Category Archives: Military

Playing with Nuclear Fire, by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Posted on January 30, 2023 | 1 comment

How can the U.S. government risk humanity’s extinction with a nuclear war over a country that is inconsequential to the U.S.? From Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., at lewrockwell.com:

I didn’t think it was possible for brain dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers to do anything in foreign policy that was crazier than what they have already done. But I have to give them credit. They have managed to do it. They are sending tanks and weapons to the Ukraine, even though doing this risks a nuclear war that could destroy mankind.

Although the US over the past year has supplied the Zelensky dictatorship with weapons, this wasn’t unlimited. Now, it looks like it is well on the way to becoming so.

Here is a statement from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken about the new aid: “The United States is announcing a significant new security assistance package to help Ukraine continue to defend itself against Russia’s brutal war. Pursuant to a delegation of authority from the President, I am authorizing our 30 th drawdown of U.S. arms and equipment for Ukraine since August 2021. This assistance package will provide Ukraine with hundreds of additional armored vehicles, including Stryker armored personnel carriers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicles. The package also includes critical additional air defense support for Ukraine, including more Avenger air defense systems, and surface to air missiles, as well as additional munitions for NASAMS that the United States has previously provided. The package also contains night vision devices, small arms ammunition, and other items to support Ukraine as it bravely defends its people, its sovereignty, and its territorial integrity.

This package, which totals $2.5 billion, will bring total U.S. military assistance for Ukraine to an unprecedented approximately $27.5 billion since the beginning of the Administration.

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What’s Next, by Helmholtz Smith

Posted on January 29, 2023 | 1 comment

Russia can wait a while if it intends to launch a big offensive in Ukraine, but it will want to do so before NATO sends in large quantities of additional and more sophisticated weapons. From Helmholtz Smith at sonar21.com:

I don’t know what the Russians are going to do in Ukraine and neither does anyone else outside of their high command. But there sure have been a lot of wrong predictions. Leaving aside the Western propaganda mill (of which more below), serious observers seem to get the timing wrong. We know the correlation of forces favors Russia but we expect things to happen more quickly. We agree that Moscow was expecting something shorter, less bloody and quicker at the beginning and was probably surprised by the resistance of the Kiev regime and NATO’s unhinged support. Therefore there was a re-examination and the call-up of further forces. Thus far we are in agreement – it’s the timing of the next step that we seem to get wrong.

I’ve been thinking about why this is so and I have come to the following conclusions. By now everybody who is paying attention knows that the Ukraine battlefield is part of a world war in which those who control the US empire are trying to hold onto their dominance. For those outside the NATO propaganda bubble there is general agreement that

  1. Russia is winning both in the Ukraine battlefield and the wider theater.
  2. Time is on Russia’s side.

First the Ukraine battlefield. The first aim in war is to destroy the enemy’s power and that Russia is doing, especially in the Bakhmut slaughterhouse. Kiev is determined to stand and fight here and the Russians are quite happy to let them do so – “artillery conquers and infantry occupies” – and that is what we see here. Slowly slowly the Russian forces advance over mountains of Ukrainian bodies. In the last week or so Russian forces have begun to advance on other fronts too. This grinding away can continue until Ukraine collapses because it is easier for the Russians to let the enemy come to them than go after them. Meanwhile Russian missiles destroy the infrastructure Kiev needs to continue the war. Time and developments favor Russia and there is no incentive to make “big arrow” movements.

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Germany the Weakest Link in NATO’s War Tracks, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on January 28, 2023 | 1 comment

Germany has been a doormat for the U.S. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

When the Leopard hulls are wheeled back with their turrets blown off, the political price for Berlin will become unbearable.

Germany is being played like a fiddle and the sound is a pathetic and plaintive one. Only days after Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Germany would not be supplying its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine to fight against Russia, Berlin has done an embarrassing U-turn. The Leopards are coming.

Germany is to send “a company” of these fearsome battlefield weapons which amounts to about 14 of them, according to reports. What is more, Berlin is giving the proprietary authorization for other NATO members to also re-export the German-made tank to Ukraine.

Last Friday at a NATO-sponsored war summit at the U.S. Air Force Base in Ramstein, Germany, the Scholz government surprised many observers by resisting mounting calls from the United States and other NATO allies to release the Leopards. Scholz has been saying for months that he did not want to provoke Russia into an escalation of hostilities by such a move. How many times has he said that regarding other German weapons only to buckle and cave in?

Immediately after the Ramstein meeting, the pressure on Berlin was ratcheted up. The U.S., Britain, Poland and the Baltic states castigated and shamed Germany for showing cowardice. Warsaw taunted that it would send some of its Leopards regardless of Berlin’s say-so, thereby snubbing the German protocol that as the manufacturer of the tank it must authorize any re-export of the weapon.

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‘Doomsday clock’: 90 seconds to midnight, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on January 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

Russia was supposed to be defeated and regime-changed by now. Instead, Russia is wiping the floor with Ukraine and the world is as close as ever been to nuclear warfare since World War II. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

The Doomsday Clock, set by the US-based magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has been moved to 90 seconds to midnight. 

That’s the closest ever to total nuclear doom, the global catastrophe.

The Clock had been set at 100 seconds since 2020. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board and a group of sponsors – which includes 10 Nobel laureates – have focused on “Russia’s war on Ukraine” (their terminology) as the main reason.

Yet they did not bother to explain non-stop American rhetoric (the US is the only nation that adopts “first strike” in a nuclear confrontation) and the fact that this is a US proxy war against Russia with Ukraine used as cannon fodder.

The Bulletin also attributes malignant designs to China, Iran and North Korea, while mentioning, only in passing, that “the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the United States, New START, stands in jeopardy”.

“Unless the two parties resume negotiations and find a basis for further reductions, the treaty will expire in February 2026.”

As it stands, the prospects of a US-Russia negotiation on New START are less than zero.

Now cue to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov making it very clear that war against Russia is not hybrid anymore, it’s “almost” real.

“Almost” in fact means “90 seconds.”

So why is this all happening?

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World War III: Has It Begun? By James Rickards

Posted on January 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

Historians may well look back and say World War III began in either 2014 (Maidan coup) or 2022 (Russian invasion). From James Rickards at dailyreckoning.com:

World War III: Has It Begun?

Has World War III already begun?

That’s a serious question and deserves serious consideration by investors. A wave of analysts and commentators have warned that the war in Ukraine could spin out of control and escalate into World War III.

One variation on that theme is that the war could escalate into a nuclear war with tactical nuclear weapons deployed. Most point a finger at Russia as the party that will launch a nuclear strike out of desperation at a failing campaign in Ukraine.

Actually, the opposite is true.

The Russian campaign is not failing (it has been on hold for several months awaiting the right conditions to launch a winter offensive). You just don’t hear about it in the mainstream media, which is essentially a propaganda outlet for Ukraine.

And the party most likely to use nuclear weapons first is the U.S. in order to save face and destabilize Russia once Ukraine is on the brink of collapse.

Reality Check

Many people have a hard time believing that. They’ve been told that Putin is the devil incarnate and would probably like to destroy the world. We like to think that in modern times we’re sophisticated and above falling prey to propaganda. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.

The fact is the U.S. did wage the only nuclear war in history from Aug. 6–9, 1945 and had a successful outcome. I’m not getting into the morality of it here, one way or the other. I’m just being objective.

Either way, another nuclear war could not be contained and it would be tantamount to World War III. It amounts to the same thing.

But my point is different. It’s not that we may be headed to World War III; it’s that we’re already there. The issue of when wars in general and world wars in particular begin and end is not as clear cut as many believe. There are many examples.

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Tanks and Tragedy, by Michael Brenner

Posted on January 27, 2023 | 1 comment

Michael Brenner plows through the Ukraine bullshit. From Brenner at consortiumnews.com:

Amid the vacuum of creditable reporting by the mainstream media, Michael Brenner offers a briefing on the background of the neocon-inspired war in Ukraine and his view on the present strategic situation.  

On Dec. 21, 2022, NATO headquarters in Brussels joined other international landmarks in switching off its lights in solidarity with Ukraine. (NATO, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Never in memory has it been so daunting to figure out what’s going on during a major international crisis as with the Ukraine affair.

That sad truth owes much to the total absence of truthful reporting and honest interpretative analysis by the MSM. We are served heavy portions of falsity, fantasy and farrago crudely mixed into a narrative whose relation to reality is tenuous.

The near universal swallowing of this confection is made possible by the abdication of responsibility — intellectual and political — by America’s political class, from Washington’s high and mighty down through the galaxy of un-think tanks and self-absorbed academia.

Now, the legion of scripters for this fictional story are working with renewed energy to incorporate a few fresh elements: President Joe Biden/NATO’s decision to send an eclectic array of armor to buttress Ukraine’s faltering forces; and the mounting evidence of crippling, incremental dismantling of its army by Russia’s superior military.

As always, that reaction turns out to be an exercise in avoidance behavior. The roughly 100 tanks slated to arrive in piecemeal fashion over the coming year will be a “game-changer.” Putin’s army is a proven “paper tiger.” “Democracy” is destined to prevail over despotic barbarism.

Or so we are told in stomach-churning doses of snake-oil. I guess that we all have ways of amusing ourselves.

A systematic refutation of this mythic construction is both superfluous and futile. It has been done over the past year by able, experienced and thoughtful analysts who actually know what they are talking about: Colonel Douglas Macgregor, professor Jeffrey Sachs, Colonel Scott Ritter and a handful of others who together are relegated to obscure websites and scorned by the MSM.

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Pretend-O-Rama, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on January 27, 2023 | 1 comment

Ukraine is shining a spotlight on both Russia’s ascent and the U.S.’s descent. From James Howard Kuntler at kunstler.com:

I doubt that many Americans — even the masses sunk in vaccine smuggery and obsessive Trump-o-phobia — believe that America’s Ukraine project is working out for us. Of course, to even begin thinking about this debacle, you must at least suspect that our government is lying about virtually everything it has its hand in. Name something it is not lying about, I dare you.

So, what is the Ukraine project about? To use that sad-ass country as a vector to disable and destroy Russia. You can’t over-state the stupidity of that objective. And why did we want to do that? Because… reasons. Oh? And what were they? Well, Russia was… there. Oh? And what was it doing? Trying to take over the world? Uh, no. It was actually just trying to be a normal European nation again after its traumatic 75-year-long experiment with communism, which ended in 1991.

And then, after that, coming along pretty well under Mr. Putin. Did I say that? Yes, I did, because it is a fact. Russia wrote new private property laws, made commerce legal again, and allowed its citizens to do business. Russia wasn’t threatening any other nations, most particularly not its former province, Ukraine. It had even invited Ukraine to be a sovereign member of its trade association, the customs union, with a bunch of other regional states who had rational interests in good regional relations. That’s what set off the maniacs at the US State Department — under Secretary John Kerry, a.k.a. the haircut-in-search-of a-brain — who, in 2014, decided to overthrow Ukraine’s government.

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This Time It’s Different, by Douglas Macgregor

Posted on January 27, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S.’s proxy war against Russia is a bust. From Douglas Macgregor at theamericanconservative.com:

Neither we nor our allies are prepared to fight all-out war with Russia, regionally or globally.

Until it decided to confront Moscow with an existential military threat in Ukraine, Washington confined the use of American military power to conflicts that Americans could afford to lose, wars with weak opponents in the developing world from Saigon to Baghdad that did not present an existential threat to U.S. forces or American territory. This time—a proxy war with Russia—is different.

Contrary to early Beltway hopes and expectations, Russia neither collapsed internally nor capitulated to the collective West’s demands for regime change in Moscow. Washington underestimated Russia’s societal cohesion, its latent military potential, and its relative immunity to Western economic sanctions.

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As a result, Washington’s proxy war against Russia is failing. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was unusually candid about the situation in Ukraine when he told the allies in Germany at Ramstein Air Base on January 20, “We have a window of opportunity here, between now and the spring,” admitting, “That’s not a long time.”

Alexei Arestovich, President Zelensky’s recently fired advisor and unofficial “Spinmeister,” was more direct. He expressed his own doubts that Ukraine can win its war with Russia and he now questions whether Ukraine will even survive the war. Ukrainian losses—at least 150,000 dead including 35,000 missing in action and presumed dead—have fatally weakened Ukrainian forces resulting in a fragile Ukrainian defensive posture that will likely shatter under the crushing weight of attacking Russian forces in the next few weeks.

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Some Questions for Our Congressmen and Senators on Ukraine, by Karen Kwiatkowski

Posted on January 27, 2023 | 1 comment

Wouldn’t it be great if Congress critters, Senators, and high executive branch officials periodically had to undergo Q & A sessions with members of the public? From Karen Kwiatkowski at lewrockwell.com:

Dear Representative and Senators,

As we approach twelve months of the Russian SMO to end Kiev’s war on Russians of east and south Ukraine, and resolve the NATO head fake of Minsk II, it’s question and answer time for London, Washington, and Poland – and each of you.

The US Congress approved over $100 Billion in arms and aid to Ukraine in the past year.  At the same time, Russian forces have secured 20% of the former Ukrainian landmass, nearly everything east of the Dneiper River, and have established not only a formidable defensive line, they have begun rebuilding political, economic, defense and civil society in the eastern Republics.

First question:  What, in your opinion, will the next $100 Billion – gain for the United States?

My apologies.  It isn’t fair to state that $100 Billion in US aid to Ukraine actually went into the Ukraine war effort.  Over half of these funds went directly into US defense contracts.. A reasonable percentage was defrauded along the way, or lost somehow in Ukraine.  In any US government operation there is also predictable waste and loss.  It is not clear whether Joe, his family and his friends in Ukraine and New York City got their 10%.

Beyond this, all of this aid arrived in Ukraine piecemeal. As the Pentagon raided the back of their closet for Ukraine, random supplies, materials and ammunition – useable or not to Ukraine – were sent.   NATO countries simultaneously did the same thing, amplifying the randomness and often pointlessness of such aid.

The US Inspector General admits that this aid and the weapons shipped in cannot be tracked.  Neither US or NATO had a system of logistical tracking or feedback in place prior to the shipments of weapons, materials and ammunition, and to date they still don’t.

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The Most Egregious Mistake, by Alastair Crooke

Posted on January 26, 2023 | 3 comments

Without the reserve currency, U.S. power will be greatly diminished and the government will have to come to terms with a multipolar world. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

The U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood.

It is the miscalculation of this era – one that may begin the collapse of dollar primacy, and therefore, global compliance with U.S. political demands, too. But its most grievous content is that it corners the U.S. into promoting dangerous Ukrainian escalation against Russia directly (i.e. Crimea).

Washington dares not – indeed cannot – yield on dollar primacy, the ultimate signifier for ‘American decline’. And so the U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood.

The Biden Team cannot withdraw its fantastical narrative of Russia’s imminent humiliation; they have bet the House on it. Yet it has become an existential issue for the U.S. precisely because of this egregious initial miscalculation that has been subsequently levered-up into a preposterous narrative of a floundering, at any moment ‘collapsing’ Russia.

What then is this ‘Great Surprise’ – the almost completely unforeseen event of recent geo-politics that has so shaken U.S. expectations, and which takes the world to the precipice?

It is, in a word, Resilience. The Resilience displayed by the Russian economy after the West had committed the entire weight of its financial resources to crushing Russia. The West bore down on Russia in every conceivable way – via financial, cultural and psychological war – and with real military war as the follow-through.

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