Tag: war

Russia Moves On Odessa

It appears the Special Military Operation is about to enter a new phase, if the recent activity in the region of Odessa means what one would reasonably assume it to mean:

The biggest story the past week has been Russia’s strikes on the Odessa and Nikolayev region. These have targeted both energy grid infrastructure as well as—most surprisingly—the transport and rail infrastructure, in what appears to be an attempt to cut Odessa off from logistics from the west.

Panic in the Odessa region after the attacks on the bridge over the Dniester near the village of Mayaki. The attacks on the bridge and the bridge in Zatoka have been ongoing for 9 days in a row. The south of the region may be cut off from the last functioning ports, through which gasoline is supplied to the central part of Ukraine and the Odessa region. Local entrepreneurs are already offering to transport people to the other side for 10,000 hryvnias. Panic is spreading on both sides of the bridge, with people buying up fuel and food, and long queues at gas stations in Odessa. Other sources report that the “fever” will last for 1-2 weeks, until logistics are reorganized through Moldova and Romania. By that time, pontoon crossings may appear in Mayaki.

As for the swings and roundabouts, these sorts of small advances and retreats such as Simplicius describes at Kupyansk mean absolutely nothing beyond PR for the media. If the media covered the Paul-Joshua fight the same way they cover the NATO-Russian war, they’d be breathlessly announcing that Paul had turned everything around and was about to knock out Joshua every time he got a punch in.

In war, as in boxing, no one goes unscathed. And the only reason the media believes otherwise is that it still thinks that turkey shoots in the desert with air supremacy are the definition of modern war, and nothing could be further from the truth in the Drone Age.

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Why the EU is Panicking

Hal Turner explains why the EU was holding its failed summit yesterday, at which Ursula van der Leyen failed to convince the member states to declare war on Russia by stealing its frozen funds. The problem is that the EU is going to have to return those funds soon, and they’re already being used to prop up loans that will now have to be written off as complete losses, which is going to cause a lot of financial pain to someone:

The United States has notified the European Union that it wants frozen Russian sovereign assets incorporated into a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine war.

That position immediately exposes a major problem for Brussels.

Europe has already functionally collateralized Russian central bank assets — not through formal seizure, but by pledging windfall profits and future proceeds from those assets to support long-term financing and loan structures for Ukraine.

This has been publicly acknowledged in EU and G7 policy frameworks over the past year.

That financing model was built on a core assumption: Either the war would continue indefinitely, or Russia would be decisively defeated.

A negotiated peace breaks that assumption.

Once the United States asserts that frozen Russian assets must be treated as part of a settlement framework, rather than permanent war financing, several consequences follow. The EU’s legal justification weakens, the collateral underpinning those loans becomes unstable, and the long-standing claim that the asset freeze is “temporary” becomes difficult to sustain.

This is not merely a diplomatic disagreement. It is a forced accounting event — one with potential implications for Euroclear, EU financial institutions, and member-state balance sheets.

This context helps explain recent developments in Brussels. Over the past days and weeks, EU leadership has moved rapidly to bypass vetoes, expand emergency authorities, and escalate rhetoric — including renewed NATO statements about preparing for wider conflict.

The underlying strategy appears straightforward: Treat frozen Russian assets as a de facto war chest.

In practice, that step had already been taken through collateralization, even if formal seizure was avoided.

President Trump is now explicitly challenging that structure.

By calling this out, he undermines the financial logic that sustained the war.

All of the bluster and posturing will not disguise the fact that NATO has already lost its war with Russia. The Russians now know that there is no ceasefire or negotiated peace agreement that can be trusted, which is why I expect them to make demands that none of the Western parties want to accept, even though they should.

Frankly, I’m surprised that the Russians are even willing to talk to anyone, given the way they have been relentlessly lied to by everyone, including formerly neutral parties. If I were Putin, I would simply smile politely and grind on until I had exactly what I wanted, then impose a peace agreement with steel teeth.

UPDATE: EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, announced that Europe had decided they could provide another $90 Billion in assistance to Ukraine, that Europe “will raise from Capital Markets.” So the Europeans are going into hock for Ukraine, to the tune of about $90 Billion.

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The EU Threatens DC

Why does anyone believe these unelected Satanic would-be world rulers are on anyone’s side, or even remotely in line with American national interests. And they desperately need to be feeling the back side of the President’s pimp hand.

The EU’s pro-war, globalist, anti-American leaders are doing everything in their power—including weighing what’s being called a “nuclear option” of deliberately shaking the foundations of the U.S. economy—to block a peace settlement in Ukraine, even as President Trump advances direct negotiations aimed at finally ending the nearly four-year-long inter-Slavic war.

According to reports, the globalist bloc in Europe is threatening to sell-off $2.34 trillion in US Treasury holdings if Trump withdraws support for Ukraine—an action that some analysts claim could  trigger a downturn more severe than the 2008 crash.

Rather than welcoming diplomacy, EU officials are allegedly weighing economic retaliation if Trump dares to end the war on his own terms. Sources say some governments have floated the idea of dumping portions of their massive holdings of U.S. debt as a form of pressure.

Such a move would be a dramatic escalation—essentially an attempt to destabilize the American economy to keep the Ukraine conflict alive. Analysts note this financial “nuclear option” could send shockwaves through global markets and severely devalue the dollar.

European technocrats appear willing to risk worldwide turmoil to preserve their geopolitical ambitions. Their threat reflects how far the EU has drifted from serving its citizens and how committed it remains to endless confrontation with Russia.

First of all, the economic crisis is going to take place regardless. Second, if I were President Trump, I would inform them that any such action would be perceived as an act of war and that they would no longer have to worry about a Russian invasion of Western Europe because the US troops already there would be seizing the central banks of the EU and every member state that supported the Commission’s action, as well as arresting all of the leaders responsible for it.

Better yet, paraphrase President Chappell:

EU, you have a problem with that? You know what you should do? You should sanction me. Sanction me with your army. Oh, wait a minute, you don’t have an army! I guess that means you need to shut the fuck up. That’s what I would do if I didn’t have no army. I would SHHH… the fuck up. Shut the fuck UP!

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A Little Late for That

The top British military officer is under the misapprehension that anyone in Britain is going to fight for the British government given the way the last few British governments have been actively seeking to destroy the English nation:

British families must be prepared to send their sons and daughters to war against Russia, the head of the military has warned.

In a stark message, Chief of the Defence Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said ‘more people’ needed to be ready to take up arms to protect the country.

He explained that although the chances of a direct Russian attack on UK soil remain remote, that ‘does not mean the chances are zero’. Sir Richard called for schools to encourage children to take up jobs in the arms industry and said more British families will ‘know what sacrifice for our nation means’.

Well, they won’t be. If there is one lesson, it is this: if your government tries to force you to make the choice, go to war with your government, not the Russian Army.

Your chances of survival are much, much better.

Besides that, we’ve seen that the British military hasn’t been able to stop an unarmed invasion of ten million. They obviously couldn’t stop a nationwide rebellion of British nationalists either.

8,200+ comments. The following are among the top-rated:

  • What is he smoking, if he thinks we going to fight wars for the rich, i’d sooner turn my weapons on them before taking up arms against our russian brothers and sisters.
  • Fight for governments that care little for its citizens instead pander to accommodating non British people and of course politicians grabbing all the wealth they can so no definitely not.
  • No F way are you taking my sons
  • No thanks – I wouldn’t vote for Labour let alone fight for their version of Britain. It’s not worth fighting for now.
  • Fight for a country that won’t even let you raise the flag, no thanks .

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The Logistics of Tolkien

An Unmitigated Pedant defends the military elements of The Lord of the Rings. I read this with particular interest, because the military scenes and battles have tended to be the one area where Arts of Dark and Light have been said to actually exceed the master’s masterpiece. His core thesis is that it is primarily Peter Jackson who is to blame for the perception that Tolkien’s military setups and strategies were suboptimal, although he blames most of Jackson’s shortcomings on the medium in which he was working.

I’m not so sure about that, given Faramir’s cavalry charge against a fortified position being held by missile-armed forces. But never mind that for now.

The army Sauron sends against Minas Tirith is absolutely vast – an army so vast that it cannot fit its entire force in the available frontage, so the army ends up stacking up in front of the city:

The books are vague on the total size of the orcish host (but we’ll come back to this), but interview material for the movies suggests that Peter Jackson’s CGI team assumed around 200,000 orcs. This army has to exit Minas Morgul – apparently as a single group – and then follow the road to the crossing at Osgiliath. Is this operational plan reasonable, from a transit perspective?

In a word: no. It’s not hard to run the math as to why. Looking at the image at the head of the previous section, we can see that the road the orcs are on allows them to march five abreast, meaning there are 40,000 such rows (plus additional space for trolls, etc). Giving each orc four feet of space on the march (a fairly conservative figure), that would mean the army alone stretches 30 miles down a single road. At that length, the tail end of the army would not even be able to leave camp before the front of the army had finished marching for the day. For comparison, an army doing a ‘forced march’ (marching at rapid speed under limited load – and often taking heat or fatigue casualties to do it) might manage 20 to 30 miles per day. Infantry on foot is more likely to average around 10 miles per day on decent roads.

Ideally, the solution to this problem is to split the army up. By moving in multiple columns and converging on the battlespace, you split one impossibly long column of troops into several more manageable ones. There is a danger here – the enemy might try to overwhelm each smaller army in turn – but Faramir has had to pull his troops back out of Ithilien, so there is little risk of defeat in detail for the Army of Mordor. The larger problem is terrain – we’ve seen Ithilien in this film and the previous one: it is heavily forested, with few roads. What roads exist are overgrown and difficult to use. Worse yet, the primary route through the area is not an east-west road, but the North-South route up from Near Harad to the Black Gate. The infrastructure here to split the army effectively simply doesn’t exist.

A map from regular Earth, rather than Middle Earth. This is Napoleon’s Ulm Campaign (1805) – note how Napoleon’s armies (the blue lines) are so large they have to move in multiple columns, which converge on the Austrian army (the red box labeled “FERDINAND”). This coordinated movement is the heart of operations: how do you get your entire army all to the battlefield intact and at the same time?
This actually understates the problem, because the army of Morder also needs supplies in order to conduct the siege. Orcs seem to be able to make do with very poor water supplies (Frodo and Sam comment on the foulness of Mordor water), so we can assume they use local water along the march, but that still leaves food. Ithilien (the territory they are marching through), as we have seen in the film, is unpopulated – the army can expect no fresh supplies here (or in the Pelennor beyond, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly). That is going to mean a baggage train to carry additional supplies, as well as materials for the construction of all of the fancy siege equipment (we, in fact, later see them bringing the towers pre-built – we’ll get to it). This would lengthen the army train even more.

All of that raises a second point – from a supply perspective, can this operation work? Here, the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, yes. Minas Morgul is 20 leagues (around 60 miles) from Minas Tirith. An infantryman might carry around (very roughly) 10 days or so of rations on his person, which is enough to move around 120 miles (these figures derive from K. Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003) – well worth a read! – but are broadly applicable to almost any army before the invention of the railroad). The army is bound to be held up a bit along the way, so the Witch King would want to bring some wagons with additional supplies, but as a matter of supply, this works. The problem is transit.

As a side note, the supply issue neatly explains the aggressive tactics the Witch king employs when he arrives at Minas Tirith, moving immediately for an assault rather than a siege. Because the pack animals which pull wagons full of food eat food themselves, there is literally no amount of wagons which would enable an army of this size to sustain itself indefinitely in a long siege. The Witch King is thus constrained by his operational plan: the raw size of his army means he must either take the city in an assault quickly enough to march most of his army back, or fail. He proceeds with the appropriate sense of urgency.

That said, the distances here are short: 60 miles is a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network. One cannot help but notice the Stark (hah!) contrast with the multi-hundred-mile supply-free lunges in the TV version of Game of Thrones, which are far less plausible.

Great, now I have to re-read The Lord of the Rings from a strategic and logistics perspective. Hmmm, this might actually make for an interesting Darkstream series. Would that be of interest to anyone else or is this just another AI music sort of thing?

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The Time is Now

A comical “warning” of war from the current NATO head:

NATO chief Mark Rutte has warned that war with Russia ‘is at our door’ as he urged European allies to prepare for action now or risk facing a conflict on the scale ‘our grandparents and great-grandparents endured’.

Speaking in Berlin on Thursday, Rutte said too many NATO members remained ‘quietly complacent’ about the threat posed by Moscow and insisted Europe must urgently ramp up defence spending and weapons production to deter Vladimir Putin.

‘We are Russia’s next target,’ he said. I fear that too many are quietly complacent. Too many don’t feel the urgency. And too many believe that time is on our side. It is not. The time for action is now.’

The only reason “the time for action is now” is because in five years, the USA isn’t going to be a member of NATO. NATO may or may not still exist as a rudimentary parody of a transnational military force, but regardless, time is not on the side of either NATO or the EU because in five years, both China and Russia are going to be stronger in both economic and military terms, the USA will be trying to survive its self-inflicted demographic shocks and maintaining its preeminence in the Western hemisphere, and the European militaries won’t even be able to control their own populations.

So NATO can lose now or lose later. It makes zero difference. The smartest thing these Clown World puppets could do is surrender preemptively to Russia and stop constantly poking both the Bear and the Dragon. Doing so is in the interest of them and the European nations alike. But they won’t be permitted to do so, which is why we’re going to have to endure this charade for another few years.

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The National Security Strategy

It’s far from ideal, but it is a massive improvement upon the destructive path of the entire post-WWII period. (PDF document)

First, a long-overdue condemnation of the foreign-infested elite’s strategy.

American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short—they have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want.

After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.

They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend. They allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own. And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty. In sum, not only did our elites pursue a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal, in doing so they undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.

Second, the very first priority listed is to shut down the societally destructive policy of permitting mass immigration. While it falls short of the much-needed policy of mass remigration, it’s clearly pointing in that direction.

The Era of Mass Migration Is Over – Who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation. Any country that considers itself sovereign has the right and duty to define its future. Throughout history, sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration and granted citizenship only rarely to foreigners, who also had to meet demanding criteria. The West’s experience over the past decades vindicates this enduring wisdom. In countries throughout the world, mass migration has strained domestic resources, increased violence and other crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted labor markets, and undermined national security. The era of mass migration must end. Border security is the primary element of national security. We must protect our country from invasion, not just from unchecked migration but from cross-border threats such as terrorism, drugs, espionage, and human trafficking. A border controlled by the will of the American people as implemented by their government is fundamental to the survival of the United States as a sovereign republic.

And third, the administration still doesn’t comprehend the degree to which China’s military capabilities already dwarf those of the USA from the strategic perspective:

In the long term, maintaining American economic and technological preeminence is the surest way to deter and prevent a large-scale military conflict… We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain. But the American military cannot, and should not have to, do this alone.

Our allies must step up and spend—and more importantly do—much more for collective defense. America’s diplomatic efforts should focus on pressing our First Island Chain allies and partners to allow the U.S. military greater access to their ports and other facilities, to spend more on their own defense, and most importantly to invest in capabilities aimed at deterring aggression. This will interlink maritime security issues along the First Island Chain while reinforcing U.S. and allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible.

There is nothing to maintain. China’s shipbuilding and dronebuilding advantage already exceeds the historical US industrial advantage over Japan. Taiwan and the South China Sea are already gone. So plan accordingly, don’t strategerize about military fantasies.

One hopes this strategic approach will be rather more successful than its predecessor, which in 1992 asserted:

The United States had become the world’s sole remaining superpower following the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, and declared that its principal objective was to preserve that status.

I think we can certainly assess the so-called “Wolfowitz doctrine” as having been complete and comprehensive failure by that metric. Which, of course, what always happens when you let opportunistic tacticians make the strategy.

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Why War in Venezuela

This is a helpful explainer to those of us who are wondering why the USA is threatening the Maduro regime in Venezuela. It’s essentially a combination of a) oil, b) Monroe Doctrine, and c) fallout from US interference in Ukraine.

Venezuela implemented a bunch of utterly catastrophic and self destructive economic policies. Among these was the rational sounding policy of capturing Venezuela’s vast oil wealth which was going abroad, and applying it to the purposes of Venezuelan government.

This resulted in the US issuing a bunch of economic sanctions, similar to those applied to Russia, but vastly less extreme. The damage done by those sanctions was probably insignificant compared to the damage Venezuela did to itself.

The US government then attempted to color revolution Venezuela, but this failed dismally, because Venezuela was run by leftists who were veterans of color revolution, and knew their opponent’s playbook — had in fact been taught the playbook by their opponent’s NGOs.

The Venezuelan politicals took over management of the oil industry in Venezuela, which predictably collapsed. Like the rest of the private economy in Venezuela.

Venezuela then reached out to Russian oil companies, who set about restoring oil production. This was a somewhat Thermidorian policy, since the Russian oil companies understandably insisted on making a profit and refused to have the politicals interfering in management.

This, of course, was violation of the Monroe doctrine, which really pissed off America. Hence war threats from the Trump administration. Their idea of Thermidor was that Venezuela should let US oil companies do what the Russian oil companies are now doing.

Well, said Russia, if you can stick your oar into our boat, we are going to stick our oar into your boat. So Russia sent military advisers and military equipment to Venezuela, and its warships visited Venezuelan waters. Which is a really big violation of the Monroe doctrine, which pissed off America even more.

This is a substantial and significant step towards World War III

The obvious solution is to the US to concede to the Russian 2022 ultimatum “Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization” that was addressed to NATO.

America’s rejection of this ultimatum led to disastrous Ukraine war, and is now threatening to lead to a similarly disastrous Venezuelan war.

That makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, the new strategic document, as good as it is, appears to leave plenty of room for wars with Venezuela and Taiwan in it. I’ll address its more important elements in a post later today, and go over the whole document in tonight’s Darkstream.

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The Industrial Insanity of the Third Reich

For those few historical ignoramuses who still lionize the grand strategery of the German Chancellor during the leadup to WWII, this article by Big Serge will suffice to conclusively prove that he was every bit as irrational and incoherent as his eventual successor, Angela Merkel. And then some.

In many ways, the German surface fleet became something like the perfect black hole for resources. In the prewar years, it began a nominally ambitious building program which was still in its infancy when the war began. Naval planners were explicitly preparing for a mid-century war, with construction programs targeting fulfillment in 1948. Consequentially, the navy was entirely unprepared for war in 1939, and the surface fleet never threatened to fulfill any meaningful strategic function. Yet the scale of the building program was sufficient for the navy to siphon meaningful financial and industrial resources from the ground forces and the Luftwaffe. This was an impressively titrated level of wastage: naval expenditures were large enough to weaken the other arms of the Wehrmacht, but too late and too little to make the navy into a useful arm in its own right…

The picture that emerges is one of absolute strategic schizophrenia, and nearly total disconnect between the naval authorities and Hitler’s foreign policy and war aims.

The real kicker, however, was that in 1939 Hitler – reacting to Raeder’s complaints about shipyard delays – promoted the Z-plan to the highest industrial priority. This made an immediate and material impact on the readiness of the German ground forces for the war that was about to start. Steel rations to army production were cut dramatically, precisely as the ground force was expanding and preparing for action. In 1939, after Hitler pushed the navy to top priority, the German Army was forced to scale down production of the MG34 machine gun (cut by 80%), the 10.5cm field howitzer (by 45%), and the Panzer III and IV tanks (by 50%).

The abrupt priority shift towards naval construction occurred at the worst possible moment on the German strategic timeline. Shipbuilding, with its long timeframes and technological bottlenecks, could yield nothing in the short term – the lone exception being submarines, which could be built faster, but of course Raeder was not focused on U-boats at this time. Thus, despite accelerating the naval program, all the active ships at the start of the war had been laid down in 1935 or earlier. However, the naval program did succeed in cannibalizing the ground forces, siphoning off critical industrial resources. 1939 was the worst time for such a reordering of industrial priority, and it ensured that Germany began the war with hundreds fewer tanks and howitzers, and not a single extra ship to show for it.

In fact, the more that one looks at the Nazi program, the more totally insane its actions appear, and the more one begins to wonder if Hitler, like Zelensky, was merely an actor-puppet who was installed by whatever precursor to modern Clown World was active at the time in order to do what no sane and intelligent military leader would ever even think to do.

Then again, modern Germany’s actions appear no less insane, as it eschews inexpensive Russian oil even as its economy collapses despite the influx of third-world refugees who all the economists and scientists repeatedly vowed were good for it. It’s becoming increasingly obvious why France, Britain, and Germany are so desperate to keep Ukraine in the war it cannot win, as Ukraine is the only customer for the armaments industries that are presently keeping their sinking economies from going straight to the bottom.

No matter what the ideology is, the price of ignoring the rules of objective reality is always incoherency, followed by inevitable failure.

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Clown World is Buying Time

But for what, exactly? Or is this just the pointless floundering of those desperate to stave off the inevitable until the last possible moment, like an NFL coach calling timeout with less than a minute less when his team is down by 21 points?

It’s no surprise that Simplicius concludes what most of us also thought: the latest so-called “peace plan” is just more Trump administration pettifogging.

We can conclude that the initial read from the very beginning—that this entire ‘peace plan’ charade is nothing more than empty blather—was in fact correct. The Russian side views the various schemes as little else than extremely preliminary starting points for the serious discussions to take place long after.

Putin did again mention in his new presentation that Russia was open to stopping hostilities if Ukrainian forces left Donetsk and Lugansk; I’ve already described before the game-theoretic value of Putin’s gambit on this count, as Russia has virtually nothing to lose to offer this.

Apart from all this back and forth, the war continues as before—nothing has changed. In fact, my operative theory now is that the MSM makes a big deal of this empty spectacle for one purpose only: to use it as a smokescreen to cover the rapid advances and victories of the Russian Armed Forces. By clogging the news cycle with this vapid ‘settlement’ business that is clear to everyone will go no where, mainstream corporate press outlets get to bury the real lede of Russia’s mounting triumphs and the AFU’s consequent collapse.

At this point, the only directive from the corporate cabal that controls both the global MSM outlets and the fascist EU apparatus is: buy more time at all costs.

The absolute lack of concern for the lives of the Ukrainian soldiery on the part of the Kiev regime would be shocking, if the reason for it wasn’t so obvious. Never accept foreign rulers, because they really, truly, don’t give even a fragment of a damn about the people, much less the national interest.

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