Yet Another Garbage From RAND.

RAND suddenly produced yet another "study" about SMO, this time about "propaganda". In this study titled The Nightingale Versus the Bear, What Persuasion Research Reveals About Ukraine's and Russia's Messaging on the War, RAND's continues to live in alternative universe and once one tries to take this "study" seriously, at the first try one immediately runs into the one of the reasons why the US cannot win a single war despite all efforts from RAND to pretend that they deal with strategy and not strategery. It doesn't take them long:

The Specifics of Period 1: Russia’s Initial Offensive and the Battle for Kyiv. Russia’s Messaging Targeting Russian Audiences. 

So, this group of RAND "scholars" evidently still believes, trying to do the "study", that there was some "Battle for Kiev". It is not surprising for RAND and overwhelming majority of the US think-tanks to confabulate things, but it may come as a shock to these shysters but there never was any Battle for Kiev, nor there was any intent on Russia's part to conduct any battle other than to do a demonstration probing attack to convince Kiev regime to sit at the negotiation table. There never was any operation conducted to take Kiev, nor any serious intent to surround (blockade) Kiev, and we still don't know a full set of objectives for Russian paratroopers fighting for Gostomel airfield. Part of it, obviously, was to take the field itself, but rumor has it there were things at this field which needed urgent taking care of, which did happen. 

But then again, what can one expect from US "think-tanks" when they use, like RAND did, this type of "experts". 

Khrystyna Holynska. Assistant Policy Researcher, RAND, and Ph.D. Student, Pardee RAND Graduate School Santa Monica Office.

Education: Ph.D. in political science, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine; MBA+MBAI in business administration, artificial intelligence and data analytics, Kyiv School of Economics, Kyiv, Ukraine; M.A. in political science, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine.

And here comes this proverbial issue--what good your "data" analysis IS when your "data" is utterly corrupted? GIGO--Garbage In, Garbage Out--this is the ONLY type of data which US "strategists", even those who try to be objective, use--garbage. The examples abound--America's "history" of WW II, America's economic data, GDP metric, finally, total, utter ukrainization of America's always second rate military analysis, and now fantasies about SMO, which paraded Pentagon and its subsidiaries like RAND as a collection of amateurs. RAND, read my lips--you do not have Russia specialists in your pseudo-academic org, neither you have any real military specialists in practical geopolitics and balance of power.

This whole book 5 years ago described in detail how your "models" and views of war and geopolitics are nothing but concoctions of utter rubbish. 

How about some excerpt from it:

We are not going to review Richardson’s arms race model here—it is outdated and requires very serious quality adjusters to an otherwise purely quantity-driven model. But one of the models which does reflect a degree of competition and is helpful in gaining an understanding of equilibrium between major powers that Richardson was trying to describe is the model, Status of the Nation. This model is claimed to be quantitative and is new despite absorbing many principles of geopolitics and military balance from as far back in time as the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan up to the 2005 RAND publication, Measuring National Power. This model, developed within the framework of the project Complex System Analysis and Modelling of Global Dynamics, which was done in the world-renowned Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of Russian Academy of Sciences was developed by a group of researchers who titled their paper “Russia in the Context of World’s Geopolitical Dynamics: Quantitative Assessment of Historic Retrospective, Current State and Perspectives for Development.” This model is very instructive for a number of reasons, the main one being a manifest failure in accounting for qualitative, such as operational and technological, military factors as the main drivers of the geopolitical balance and status of nations. 

Guess from three times who turned out to be correct, me or RANDinians? Well, you know the answer. Remarkably, what I warned about for many years, namely utter incompetence of US military "modelling" establishment now became obvious to Russians who increasingly begin to not just question but state a complete failure of American views on XX century history, warfare and geopolitics. This failure is not anymore a theorem, but axiom and no amount of Ph.D degrees in useless contrived subjects, such as "Policy Analysis" can obfuscate the fact that no serious self-respecting people would continue to churn out in industrial quantities pseudo-academic bullshit which is absolutely useless, especially in the country undergoing what James Kunstler brilliantly described as:

And the USA is so lost in self mind-fuckery that we can’t even get our House of Representatives in order. The American students (and faculty!) cheerleading for Gaza’s Road Warrior executioners might represent the last stand of Woke derangement. This degenerate nonsense has run its course. It may dawn in our centers-of-learning — and every other collaborating institution — that we have more important things to think about than the etiquette around men who dress-up as women.  

American education is destroyed and so is its understanding of the real world which to a large degree drives this self mind-fuckery. RAND's yet another "paper" is a proof of it.

Comrade Li Shangfu Had A Very Productive Visit.

To understand why, just take a look. Emphasis on WHO conducted this study and why it is published now. 

Chinese military study names TikTok among tech companies involved in ‘cognitive war’ on Russia

The study concludes:

A new study by Chinese military scientists named TikTok as one of several hi-tech companies involved in propaganda campaigns against Russia. TikTok stands out as the only Chinese-owned business on the list, which contains nearly 40 private entities from the internet, space, finance and AI sectors.According to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) investigation, TikTok has joined Facebook, Twitter, Google and other Western tech giants in offering a platform for cognitive war on Russia that has “greatly undermined Russian military morale” and eroded its international image.“Combat in the cognitive domain is a new, advanced form of warfare. It is also the highest level of human [war] games,” the authors said.

The paper was published prior to Li Shangfu's visit to Moscow and as article notes:

The Alliance for Securing Democracy, a US-based national security advocacy group, noted in a report last month that Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT had more TikTok followers than The New York Times. It also found that Russian news agency RIA Novosti’s top TikTok post this year gained more than 5.6 million views while its top Twitter post had fewer than 20,000 views.  

As much as I have issues with RT, there is no comparison between contemporary Russian reporting and a trash which NYT and its cabal of ignorant agenda-pushers "journalists", trained only to brainwash already confused American public, produce daily. Soviet time Pravda had more useful and, remarkably, truthful reporting than NYT which is dangerous even to be used as a last resort toilet paper due to a risk of getting a brain cancer or psychosis by the way of anal application after #2. So, no real news here. But it looks like some type of attitude adjustment "request" was issued to Chinese owners of TikTok. I, however, have only one issue with this piece of news--neither TikTok nor Facebook or any other social network are "tech-giants". Not even close. Real tech is not anymore in Silicone Valley. In fact, it left it long time ago. But don't start me on them and Musk's latest... if you know what I mean.

Newspeak.

Thanks to Thermobarbaric for pointing this out.

A new academic report on efforts to integrate Marine Corps boot camp recommends dropping gender-specific salutations for drill instructors, but service leaders are not convinced they want to take that step. The lengthy report, commissioned by the Corps from the University of Pittsburgh in 2020 and completed in 2022, points out that half of the military services already have done away with gendered identifiers for training staff.

I briefly looked over the gist of this report as well as visited the site of this Lab in Pittsburgh and can confidently state that pseudo-sciences are increasingly present in American and Western universities and, obviously, the issue of combat training long ago became in the US Armed Forces the matter of voodoo-dancing, bad spirits exorcism rituals and developing a newspeak for already demoralized force. It has nothing to do with real combat training, cohesion of sub and units and tradition. 

Tucker and Candace speak about this issue a day ago. 

In general, at this stage any humanities "degree" obtained in the last 10 years from any US university should be viewed as disqualifying factor in any discussion on matters concerning history, politics, national security and real economy. The imposition of totalitarian (non)thinking is in full swing in the West and, eventually, this will also completely corrupt even STEM and natural sciences field. In fact, this is also in progress as I type it. 

Physicists Need to Be More Careful with How They Name Things. The popular term “quantum supremacy,” which refers to quantum computers outperforming classical ones, is uncomfortably reminiscent of “white supremacy”

I wrote about this insanity before. We observe a complete societal collapse, one institution after another, US military is in progress, STEM and free scientific inquiry are next. This is how civilizations die.