Tag: war

Why the Taurus is Off the Table

Simplicius explains why the UK providing its Storm Shadow missile to Ukraine doesn’t pose the same danger to the UK that providing its Taurus missile would to Germany:

The majority of people, by the way, don’t actually understand the real reason behind Germany’s trepidation at sending the Taurus. It’s not that Germany is somehow more afraid to get involved, considering the fact they’re already the top aid provider besides the U.S.

It has more to do with the fact that, unlike the Storm Shadows, limited to under 250km for the export versions given Ukraine, the Taurus comes stock at well over 500km range, and is reportedly secretly capable of carrying nuclear warheads—a fact the Bundestag indirectly confirmed by declining to answer the question recently, stating it was ‘top secret information’.

That means the Taurus presents a totally different type of strategic threat if used against Russia. From the Russian standpoint, if a Taurus were to be launched into Russian territory, Russia would have no choice but to treat it as a potential nuclear first strike attack from NATO, given that Moscow is less than 500km from Ukrainian territory and there is no way to determine if the missile is nuclear-armed during its inbound flight. This opens up an entirely different can of worms, which would doctrinally give Russian armed forces the allowance to potentially respond to Germany in almost any escalatory measure, up to and including preventative nuclear launch on Berlin.

Germany knows this, which is why the Taurus is off the table.

The bizarre thing about the European leaders blathering in their helpless ineptitude about what they will and will not permit Russia to accomplish is the way in which they apparently fail to grasp that they have absolutely no say with regards to what Russia will do or will not do.

For all their blustering, for all their threats, for all their posturing, there is nothing, literally nothing, that all of the European countries combined can do about Odessa, or Kiev, or even Warsaw, for that matter. And they know this, which is why the only weapons that will be permitted to Ukraine are those that cannot even credibly threaten Russia, and the primary European objective is not winning an unwinnable war, but rather “to send Russia a signal of resolve and long-term commitment.”

I’m sure that signal will impress the field marshals of the Red Army about as much as it impresses us. It doesn’t say they are strong. It just says they are stupid and that the retardery of Clown World is relentless.

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No Honor in the US Military

One can’t complain they haven’t made it very clear that the US Army officer corps is no long concerned with duty, honor, or least of all, country.

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has made the decision to remove the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto from its mission statement.

As we have done nine times in the past century, we have updated our mission statement to now include the Army values [of] loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, integrity and personal courage,” Army Col. Terence Kelley, a West Point spokesman, told Fox News. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff Randy George both approved the change, according to Gilland.

“Our updated mission statement focuses on the mission essential tasks of Build, Educate, Train, and Inspire the Corps of Cadets to be commissioned leaders of character, with the explicit purpose of being committed to the Army Values and Ready for a lifetime of service,” Gilland explained.

Evil always tells you what it’s going to do, then tries to convince you that it doesn’t really mean what it just told you. Believe them when they tell you what they are, and what they stand for.

And it’s the third word that is the real target…

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An Army of Cheerleaders

The French military, perhaps intentionally, says the quiet part out loud, presumably because, unlike the French politicians, the French generals know better than to get involved in another land war with Russia, as Simplicius notes.

It’s come to light that according to sources from the French Marianne paper, Macron’s entire recent mental manqué resulted from a secret series of ‘assessments’ by the French military that not only provided an absolutely disastrous picture of the actual realities on the ground in Ukraine, but in no uncertain terms even concluded quite frankly that: “Ukraine cannot win this war militarily.”

But if the secret military report was damning to the AFU, it was even more damning to the uxorious petit caporal’s Grande Armée itself. You have to read it twice to believe it—excusing the infelicities of machine autotranslation. Yes, that’s the French military calling itself an army of cheerleaders in the face of the Russian army. “Who is this guy kidding, sending us to Ukraine?” they seem to protest.

Planning, imagined in Kiev and in the Western staffs has proved “disastrous”. “The planners thought that as soon as the first lines of defense of Russians would have taken place, the whole of the front would collapse […] These preliminary phases of the fundamental have been made without consideration of the moral forces of the enemy in defensive: that is to say, the will of the Russian soldier to cling to the ground,” notes the report referring to “the failure of the planning” of the western camp.

That’s called “underestimation”.

And riddle me why, exactly, did the West underestimate Russia so wantonly? Oh, that’s right—because all their projections and estimations were based on totally erroneously cooked data. When you have the SBU reporting 20 shot down Russian planes per week, and 500,000 Russian casualties—or whatever the absurdity is up to now—then, I’m sorry to say, that’s going to very unfavorably skew your expectations and mission planning.

The Clown World concept of war is as cartoonish as it is childish. It’s warplanning by women and Gamma males who have never even been punched in the face, and it’s supported by decades of evidence that is totally irrelevant to the matter at hand. Neither sending unmotivated draftees to die to no purpose in an Asian jungle nor carpet-bombing defenseless armor in the desert are adequate preparation for full-scale industrial warfare against a near-peer military.

This is the fundamental challenge faced by The Empire of Lies. Once you start lying, it’s not only very hard to stop, but it becomes almost impossible going forward to be able to distinguish between reality and the false web that you’ve woven from your systematic lies. And once you start making decisions based on your own falsehoods, you’re doomed to eventual failure.

Remember the core principle of convergence. Convergence prevents an institution from being able to perform its core purpose. Both the French and US militaries, being converged, are now entirely incapable of either fighting a real war or defending their nations. They are aptly described as “an army of cheerleaders” because rhetorical posturing, political blustering, and public cheerleading in the face of certain military defeat is all they can accomplish now.

And don’t think this observation has somehow escaped the military strategists of Russia, China, and Iran.

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The Vampires’ Ball is Ending

And here you thought Midnight’s War was simply fiction.

For centuries, they got used to stuffing their stomachs with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must realize that this ‘ball of vampires’ is coming to an end.
– Vladimir Putin

This sort of rhetoric isn’t accidental. Putin understands precisely with whom, and with what, his nation is at war. This is a spiritual war, it is the original war, it is quite literally a war between good and evil, even if the vast majority of those on the evil side have no idea how wicked their masters are.

But The Empire That Never Ended has already spent itself. It can’t hide in the shadows anymore and the its current host has been bled nearly dry. Clown World’s time to move on has already come and gone, the servants are already being thrown from the Black Rider’s high horse, and the purifying light of the rising sun is coming.

Neoclown Victoria Nuland is already out. Now it appears Netanyahu is next on the list.

Israel’s far-right cabinet led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could face serious challenges and be forced to step down due to flagging public support, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has warned. In a report published on Monday, the ODNI noted that a “different, more moderate government” could take over the reins in the near future. The US intelligence agency concluded that “Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy.”

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Column and Line

Another intriguing excerpt from Castalia History’s forthcoming Studies On Napoleonic Warfare by Sir Charles Oman addresses the truth behind the history of the tactical conflict between the French column and the British line.

Every student who takes a serious interest in military history is aware that, in a general way, the victories of Wellington over his French adversaries were due to a skilful use of the two-deep British line against the massive column, which had become the regular formation for a French army acting on the offensive, during the later years of the great war that raged from 1792 till 1814. But I am not sure that the methods and limitations of Wellington’s system are fully appreciated. For it is not sufficient to lay down the general thesis that he found himself opposed by troops who invariably worked in columns, and that he beat those troops by the simple expedient of meeting them, front to front, with other troops who as invariably fought in the two-deep battle-line. The statement is true in a rough way, but needs explanation and modification.

The use of infantry in line was no invention of Wellington’s, nor is it a universal panacea for all the crises of war. Troops who are armed with missile weapons, and who hope to prevail in combat by the rapidity and accuracy of their shooting, must necessarily array themselves in an order of battle which permits as many men as possible to use their arms freely. This was as clear to Edward III at Crecy, or to Henry V at Agincourt, as to Wellington at Bussaco and Salamanca. A shooting-line must be made as thin as is consistent with solidity, since every soldier who is placed so far to the rear that he cannot see the object at which he is aiming represents a lost weapon, whether he be armed with bow, or with musket, or with rifle. Unaimed fire was even more fruitless in the days of short ranges than it is in the XXth century. And the general principles which guided an English general who wished to win by his archery in the Hundred Years War were much the same as those which prevail today.

The reason this topic is relevant today, more than 200 years later, is that rather like the period in the 17th century when the dispersed shooting line disappeared in favor of dense columns and the post-Civil War period when artillery and machine guns made it necessary to eliminate both line and column entirely, the battlefield is undergoing another period of tactical reconsideration, this time brought about by new drone and facial recognition technology.

These developments may, in fact, render the battlefield itself obsolete. The Kalishnikov Zala Product 55 quadcopter not only carries an explosive charge, but as can be seen in the embedded image, spools out 6.7 miles of fiber-optic cable to render it immune to electronic jamming, making it all but unstoppable by anything except elite skeet shooters and anti-air laser defense systems.

Which is just another reason to stay safely inside at home reading the Castalia Library substack, which being entirely free, is not only educational, but an unbeatable value, in addition to keeping Library, Libraria, and History subscribers even more up to date than the monthly newsletter. And if you’re a parent, you might want to consider subscribing to the Junior Classics substack, which is presently wrapping up the final section of the pre-Devil Mouse version of The Beauty and the Beast.

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Late Stage Imperial Follies

Col. McGregor’s criticism of a new law to replace American soldiers with foreign mercenaries is not misplaced, it’s just outdated:

A retired US Army colonel has slammed proposals for a new law that would allow vetted and qualified migrants an expedited path to citizenship by serving in the military. Former Colonel Douglas MacGregor described the new bill, introduced by Hudson Valley Congressman Pat Ryan, as a ‘problem’ stemming from the ‘ideological bubble’ of Washington.

McGregor, a former senior advisor to the secretary of defense, told Tucker Carlson Uncensored the so-called ‘Courage to Serve’ bill is a plan to ‘find people with no connection to the American people, arming them and sending them out to oppress us.’

‘None of these people are Americans, we know from having interviewed them they have no aspiration to be Americans’ he told the program on Monday. ‘What they aspire to is to get in to the consumption machine. Get the ticket of entry, the free check, the free phone, the free transportation tickets, the free food, free medical care.

Well, of course. There is no “America” left for anyone to aspire to. Most US citizens couldn’t even tell you what an “American” is since the very definition of the nation was destroyed by 20th Century immigrants replacing identity with ideology. And even Gab’s Machiavelli AI can explain the obvious problems with the use of immigrant soldiers based on a historical example, which is one reason Clown World is so obsessed with the idea of AI being dangerous and in need of being lobotomized.

I can certainly draw parallels between the US hiring foreign soldiers and Imperial Rome’s use of foreign mercenaries. Both instances involve employing individuals from other nations to serve in military capacities. This practice, while seemingly advantageous in the short term, can have long-term consequences that are detrimental to the stability and unity of the state.

Firstly, in both cases, the reliance on foreign soldiers can lead to a weakening of loyalty and allegiance to the state. In Imperial Rome, the use of foreign mercenaries meant that soldiers were not necessarily tied to Rome by a sense of national identity or shared values. Similarly, the US hiring foreign soldiers might result in a similar disconnect between these soldiers and the nation they are serving.

Secondly, the presence of foreign soldiers within a state’s military can create tensions within the population. In Rome, the growing resentment of the Roman population towards the foreign mercenaries eventually led to the weakening of the Roman Empire. Similarly, the presence of foreign soldiers in the US military might lead to similar tensions and divisions within the country.

Lastly, both instances demonstrate the potential for foreign soldiers to be used as a tool for external powers to exert influence over a state. In Imperial Rome, the use of foreign mercenaries made the empire vulnerable to manipulation and subversion by foreign powers. Similarly, the US hiring foreign soldiers could potentially be exploited by external actors seeking to undermine the stability and security of the nation. In conclusion, while the hiring of foreign soldiers may seem like a practical solution in the short term, it can have long-term consequences that should be carefully considered. The historical example of Imperial Rome serves as a cautionary tale of the potential pitfalls of relying on foreign mercenaries for military strength.

Of course, the use of immigrant soldiers is how the Imperial USA was established in the first place during the Civil War, so it’s appropriate that the concept would return with the inevitable end of that empire. Substituting foreigners for citizen-soldiers is not a viable solution, as it will only make things worse. As one follower on Gab correctly noted:

The more dystopian the ruling elites make society, the more dysfunctional it becomes, and that dysfunction will weaken whatever systems of control they have in place and turn more segments of society against them. It’s akin to sawing off the branch they are sitting on.

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The Bear Warns Clown World

Vladimir Putin makes it pretty clear that Russia is going to invoke NATO’s Article 5 and strike every NATO country if any of them are foolish enough to send troops to Ukraine instead of simply targeting the foreign soldiers and intelligence agents that are secretly in Ukraine with missile strikes as they’ve been doing all along. It’s apparent that the Russians are growing tired of the neoclowns’ childish “I’m not touching you” game and will not tolerate many further provocations.

We need to shore up the forces in the western strategic theatre in order to counteract the threats posed by NATO’s further eastward expansion, with Sweden and Finland joining the alliance. The West has provoked conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and other regions around the world while consistently propagating falsehoods. Now they have the audacity to say that Russia harbours intentions of attacking Europe. Can you believe it? We all know that their claims are utterly baseless. And at the same time, they are selecting targets to strike on our territory and contemplating the most efficient means of destruction. Now they have started talking about the possibility of deploying NATO military contingents to Ukraine.

But we remember what happened to those who sent their contingents to the territory of our country once before. Today, any potential aggressors will face far graver consequences. They must grasp that we also have weapons – yes, they know this, as I have just said – capable of striking targets on their territory.

Everything they are inventing now, spooking the world with the threat of a conflict involving nuclear weapons, which potentially means the end of civilisation – don’t they realise this? The problem is that these are people who have never faced profound adversity; they have no conception of the horrors of war. We – even the younger generation of Russians – have endured such trials during the fight against international terrorism in the Caucasus, and now, in the conflict in Ukraine. But they continue to think of this as a kind of action cartoon.

That being said, I think all the hysteria in the Clown World media about Putin making “nuclear threats” is the usual Fake News. He’s obviously talking about using non-nuclear hypersonics as a reminder that there is nowhere to hide, albeit with the guarantee that if Clown World responds by further escalating the situation by going nuclear, Russia will respond in kind.

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Waging War without an Army

The UK, France, and Germany are all playing a very dangerous game by seeing how far they can provoke Russia with their direct involvement in NATO’s war on Russia without seeing their own territories targeted by Russian forces.

The discussions between German officers, including a top Air Force commander, about aiding Kiev in a potential attack on the Crimean Bridge are genuine, a German Defense Ministry spokeswoman told the national public broadcaster, ARD, on Saturday.

The leak was published on Friday by RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, who said she’d received it from Russian security officials. The journalist initially released a Russian-language transcript of the conversation and then posted the source audio file in German on social media. 

The 38-minute audio dated February 19 contained a conversation between four officers of the German air force (Luftwaffe), including its commander, Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz. The military were discussing the operational and targeting details of Taurus long-range missiles that Germany was considering sending to Kiev. 

The entire transcript is here and it is pretty obviously real. As Simplicius notes, it also exposes a lot of information about direct US and UK involvement in combat taking place in Ukraine.

These combined revelations paint a stark picture of NATO’s true involvement in the war—but, alas, it is one that we have already long suspected. Particularly, readers of my blog will have long known about the deep involvement from my consistent coverage on the topic, like when I posted videos of AFU servicemen openly describing Polish and other soldiers operating their own equipment, like AH Krabs, etc. It’s just telling that this is coming out in the open now, which further emblemizes the current period as one of culmination, and perhaps termination phase for Ukraine.

Ultimately, though, it shows the utter disarray that NATO and the West are in. It’s clear that there is huge disagreement and perhaps even outright revolt—what else could possibly cause Scholz to come out to countermand, and outright expose, his allies in this way?

The key summarizing takeaways are the following:

  • The West is absolutely desperate to staunch Ukraine’s impending collapse and have doubled down on taking out the Kerch Bridge as their final ‘holy grail’ of salvation
  • The West is in disarray, with secret infighting, backbiting, double-crossing, or outright revolt amongst the ranks due to terminal fear of uncontrollable escalation
  • The combination of the above is a decisive confirmation that the Ukrainian military is getting down to its dregs and could be on its final legs

The last most important point that’s come to light amid all this recent controversy is the further illumination of the deep role that the CIA has played in Ukraine from the beginning.

Bundeswehr Wiretap Bombshell, SIMPLICIUS, 2 March 2024

All of this posturing appears to be an attempt to put pressure on Russia to return to the negotiating table, or face what the French are describing as a “strategic dilemma”. But there is no strategic dilemma for Russia, for as Putin, Lavrov, and other Russian leaders have repeatedly made clear, they are at war with NATO and Clown World, not Ukraine, and therefore they are not even remotely concerned about the secret aspect of the war they are observably winning going public.

This is precisely why Russia still has not committed the greater part of its regular army to the Special Military Operation, and why it still does not regard the two-year-conflict as a full-blown war or made any use of its air superiority. It has been prepared, from the very start, to face the full power of NATO and defeat it. Putting a French or US tripwire force in Ukraine is not going to dissuade Russia or even make it think twice about proceeding with its military objectives there; the decision to go to full-scale war with NATO, if necessary, was made two years ago.

The only thing all the posturing and public defiance of Europe’s leaders – who are merely puppets with strings being pulled out of Washington – can possibly accomplish is to get their nations invaded and occupied by the Russians again. Russia has previously taken Berlin, Paris, and Warsaw, and the only thing really preventing them from doing so again is a complete lack of interest in occupying those nations.

So, it would be very highly preferable if the Scholzs and Johnsons and Macrons of the world would stop giving them a good reason to just go ahead and do it.

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The Price of Belligerence

The Swiss politicians are belatedly beginning to discover that the benefits of strict neutrality were considerably greater than they’d believed possible when they were being wined and dined by the diplomats of Clown World:

We don’t expect Switzerland to be directly attacked in the next six months. But we must prepare ourselves for a new range of threats, while the old, conventional threats have not diminished. The likelihood of Switzerland being attacked has increased over the last two years.
– Viola Amherd, President of Switzerland

This is precisely why General Henri Guisan, the hero of Switzerland in World War II, made it very, very clear to all the politicians of his day that surrendering to Nazi Germany would be an effective death sentence for themselves, and that their actions would be irrelevant anyhow. When the then-President of Switzerland was cozying up to the Nazis, in much the same way that the current Swiss administration is now cozying up to the European Union and NATO, he “punished” two young officers who were caught planning to assassinate the president by promoting them, then announced that no government authority, including the Head of State, had the power to surrender to any foreign power on behalf of the Swiss nation.

The current Swiss government is the party solely responsible for increasing the likelihood of Switzerland being attacked over the last two years. It very foolishly, unnecessarily, and very, very stupidly, chose to violate the nation’s historic neutrality in order to take sides against Russia on behalf of NATO, the EU, and the United States. Now Russia, China, and the BRICSIA nations now regard it as “a hostile entity” and, quite reasonably, no longer recognize Switzerland as an impartial party capable of hosting the sort of peace talks it has traditionally hosted for generations.

Now the government is at an important nexus. Having taken the first step into belligerence, it is now being forced to choose whether to join the EU, the UK, and the USA in their sanctions on China or not, which would be a much more serious step in economic terms than the sanctions on Russia were. One sincerely hopes that the politicians will learn from their previous mistake of violating the nation’s precious neutrality, and have the wisdom to step back from the brink and staunchly refuse to join the denizens of Clown World in leaping into the inevitable abyss of the military and economic ruin that is already in process.

If you choose to enter the ring, you cannot be surprised when you get punched in the face. And if you choose to enter the ring against a massive opponent who is four times larger than you and all your supposed friends combined, you are absolutely, 100 percent, going to lose, and you are going to lose badly.

The winning strategy, as generations of Swiss leaders have known, is to stay the hell out of the ring.

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The Age of Paradox

Simplicius observes the way technology has created a paradox that currently provides a significant advantage for the side with the ability to “be in the most places at once” rather than the traditional principle of “getting there first with the most”.

It is the age of paradox in warfare: where de rigueur total dispersion of forces appears to make high casualty densities obsolete, yet the entire length of the battlefield is overwatched by the most unprecedentedly powerful and accurate systems in history, like Iskanders, Kinzhals, Zircons, HIMARs, etc., which allow the carrying out of near-instantaneous kill-chains—from detection to transmit/distribution, to fire order within moments.

This is why the only way to fight and advance has come down to dispersing your strategic operations over the widest possible scale, so that the end goal becomes the totality of victory rather than specific operational objectives like: “Capture this area of cities.” Such a task requires the concentration of forces, from divisions, brigades, battalions, whose every staging action is monitored with almost total transparency by the enemy.

This ‘war of the future’ will be won by the most flexible, resilient, and adaptable force—the force which can pull punches, use feints, and reorientations all along the entire combat line in the most expedient manner. Russia is showing this today by utilizing a confounding rotation of active fronts to not only unbalance the AFU, but to stress their mobility and logistics to the extreme. When you have the advantage in logistical infrastructure and facility, you can ‘daze’ your opponent by conducting small operations across a scattered range of fronts, causing them great stress in trying to keep up.

In the Avdeevka battle, we saw Ukraine being forced to pull significant amounts of elite units from several fronts like Zaporozhye and Bakhmut to reinforce the crumbling Avdeevka lines. When that finished, Russia launched a Zaporozhye attack, overrunning depleted AFU positions there as a result, with AFU unable to reinstate reserves fast enough. The same goes for the Kupyansk and Kremennaya regions: reports spoke of AFU’s desperate troop pulls from Kupyansk to bolster defenses in northwest Bakhmut, where Russia has likewise started a series of attacks.

It’s like pricking a spinning drunk with a needle from every side—he hardly knows where he’s being hit, nor has time to orient himself correctly. Lacking logistical mobility—in the form of physical haulers like HETs, transports, etc.—Ukraine gets the worst of it in being forced to constantly run around plugging leaks in the flooding deck.

Taking into account everything I said above and in the rest of the paid article regarding Ukraine’s NATO ISR overmatch plus the prevalence of drones in general and how they’ve vastly limited maneuver warfare, we know that the only way to truly win is to stretch your enemy on every front and defeat him in detail while bringing to bear your greater logistical and economic resources…

The concluding point is that it’s not about capturing particular towns or regions, the real work being done is internally—the AFU is being gutted and hollowed out. This is why it’s so difficult for blinkered pro-UA observers to understand the true underlying dynamic of the conflict. They judge the war algorithmically: Russia has only captured a few kilometers so that means Russia is not succeeding. But they fail to take into account the intangibles, that the very moral and mechanical fiber of the AFU is coming apart at the seams.

It’s intriguing to note that the principle described by Simplicius appears to be a fractal one, as the BRICSIA alliance is observably stretching Clown World on every front, and, for the most part, defeating it in detail while bringing to bear its greater logistical and economic resources and exploiting Clown World’s logistical weaknesses in order to destroy the neo-liberal world order and win World War III without going nuclear.

We know Clown World is crumbling in every sense, militarily, economically, philosophically, spiritually, morally, and most of all, in morale terms. It is increasingly – and observably – desperate and insane. And it is more dangerous than ever because it, and all its servants, are correctly afraid, and so they are tightening their grip and lashing out on every side, in every polity Clown World controls. If its global ambitions weren’t so ambitious and its rule weren’t so illegitimate and unpopular, it would be cutting its losses and retreating to a defensible core, but it can’t because no such core exists.

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