Tag: war

Past as Prelude

One of the great advantages of being conversant with history is the ability to recognize reoccurring patterns and apply one’s knowledge of the events of the past to observe current events in order to successfully anticipate the events of the future.

The great Soviet marshal Zhukov wrote the following in his autobiography concerning the turning point of WWII on the Eastern Front:

The Wehrmacht’s defeats in the summer and autumn of 1943 destroyed whatever was left of the confidence that the satellites of Nazi Germany had in the Hitler regime. The fascist bloc began falling apart. A still more favourable strategic situation developed for the Soviet Armed Forces. And the Supreme Command exploited it skilfully when preparing the 1944 operations.

No longer did Nazi Germany’s allies and the neutral countries believe that Hitler’s regime could escape total defeat. But the main thing was that the elements in Germany which had brought Hitler to power and had supported him in every way during the years that followed, also lost trust in the Nazi leadership. Most Germans began to see that they had been dangerously deluded by the easy victories of the first period of the war, and that Germany could not stand up to the Soviet Armed Forces and the anti-Hitler coalition.

Marshal of Victory, Georgy Zhukov, 1974

One can easily substitute NATO for “the Wehrmacht”, the USA for “Nazi Germany”, the neoliberal rules-based world order for “Hitler regime”, and the G7 for “the fascist bloc”. The failure of US proxy forces in Ukraine, combined with their failures in Syria and Afghanistan, have caused the majority of the world’s nations to lose trust in the leadership of Clown World.

As with the Germans 80 years ago, most people outside of Clown World now recognize that the seemingly inevitable triumph of the neoliberal world order was a delusion based on nothing more than an easy victory over an inept Iraqi army, neoclown influence in the media, and the false economic ideology of cheap credit, free trade, and mass immigration.

What is truly remarkable is the way that these decisive events of 80 years ago took place in precisely the same geographic region as they are taking place today.

The second blow was struck in the Ukraine to the right of the Dnieper. This was an intricate operation and, in fact, consisted of a series of major offensives which were carried out chiefly in February and March 1944 in the Korsun-Shevchenkovsky area and on the Southern Bug. The German troops were routed and flung across the Dniester, and finally all the Ukraine to the right of the Dnieper was liberated. The Soviet troops reached a favourable line for a subsequent advance into Europe’s south-eastern regions, for an offensive on the Balkans against Romania where the fascist Antonescu was still in the saddle, against Horthy Hungary, and other enemy forces. In April and May 1944, the Red Army delivered its third blow in the region of Odessa and in the Crimea. Odessa, Sebastopol, and the Crimean Peninsula were cleared of the enemy.

ibid.

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Anywhere and Anytime

In what can hardly be described as an “assassination attempt”, two drones launched at the Kremlin were shot down by Moscow air defenses this morning. The Russians don’t appear to be particularly worked up over it:

Russia reserves the right to retaliate “anywhere and anytime it deems necessary” in response to the drone attack on President Vladimir Putin’s residence, the Kremlin has said. Officials said two Ukrainian drones attempted to strike the Kremlin early on Wednesday morning, but the raid was thwarted. The president was not hurt in the “terrorist attack,” and the Kremlin complex did not suffer any damage, Putin’s office said.

Russia Today, 3 May 2023

Compare the dry description by Russia Today with the histrionic version that appears in The Daily Mail.

Russia has accused Ukraine of attempting to assassinate Vladimir Putin in a double drone strike on the Kremlin overnight.

Moscow furiously decried the attack as ‘a planned terrorist act and an attempt on the life of the President of the Russian Federation.’

The allegation of the failed assassination attempt was made by the Kremlin today and reported by Russian news agencies.

It said two drones had been used in the alleged attack, but had been disabled by Russian defences. Extraordinary video purportedly showed the moment the drone struck the Kremlin, with flames and smoke seen erupting from the domed roof.

‘Two unmanned vehicles were aimed at the Kremlin… the devices were put out of action,’ Moscow’s statement read. In a chilling threat, Russia made clear it reserved the right to respond to the alleged drone strike.

The Daily Mail, 3 May 2023

Meanwhile, the Kiev regime is drafting men over 60 and forcing them to join the military. From a Ukrainian expat whose father has been drafted:

Other men from my father’s church have also been taken into the military. Men that I grew up around, who have wives and children. One was at an interview to work for the railroad, because they are supposedly exempt from military service due to their contributions. A prerequisite to acquiring the job was to go to a military instillation to provide updated medical information. They took him immediately into service without barely any notice to say goodbye to his wife. Apparently there has been an order put out to basically bring on board as many men into service as possible for a major counter assault. Old men (early 60s) are being taken away from their homes by military police and being put into service because they ignored the draft letters.

Things appear to be coming to a head soon. Considering that neither Napoleon nor Hitler managed to defeat Russia, I wouldn’t bet a wooden nickel on Biden, Zelensky, and Victoria Nuland. I suspect that the main reason Russia continues to bide its time is because the economic war is absolutely ravaging its enemies and steadily improving its relative position.

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Neoclowns in Retreat

The Ukraine War hasn’t even been officially lost yet and the neoclowns responsible for it are already in retreat again from their own imperialist ideology.

Shortly after September 11, 2001, I became known as a “neoconservative.” The term was a bit puzzling, because I wasn’t new to conservatism; I had been on the right ever since I could remember. But the “neocon” label came to be used after 9/11 to denote a particular strain of conservatism that placed human rights and democracy promotion at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. This was a very different mindset from the realpolitik approach of such Republicans as President Dwight Eisenhower, President Richard Nixon, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and it had a natural appeal to someone like me whose family had come to the United States in search of freedom. (We arrived from the Soviet Union in 1976, when I was six years old.) Having lived in a communist dictatorship, I supported the United States spreading freedom abroad. That, in turn, led me to become a strong supporter of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, Paper American thinks he should be setting US foreign policy because he lived in an imperialist dictatorship created by his own people for five years. Strangely enough, he supports the same imperialist foreign policy of the place from which he came.

Although I remain a supporter of democracy and human rights, after seeing how democracy promotion has worked out in practice, I no longer believe it belongs at the center of U.S. foreign policy. In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking. I am a neocon no more, at least as that term has been understood since 9/11.

So we’ve seen the neoclowns retreat from the inevitable “End of History” to the need to “Garden the Jungle”, and now we’re seeing them retreat again to “Garden the Garden”.

I still favor U.S. international leadership and support of allies, including a strong U.S. military presence in the three centers of global power—Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia—where their deployment is essential to maintain order and deter aggression.

But you know what? The Garden is going to fail too. The neoclowns are going to lose control because they are not only at war with reality, but with God, history, and human nature. And they know it, which is why they are rapidly attempting to change their tune in order to try to escape being held accountable for their monstrous failures for which so many lives, including Americans, were sacrificed.

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Color Revolution in Sudan

AUG 24, 2022 – US Ambassador appointed to Sudan following a 25 year absence.

SEPT 28, 2022 – US Ambassador warns Sudan against finalizing Russian naval base deal

NOV 11, 2022 – Blinken urges Sudan to consider “US support for the rapid formation of a civilian-led transitional governnent”.

DEC 5, 2022 – UN brokers Framework Agreement between Sudan’s military leaders and leading pro-democracy parties

DEC 7, 2022 – Blinken threatens travel ban for Sudanese who endanger Framework Agreement deal

FEB 12, 2023 – Sudan confirms deal for Russian naval base, key players Lavrov and General Burhan.

FEB 16, 2023 – CIA payout cash sent. Biden administration sends $218 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan.

MAR 9, 2023 – Coup plans finalized, orders given as Victoria Nuland visits Sudan to “discuss democracy”

APR 8, 2023 – Conflict escalates between Sudanese Armed Forces (under General Burhan) and paramilitary group RSF (under Dagalo)

APR 22, 2023 – US diplomats evacuate Sudan

APR 24, 2023 – Biden submits a War Powers Resolution to Congress regarding the Deployment of U.S. Military Forces to Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Sudan.

APR 25, 2023 – U.S. moves intelligence assets, troops into Africa.

This is precisely the process that what Victoria Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan, describes as “tending the jungle on behalf of the garden of democracy” in his 2019 book The Jungle Grows Back.

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A Wargame in Washington

This may be the only time I have ever regretted not becoming a Congressman. This weekend, the House Ways and Means Committee played a wargame simulating a US-China war over Taiwan.

It’s April 22, 2027, and 72 hours into a first-strike Chinese attack on Taiwan and the U.S. military response. Already, the toll on all sides is staggering.

It was a war game, but one with a serious purpose and high-profile players: members of the House select committee on China. The conflict unfolded on Risk board game-style tabletop maps and markers under a giant gold chandelier in the House Ways and Means Committee room.

The exercise explored American diplomatic, economic and military options if the United States and China were to reach the brink of war over Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own. The exercise played out one night last week and was observed by The Associated Press. It was part of the committee’s in-depth review of U.S. policies toward China as lawmakers, especially in the Republican-led House, focus on tensions with President Xi Jinping’s government.

In the war game, Beijing’s missiles and rockets cascade down on Taiwan and on U.S. forces as far away as Japan and Guam. Initial casualties include hundreds, possibly thousands, of U.S. troops. Taiwan’s and China’s losses are even higher.

Discouragingly for Washington, alarmed and alienated allies in the war game leave Americans to fight almost entirely alone in support of Taiwan.

In the war game, lawmakers played the blue team, in the role of National Security Council advisers. Their directive from their (imaginary) president: Deter a Chinese takeover of Taiwan if possible, defeat it if not. Experts for the Center for a New American Security think tank, whose research includes war-gaming possible conflicts using realistic scenarios and unclassified information, played the red team.

In the exercise, it all kicks off with opposition lawmakers in Taiwan talking about independence.

With the think tank’s defense program director Stacie Pettyjohn narrating, angry Chinese officials respond by heaping unacceptable demands on Taiwan. Meanwhile, China’s military moves invasion-capable forces into position. Steps such as bringing in blood supplies for treating troops suggest this is no ordinary military exercise.

Ultimately, China imposes a de facto blockade on Taiwan, intolerable for an island that produces more than 60% of the world’s semiconductors, as well as other high-tech gear.

One hopes that the wargame’s designers made it real enough to teach the politicians that a war with China over Taiwan is actually less winnable than Ukraine. The basic concept of a “regional power” necessarily entails not interfering with that power in its region-of-control.

The fact that the wargame did not culminate in a US victory, unlike the previous wargames by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is a good sign that it had at least some connection to the actual situation. But the fact that one of the lessons they took from the exercise concerned “diplomacy” and “the lack of direct, immediate leader-to-leader crisis communication” is dangerous, because a) there is no amount of diplomacy or talk-talk that is going to dissuade the Chinese and b) it means the politicians are still hoping to find some sort of painless Smart Boy solution that does not exist.

China fully expects reunification by 2030. I would not be surprised if it takes place sooner than that, and more or less peacefully, given the absolute lunacy of Clown World’s latest ideas for trying to deter the Chinese from their top strategic priority.

The latest remarks by the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell, who called for European navies to patrol the Taiwan Straits, caused huge controversy on Sunday as some Chinese observers said the comments are “extremely dangerous” and signal “a retrogression” of the EU’s stance on the Taiwan question following the recent G7 meeting during which the US tried to pressure its allies to take a tougher position on the matter.

European navies should patrol the disputed Taiwan Straits, Borrell wrote in an article published in the French newspaper Journal Du Dimanche, saying that the Chinese island concerns the EU economically, commercially and technologically, according to media reports on Sunday. He called for European navies to patrol the Taiwan Straits to “show Europe’s commitment to freedom of navigation” in this crucial area.

Call of top EU diplomat for European navies to patrol the Taiwan Straits ‘very dangerous’, Global Times

I really don’t think a resort to European gunboat diplomacy is a wise idea when China is actively seeking vengeance for its “Century of Humiliation”. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

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The Failure of the Materialist Model

Those who blame every form of evil and insanity on “corporate greed” will find it very difficult to explain why Clown World is so willing to sacrifice the US and European economies and destroy corporate profits on behalf of Ukraine and Taiwan:

President Joe Biden will stop at nothing to protect America against security threats posed by China, even if it means damaging the US economy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has claimed.

“National security is of paramount importance in our relationship with China,” Yellen said during a speech in Washington in Wednesday. She gave the example of blocking China from obtaining certain technologies, adding, “We will not compromise on these concerns, even when they force trade-offs with our economic interests.”

It’s evident that China and Russia are leading the charge against Clown World’s satanic hegemony, and that more and more countries are showing signs of following their lead. This is a spiritual war between the global satanists and the nations, not an economic war between rival sets of materialists, which is why all of the secular and materialist analysts are completely off every time they make a prediction or offer an explanation for why things are happening.

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There is No Thucydides Trap

And WWIII has already begun, so Ron Unz is incorrect to imagine that the lunacies of the neocons have saved the USA from the inevitable war with China et al.

The reality is that over the last year the Neocon-orchestrated war against Russia has collapsed any American hopes of forming a strong anti-China coalition.

For generations, India has had a troubled relationship with China and just a couple of years ago a bitter border skirmish had prompted a national ban on TikTok. But India and Russia had been strong allies throughout the Cold War and most of India’s military equipment is still Russian, while it has also benefitted from a very lucrative trade in refining and selling sanctioned Russian oil. So India has now clearly moved towards the Russia-China bloc.

In recent years, China has become the largest market for Saudi oil, while Russia is the other leading member of the crucial OPEC+ cartel. With both those countries joined together in a tight embrace, a Saudi shift away from its longstanding American alliance was hardly so surprising, but it still generated shockwaves.

Japan’s energy needs have led it to begin importing Russian oil despite the Western campaign of sanctions, so even our strongest ally in the Far East may be starting to reconsider its options.

In his 2014 analysis, Mearsheimer had logically presented Russia, India, and Japan as the three most important members of the balancing coalition that America would create against China, but we have now lost two or possibly all three of those countries.

The First World War lasted so long and cost so many millions of lives because the two contending coalitions were evenly matched, with the rising power of Germany so immensely strong that an alliance of the next three European powers—Britain, Russia, and France—could barely fight it to a draw over four years, and only American intervention finally turned the tide at the end. As Niall Ferguson cogently argued in The Pity of War, a swift German victory would have essentially resulted in the creation of the EU a century earlier and with negligible bloodshed.

But if the British government of the time had been so mad as to deliberately provoke a conflict with Russia on the eve of that war, thereby driving the Czar into the arms of his German cousin, the resulting realignment would have ensured a quick victory for the Kaiser, or more likely a German-led coalition too strong to even be opposed.

As envisioned by Mearsheimer, an America allied with Russia, India, Japan, and the NATO countries would have constituted a better than even global match for China, thereby allowing a highly aggressive American policy in the South China Sea. But Neocon blunders have now produced an entirely different correlation of forces, one so unfavorable to our own country that any armed conflict has become much less likely.

In his book, Allison considered a long list of geopolitical transitions over the last 500 years, and one of the few that avoided any bloodshed occurred when American power surpassed that of Britain early in the twentieth century. As he tells the story, by the time the British government considered challenging American dominance in the Western Hemisphere, our country had already grown too powerful to resist and their military leaders vetoed the idea. Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister, later wistfully reflected that if his country had intervened in the Civil War decades earlier and helped split the U.S. into rival, hostile nations, matters might have later played out very differently.

In similar manner, I think the developments of the last year have fostered the growth of a China-aligned global coalition far too powerful for America to directly confront, with even our subservient military leaders probably recognizing that reality.

Ron Unz is a smart and reasonably well-read individual. But, first of all, there is no such thing as a “Thucydides Trap”. It’s nothing more than a term coined by a Clown World pseudointellectual designed to capture the media’s attention and make other pseudos feel smart when stating the obvious, and it doesn’t even make sense, as anyone who compares the positions of Athens-Sparta to USA-China will immediately recognize.

“The front of the paperback edition was packed with a remarkable ten pages of glowing endorsements by a long list of the West’s most prestigious public figures and intellectuals, ranging from Joe Biden to Henry Kissinger to Gen. David Petraeus to Klaus Schwab.”

The “Thucydides Trap” is just another form of historical squid ink meant to obscure the observable patterns of the Empire That Never Ended from those capable of recognizing them. The only utility of the term is that one knows better than to take seriously anyone using it.

Second, China has been at war with the USA since 1999. It has been at war with Clown World since 2015. The fact that this war has been “unrestricted”, to use the Chinese word, rather than “hot” is irrelevant with regards to the possibility that the war might be avoided. But war that has already begun cannot, by definition, be avoided.

The historical truth is that empires always end. But other than a vague sense of discomfort, anomie, and being past the peak glory days, the citizens of the empire seldom realize that the imperial age has ended until it is long gone.

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Why Mexico Turned to China

After turning a blind eye to the Mexican invasion of the USA for the last 40 years, Republicans now want to invade Mexico:

US Republicans are increasingly warming to the idea of waging war against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels, according to Politico, which spoke to several lawmakers in the party about the controversial idea.

Former president Donald Trump is eager to send “special forces” south of the border to take out the cartels, according to Rolling Stone, whose sources claimed the 2024 Republican frontrunner was asking for “battle plans” to engage traffickers. Trump, they said, has been complaining about “missed opportunities of his first term” and is surrounded by people “who want fewer missed opportunities in a second Trump presidency.”

But the ex-president is far from alone inside his party. Republican congressmen Dan Crenshaw and Mike Waltz are pushing legislation that would seek an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) targeting the cartels, accusing them of “turning Mexico into a failed narco-state.”

Waltz agreed that it was “time to go on offense” against the traffickers, echoing his colleague’s comparison to the banned terrorist group. “We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” he told Politico on Monday.

A group of 20 Republican congressmen led by Texas Rep. Chip Roy last month introduced a bill that would designate the Gulf Cartel, Cartel del Noreste, Cartel de Sinaloa, and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”

Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John Kennedy unveiled a similar bill last month calling for a task force dedicated to cartels and drug traffickers and naming nine such organizations to be designated as terrorist.

What they’re leaving out is the fact that the US military trained the cartels. The cartels are genuinely analogous to ISIS, in that ISIS was a US creation utilized to justify the US military intervention in Syria. First they create the problem – ISIS, the cartels – and then they offer the solution, which is always a military intervention.

But whereas Russia stepped in to prevent the US from effecting regime change in Syria, I think we can expect China to step in to prevent the US from effecting regime change in Mexico. I also suspect that the “young Chinese men of military age” reported being seen in Mexico by Michael Yon are not there to prepare for a Chinese invasion of the southern border, but rather, to build the Chinese military bases that will be used to defend the Mexican government from the US military.

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No Point in Talking

China has realized that Russia is correct and there is absolutely no point in communicating with an enemy party that is agreement-incapable.

Beijing’s current aversion to sustained high-level engagement underscores the particularly fraught nature of U.S.-Chinese relations over the past few months. What was a two-sided desire to stabilize an increasingly volatile relationship is becoming much more about Washington reaching out and the Chinese government demurring.

Beijing is increasingly resentful about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and official contacts that China says encourage Taiwan’s pro-independence elements.

There’s always a certain degree of diplomatic theater to the canceling of high-level meetings between the United States and China. But ensuring stable communications with major adversaries like China and Russia has long been a U.S. preference. Some U.S. officials worry Beijing’s thin-skinned diplomacy is hampering crucial communication between the rivals in a way that could have global fallout in a major crisis.

“The Chinese have been reluctant to engage in discussions around confidence building or crisis communications or hotlines,” National Security Council Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell said at a Center for a New American Security event last week. “Given the fact that our forces operate in proximity, we’re going to have increasing challenges.”

If one reads the English-language Chinese media, such as Global Times and CGTN, it quickly becomes apparent that China neither fears the US military nor respects the US government anymore. While the Chinese are still wary of the power of the US military, particularly the sea power of the US Navy, it is evident that the Chinese are aware of the way in which US diplomacy is no longer in line with actual US military capabilities, as well as the fact that no agreement with the USA is worth the paper on which it is written.

No doubt this serious concerns those whose influence rests on their ability to confound others with their word-spells. But you can’t bamboozle those who won’t even talk to you. Russia Today notes the recent Chinese indifference to US diplomacy with a noticeable degree of satisfaction.

China has demonstrated immense diplomatic patience towards the US over the past few years, even as Washington has been venting relentless hostility towards Beijing, including, but not limited to:

  • accusations of genocide;
  • blacklisting numerous technology companies;
  • attempting to crush China’s technological development;
  • backtracking on its commitment to the One-China policy;
  • spreading conspiracy theories over the Covid-19 pandemic’s origins;
  • building new military alliances such as AUKUS, with the intention of containing China;
  • coercing third-party countries into blocking and rejecting key Chinese investments;
  • forcing other countries to take sides in an attempt to create a Cold-War-like climate;
  • whipping up anti-Chinese paranoia and vilification of China in US domestic politics.

The list is not exhaustive, yet once upon a time, China genuinely believed that these hostile policies were a ‘glitch’ of the Trump administration, and sought to engage Biden positively to try and establish a course correction. It was wrong, it was very wrong. The Biden administration has not only embraced the foreign policy consensus which former President Donald Trump created, but has doubled down on it uncritically and made things even worse. This has empowered hawks in Beijing, including President Xi Jinping himself, who has now directly called out the US, to arrive at the conclusion that the relationship with the US is beyond saving. The domestic political climate within the US is so toxic that is questionable the Biden administration even controls its foreign policy at all. 

World War III has already begun. And the imperial USA is going to lose that war.

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Barbarossa

Big Serge has a detailed article on Operation Barbarossa which is well-researched, insightful, and very long. Anyone interested in WWII history, and anyone who hopes to make any sense of what is happening in Ukraine, would do well to read the entire thing.

Soviet preparation for war had focused on material factors – the sheer size of tank, artillery, and aircraft inventories – while neglecting the professional aspects of command, communications, and coordination. Consequentially, despite adequate equipment and weaponry, the Red Army was, very simply, outmatched by the nimbler and more responsive Wehrmacht.

In the first place, the performance of the Red Army cannot be separated from the fact that Stalin had conducted a widespread purge of his own officer corps only a few years prior to the outbreak of war. This appalling churn in the command hierarchy had occurred at the same time that the Red Army was expanding; as a result, Soviet officers tended to be rapidly promoted and were for the most part in over their heads early in the war, fighting a highly trained, experienced, coolly competent German officer corps, which had by now successfully undertaken two large campaigns in France and Poland, along with a variety of other specialized operations from Norway to Greece. The basic factors of experience and training were thus hilariously disposed in Germany’s favor.

At the same time, the Red Army lacked a dedicated communications system and relied on civilian telephone and telegraph lines, many of which were quickly cut by the Germans. It was not uncommon during the early phases of the war for Soviet officers to have to inquire with local communist party officials (the party did have access to wireless communications) as to where the Germans were and how far they had advanced.

The Red Army fought bravely but was unprepared for war at Germany’s pace
These two factors – an overwhelmed officer corps and a broken communications system – had a particularly deadly synergy. Different levels of the command hierarchy were cut off from each other and blind, while at the unit level, commanders were simply unable or unwilling to take initiative. Furthermore, the… shall we say peculiarities of the Stalinist system left the officer corps with instincts that were oriented towards political survival, rather than military exigency, and this meant not making drastic unilateral decisions.

This was an absolutely central aspect of war making that Stalin and the communists simply did not grasp; they had focused on churning out tanks, guns, and shells, while neglecting the command and control functions of the army. The Germans, quite simply, were prepared to fight war at a different pace than the Soviets: German commanders were more experienced, more decisive, more precise, more willing to act independently, and more level headed. The Red Army consequentially resembled an enormous, muscle bound fighter, but with a diseased nervous system and bad eyesight.

These vulnerabilities made the Red Army particularly susceptible to the Wehrmacht’s approach to warfighting, which brought overwhelming firepower and violence at the point of attack to allow rapid penetration and movement, creating an encircled pocket, or what the Germans called a kessel, for cauldron – which could then be liquidated. By fighting multiple kesselschlachts, or encirclement battles, the Wehrmacht planned to annihilate the Red Army and destroy the Soviet Union’s capacity to resist by the autumn of 1941. The objective was very clear: destroy Soviet fighting power. Annihilating the Red Army took absolute priority over capturing any specific geographic markers. Hitler himself had remarked that even Moscow was “of no great importance.” Rather, the objective of Barbarossa was to destroy Soviet manpower: “The mass of the army”, read the Barbarossa directive, “is to be destroyed in bold operations involving deep penetrations by armored spearheads, and the withdrawal of elements capable of combat into the extensive Russian land spaces is to be prevented.”

This last portion is the key to the concept of Barbarossa, but we shall return to this later.

The first shots fired in the cataclysmic Nazi-Soviet war came in the form of an aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe, which attacked over 60 frontline Soviet air bases early on June 22. The Red Air Force lost over 1200 aircraft on the first morning of the war, ensuring German control of the air all along the line of contact. On June 24, literally two days into the war, Soviet western front headquarters informed Moscow that “Enemy aviation has complete air dominance.” The wholesale destruction of the Red Air Force’s frontline units was one of the most remarkable events in the history of warfare, yet it occurred so quickly that it receives scant mention in much of the war’s historiography; it is as if the Soviet air force simply vanished into thin air. Meanwhile, German advance teams managed to cut many civilian telephone and telegraph lines, throwing the Red Army’s command and control system into disarray and forcing the NKVD (which operated a wireless radio communication system) to act as middlemen to relay orders to the army. With the Red Army severely disoriented and bereft of air support, on came the fearsome German mechanized package.

The Soviet response was woefully inadequate. 1941 would be a year of terrible mistakes, but above all, what high level Soviet leadership – including and especially Stalin – did not understand was just how much could be won or loss in the opening moments of the war. By neglecting to put the Red Army on full combat alert, the regime allowed the Wehrmacht to achieve tactical, but not strategic surprise. Years later, one Soviet Marshal, Andrei Grechko, would make the tongue in cheek remark that the government and senior commanders were fully prepared for the outbreak of war, and the only people surprised by the German attack were the Red Army soldiers on the front line. What Stalin’s team did not comprehend was that tactical surprise, mixed with Germany’s particularly aggressive and mobile approach to war and the Soviet Union’s sclerotic command system, could produce a total catastrophe.

It is interesting to note that Big Serge tends to support Suvorov’s Icebreaker hypothesis, which is that Stalin was preparing to invade Central and Western Europe, but was taken by surprise by the timing and effectiveness of the German offensive. And indeed, the most convincing aspect of the hypothesis is the extreme forward placement of the 60 Soviet air bases, which led to the incredible destruction of the Soviet air forces.

it occurred so quickly that it receives scant mention in much of the war’s historiography

I would argue that it receives scant mention because it destroys the narrative that the German attack on the Soviet Union was unprovoked and took place solely as a consequence of Hitler’s vast imperial ambitions.

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