Tag: war

Israel Invades the West Bank

Apparently the Gazacaust wasn’t enough, so the IDF has entered the West Bank in force now.

Having failed to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, Israel on August 28 began a war on the West Bank, dubbed ‘Operation Summer Camps’.

This Israeli assault on West Bank areas is the largest since 2002, with thousands of Israeli soldiers, supported by helicopters and drones, invading northern West Bank cities, particularly targeting the refugee camps of Jenin, Tubas, and Tulkarem.

I don’t know how much longer the US media is going to be able to pretend this isn’t a long-planned ethnic cleansing. I suppose the Israeli government figures they’ve gotten as much as they can out of the “helpless victims” routine and so it’s time to switch to mask off mode.

But this primarily strikes me as an escalation meant to encourage Iranian action before the Palestinians can further attrit the IDF and its US supplier.

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How to Get Your Ship Sunk

US Navy officers were caught putting a contraband Starlink satellite dish on their ship so they could stream TV and movies:

Today’s Navy sailors are likely familiar with the jarring loss of internet connectivity that can come with a ship’s deployment. For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.

But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.

As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.

So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.

It’s like the idiotic mercenaries in Ukraine who carry their cell phones around with them until Mr. Kaliber or Mr. Iskander comes to visit, only on a grand scale. I think we can definitely say that this officially marks the end of the Pax Americana and the US Navy ruling the oceans. This navy will be lucky if any of its ships survive contact with the enemy. I mean, it’s already lost one battle against the landlocked forces of Yemen.

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Clowns are Falling

Sweden’s Foreign Minister unexpectedly resigned on the same day that the Kiev regime fired what seems to be about half of its cabinet.

Tobias Billstrom, who oversaw Sweden’s accession to NATO, has announced his resignation as foreign minister and retirement from politics, offering no reason for the move. Billstrom, 50, was first elected to the Swedish parliament in 2002 and was appointed foreign minister in 2022… As his biggest achievement over the past two years, Billstrom listed Sweden’s abandonment of its 200-year neutrality to join NATO “after a long and sometimes challenging process.”

I suspect the reason for his sudden resignation is that more Swedish “instructors” were killed in the recent double-Iskander missile strike in Poltava than have been reported. The number of KIA is officially 41, but Ukrainian locals are reporting up to 760 bodies in the morgue. To go from 200 years of safe neutrality to losing dozens of military officers in a single Russian strike is a catastrophe that the leading advocate of abandoning neutrality would have to be held responsible.

One hopes that the utterly deluded Swiss politicians who are so desperate to follow Sweden’s lead will learn from Billstrom’s example and abandon their insane campaign to sign Switzerland up for the same sort of military and economic devastation that is facing the NATO slave-nations.

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The Lead Villain of WWII

It wasn’t Stalin. It wasn’t Roosevelt. It wasn’t even Hitler. It was Winston Churchill, whose actions during and after WWI not only helped lay the foundations for WWII, but who unnecessarily caused millions to lose their lives by his determination to force Germany into a war of attrition.

My intention here is not to defend the actions of the Third Reich or any of its leaders, but only to support a narrow claim: that of all the belligerent leaders, Churchill was the one most intent on prolonging and escalating the conflict into a world war of annihilation. Germany and Italy did not want it – in fact, before the conquest of Western Europe, German leaders including Hitler were skeptical that they’d be able to take on Britain in a fight. We can be skeptical of Hitler’s motives for offering peace again and again, and for holding back against British civilians despite months and months provocations, but the fact is that Germany was offering peace, and by all accounts sincerely wanted it. After the annexation of Poland, Hitler told other party members, “The Reich is now complete.” Would Germany have eventually attack the Soviet Union? Perhaps. But they would not have done so in June 1941 if England had agreed to end a war which had no hope of victory short of expanding it into a much larger conflict, by bringing in the USA, USSR, or both.

Like the Turkish massacre of Armenians, the atrocities that took place in the east – for which the German perpetrators are responsible, make no mistake – could not have happened except in the chaos of a world war in which millions were already being killed. Because its so central to our founding ideology, we speak of World War 2 as if it was the best possible outcome, or certainly the least bad outcome, but any objective look shows that it was the worst possible outcome, and that it could have been avoided if not for the warmongers – chief among them Winston Churchill.

I’ve read Churchill’s own history of WWII. And his own justifications for his actions don’t add up even in his own words. The most damning evidence is his waging of a unilateral, one-way air war against German civilians immediately after the German military forces spared the trapped British soldiery at Dunkirk.

There were no good men in command of the Axis or the Allies. But then, as now, Clown World was the greater evil, as the state of our present world suffices to prove.

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Reading the Economic Winds

Turkiye has asked to join BRICS.

Turkiye has formally requested to join the BRICS group of emerging economies, Bloomberg cited informed sources as saying on 2 September.

Ankara “seeks to bolster its global influence and forge new ties beyond its traditional Western allies,” the sources said. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes “that the geopolitical center of gravity is shifting away from developed economies” and that the push to join BRICS “reflects its aspirations to cultivate ties with all sides in a multipolar world, while still fulfilling its obligations as a key member of NATO.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in early June that BRICS serves as a good alternative to the EU. Later that month, he confirmed that dialogue between Ankara and BRICS nations was ongoing – coming as Turkish frustration continued to grow due to stalled efforts to join the EU.

It wouldn’t be surprising if China and Russia inform Turkiye that before it can join BRICS, it has to leave NATO. With both the leading powers at de facto war with the USA, I don’t see how they can permit a country with an Article 5 obligation – however flimsy and easily-evaded – to go to war with them to join the organization. Of course, this may be part of the process that Erdogan anticipates; since BRICS is clearly of far more value to Turkiye than NATO, he might simply want the excuse of reacting to a BRICSian demand rather than proactively leaving NATO of his own accord.

But one way or another, I expect Turkiye to join BRICS and leave NATO. I also suspect that Macron’s brief and bizarre expression of interest in having France join BRICS was a test to see if BRICS would potentially consider accepting a NATO member, in order to see if it would be necessary to try forestalling Turkiye’s application.

And considering that Switzerland is still foolishly wandering down the path toward taking sides with NATO and the EU, Turkiye may well find themselves in an optimal geopolitical position, filling the very profitable space between BRICS and Clown World that Switzerland played in the 20th century during both World Wars and the Cold War.

UPDATE: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accepted the Kremlin’s invitation to attend the BRICS summit in the Russian city of Kazan next month, Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov said on Tuesday.

It looks like the Turks are changing sides. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ll know the total collapse of Clown World is upon us when Japan does the same.

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William Lind Wept

I have read The Maneuver Warfare Handbook. I know what maneuver warfare is. And Simplicius is correct, what we’re seeing in the disastrous invasion of Russia by the Ukrainian Armed Forces is not maneuver warfare:

Ukraine choosing a lightly guarded, strategically trivial rural border area to send a shock fist of their most elite brigades through against a bunch of unarmed conscripts is not the highpoint of “maneuver warfare”, and in no conceivable way heralds its return. Anyone can send a couple light cavalry battalions to go romping through an undefended countryside to temporary effect—but that is not at the heart of maneuver warfare’s basest definition.

The primary importance behind maneuver warfare in operational art revolves around defeating enemy armies. When you’re maneuvering around a place where no army even exists, you’re not really accomplishing much. If Ukraine had truly revived the art then it would have been able to effect this discipline against Russian reserves which subsequently arrived to dig in. But what happened? Ukrainian forces hit a wall and became quickly stalled by the slightest resistance from actual professional troops.

Anyone can “maneuver” around a small token complement of conscripts when they’re outnumbered five to one. The reason maneuver warfare was deemed dead on the main contact lines was because there, both sides are of comparable strength and armament—albeit sometimes asymmetrically.

The Kursk invasion was a move born of political desperation, there was no military justification for it nor was there even the most remote chance of somehow achieving either a tactical or a strategic advantage from it. And now that it has obviously failed, all that is left is attempting to provoke Russia into an escalation that will necessitate the entrance of the USA into a hot war against Russia.

But Russia already knows that, which is why neither Russia nor Iran has been responding in kind to Ukrainian and Israeli provocations.

Ukraine and Israel are trying to spark major regional wars which they believe will solve their own problems at the expense of others, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

When attrition, industrial capacity, and demographics are all on your side, there is no need for escalation.

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Weimar Britain

And no, this isn’t a result of Brexit. Germany is in even worse shape. But regardless, it is clear that the decision to back Ukraine has been a fatal one for the British economy, the coming collapse of which is becoming increasingly obvious in the wake of Ukraine’s recent defaulting on its massive debt:

22 July 2024: we have a deal!
Almost as soon as Zelensky’s visit in London concluded, the Government of Ukraine announced that a deal was reached with its main bondholders to restructure the country’s near-$20 billion worth of bonds, including a 37% reduction of the amounts owed. But this was only “an agreement, in principle,” reached with an “ad-hoc creditor committee,” and it wasn’t binding on all the bondholders. Instead, it imposed on Ukraine’s government “the Restructuring as soon as practicable,” to be implemented through a “consent solicitation.” In other words, Ukraine was expected to chase after its creditors and beg them to accept the deal, even offering them a 1.25% “consent fee.” Well, things were about to take a sharp turn for the worse…

24 July 2024: Ukraine strikes the Fitch iceberg
Only two days after Ukraine announced the deal with their bondholders, Fitch downgraded Ukraine’s credit rating from CC to C, reflecting extreme credit risk reserved for countries that “entered default or default-like process.” Significantly, Fitch made it explicit that “the publication of sovereign reviews is subject to restrictions and must take place according to a published schedule…”

31 July 2024: Zelensky ‘temporarily’ suspends debt repayments
Zelensky signed a law enabling Ukraine to suspend payments of external debts for two months (or longer).

Thursday, August 1 2024: debt repayments freeze takes effect
Bondholders’ grace period expires; Zelensky’s unilateral debt repayments freeze takes effect.

What’s peculiar about the British financial system is that the taxpayers are obliged to reimburse the Bank of England for any losses it sustains on its balance sheet assets. If the price of gilts on the bank’s balance sheet collapses, British taxpayers must cover those losses and make the bank whole. So, what kind of money are we talking about? As the the FT reported last July, the BOE has estimated it will require the Treasury to transfer a total of £150 billion by 2033 to cover expected losses on the central bank’s quantitative easing program.

So how much is £150 billion? Provided that things haven’t deteriorated since July 2023 (they have), we’re talking £2,240 per man, woman and child in Britain. Stand and deliver: that’s the ransom that the BOE is claiming from them! But given that the British workforce is only about half the population, and that private enterprise accounts for less than 55% of the British GDP, this sum represents nearly £10,000 per employee working in the private sector.

In all, the situation is impossible and all the cabinet reshuffles and cosmetic patches changed nothing of substance in the UK; they amounted to a sort of rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic as the ship is already sinking.

Translation: Ukraine is bankrupt and can’t even pretend that it’s going to repay all of its massive war-related debts after defeating the Russians. The economic collapse of the Ukrainian government will lead to a political collapse and the military collapse of its armed forces; Russia’s increasingly rapid advances in the Donbass are in part due to the beginning stages of the latter. And the surrender of Ukraine may lead directly to the economic collapse of Britain as well as several countries inside the EU, most likely those most deeply invested in Ukraine, which includes the Baltics, Germany, and Poland.

28 August 2024: Game Over? Ukraine Announces Partial Halt to Payments on Its Gargantuan Debt

This is the genius of Putin’s patient multi-front attritional strategy and why he has an economist running the Russian Ministry of Defense. He never needed to bomb Britain or Berlin in order to comprehensively defeat them. And as for the USA, well, China and Iran are taking the lead with regards to the Clown World’s major stronghold.

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So That Went Well

It didn’t take long for Ukraine to lose its first F-16. And by “not long”, I mean the very first mission. So much for the so-called game-changer.

Well, the quintessential ‘game-changer’ of all game-changers was unceremoniously shot out of the sky on its maiden mission. As I had stated from the get-go, F-16s were being utilized only in “safe” defensive roles in the far rear of the country to help shoot down Russian drones. Apparently even this task was too great for the poor F-16. But the more shocking detail was revealed when Ukrainian Rada rep Mariana Bezuglaya claimed on her official account that the F-16 was kiboshed by none other than a friendly American-made Patriot missile system. Face palm. Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh confirmed the loss but refused to comment on whether it was indeed a Patriot that brought the plane down.

All in all, it’s a testament to the fact that modern near-peer, high-intensity conflict is not about wunderwaffe and ‘game changer’ toys. There is no such thing as a golden bullet or unicorn weapon that can really move the needle in near-peer conflict. It’s all about the totality of what your nation as a whole can bring to the table, economically, militarily, productively, and in terms of willpower, political influence, morale, etc. Any single weapon system is meaningless in the grand scheme of things and can be destroyed easily by the plethora of available modern counter-systems.

Simplicius is right. As is Martyanov. Victor Davis Hanson’s division of the way of war into Eastern and Western variants needs an updating, because there is a more important and fundamental difference between the way a sea power wages war on an expeditionary basis, a land power wages war on an existential and attritional basis, and an air power wages war on an regime change basis. This is why Clown World is obsessed with gestures, gimmicks, and short-term game-changing moves that look pointless and insane from a land power perspective; not even when their threats prove utterly toothless do they understand that their defeat is as inevitable as was Japan’s in 1941.

UPDATE: Ukraine’s General Staff has confirmed that a Western-supplied F-16 fighter jet has been lost along with its pilot.

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Kursk was a UK Operation

Andrei Martynov and others have gradually come to the conclusion that the US military was actually not involved in the debacle of the Kursk invasion:

Many online commentators were surprised when footage of the Challenger 2 in action in Kursk began to circulate widely on August 13th. Furthermore, numerous mainstream outlets dramatically drew attention to the tank’s deployment. Several were explicitly briefed by British military sources that it marked the first time in history London’s tanks “have been used in combat on Russian territory.” Disquietingly, The Times now reveals this was a deliberate propaganda and lobbying strategy, spearheaded by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Prior to the Challenger 2’s presence in Kursk breaking, Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey had reportedly “been in talks about how far to go to confirm growing British involvement in the incursion towards Kursk.” Ultimately, they decided “to be more open about Britain’s role in a bid to persuade key allies to do more to help – and convince the public that Britain’s security and economic prosperity is affected by events on the fields of Ukraine.” A “senior Whitehall source” added:

“There won’t be shying away from the idea of British weapons being used in Russia as part of Ukraine’s defence. We don’t want any uncertainty or nervousness over Britain’s support at this critical moment and a half-hearted or uncertain response might have indicated that.”

In other words, London is taking the lead in marking itself out as a formal belligerent in the proxy war, in the hope other Western countries – particularly the US – will follow suit. What’s more, The Times strongly hints that Kursk is to all intents and purposes a British invasion. The outlet records:

“Unseen by the world, British equipment, including drones, have played a central role in Ukraine’s new offensive and British personnel have been closely advising the Ukrainian military…on a scale matched by no other country.”

Britain’s grand plans don’t stop there. Healey and Foreign Secretary David Lammy “have set up a joint Ukraine unit,” divided between the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence. The pair “held a joint briefing, with officials, for a cross-party group of 60 MPs on Ukraine,” while “Starmer has also asked the National Security Council to draw up plans to provide Ukraine with a broader range of support.” On top of military assistance, “industrial, economic, and diplomatic support” are also being explored.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that Martyanov’s observation that neither the British nor the US militaries have any idea of how to fight a war on this scale was spot-on. How the British think they can fund, plan, and help execute attacks on Russian soil without the world endorsing Russian reprisals on British soil is entirely beyond me. I mean, there is no amount of conceptual redefining and word magic that is going to defend these clearly belligerent actions and redefine them as non-belligerent.

The only thing I can come up with is that Britain is playing the same game with Russia that Israel is playing with Iran, which is “Mom, He Hit Me First”, in the hopes that provoking a reprisal will commit the USA to fighting the war for them. Unfortunately, neither the British nor the Israelis appear to understand that the global superpower days are over and the USA is no longer capable of successfully fighting Russia in Russia or Iran in Iran.

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No Carriers in the Pacific

The US Navy has lost control of the Pacific Ocean:

The U.S. Navy is facing a shortfall of deployed carriers in the Pacific as the buildup in the Middle East continues. The lack of carriers has left a critical gap in the West Pacific. The departure of USS Abraham Lincoln coincides with the change in homeport of USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) from Yokosuka, Japan to Bremerton, Washington. The Ronald Reagan‘s replacement, the USS George Washington (CVN 73) still in San Diego on a scheduled port visit.

The U.S. Navy’s other Pacific-based carriers are in port or in their maintenance availability period. Out of six carriers in the Pacific, the USS Carl Vinson recently participated in RIMPAC 2024, the USS Nimitz recently completed a six month planned incremental availability period for maintenance, the USS Ronald Reagan recently completed a homeport shift to Naval Base Kitsap, and the USS George Washington will remain in San Diego until the crew and equipment swap from USS Ronald Reagan is complete.

With no U.S. carriers in the Pacific for at least three weeks, the Navy is leaving a critical gap in coverage in a region where standoffs and incidents are common, as seen this week when a Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) vessel collided with a Philippines Coast Guard (PCG) vessel in the South China Sea near Filipino outposts in the region.

The Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense also announced several live fire exercises with precision guided weapons, including a series of tests with PAC-2 and Tien Kung III surface-to-air missiles and Hsiung Feng II-E anti-ship missiles.

Between the Middle East, maintenance periods, and the Indo-Pacific, the US Navy’s carrier fleet is stretched thin trying to uphold a high-demand presence worldwide.

It’s fascinating to see how the once-dominant power of the US Navy has so rapidly faded, without the Navy losing a single capital ship to enemy action. But the advancements in anti-ship missile technology are rendering surface ships even more vulnerable than aircraft; since the US has always been an air-and-naval power, these advancements have naturally affected the US military most and eliminated its global superpower status.

We’ll know that the USA has surrendered the Pacific to China when Japan formally switches sides and shuts down the US bases in the mainland, and especially, on Okinawa. This could be coming as soon as the next Japanese administration, depending upon whom is elected as the next leader of the Liberal Democratic Party.

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