The US military is showing definite signs of imperial overstretch. Its proxies are overwhelmed in Ukraine, the IDF appears to be bogged down in Gaza, the Navy can’t keep the Red Sea clear for cargo transports, and Iran’s proxies have hit US military bases 118 times without much in the way of resistance.
Since Hamas’s brutal attack against Israel on Oct. 7 and the resulting Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip, tensions and hostilities across the Middle East have reached fever pitch. And with such a complex regional crisis playing out, it should not come as a surprise that the Biden administration is reconsidering its military priorities in the region.
It should be cause for significant concern, however, that this could involve a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. While no definitive decision has been made to leave, four sources within the Defense and State departments said the White House is no longer invested in sustaining a mission that it perceives as unnecessary. Active internal discussions are now underway to determine how and when a withdrawal may take place.
The US should withdraw from Syria. It should withdraw from the entire Middle East, and Europe too. But it’s one thing to be vaguely aware that one might have limitations, it’s another thing entirely to be smart enough to actually respect them and reduce one’s imperial ambitions.
Simplicius offers a succinct explanation: My take is this: in short, the US is being run out of town by Iran. Their bluff was called and US knows their puny strikes can do nothing to truly degrade Iran’s highly decentralized hybrid warfare systems and groups. Iran has risen to become a hegemon verging on a Great Power of the region. The US has a few obsolete fleets which cannot keep up blow for blow with Iran in exchanged rounds of ammo. Iran can saturate them forever with drones and cheap rockets which the US is spending millions per every fired shot to intercept.
He’s not wrong. The problem is that there are two powerful forces resisting the acknowledgement of the inevitable: American exceptionalism and the will of the foreign ruling elite. It will probably be necessary for the former to be shattered before it is possible for the latter to be successfully resisted.
This may explain why the IDF has withdrawn a number of brigades from Gaza even as its anti-Iranian rhetoric has recently heated up. It should be obvious to the Israeli strategists that time is not on their side, and that no matter what the actual odds might be, their best chance for defeating Iran is right now, while the US military is still present in the region.
The point of no return has been reached for the Imperial USA. And the choice is between WWIII and probable defeat or a face-saving acceptance of imperial decline which will fool absolutely no one.
Today, current Army chief General Sir Patrick Sanders raised the spectre of conscription once again, when he called on the Government to ‘mobilise the nation’ in the event of a wider conflict against Russia amid its war with Ukraine.
I wonder if all those Swedes who were gung ho about Sweden joining NATO realize that their forced military service is a direct consequence of their foolish decision to join the military wing of Clown World. I also wonder how they’re going to square the logical circle about forcing young men to fight in defense of individual freedom and democracy.
Regardless, it appears the young men of the West are going to face a choice. Fight the clowns ruling your country or fight the combined military forces of China and Russia. Based on recent events in Ukraine, the former would appear to be a much better bet.
Because I doubt the generals in Moscow are quaking over the prospect of sending their battle-hardened veterans into a war against a collection of scared and unwilling European soyboys who weren’t even capable of resisting the vaxx.
Belgium will transfer €611 million (58.3 billion rubles) to Ukraine from income received from interest on frozen Russian assets. The information was confirmed by the head of the Belgian Ministry of Defense, Ludivine Dedonder (pictured), Belga News Agency reports. The total amount of frozen Russian assets in the EU is about €180 billion (17 trillion rubles), most of them are located in Belgium, the agency clarified.
No doubt the EU will try to hide behind the fact that they aren’t seizing the frozen capital, only the interest on the capital. This will not fool the Russians, and it’s safe to anticipate some sort of tit-for-tat will soon take place, if not escalation.
The Russians have to find this childish tomfoolery more than a little tedious by now.
The son of a brigadier general of the French army was killed by a strike by the Russian Armed Forces at a point of temporary deployment of foreign mercenaries in Kharkov. His partner (also killed) came from a hereditary military dynasty in France.
According to Mash, the name of the Frenchman eliminated by a high-precision strike is Sabastien Claude Remy Benard. He served in the RICM (formerly the Moroccan Colonial Infantry Regiment) in the Marine Light Armor unit. For reference: it was these groups that equipped the famous AMX-10RC wheeled tanks, which Paris proudly sent to Kiev as military aid. During the process, this scrap metal was deemed unsuitable for mechanized combat.
Benard first arrived in Ukraine in 2022, but did not receive the desired position in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and returned to his homeland. A year later he tried his luck again and joined the 5th Assault Brigade. On July 3, in the Bakhmut area, he participated in the medical evacuation of his wounded fellow countryman Maxim Leconte (a rifleman from the International Legion of Terrestrial Defense), who publicly admitted that the much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive turned out to be a bloody failure. On January 16, he was killed by a Russian missile strike.
His partner is Alexis Drion. He is the son of Frédéric Drion, who became a brigadier general in the French army in 2001. Alex joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces no later than last year. He served in the 2nd Battalion of the International Legion. Also was killed on January 16th.
The remaining 60 killed and about 20 wounded mercenaries are recognized activists of Nazi groups in France and other EU countries. Each of them served in the army and even belonged to a battalion of alpine hunters. Many were fired for inappropriate behavior, after which they left for Ukraine. In total, more than a hundred mercenaries from France died during the fighting in the SVO zone. – FRWL reports
The Kharkov strike is far from the only one of its kind. Many of the fatal “accidents” that have been reported occurring to US troops around the world are actually combat fatalities taking place in combat zones where US and other NATO troops are not supposed to be; you may recall the US Army Rangers who were killed in another Russian missile strike on a restaurant they frequented a few months ago. This sort of thing isn’t new, as we know, from the early days of the World Wide Web when the US military didn’t bother to block open access to its sites, that many soldiers had confirmed kills in places that US troops were not supposed to be.
The active engagement by NATO troops disguised as “mercenaries” is one reason is why I’ve been describing the situation in Ukraine as a NATO-Russian war rather than a Ukro-Russian one for more than the last year. While Ukraine has suffered the bulk of the casualties, the number of US, French, German, and other military casualties will probably shock the various publics when it is finally revealed to them.
While it’s not my intention to link the daily Sigma Game post here on a regular basis, I suspect this particular SSH application will be of some interest here even to those readers who usually prefer to ignore discussions of the socio-sexual hierarchy.
Please note that I am absolutely, 100-percent, not saying that modern geopolitical analysis is not insane, retarded, and reliably wrong, only that a sound grasp of the SSH will prove beneficial to anyone who is forced to pay attention to or otherwise utilize those analyses.
The US is preparing for a “sustained” bombing campaign in Yemen after ten days of airstrikes failed to undermine the ability of Houthi fighters to target ships in the Red Sea, the Washington Post has reported, citing unnamed officials.
The administration of President Joe Biden does not expect a protracted operation such as the US campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan, but at the same time it cannot provide a timeframe for when Houthi military capabilities will be adequately diminished, the newspaper reported on Saturday.
Washington’s strategy is to curb the ability of the Shiite militant group to target ships off the coast of Yemen, or at least create safe conditions for shipping companies to resume sending vessels through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, sources added.
That will show them! There’s nothing like shooting several years’ production of ballistic missiles on some empty tents and camels to let people know you mean business. I mean, if I owned a US-flagged cargo ship, that would make me feel good about my chances of transiting the Red Sea, right?
Surely the Yemenis will surrender once they see their industrial intrastructure bombed back to the Stone Age. And by “industrial infrastructure” I mean rocks and sand.
The long-predicted end of Air Power has already arrived. But the battlefield reign of the drone, first evidenced in the brief Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020, then subsequently confirmed by the NATO-Russian war in the Ukraine, looks to be a very short one.
An industry team has for the first time destroyed an aerial target using a high-power shot with its DragonFire laser, the British Defence Ministry announced Friday. The trial with the direct-energy weapon is considered a significant milestone toward the deployment of the system, possibly within five years. Efforts to quickly field such weapons are partly driven by conflicts in Ukraine and near the Red Sea, where expensive air defense missiles are used against cheap but effective drones. The cost of operating the laser is typically less than £10 (U.S. $13) per shot, the ministry noted.
So, the question of who is going to dominate the future battlefield can be reduced to the question of who can make more vehicle-mounted laser platforms, more cheaply, than anyone else. The technology isn’t especially difficult, which means it will be a matter of industrial capacity and efficiency.
So this is clearly not a development that favors the military wing of the neo-globalist order.
On the plus side, this brings us one step closer to laser-equipped cyber otters for the home.
Apparently two proxy defeats for NATO at the hands of Russia, in Georgia and in Ukraine, haven’t been enough, as leaked plans published in Bild indicate that the neoclowns won’t be content until NATO is directly defeated in Europe.
As the West continues to wage a hybrid proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, supplying the Kiev regime with modern weapons systems, it has been hyping up allegations of a broader “Russian threat” for all of Western Europe and NATO – claims that have been dismissed as false and ridiculed by the Kremlin. “Germany is gearing up for “war between NATO’s forces and Russia,” which could begin in the summer of 2025, Bild has written, citing a “secret” Bundeswehr document.
According to the alleged “training scenario” of the German Ministry of Defense, “on ‘Day X,’ NATO’s commander-in-chief will give the order to move 300,000 troops to the eastern flank, including 30,000 Bundeswehr soldiers,” the tabloid states. The escalation could reportedly begin as early as February 2024 with the start of Russia’s active offensive against the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. By June of the same year, according to Bild, Russia will have forced Kiev’s military to retreat.
Without offering any specific details, the publication noted that the most likely location for a “clash” will purportedly be the so-called “Suwalki Gap” or “Suwalki Corridor” (Przesmyk suwalski). This is a section about 100 km long near the city of Suwalki in the northeast of Poland, located between Belarus and Russia’s Kaliningrad region.
In July, according to the “secret document,” Russia might allegedly launch “cyber attacks and other forms of hybrid warfare” against the Baltic countries. Furthermore, “clashes” would occur which Moscow ostensibly could use as a pretext to begin large-scale exercises on its territory and in Belarus, as per the authors. By October Russia could allegedly transfer troops and medium-range missiles to its Kaliningrad region, and December might see a border conflict erupt in the Suwalki Corridor.
According to Bild, the “secret document” also indicates that when Washington is temporarily left without a leader as a result of the presidential elections in the United States in 2014, “Russia, with the support of Belarus, will repeat the 2014 invasion of Ukraine on NATO territory.” No further clarification is offered to these wild scenarios and off-mark references. One can guess what the mention of 2014 events refers to the Euromaidan (lit. “Euro Square”) coup fomented and sponsored by the West that culminated in the ouster of Ukraine’s government, and its replacement with a pro-US, and pro-NATO regime hostile to Russia. Furthermore, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and its chances of gaining the coveted status in the alliance remain uncertain.
“Actions of Russia and the West, culminating in the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of NATO soldiers and the inevitable outbreak of war in the summer of 2025 are described down to the exact month and location,” the publication stated in reference to the ‘secret’ Bundeswehr plan.
One wonders with what army NATO is supposedly going to be fighting this war. The vaunted Polish army? The Texas National Guard? And, more importantly, with what ammunition, artillery, and air support? And while I have no doubt that this “leak” is actually pure wishful thinking on the part of Donald Kagan’s neoclown crew, and has been released with the intention of baiting Russia into some sort of precipitate action, it’s pretty clear that Russia isn’t falling for it, as Russia Today has reported:
Moscow has ridiculed the claims, calling them a “hoax.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Monday that he refused to “even comment on this report.” Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also brushed the claims off as a “last year’s powerful zodiac forecast.”
Russia has no need to go to war with NATO in the next year. Both the German and the US economies are rapidly collapsing, not because of Russia or China, but due to the greening of the former and the parasitical financialization of the latter. The Yemeni stranglehold on the Red Sea isn’t exactly helping either the Clown World economies either.
What Russia will likely be doing in 2025 instead of fighting a third round with NATO is supporting the rising nationalist parties across Europe by offering logistical support to the third-world remigration programs that will a) be massively popular and b) put the final nail in the coffin of the neoliberal globalization that is the foundation of the Clown World Order. The AfD isn’t looking to bankrupt Germany or fight Russia on the USA’s behalf, and pushing the German people toward another defeat at the hands of Russia will likely be enough to break the CDU/CSU and SPD/Green alliance that has been methodically destroying Germany.
Germany on edge as far-right’s bold mass deportation plan shakes nation
This isn’t to say it isn’t possible for NATO to force Russia into taking the Baltic States in the same way Ukraine forced Russia into taking the Donbass. But outside of the Baltics, there aren’t many ethnic Russians, and if we learned one thing from the failed Ukraine offensive, it is that Russia is perfectly content to defend itself and let the NATO forces dash itself to pieces against its fortifications.
Furthermore, I don’t see how the USA can possibly send 200,000 troops to Europe so long as Israel is engaged in hostilities in the Middle East. The US military isn’t strong enough to fight on two major fronts anymore, and if the US were to commit to go to war in Eastern Europe, it would be effectively hanging Israel out to dry by making it clear to everyone that the US cavalry would not be coming to its rescue.
Andrei Martyanov explains why it’s not just the loss of US industrial capacity that has hamstrung its once-superlative military infrastructure and rendered the US military incapable of defeating Russia, China, or quite possibly, even Yemen.
In theory the US may build, in the next 10+ years, some facilities to increase production of 155-mm shells or drones. But it will not be able to match industrial capacity of Russia in this respect, even with theoretical addition of future, if any, European capacity. The issue here is not just quantity–the target impossible to reach due to utter destruction of US manufacturing base and an extremely complex supply chains for military production. This all is just the tip of the iceberg. The main body of the iceberg is a complete catastrophe that the US military doctrine, and, as a result, procurement development is. I spoke about it for years–some gaps, such as in air defense or missilery the US will not be able to close, because as I type this, this gap continues to grow. It is measured not in years but in generations. This is, as an example, the result of misguided and illiterate approach to air defense based on… air power. You have to literally undo the whole thing, and this requires not just building some facilities, but a complete rethinking of America’s defense or, rather, “offense” philosophy which doesn’t work. It never did. This is impossible in the present state of the American geopolitical thought without rethinking the United States as it perceived itself in the last hundred years. The US has no courage, intellect and will to do so because it leads to a destruction of America’s mythology.
So, the US is stuck. So, it is good that John Mearsheimer understands parts of it, but he doesn’t understand the heart of the matter. After the US strategically and operationally “planned” VSU’s “counteroffensive”, the question of the competence of the US military establishment arose and was answered–it is incompetent! It will take a generation or two to even teach those who are currently in the plebe years in US service academies to think properly and within the framework of America’s REAL military and industrial capability. This REAL capability has nothing in common with the US halcyon years of WW II and after and it is not coming back. Russia will not allow the US to unleash the war in Europe while thinking that the US can sit this one out again behind the ocean. Doesn’t work like this anymore, especially with the construction tempo of Russia Navy’s subs such as 3M22 Zircon carriers Yasen-class subs and frigates which already have Zircons deployed. These are technologies the US simply doesn’t have and are nowhere near of getting them. China can rely on them, and much more from Russia in case of the US deciding to commit suicide, the US cannot.
It is grim picture of corruption, financial and, most importantly, intellectual within the US military and foreign policy establishment, and what John Mearsheimer fails to understand–these are not just some pieces of hardware whose utility the US suddenly recognized. Nope, the REAL experience of SMO is way more than technological, it is above all operational and strategic, which made Russia’s General Staff a well-oiled machine which merely uses 404 as a trap and a junkyard for NATO’s military capacity, because Russia fights not Ukraine, she fights NATO.
Having read two of Martyanov’s excellent books on US military and imperial decline, both of which were written and published well before the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, it’s clear that he’s identified something that goes well beyond the common level of military analysis in the Western think tanks.
What he’s talking about here is neither the loss of US industry nor the inability of the US to design, build, and procure hypersonic missiles, inexpensive missile platforms, and squad-level drone swarms. It’s not even the demographic changes, and the fact that the USA is now an empire with a foreign elite ruling over a melange of peoples who have no connection to the heritage Americans or even first-wave immigrants who fought its previous wars. What’s he’s talking about is the fundamental failure of the US military strategists to understand the realities of military power and the way that a sea-based naval power accustomed to relatively small expeditionary conflicts well away from home simply doesn’t possess the operational and strategic capability to defeat a massive land-based power that is on a reasonably similar technological level.
Britain couldn’t defeat France. The USA couldn’t defeat Germany. And Athens lost to Sparta in the end.
British and US forces have rained bombs on Iran-backed rebels in Yemen using warships, fighter jets and submarines. After the airstrikes, Rishi Sunak said attacks on international shipping by Houthi rebels ‘cannot stand’, while US President Joe Biden hailed the ‘successful’ blitz and vowed more action if it was needed.
Explosions were heard in the capital Sana’a and other major cities shortly before midnight in a drastic escalation of tensions in the Middle East.
US and UK forces – including four Typhoon jets – bombed more than a dozen sites used by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen in a massive retaliatory strike using warship-launched Tomahawk missiles and fighter jets, US officials said.
The four RAF Typhoons used Paveway IV guided bombs to ‘conduct precision strikes’ on two targets that had been chosen to ‘reduce the Houthis’ capability to violate international law’.
One of the targets was a launching site for reconnaissance and attack drones in Bani, north-western Yemen. Another was an airfield in Abs in the same area of Yemen.
Officials said the Houthi rebels, who have carried out a series of attacks in the Red Sea, had ignored a ‘final warning’ as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak signed off on the raids during an emergency cabinet meeting last night.
Somehow, I have the very strong impression that this is not going to go the way the neoclown geostrategists believe it is going to go. The Yemenis have survived years of being attacked by US-backed Saudi forces, so a few airstrikes, however massive, are very unlikely to cause them to stop blocking the Red Sea.
So it really looks a lot like the US and UK forces taking the bait, although it’s not yet clear whose bait that would be. The problem is that both countries have taken a strong position that providing missiles to combatants is not a casus belli; objecting to Iranian, Chinese, or Russian missiles being used against US or UK ships would immediately provide Russia with cause for attacking either country.
UPDATE: An unconfirmed claim. The fact that no ship name or description was provided makes me very dubious, but we’ll find out soon enough.
“By the grace of Almighty Allah, we sank the first American ship with everyone on board using our missiles.”
