Tag: war

Tucker’s Putin Interview

I’m not at all interested in why Tucker Carlson is interviewing Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader is, after all, one of the most influential men on the planet and one of the few people whose opinion actually matters. I’m more interested in learning why Tucker is interviewing Putin NOW.

My guess is that after decades of demonization, and two years of relentless pro-Zelensky propaganda, Clown World has deemed it necessary to put a human face on the Russian leader in order to permit public acceptance of a negotiated surrender that the Ukrainian and NATO leaders are now desperately seeking prior to the next big Russian offensive that will reconfigure the situation on the ground.

Russia has claimed that its terms remain the same as they were at the start of the Special Military Operation, so it will be interesting to see how Putin portrays Russian aims in the interview.

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NATO’s Sicilian Expedition

Russian generals and military analysts increasingly betray open disdain for the incompetence of their Western counterparts. Even the ever-wary Putin, despite his habitual caution and openness to negotiation, radiates a distinct contempt for the enemies of Russia, perhaps in part due to his anticipation of them reliably choosing suboptimal courses.

And lest one think that the Russians are simply striking poses in order to put themselves in a better negotiating position, consider the insane new British plan to do just that as reported yesterday by RIA Novosti. Autotranslated from the Russian:

MOSCOW, Feb 2 — RIA Novosti. Great Britain invited NATO allies to consider sending an alliance expeditionary force to Ukraine, an informed source told RIA Novosti.

“In connection with the unfavorable development of events for Kiev at the Ukrainian theater of operations (TVD), Britain invited NATO allies to consider sending an alliance expeditionary force to Ukraine, as well as establishing a no-fly zone over the territory controlled by the Kiev authorities and increasing the supply of weapons and equipment VSU”, — said the agency interlocutor.

Nevertheless, the British side expects that with a significant weakening of the Armed Forces and the successful advancement of the Russian army deep into the territory of the former Soviet republic, the Allies will approve the initiative, the source noted. He specified that the kingdom offers to secretly transfer to Ukraine large highly maneuverable NATO forces from the border regions of Romania and Poland for the occupation of defensive lines on the right bank of the Dnieper.

In addition, the British plan involves the deployment in Norway and Finland of a contingent of the alliance and armies of individual members of the organization to “spray” the forces and means of the Russian troops, he said. “At the same time, attacks can be made on strategic infrastructure facilities in the northern regions of Russia,” — the source emphasized.

Then, according to him, the NATO military will create a buffer zone within the occupied positions, including the border with Belarus and the territory around Kiev, and the released reserves of the Armed Forces will be sent to the special operation zone. Thus, according to London, NATO will supposedly be able to undermine Russia’s offensive capabilities and Russia will have to negotiate, he said.

Britain intends to complete the preparation of such a scenario by May of this year, the source of the agency summarized.

London proposed to send NATO expeditionary force to Ukraine, RIA NOVOSTI, 2 February 2024

The last time Britain organized an expeditionary force against Russia, it did not go well. Very few in the West now recall the North Russian Intervention, which involved 32,000 British, French, and US troops being sent to Archangel for a year-and-a-half. But the Russians assuredly have not forgotten it. From Infogalactic:

The North Russia intervention, also known as the Northern Russian expedition, the Archangel campaign, and the Murman deployment, was part of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War after the October Revolution. The intervention brought about the involvement of foreign troops in the Russian Civil War on the side of the White movement. The movement was ultimately defeated, while the British-led Allied forces withdrew from Northern Russia after fighting a number of defensive actions against the Bolsheviks, such as the Battle of Bolshie Ozerki. The campaign lasted from March 1918, during the final months of World War I, to October 1919.

Presumably, the USA is behind this latest British brainstorm, just as it was behind the decision of the Kiev regime to fight a proxy war for NATO instead of surrendering in April 2022 at the behest of then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But perhaps the neoclowns should focus on winning their latest war in Yemen and defeating that formidable military power before setting up to lose on yet another front in Ukraine.

Although it would be historically fitting if NATO were to end with its own Sicilian Expedition.

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The Russian Art of War

A new book by a French colonel explains the difference between Western and Russian military thought, and how the superiority of the latter is why the former loses its wars:

Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviet Union saw itself as the spearhead of a historical struggle that would lead to a confrontation between the “capitalist” system and “progressive forces.” This perception of a permanent and inescapable war led the Soviets to study war in a quasi-scientific way, and to structure this thinking into an architecture of military thought that has no equal in the Western world.

The problem with the vast majority of our so-called military experts is their inability to understand the Russian approach to war. It is the result of an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks—the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war. The corollary of this approach is that our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into a narrative that feeds hatred and increases our vulnerability. We are thus unable to find rational, effective solutions to the problem.

The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. This explains why Vladimir Putin’s speeches invariably include a return to history. In the West, we tend to focus on X moment and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see today. The idea that “from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it” is totally foreign to the West. In September 2023, an English-speaking journalist even pulled out the “duck test” for me: “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” In other words, all the West needs to assess a situation is an image that fits their prejudices. Reality is much more subtle than the duck model….

The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars…

In Russia, unsurprisingly, the principles of the military art of the Soviet forces inspired those currently in use:

  • readiness to carry out assigned missions;
  • concentration of efforts on solving a specific mission;
  • surprise (unconventionality) of military action vis-à-vis the enemy;
  • finality determines a set of tasks and the level of resolution of each one;
  • totality of available means determines the way to resolve the mission and achieve the objective (correlation of forces);
  • coherence of leadership (unity of command);
  • economy of forces, resources, time and space;
  • support and restoration of combat capability;
  • freedom of maneuver.
  • It should be noted that these principles apply not only to the implementation of military action as such. They are also applicable as a system of thought to other non-operational activities.

An honest analysis of the conflict in Ukraine would have identified these various principles and drawn useful conclusions for Ukraine. But none of the self-proclaimed experts on TV were intellectually able to do so.

Thus, Westerners are systematically surprised by the Russians in the fields of technology (e.g., hypersonic weapons), doctrine (e.g., operative art) and economics (e.g., resilience to sanctions). In a way, the Russians are taking advantage of our prejudices to exploit the principle of surprise. We can see this in the Ukrainian conflict, where the Western narrative led Ukraine to totally underestimate Russian capabilities, which was a major factor in its defeat. That is why Russia did not really try to counter this narrative and let it play out—the belief that we are superior makes us vulnerable….

This is very, very similar to what Martyanov describes in the current Castalia Library book, Losing Military Supremacy. Which should come as no surprise, as both men are familiar with Russian military thought and how different it is than what Victor Davis Hanson once described as the Western way of war. The short term thinking of the Western military strategists can most easily be seen in their historical obsession with “the decisive battle” and strange focus on the idea that losing a battle or two, or even denying him a sufficiently impressive victory, will somehow weaken the enemy leader and magically cause him to be replaced by a more amenable successor.

Which is why the Russians are patiently winning a brutal attrition war in Ukraine while the US bleeds itself out everywhere from Afghanistan to Yemen.

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Immiliteracy and its Consequences

The US military is already losing serious face around the world without even losing a ship, much less an aircraft carrier, in the Middle East:

Lost amid all the other news breaking in the last 24 hours is one particularly disturbing story: the United States Navy lost a battle at sea yesterday. CENTCOM put out an anodyne press release yesterday stating that afternoon, “Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists fired three anti-ship ballistic missiles from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen toward the U.S.-flagged, owned, and operated container ship M/V Maersk Detroit, transiting the Gulf of Aden.

One missile impacted in the sea. The two other missiles were successfully engaged and shot down by the USS Gravely (DDG 107). There were no reported injuries or damage to the ship.” All well and good… but as it turned out there was a lot more to the story.

This engagement occurred while two American merchantmen – the Maersk Detroit and the Maersk Chesapeake – were attempting to run the Bab al-Mandeb from south to north while being covered by the USS Gravely. An AEGIS destroyer’s defensive umbrella should have turned this transit into a milk run – except it didn’t. CENTCOM admits that one of the Houthis’ tactical ballistic missiles – undemanding targets as far as such things go – got through the Gravely’s interceptors.

What they neglected to mention was that it struck about a hundred meters from the Maersk Detroit, and that after the attack the convoy aborted the transit and retreated back into the Arabian Sea rather than press on into enemy fire. Was retreat the correct decision at the moment? Probably, the Gravely was shepherding two lumbering merchantmen and facing unsuppressed shore batteries of unknown strength and capability in broad daylight, quite possibly without adequate air cover given the ambiguities of the Eisenhower’s exact station in the Red Sea and the limited combat radius of its air wing.

Was this operational plan inadequate? Almost certainly – reading between the lines, it reeks of a complacent assumption that Houthi missile batteries had actually been suppressed by a few rounds of air raids and that a single AEGIS destroyer could handle anything the Houthis could throw at them with no need for additional contingency planning.

In the event neither of these assumptions were correct – and because of it a convoy covered by one of the US Navy’s premier warships retreated from a battle that was going badly.

The United States Navy Essentially Lost A Battle At Sea This Week, ZEROHEDGE, 27 January 2024

Now, this decision to turn around and leave the danger zone was obviously an eminently intelligent decision by the captain commanding the convoy. At this point, the escorts aren’t there to actually protect the cargo ships, they were intended to dissuade the Yemenis from launching any attacks in the first place. Obviously, the attempt at intimidation failed, so the captain did the right thing and saved both his destroyer as well as the merchant ships that were attacked by abandoning the planned transit of the Gulf of Aden.

The problem is that the media has been relentlessly attacking the Russian generals who did precisely the same sort of thing at the beginning of the disastrous Ukrainian counteroffensive. In fact, one of the reasons the AFU counteroffensive was so disastrous was because the Russians wisely withdrew their troops from untenable positions and fell back to ground that could be better defended at a reduced cost. Which, it has

Being completely immiliterate – Is that even a word? If it isn’t, it should be – the media invariably describes every strategic retreat, tactical fall-back, or exit from an indefensible position as a defeat. So, there is no way to avoid the rhetorical consequences of the fact that a small group of desert fighters managed to drive off a US destroyer that might have even been protected by the air cover of a US carrier.

Bravely the US Navy sailed into the Red Sea
They were not afraid to sink, so brave the Navy!
They were not at all afraid to be sunk beneath the waves.
Brave, brave, brave, the Navy!

More, inevitably, to come.

And the public demonstration of weakness, too, has consequences.

It was reported, that the U.S. offered through the Swiss embassy to Iran, to strike one of their sites but Iran should not retaliate. This would allow the US to save face. Looks like it was REJECTED.

UPDATE: No wonder the captain of the Gravely decided to retreat. It was clearly the right decision.

CNN reports per 4 Defense Officials that yesterday’s interception of a Houthi ASCM by USS Gravely (DDG-107) was at a range of around 1 mile or 0.86 nautical miles and was shot down by the ships CIWS. This is the first specifically reported instance of a Houthi missile/drone interception by CIWS. This is the closest interception to date the others being within 5-10 miles away.

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Digging In Deeper

The USA appears to be preparing for a “retaliation” to the drone attack on the US base in Syria that will assure escalation in the Middle East:

The U.S. claims that an Iraqi resistance group, allegedly supported by Iran, is responsible for the strike. There are several such groups allied with Iran in Syria and Iraq. Which one of them did this? Does the U.S. know this at all?

Iran denies any involvement in the attack.

The attack is certainly an escalation over previous ones. President Biden has said that he will respond to it.

The question in then to where to respond (Syria, Iraq, Iran) and to what grade. Most likely the U.S. will escalate from its previous bombing of this or that Iraq resistance group. Should the U.S. attack any state related institutions or position, the situation will escalate further. The resistance camp would then try even harder to damage more U.S. assets. Since the U.S. assassination of General Quassam Suleimani its overall aim is to remove the U.S. from the Middle East.

The U.S. immediate response to the hit was the activation of long range tanker planes:

At least 6 U.S. Air Force KC-135 Aerial-Refueling Tankers, most from March Air Reserve Base in Southern California, are heading Northeast across the United States and preparing to Transit the Atlantic towards the U.K. and Europe. I wonder what kind of Aircraft they are Refueling?

Aerial-refueling tankers are used to keep fighter jets in the air for several hours. The reasons to keep jets in the air may not necessarily be to attack someone, but to prevent them from being destroyed by an attack on ones own airports.

The U.S. has plenty of bases in the Middle East which house a lot of expensive jets. If the U.S. suspects that those bases will come under attack it will need lots of air-tanker capability to save the jets currently stationed on them.

One could conclude from this that the U.S. will attack a target so important that it has to prepare for an all out response attack on its own Middle East bases. There are several other possibilities but this seems to be the most likely conclusion.

War On The Middle East, MOA, 29 January 2024

What will be will be. What is of more interest to me is the question of who is behind this gradual enmeshing of the US military in the Middle East. The most obvious answer is Israel and the US neocons, and the green flag on October 7th tends to support that idea, but they’ve been trying to get the USA to go to war with Iran for the last 20 years, so how is it that they have finally achieved some success in this regard after so many recent setbacks? Could they not have managed to kill three (3!) US soldiers at pretty much any point over the last two decades?

My assumption, and it is only that, an assumption, is that this is an aspect of the Sino-Russian geostrategy of implementing a death by a thousand cuts to gradually weaken and bleed out the imperial US military.

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You Know What They Are

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans don’t, and will not believe it until the fireworks start. Even then, they will struggle to believe that war has actually come to the United States, a war that isn’t going to be a civil war in any sense of the term:

1stResponderMedia posted a video on X showing an interview with a group of migrants who illegally crossed the border 12 miles east of Sasabe, Arizona, over the weekend. At least one of the migrants in the small group identified himself as an African migrant from Morocco.

A second male migrant traveling in the same group responded to a question about his country of origin with an ominous message.

“If you are smart enough, you will know who I am,” the migrant began. “But you are really not smart enough to know who I am. But soon you’re gonna know who I am.”

The migrant then walked away.

These young male migrants are neither refugees nor conventional immigrants. They are being brought into the United States to serve as a Praetorian Guard for the foreign elite that is terrified of the reaction of the US citizenry to the inevitable collapse of the empire that the people never even wanted in the first place.

We wondered what the reaction to the failure of the jump to China would be, and now we know.

The picture below doesn’t show any poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It’s a well-funded army of mercenaries that only lacks weapons and orders to take action. And it’s already present across most of the United States.

The growing resistance centered in Texas is a positive development, but it’s almost certainly too little, much too late, led by a leadership that is more instinctual than cognizant of the real state of affairs. And that’s assuming that it isn’t some sort of oppositional gatekeeping in the first place.

Hitler must be cursing in Hell now that he’s realized all he had to do to successfully execute Operation Sea Lion was to dress his Wehrmacht in civilian clothing, put them on rubber rafts, and tell the Royal Navy that they were huddled masses yearning to breath free.

As the great Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld finally concluded after examining the movement of peoples throughout history, immigration is war.

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Ukraine Fires Head of Armed Forces

ITEM: Rumors are making the rounds in Kiev that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will fire the head of his armed forces, General Valerii Zaluzhny.

ITEM: /pol/ reports that General Zaluzhny was fired by Zelensky.

Apparently there was just too much winning and Zelensky feared Zaluzhny’s popularity that resulted from all of the victories over Russia would allow the general to win the elections that he cancelled. Or something equally retarded.

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No Boots for the Ground

Simplicius explains why a US invasion of Iran is unlikely even in the event of an Iran-Israeli war:

Don’t even bother thinking about boots on the ground, if such a thing was possible it would take a year or more of preparation. Remember the Iraq invasion required 6 months just of transporting materiel and assets to the region, staging them, etc. But Iran wouldn’t let you stage them because it has far more sophisticated modern ballistic systems than anything Iraq had, which means large troop concentrations and armor/materiel staging areas could be hit and wiped out long before zero hour. Don’t believe me? Just watch the video at the beginning, the US army general says it himself toward the end: he states the accuracy of Iran’s ballistic missiles was shocking and they hit “pretty much everything they wanted to hit.”

So ground invasion is out—that’s not happening. The only thing they could possibly attempt is a long-spanning aerial campaign. But to even remotely scratch Iran’s capabilities would require a vast campaign lasting minimum 6-12 months and probably much longer. Remember, all of NATO mustered for 3 months against little Serbia with 6 million people and barely managed to destroy anything of worth. Iran has a 90 million population and a country probably a hundred times the size of Serbia, not to mention a far larger military. How long do you think it would take NATO to even put a dent in that from only an aerial campaign?

In short: it would take years, and during those years, Iran would shut down every major maritime and economic chokepoint in the region, crashing the global economy. If you thought a few ships being hit now was bad, wait til you see the nominal Iranian forces rather than Houthis hitting everything in sight—it won’t be pretty. And I’ve beaten the point before about how difficult it would be to even find targets in the decentralized vastness of Iran, just like in Yemen.

Furthermore, the US military can’t afford the necessary troop commitment for an invasion. The US Army doesn’t even have enough troops to confront Russia directly without withdrawing from most of its bases all over the world, assuming that the Russians permitted the delivery of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers to Europe in the first place.

Desert Storm required 950,000 soldiers, 3100 tanks, 2200 artillery, and 1800 aircraft back in 1991. The US Army currently has 452,689 on active duty, plus 180,958 Marines, and none of its NATO allies now have more than a handful of troops, most of whom have no equipment or ammunition anymore in the aftermath of NATO’s proxy defeat in Ukraine.

At this point, a real war with either Russia or Iran would not only lead to the loss of Taiwan, it might also lead to the loss of Texas. Which means that an ineffective “air war” is about the most that the USA can use to aid Israel, and even that might be too risky now that Russia has anti-air assets in the region securing Syrian airspace.

The neoclowns are agitating furiously for war in the Middle East, and later today I will post some extremely esoteric reasons why the Netanyahu administration might even deliver them one despite the USA’s limited ability to engage in one, but from a strictly military perspective, it is hard to imagine even the most deluded Clown World puppeteer deciding it is time to have the Fake Biden administration order a ground war anywhere outside of the current US borders. But as their time appears to be running out, we cannot dismiss the possibility of a desperate decision to roll the dice while they still have the influence required to do so. They did with the Ukraine counter-offensive that was always doomed from the start, and it’s not as if they are any less indifferent to American lives than to Ukrainian lives.

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Confident or Crazy?

There are reports that in the aftermath of the International Court of Justice telling him to stop the Gazacaust, the Israeli Prime Minister is not only going to reject their demands, but order the IDF to invade Lebanon:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared to start a full-blown war against the pro-Palestinian armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Lebanese broadcaster LBCI reported on Saturday. Hezbollah has been firing rockets and mortar shells at Israeli positions since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. The barrages have prompted retaliatory strikes from the Israeli army.

According to LBCI, an intelligence report on Israel’s plans has been provided to Hezbollah by an unnamed Arab country. The potential IDF campaign would be aimed at compelling the militants to abide by UN Security Resolution 1701, which was adopted after the end of the last Israel-Lebanon war in 2006, the TV channel said. The UN document facilitated the creation of a demilitarized zone along the Israeli-Lebanese border.

I understand the political pressures driving Netanyahu to try to find a military success somewhere as Israel comes under increasing international and economic pressure even as the internal political pressure on him reaches a boiling point. But this would be a pretty serious roll of the dice, and one that would indicate something akin to desperation on Netanyahu’s part.

The problem is that mainstream opinion in Israel is becoming literally genocidal as the fear there grows, which tends to confirm the very worst opinions of Israel’s enemies in the Arab world as well as in what were previously less hostile BRICS countries. While China has limited itself to simply telling the US it will not lift a finger to help prevent the Yemenis from preventing US, UK, and Israeli cargo ships from transiting the Red Sea, Russia is prepared to start shooting down Israeli warplanes attacking Syria, and presumably, Lebanon. And even in Clown World, people are openly rejecting the neoclown narrative about the moral sanctity of mass-murdering civilians with a side of ethnic cleansing.

When even the most loyal of Israelis, like the great historian Martin van Creveld, are troubled by the obvious falsity of the Israeli rhetoric, it’s probably not very effective on anyone else.

One thing, and by no means not the least important thing, war always produces a tsunami of kitsch. The kind that seeks to show how utterly wicked, utterly cruel and utterly depraved, the enemy is. The kind that claims to weep for, and commiserate with, the losses on one’s own side. The kind that contrasts our heroes’ indomitable courage and commitment to the sacred cause with the dastardly cowardice and treachery so characteristic of, so inherent in, the other side. The kind that, by its very nature, stokes the flames and undermines any kind of rational thought. If, indeed, it does not prohibit such thought altogether. Needless to say, Israel—my Israel—is not exempt. Some of the stuff that has been drowning us since the 7th of October is the product of genuine emotion. But much of it—especially that pronounced by, or commissioned by, politicians—is patently false. At times, so obvious is the fakery as to make one want to puke.

And if you’re losing an Israeli-born US Jew like Ilana Mercer, you’ve already lost pretty much everyone who hasn’t sold you their soul.

These days, Israel’s political discourse is marred by the likes of Eliyahu Yossian, a mainstream opinionator… “Hamas is not the enemy,” he vociferates, “Gaza is. You level the area, and you kill the largest possible numbers, because the woman there is an enemy, the baby there is an enemy and the first grader is an enemy …and the pregnant woman is the enemy.” Yossian goes on to explain that Israel must not entertain “Western values” because these “blur basic logic.”

And so the IDF has done. Should you want proof that this man’s views have gone mainstream in Israel; look at Gaza. It’s a moonscape…

It used to be that leaders like “Yoni” Netanyahu charged with their men into battle. Not anymore. Nowadays, celebrity, champagne-swilling generals give the order, after appearing on Fox News, to chubby men in front of AI consoles to bomb the anthills from above and afar. The broad and short of it is that, no reparations can fix an irreparable Gaza, although these are owed. The Israel of my formative years was no Eden before the Fall, but it was not a terrorist state. Jewish supremacism, like the American exceptionalism driving the United States’ foreign policy, breeds barbarism.

Jewish exceptionalism is every bit as stupid, evil, murderous, and false as the German exceptionalism that led to the horrors of the National Socialist imperialism and the American exceptionalism that led to the establishment of the imperial USA and subsequent downfall of the American nation. And, if the rumors about another invasion of Lebanon are true, I doubt it will end any better for the Israeli leaders than it did for their Nazi counterparts.

The leader postures.
Frightened people shout for war.
Will it never end?

UPDATE: It won’t end now, anyhow. It appears US soldiers are already dying in the Middle East again. Why are there US Army soldiers in Jordan?

Three US Army soldiers have been killed and many others wounded by an overnight drone attack in Jordan, President Joe Biden has announced. The strike on a US army outpost represents a significant escalation of simmering tensions in the Middle East.

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Battlegames

Spent the day wargaming with some professional types. Smart, very well-informed guys. Gave a brief presentation, listened to some longer, more detailed, and much more impressive ones. Reached three conclusions:

  1. Blitzkrieg is not a strategy, much less a doctrine.
  2. Hoping that the leader of the other side is a) the sole reason for the war, and, b) he will vanish as soon as the other side faces a setback is not a strategy. Not a viable one, anyhow.
  3. Wargame is a misnomer. Very, very few wargames actually involve the primary elements of war. They’re battlegames.

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