it to Serbia. Moreover, in Syria the USAF is contested in a sense that Russia's VKS guard vast territories of Syria from the US control. Russia closes her eyes mostly on Israel's operations against Iranian assets there. The decision is purely political and underscores an immense complexity of politics in the Middle East. Lastly, the USAF met a proper peer in a proper, classic, air-to-air combat only in Korean War against Soviet 64th Fighter Corps and it was an unpleasant account for USAF. I do not include Vietnam here, but even there Vietnamese gave a good account of themselves in the air, while making sure that Air Defense becomes a more complex affair than merely AAA and dogfights. They, with the help of the USSR, surely succeeded. 

Today we are deep inside Real Revolution in Military Affairs where the USAF faces insurmountable barrier of advanced technologies and operational concepts which make all, grossly backward, views on the air-war as merely a contest between two opposing air forces as relevant to reality on the ground, or in the air, for that matter, as having a crank-shaft for 2020 Toyota Camry or Chevrolet Camaro as means of starting the engine. It is good that Charles Brown acknowledges possible losses for USAF in the modern peer-to-peer war, but as Russians say--best air defense is our tanks at enemy's airfields. Russia is not going to be sending tanks to take Rammstein or whatever forward jump air strips may be chosen in case the US and NATO want to commit physical suicide, but modern air war, even before any aircraft reaches the edges of weapons' release, which in itself a dubious proposition, will pretty much have no airfields to come back to, nor, very possible, countries from which any attempts may be made against Russia or, for that matter, China. 

Reality of modern air war is such that every single NATO aircraft will be tracked the moment it takes off from any field in Europe, in fact, many will be tracked while at the runway getting ready to take off, the first wave of counter-strike will be in the air shortly after that and even before those aircraft are properly airborne things will start happening which USAF never encountered before, ranging from great degrading, or complete shut-down, of communications to long-range EW, to disabling GPS and the list is too long to continue. And this is before anything happens at all. USAF never in its history operated in the environment like that and the remedy it suggests is, oh, boy...

How will the Air Force do this? Drones, drones, and more drones. Manned military aviation has been in a death spiral for some time. Technological complexity leads to increasingly sophisticated aircraft that require more time and money to develop. As a result, planes like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter require two decades to develop, cost $90 million each, and require months to build. The result is a smaller air force where even brand-new fighter jets feature 20-year-old technology, which isn't capable of making up for World War II-style losses.

I am having a... facepalm. A real drone, capable of any real military impact while carrying out whatever mission: strike, recon, air-to-air etc. will still be subjected, in the war against peer (Russia and China), to the same set of threats and counter-measures, which will either mitigate their impact or derail drones' mission altogether, unless it is a drone which is...well..expensive and extremely valuable, which brings us all back to the square one. The United States, as Andrei Raevsky once succinctly observed, can not fight wars on cheap, period. In fact, the ratios of US military technology costs relative to the same by peers continue to grow across the board for the United States. This is not a good indicator at all, for ANY military technology the United States procures or is about to. Same applies to drones. The world changed and any most "advanced" technologies the US tries to develop and procure are already obsolete the moment they leave manufacturing floor. 

Without understanding of modern peer-to-peer conflict as a whole, as a vertical engagement from a strategic down to tactical levels, with all forces involved in it and interacting constantly across modern battle-space, all this silly talk is just...well, silly. At least RAND's big air operations honcho understands that:

We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary,” RAND analyst David Ochmanek told a security conference on Thursday. “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it.”

Well, good that he at least understands that. As per "aggression" tropes, as I say non-stop: it so tired, it is so contrived and its really so rich coming from people whose actual combat score against peaceful weddings exceeds that against competent and determined air forces as of lately, that one has to simply dismiss this BS and admit that at this stage US military simply cannot adapt and develop a viable fighting doctrine and technology to fight serious adversary capable of rearranging stones, even without any nuclear weapons, anywhere in the world. In related news, Boeing wants at least 20% of its labor force to be black, while Hollywood issued new guide-lines for Oscars on inclusion (wokeness, that is). What can possibly go wrong? s/ 

Oh, Not Again.

Another one of those pieces by some Pentagon's big honcho about this and that. Pentagon's R&D Chief Mike Griffin waxes exceptional and writes another, in a row of now tiresome, platitudes about how US Armed Forces are great... sort of. He starts with a predictable fodder of Berlin Wall:

Nov. 9 marked the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event followed within a couple of years by the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the freeing of the Eastern European vassal states. Francis Fukuyama thought we had reached “the end of history,” that global great power conflict was at its end and that the ascendancy of the Western liberal concept was the permanent future. “We won the Cold War” — it says so in all the history books. Winning is great, except for the part where the losers retreat, rethink, retrain and try again; while the winner thinks the race is won once and for all — which is why the United States now finds itself running from behind in certain aspects of today’s great power rivalry. How did we get here, and what should we do about it?

I have news for Griffin: Fukuyama is a classic representative of the American so called political pseudo-science class and could serve only as an Exhibit A of sheer ignorance, expected from the guy with no particular education or coherent analytical skills. Obviously, neither Fukuyama nor Griffin are good scholars of Clausewitz who is explicit in that: in war the outcome is never final. (c) Oh boy, was Clausewitz a Marxist? I though in a 200 years since Vom Kriege was penned we all should have developed some degree of recognition of what works and what doesn't in Western Civilization's most important work on war. No wonder Lenin was a huge fan of good ol' Carl. But that simple fact aside, there is one thing which Griffin, himself a superb engineer with a stunning array of STEM degrees and former NASA chief must know that his this statement is trivial at best:

Equally critical was the ability to prevail against a larger force in a conventional fight. The U.S. seized the advantage with precision, with a precise conventional strike, enabled by pattern-matching seekers. With a global positioning system to guide force projection to the right place, stealth technology to hide our aircraft from enemy radar, encrypted high-rate communications to enable superior command and control, electronic warfare to deny that advantage to our enemies, unmanned aerial vehicles for both reconnaissance and force projection, and the uncontested dominance of the space domain to tie it all together, we prevailed.

It is becoming downright nauseating reading these Clanciesque pop-warfare narratives since most of them are not true. I don't know if Griffin's tenure at NASA taught him anything but NASA being a paying customer of Russian rocketry for years now, he surely must know that the age of precision guided weapons originally was started by Nazi Germans in WW II when they sunk Italian battleship Roma with radio-guided Fritz-X bomb. But these were Soviet who developed an astonishing array of anti-ship missiles in post-WW II period and I am sure Griffin should know that those by definition are precision guided weapons. It just happened so that the United States was not even a competitor in this field from the inception, lagging badly in development of combat missile technologies in which Soviet Union and Russia had and have a dramatic technological lead, which today may have become insurmountable for the United States. In terms of air defenses the United States military is not even a competitor having nothing even remotely comparable to S-3XX-4XX-5XX systems, not to mention systems of A-235 Nudol. I will skip talking about hyper-sonic weapons here altogether. I will just add that Russians were involved with satellite-based navigation since the same time US got involved with GPS--early 1970s, such as Parus. GLONASS followed in 1982. Griffin surely must know about TU-143 Reis or even ancient LA-17R too. You know, drones.

My question is not even with Griffin's statement such as this:

In brief, the United States no longer possesses the unquestioned technical superiority to dominate a future fight.

Because most of "unquestioned" was primarily, up to late 1970s, in processing power and electronics, but in the fact that Griffin narrates totally made up history of US weaponry which, bar few limited fields, was neither "unquestioned" nor dominant. Even US jewel of a true technological excellence, it's world-class superb nuclear submarine force experienced a serious technological push-back since late 1970s which resulted in at least technological parity by 1990s. My quarrel is with this "creative" history of the warfare as a narrative of only American ingenuity and pioneering--this is absolutely false. Those challenges Griffin talks about--and they ARE challenges in every sense from technological to doctrinal--they didn't appear out of nowhere in an instant. All those challenges gestated and grew out of these very Russians understanding the nature of the warfare and doing their due diligence in R&D and fighting doctrine field. The roots of those "challenges" are in 1970s and 1980s, not in 2010s. Well, what do you know--I just wrote a book on the nature of real revolution in military affairs. It is precisely about what Griffin talks. But in the end, these ad nauseam trivialities, such as this:

What near-term risks are we willing to take, and what current systems are we willing to let go, so that we can invest in capabilities that will impose costs on our adversaries and deter them from starting a fight because they know they cannot win? This is the critical national security challenge of our time.

Invoke only one question--under what stone did Mr.Griffin spend last 20 years in order to not recognize the fact that it is the United States who unleashed non-stop violent wars and coups all over the globe and made sure that people will start the fight once they recognize that their livelihood and sovereignty is under attack by the United States. Luckily, the instruments to defend themselves against American military aggression are better than those of the aggressor and that what saddens US establishment, which has no idea what real war is. Or maybe they do? And that is why they are sad.

This brings me to another point, of Michail Khodaryonok today making a statement to RT:

An attack by NATO on Russia’s westernmost exclave Kaliningrad – a scenario that’s been speculated about in the media lately – would lead to a nuclear apocalypse and affect even countries not involved in a hypothetical conflict.International media have recently made regular publications on how Kaliningrad – the Russian outpost in Europe – could be ‘captured’.Such publications serve the interests of NATO members’ military and industrial complex, according to Kaliningrad’s governor Anton Alikhanov.

What Khodaryonok forgets to mention is that Russia has enough conventional deterrent to not go for the nukes. I may understand (I think) where Khodaryonok is coming from but he, as a graduate of the Academy of General Staff, should know that conventional step in the escalation process in case NATO wants to commit suicide, is, in fact, an additional deterrent and adds robustness to Kaliningrad's defense. Khodaryonok writes:

Now, a few remarks on the message posted by China’s Eastday.com. It says that if NATO and Russia went to war, the bloc could seize the Russian region in a matter of two days. Our Chinese comrades are a little off with their timeline. The operation would not actually take this long, and the result would be very different. It would take Russia no longer than 40-45 minutes to launch a nuclear strike, and after that we would be able to do only one thing – discuss the peculiar aspects of the modern nuclear apocalypse. To sum it up, the battle for Kaliningrad would under no circumstances remain an isolated military conflict. It would become just an episode of a global nuclear war. And even the countries not involved in this conflict would suffer the consequences. Unfortunately, these are the effects of using strategic nuclear weapons.

While Khodaryonok is absolutely correct in stating that such a conflict will not stay local, I don't know if he missed Valery Gerasimov's statement (in Russian) couple of years ago that already then Russia had enough cruise missiles deployed on critical strategic directions for a complex deterrence by means of high precision weapons. A lot of time passed since then and when even RAND admits impossibility of involving NATO in a conventional conflict with Russia:

“We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary,” RAND analyst David Ochmanek told a security conference on Thursday. “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it.”

Khodaryonok  retired from the Armed Forces in 2000. 19 years ago. Since then one could observe a dramatic change in Russia's doctrinal thinking with introduction of "strategic force deterrence by high-precision weapons" already in 2010 Military Doctrine. One couldn't fail to notice that these were primarily conventional forces that Russia was improving and updating since early 2000s. This was done primarily to be able to fight a conventional, not a nuclear, conflict. So, if Mikhail Khodaryonok thinks that in case of NATO attacking Kaliningrad, Russia is going to go for nuclear jugular immediately, I have a bit of disagreement with him, because the first thing which will be done will be a conventional strike on NATO's infrastructure and for that Russia has enough force to disrupt NATO's C4ISR architecture and inflict major losses. That is precisely what is called a "strategic force deterrence" by means of stand-off, precision-guided weaponry. In the end, rearranging stones in D.C., Brussels or London in purely conventional way is nothing that 3M14 or X-101 cannot do. It is also a good way to avoid apocalyptic scenario by inflicting a lot of pain for aggressor to have second thought about escalation. It is so self-evident from Russia's military development since mid-2000s, that it is strange that Khodaryonok had to reply in this manner to some strategic delusions by some butt-hurt "strategists" who lost every single war they were involved in since 2000 and who still are dreaming of some revenge out of desperation after seeing the myth of their conventional military power blown to smithereens. In the end, even R.D. Hooker's "opus" is about "defending" Baltics and cannot be taken seriously from any professional point of view. Khodaryonok, evidently, forgot Macron begging not to sink French frigate or harm any forces in April 2018. They are not complete idiots there, yet. They can calculate and know, as an example, that NATO's fleet combat life in case of attacking Kaliningrad will be counted in tens of minutes before Kinzhals or P-800s arriving. Khodaryonok MUST know these things. As for nuclear war. Well, no special commentary is needed here.   

Why North Korea?

As I type this, USS Carl Winson's Carrier Battle Group is steaming towards North Korea's shores.  Once at the station the group will be ready to strike in order to, as US media say, prevent this North Korean regime from developing its nuclear arsenal. OK, we get this and I, personally, have very little sympathy for this regime, which is not to the case with North Korean people who suffered enough, not that it is of any concern in D.C. Two main reasons for this sudden US urge to face down a cartoonish regime in Pyongyang have nothing to do with North Korean nukes--this reason is secondary to a whole new brain game Trump Administration is trying to play in the region. First reasons is, of course, China. 

1. Yes, China is big, she is the largest economy in the world and, as rumor has it, is also not very happy with her rambunctious North Korean neighbors. But what China is not as of now, she is not a serious naval threat to US Navy and she is not there yet to deal with US desperate need for Asia-Pacific pivot, which this whole tour de force' is designed to demonstrate to China. In the end, huge part of China's economic heart is not even in China--it is in Walmarts, JC Penney's, K-Marts and Home Depots of North American continent. Take away a large part of enormously voluminous, consumerism-obsessed US market and China will find herself immediately in huge economic trouble. There is much more to it, of course, than purely economic considerations, there is an issue of window of opportunities for fading US (I write about it in detail in the piece which should be published in Unz Review this coming Monday). Plus, it is always good, in Washington's view, to flex muscles as a way of self-medication. Yes, this China factor is important, but the second one could have been placed in the first place.

2. North Korea, despite her bluster and possession of actual nuclear weapons is not a competitor militarily for a power with a full blown stand-off capability such as US Navy. Once nuclear weapons are factored out of the equation, the only way North Korea may respond to US aggression is to launch a massive land invasion of South Korea. That is it. That is the only weapon in Pyongyang's arsenal which can be seriously considered, the rest? North Korean Armed Forces are simply antiquated and are no contest for Carl Winson's group. North Korea doesn't have means to even reach this CBG and, unless some bizarre confluence of conditions allows it, North Korean Air Defense and Air Force will be destroyed within 48 to 72 hours by Carl Winson's air wing. Realistically, this could be a turkey shoot but that is precisely why North Korea was chosen as the next bogey--military weakness in modern warfare. It is obvious that Pentagon thinks that it can control escalation. I, however, don't think so and I base my assumptions on the "credit history" of US political and military leadership. 

Once North Korea decides to attack South (God forbids) and US forces in South Korea get embroiled in the mayhem, which will follow, the dynamics may change dramatically. US hopes, using North Korea as punching bag, to put China in the place Washington thinks it is appropriate, but what could reaction of Beijing be I can only speculate. US cannot impress Russia with her military and, rather embarrassing, Tomahawk strikes, but it seems that starting from the false flag "chemical attack" in Syria and punitive action, Trump, and those who "advise" him on military strategy, kept China in mind. China may (I am not saying that she was) have been "impressed" and there is no denial here that US, for now, still have a bit of a grasp if not both of China's cojones, but one for sure. It is a rather strange time we live in but in this a wonderful Easter time and I wish to all faithful a Happy Holiday and say with all my atheistic agnostic passion--Christos Voskrese! Let there be life.