Category Archives: Military

US To Open 4 New Sites In Philippines, Accelerating ‘Pivot To Asia’, by Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman

Posted on February 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

It’s not clear if the four Philippines sites will be enough to stop Chinese balloons. From Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman at libertarianinstitute.org:

Washington and Manila are close to inking an agreement that would see four new American installations opened in the Philippines. The new sites are part of a US military buildup in the Indo-Pacific to prepare for war with China.

According to the Washington Post, negotiations are ongoing but a deal between Manila and Washington is nearing completion. Once inked, American forces are expected to have new sites at four Philippines bases.

Two of the new facilities will be located in Luzon, in the northern half of the country. The military sites are expected to be used in a future war between Washington and Beijing, and “could give US forces a strategic position from which to mount operations in the event of a conflict in Taiwan or the South China Sea,” the Post reported.

In 2012, then-President Barack Obama adopted a more aggressive policy toward China – dubbed the “pivot to Asia,” the largest military buildup since World War II. Under the strategy, Washington has authorized billions of dollars for new bases, ships and weapons to be deployed to the Asia Pacific. The Pentagon aims to encircle China with two-thirds of all US air and naval forces.

The increased military activity has led to a string of deadly accidents in the region. A series of US warships have collided with civilian vessels, resulting in dozens of casualties. In 2018, an F-18 collided with a refueling aircraft off the coast of Japan, killing six.

The Joe Biden administration has accelerated the military buildup in the Pacific. Last week, the Department of Defense opened a new base in Guam. At the end of the year, the Pentagon awarded contracts to begin work on a new radar installation in Palau.

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Will U.S. ‘Interests’ Become Sacrificed on Altar of New Indo-Pacific Strategy? By Matthew Ehret

Posted on February 5, 2023 | 1 comment

Will the U.S. do any better with its Indo-Pacific strategy than its done with its Eurasian strategy? The question almost answers itself. From Matthew Ehret at strategic-culture.org:

The Anglo-American foreign policy hawks imagine that the world is yearning to be liberated from Beijing’s nefarious agenda to end poverty

As the trans-Atlantic world is pulled into the vortex of a McCarthyite nightmare with a renewed wave of anti-Russian and now anti-China hysterics, a wave of new “Asia Pacific” doctrines have emerged across captured states… I mean “member” states throughout NATO.

Starting with the February 2022 American ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’, similar anti-China programs have popped up left and right with one principled target in mind: eliminate the threat of China through every tool available.

By early June 2022, the UK announced its own branding of the Asia Pivot remixed into the oddly named ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ which focuses less on the liberal eco-friendly language of the EU and devotes itself entirely to vastly increasing its military presence in China’s backyard.

After NATO’s June 2022 Madrid Summit officially designated China as ‘a systemic rival’, Canada’s foreign ministry announced its own Indo-Pacific Strategy in November 2022 followed by an absurd 26 page program published in January 10, 2023 outlining the details of Canada’s new role in the Pacific (which will be the subject of a subsequent report).

On January 25, 2023 NATO’s ironically named ‘Science for Peace and Security Program’ launched a new ‘cooperative initiative on the Indo-Pacific, followed by a January 30, 2023 Atlantic Council Indo-Pacific Security Initiative focused on dealing with “China’s growing threat to the international order”. The same day the Atlantic Council unveiled this new doctrine, an American intelligence spook named Markus Garlauskas was named the program’s new director.

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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The Chinese ‘Spy Balloon’ Story As Manufactured Crisis: An Alternative Reading, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 5, 2023 | Leave a comment

SLL is finding it hard to work up much excitement one way or the other about this application of a decidedly legacy technology. Here’s an article that seems to make sense. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Previous constant headlines of the Ukraine-Russia war were put on pause Friday into Saturday as the American public’s attention and discourse got temporarily consumed by the bizarre Chinese ‘spy balloon’ saga, which grew more dramatic by the hour until it was shot down by the Pentagon over the Atlantic Ocean.

But few are currently asking the necessary deeper questions related to the timing. Given the last major balloon crisis to take over 24/7 network news coverage ended up being a complete hoax (remember the “balloon boy” stunt of 2009 which had the world breathless and on edge for a full news cycle?), the current context to the Chinese balloon story and the question of cui bono is worth a deeper dive…

Images: The Billings Gazette/AP

Entrepreneur and geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand, who as a Westerner has spent many years living in China and frequently attempts to correct the often misleading analysis of mainstream press reports, offers an ‘alternative view’ of what’s fast unfolding below [emphasis ZH’s)…

* * *

“I took a bit of time to dissect the “spy balloon” story – both how it is portrayed in the US and China’s response,” Bertrand begins a lengthy thread. As you’ll see, the more you think about it, the more stunned you get at the sheer absurdity of the whole thing.”

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The New York Times Just Admitted That The West’s Anti-Russian Sanctions Are A Failure, by Andrew Korybko

Posted on February 4, 2023 | 1 comment

Eventually the mainstream media usually catches up to the alternative media. In the AM, plenty of commentators suggested the sanctions would fail, some before the sanctions were even implemented. From Andrew Korybko at theautomaticearth.com:

Andrew Korybko approached me a few days ago asking if we could share some of his work. I don’t view the Automatic Earth as a publishing platform, and given all the censorship of the past 2-3 years (it’s expensive!), I will be very cautious about letting anyone in. But I like Andrew’s writing, so I said: let’s give it a go.

Then I had to transfer his Word file to the simple text editor I have been using for many years, but that only took half an hour … I don’t like Word. Or Bill Gates. Here’s Andrew:

Andrew Korybko: The “official narrative” surrounding the Ukrainian Conflict has flipped in recent weeks from prematurely celebrating Kiev’s supposedly “inevitable” victory to nowadays seriously warning about its likely loss. It was therefore expected in hindsight that other dimensions of the information warfare campaign waged by the US-led West’s Golden Billion against Russia would also change. As proof of precisely that, the New York Times (NYT) just admitted that the West’s anti-Russian sanctions are a failure.

In Ana Swanson’s article about how “Russia Sidesteps Western Punishments, With Help From Friends”, she cites Western experts who concluded that “Russia’s imports may have already recovered to prewar levels, or will soon do so, depending on their models.” Even more compelling, she references the IMF’s latest assessment from Monday, which “now expected the Russian economy to grow 0.3 percent this year, a sharp improvement from its previous estimate of a 2.3 percent contraction.”

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The Arsenal of Democracy Isn’t, by imetatronink

Posted on February 3, 2023 | 1 comment

The U.S. would have a tough time rebuilding its industrial war armaments industry in under 10 years. From imetatronink at imetatronink.substack.com:

The erstwhile “arsenal of democracy” is neither a democracy nor an arsenal. It’s a pretentious empty shell.

WW2-era Studebaker Truck

As I originally wrote in my July 10, 2022 article Wunderwaffe Du Jour:

“The US military is not built nor equipped for protracted high-intensity conflict. Nor can it supply a depleted proxy army with the means to prosecute a protracted high-intensity conflict.”

The incontrovertible reality is that the US and its NATO allies are presently incapable of supplying the massive material demands of modern industrial warfare, as Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Alex Vershinin articulated so well in this essential June 2022 analysis: The Return of Industrial Warfare.

And yet the public discussion of potential war always includes convinced voices proclaiming that, just like in the Second World War, US industry could very rapidly ramp up to produce armaments of surpassing quality, and in overwhelming quantities.

This titillates the biases of American exceptionalists in general, and is a particularly seductive fantasy of the #EmpireAtAllCosts cult drones propagandizing for filthy lucre at the countless armaments-industry-funded “think tanks” in Washington and London.

But the notion that the rapidly declining empire can resurrect the Arsenal of Democracy band for one final farewell tour is a singularly delusional vanity.

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Posted in Business, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Horseshit, Military, Politics, War

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Doomsday Approaches, by The Zman

Posted on February 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

Is there any line U.S. rulers will not cross? Let’s hope there’s one drawn at nuclear warfare. From The Zman at thezman.com:

The shadow that has hung over the Ukraine war is the fear that it could lead to a direct clash between Washington and Moscow. Given that both sides have large arsenals of nuclear weapons, conflict could lead to Armageddon. Compounding things is the fact that Biden cannot stop talking about nuclear war. Given his mental condition, this suggests that he is often in earshot of the decision makers, who may be seriously discussing the possible use of nuclear weapons.

The dynamic of the war thus far has been Washington poking Moscow hoping for a response, which it can use to justify escalation. First, they said that they would not supply Ukraine with Western weapons, then they sent Western weapons. Then it was long range guided missiles. Now we see modern tanks being prepped, with discussions about F-16 fighter jets on the agenda. All of these weapons transfers are intended to provoke a response from Moscow.

The proof of that is the fact that none of these systems can make a difference on the battlefield for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is that the West has designed its weapons to be used in combined arms warfare. Alone, these weapons are not terribly useful and may even be a hinderance to the Ukrainians. The M777 howitzer, for example, is known for being maintenance heavy. Giving the Ukrainians these weapons just adds to their onerous sustainment burden.

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Lose-Lose, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on February 3, 2023 | 1 comment

Spend much time reading the mainstream media and your head will surely explode. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official narrative and the consequent eternal shame.” — Hugo Dionisio

The New York Times — indicted this week as a chronic purveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review — is lying to you again this morning.

This whopper is an artful diversion from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms are symbionts: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on their glide path to a late winter crash.

The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, Military

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Fact Checking Zelensky on Non-Alignment, by Ted Snider

Posted on February 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

Any fact checking of Zelensky will yield a bounteous harvest of lies. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:

In his annual message to the parliament of Ukraine at the end of 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine has changed the world by uniting the West and making non-alignment unpalatable.

He said that Ukraine has “helped the West find itself again,” that it has “united the European Union.” He said that Ukraine has “helped Europe and most of the world feel that being neutral now is, pardon me, immoral.”

There is some truth to Zelensky’s first claim. The war in Ukraine has given renewed unity, agreement and purpose to NATO. Although, even here, there are outliers.

Turkey has not been united with NATO. It has sought to mediate a negotiated settlement to the war, it has held out on approval of Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO, it has spurned the sanctions regime against Russia and drastically increased trade. Hungary has not been united with NATO. On January 15, Croatian President Zoran Milanovic opposed sanctions on Russia and accused “Washington and NATO” of “waging a proxy war against Russia with the help of Ukraine.” Italy has been hesitant to send further aid in part because of domestic political tension.

Even France and Germany have not been fully united with the West. Both German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron have continued to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And both Macron and Scholz have defied the US in suggesting that negotiations with Russia include addressing Russia’s security concerns.

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Recent Data Shows ‘Stunning Increase’ In Serious Harm Reports In Young Healthy Pilots: Army Lt. Col. Theresa Long, by Carly Mayberry

Posted on February 3, 2023 | 1 comment

When are they going to quit pretending and stop this insanity? It’s probably going to take some indictments. From Carly Mayberry at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

t’s been a year since four Department of Defense (DOD) whistleblowers found a sudden increase in various diseases in the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED), which coincided directly with the introduction of COVID-19 vaccinations. Now, new data shows more evidence.

LTC Theresa M Long’s promotion, Ft Rucker, AL. Photo taken by Michael Luna. (Courtesy of Theresa Long)

That’s according to Lt. Col.Theresa Long, M.D., MPH, a board-certified aerospace medicine doctor and Army Brigade flight surgeon with specialty training as an aviation mishap investigator and safety officer, who was one of the four whistleblowers. Long’s background has uniquely equipped her to recognize what she described as “unusual diagnoses and alarming trends only after the introduction of the COVID-19 vaccinations.”

Sharp Increase in Serious Harm Reports in Pilots: DOD Data

Long said what she has now found has led her to file yet another whistleblower complaint with Sen. Ron Johnson’s (R-Wis.) office. She described this data as “more alarming DMED data” after she “went back into the ‘fixed’ DMED again to look for signals of harm for Army aviation.”

“What I found was a clear signal, that something in 2021 changed the health of service members,” Long told The Epoch Times. She said these signals were consistent with those in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports. But unlike VAERS reports, DMED data showed spikes in the number of diagnoses “made by a healthcare professional within the DOD on service members.”

According to the Military Health System, the DMED provides remote access to a subset of data contained in the Defense Medical Surveillance System (DMSS). The DMSS contains up-to-date and historical data on diseases and medical events (including reportable events) and “is available to authorized users such as U.S. military medical providers, epidemiologists, medical researchers, safety officers or medical operations/ clinical support staff for surveying health conditions in the U.S. military.”

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Posted in Government, Medicine, Military, Politics, Science

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End the War, You Idiots! By Declan Hayes

Posted on February 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

Proponents of the U.S.’s proxy war in Ukraine were certainly idiots. It’s past time to end it. From Declan Hayes at strategic-culture.org:

NATO should stop their Pontius Pilate hand-wringing about sending their upgraded Tiger tanks to Ukraine’s wrecking yards as they are damned whether they throw good tanks after bad, or if they do not. The best NATO can do is to form a line of defense stretching from the brothels of Romania in the south up through Poland’s and onwards to the pimple states of the Baltic and the big mouthed women leaders of Sweden and Finland. Ukraine, like Vietnam and Afghanistan before it, is a lost cause. NATO should end this war by packing its bags, going home and allowing Zelensky’s thugs await their fate on their own.

The Americans can send their Bradleys, the British their Challenger tanks, the French their Leclercs and the Germans their Leopards. Russia will destroy all of them and all crews unfortunate enough to man them. If Hitler’s Tigers could not stop the Russian tide, nor will they.

Though the British can boast to their hearts’ content about their invincible Challengers, those British wunderwaffe weapons will break down and need repair when they reach Ukraine’s killing fields. That is assuming Russia does not send them to Hades before they first see action. Showcasing your wunderwaffe weapons in Ukraine is one thing. Prevailing, as the Wehrmacht discovered, is another.

No plan, the legendary German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke declared in his 1871 ‘Ueber Strategy’ On Strategy essay, survives its first contact with the enemy. This will certainly be the case with NATO’s Tigers, which will fare as poorly as the Wehrmacht’s tanks did at Stalingrad and at Kursk, history’s biggest ever tank battle, when von Manstein, von Kluge and some of the Reich’s other great commanders faced Zhukov, Popov and their endless columns of T34s, which were more suited to Ukraine’s terrain than were the Reich’s wunderwaffe tanks, the Challengers, Leopards, Bradleys and Leclercs of their day.

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