Tag: war

Strike Two

There are signs that Russia is going to be launching another Oreshnik missile strike very soon.

Russia has issued another Notice To Air Missions (NOTAM) closing its air space over Kapustin Yar. This was the area from which Russia launched its new Oreshnik Ballistic Missile at Ukraine last week.

Since that Russian launch, which utterly obliterated a Soviet-era munitions factory inside Ukraine, the Ukrainians have again used American-supplied ATACMS to launch at least THREE MORE attacks into Russia, primarily in the Kursk region.

It seems logical to believe Russia is going to launch again as response to Ukraine continuing to use west-supplied missiles to strike interior Russia.

One might also theorize that it won’t be just one Oreshnik this time.

The NOTAM Begins on 11-27-2024 at 0400 UTC.

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Asking For Trouble

The US military is deploying missile bases in Japan and the Philippines in support of an anticipated war with China over Taiwan:

The U.S. military will set up temporary bases along Japan’s southwestern Nansei island chain and the Philippines to deploy missile units in the event of a Taiwan contingency, sources familiar with Japan-U.S. relations said Sunday.

The deployment of the missile units will be incorporated in the first joint operation plan for the United States and Japan to cope with a contingency involving Taiwan and China, which regards the self-ruled island as its own, to be formulated in December.

The U.S. Marine Littoral Regiment, which possesses a multiple-launch High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, will be deployed along the island chain stretching from the Japanese prefectures of Kagoshima and Okinawa toward Taiwan, according to the sources.

From an early stage, when a Taiwan contingency becomes highly imminent, temporary bases will be set up on inhabited islands of the island chain, based on U.S. military guidelines for dispatching Marines in small formations to several locations.

The Japan Self-Defense Forces is expected to mainly engage in logistical support for the marine unit, including supplying fuel and ammunition.

Apparently bravado and bluff is the order of the day. They’re not limiting their imperial overstretch to Europe.

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The Next Russian Target

Russia has publicly warned Poland and the USA that it intends to strike a US military base in Poland soon:

Russia is now warning about a new attack on a US base in Poland with “advanced weapons,” only hours after they reportedly launched intercontinental missiles inside Ukraine in response to Ukraine sending US-made ballistic missiles into Russia. According to the New York Times, America’s “President” Joe Biden gave Ukraine permission to launch the missiles, which was a major shift in US policy.

The US base at Redzikowo, which opened Nov. 13, is part of a broader NATO missile shield — known as “Aegis Ashore” — that can intercept short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles, according to the alliance.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova made the announcement today: “This long-term America’s and NATO’s construction, which lasted for almost a decade and totally neglected Russia’s security concerns, has been the focus of our attention from the standpoint of compensating countermeasures. Given the nature and level of threats posed by such Western military facilities, the missile defense base in Poland has long been added to the list of priority targets for potential destruction, which, if necessary, can be executed with a wide range of advanced weapons.”

Rumor has it that three “TOPOL-M” ICBMS have been observed on the move with their launchers. However, I very much doubt Russia would strike using the 1 megaton nuclear warheads that the missiles usually carry, since a) nukes may not actually exist and b) a conventional strike would suffice to deliver the warning without escalating to the nuclear level.

Since NATO is already at war with Russia and has launched long-range missile strikes inside Russia, there is no reason Russia should not proceed to methodically destroy every US base located in all the countries on its borders. NATO already escalated, and if the Russians have learned one thing from their experience with NATO, it is that even if one doesn’t give it an inch, it will take hundreds of miles.

If the Russians do destroy the base in Poland, it’s going to be interesting to see the response of the people who have hitherto believed the claims that all of the Russian missiles targeting Ukraine, and all of the Iranian missiles targeting Israel, have been shot down.

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The Rhetoric of London Larry

The British are gradually beginning to realize that they have bitten off far more than they can possibly chew, and that their time-honored method of providing the decisive force to help one side or the other have the advantage in the conflict is not going to work in the current situation:

Putin’s aim is not to defeat us in military combat: he knows he cannot – for now – win against the combined might of Nato, while Beijing remains unlikely to commit its millions of troops to his cause.

His aim instead is to instil cowardice in the general population – to cause ordinary Britons to turn their backs on Ukraine, and demand that their own government stop supporting the defenders.

Why support Ukraine, these siren voices will sing, when the price is misery at home?

Why do we maintain and expense a ‘tripwire’ force in Estonia?

What is the point of Nato now that an isolationist Trump is heading back to the White House?

Surely it is better to pull out of these entanglements and concentrate on our own problems?

Yet if we allow Russia to conquer Ukraine, the result will not be perfect peace. Instead, the seeds will be sown for a future conflict, one in which Britain will be in a far more parlous position.

Instead of kowtowing to our foes, we should rekindle the spirit that won previous epic contests — the world wars against Germany and its allies, and the cold war against Soviet Communism.

We need, too, a new arsenal of crafty, painful counter-measures – for example seizing the frozen £250billion assets of Russia’s central bank and using it to arm and rebuild Ukraine.

So long as our enemies believe they can attack us with impunity, they will not cease from doing so. That is why we must continue to support the Ukrainians – and show Putin that we will not back down.

Let’s count the errors:

  1. Putin’s aim is not to defeat Britain in military combat. His aim is to remove a structural threat to Russia that has spread from the middle of Germany to his borders, a threat that the USA created unnecessarily by breaking its promises to not expand NATO in return for Russia abandoning its occupation of East Germany.
  2. Beijing will absolutely stand by Russia, and has no need to send troops to Europe in order to provide decisive military aid the Russians. It can quickly and easily remove more than half the military forces capable of being brought to bear in Europe by simply pursuing its own objectives. That’s how military alliances work when properly conceived. Forget Taiwan. Just one move aimed at South Korea or Japan would be sufficient to cause the US military to abandon all support for Europe.
  3. Russia can defeat “the combined might of NATO”. It has already done so. If Putin wanted to go all the way to Normandy, he could. Russia has lost 70,000 soldiers, one-quarter of one percent of the number of Russians it lost in WWII, while inflicting casualties at a rate that exceeds that of the historical delta in favor of the IDF in the Arab-Israeli wars.
  4. The British public already wants their government to stop spending money on Ukraine. There are already mass demonstrations against the Labour government’s rapacious new tax schemes. That’s not cowardice, that’s putting the British national interest ahead of Clown World’s interest in Ukraine.
  5. Russia has frozen an equivalent amount of European assets. Stealing the frozen Russian assets and giving them to Ukraine will be counterbalanced by the Russians liquidating those European assets and utilizing them. This is an obviously futile threat.
  6. It is not within the British power to “allow” Russia to conquer Ukraine. Russia has already defeated both Ukraine and NATO in Ukraine; if Ukraine is not permitted to surrender, Ukraine will be conquered and occupied.
  7. There will be no rekindling “the spirit that won previous contests” because the multiracial, multicultural morass of New Britain is not inhabited by the same British people who contributed to the victory of the Allies in WWII. Furthermore, it was the Russian people who won the war; the British population would have been 60 percent smaller if they had suffered the same number of fatalities that the Russians did.

This is just rhetorical bluster, no different than the “mother of all battles” posturing we became accustomed to hearing from Baghdad Bob. London Larry is no more convincing, and every bit as deluded about the military prospects for the British military, as Baghdad Bob was about those formidable forces of the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein.

UPDATE: Clown World’s most-likely replacement for Zelensky, Valery Zaluzhny, points out that North Korea, Iran, and China are already fully allied and aligned with Russia. Not only that, but they are much more likely to stand by Russia than the USA, the UK, or the European nations are to continue “supporting” Ukraine once either a) Russia decides to cross the Dnieper, b) Russia drops the hammer on the UK or a European state, or c) the next front goes hot.

Ukraine’s former military chief has warned that World War Three is already underway – with Vladimir Putin’s autocratic allies, North Korea, Iran and China, openly supporting his forces on the battlefield. Valery Zaluzhny, who is now Ukraine’s envoy to the United Kingdom, told the UP100 award ceremony in Kyiv: ‘I believe that in 2024 we can absolutely believe that the Third World War has begun.’ The General said that as of this year, ‘Ukraine is no longer facing Russia. Soldiers from North Korea are standing in front of Ukraine.’

UPDATE: Uncle John calls a scripted bluff.

Note incongruities. Beast media is running two incompatible nonsense narratives. A) crumbling Putin’s impotent rage and B) OMG nuclear war. It’s not which is right. It’s sowing chaos. Chaff. Put down a marker. No one will be using “nukes”.

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Russia’s Warning

Russia hit Ukraine with an ICBM containing multiple conventional warheads in response to the long-range strikes by the USA and the UK on its territory. The message is clear: next time, these might not be conventional warheads and they might not be hitting Ukraine.

However, the willingness of the Clown World leaders to risk nuclear war does tend to suggest that Big Bear and the other nuclear skeptics might be correct. What if they’re not crazy, they’re simply willing to blow the cover off the official story and allow the world to discover the nonexistence of nuclear weapons? That’s what Occam’s Razor would suggest, anyhow.

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Ethnic Cleansing and Annexation

First Gaza, now the West Bank. Seymour Hersh reports that Israel is going to attempt to annex the West Bank before President Trump takes office in January:

Israel, fortified by bombs and funding from the Biden administration, is escalating the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands from the north of Gaza to the south, amid fierce bombing and the deprivation of food and water for those who stay behind. This is continuing amid marches and other demonstrations sponsored by the religious right in Israel whose leadership also is calling for north Gaza to be turned over to Israeli settlers. What was a worrisome rumor in Gaza more and more seems like a reality.

Control over all of Gaza and the West Bank is the core demand of the religious right in Israel that now dominates the government. I was told this week by a well-informed Washington official that the Israeli leadership will formally annex the West Bank in the very near future—perhaps in two weeks—in the hope that the decisive step will end, once and for all, any talk of a two-state solution and will convince some in the skeptical Arab world to reconsider financing the planned reconstruction of Gaza.

It’s fascinating to see how many of the parties that have been aggressive over the last three years are getting even more aggressive as the clock runs out on Clown World. I don’t see this working out as smoothly as the Netanyahu regime might be hoping, assuming that the report is real and not just a trial balloon.

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Germany Suicides Even Harder

It’s very, very difficult to imagine what the NATO mouthpieces currently pretending to run Germany think they’re going to accomplish by threatening to suicide Germany even harder by throwing its young men and women on the same altar they’ve sacrificed the German economy:

Now Germany reveals plans to mobilise national defence and 800,000 NATO troops after Kremlin nuke threat – as US announces new weapon Kyiv can use to stop Russia after allowing long-range missile strikes.

Ukraine’s strike on an ammunition depot in Russia’s Bryansk region yesterday with US-supplied ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) meets these criteria, with Moscow saying that it marks a ‘new phase of the Western war’. ‘This is, of course, a signal that they want to escalate,’ Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said, while foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin said attempts by NATO countries to facilitate Ukrainian missile strikes deep inside Russia ‘would not go unpunished’.

In Eastern Ukraine, Russia’s forces are steadily grinding towards the logistics hub of Pokrovsk having taken large swathes of territory in the Donetsk region in recent months. Putin’s army took 185 square miles of Ukrainian territory in October, a record since the first weeks of the conflict in March 2022, according to an analysis of data provided by the real-time conflict tracker from the Institute for the Study of War.

Now, where are those “800,000 NATO troops” going to come from? Not Poland, the Scandinavian countries or the Baltics. They’re talking about US troops, mostly, but there is no way President Trump is going to send more US troops to Germany; he’s far more likely to withdraw all the troops that are already there.

Simplicius points out that the IMF, the World Bank, and the CIA have now all confirmed that Russia is decisively winning its war with NATO and its member states on economic terms as well as in the military context.

A couple months back, you may recall World Bank announced that as per their calculations, Russia had finally surpassed both Germany and Japan in GDP PPP. However, the official IMF and CIA figures still scoffed at this, with Russia trailing both countries on their counts. This allowed the popular narrative to be maintained that the World Bank figures were some kind of inaccurate fluke or anomaly.

Well, the IMF has just done their latest report and has officially concluded that Russia has blown past both Germany and Japan as of 2024, and is now the number four economy in the world. And not only that, but the IMF has Russia in the lead by an even larger margin than World Bank. On top of which, the CIA also updated their numbers and likewise reflects Russia at the number four position.

This means that the longer Germany persists in its futile denial of the need to stop supporting Ukraine and encourage it to surrender, the worse off the Germans and the other Europeans will be. Time, attrition, and economics are all on the side of the Russians, and more importantly, their allies in China, North Korea, and Iran.

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The Macgregor Plan

Col Douglas Macgregor’s five-point plan for updating the US military for its actual 21st Century challenges:

Toward a New National Military Strategy

For real and meaningful reductions in the current $1 trillion national defense budget to occur, national command authorities must alter the nation’s strategic focus. New national security legislation must move the posture of U.S. forces away from military interventions focused on nation-building, democratization, or alleged threats. Instead, the defense posture should focus on the Western Hemisphere, learning to avoid patterns of behavior antithetical to U.S. interests.

The following five points offer the foundation for a new national military strategy that is both affordable and sustainable within the new multipolar, international system of the 21st century:

            •          Defend America First: Reserve the use of American military power for defense of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Secure U.S. borders, coastal waters, and airspace. Military power may be used to defend American citizens and identified vital strategic interests at home and abroad. However, unless the United States’ vital strategic interests or territory are directly attacked, Washington will avoid the use of force.

            •          Maintain Strategic Military Power: Ensure U.S. freedom of action in areas of strategic importance by preserving and enhancing the American military’s core capabilities. Identify, defend, and maintain critical lines of communication and a reduced number of overseas bases needed for the execution of these tasks.

            •          Declare a “No First Use” Doctrine for Nuclear Weapons: Maintain the scientific-industrial capacity to wage high-end conventional warfare and build nuclear weapons, but recognize that the alleged advantage of striking first with nuclear weapons is illusory. Preventive or preemptive war is unwise and immoral and should be excluded from American military strategic planning.

            •          Establish an Operational National Defense Staff: Develop, update, and implement a refined Unified Command Plan to dramatically reduce unneeded overhead and improve the U.S. Armed Forces’ responsiveness to national command authority. This action requires legislation to place a “Chief of Defense” in the chain of command with real authority, not just advisory responsibility.

            •          Build New Armed Forces for the 21st Century: America needs a strong military designed to protect the United States in the 21st century, not an anachronistic and expensive industrial-age structure with enormous overhead and few fighters.

The one thing I think is missing from the plan is addressing the strategic retardery that engulfs Washington. There are far too many military neophytes who don’t know the first thing about war, or even math, who are involved in establishing the USA’s military goals. Perhaps starting with banning all dual-citizens from being permitted any involvement in military planning or geopolitical strategy would be a good start.

It doesn’t matter how excellent all the other aspects of the military are if you’re going to permit a few ambitious Peruvian-Americans to direct all US military assets to serve the interests of Peru.

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Should Have Stayed Neutral

Swedes are rapidly discovering that a) listening to their government is foolish and b) joining NATO has only reduced their national security by putting them at risk of being nuked.

Sweden is sending out five million pamphlets to residents urging them to prepare for the possibility of war, with instructions on how to stockpile food and even seek shelter during a nuclear attack, as fears grow of a conflict between Russia and NATO. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Stockholm has repeatedly urged Swedes to prepare both mentally and logistically for a possibile conflict, citing the worsening security situation in its vicinity.

The booklet ‘If Crisis or War Comes’, sent out by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), contains information about how to prepare for emergencies such as war, natural disasters, cyber attacks and terrorism.

‘An insecure world requires preparedness. The military threat to Sweden has increased and we must prepare for the worst – an armed attack,’ its new introduction states. In one of the more worrying excerpts, which harks back to advice given by governments during the darkest days of the Cold War, it informs people of the risk of nuclear weapons.

If they’d simply stayed neutral, they wouldn’t have to worry about going to war with a nuclear power. But, when you’re dumb enough to sign up for war as a US proxy, well, you’re going to assume a level of risk that you’re simply not going to be able to handle.

As Henry Kissinger once observed, while being an enemy of the USA is dangerous, to be its friend is fatal. NATO has not, cannot, does not, and will not protect anything.

If a small nation wants to stay out of a large war, neutrality is always its best bet. See: Portugal, Spain and Switzerland during WWII.

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History in the Making

I am awed and dumbstruck at the opportunity to witness something this significant and epic, even if it’s only on video.

Drone wars: Russian net-throwing drone intercepts Ukrainian net-throwing drone. Perhaps the first duel of its kind.

Imagine having been able to witness the first manned aerial duel during WWI. This may have been the first unmanned air duel in human history, and soon we’ll probably be able to see the first AI air combats. That’s not the only callback to WWI, as another thing to note is the terrain below, which is so cratered by shells that NASA could fake another Moon landing there.

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