If you've been following mainstream news you'll probably have seen a map like this providing an overview of the looming Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are lots of maps and info-graphics like this out there. There are maps with tables comparing numbers of tanks, aircraft, missiles, battalions, as if any of that meant something. It doesn't. It's nonsense. This is not 1943.
There is a truism that generals are always planning to win the last war. Despite the relentless propaganda about the US military being the best the world has ever seen, the US has a terrible record in war. All the wars the US has 'won' have been fought against second or third rate adversaries at best - Mexico a dozen times. Colonial Spanish forces in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. Germany in last 100 days of the Great War (1914-18). Germany in Europe from 1943 to 1945 (by the time the western Allies landed in Europe, the German army had already been ground into pulp on the Eastern Front by the Soviets. That's not to say it wasn't a hard fought battle, but the Germans lost 90% of their army in the east). Japan in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945 (that too was an extremely hard fought victory for the US, but Japan - determined as she was - never had the industrial capacity to beat the Americans). Grenada in 1983 (really, the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada - they still call that a victorious war!). Iraq in 1991.
Against these greater and lesser victories there are numerous defeats and debacles, some catastrophic. The US intervention in Korea ended in a stalemate and truce after three years of hard fighting and bombing North Korea into rubble (1950-53). After 20 years of intervention the US was forced out of Vietnam in a humiliating, desperate flight in 1975. US 'peace keepers' were driven out of Lebanon after the bombing of a marine barracks in 1984. After smashing Iraq in 1991 and then a decade of daily bombing to enforce a fictitious 'no fly zone', the US invaded and occupied the country in 2003 and immediately become bogged down in a destructive insurgency. The US formally withdrew its troops in 2021, although some troops remain. The US and its coalition partners invaded Afghanistan in 2002, achieving a prompt victory followed by a disastrous occupation and insurgency. Biden's evacuation of US forces from Afghanistan in 2021 was little better than a rout.
An aside - this Russian intelligence archive details how the Coalition in Iraq found the going far harder than they anticipated: https://stolzuntermenschen.substack.com/p/2003-iraq-war-the-gru-intelligence
The US spends more on its military than the next eleven countries combined, but US military spending is nothing more than a corporate rorting scheme. Generals and consultants in the Pentagon demand expensive weapons systems, which are provided at exorbitant expense by parasitical corporations, who reward their Pentagon partners with board seats, consultancies and share portfolios. While this merry-go-round is an effective way of plundering the treasury, it is only capable of producing waste. Consider these recent examples - the multi-trillion dollar debacle that is the Joint Strike Fighter, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and the preposterous USS Zumwalt, a class of warship designed around a single use weapons system that proved too expensive to build. https://navy-matters.blogspot.com/2020/06/zumwalt-status-update.html (I do recommend Navy Matters as an exceptionally good resource that calls out the complete incompetence of the US navy and modern military thinking).
The situation in Russia was precisely the opposite. When Vladimir Putin became president in 1999, he set about restoring order to the country after nearly a decade of corruption, incompetence and plunder. The power of the oligarchs was smashed and the privatized industrial concerns were bought back under state control. Law and order was restored. Pensions and social services rebuilt. A key priority was putting the Russian armed forces back together again. During the Yeltsin years, the massive Soviet arsenal had been allowed to fall into ruin. Ships sank at their moorings for want of maintenance. Tanks and military vehicles were stripped for parts or stolen from their reserves. Aircraft fell apart on their runways.
Such was the appalling condition of the Russian military at this time that small insurgencies on the post-Soviet periphery could not be suppressed easily, leading to military debacles in Georgia, Chechenia and the Caucasus. If not for the deterrence of Russia's nuclear arsenal, the west could have rolled over Russia in a conventional war - at least initially (the Russians always pull together in a crisis). This existential crisis required concentrated effort to resolve. To counter the western threat, the Russian leadership focused the country's limited resources on high-tech, but relatively low cost military systems. The first priority was airspace denial systems to shoot down or disable incoming aircraft and missiles. This was followed by strategic anti-missile systems to protect Russia against a first nuclear strike. Having established a defensive shield against attack, offensive capabilities were then uplifted with hyper-sonic missiles, long range cruise missiles, autonomous undersea drones, 5th generation aircraft and, if worse comes to worse, super ballistic weapons capable of wiping the continental United States off the map a single strike (aka, the Satan and Sarmat delivery system).
All of this development went on quietly behind the scenes without any fanfare, observed by only a few analysts, while the US military strutted around the globe smashing things up. The first real display of the new Russian military was in Syria. The US and UK had sponsored a terrorist insurgency in Syria in an effort to topple the Bashar al-Assad government since 2011, but despite numerous setbacks, the Assad government held. Several times the Syrians managed to effect a military recovery, destroying the terrorist armies set against them, which required further escalation by the US and UK, such as bombing the Syrian army positions 'accidentally' when bombing 'ISIS' and constantly ramping up weapons supply.
The first display of Russian capabilities was subtle and passed unnoticed by many. Despite being 'under siege' in Damascus, president Basha al-Assad hopped aboard a Russian jet and flew to Moscow to sign a mutual defence pact. The first western intelligence knew of the event was when it was broadcast on Russian television. This, despite the fact that US and Israeli spy satellites were all over Syria observing everything. The plane had even flown across the territory of NATO member Turkey. The feat was repeated several times, with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and defence minister Sergei Shoigu appearing suddenly in Damascus, unobserved.
With the Russians increasing their footprint in Syria, the western powers endeavoured to strong-arm the Russians by moving a naval task force into the eastern Mediterranean in August 2013 in response to a fake chemical weapons incident that the allies blamed on the Syrian government. However, the presence of the Russians in their bases Latakia was problematic to their plans for a missile strike on Damascus. The US demanded the Russians allow the US fleet to fire over the Russian forces to hit targets within Syrian. The Russians refused and the Russian admiral warned that any missiles fired anywhere towards Russian naval, ground or air forces would be shot down and the ship or aircraft firing towards the Russians would be targeted and destroyed.
In the face of a military stand off, the British parliament withdrew its approval for military action and consequently the allied fleet was withdrawn and war was averted. Hooray for democracy! However, this was nothing more than a cover story to allow the Obama regime to back down without losing face. The facts on the ground were very different. Having been denied permission to over-fire the Russian fleet, the allies decided to test out the Russian defenses. On 3 September 2013, a submarine off the coast of Spain launched two cruise missiles at targets in Syrian. As they neared the Syrian coast, the Russians shot one missile down with an anti-missile battery. The other was electronically hijacked and turned back towards the western task force, which resulted in the missile being self-destructed before it hit its new target. The launch of the two missiles was reported ambiguously by the Russian media on the evening of the 3rd September, but without details of where they had come from. The US scrambled to declare it wasn't them and, in a desperate move, blamed the Israelis. The Israelis denied firing any missiles, but later retracted that statement and on announced they conducted a missile defense test off the coast of Syria.
"An Israeli warplane fired a “Sparrow” missile that was successfully detected and shot down by an interceptor shortly after 9.15 a.m. local time (3.15 a.m. ET), according to statements issued by Israel and the United States.Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/amid-syria-tension-israel-test-fires-missile-over-mediterranean-sea-flna8C11062386
The action appeared to take officials in some countries by surprise – not least Russia, whose official Itar-Tass news agency reported that Moscow had detected the launch of two ballistic “objects” in the Mediterranean area.
It also did little to calm fears in the region which is under the shadow of an imminent military strike on Syria by the United States."
In their desperation to cover up this shocking turn of events, the western allies left the traces of their lie. The launch of two ballistic 'objects' from the western Mediterranean had been detected and reported by numerous counties. The Israelis claimed to have launched one missile and destroyed it with one interceptor. One ballistic missile is missing.
In the aftermath of this incident (details of which are extremely hard to find online these days), the allied task force beat an extremely hasty retreat, leaving the Russians in control of the battlefield.
The Invasion of Ukraine
For a military power that has basically been fighting some low-intensity war somewhere on the planet every day since 1945, US war planners are extremely dense and unimaginative. All foreign interventions have involved months of pre-invasion propaganda where plans are openly discussed in the media - I guess so that there are no surprises. A lengthy air and sea lift of supplies, weapons, infrastructure and men into a neighboring country occurs over several months. Once the infrastructure of invasion is complete, shock and awe follows. Enemy air defenses and engaged and destroyed, air superiority is achieved and then the country is bombed into rubble before the tanks roll. This is how the US and its partners destroyed Iraq and other countries. It has its origins in the invasion of Europe during the Second World War.
For preposterous reasons of geopolitics, US political and strategic thinkers have long believed that removing the Ukraine from Russia's sphere of influence would be a fatal blow to Russia's imperial ambitions. Geography is king however, and while Ukrainian politicians would prefer their country to share a border with Canada, it does not, nor ever will. Ukraine is next door to Russia, and Russia will always exert its gravitational force on Ukraine just by its very existence. For this reason, the Ukrainians and their western sponsors want to destroy Russia. This taps into the dreams and violent fantasies of the Ukrainian expats in the US, Canada and Australia. These descendants of the Nazi-allied Galicians of western Ukraine, who mass murdered hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews and Russians on behalf of the Nazis during the Second World War, fled westwards when the Soviet Red Army rolled back the Nazi tide in 1944. Being ardent anti-communists, they received welcome asylum in the west where they have never stopped agitating for the destruction of Russia.
When the US sponsored a coup in Ukraine in 2014 they expected to seize the entire country, including the strategically important Russian naval base at Sevastopol. The US even had the gall to publicly tender for the repair and restoration of the Russian port facilities. The Russians responded promptly and sealed off the Crimea. A referendum held in the aftermath of the coup saw 95% of Crimean residents endorse a return to Russia. The strongly ethnic Russian Donbas region - formerly considered the heartland of the Soviet Union - took matters into their own hands, driving out the Nazi interlopers and declaring people's republics. After an intensely fought war against Kievan forces, the combined forces of the Donbas republics smashed the Ukrainian army to pieces, twice. A ceasefire of desperation was negotiated by the Ukrainian government to extricate the remains of their defeated army, but after the army was evacuated, Ukraine has steadfastly refused to abide by the terms of the Minsk Agreements.
Donbas is the Heart of Russia! There is a reason why Hitler diverted German armies to the south.
These developments were little more than a speed-hump in US war plans. The Ukrainian civil war gave them a perfect propaganda tool against Russia, allowing them to scream constantly, "Russian Aggression!" and gradually build up of the infrastructure for invasion under the guise of 'defending Ukraine from Russian invasion.' Weapons systems began piling up in depots across the country in preparation for D-Day. While the western press has ignored all of this, the Russians have not. Putin and Lavrov have both stated openly that "we can see what you are doing." They understand the threat. The US has been moving tactical weapons systems into Ukraine in preparation for a lightning attack on Russia that would likely involve tactical nuclear weapons to decapitate the Russian leadership. There is a whiff here of Adolf Hitler's remark during the Barbarossa planning that "a swift kick on the front door will bring down the whole rotten structure." It's a delusional fantasy.
The problem for the US is that they cannot be seen to initiate the war. They need the Russians to invade. This aim to do by encouraging the Ukrainians to attack the Donbas, provoking the Russians to intervene, giving the US its casus belli. The problem for the US is that its war planners expects Russia to behave they way they have planned, with predictable armored thrusts into Ukraine to seize territory. This would involve hundreds of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers driving into killing zones and becoming bogged down in a grinding conflict.
Although you wouldn't know it reading the main stream news, the Russians have openly stated they have no intention of invading. Why would Russia want to take over the basket-case that is Ukraine, a country riddled in endemic corruption, in economic and demographic free-fall? It's a disaster. Nor do the Russians need to in order to remove the military threat on their doorstep. They have complete battlefield dominance and can - and will - do what is necessary. In the event of a Ukrainian attack, the Russian response will be decisive and overwhelming and will not involve columns of tanks. Using its electronic warfare resources, Russia will cut off all electronic communications in eastern Ukraine. GPS will be deactivated and US spy satellites blinded. In the ensuing chaos and confusion, stand off missiles and massed artillery fire will destroy all front-line Ukrainian units, their reserves and supply bases. Hidden stocks of tactical weapons will be vaporized in the first strike.
All military aircraft will be destroyed on the ground and anything that gets into the air will be shot down. A no fly zone will be enforced over Ukraine and Russia's western airspace. Any Nato aircraft attempting to approach Russia will be subjected to electronic interference and GPS jamming/spoofing and directed away. US and Nato advisors and combat troops, both those in the front-line and those coordinating affairs in the rear, will not escape, being wiped out with hyper-sonic weaponry. Any US or Nato warships in the Black or Baltic Seas that make a threatening move will be sent to the bottom with Kinzhal missiles or similar. By the time action reports start coming online in the west, the business will be over and the choice in Washington, London or Brussels will be do we escalate and face annihilation, or stand down. The tanks may not even need to roll.
The US has been warned and it seems they have heeded the message. US and Nato advisers and embassy staff are evacuating Ukraine as we speak. Not that that will help them if they attempt to instigate the war from further afield. Putin, in his subtle manner has already stated that Russia knows the who is pulling the strings and if they think they are safe from retaliation, they are wrong. Like the Chechen terrorist leaders, they can run, they can hide, but they will be found and....
Scoop - the Russian invasion plan revealed! https://stolzuntermenschen.blogspot.com/2022/02/scoop-russian-ukraine-invasion-plan.html
And it begins, days late and with a Ukrainian attack (of course): https://stolzuntermenschen.blogspot.com/2022/02/and-so-it-begins.html
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