Tag: war

Even though Biden has, to a certain extent, backed down, The Saker is still concerned about the prospects of war over Ukraine:

Bad news all around today.  The US has just slammed provocative sanctions against Russia even though the US ambassador to Moscow was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and clearly told that if the US imposes more sanctions there will be no meeting between Putin and Biden.

Then there is this: the US has informed the Turkish authorities that they will not send two USN ships into the Black Sea.  This is politically a good sign, but in military terms, this is what the US should be doing if they were preparing for war.  Why?  Because any USN ship in the Black Sea at the moment of the initiation of a conflict would be sunk withing minutes: not only do the Russians have formidable missiles – Bal and Bastion – they had SIX advanced diesel-electric submarines of the 636.3 class ready to “greet” them.  Keep in mind that engaging submarines without air cover is another form of collective suicide.

So, the phone call was a deception and the US is still going down the road towards war with Russia.

In my professional opinion, what I see is a joint preparation by the Ukronazis and the USA (along with the UK and Poland) to attack the Donbass and force a conflict upon Russia.

It is very hard for me to see how a war could be avoided.

UPDATE: Biden has just declared a national emergency in the USA in response to the Russian threat.  He will make a special address to the nation tonight.

I don’t have an opinion, simply because I have no confidence about who is actually calling the shots behind the scenes of the Biden Not-Administration. If it’s China or the neoclowns, there will be war. If it is the US military, there will not be war.

Biden, of course, has no idea what is going on. The question is, who is writing his script? 

The neoclowns are belatedly beginning to realize that a proxy war with Russia over Ukraine is not going to end well for them or their clown-puppet regime:

Ukraine has warned Russia that it will bear ‘very painful’ consequences if it invades as Vladimir Putin continues to mass his forces in eastern Europe. Dmytro Kuleba, the country’s foreign minister, added that Moscow is ‘openly’ threatening Ukraine with ‘destruction’ by stationing 80,000 troops along its border – with more arriving every day.

He issued the warning following a meeting with the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – NATO allies in the region – saying ‘the four of us condemn the exacerbation of the situation by Russia.’ 

‘The world is on the side of Ukraine and international law, and this is one of the elements of restraining Russia from reckless actions,’ he added.

He spoke as Joe Biden prepares to slap sanctions on Russia in response to bounties put on American troops in Afghanistan, attempts to interfere in US elections, and the SolarWinds cyber attack of federal government data which US intelligence services blame on Moscow. Sanctions are likely to include the expulsion of 10 Russians from the US including diplomats, extending a ban on US banks trading Russian sovereign debt, and targeted measures against 30 Russian entities, US media reported, saying the move could happen as soon as today.

In response, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that Mosow will respond in kind to any ‘illegal’ sanctions, adding that it ‘will not help’ the prospect of talks between Biden and Putin. He added that it is ‘too early’ to talk about de-escalating tensions along the Ukraine border despite Biden’s calls for restraint earlier in the week….

In another sign that Biden is now softening his tone towards Moscow, the deployment of two US destroyers into the Black Sea was cancelled last night.

Turkey had originally confirmed that Washington had asked for permission for two warships – the USS Donald Cook and USS Roosevelt – to transit through straits which it polices and into the Black Sea in a move that was assumed to be a deterrent to Putin.

But last night Turkey said the U.S. Embassy in Ankara had notified the foreign ministry of the decision, without giving a reason. U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment. 

Once more, we see Vladimir Putin demonstrating the difference between influence and power. It’s all fun and games until someone sends 100,000 troops supported by air, armor, and artillery on your border. However, it’s important to note that the USA is now clearly in a state of cold war with both Russia and China, only this time the economic, technology, and demographic trends are not in its favor.

Russia issues a pair of very clear warnings to the US about its continued provocations over Ukraine:

Two detachments of the Russian Army, along with three airborne units, are ready to act in the event tensions with the West escalate into full-blown fighting, Moscow announced on Tuesday following a surprise inspection of troops.

After paying a visit to the soldiers, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told journalists that the personnel met the standards required for the situation. “The troops have shown full readiness and ability to fulfill the tasks of ensuring the country’s military security,” he said. “Currently, these associations and formations are engaged in drills and exercises.”

Shoigu said that the redeployments had taken place “in response to the military activity of the alliance that threatens Russia.” The move comes amid escalating tension with the US-led NATO bloc and after bloody fighting in eastern Ukraine between Kiev’s forces and two breakaway republics….

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told journalists that there is “absolutely nothing” that requires the Americans’ presence near his country’s Black Sea shore, accusing the White House of trying to provoke Moscow.

“Provocative in the literal sense of the word: they are testing our strength, playing on our nerves. They won’t succeed,” he said, noting that Washington would also be better off staying away.

“It will be for their own good,” Ryabkov added, also dubbing Washington as Moscow’s “adversary.” His use of the term marks a departure from Moscow’s usual manner of referring to the Americans as “partners.” He also accused Washington of “doing everything to undermine Russia’s position in the international arena.”

The official’s words come after the US told Turkey that two American warships would pass through the Bosporus Strait into the Black Sea next week.

It is often said that there is stupid, there is very stupid, and there is invade Russia stupid. The rule is very simple and straightforward. If your name is not “the Great Chingiss Khan”, you do not invade Russia under any circumstances.

And especially not because a Jewish comedian holding political office is sufficiently ignorant of military matters to start a war on its borders. In Ukraine, Clownworld is not a metaphor, it is quite literally Clownworld.

Vladimir Putin has made it clear that Russia does not intend to fight its next war inside its borders. And I don’t think he’s referring to Ukraine either.

UPDATE: this doesn’t bode terribly well.

The Russian navy will hold snap live-fire drills in the Black Sea today as the first of two US warships is expected to arrive, the military has announced. Two missile ships – the Graivoron and Vyshny Volochek – will take part in target practice alongside the missile hovercraft Samum, accompanied by the frigate Admiral Makarov and mine-sweeping ship Ivan Golubets, the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet command said.

The sinking of a pair of destroyers is unlikely to awake the US public to the fact that the US military is no longer the global monopower it was from 1989 to 2015. Which is probably why the Russians won’t bother to sink them unless it becomes absolutely necessary:

I suspect that is the deal that the Biden not-Adminstration made with its paymasters in order for its support of his fake election. One defense expert even anticipates an invasion of Taiwan within three years:

Beijing’s incursions are part of a series of dry runs in preparation for an invasion of Taiwan, John Mills, former director of cybersecurity policy, strategy, and international affairs at the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, told The Epoch Times.

Mills projects that these exercises could culminate in a large-scale dry run in the next two years. These dry runs are necessary, Mills said, given the complexity of amphibious landing operations—as well as the fact that the Chinese military has never conducted a forced landing on a hostile power in a real-life situation before.

Any amphibious assault on Taiwan may also involve swarms of Chinese civilian merchant vessels and fishing boats, he said.

He believes an invasion could come in the next three years—much sooner than the six-year estimate given by U.S. Adm. Philip Davidson, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), during a congressional hearing in early March.

“If they haven’t done it in 10 years, I think Xi will probably have been removed from office. I think even six years is pushing it,” Mills said. He added that Xi could come under pressure to attack Taiwan to deflect attention away from internal problems, such as an economic crisis.

U.S. Adm. John Aquilino, the nominee to replace Davidson as head of INDOPACOM, at his confirmation hearing in March declined to endorse Davidson’s six-year estimate, but said the threat of a Chinese invasion is “much closer to us than most think.”

I would assume the plan is to invade Taiwan while their asset is still believed to be Commander-in-Chief of the US military and capable of misdirecting it. This explains why Ukraine is being actively encouraged to launch a suicidal war against Russia while asking to join NATO, as war in Ukraine would commit the US military to an unwinnable war against Russia, thereby providing China a free hand to operate in the South China Sea without US interference.

 Ron Paul asks “why is the Biden Administration pushing Ukraine to attack Russia?”

The unhinged US “experts” behind the 2014 coup against the elected Ukrainian president are back in power and they are determined to finish the job – even if it means World War III! The explicit US backing of Ukraine’s military ambitions in the region are a blank check to Kiev.

But it is a check that Kiev would be wise to avoid cashing. Back in 1956 the US government pumped endless propaganda into Hungary promising military backing for an uprising against its Soviet occupiers. When the Hungarians, believing Washington’s lies, did rise up they found themselves all alone and facing Soviet retaliation.

Despite the cruel US propaganda, at least Eisenhower was wise enough to realize that no one would benefit from a nuclear war over Budapest.

Why is it any of our business whether Crimea is part of Ukraine or part of Russia? Why is it any of our business if the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine prefer being aligned with Russia?

Why, for that matter, are unproven allegations of Russian meddling in our elections a violation of the “rules-based international order” but an actual US-backed coup against an elected Ukrainian government is not?

We are seeing foreign policy made by Raytheon and the other US military contractors, through cut-outs in government like Austin and others. Feckless US foreign policy “experts” believe their own propaganda about Russia and are on the verge of taking us to war over it.

It seems as if Americans are sleepwalking through this dangerous minefield. Let us hope they soon wake up before we’re all blown up.

Because the Trotskyites who fled the Soviet Union after Stalin won the intra-communist power struggle and infested the United States now run the Biden administration and they have been seeking to use the US military to take their revenge ever since.

As Ron Paul assiduously avoids noticing, the third- and fourth-generation followers of Leon Trotsky who call themselves “neoconservatives” and include people such as Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Ben Shapiro, and Doug Emhoff are entirely responsible for advocating these would-be wars on Syria, Russia, and Iran. It is not the defense contractors, who strongly tend to prefer Cold War-style arms buildups that don’t actually involve their overpriced products being put to the test.

Russia sends a clear message to the neoclowns: whatever you start in the Ukraine, we will finish:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that any attempts to start a new military conflict in Ukraine’s war-torn east could end up destroying Ukraine, the TASS news agency reported.

Translation: Knock it off, neoclowns, or we’ll take the whole of the Ukraine, even though we don’t want it. 

Ukraine knows they have no chance against Russia, but its foreign leaders can get paid well by offering up its land and people to serve as bait in the neoclowns’ endless War on Russia

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba announced this week that the country’s National Security and Defense Council had approved a strategy that is aimed at retaking Crimea and reintegrating the strategically important peninsula.

Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea, was annexed by Russia in March 2014, following a US-backed, far-right coup in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.

Announcing the move on Twitter, Kuleba wrote, “The signal is clear: we don’t just call on the world to help us return Crimea, Ukraine makes its own dedicated and systemic efforts under President [Volodymyr] Zelensky’s leadership.”

As part of its “3 pillars” strategy for retaking Ukraine, Kuleba notably stated that Zelensky’s administration sought “full Ukrainian sovereignty” over not just Crimea but that of the port city of Sevastopol as well, which serves as the home of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet.

Following Kuleba’s comments, Ukrainian President Zelensky announced via Twitter the creation of a Crimean Platform Initiative which the Ukrainian government described as “a new consultative and coordination format initiated by Ukraine to improve the efficiency of the international response to the occupation of Crimea, respond to growing security challenges, step up international pressure on Russia, prevent further human rights violations, protect victims of the occupying power and to achieve the de-occupation of Crimea and its return to Ukraine.”

The seeds of failure are always planted in the soil of previous success. 

Military Strategy Magazine devotes an entire issue to the immortal Carl von Clausewitz, the second-greatest military philosopher in human history:

As someone with a reputation for adhering to the teachings of Carl von Clausewitz it would seem odd if I were to do anything but commend the writing contained in this Military Strategy Magazine Special Edition to our readers, so please take that as a given.

My introduction to Clausewitz came via the late Colin Gray and his work Another Bloody Century. To that point I had been deeply skeptical of Clausewitz and his academic fan club, never having set foot in a university, attended any lectures and left school at 16. Thus it speaks in Clausewitz’s immense favor that when I actually engaged with the text and the more commonsense commentaries about it, On War immediately began to answer questions that had so far left me confused and bewildered as to the unedifying, confused and clown infested swamp which is modern military thought – and if you think that harsh, Clausewitz would probably not argue with that description because he wrote to clarify and inform his peers, not confuse them further with reputational writing intended to show how clever he was. Clausewitz may not live in the Corporals club, but he should be more of a welcome visitor than many think.

Clausewitz really lives and dies in Professional Military Education (PME). Romping through On War next to other works is a miserable introduction yet that is how many come to meet Clausewitz’s work, yet why should anyone bother? To quote Colin Gray, “if not Clausewitz, then who?”

Ironically, if PME was as practice and evidence based, as some claim, no one would need to teach or even read Clausewitz because a 189-year-old book should have been surpassed by clearer and better work found in modern curricula but barring this somewhat nugatory observation it is fair to state that both reading and understanding On War will never set you wrong or harm your understanding of War and Warfare.

In well over a decade as Editor of Infinity Journal, now Military Strategy Magazine (MSM), and many, many email exchanges and ‘blog’ posts, I have seen all the critiques of Clausewitz flounder, mostly on the simple fault of not having read the book, or not understood the words on the page.

As I have said many times before, Clausewitz is not beyond criticism. There are things he did not say, and things he did not say clearly or well. He was prone to overstatement and using analogies that were perhaps not the best. He didn’t mention naval forces. He didn’t deal as well as he might with Logistics or Intelligence, but very few have, and no other military theorist is held to same semantic standards or levels of rigor as Clausewitz, mainly due to the efforts of more failure prone theorists such as Fuller and Liddell-Hart, post 1918.

Read Clausewitz. Read On War. Everything and anything Clausewitz ever wrote, and make sure to read it more than once. If you don’t get it or think it’s turgid and boring, try and speak to those who don’t and ask for clarity and insights. No soldier or officer was worse at his job for having engaged with Clausewitz.

One of the things that is most striking about reading these various articles for anyone who has read Lind, van Creveld, and the Chinese duo of Qiao and Wang, is the utter necessity for more post-Clausewitzian thinking on strategy, operations, and tactics. Martin van Creveld was absolutely correct in his explication of the transformation of war, as the Clausewitzian framework has become too limited to serve as a sound philosophical basis to understand 21st century warfare.

That doesn’t render any of his core concepts less valid or important. Clausewitz absolutely remains relevant, and only a fool hell-bent on defeat would disregard his works anymore than one would disregard Sun Tzu’s aphorisms simply because the Chinese framework is outdated too. There is, for example, friction in “unrestricted warfare” just as there was on the Napoleonic battlefield. The point that I am making here, with all due respect and deference to the great Prussian, is that the Clausewitzian trinitarian framework no longer encapsulates war in all its forms, and therefore tends to suppress rather than support a comprehensive understanding of modern warfare.

At this point, it appears apparent that the US empire is not going to end with applause, or with a Sicilian Expedition, but rather a quiet retreat from the South China Sea:

Last fall, the U.S. Air Force simulated a conflict set more than a decade in the future that began with a Chinese biological-weapon attack that swept through U.S. bases and warships in the Indo-Pacific region. Then a major Chinese military exercise was used as cover for the deployment of a massive invasion force. The simulation culminated with Chinese missile strikes raining down on U.S. bases and warships in the region, and a lightning air and amphibious assault on the island of Taiwan.

The highly classified war game, which has not been previously made public, took place less than a year after the coronavirus, reportedly originating in a Chinese market, spread to the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, taking one of the U.S. Navy’s most significant assets out of commission.

Then in September in the midst of the war game, actual Chinese combat aircraft intentionally flew over the rarely crossed median line in the Taiwan Strait in the direction of Taipei an unprecedented 40 times and conducted simulated attacks on the island that Taiwan’s premier called “disturbing.” Amid those provocations, China’s air force released a video showing a bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons carrying out a simulated attack on Andersen Air Force Base on the U.S. Pacific island of Guam. The title of the Hollywood-like propaganda video was “The god of war H-6K goes on the attack!”

In case the new U.S. administration failed to get the intended message behind all that provocative military activity, four days after President Biden took office, a large force of Chinese bombers and fighters flew past Taiwan and launched simulated missile attacks on the USS Roosevelt carrier strike group as it was sailing in international waters in the South China Sea.

Little wonder that many foreign affairs and national security experts believe the global pandemic has accelerated trends that were already pushing the United States and China toward a potential confrontation as the world’s leading status quo and rising power, respectively. This month the Council on Foreign Relations released a special report, “The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War,” which concluded that Taiwan “is becoming the most dangerous flash point in the world for a possible war” between the United States and China…. What many Americans don’t realize is that years of classified Pentagon war games strongly suggest that the U.S. military would lose that war.

The USA is not going to go to war over Taiwan. Not even the most gung-ho, pro-military Southern family with a military tradition has any interest in sending its sons to die for a breakaway province of the foremost regional power in the Pacific, and the US Navy already knows it has no more ability to prevent the annexation of Taiwan than the British Navy had to prevent the annexation of Austria in 1938. And certainly not with China Joe Biden as nominal Commander-in-Chief.

Moreover, the strategy utilized by the Blue Team in the wargame to successfully deter the Red Team required a considerable amount of equipment, tactics, and training that the US military does not have.

This doesn’t mean war is out of the question in the near future. The foreign neoclown elite is still focused on making use of the US military to serve its purposes while it still can, which is why it is furiously trying to push wars in Syria, Iran, and Ukraine while completely ignoring Asia. And nothing could serve China’s strategic objectives better than for the US military to be tied down with a conflict with a major regional power on a front in Europe or the Middle East, which is why the possibility of even the most pointless, idiotic, and strategically insane military action by the US military cannot be counted out at this point in time.