Category Archives: Military

Zelensky Admits Ukraine Already Ran Out Of Ammo, by Andrew Korybko

U.S. taxpayers have been soaked for $100 billion plus and Ukraine has no ammo. Makes it kind of hard to fight a war. From Andrew Korybko at theautomaticearth:

The US-led West’s Mainstream Media (MSM) began reporting more accurately on the military-strategic dynamics of the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine since the start of the year, but the true test of their comparatively improved integrity will be whether they raise awareness about Zelensky’s latest damning admission. In an interview with Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, he candidly told his interlocutors that “We do not have ammunition. For us the situation in the East is not good.”

This is a major revelation for several reasons. First, it proves that Russia is winning NATO’s self-declared “race of logistics” in the sense that its armed forces still have ammo to continue fighting while the West’s Ukrainian proxies already ran out of that which their patrons provided over the past year. Second, the aforesaid aid that was already extended to this crumbling former Soviet Republic exceeds $100 billion, which makes Russia’s leading position in this “race of logistics” all the more impressive.

Third, Zelensky’s admission adds credence to what the Washington Post recently reported regarding how poorly Kiev’s forces are faring in this conflict, especially its “severe ammunition shortages” that one of its sources spoke about. Fourth, the preceding points drastically decrease the chances that Kiev’s upcoming counteroffensive will achieve much of anything and actually make it increasingly likely that such a move would be an epic mistake that could ultimately lead to a decisive Russian breakthrough.

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Why hypersonic weapons change everything, by Alex Krainer

Russia’s Kinzhal missile can fly at 15 times the speed of sound and one has taken out an Ukrainian weapons depot buried 500 feet underground and fortified with layers of concrete. It can also make short work of an aircraft carrier. From Alex Krainer at alexkrainer.substack.com:

They can sink ALL of the U.S. aircraft carriers, all at once

When it comes to all matters military, I have been following a handful of analysts among whom Croatian Admiral Davorin Domazet (retired) emerged as perhaps my favorite. He has deep and detailed command of technical matters (like Andreiy Martyanov he insists that you can’t prevail in modern warfare without deep knowledge of of advanced mathematics and probability). More importantly, he has perhaps the clearest understanding of the broad historical context of today’s clash between Russia and the western powers.

Unfortunately, Admiral Domazet does not give many interviews and none in English, but I thought that his last one was important enough to share more broadly in this article.

If you happen to speak Croatian/Serbian, you can find the interview, published on 17 March 2023 at this link. It runs over 2 hours.

The context is everything

Domazet is the only military analyst that I know of, who takes into account the history of western financial oligarchy, their Venetian roots, migration to Amsterdam where they formed the Dutch Empire, and subsequent move to London which, to this day remains the ideological and spiritual headquarters of the undead British Empire.

He has correctly labelled humanity’s enemy as the “western occult oligarchy,” and has even called the war in Ukraine as the clash between Christ and anti-Christ, underlining that the anti-Christ is in the west. Mind you, Croatia is a NATO member state and is, like Poland, a catholic Slavic nation, sharing even some of its cultural Russophobia (though it may not quite as rabid in Croatia as it is in Poland).

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Leading GOP Lawmakers Push To Send Cluster Bombs To Ukraine, by Tyler Durden

There’s no such thing as humane weapons, but ask Vietnam veterans and the 120 countries that have banned them just how inhumane cluster munitions are. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

So much for weapons deemed inhumane and banned under UN-backed international treaties… apparently it’s OK if they are used against Russians or other official enemies of the United States – at least according to the logic of some US lawmakers.

A group of four Republican members of Congress are urging President Biden to send Ukraine cluster munitions as part of the next major weapons package approval . “Ukraine is seeking the MK-20, an air-delivered cluster bomb, to release its individual explosives from drones, and 155 mm artillery cluster shells,” according to prior reporting in Reuters. These Republican hawks want to provide it.

AP: Cluster Bomb Unit containing more than 600 cluster bombs sits in a field in the southern village of Ouazaiyeh, Lebanon in 2006.

The Republican letter chastises the White House’s “reluctance to provide Ukraine the right type and amount of long-range fires and maneuver capability to create.”

The letter is signed by the following influential, high-level GOP Congress members: 

  • Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
  • Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
  • Mike McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
  • Mike Rogers the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee

Some 120 countries have banned cluster munitions as they have long been understood to be more indiscriminate than conventional weapons, given they randomly disperse small bombs over large areas.

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IRAQ 20 YEARS: Chris Hedges — The Lords of Chaos

Chris Hedges on what happened to those who told the truth about Iraq, from personal experience. From Hedges at consortiumnews.com:

The politicians and shills in the media who orchestrated 20 years of military debacles in the Middle East, and who seek a world dominated by U.S. power, must be held accountable for their crimes.

We’re Number One – by Mr. Fish

Two decades ago, I sabotaged my career at The New York Times. It was a conscious choice.

I had spent seven years in the Middle East, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief. I was an Arabic speaker. I believed, like nearly all Arabists, including most of those in the State Department and the C.I.A., that a “preemptive” war against Iraq would be the most costly strategic blunder in American history.

It would also constitute what the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the “supreme international crime.” While Arabists in official circles were muzzled, I was not. I was invited by them to speak at The State Department, The United States Military Academy at West Point and to senior Marine Corps officers scheduled to be deployed to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion.

Mine was not a popular view nor one a reporter, rather than an opinion columnist, was permitted to express publicly according to the rules laid down by the newspaper. But I had experience that gave me credibility and a platform. I had reported extensively from Iraq. I had covered numerous armed conflicts, including the first Gulf War and the Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq where I was taken prisoner by The Iraqi Republican Guard.

I easily dismantled the lunacy and lies used to promote the war, especially as I had reported on the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection teams. I had detailed knowledge of how degraded the Iraqi military had become under U.S. sanctions. Besides, even if Iraq did possess “weapons of mass destruction” that would not have been a legal justification for war.

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No, We Don’t Need More Nuclear Weapons, by Ryan McMaken

What we need is more sanity, but we’re not getting that. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

Republicans and Democrats may quibble over how federal tax dollars might be spent on various social welfare programs like Medicaid and food stamps. But alongside Social Security, there is one area of federal spending that everyone can apparently agree on: military spending. Last year, the Biden administration requested one of the largest peacetime budgets ever, at $813 billion. Congress wanted even more spending and ended up approving a budget of $858 billion. In inflation-adjusted terms, that was well in excess of the military spending we saw during the Cold War under Ronald Reagan. This year, Joe Biden is asking for even more money, with a new budget request that starts at $886 billion. Included in that gargantuan amount—which doesn’t even include veterans spending—is billions for new missile systems for deploying nuclear arms, plus other programs for “modernizing” the United States’ nuclear arsenal.

Indeed, over the past year, the memo has gone out among the usual advocates of endless military spending that the US needs to spend much more on nuclear arms. This is a perennial position at the Heritage Foundation, of course, which has never met a military pork program it didn’t like. Moreover, in recent months, the Wall Street Journal has run several articles demanding more nuclear arms. The New York Post was pushing the same line late last year. Much of the rhetoric centers on the idea that Beijing is increasing its own spending on nuclear arms and thus the United States must “keep up.” For instance, last month, Patty-Jane Geller insisted that the US is in an “arms race” with China. Meanwhile, writers at the foreign-policy site 1945 claimed Congress must “save” the American nuclear arsenal.

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The Not-So-Winding Road From Iraq to Ukraine, by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

There’s more similarities than differences between America’s involvement in Iraq and its involvement in Ukraine. The biggest difference is that U.S. troops have not”officially” entered Ukraine . . . yet. From Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies at antiwar.com:

March 19th marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as US and Western politicians.

While the US was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its “coalition of the willing” to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering US empire.

Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused US entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.

The architects of the US invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.

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‘Warfighting Imperative’: Navy Plans To Increase Climate Spending Nearly 40% In 2024, by Micaela Burrow

That’ll take out those Chinese in the war the U.S. is threatening. From Micaela Burrow at dailycaller.com:

US-MILITARY-NAVY-HARVEY MILK

(Photo by ARIANA DREHSLER/AFP via Getty Images

The Navy wants Congress to fund an additional $397 million in climate change resiliency programs in 2024, including money for electric vehicles and solar microgrids, according to budget plans revealed Monday.

If Congress grants the funding, total Navy and Marine Corps spending on climate-related programs, such as energy, installation resiliency, disaster preparedness and research and development in fiscal year 2024 will top $1.47 billion compared to $1 billion in FY 2023, according to budget documents (p. 131). The Navy says the plan “increases climate change resiliency by 39%” and supports its objective in “strengthening maritime dominance in order to defend the nation,” documents show.

“It is a national security and warfighting imperative for the [Department of the Navy] to address the impact of climate change on readiness, operations, and the ability to fight and win,” the budget highlights document states. (RELATED: Long Awaited US-Australia Submarine Pact Promises To Be A Windfall For American Defense Contractors: REPORT)

Rising shores and extreme temperatures that contribute to harsh coastal weather, seen as associated with man-made climate change, pose a serious risk to Navy and Marine Corps personnel, weapons and bases globally, according to the documents.

The Navy’s proposed budget includes funding to lease electric vehicles for non-tactical uses, construct EV charging stations and install various power-saving and backup equipment on department installations, the documents show. It also sets aside money for carbon sequestration projects, meant to restore natural environments meant to capture and store carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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Chris Hedges: Ukraine’s Death by Proxy

Ukraine is the new Afghanistan. From Chris Hedges at consortiumnews.com:

Proxy wars devour the countries they purport to defend. There will come a time when the Ukrainians will become expendable to the U.S. They will disappear, as many others before them, from U.S. national discourse and popular consciousness.

There are many ways for a state to project power and weaken adversaries, but proxy wars are one of the most cynical. Proxy wars devour the countries they purport to defend. They entice nations or insurgents to fight for geopolitical goals that are ultimately not in their interest.

The war in Ukraine has little to do with Ukrainian freedom and a lot to do with degrading the Russian military and weakening Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. And when Ukraine looks headed for defeat, or the war reaches a stalemate, Ukraine will be sacrificed like many other states, in what one of the founding members of the C.I.A., Miles Copeland Jr., referred to as the “Game of Nations” and “the amorality of power politics.”

I covered proxy wars in my two decades as a foreign correspondent, including in Central America where the U.S. armed the military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala and Contra insurgents attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. I reported on the insurgency in the Punjab, a proxy war fomented by Pakistan.

I covered the Kurds in northern Iraq, backed and then betrayed more than once by Iran and Washington. During my time in the Middle East, Iraq provided weapons and support to the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) to destabilize Iran. Belgrade, when I was in the former Yugoslavia, thought by arming Bosnian and Croatian Serbs, it could absorb Bosnia and parts of Croatia into a greater Serbia. 

Proxy wars are notoriously hard to control, especially when the aspirations of those doing the fighting and those sending the weapons diverge. They also have a bad habit of luring sponsors of proxy wars, as happened to the U.S. in Vietnam and Israel in Lebanon, directly into the conflict.

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On War With China, Australia Is Caught Between A Rock And A Pentagon, by Caitlin Johnstone

Militarily, Australia and the U.S. are joined at the hip. Economically, Australia and China are joined at the hip. It makes for an interesting situation because China and the U.S. view each other as adversaries. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

As part of Australian media’s relentless onslaught of warwithChina propaganda, the government-run Australian Broadcasting Corporation just aired a radio segment on RN Breakfast about the newly revealed details on the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal, featuring two guests who are enthusiastic supporters of the deal, and hosted by another enthusiastic supporter of the deal.

One of the guests, Australia’s former treasurer and ambassador to the United States Joe Hockey, made some interesting remarks.

“This locks us in with the United States for decades to come; is there a risk, as the smaller partner in this deal, we’ll just have to do what the US tells us when it comes to future wartime engagements?” host Patricia Karvelas asked Hockey.

“Well we’re already fully integrated with the United States military, and arguably have been for more than one hundred years,” Hockey replied. “We’re the only country in the world that has fought side-by side with them in every major battle for the last one hundred years. And already today a lot of our navy has the Aegis Combat System, which is an American combat system; our current Collins-class submarines use American torpedoes… and in every major way, communications systems and integration, we already have American technology, and we’re integrated with American systems. So there’s nothing new here in that regard.”

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Stop Making Trouble! By James Howard Kunstler

America’s ruling class is pushing a chaos agenda. From James Howard Kunstler at dailyreckoning.com:

If you think about it at all, can you come up with any good reasons why our country has involved itself in the Ukraine war? To defend democracy, many say? An emptier platitude does not exist in the vast slippery lexicon of spin.

To thwart Russia’s imperial overreach? You apparently have no clue about Ukraine’s history, ancient or modern. To incite an overthrow of the wicked Putin by his own people? The Russian president is more popular there now than even John F. Kennedy was here in 1962.

Oh, I know, I’m just parroting Russian propaganda by saying that. Isn’t that what they always say when you confront them with an uncomfortable truth about the war in Ukraine?

Meanwhile, Western “intelligence” sources and their mainstream media mouthpieces have been saying for about a year now that Russia was running out of ammunition. Well, they still have plenty of it, as the Ukrainians can painfully attest.

It’s actually the Ukrainians who are running out of ammo, which is why the U.S. and its NATO allies are looking under the couch cushions for any spare ammo they can find to send them.

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