Tag: war

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 .

DISCUSS ON SG

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?

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

Clown World is Agreement-Incapable

The 28-point peace plan announced last week is obviously dead on arrival. Clown World’s European puppets are already engaging in their characteristic surreal legalism as they explain how they’re going to put European troops from 20 countries into Odessa the day after the Russians sign the agreement, and that will be fine because they won’t be NATO troops even though all the countries contributing the troops are NATO members. This very clever approach was courtesy of President Macron of France.

The second component, the second line, is what we call the reinsurance forces. This means that, far from the front line, but in fallback sites, in Kiev, in Odessa, to give an example, things are planned, they have a confidentiality component, we set up reinsurance forces. Meaning that there are British, French, Turkish soldiers, who, on the day when peace is signed, i.e. not in a context of war, are there to carry out training and provide security, just as we do in certain countries on NATO’s eastern flank.

This will be a different case, because it’s not NATO, it’s an intergovernmental coalition, but we have around twenty countries that have already said what they are prepared to do actively, either in the air, on land, or at sea.

I didn’t think the peace plan was viable because it didn’t give the Russians the one thing they want that they don’t already control, which is Odessa. If you’re winning a war in the operational, strategic, and economic contexts, there is no reason to take any deal that doesn’t give you what you’re going to be able to take eventually.

And now that its clear that the Europeans will play word games about NATO in order to establish their speed bumps intended to trigger US military intervention, there is no point in signing Minsk 3.0 and guarantee the war continues in 2-3 years in a potentially less advantageous environment.

Although, to be honest, I don’t see any sign that the European militaries will be any stronger in the future than they are today; by then at least one of the major governments, or quite possibly both the French and German regimes, will have been replaced by a pro-Russian nationalist one.

DISCUSS ON SG

Go Back to Hell

A reporter asked me today, with some degree of incredulity in his voice, if I truly believed that there are factions of satanists in power throughout the West. Yes, I do, absolutely, I told him. And you’d have to be purposefully, stubbornly, and willfully ignorant of the supernatural to avoid noticing it.

No, we will never agree to anything of the sort. We’ll send you and all your fellow servants of Moloch back from whence you came instead.

Deus le vult.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Proposed Peace Plan

The USA and Russia are discussing the possibility of imposing a peace on Kiev and the European Union:

A US-proposed peace plan to resolve the Ukraine conflict, reportedly developed with Moscow, requires concessions from Kiev and would amount to it giving up its sovereignty, sources have told Axios and the Financial Times. Russia has neither confirmed nor denied the proposal.

The 28-point draft framework agreement was reportedly delivered to Kiev this week by US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, according to people familiar with the matter, cited by various outlets. The sources said Witkoff has made clear that he wanted Vladimir Zelensky, who is meeting a senior US military team on Thursday, to accept the terms.

According to the Axios and the FT, the proposed plan would require Ukraine to relinquish the parts of the new Russian regions in Donbass still occupied by Kiev, cut the size of its armed forces by half and abandon key categories of weaponry. A rollback of US military assistance is also included in the framework.

On the plus side, the perspective on the Donbass appears to be realistic and the bellicose little yappy dogs are being kept out of the discussion. On the downside, I don’t see any reference to Odessa, and I am skeptical that Russia will settle for any surrender that doesn’t provide the Russians with control of that port city. Considering how things are proceeding, I don’t think I would settle for any less if I were commanding the Russian forces, given that another year of military action will probably suffice to give them control of it.

DISCUSS ON SG