Category Archives: War

Russia Has No Strategy for Winning This War, by Rolo Slavskiy

Posted on February 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

It may be a very long war. From Rolo Slavskiy at unz.com:

If you look at and analyze the Not-War on the strategic level, well, you can’t help but come to the conclusions and talking points presented by the pessimists. If you’re honest, that is.

But the narrative has now shifted and the discussion is being framed on the tactical level. That is, the events around Bakhmut are what the Russian news and the commentators are talking about now. But the action around Bakhmut is a tactical one. There are three levels to military operations, at least in the Russian school.

Tactical

Operational

Strategic

And if you were hoping for a quick conclusion to the Bakhmut offensive, well. I’ve got more bad, but totally predictable, news for you.

URA:

The founder of Wagner PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin denied the information about the encirclement of 1.5 thousand Ukrainian soldiers near Bakhmut (Artemovsk). His comment is published by Prigozhin’s press service in the official telegram channel. He noted that the Ukrainians are putting up strong resistance and Bakhmut (Artemovsk) will not be taken in the near future.

“In all directions, the enemy is becoming more active, pulling up more and more new reserves. Every day, from 300 to 500 new fighters approach Bakhmut in all directions. Artillery fire intensifies every day,” said Yevgeny Prigozhin. He drew attention to the inappropriateness of positive promises that will not come true in the near future.

At the moment, fierce battles are being fought near Bakhmut (Artemovsk). Serious losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near Bakhmut were reported by the American media, 360 TV channel reports . Yevgeny Prigozhin said that the capture of Bakhmut would be the key to Russia’s victory in the Ukrainian conflict, the National News Service reports . Acting head of the DPR Denis Pushilin said that the Russian military surrounded 1.5 thousand Ukrainian soldiers near Bakhmut .

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Democrats Praise Bush, Want More Small-Business War Profiteers, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on February 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

Nobody has any problem with obscene military budgets, but there’s a strong sentiment that smaller businesses should also get on the gravy train. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Well it’s another big day for Democrats doing Democraty things.

At a Friday event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) hosted by the George W Bush Institute, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke glowingly of the president who instituted the program in 2003 at the same time he was preparing to launch an invasion which would inflict unfathomable horrors upon our world which continue to unfold to this day.

“I’ll just say this honestly, that the Bush family, it’s because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion,” said Pelosi. “Once again, it’s an honor to be associated with President Bush in this.”

Pelosi then pointed to the former president, who was also joined by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and oligarch Bill Gates, with video appearances by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Bono of U2 fame.

Pelosi: “The Bush family it’s because of their humanity, their faith, their generosity of spirit, their compassion. Once again, it’s an honor to be associated with President George W. Bush in this.” pic.twitter.com/NrIqLxc8Ck

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 24, 2023

Also on Friday we witnessed what Glenn Greenwald described as the “most Elizabeth Warren tweet ever,” in which the Massachusetts senator took a bold stand against Big War Profiteering to advocate on behalf of the little guy (by which I mean Small War Profiteering).

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Posted in Business, Government, Military, Politics, Propaganda, Uncategorized, War

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NATO Members Float Plan For Negotiations Amid “Growing Doubts” Ukraine Can Retake Territory, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S. and NATO are looking for a face saving way out. Good luck with that. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Update(1525ET): NATO has “answered” China’s Ukraine peace proposal unveiled earlier in the day by previewing a peace plan that three major Western allies reportedly have in the works. The plan hinges on Ukraine forging a defense pact with NATO (though stopping short of formal membership), and in return Kyiv would enter talks with Moscow, likely with territorial concessions on the table.

It’s said to be motivated in part by Western leaders having “growing doubts” over Ukraine’s ability to reconquer territory – thus a more ‘realist’ and pragmatic perspective might be taking hold one year into the stalemated conflict. The Wall Street Journal broadly outlines the German, France, UK plan as follows: 

Germany, France and Britain see stronger ties between NATO and Ukraine as a way to encourage Kyiv to start peace talks with Russia later this year, officials from the three governments said, as some of Kyiv’s Western partners have growing doubts over its ability to reconquer all its territory.

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last week laid out a blueprint for an agreement to give Ukraine much broader access to advanced military equipment, weapons and ammunition to defend itself once the war ends. He said the plan should be on the agenda for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s annual meeting in July.

But if the plan hinges on creating a ‘fortress Ukraine’ through ramped up arms deliveries, including tanks and possibly jets, then it’s unlikely to sit well with Moscow – especially if the plan falls short of making territorial concessions. WSJ continues: 

The officials were careful to say that any decision on when and under what conditions any peace talks start is entirely up to Ukraine. Sunak on Friday said the West should give Ukraine arms that would give it a “decisive advantage” on the battlefield, including warplanes.

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The Geoeconomics of Modern Conflict, by James Rickards

Posted on February 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

China is probably not going to invade Taiwan, and it is nowhere near the threat it is made out to be. From James Rickards at dailyreckoning.com:

Geopolitics play a major role in the outlook for global economies. But more importantly, today, we must look at the world through the prism of geoeconomics.

What is “geoeconomics”? Obviously, it’s a portmanteau from the words geopolitics and economics. There’s nothing new about considering those disciplines in the same context.

Wars are geopolitical and are often won through industrial capacity, which is primarily economic. Economics and global strategy have always been entwined. What is new is the idea that economics are not just an adjunct of geopolitics, but are now the main event.

This does not mean that warfare is over or that military prowess no longer matters… It means that the major powers in a globalized age will base their calculations on economic gain and loss, and will use economic weapons not as ancillaries, but as primary weapons.

This change was described at the beginning of the new age of globalization by strategic thinker Edward N. Luttwak in a 1990 article titled“From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of Conflict, Grammar of Commerce.”

Luttwak wrote that the end of the Cold War and the start of globalization meant that armed conflict was too costly and uncertain for great powers. Economic interests would now be the arena for great power conflict.

Luttwak wrote, “Everyone, it appears, now agrees that the methods of commerce are displacing military methods – with disposable capital in lieu of firepower, civilian innovation in lieu of military-technical advance and market penetration in lieu of garrisons and bases.”

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, Propaganda, Trade, War

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Patrick Lawrence: Russia’s New Reset with the West

Posted on February 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

The new reset is Russia’s recognition that the West has been double-dealing and cannot be trusted. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

Putin’s announcement of a suspension of the last extant U.S.-Russia arms-control pact this week was a carefully attenuated move. It was also a big deal, but not in the way Western officials encourage us to think it is.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 23 in Moscow during Defender of the Fatherland Day, which marks the founding of the Red Army. (President of Russia)

News that Russia will suspend its participation in the New START nuclear arms pact, which arrived Tuesday via Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly, had to land hard.

This suspension is not a withdrawal, as various Western media reports initially described it, and it is temporary, as the Russian president described it. It is a carefully attenuated move, then.

But it is a big deal nonetheless, although it is not a big deal in the way Western officials encourage us to think it is. It is a big deal in ways that Western officials do not want us to think about. 

“With today’s decision on New START,” NATO Secretary–General Jens Stoltenberg said at a joint press conference in Kiev with Dmitry Kuleba, the Ukrainian regime’s foreign minister, “the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled.”

This is the baldest, farthest-out-there take on Moscow’s step back I have been able to find. The New York Times initially ran this quotation but dropped it from its news report within a few hours, wisely. Now you have to find it in The Kyiv Independent, the not-independent propaganda daily backed by various Western governments.

What Stoltenberg was doing in Kiev, given NATO claims it is not prosecuting a war against Russia, is a good question. Then again, lots of people of Stoltenberg’s stature travel to Kiev these days.

President Joe Biden just took a train from Poland to Kiev to have a look at the progress or otherwise of the war the U.S. is not waging against Russia. Let us not miss: This kind of thing has much to do with Putin’s New START decision, as he made clear in his remarks Tuesday. 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, passing through Athens, termed Moscow’s decision “unfortunate and irresponsible”— an improvement on Stoltenberg’s deranged assessment.

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The World Has Enough Trouble, by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on February 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

The trouble is created by our rulers and borne by us. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

“[This] is what happens when you invent your own reality. You end up bamboozling yourself. — The Sirius Report on Twitter

    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.

     There actually are no good reasons for what we are doing in Ukraine, only bad reasons. Mainly, stoking the war there diverts Americans’ attention from our own problems, which is to say the titanic failures of America’s political establishment. The USA is falling apart from a combination of mismanagement, malice, and negligence. Our economy is a tottering scaffold of Ponzi schemes. Our institutions are wrecked. The government lies about everything it does. The news industry ratifies all the lying. Our schoolchildren can’t read or add up a column of numbers. Our food is slow-acting poison. Our medical-pharma matrix has just completed the systematic murder and maiming of millions. Our culture has been reduced to a drag queen twerk-fest. Our once-beautiful New World landscape is a demolition derby. Name something that hasn’t been debauched, perverted, degenerated, or flat-out destroyed.

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Have the Ancient Gods Returned? By Dr. Naomi Wolf

Posted on February 24, 2023 | 2 comments

Why all the Satanic symbols and rituals the last few years? From Dr. Naomi Wolf at naomiwolf.substack.com:

Is a Seemingly Far-Fetched Premise, Unfolding After All?

These days, to my surprise, people want to talk to me about evil.

In a Substack essay last year, and in my book The Bodies of Others, I raised a question about existential, metaphysical darkness.

I concluded that I had looked at the events of the past two and a half years using all of my classical education, my critical thinking skills, my knowledge of Western and global history and politics; and that, using these tools, I could not explain the years 2020-present.

Indeed I could not explain them in ordinary material, political or historical terms at all.

This is not how human history ordinarily operates.

I could not explain the way the Western world simply switched, from being based at least overtly on values of human rights and decency, to values of death, exclusion and hatred, overnight, en masse — without resorting to reference to some metaphysical evil that goes above and beyond fallible, blundering human agency.

When ordinary would-be-tyrants try to take over societies, there is always some flaw, some human impulse undoing the headlong rush toward a negative goal. There are always factions, or rogue lieutenants, in ordinary human history; there is always a miscalculation, or a blunder, or a security breach; or differences of opinion at the top. Mussolini’s power was impaired in his entry to the Second World War by being forced to share the role of military commander with King Victor Immanuel [https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/fascist-king-victor-emmanuel-iii-italy]; Hitler miscalculated his ability to master the Russian weather — right down to overlooking how badly his soldiers’ stylish but flimsy uniforms would stand up to extreme cold. [https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/hitlers-winter-blunder/]. Before he could mount a counter-revolution against Stalinism, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City in his bath. [https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/leon-trotsky-assassinated-mexico]

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Pentagon Secretly Working To Unleash Massive Swarms of Autonomous Multi-Domain Drones to Dominate Enemy Defenses, from The Debrief

Posted on February 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

The military will soon have incredible drone and drone swarm technologies. It takes no imagination at all to see how they could be used against the citizens they were nominally meant to protect. From The Debrief at thedebrief.org:

(This Article was updated on February 6, 2023, to include statements from DARPA officials.) 

The U.S. Department of Defense has quietly launched a new program to develop the ability to unleash thousands of autonomous land, sea, and air drones capable of overwhelming and dominating an enemy’s area defenses. 

Details of the project are largely shrouded in secrecy. However, language in recently updated pre-solicitation documents suggests the development of massive autonomous vehicle swarms likely has a specific focus on deterring or defeating a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. 

According to documents, the effort will be managed by the Strategic Technology Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

And while DARPA has yet to formally announce the new program, DARPA confirmed to The Debrief that the project will be operating under the moniker “Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms” program, or “AMASS.”

“DARPA’s singular and enduring mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security,” said a DARPA spokesperson via email.

“The DARPA AMASS program is exploring the use of swarms-of-swarms to conduct military operations in highly contested environments that pose great risk to our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines. It is meant to inform future military programs of record and not to be a military program of record itself.” 

AMASS is hardly the first, or only, DARPA project currently underway leveraging autonomous drone swarm technology to give the U.S. military an advantage on future battlefields. 

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Marketing Ukraine’s Reconstruction to Fuel the War, by Laura Ruggeri

Posted on February 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

You can’t have reconstruction without ruination. From Laura Ruggeri at strategic-culture.org:

The fantastical narratives of recovery and reconstruction were concocted years earlier as part of several ‘reform plans’ for Ukraine.

Immediately after the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, key players in the coalition supporting Ukraine, as well as transatlantic financial institutions and think tanks, were already discussing the governance and financing of Ukraine’s reconstruction. They invariably framed it as a historic opportunity for the country: like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Ukraine would become a beacon of freedom, democracy and rule-of-law, a testimonial for Build Back Better, a “green and digital economy” success story; the country would leapfrog several stages of economic and governmental development and its economic growth would replicate Germany’s post-war boom. Unsurprisingly, the more recent and far less inspiring examples of Western-led ‘reconstruction’ in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan didn’t earn mention.

The speed with which fantastical narratives of recovery and reconstruction were churned out shouldn’t surprise anyone because they had been concocted years earlier as part of several ‘reform plans’ for Ukraine. One could say they are hardwired into the overall strategy of this proxy war against Russia as they are aimed at securing political, military and financial support for Ukraine to prolong the war rather than an incentive to negotiate peace. All those who produce these narratives are directly or indirectly linked to governments that are involved both in the destruction of Ukraine and the Ukrainization of Europe, a process designed to fully control, militarize and loot the Old World.

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Putin’s ‘civilizational’ speech frames conflict between east and west, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on February 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

The West is not going to destroy Russia, not if Vladimir Putin has anything to do with it. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

In his Federal Assembly address, President Putin emphasized that Russia is not only an independent nation-state but also a distinct civilization with its own identity, which is in conflict and actively opposes the values of ‘western civilization.’

https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Vladimir-Putin-speech-START-treaty.jpg

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much awaited address to the Russian Federal Assembly on Tuesday should be interpreted as a tour de force of sovereignty.

The address, significantly, marked the first anniversary of Russia’s official recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, only a few hours before 22 February, 2022. In myriad ways, what happened a year ago also marked the birth of the real, 21st century multipolar world.

Then two days later, Moscow launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine to defend said republics.

Cool, calm, collected, without a hint of aggression, Putin’s speech painted Russia as an ancient, independent, and quite distinct civilization – sometimes following a path in concert with other civilizations, sometimes in divergence.

Ukraine, part of Russian civilization, now happens to be occupied by western civilization, which Putin said “became hostile to us,” like in a few instances in the past. So the acute phase of what is essentially a war by proxy of the west against Russia takes place over the body of Russian civilization.

That explains Putin’s clarification that “Russia is an open country, but an independent civilization – we do not consider ourselves superior but we inherited our civilization from our ancestors and we must pass it on.”

A war dilacerating the body of Russian civilization is a serious existential business. Putin also made clear that “Ukraine is being used as a tool and testing ground by the west against Russia.” Thus the inevitable follow-up: “The more long-range weapons are sent to Ukraine, the longer we have to push the threat away from our borders.”

Translation: this war will be long – and painful. There will be no swift victory with minimal loss of blood. The next moves around the Dnieper may take years to solidify. Depending on whether US policy continues to cleave to neo-con and neoliberal objectives, the frontline may be displaced to Lviv. Then German politics may change. Normal trade with France and Germany may be recovered only by the end of the next decade.

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