Tag: war

1. Civilian leadership usually appoints the wrong commanders.
2. The main thing lacking in military leaders, from the highest level to the lowest, is a willingness to accept the risk of defeat. Nothing assures failure like indecisiveness.
3. Advances in communications technology increases the amount of civilian interference into war operations.
4. Civilian leadership seldom has a clear objective in mind.
5. Military commanders regard “the book” as an intrinsic excuse and therefore have a tendency to cling to it.
6. A historian’s take on a given war is strongly influenced by his nationalist sympathies.
7. The temptation to interfere with a strategic plan once it is put into action appears to be almost overwhelming.

My favorite quote from Max Hastings history of World War I thus far: Falkenhayn noted laconically on taking over command:  “Schlieffen’s notes are at an end and therewith also Moltke’s wits.”

It’s really remarkable to observe how overwhelmed, inept, and generally detached from reality the generals on both sides were. Between the commander of the British Expeditionary Force constantly attempting to retreat and the high commander of the German forces not bothering to even give orders to his generals for literally days at a time, it’s just astonishing.  And they were the relatively competent ones in comparison with the Austrian and Russian commanders.

It’s somewhat sobering to read the historical blunders in light of the lunatic decisions presently being made by the US and European military leaders.

At what point are the EU and USA going to realize that Putin doesn’t react well to token gestures:

As fighting between the army and Russian-backed rebels rages in eastern Ukraine, preparations are under way near its western border for a joint military exercise this month with more than 1,000 troops from the United States and its allies.

The decision to go ahead with the Rapid Trident exercise Sept. 16-26 is seen as a sign of the commitment of NATO states to support non-NATO member Ukraine while stopping well short of military intervention in the conflict.

The annual exercise, to take place in the Yavoriv training center near Ukraine’s border with Poland, was initially scheduled for July, but was put back because early planning was disrupted by the crisis in the eastern part of the country.

“At the moment, we are still planning for (the exercise) to go ahead,” U.S. Navy Captain Gregory Hicks, spokesman for the U.S. Army’s European Command said on Tuesday.

I suspect there will be a substantive Russian response to this which will likely involve taking more territory.

A group of retired intelligence officers are warning Angela Merkel and the other EU leaders not to trust current US intelligence regarding the reported Russian invasion of Ukraine:

Timing of the Russian “Invasion”

The conventional wisdom promoted by Kiev just a few weeks ago was that Ukrainian forces had the upper hand in fighting the anti-coup federalists in southeastern Ukraine, in what was largely portrayed as a mop-up operation. But that picture of the offensive originated almost solely from official government sources in Kiev. There were very few reports coming from the ground in southeastern Ukraine. There was one, however, quoting Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, that raised doubt about the reliability of the government’s portrayal.

According to the “press service of the President of Ukraine” on August 18, Poroshenko called for a “regrouping of Ukrainian military units involved in the operation of power in the East of the country. … Today we need to do the rearrangement of forces that will defend our territory and continued army offensives,” said Poroshenko, adding, “we need to consider a new military operation in the new circumstances.”

If the “new circumstances” meant successful advances by Ukrainian government forces, why would it be necessary to “regroup,” to “rearrange” the forces? At about this time, sources on the ground began to report a string of successful attacks by the anti-coup federalists against government forces. According to these sources, it was the government army that was starting to take heavy casualties and lose ground, largely because of ineptitude and poor leadership.

Ten days later, as they became encircled and/or retreated, a ready-made excuse for this was to be found in the “Russian invasion.” That is precisely when the fuzzy photos were released by NATO and reporters like the New York Times’ Michael Gordon were set loose to spread the word that “the Russians are coming.” (Michael Gordon was one of the most egregious propagandists promoting the war on Iraq.)

No Invasion – But Plenty Other Russian Support

The anti-coup federalists in southeastern Ukraine enjoy considerable local support, partly as a result of government artillery strikes on major population centers. And we believe that Russian support probably has been pouring across the border and includes, significantly, excellent battlefield intelligence. But it is far from clear that this support includes tanks and artillery at this point – mostly because the federalists have been better led and surprisingly successful in pinning down government forces.

At the same time, we have little doubt that, if and when the federalists need them, the Russian tanks will come.

This is precisely why the situation demands a concerted effort for a ceasefire, which you know Kiev has so far been delaying. What is to be done at this point? In our view, Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk need to be told flat-out that membership in NATO is not in the cards – and that NATO has no intention of waging a proxy war with Russia – and especially not in support of the ragtag army of Ukraine. Other members of NATO need to be told the same thing.

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

        William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
        David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
        Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
        Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.)
        Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)
        Coleen Rowley, Division Counsel & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
        Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)

Just remember, the Official Story is never, ever, true, especially with regards to military situations. The only thing you can be absolutely sure of is that whatever is being reported in the mainstream media is not what and how actually took place. It’s remarkable that people forget this, when almost every single book of military history openly describes how the various governments almost always mislead their people, or at the very least leave them in the dark at the time the important decisions are being made.

The EU is sounding increasingly panicked over Russia’s refusal to back down and accept the EU-backed coup in Ukraine as a fait accompli:

EU leaders warned Russia’s invasion of east Ukraine was at a “point of no return”, risking a “state of war” with Europe and instructed officials to prepare new sanctions to hit the Russian economy. A summmit in Brussels on Saturday gave the green light to toughened economic sanctions, targeting Russia’s finances, oligarchs linked to the Russian president and the country’s vast mineral wealth.

Dalia Grybauskaite, Lithuania’s president and a staunch critic of Mr Putin’s Russia, called on the EU to get serious as Russia’s war in the Ukraine menaced peace in Europe for the first time in decades.

“Russia is in a state of war against Ukraine and that is against a country which wants to be part of Europe. Russia is practically in a state of war against Europe,” she said.

Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, said that the EU was prepared for new sanctions against and pleaded with Mr Putin to step back from the brink of outright war between Russia and the Ukraine….

European leaders will tell Mr Putin that unless he withdraws troops and pulls
back from “direct military confrontation between Ukrainian and Russian
military forces” that the EU will move to introduce new economic sanctions
over the coming weeks. European Union leaders instructed their officials on Saturday to prepare
urgently possible new sanctions against Russia over its involvement in
Ukraine, according to a draft statement seen by Reuters.

Some more or less random thoughts on the situation.

1. The “moral high ground” argument puts no pressure on Putin at all. It might sell in the American press, but everyone in Europe knows that the EU is considerably less democratic, more corrupt, and less concerned about its own people than Putin is about his Russian people. The EU, aided by American neocons, intervened in Ukraine first, staging a coup and installing a puppet government. It’s a clear-cut case of “the EU cries out in pain as it strikes you”. Russia is reacting defensively, not acting aggressively.
2. Russia has usually defeated the various European powers in war, both individually and in combination, since the dawn of the Napoleonic era. With the exception of the Crimean War, which only managed to delay Russia’s Black Sea ambitions for 15 years, Russia has defeated Turkey, defeated France, fought Germany to a standstill (WWI) and defeated Germany (WW2). The Russians have absolutely no fear of the other European nations.
3. Vladimir Putin is very conscious of war being ultimately economic in light of the Soviet defeat in the Cold War. I expect he is extremely conscious of the weak state of the Western economies and what that signifies concerning the USA’s ability to support EU efforts against Russia.
4. The entire Western economic system is based on credit. The rich and “successful” are, for the most part, nothing but parasites permitted to greatly profit at the expense of the people of everyone else by siphoning off money from the great circulatory river of credit. It’s a monetary form of feudalism, only instead of land rights, credit rights are granted. The very public attempt to hit at the Russian oligarchs and their offshore finances is really an appeal to Putin to simply knock it off, play along, and collect his billions like all the other credit lords.
5. An appeal to personal corruption is always going to fail with a man of principle. I don’t know Putin at all, and I am aware of the circumstances that saw him rise to power, but it increasingly appears that he may be a ruthless man of principle who truly loves the Rodina and despises the very oligarchs and credit lords with whom he was previously allied. Some people learn from their experiences. Some people change their priorities. If Putin is just another corrupt oligarch, he would accept the EU/USA deal, leave the ethnic Russians in Ukraine to their fate, and live the rest of his life in fabulous wealth. Perhaps he is simply holding out for a better offer, but I tend to doubt it.
6. Putin is not much worried about the U.S. military. He knows it is going to be fully occupied with the expansionary challenges posed by the Islamic State and China. Obama and whoever succeeds Obama will make noises about supporting the EU, but supporting a crumbling EU’s expansionary efforts against a major military power is simply not in the cards. And if the USA tries to aid the EU, Russia can easily return the favor ten-fold by aiding ISIS.
7. If the EU doesn’t back down and accept the Russian claim to whatever territory it deems appropriate (which, based on Putin’s use of the term Novorossiya, appears to be fairly clear), Putin will shock the world by taking the entire Ukraine and doing so in a matter of 2-3 weeks. At this point, the “threat” of being expelled from the global credit system is more of a solution than a problem, especially for a material-rich nation.

It is a sign of how widely hated the EU and the global elite have become that so many Europeans and Americans are more or less on Russia’s side in this matter.

Roger Simon needs to stop worrying about other men’s pants and start looking at the consequences of the idiot interventionist and immigrationist policies he has advocated in the past:

In other words, it’s time for libertarians to put on their big boy pants and give some serious thought not just to national defense but to global defense, because I have some news for them: The Pax Americana was the real deal. It worked for decades, saving myriad lives, and now it’s almost gone.   We have seen that writ large for us in the last few years  as never before. Obama’s non-existent, feckless, reactionary, confused, absurd (or whatever other adjective you want to pick) “leading from behind” foreign policy has brought the world to the brink of madness as nothing since WWII.

These days the man carrying the libertarian mantle most prominently — Senator Rand Paul — is off curing  Guatemalans of eye disease. Laudable an enterprise as that is, I am less interested in what Paul can do for a few indigent Guatemalans as I am how he would respond to that other ophthalmologist/politician Bashir Assad. And not just Assad, of course, all of them.

It’s not enough to say we would respond as necessary.  We live in a peanut-sized globe.  What happens in Singapore redounds in San Diego and so forth. Paul has been a captivating candidate so far with some original ideas and approaches, but given the way the world is headed he is going to have to pull on his big boy pants and start articulating how he will deal with this escalating era of jihad.

And as for those libertarians who still prefer an isolationist approach, I can first remind them of Reagan’s advice about the necessity of a strong defense in order to have peace.  If they don’t believe that, then I can promise them they will meet head on the famous prophecy of that same Comrade Trotsky: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Simon doesn’t stop to think that the reason the USA is in such a parlous state is the direct result of a) American military interventions, and b) America’s quasi-open immigration policies. It’s always interesting to see naive commentators ignorant of basic military history babbling about war, because the Clausewitzian center of gravity is NOT in the Middle East, Syria, or even Iraq. It is in the West. The war in the East cannot be seriously fought until the war in the West is won; contra the insistence of the WWI-era generals, offense is not the way to win a war.

UPDATE: To say nothing of the fact that this is the same guy who wanted the USA to remove Assad from power last year, which would have assured that ISIS was even better established in the region than it is now.