Tag: war

The Appetizer Ate Them

I’ve been reading the memoirs of Giorgy Zhukov, the Soviet general who was part of the Supreme Command Staff of the Soviet Union during WWII. I’ll put up more posts in the future about some of the notes and observations I’ve made while reading them, but this article by Big Serge points to something I keep noticing again and again, which is the similarity between the false assumptions of the Nazi command staff and the false assumptions of the NATO command staff.

We must strongly note (for this is of great importance) that in early 1942, much of Wehrmacht leadership still believed that the war with the Soviet Union was a sort of appetizer, which would be won as a preliminary condition for waging a global war with the Anglo-Americans. The land war in the east, in other words, was something that needed to be resolved so that Germany could be freed to wage a full strategic defense of Europe by land, sea, and air – using the resources of the defeated Soviet Union to power this long war effort.

This, of course, demonstrates that Germany was asking the wrong questions and thinking about the wrong problems. They were concerned with bringing a resolution in the east so they could move on to the (as they saw it) bigger problem of contesting Anglo-American global hegemony. They did not yet seem to realize that they were being defeated outright in the east. So eager were they to move on to the main course, they did not see that the appetizer was eating them.

As I have repeatedly stated, WWIII appears to be a remake of WWII, only with the USA playing the part of Germany, Europe playing the part of Italy, the UK and the Commonwealth playing the part of Japan. Russia is the Soviet Union, while China is the USA.

And like the Nazis before them, NATO is asking the wrong questions and thinking about the wrong problems. They’re already trying to pivot to war with China while they are losing the war with Russia.

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Why Your Grocery Bill is Rising

Russia abrogated the Black Sea grain deal and reimposed its naval blockade of Ukraine after the West – shockingly and totally unexpectedly – again failed to live up to its responsibilities under the treaty.

The Russian military issued a new navigational warning for the Black Sea on Wednesday, declaring certain areas in its international waters to be “temporarily unsafe” for vessels. Apart from that, the military advised seafarers against attempting to reach Ukraine’s ports, stating that all vessels heading there will be treated as potential carriers of war goods starting from Thursday.

Therefore, the flag state of a ship attempting to reach the Ukrainian Black Sea ports will be deemed as “taking part in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kiev regime,” the Russian Defense ministry said in a statement.

The military said it also declared certain areas in the international waters of the Black Sea to be “temporarily unsafe” for navigation. The areas are located in the north-west and south-east of the waterway, the military noted, adding that all the necessary navigational warnings have already been published as required under existing procedures.

“With the termination of the Black Sea Initiative and the abolition of the maritime humanitarian corridor, from 00:00 Moscow time on July 20, 2023, all ships en route to Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea will be considered potential carriers of military cargo,” the military insisted.

The new restrictions de-facto re-impose the Russian naval blockade on Ukraine, lifted under the so-called Black Sea grain deal in July 2022. The agreement, signed with mediation by the UN and Türkiye, enabled the safe shipment of Ukrainian grain through Black Sea corridors amid the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Moscow withdrew from the deal on Monday, citing the West’s failure to keep any of the promises made to Russia under the agreement, including re-enabling exports of grain and fertilizers from the country.

The Russians followed the announcement with a series of missile strikes on Odessa and other Black Sea port facilities, as well as a warning that ships would no longer be allowed to freely transit the Black Sea.

Footage circulating online shows massive explosions in the vicinity of Odessa, including at its Black Sea ports. Ukrainian officials have claimed the strikes also inflicted damage on civilian infrastructure, with the city’s mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, saying the attack was the largest since the beginning of hostilities. He described last night in the city as “terrible.”

The cancellation of the grain deal is expected to contribute to rising food prices, especially in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, according to the IMF, but will likely have a knock-on impact in Europe and North America as well.

As I mentioned on a recent Darkstream, we appear to be entering a new and more dangerous phase of the NATO-Russian war.

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The War Comes to the USA

It is very unlikely that the six explosions that destroyed a Dow Chemical plant in Louisiana were simply an industrial accident:

A fire at a Louisiana chemical plant triggered explosions that shook homes several miles away and sent flames and smoke billowing into the air, prompting emergency officials to urge a few hundred nearby residents to shelter indoors for several hours and to turn off their air conditioners.

Flames erupted late Friday at Dow Chemical’s plant on the Mississippi River near Plaquemine, south of Baton Rouge. Iberville Parish officials told The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate that the fire started in an area of the plant that handles ethylene oxide, a flammable and toxic chemical.

The sheriff told WBRZ-TV that six explosions were detected at the plant around 9:30 p.m. Friday. Tall flames could be seen rising from the site, with thick smoke overhead. Residents felt their homes shake in Baton Rouge, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) away, WAFB-TV reported.

Ethylene oxide is a primary component of thermobaric munitions, which includes the AGM-114 Hellfire missile, the BLU-118/B thermobaric bomb, the XM1060 40mm thermobaric grenade, and the SMAW-NE antitank missile. While it’s possible that the timing of the plant’s destruction was coincidental, the fact that it took place as NATO is desperately attempting to ramp up munitions production to replace its depleted stocks tends to suggest that covert enemy ops were responsible.

As unpleasant as it may be to contemplate the possibility, the USA is now almost certainly finding itself on the business end of the special operations spear that it has so heavily utilized around the world for the last 40 years. While one assumes the Russians are the most likely culprits, the Chinese have been preparing for direct conflict with the US military for more than 20 years and it is certainly in their interest to ensure that US munitions supplies remain scarce.

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Clown World Won’t Quit

The Ukrainian offensive didn’t just fail, it reportedly failed in a historic manner reminiscent of Napoleon’s epic debacle. But the neoclowns are willing to fight to the last… whoever they can get their hands on.

Colonial MacGregor revealed that American intelligence sources provided information to him and the media showing that during the past two and half weeks alone, Russia suffered 1,500 casualties, of which 200-300 were estimated to be killed, while Ukraine suffered 24,000 to 26,000 combat deaths, with twice that many wounded.

So, naturally, Clown World is determined to send in American soldiers, who despite their military prowess are even less experienced in this sort of modern warfare than the Ukrainians were when it started. And in the meantime, the Ukrainians are recruiting South Americans, particularly Brazilians.

“Ukraine is recruiting in the Global South because it no longer has people to send to the battlefield.” -Brazilian military analyst and reserve officer Robinson Farinazzo

An 83-1 KIA ratio (33-1 casualty ratio) dwarfs some of the most one-sided wars in modern history. The British defeated the Argentines with a 2.9-1 KIA ratio. The notoriously one-sided Israeli-Arab KIA ratio is 4.8 to 1. An 83-1 margin borders on the levels of science fiction or fantasy.

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The Problem with Word Spells

Is that the words were originally created for a coherent and consistent reason. Michael Hudson explains that the purpose of the current US military doesn’t actually have much to do with historical military purposes:

Military, for the United States, is different from what the word ‘military’ meant in every other society from the beginning of time. When you say military, you think of an army fighting. You cannot conquer a country without invading it, and to invade it, you obviously need an army, you need troops. But the Americans can’t mount an army, of enough size, to occupy anybody except Grenada, or Panama, because the Vietnam War stopped the military draft. What America does have, what it calls military, is what you quite rightly linked it to: the military industrial complex. It makes arms. And weapons.

But again, these are a funny kind of weapons. Suppose you had a winery that made wine that was so good, that really wasn’t for drinking. It was for wealthy people to buy, and to trade. And as the years go by, the wine would turn to vinegar. It’s not wine for drinking. It’s wine for making a profit, a capital gain.

Well, you can say the same thing about America’s military arms, as we’re seeing in Ukraine right now — or as President Biden calls it, Iraq. The arms, basically, are there to create a huge profit for Raytheon, and the other companies in the military industrial complex. They’re for buying, and they’re for giving to the Ukrainians, to let Russia blow them up.

But they’re not for fighting. They’re not for winning a war. They’re for being used up, so you have to replace them now, with yet new buying. And so the United States State Department has asked Germany and other European countries, well, you’d promised to pay 2% of your GDP on military arms to enrich our military industrial complex.

But now that we’ve given all these tanks and missiles away – Russia just blew up 12% of all the tanks in just one week – so we only have a few weeks left to go before they’re all wiped out. Because they really don’t work on the battlefield. They’re not for fighting, they’re for being blown up. Now we want you to actually increase your spending to 4%, to replenish all of the stocks, you’ve just depleted, 10 years, maybe 20 years, of your arms stocks. And you have to now replenish them very rapidly, in order to meet the NATO targets, that we and the State Department, have set. So military today isn’t really how you control other countries. America’s found it much easier to do this by financial mechanisms.

You conquer a country financially, you conquer a country by getting it to submit to austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund, again, to impose austerity, to keep its local wages down. So you use finance as a means of imposing post-industrialization and depression, in order to prevent democracy from developing.

So any country that is seeking to promote a democracy by public spending on basic infrastructure, or banking, like China is doing, is called an autocracy. And every autocracy that has imposed a client oligarchy, to fight against labor, and to prevent these policies that would help enrich and industrialize the economy, is called a democracy, not an autocracy.

So we’re back in the Orwellian logic to describe a situation, that probably even the cynical George Orwell, would not have thought could go quite this far.

Much like the famous aphorism about the Holy Roman Empire, the Military-Industrial Complex can’t wage war, has no industrial capacity, and really isn’t difficult to understand.

Redefine a word all you want, but don’t expect the redefined version to perform its original function.

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The Military Wing of Clown World

The New York Times admits that NATO exists to control the European nations, not defend them:

Many observers expected NATO to close shop after the collapse of its Cold War rival. But in the decade after 1989, the organization truly came into its own. NATO acted as a ratings agency for the European Union in Eastern Europe, declaring countries secure for development and investment. The organization pushed would-be partners to adhere to a liberal, pro-market creed, according to which — as President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser put it — “the pursuit of democratic institutions, the expansion of free markets” and “the promotion of collective security” marched in lock step. European military professionals and reform-minded elites formed a willing constituency, their campaigns boosted by NATO’s information apparatus.

When European populations proved too stubborn, or undesirably swayed by socialist or nationalist sentiments, Atlantic integration proceeded all the same. The Czech Republic was a telling case. Faced with a likely “no” vote in a referendum on joining the alliance in 1997, the secretary general and top NATO officials saw to it that the government in Prague simply dispense with the exercise; the country joined two years later. The new century brought more of the same, with an appropriate shift in emphasis. Coinciding with the global war on terrorism, the “big bang” expansion of 2004 — in which seven countries acceded — saw counterterrorism supersede democracy and human rights in alliance rhetoric. Stress on the need for liberalization and public sector reforms remained a constant.

In the realm of defense, the alliance was not as advertised. For decades, the United States has been the chief provider of weapons, logistics, air bases and battle plans. The war in Ukraine, for all the talk of Europe stepping up, has left that asymmetry essentially untouched. Tellingly, the scale of U.S. military aid — $47 billion over the first year of the conflict — is more than double that offered by European Union countries combined. European spending pledges may also turn out to be less impressive than they appear. More than a year after the German government publicized the creation of a special $110 billion fund for its armed forces, the bulk of the credits remain unused. In the meantime, German military commanders have said that they lack sufficient munitions for more than two days of high-intensity combat.

Whatever the levels of expenditure, it is remarkable how little military capability Europeans get for the outlays involved. Lack of coordination, as much as penny-pinching, hamstrings Europe’s ability to ensure its own security. By forbidding duplication of existing capabilities and prodding allies to accept niche roles, NATO has stymied the emergence of any semiautonomous European force capable of independent action. As for defense procurement, common standards for interoperability, coupled with the sheer size of the U.S. military-industrial sector and bureaucratic impediments in Brussels, favor American firms at the expense of their European competitors. The alliance, paradoxically, appears to have weakened allies’ ability to defend themselves.

Yet the paradox is only superficial. In fact, NATO is working exactly as it was designed by postwar U.S. planners, drawing Europe into a dependency on American power that reduces its room for maneuver. Far from a costly charity program, NATO secures American influence in Europe on the cheap.

In related news, Germany has announced that it is sending its last 20,000 155mm artillery shells to Ukraine, along with 25 more Leopard tanks, which along with the 29 Leopards previously provided, represent 24 percent of its total armor. By the current rate of usage in Ukraine, the ammunition will last just under one week.

This is an astonishingly risky decision by the German government, since once Russia wins the war of attrition and completely depletes all NATO stocks, it may find that it has the option of rolling all the way to the English channel without any meaningful opposition even if it previously had no intention of doing so.

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NATO Failed Sun Tzu 101

NATO did not know its enemy in Ukraine.

When I was in officer school, pre-1991, NATO was less dependent on air-superiority than it is today. We also had some good air defense systems. Our artillery was not superior to the Soviet one but was well layered – from short, medium to long ranged systems – and would have created very significant damages. We also had good pioneer equipment that allowed for the crossing rivers and ditches as well as serious mine fields.

All this changed after the 1991 Gulf war in which U.S. air superiority and tank fist destroyed the Iraqi defense forces. That war was misconstrued as a big win when it in fact was simply the effect of a by far superior professional force over a unmotivated conscript army with old and often defunct weapons.

As an effect of the first Gulf war and later operations in Serbia, Afghanistan and again in Iraq the believe in NATO air-land doctrine was reinforced. Air superiority was the holy grail while the strong land force capabilities atrophied. An emphasis on guerilla suppression and on vehicles that could withstand simple improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan further unbalanced the force.

It explains why the Ukrainian troops were miss-trained and miss-equipped for a counter-offensive even when the opposing force was a much harder to crack one than some goat herders from Helmand, Afghanistan.

I’m pretty sure NATO would also fail the other half of the equation too. And, at any rate, you don’t need to worry about Sun Tzu when you’ve already failed W. Edwards Deming 101.

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The Non-Diplomacy Dance

It’s rather amusing to watch Clown World attempting to do diplomacy without actually going through the traditional diplomatic exercises in order to maintain its facade of complete control of the situation.

NATO leaders will “send a clear and positive signal” to Kiev regarding Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told journalists ahead of a two-day summit in Lithuania. The country will be able to skip one of the normal steps for candidates, he predicted.

The official said he proposed to member states to “remove the requirement for Membership Action Plan (MAP)” for Ukraine. This will change the accession path “from a two-step process to a one step process,” he explained during a conference on Tuesday.

In absolutely-related news, Turkey has unexpectedly dropped its opposition to Sweden’s entry into NATO.

NATO has cleared the way for Sweden to join the Western military alliance by persuading Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to end his opposition to Stockholm’s bid.

Persuading = large cash payments. But hey, whatever works, right?

All of this frantic non-diplomacy diplomacy is meant to “send a message” to Russia, which is completely futile since Russia doesn’t consider NATO or the USA to be “agreement-capable” and the entire world now knows that NATO is ‘victory-incapable”. The idea is to threaten Russia with a full-scale direct confrontation with NATO, and the problem is that the threat is simply not a credible one now that NATO’s ammunition and armor stores have been significantly depleted.

Meanwhile, Russia is growing stronger by the month, as its productive capacity is growing and it is building more tanks and APVs than it is losing. More importantly, the NATO calculation relies upon its own alliance while completely failing to take into account the extent to which Russia’s allies are capable of assisting it, both in terms of supplies and siphoning off NATO resources to other theaters.

I’d always thought that it would be the loss of several aircraft carriers that would signify the end of the US empire. But it increasingly appears that it is the combination of economic and military futility being exposed in Ukraine that will do so instead. And the longer this process continues to play out and methodically weaken the infrastructure of Clown World, the better it will be for the sovereign nations and the American posterity.

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BRICS Opts for Gold

This move by the anti-Clown alliance is almost the exact opposite of surprising:

In a surprising move, the BRICS+ countries – a group including Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, plus additional emerging economies – plan to introduce a new currency, likely linked to a weight of gold. This plan, set to be unveiled at their annual leaders’ summit conference, marks a significant challenge to the dollar’s reign in international finance.

The initiative, principally driven by Russia and China – the world’s largest gold producers – aims to link the new currency to a specific weight of gold. This strategy leverages their gold-rich status and presents a formidable challenge to the dollar’s pre-eminence. Experts are closely watching the development and analyzing the potential repercussions for global markets.

Understanding the implications of this currency shift requires an exploration of the dollar’s standing in international finance. Traditionally, the dollar has enjoyed an unchallenged position, serving as the world’s primary reserve currency. It’s used widely in international trade, providing stability and convenience to global transactions. However, the introduction of a new gold-linked currency could disrupt this balance, challenging the dollar’s omnipresence and potentially displacing it as the dominant payment currency.

The impact on the dollar will be best understood by gauging its strength in gold rather than comparing it with other currencies. If the gold price rises significantly, it would indicate a devaluation of the dollar and a collapse of confidence in major currencies. While this is speculative at the moment, it’s a possibility that global markets cannot afford to overlook.

It’s exactly the right thing to do to undermine the dollar-based financial system that is one of the two pillars of Clown World: the dollar and the US military. I’ve been wondering what has taken BRICS so long to reach this point, since it was an obvious need, but I suppose there has been considerable negotiation behind the scenes in determining precisely who will get to call the shots.

It’s one thing to be mutually opposed to something, it’s another thing to cooperatively work together. But this is probably the biggest global financial development since Russia unexpectedly survived the multiple waves of sanctions.

And the fact that there will be an objective foundation for the alternative currency will make it extremely attractive to unaligned parties.

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St Breivik, Pray for France

A young Frenchman lost his life fighting fires instead of fighting the invaders of his nation:

A young Parisian fireman was killed last night as he tried in vain to extinguish a fierce blaze in an underground car park as France suffered a sixth night of rioting.

The 24-year-old, who has not been named, was on Monday part of an emergency operation in the troubled suburb of Saint-Denis, just north of the capital.

‘Overnight, while fighting against a blaze involving several vehicles in an underground car park in Saint-Denis, a young Corporal-Chief of the Paris Fire Brigade died despite very rapid treatment by his teammates,’ Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.

Europe and America are at war. But not with Russia. They are at war with Clown World and the invaders that serve as its minions. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Europeans and Americans have not yet accepted the fact that they have been invaded and they are at war, and thus they find themselves struggling with the consequences of their enemy’s actions in vain.

Homogenous nations come from heterogeneous empires, but there are no guarantees as to what the makeup of those nations will be.

Sun Tzu said that one must know one’s enemy and oneself if one is to be victorious. It is long past time for the people of France to accept that they have not been augmented, but rather, invaded. Both the French government and the current “opposition” is timid and totally useless; it’s clear that democracy has failed France.

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