Wars are often described in the context of the diplomacy between the combatants and the battles that make up the war. Today is the anniversary of the launch of Operation Citadel by the Germans in the Second World War. This battle was part of the larger Battle of Kursk, which featured the largest tank battle in history. This battle, like the war itself, is described by its various operations. It was decided, however, by decisions made by both sides long before the battle took place.
It is those decisions made in advance of war that play the biggest role. The planning of both sides, their assumptions about the other side, as well as assumptions about the course of the war, are the major factors in a war. Once the fighting begins, both sides are often swept up in the action, which is the product of their plans and assumptions interacting with the plans and assumptions of the other side. Fighting becomes a machine with a mind of its own.
We see this with the Ukraine war. Before the actual fighting, both sides were busy preparing for what they assumed would come next. The Russians amassed about 150,000 men on the border of the Donbas. The Ukrainians had been preparing a summer attack on the Donbas but switched to preparing for a defense. Both sides were preparing based on the assumptions they were making about the other. In the case of Ukraine, their assumptions were NATO assumptions.
The Russians were the first to move their pieces on the board. They assumed that the Ukrainians would not want a war. They assumed Europe would jump in to broker some sort of peace deal based on the Minsk agreements in 2014. They crossed the border in Ukraine assuming they would not have to do much fighting. The sight of Russian tanks outside Kiev would conjure images of war, which would cause the Europeans to rush to the table offer a peace deal.
This plan was a total failure for the Russians because they were operating from assumptions about the West that were all wrong. Ukraine was not interested in a deal and the Europeans would not try to persuade them because Washington was not interested in a deal. Washington wanted regime change in Russia, which meant they wanted war with Russia in the Ukraine. Not only that but the Minsk agreements were a deliberate ruse to sucker the Russians.
In the spring of 2022, the Russians had to rethink everything. This meant new assumptions and new plans based on those assumptions. This is when they reorganized their command structure, called up hundreds of thousands of reserves and embarked on an entirely new strategy for dealing with the West. The Russians pulled out a blank piece of paper, wrote down what they knew, what they thought they knew and then built a war plan from what they had on the paper.
On the other side, the West had been preparing for this war since Washington overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014. Their base assumption was that Russia was too weak to either stop NATO from expanding into Ukraine or two weak to sustain the effort required to halt NATO expansion. They would either put nuclear missiles on Russian’s border or they would get war that would quickly exhaust the Russians, thus ushering in the planned breakup of Russia.
At the start of the war, the Ukrainians were faced with the same choices that faced the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War. When facing a more powerful opponent, you can either make a daring attack on their forces hoping to force a truce, fall back into defense hoping to sap their will to fight or you can look for some way to reduce their ability to conduct the war. This may mean using unconventional tactics to destroy their war production and logistics networks.
In the case of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis preferred the defensive strategy, assuming the North would quickly tire of the war. General Lee preferred to go on attack, largely based on the same assumption. The superior field commanders of the South would quickly drive up the cost of war for the North. Stonewall Jackson, on the other hand, saw the problem in both strategies. He preferred to attack the North’s industrial capacity and logistics. Lee won the argument and lost the war.
Like the Confederates, the West made the same assumptions about the other side’s willingness and ability to sustain the war. They chose two of the three options, by waging a sanctions war on Russia to reduce her capacity to fight and had the Ukrainian army dig in for a long siege. Even to this day, Western media is predicting that the Russians will collapse any minute. The long-promised summer offensive was predicated on this key assumption about the Russians.
In what may go down as one of history’s greatest ironies, the West has made the same mistake that was made by the Confederacy. It turns out that the Russians can wage war for as long as it takes to achieve their goals. Not only that, but Russia also has large untapped resources to supplement what she had on-hand. As some Western analysist have noted, the Russians are stronger now than at the start of the war. The key assumption of the West about Russia has proven to be wrong.
Once the Russians realized their blunder, they found themselves with the same choices as the North in the Civil War. They could sue for peace and accept whatever would come from it. They could ramp up for a massive offensive against the Ukrainians and accept sizable losses or they could prepare for a war of attrition aimed at sapping the ability of Ukraine to maintain her army in the field. The Russians settled on what amounts to a Slavic version of the Anaconda plan.
The Russians appear to have made three key assumptions. One is they assumed the West lacked the military industrial capacity to fight a war of attrition based on artillery and mine warfare. The second assumption was the West could not replace the Ukrainian air defense system once it was depleted. This would give Russia control of the skies over the battlefield. Finally, the Russians assumed that eventually the West would force the Ukrainians to go on offense using NATO tactics.
The first assumption has proven to be true. The West is running out of stocks to send Ukraine and has limited ability to produce more. The American military system is not built for this sort of war. Ukraine uses in a month what the West produces in a year in terms of artillery shells. This is a fraction of Russian production. Added to this is the fact that the Russians are simply better than the West at artillery war. They have better guns, better training, and better tactics.
The second assumption has also proven correct. At the start of the war, the Ukrainians had the second-best air defense systems in Europe. The reason is they were using the same systems as the country with the best systems, Russia. Again, this is not something in the Western toolkit. American strategy is to use air power to control the skies, not ground based missile systems. That missile barrage against power plants was meant to deplete Ukrainian stocks and it has succeeded.
Finally, the long-awaited offensive by Ukraine is looking like what the Russians prepared for over the last six months. Like the German army in the Battle of Kursk, the Ukrainians are running into complex defenses based on slowing them down so Russian artillery and air power can destroy them. That plus the extensive use of mines to entangle Ukrainian forces as they approach has led to scenes like this one during the early days of the long anticipated offensive.
NATO is set to meet this month to discuss where they go next with this war, so the Ukrainians are desperate to find a victory somewhere to show them. They are currently back to hurling infantry at Russian defenses around Bakhmut. Given the Russian understanding of the dynamics of this war, it is possible that Ukraine wins a battle for a village or two at some point along the front. The point is to keep driving up the cost to the Ukrainians in terms of men and material.
To bring us back to where we started, the long promised Ukrainian counter-offensive is looking a lot like the Battle of Kursk. The Russians were prepared and understood what they were facing. Like the Germans, the Ukrainians have misread things and continue to operate from false assumptions about their opponent. The result is the Russian anaconda plan is about turn this offensive into Gettysburg. It is a defeat from which Ukraine can never recover.
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I’ve said this before: The big event of 2022 wasn’t Putin finally having enough of the ziocon shit, it was Xi’s visit to S.A. Recall that just a few weeks before Biden, or what passes as Biden, had arrived in Riyadh to beg for more oil, got an Uber from the airport and was greeted by a fist bump. His two hour meeting was attended by several other characters, none of any note, before he was told to piss off home empty handed. Xi Jinping however, had his plane escorted by Saudi Jets- I thought I counted seven, and upon… Read more »
Solar panels in desert environments will more care and maintenance because of the sand in the air. Let’s see how they do in the years to come.
Yup.
Plenty of info out there describing the challenges and failures of solar plants in desert environments.
They aren’t nearly the panacea the green lunatics want you to believe they are.
do they even produce the energy it takes to manufacture them?
China laughs, and sequesters even more of the rare earth metals market- because the Saudis can pay those higher prices, by giving them a discount on the oil.
The European empires of the 19th century — the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, and to a lesser extent German — were pretty good at taking on primitive nonwhites in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific. But when they fought other whites in World Wars I and II, it turned out to be not quite as easy as shooting spear-chucking Zulus with rifles. With that little bit of history in mind, consider the fact that the American GloboHomoZio Empire hasn’t defeated a peer rival since 1945. And unlike the European whites of the 19th century, they haven’t been able… Read more »
We need to keep reminding ourselves that our rulers might have insane plans (like blocking out the sun to help Mother Gaia), live in an information bubble and not be able to win wars except against small countries like Libya and Serbia but they are great at expanding their power domestically. The ruling class gets setbacks every now and then like the Louisiana judge telling the Biden administration it can’t force censorship on social media but that is always a speed bump not a brick wall. Take a look at the mental wellbeing, demographics and political views of Gen Z,… Read more »
That video you linked was brutal.
Is there a good collection of war videos somewhere on net?
Youtube censors everything and last decade’s old go-to liveleak is long gone. Some twitter videos are good, but they are to hard to track down unless one happens to cross my feed every now and again.
Most of the accurate videos of the war (from both sides) are readily available on platforms like Telegram, Rumble, and Gab. Also on some select, (and hard to find with search) YouTube channels and Twitter feeds.
Don’t kid yourself. The recent coup attempt was the Rooskie version of the Tet Offensive. In other words, the beginning of the end.
Why don’t you go to your room and paint homo things, Todd?
“…the beginning of the end.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You can’t put oil rigs off the California coast.
They would be bad for the environment.
You need to put up thousands of gigantic windmills off the California coast.
Also, remember to recycle and make sure to get your Covid vaccine and boosters: they are safe and effective.
The most important conflict, and one Russia has prepared badly for, is the internal one inevitable within the Regime. Elements within the Party want to replace Biden with Newsom, that has been amply telegraphed. However, Biden will not go, and just as importantly the crazies, weirdos, perverts, lunatics, and neocons given massive power will not go. These include but are not limited to: Buttgig as the head of the Alphabet lobby, Mayorkas as Open Borders enforcer, Garland as the Lavrenti Beria of the Regime, Blinken as Nuland’s errand boy (the way Bob Iger at Disney reports to basically Kathleen Kennedy… Read more »
One big problem with trying to stage a palace coup against Biden is it puts you at odds with a certain Chicago product
A Chicago product brought to us by the Pritzker billions.
He’s bigger than them now
And that is how we find the new President of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, picked by Penny Pritzger, who served on the Harvard Board of Overseers as Chair of the Presidential Search Committee. Charming, f’in charmin’! Chicago is worse than NYC in corruption. Don’t forget the Obamas getting their start there.
American air power IS its artillery system. It’s very precise and quite destructive.
But if Air power can’t be used, American ground artillery is just too small to make a difference in a prolonged engagement.
The million dollar question is if American gloves came off, would the Russians (and China next) be able to shut down American air power?
Nobody knows.
US Air power would require destroying Russian air fields, missile bases, radar systems and more deep inside Russia. So any use of US Air Power means lots and lots of US Raids on Russian defense systems indistinguishable from that preceding a nuclear attack. Russia would have to use it or lose it, with respect to launches of nuclear missiles. They don’t have a robust triad of boomer subs with nuclear missiles or much of a Strategic Air Command (which would in any case be destroyed by US Sorties). Neocons respond to this by “Putin would not dare, his generals would… Read more »
Know guys who would know who’ll tell you the F22 is unbeatable.
Not said “unbeatable in the air”
One Russian hypersonic missile with a small yield tactical nuke over Ramstein Air Base, Germany pretty much ends that though.
The US never takes nukes off the table. Russia will be the same if they’re cornered.
Assuming “unbeatable,” the big question becomes how much damage can the F22 do to ground targets with the limited ordnance it is able to carry. Being primarily an air superiority fighter is not as relevant as it used to be in our new age where the Russians try to control airspace with SAMs instead of with fighters. So the F22 being better than other air superiority fighters is largely moot. Let’s say the F22 is immune to SAMs, but the bombers it would escort, to defend from enemy fighters that aren’t there, are not immune to SAMs. There are 183… Read more »
You seem to be assuming that America aircraft over Russia would fly more than one sortie.
I don’t
Col. Douglas Macgregor has further good analysis of these same points in this recent video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o92oSgU17Lo
The die was cast when the GAE decided to pick a fight it couldn’t afford to lose… with Russia…. right on Russia’s border. I guess we’ve been over (and over) all the flawed assumptions and the misguided “intellectual” environment that led up to that, the GAE’s sense of invincibility and inevitability (going back to and stemming from the ’91 Gulf War/USSR collapse). The core religious belief in the GAE brain trust that “free” societies always win, and the GAE is “free” so it must win. No, really. Even assuming that is true, one would think that, circa 2021, when the… Read more »
Perhaps the actual dangers of the fallout might be somewhat overhyped, but the dangers from a false flag exploitation of some sort of a “dirty” release are not. The US did send a “sniffer” plane to Europe, you know, just in case a false flag was greenlighted, and the propaganda needs to be vaulted.
Worst case, you might we might wind up getting the maximum test case concerning the dangers of radioactive fallout.
The dangers of radioactive fallout generally overstated?
You could die.
You could burn or get very sick.
You could get cancer. Is why you want to wear a lead vest for certain medical / dental procedures.
How intense, how widespread? The poison is in the dose.
Try to tell the citizens, troops that the danger is overstated.
Nobody (at least not me) is saying that the stuff is good for you. What I am suggesting is that there may not be as much of it, and not as widespread, as seems to be commonly believed.
Say what you will about the risks of radiation, thank goodness it isn’t Covid.
Russia can shut down our electric grid by unleashing enormous nuclear explosions in the atmosphere above the US. Try to imagine what life would be like with 95% of electricity disabled. And major cities destroyed. I’ll give you some time to contemplate this.
No need to have commit an EMP attack on America. It’s a waste of resources. Just hire the Mexican cartels to blow up the power grid, or do it with special forces teams you’ve inserted through our open borders. They don’t even have to speak English, we aren’t allowed to notice.
“The American military system is not built for this sort of war.” – True! The American military system reflects the culture of our country. It’s about vapid, grotesque political grandstanding by some closeted homosexual Senator, followed by orders for some kind of “Shock-N’-Awe” from the President. The “Shock-N’-Awe” is a nice display for high resolution TV’s where news-bimbos in pumps have a coffee clutch about it, then nothing……nothing to back it up….followed by a trillion dollars in opaque defense spending over 10 years…followed by a slow-motion withdrawal and on to the next event…
A note about Kursk; despite the obviousness of the Kursk salient & the very probable coming German offensive & the Red Army’s prepared defenses in depth, the Germans still made very good penetration & progress. Don’t forget the tip of the spear was the II SS Panzerkorps comprising the 1st Waffen SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, 2nd SS Division Das Reich, & the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf. The Russians didn’t so much as stop the German advance as AH called it off himself due to the Anglo-American invasion of Sicily. The climatic armor clash took place around the small village… Read more »
The northern part of the German attack was more or less stopped cold. The southern part, as you noted, made significant progress and achieved at least a draw at the battle of Prokhorovka. Field Marshall Manstein, commanding the southern part of the attack, was sufficiently encouraged that he wanted to renew the attack the next day. As you also note, Hitler, who was never enthusiastic about the operation, called it off when the Allies landed in Sicily. Even if Manstein’s forces had continued the advance, the Russians launched a very large attack aiming at the town of Orel, which collapsed… Read more »
The Leibstandarte, Das Reich (formally the SS Verfugungstruppe) and the Totenkopf: the three original formations of the Waffen SS. The entry requirements for the Leibstandarte and Das Reich were very stringent – of course on both physical and racial grounds. By the time of the Kursk, the Waffen SS had undergone a large amount of organizational restructure, with many non-germanic personnel serving in many field formations that used to pride themselves on having the cream of the crop. Not sure how it affected the three original formations by ’43, but they sure were a force to be reckoned with in… Read more »
The French SS “Charlemagne” Division was certainly a force to be reckoned with during the final battle for Berlin.
The Russians stopped the Germans at Kursk.
If the Germans could have traded a victory at Kursk for losing Sicily they would have in a heartbeat.
@Boarwild –
Can you recommend a good book on the Eastern Front?
I read L3on D3gr3lle’s Eastern Front and appreciated it. Not sure about the accuracy of a politically motivated writer but enjoyed the narrative, anecdotal form with a soldier’s eye view.
Read “The Forgotten Soldier” and Antony Beever’s “Stalingrad”.
We have to remember that we are in the dark as much as the Russians are. .”Washington wants this war?” Who, in Washington? It can’t be Biden, he doesn’t know what he wants for lunch, and he can’t remember what he ate for breakfast. His team is a veritable freak show of vibrants and sexually depraved clowns. They all have as much or even less leadership acumen than Biden does. The smart play here, is (and always was) – to sit down and negotiate. Nor can any of this be attributed to an intelligence failure… there are any number of… Read more »
The plan makes sense to the neocons even to this day because, as the Z Man points out, they believe their own bad information. You see the Russians are very close to a total collapse, according to the neocons. IMHO the war is not what will actually be the demise of the empire. The neocons with their sanctions are what is doing them in. Most of the world sees the U.S. system as now unreliable and many countries do not want to be dependent on it. So the BRICS movement is gaining all the time. They are moving toward conducting… Read more »
Filthie – “If we actually WANTED to win this war… we would take part in it, put real warriors on the ground’ I could be totally wrong but just a hunch I don’t think the U.S. would come out well in the type of combined arms engagement that a U.S. vs Russia face off would be. U.S. infantry has never been particularly aggressive, SOP seems to be once encountering resistance fall back & call in arty & air support to minimize casualties. For the last 20yrs+ we’ve been fighting goat herders & can’t even defeat them. Focus – ever since… Read more »
The money angle (bailing out others) makes sense if you are aware that dollars will soon be useless and one is trying to buy up assets for fiat dollars before ushering in a new global currency. The destruction of Western Civilization makes sense if you are part of a global cabal trying to get rid of national borders, usher in a worldwide crisis, and institute a one world, authoritarian government. And the evilness of this plan, and its inevitable success, makes sense if you believe in Satan. Just my two cents.
I am unable to wrap my head around why the CBDC would be any more (or less) sound than the dollar it replaces.
CBDCs would be programmable, which would allow central planners to endlessly control and manipulate the currency and therefore the population. That is the real goal behind them. Imagine having dollars that expired after a certain time, or decayed in value along a logarithmic curve, or could only be spent on certain types of goods and not others, or shrank in inverse proportion to your carbon footprint. Imagine prices that continuously varied by micro-cents based on instantaneous demand, or were discounted for approved minorities. Imagine the whole task of calculating all this stuff placed in the hands of the new Woke… Read more »
Imagine having dollars that expired after a certain time, or decayed in value along a logarithmic curve
No need to imagine. It’s called inflation.
A national gulag can have two currencies.
Domestic, the Company store scrip;
International, the trade settlement currency, based on the productivity of the indentured slaves in the gulag.
Several reasons. Electronic means like only authorized, monitored transactions can be made. Just like public transit or self driving: only authorized movements allowed. Two, strengthens a single, global leviathan. Three, helps erode national identity further. To be clear, I do not think the currency will be better for the average prole. I actually think it will be worse.
But TPTB will not care. Do they care about the flood of third worlders ruining the country further?
If they are going to seize Bankalankastan’s cash reserves, they have to actually seize them. With a cbdc, they just “suspend your account for violating the TOS.”
And because the cost of hyperinflating cash is nontrivial, while inflating any amount on a cbdc is free and instantaneous.
I wouldn’t underestimate Biden’s role in all this. Few if any have been more hip deep in the Ukrainian mire for the last decade+ than he.
The inability to read the enemy seems to be a pretty universal problem. But Putin’s failure to anticipate the reaction of the US and by extension, NATO, to the invasion is pretty dramatic. The US was telegraphing its intentions for months before the SMO started. Hitler’s failure to anticipate the US’s willingness to turn all of its economic might to the war effort was astonishing given it was happening early on in the war with lend lease. How WW1 even got started is a convoluted mess of missteps. Afghanistan could have avoided a 20 year occupation by simply handing over… Read more »
It’s wishful thinking. The types of ambitious people that rise to the top of the hierarchy are the sorts of people that act assuming the best scenario will unfold. They’re at the top because they got lucky so far, but once they’re at the top they tend to assume it was all via superior ability and their shit no longer stinks. What’s entertaining is when their luck runs out and they flail around, never quite realizing that they weren’t God’s gift to the world after all. Reading Hitler’s biography it really struck me how lucky he was, right up to… Read more »
Pearl Harbor was the trap to drag Hitler in; Germany declared war four days after Pearl.
Germany was obligated under Axis treaty, they didn’t pull some “secret treaty” out of their ass as an excuse.
That trap was part, only part, of the reason the U.S. got “involved” against Japan. The neocon criminal network was deeply vested in Asia for a century, but global empire was always on their mind.
(And still is, as Eloi points out, remember Who they work for.)
The only sense it makes was it allowed Hitler to order US ships sunk. The US was illegally arming both the British and the Soviets. They broke further neutrality laws by putting the stuff on US ships. The recognized international law for neutral nations was payment in gold “cash and carry” (no credit) on the other country’s ships. So Britain could send ships full of gold to go buy US war materials, pay for the materials with that gold and then ship it back to Britain on that ship. I guess Hitler didn’t want to sink those ships before declaring… Read more »
getting to the top involves internal competition; once there involves external competition. and that’s when the wheels come off the klown kar.
Quite right, as we’re finding out to our grief.
It’s my thought that Hitler was always the primary target; provoking Japan was a way to provoke Germany, to pull him in using “legal” means.
The obstinate Austrian had refused to kick the tripwire, over and over.
The neocon interests in Asia were related, and the Soviet eastern front, but I’d say Germany was the #1 threat to the internationalists.
Nobody had proposed a Kaufmann or Morgenthau total genocide of the Japanese; they weren’t Amelek, the ancient Aryan enemy.
Excellent point. The Japanese probably would have dealt fairly with the US’s commercial interests in China. The official line about Japan using Chinese forced conscripts to take over the world is just about as dumb as Hitler’s supposed world domination schemes, without a navy no less.
Whenever someone says “at least you’re not speaking German,” I say, “you’re right. Lets go down to the pride parade and celebrate. Don’t forget your mask”
In almost every war ever fought, at least one side thought it was going to be easy. That’s how these things get started.
“But Putin’s failure to anticipate the reaction of the US and by extension, NATO, to the invasion is pretty dramatic. The US was telegraphing its intentions for months before the SMO started.”
Agreed but in Putin’s partial defense, he probably assumed the US couldn’t really be as stupid/crazy as they appeared to be.
I rather like the idea that this Putin is a body double. The conspiracy theory, relying on pictures of younger Putin and current Putin, is that the original was a deranged psychopath, a KGB killer. That was the one who pulled a hit job on his electoral rival and stole 129 million meant for relief supplies in St. Petersburg. Seeing how dangerous and ambitious he was, an offer was made to a lookalike, an accountant with an architectural bent in the KGB bureaucracy. Bad Putin was “retired” in the traditional Mafya manner, and good Putin was able to pursue his… Read more »
Douglas Macgregor has said, “people in Washington don’t think, they emote.”
For reasons others would know better than I, the Union was determined, at all costs, to prevent the Confederacy from departing. However deranged our neocons might be, why the mania about regime change in Russia or its desired breakup if the regime, under Putin, is as reasonable as it seems. Few American hearts, unless sufficiently propagandized, will break if the Donbass reverts to its Russian roots and Ukraine becomes a Polish corridor. The question may be relevant if our ruling class is bent as it seems to be on preserving our natural resources for our future Asian overlords. It may… Read more »
Actually, the North was getting very tired of the war by 1863, as the Draft Riots in NYC confirmed, and if the South had adopted Stonewall’s (and Nathan Bedford Forrest’s) hit and run strategy, there probably would have been a peace…Indeed, it’s clear that General McClellan would have won in 1864 if the Army had not committed massive vote fraud in the border States, basically selecting the electors for Lincoln… And I disagree that Putin ever had a choice of suing for peace with the Ukraine, the tentative Istanbul treaty only occurred after the Russians virtually wiped out the UKR… Read more »
If Atlanta hadn’t fallen to Sherman in Sept 1864, then McClellan quite likely would have won in November. It was that union victory which signaled to the voters that they were winning, that the end in was in sight. Prior to that, to the man on the street, 1864 had appeared as just another year of carnage little different from the previous 2 or 3. This gets us to Davis’ fateful decision to replace Johnston with Hood, but that’s getting kinda OT.
then McClellan quite likely would have won in November
—
As you could probably guess, that doesn’t mean the war would’ve ended
McClellan campaigned on a political settlement with the south. The big sticking points would have been what to do with occupied territory, Tennessee, New Orleans, much of Mississippi…..
The citizenry of Russia, Ukraine, USA, and Europe are all opposed to this war and the senseless loss of life it has wrought (hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men have now been killed or seriously wounded). Zelensky was elected on a platform of negotiating peace with Russia, and Putin bent over backwards trying to get a diplomatic solution before hostilities were forced upon him. But it was a small cadre of politicians and neocons in the US and UK that drove this debacle inexorably into a hot conflict. Why did they do this? Two reasons. The first is that Ukraine… Read more »
>The bubble will burst after the 2024 election.
Why should that election mean anything?
That’s as far as they can kick the can before the chickens come home to roost.
The Ukraine is also a center for sex trafficking, including child sex trafficking, and organ trafficking…It also has or had 46 US bio-labs (per Nuland’s testimony) doing God knows what…
Anyone who’s rooting for the Ukraine is rooting for that kind of depravity….
Much like the North Slope, it would make almost no difference. When the North Slope came online, it only slowed the decline of US production. The US really won’t benefit much if at all from Ukrainian oil fields. The North Slope only lasted as long as it did because of the pipeline bottleneck. The pipeline bottle-necked the whole thing at 2 million barrels a day. If it is even still producing (I haven’t looked in 10 years), it cannot even keep the pipeline full (it couldn’t keep the pipeline full 10 years ago). Despite the uptick from 2010-202, the US… Read more »
A lot to unpack. First, only a small fraction of the North Slope oil fields have been drilled. Most of these areas are still off-limits. Second, the volume of oil still coming in from North Slope fields is still very high and its a good crude for refining purposes (versus heavy sour crudes from Venezuela which are costly to refine). Third, production near the Arctic Circle is expense versus domestic fracking derived oil, so economics are keeping a lid on expansion. Fourth, production from the Black Sea and Azoz will be much cheaper than North Sea supply, and would flood… Read more »
North Slope oil production is 500k barrels a day, a 1/4 of what it was in the 80s. The US does produce very light oil in the tight oil plays. AFAIK, Canadian Syncrude sells at a premium. As of last year (the first headline of a google search), Candian Syncrude was selling at $15 premium over WTI. I agree that producing in the arctic is more expensive than at lower latitudes. But I was talking about the US, not Europe. Selling that oil to Europe is easy and for a higher price. Oil generally sells for like 10 Dollars more… Read more »
there is a shiton of oil right off the coast of cali, just waiting for pumping to be restarted. shallow water, too.
You can’t put oil rigs off the California coast.
They would be bad for the environment.
You need to put up thousands of gigantic windmills off the California coast.
Also, remember to recycle and make sure to get your Covid vaccine and boosters: they are safe and effective.
These are the same idiots who are forcing their last nuclear power plant out of commission while mandating their passenger automobile fleet run on electricity. There is basically no chance that oil, whatever amount it may be, will be produced anytime soon.
I wish I could agree that AINO citizenry is opposed to US involvement in Ukraine. It doesn’t really bother me that they might get what they wished for good and hard, but it bothers me that I could be collateral damage.
That’s why I mentioned the Vilnius summit.
What a target. WHAT a target, if the “rules based order” has broken all the rules.
What is the missile flight time from Moscow to Lithuania, again?
——–
(Big thanks for the Caspian Sea region oil mention…right smack dab in the middle of the Road, close offshore to the Sea Road. Azov Sea is already a polluted, toxic dump, so drilling there won’t harm widdle bunny-wunnies.)
Russia has Mig-31s and Kinzhals in Kalingrad ready on a moments notice. They would have proably less than 30 seconds flight time to Vilnius.
Seems to be a tempting target, purposefully. You can bet no Escudorojos will be present.
After watching France for the past few weeks, it seems essential for the survival of our White civilization to have alternate models to “liberal democracy”. Russia might not be as “good” as the West, but they don’t have an elite that hate their own people with every fibre of their being. That goes for a lot of the world and allows many second tier countries to compete with the West. So yes, NATO needs to be stopped. Hopefully this war wraps up soon. They might be piping mad if they fail though, and it does make you wonder what they… Read more »
In Russia, all gay propaganda is banned, and child trannies do not exist…That alone makes them much better than the West…
If it was tropical rather than frigid I might have already emigrated
Ice People trend toward competence, while the Tropical People, well, not so much. Snow, ice, strong seasonal swings are stimulants, weak seasonal swings, and e-z livin’ encourage lassitude.
Web:
“increasingly clear that “democracy” just means government by media and population replacement by Third Worlders.”
they were making noises at china, but that seems to have petered out once they realized they are out of firecrackers.
why don’t the Russians kill the neocons? there aren’t that many of them and they can’t have much if any personal security?
Their security is the Mossad.
The intelligence service of a state with a population slightly larger than that of New York City?
When its over maybe the Ukrainian ultra nationalists will track them down, a bit like the Armenians killing key Turks after the genocide
The very thought of it just makes my day.
This offers an out.
Mossad could do it and blame the nationalists!
This is off topic for today’s informative post, but it is in keeping with the snake theme. Back into the American Cold Civil War … When Kotkin showed up at the lectern and soon after the AmericanMind rotation, I was puzzled. It appeared as some joint anti-woke alliance. Now we find out that he fully endorses the woke project and is permitted to advocate it on their site: https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-luckiest-country/ A post for Independence Day nonetheless. It is an aggregation of Barbara Lerner Spectre’s “multi-culturism is your future to survive”, and Krugman’s, “your power is going to go away”, diktats with… Read more »
> This does not mean, as some on the Right may hope, a return to the old, whiter, less diverse America. Beyond the chaos of the Biden border policies, the country is made stronger by remaining the most immigrant friendly country in the world. The right are the true “diversity is our strength” vanguard. > These newcomers are helping to make America both broadly both more cosmopolitan but also intrinsically American. This guy’s idea of America is a giant shopping mall. > Joel Kotkin is a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life, the… Read more »
“This guy’s idea of America is a giant shopping mall.”
Yes. The Claremont’s stated aim is to preserve the American way of life. Little do we know the political double speak involved. To the rubes it means it means sovereignty, balance between commercial, religious, cultural, political pursuits. To the donors, it means America The Shopping Mall and Food Truck Lot.
America is a whorehouse with an ATM. And it’s running out of bills.
He’s jewish, is he not? No surprises there…
Ah.
“Our, as in OUR, Democracy,” strikes again.
Guys like Kotkin and Michael Lind are the ones they send “over the wall” to hedge their bets by having a foot in both camps. Krauthammer was one of these (took me a long time to figure that out, I’m ashamed to say), as were the original neocons, for that matter. They come with money, which eventually leaves only corruption and controlled opposition in their wake. The great tell is that you won’t find many who are opposed to legal immigration. They may prattle on ineffectually about curbing the illegals, but they are almost universally ok with changing the the… Read more »
Somebody tell them the rioters in France are mostly LEGAL immigrants.
The rioters are doing the Finkels’ business.
Iirc, Lee’s aim was Philadelphia. Confederate troops made it as far as York, near the Susquehanna River. The Wrightsville-Columbia bridge over the Susquehanna was burned to keep them from crossing into Lancaster County. The piles from that bridge are still there, I believe. Farther north are Carlisle (where the Army War College is), and Harrisburg. Harrisburg was a major rail hub and the site of a major Union training camp. That would’ve been the way to go to cripple the Union’s ability to make war. Gettysburg was as big a deal as it’s made out to be. The Confederacy never… Read more »
Holy schmidt. Our founding patriarch had a land grant in the county of the Duke of Lancaster. We still have the cemetery ol’ Johann and family are planted in. They had fled the immediate aftermath of the 30 Years War.
Part of the issue is that the West’s foreign policy is lead by the neocons, whose skillset lies more in manipulation and narrative than actual conflict. The neocons seem pretty skilled in implementing color revolutions, where money flows to organizations and politicians, media is used to change public perception and voting shenanigans help to install the neocon’s preferred leadership. In essence, the neocons are really good at meddling in other people’s affairs and manipulating the system to cause trouble or install their man as the leader. But the neocons are truly awful as strategic planning. Once they move past the… Read more »
Hard to imagine a *weaker* Russia coming off this war. They continue to sell their resources for cash, have increased their military *and* population (annexation), and finally proof tested new military weapons and personnel—both theirs and NATO’s.
Neo-cons are really good at starting wars, then losing them. And their appetite for losing seems to be growing. From Afghanistan 20 years ago to wanting to lose to Russia and China now…
Our neocon class are such vile, demented psychopaths that I can imagine them literally deriving great pleasure watching that grotesque minefield footage. Dead and maimed Ukrainians or Russians, it’s all good news to these sick degenerates.
As my late mother, a well known writer and therapist, would have said about hideous Nuland, et. al. “they wear their pathology”.
That’s an excellent turn of phrase. I’ll be using it.
She had a lot of them. Another related one was “you have all the information you need” just by looking at something like Nuland.
The West is like the Confederacy, but also like the Germans, in underestimating the ability of the Russians/Soviets to mobilize men and resources. Facilitating this war may be the worst, and most consequential, of the many mistakes our leaders have made in the past 60 years.
> The American military system is not built for this sort of war.
Imagine having an 800 billion dollar military budget and being unable to produce enough artillery shells for a ground war.
Yeah, that’s the weird part. Sure, our military is geared for a different kind of war, but our military budget is still ten times the size of the Russian budget. You’d think that sheer size alone would give us an ability to at least keep up, not that I care. I’m assuming that our military would argue that if the U.S. was fighting the Russians, our superior weapons, air power and technology would make Russia’s artillery shell advantage mute. They’d argue that we’d wipe out their guns, transportation and power stations in a few days and that’d be the end… Read more »
Who is this “our” you speak of, kemosabe?
It is the elephant in the room. The Leopard tanks given to Ukraine were supposed to be the best of the West. They were useless in this offensive because they are not really designed for this sort of combat. I suspect the Pentagon is dragging its feet delivering Abrams tanks because they do not want pics of them in burning piles all over the internet.
No tank is designed for that kind of abuse. They can only operate in a combined arms environment with protection from the air, lurking infantry, and some suppression of enemy artillery. The Ukes have none of those things, so their armor is slaughtered before reaching the first (of many) line of Russian defenses.
The same is true of the Challenger 2 from the UK. No one wants to see graveyards of their very expensive equipment and the publicity that comes from that.
The never ending propaganda that the next Wunderwaffe will be the key to victory is another striking parallel between this conflict and the German war effort after Stalingrad. The piecemeal addition of insignificant numbers of western military hardware to a numerically inferior army with zero control of the sky is literally the complete opposite of a sensible military strategy. At this point, a handful of F16’s will make as much difference to the outcome as the ME262 did in 1945.
Imagine having an 800 billion dollar military budget and being unable to produce enough artillery shells for a ground war. Artillery shells aren’t “sexy” in the way that a multi-million dollar guided missile or multi-billion dollar jet fighter is. They aren’t sexy but they are necessary. But it’s a mature technology (I would figure advances in artillery shell design are incremental vs. sudden) so where’s the chance for kickbacks and graft slushing around? Tell some Congresscritter it’ll take 10 years and multi-millions, nay billions of dollars to build a new 155 MM shell and they’ll start wondering what the Hell… Read more »
“As always, stuff that needs to be done isn’t as cool as new shiny stuff. And new shiny stuff gets attention.”
I suspect it gets attention because it is ultimately more profitable. Old technology production goes to the lowest bidder, so research and development is the key to more and more profitability for the MIC.
Imagine trying to tell them that they need a lot of relatively intelligent physically fit young men to operate those systems.
The US military was busy getting ready for the next war–civil war against the deplorables among its own citizens–when Russia vs. Ukraine happened. And here we are.
> Imagine having an 800 billion dollar military budget and being unable to produce enough artillery shells for a ground war.
Artillery may win wars but it cannot finance vacation homes.
No truer words were ever spoken.
As an undergrad, I had a fairly brilliant professor who knew his European martial history forwards and backwards. One day I asked him, “Do you think that war profiteers literally get together and plan a war, like men with cigars in a backroom, like the old school Left depicts?” He smiled and said, “You don’t have to call the pigs to the trough. They know when it’s feeding time.” For the longest time I thought it was an oversimplification—a mix of Smedley Butler’s polemic “War is a Racket” and Marxist dialectical materialism—to say that rich men start wars to make… Read more »
Wars are fought for economic ends — conquest of land and/or control of other resources (water, oil, rare earths). In that sense it is always a racket. But in the modern world, war has become an industrial undertaking. The military-industrial complex is a major chunk of USA’s faltering economy. The oligarchs behind this complex are the driving force in foreign and military policy. Politicians and think-tank intellectuals are merely their hired whores. And the ever-weakening US hold on the rest of the world depends on the mailed fist. So there is a constant will-to-war. The only way out is for… Read more »
Don’t forget the financiers. Most wars of the last two centuries had strong financiers involved to either trap participating countries into debt or push a central bank on them to take over the currency. Funny how the opponents of these things always seem to lose (Hitler, Saddam, Qaddafi)
The greatest killer in, and aftermath of, wars? Disease.
Sepsis, corpse-polluted waters, and cholera.
One thing you’re making clear in your excellent essay is the mismatch in the quality of strategic thinking between the US (which hides behind the skirts of NATO) and Russia. Bluntly put, the neo-cons and their masters in the military-industrial complex simply cannot think strategically. Strategic thinking involves, inter alia, patience, being geared towards the long-term, and having various contingency plans in place. It’s now becoming blatantly obvious that the USA is just lurching from one tactic to another and all of them are coming a cropper. The economic sanctions backfired and the battlefield tactics have failed. The latter have… Read more »
GAE got the intelligence on Russia so wrong that they probably had some “climate change” analysis being done (firing whoever told them things they didn’t want to hear). Yes, incompetence was probably involved too, but still, I’d think that only explains part of it.
Note to Arshad: M.Hudson lifted that one from the Zman, whaddya bet?
“…never recover.”?
Pedantic quibble: after Gettysburg, the Southern United States had to fight for another two years before agreeing to a reconciliation with the North. The South lost their farm equipment, but maintained their arms and ability to fight.
Reconstruction was but a blip in time.
More importantly, up until their 21st century colonization & replacement, the South retained its distinct cultural and genetic homogeneity.
My children/ grandchildren/ great grandchildren will be fortunate to live as free as Southenors from 1865-2015.
Re the chatter about a dirty bomb to the Zaporozhye nuclear plant by a desperate Zelensky, what made me perk up was this response on Simplicius’ substack:
“And if Zelensky/CIA/MI-6 did such a thing, how safe would the NATO meeting in Vilnius be?”
(Apparently, Kiev has about a week to show results, to pitch the summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. We’re supposed to hold our breath waiting for the 3 a.m. sunrise for the next 5 days.)
The original Russian plan almost worked. In March, 2022, Russian and Ukrainian diplomats in Istanbul initialed a ceasefire that would have implemented the Minsk Agreements and kept the Donbas in Ukraine. Ukraine would have recognized Russian sovereignty over Crimea. Immediately, the US sent Boris Johnson to Kiev to squelch the deal, and he did. The US will not tolerate a negotiated settlement to the war. So now Russia’s plans are different. Now they seek the elimination of the Kiev junta and the installation of a Russo-philic regime, the demilitarization of Ukraine, the elimination of the Nazis, and neutrality for the… Read more »
Yes – the Russians underestimated how crazy the neo-cons and their British counterparts have gone. Otherwise their plan would have worked just fine.
You didn’t mention the sabotage of the nuclear plant. Zelensky is laying down the lie that the Russians are going to destroy it which means the opposite. Then they can hopefully get Nato fully involved. Thoughts?
Neocons hate being wrong, and are looking like fools right now. Their hatred for Russia multiplies after each loss or setback in Ukraine. They are irrational and will try anything at this point, so contaminating a large area of Europe with radiation is not out of the question. They hate Ukrainians as much as they hate Russians, so killing off large numbers of them are win/win for the neocons.
I think what he is up to here is blackmailing the Europeans. They know the Russians are not going to blow up their own facility. He is using the threat of a nuclear disaster to force them to keep funding this war. My guess is the Kagan cult is the masterminds of this strategy.
The neocons aren’t exactly being subtle about this gambit.
Also, are you sure that it’s just about funding. It seems a last gasp to get the Americans involved direct.
I suspect the game here is to replicate what they did in Syria. They have placed American troops in Syria ostensibly to guard the oil field that Chevron is poaching as well as the farm land, but the real reason is to act as a trip wire. If they can get Poland and the Baltic states to send their troops into western Ukraine, then there is a good chance they get hit by the Russians. That will then trigger NATO to declare war on Russia. It is a crackpot plan, but these people are insane, in addition to be incompetnant.
I always figured that NATO would send in Polish troop to western Ukraine for “humanitarian” purposes if Russia ever started to getting the visible upper hand. The troops would ostensibly be to help with refugees or something like that, but would, in fact, be either tripwire or, at least, a force keeping Russia from crossing the river. Regardless, I can’t believe neutered the Germans and other Europeans have become. The Americans are telling the Ukrainians that they can get NATO troops on the ground if they can find a way to cause a nuclear power plant “accident.” The Americans are… Read more »
Andrei Martyanov (“smoothieX12” on blogspot and youtube, and most informatively was just a guest on The Duran) generally has the most informed take on all this, coupled with insider knowledge (being former Soviet military).
He points out that the nuclear plant has been shut down for a while now so this is an empty threat.
He also points out that from the Russian perspective this is not yet a war, and they haven’t even begun to really mobilize.
Na, I don’t buy the special military operation BS, its a war, Putin is trying to keep the effects on the general Russian population to a minimum, I was surprised that the Russians didn’t call up more men, but apparently they take in 1400+ men a week and train them up, slowly building up their army As for the Ukrainians, they have lasted far longer that I expected, but thats not a good thing. they need this to stop ASAP. the end result seem almost certain to me, its just how many people die before we get there If they… Read more »
Recall that Satan has been defeated. It does not stop him from ruining as many souls as he can.
Martyanov is smart, but he’s not always correct. His schtick also gets hard to take after a while. The threat is not empty. The Ukes aren’t going to try and penetrate the ZPP containment vessel. They are either going to try and strike the less well protected nuclear waste stored at ZPP or they are going to load up a Tochka-U ballistic missile with waste from a plant under Uke control, then shoot it at ZPP to make it look like the Russians released nuclear contaminants. Both of these plans are still pretty dumb, but they are not empty threats.… Read more »
Calls to mind Sheriff Bart holding a gun to his head in “Blazing Saddles”.
“Do as he say! Do as he sayyyyy!!!”
So that begs the question; if the “radiation bomb” goes off on the nuclear facility, will the blame fall on that madcap Ukie Pres., or will the Russians hold NATO responsible and react accordingly?
The ZNPP is pretty much shut down. So Ukraine is said to be planning to drop some nuclear waste in the aftermath of the attack to panic the West into thinking there is more radiation than would be caused by destroying the plant.
Then Lindsey Graham might get is wish for an all out NATO intervention.
By God how I despise that old poof.