The Crisis At The Window

For about six months, starting last winter, Western media talked about a Ukrainian counter-offensive that was supposed to change the direction of the war. These stories coincided with stories about the delivery of various types of equipment, along with expert opinions from retired generals. Late in the spring Washington sent reliable toadies over to Kiev to see the plans and then talk to the media about how the Ukrainians were preparing to deal a death blow to Moscow.

As we get into the heart of August and the third month of the offensive, it is clear to most everyone that it has been a disaster. First came the images of Western armored vehicles trapped in minefields. Images of burning tanks were then followed by video of Ukrainian soldiers struggling to escape the same minefields after their armored vehicles were disabled by mines. Then came weeks of reports in the West about revised tactics that achieved nothing along the front.

As things stand, the most enthusiastic Ukraine supporters say that the counter-offensive has managed to capture about ten square miles. In reality, the Ukrainians failed to make it through the security zone of Russian defenses. This is the area in front of the first defensive lines that are used to slow an attack. In the south, Ukraine managed to capture a few abandoned villages, but relentless Russian attacks from artillery and airpower turned those into Ukrainian cemeteries.

At the start of the offensive, independent observers and Russian sources said the Ukrainians had enough resources to continue their offensive into August. At that point they will have exhausted men and material. At that point, they would have no choice but to stop offensive operations and fall back into defensive positions. Otherwise, they would be forced to cannibalize their lines and leave themselves open to Russian attacks in other areas along the line of contact.

That may have been a generous assessment. Over the last couple of weeks Russian forces in the north have steadily pushed the Ukrainians back. Ukraine has just moved their northern headquarters west to get clear of the Russian advance. They have also ordered the evacuation of Kupyansk, an important town located on the bank of the Oskil River in the Kharkiv Oblast. Reports suggest the Ukrainians simply lack the manpower and equipment to defend the area.

Washington is in a panic because they promised everyone that the Ukrainians would easily smash through Russian lines in the south. The plan was to rush through to the Sea of Azov, thus severing the land bridge between Russia and Crimea. Once that happened, attacks would begin on Crimea. The Russian army would either revolt after the humiliation or simply collapse, causing political chao in Moscow. It is hard to believe, but this was the official narrative.

Interestingly, the narrative was not just another pack of lies from the Kagan cult, but an official assessment from the Pentagon. It has been Western military doctrine that the way to defeat the Russians in a land war is with a rapid, concentrated attack on their defensive lines using armor and infantry. Here is a paper on the topic from 2017 and here is a recent video discussing it in connection with this war. This strategy actually goes back to the Cold War days.

The short version is that Russia organized its army around groups of 800 to 1000 men that operate independently within the defensive formation. These units have, tanks armored personnel carriers and artillery. The NATO strategy was to send overwhelming force at these units, forcing them to retreat in order to preserve their equipment. Russia is known for trading land for resources. They did this in the Kharkiv region last year and in the Kherson region last spring.

What Washington did not notice is that the Russians have moved away from the Battalion Tactical Group to more flexible arrangements based on the situation, terrain, and their own resources. In the south when Ukraine launched its main attack, they did not face battalions, but divisions. Further, the Russians had prepared complex defensive positions designed to trap advancing armored columns. In other words, the Russians read that paper and were ready for it.

Another thing Washington did not notice is that the Russian army has changed in other ways since the Cold War. They have a wide range of electronic warfare systems that work well against modern weapons. They also have incorporated drones in massive numbers that are highly effective against Western armor. The internet is full of videos where a Lancet drone takes out a Ukrainian armored vehicle. The Russians have quickly become the masters of drone warfare.

The main reason the Ukrainian offensive is a catastrophe is the side with the trillion-dollar annual budget has not updated their understanding of the Russian army since the last century. They have not bothered to notice what has been happening on the battlefields over the last eighteen months. Instead, the world’s most expensive military has gone along with the crackpot plans of the Kagan cult, either not understanding what is happening or indifferent to the inevitable results.

The Ukraine war is becoming a microcosm of the crisis of competence. It is not just the scarcity of talented people in the ranks. They still exist in sufficient numbers to keep the system operating reasonably well. The issue is the selection pressure at the top is for true believers and sycophants. The only way to get in the room to discuss the Ukraine war is to be fully on board with the dream of destroying Russia or be willing to humiliate yourself by telling these people what they want to hear.

Imagine the tag team of Victoria Nuland and General Milley replicated throughout the managerial system. Nuland is the maniacal imbecile in charge for no other reason than zealotry, while Milley is the oleaginous flunky with the credentials to provide legitimacy to the rantings of Nuland. The competent are driven from the room, leaving this combination to chart public policy. The general decline in competence that is driving demographics, is driven by this combination at the top.

In the movie Braveheart, Longshanks returns from France to confront his son who was charged with putting down the Scottish revolt. His son has his “advisor” with him, who makes the mistake of speaking out of turn. This is what has happened in the West, except Longshanks died of a heart attack and his son is in charge. The advisor now busies himself telling the son what he wants to hear. Meanwhile, outside the castle walls, the kingdom rattles toward collapse.


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181 thoughts on “The Crisis At The Window

  1. Was it ever established who blew up the Dam On The River Kwai, no wait, River Dnipro? That seemed an especially showy/pointless crazy stratagem, in an operation that has featured many. If it’s in fact owing to coincidental decrepitude and deferred maintenance, that wouldn’t really serve Ukraine’s case for retaining the eastern lands, would it? I remember when we used to fret about a museum in Baghdad being looted… Good times.

  2. The interesting little tidbit in that 2017 report is the open acknowledgement that Russian equipment was equal to or better than that of the US.
    It’s only in the past 18 months that the drunken Russians are fighting naked in the snow with shovels.

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    • Once the media gets involved the conversation has to go sub TMZ.

      We knew, we the actual military.

      The Flag Officers know, but they will say anything. It’s horrifying to watch in person.
      Worse are middle aged Colonels talking to a general. Its the human centipede.!

  3. Interesting. I wonder also how much of a free-for-all is happening inside the Hive. In particular in the military. We have a JCOS nominee who is a thin-skinned black supremacist whose primary goal seems to be a massive Great Replacement of whitey in the officer ranks across the Armed Forces. Could he and his cadre of fellow travelers be expending most of their energy on this pet project rather than their primary duties.

    That this guy proposed reducing and capping white men in the officers ranks to 43% and even got the nomination tells you have patently insane and deranged the system is. The same goes for the Brown-Jackson SC Justice being approved. Here is a person who was asked point blank if she thinks Americans have natural rights and she said she couldn’t say they do to affirm this position. The bedrock principle of our entire legal system and system of governance and she is appointed as a judge in the highest court in our land by our Congress. This system is gone.

    On a white-pill note, it looks like Matt Walsh has done something remarkable. Maybe he realizes that the system the folk created is gone, so it may be time to at least preserve the folk while we still can. We should show our support for him doing what he just did.

  4. “A call for peace between Russians and Ukrainians has landed a Ukrainian priest Roman Kurach in hot water. Kurach had to apologize publicly after the local media called it a “massive scandal”.
    “During a Sunday prayer the priest asked G-d to bring these great people together: Ukraine and Russia”. Local journalist in Uzhgorod called these words “shoking”.
    To put things in perspective: there are no places left in most of Ukrainian cemeteries. Graves of WWI times are being opened to bury soldiers.

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  5. “ Ukraine managed to capture a few abandoned villages, but relentless Russian attacks from artillery and airpower turned those into Ukrainian cemeteries.”

    The Russians have been doing this the entire time.

    • That poor CAV officer Moore who wrote the 2017 paper on how to defeat the RU BTG.
      I read it before this nonsense started, I may have posted it…

      What he actually said was a US BCT could overwhelm a BTG by high OPTEMPO aka Operational Tempo, in which the 4400 US BCT (Brigade Combat Team) vs 1100 RU BTG (Battalion Tactical Group) the USA Brigade could mount a lot of attacks and maneuvers to run the enemy out of gas and bullets and inflict sufficient casualties as to withdraw. Could. Mean. That. It doesn’t have to mean frontal attacks, hit and run on a broad area works too.

      In fact when I read it my first thought is French WW1 charging the Germans wearing Red pants to show courage. This unfortunately is what happened. They tried to make the Russians run out of shells before Ukraine ran out of men.

      Whoever is giving these orders needs to be tried and hanged.

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      • They tried to make the Russians run out of shells before Ukraine ran out of men.

        I see someone in the US Military/Industrial complex was watching Futurama with that strategy:

        “You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.” – Captain Zap Brannigan

    • Z – BTW we the soldiers knew.
      This is a Dr Karber at West Point in 2018.
      He had a lot of time put into Ukraine war 2015-2018, as did “others”
      We knew, we’re ignored.
      https://youtu.be/_CMby_WPjk4

      This means BTW that West Point Lieutenants in 2022 had better info than the White House.

      Here’s Bartles and Grau “The Russian way of War”. 416 pages but accurate and useful.

      https://www.armyupress.army.mil/portals/7/hot%20spots/documents/russia/2017-07-the-russian-way-of-war-grau-bartles.pdf

      I was using this ^^ last year to train my soldiers, which has to happen after we get our priority tranny brief etc.

      We of course are ignored and our flag officers are Flag Officers because they nod their heads.

  6. From where I sit, it looks like Russia is doing exactly what it said it was going into Ukraine to do – protect the Russian speaking people of Eastern Ukraine, the ones who were being attacked by the Nuland-Zelensky junta before the SMO. If you took Putin exactly at his word on the announcement of the SMO, you would have expected such a defensive perimeter to be built to protect those regions. Needless to say, we were told not to take him at his word, he really wanted to march on Paris. Well, I don’t see it. Maybe it will happen, but if the Kagan cult is right about that, it will be the first time they are right.

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    • Today, nobody in the world has the military/logistical capability to march on Paris, or Moscow, or Beijing. It cannot be done. Which I’m going to say is a good thing.

      Anybody who tries to scare people with talk like that is either a liar or a retard

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      • A bunch of joggers marched on paris a few weeks ago. They raped and pillaged and murdered a few locals and set up a garrison that demands constant tribute from the labor of the locals.

        Sure Beijing and Moscow, no one marches on THEM. A bunch of africans on dinghies march on western capitals whenever the mood strikes.

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    • Agreed, but as mentioned—the war drags out, lives are lost. As the extension of the war becomes meaningless in term of desired goals, then the loss of life becomes meaningless and therefore greatly unjustifiable. Meaningless even. This constitutes a grave moral error on the part of Putin and Russia. (I know. As a citizen of the GAE I should keep my mouth shut.)

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      • The aim is de-Nazification and to do that lives will have to be taken. It’s a laudable aim, I think. Besides that the Ukrainian people have shown no ability to be decent, productive members of humanity so we’re well rid of them.

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      • The thing is, a defensive line is, by definition, defensive. The “counteroffensive” was always stupid, from day one. After Mariupol, it would have been reasonable for Ukraine to come to the bargaining table as the loser in this conflict. What is definitely not reasonable is to send the last remnants of your fighting force and a lot of fancy military equipment into open fields full of landmines without air support. Yet that is just what NATO/Zelensky decided to do. This “counteroffensive” was stupid, destructive, and totally unnecessary, with the results being completely predictable. It’s so bad that the only logical explanation I could come here is that Zelensky, for whatever reason (ha!) wanted those Ukrainian men of fighting age to get slaughtered.

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        • “Zelensky, for whatever reason (ha!) wanted those Ukrainian men of fighting age to get slaughtered.”

          Zelensky being neither Ukranian, a man, nor of fighting age… what’s it to him?

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        • Yes, stupid, unnecessary and unnecessary from a realistic point of view. However, from the point of view of those who are benefitting financially from prolonged combat, it was positively brilliant! By which I mean the American arms producers like Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, et al., the politicians who take tons of campaign donations from such entities and in whose districts production facilities are located, the politicians and other grifters on both sides of the Atlantic who have their fingers tightly wrapped around the piles of cash that we have been sending and, certainly not least, our current president, whose support for Ukraine can not be untainted by his unlawful but financially rewarding connivance with various and sundry Ukrainian “businesses.” This makes one wonder what Zelensky has on Biden, pere et fils.

      • Compsci – lives are lost the instant wars begin, as far as goals?
        1. The main goal of Russia is survival.
        2. Our unstated goals of Empire and Grift remain.
        3. As far as moral failings because lives are being lost…
        … that’s not mature or masculine, or realistic.
        4. There’s absolutely no doubt there’s sadness in war. Changes nothing.

    • As Putin has repeatedly pointed out, Russia is an enormous country stretching across 12 time zones with a relatively small population..It doesn’t need more territory (and probably couldn’t hold it if it had it)…

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  7. The Ukranians are on the offensive. They have not mounted a counteroffensive.

    Ukraine has counterattacked a couple of times during this war. Russian offensive operations ceased last year. If they were to launch a broad counterattack right now, and were this to be sustained, this would represent a counteroffensive.

    Counteroffensive is used by the ignorant because they are ignorant. It is used by others to maintain the moral narrative Jews want to frame this conflict.

    Supposed professionals in the West say “counteroffensive” because they are in reality compromised amateurs on the take.

    All of this amounts to a Stalinist problem that, thankfully, offers its own Stalinist solution.

    Luttwak is at least clear in his terminology. He is also clear in his desire to see the entire Ukranian male population destroyed if it advances his ethnic interests the length of a fingernail.

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  8. Ho Chi Minh about Western leaders during the Vietnam war:

    “They are an impatient lot”, he said, “they paint the world as they would like to see it and insist that it is true. But they never have the patience or fortitude to ever actually see it through. They hide from their own shadows and possess no end-game besides fostering their own illusions. Victory, therefore, shall be ours.”

    These were the relatively good ones. For Nuland and company, multiply this for 1000.

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    • It’s questionable if the GAE has ever had the staying power for a tough war longer than 3 or 4 years. The popular history narrative is good at memoryholing how much war weariness and discontent there was in 1864, and 1945, and 1952. Sure it can maintain an occupation in a place like Afghanistan, where for long stretches there are no casualties, then one day a couple of Americans die, everyone throws up their hands and says “What are we still doing there?,” but a couple of days later it is forgotten and they are on to the next thing.

      But when it’s real, big, bloody, dirty, and seemingly intractable, that’s never been the GAE’s ballgame. It is probably incapable of fighting a war of attrition. My point being, that’s not a new development, or a result of modernism or post modernism. It’s been in our national psyche from way, way back.

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      • The problem may be that you happily go to war because you know that it won’t affect your territory. You are safe in your own continent. It is not like Germany or Russia going to war. They know that the war can extend to its own territory.

        So Americans see wars as: “other people suffer (and we are very sorry, really) and we, democracy and justice (choose what you want) win”. Look how good we are!

        When Americans start suffering (although 0.1% of what other people suffer), they start wondering if this war is worthwhile. So they withdraw, leaving a mess for others to fix. Countries are completely ruined. Then they invent a narrative to see themselves as victors and the good guys.

        This reminds me to this other quote of the Great Gasby:

        “They were careless people, [rich people] Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

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      • The last American Army to fight directly on the behalf of American citizens was commanded by Robert E. Lee.

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      • The War For Independence contradicts this statement. That was a remarkable show of grit, and incredible fortitude facing seemingly impossible odds for 7+ years of conflict.

        The descendents of the people who pulled that off are still here. They’ve been dispossessed, and conquered in stealth. The conquerors were very clever, however that conquering ethos has no honor warrior ethos to fall back upon. In fact, it borrows it from the warrior class of those they conquered. Who will fight for them now that they have taken off the mask?

        Will they conscript their own children and the helots they’ve have imported en masse for the past 60 years?

        Their weapon is deceipt and bribery. The former is expensive and can’t last forever, and takers have no loyalty.

        That should be a white pill for all of us with a long time horizon.

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        • The War for Independence also benefitted from considerable French assistance. Without that assistance, Great Britain would have maintained its colonies.

      • Don’t forget in 1864/1945 and 1952(?) you had conscripted armies. They learned their lesson with Viet Nam.

        1. Use volunteers only.
        2. Control the media presence and the message.

        Hence 20 years in Afghanistan and wondrous profit for the right people.

  9. Recent “news” about poor Russia’s plight:

    They are (again) so desperate for tanks that they are using decades-old mothballed units.

    Putin is begging North Korea to supply weapons.

    He’s demoralized because the Russkies lost a recent tank battle.

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  10. What’s stunning is that the neocons still consider the whole Ukrainian affair to be a success. In their minds (again, in their minds):

    1. They’re draining the Russian military
    2. Russia has been cut off from Europe
    3. Europe is more tied to the US than ever
    4. Europe is buying huge amounts of LNG and weapons from the US
    5. NATO has expanded to Sweden and Finland – right on Russia’s border
    6. Even Switzerland has come to our side financially
    7. U.S. military spending will increase and not come down for a decade at least

    This is their mindset. When the war finally ends, the neocons will walk away feeling pretty good about things. What’s more, they’ll still be in charge.

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    • Russia is much stronger than when the war started, and is using weapons that didn’t exist 18 months ago, in the words of Col. MacGregor…It takes some serious delusions to think otherwise…

      • At the end of the day Russia has an economy focused on industrial production, the US has an economy focused on purple haired tatted dykes wit a face full of fishing tackle selling blue check marks.

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  11. One of the outgrowths of GAE “invincibility” post ’91 Gulf War has been the GAE announcing, very publicly, most or all of its military intentions, prior to initiating them. Since it chose goatherders for opposition there was never any penalty for this. This habit appears to have persisted into the Ukraine war, and apparently the GAE equated the Russians with the goatherders, even after 18 months of evidence to the contrary. For pretty much everything about the “offensive” was announced publicly ahead of time. One wonders if even now the GAE still equates the Russians with the goatherders.

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  12. As things stand, the most enthusiastic Ukraine supporters say that the counter-offensive has managed to capture about ten square miles.

    I hate reducing things to pop culture references, but I keep thinking of this scene in Blackadder Goes Forth after reading that sentence:

    https://youtu.be/yZT-wVnFn60

    In reality, the Ukrainians failed to make it through the security zone of Russian defenses. This is the area in front of the first defensive lines that are used to slow an attack.

    What Washington did not notice is that the Russians have moved away from the Battalion Tactical Group to more flexible arrangements based on the situation, terrain, and their own resources. In the south when Ukraine launched its main attack, they did not face battalions, but divisions. Further, the Russians had prepared complex defensive positions designed to trap advancing armored columns. In other words, the Russians read that paper and were ready for it.

    Operation Citadel, Operation Citadel on Line 1 please.

    The main reason the Ukrainian offensive is a catastrophe is the side with the trillion-dollar annual budget has not updated their understanding of the Russian army since the last century. They have not bothered to notice what has been happening on the battlefields over the last eighteen months.

    It’s trite and cliched to use the “You know who else underestimated the Russians?” line, but it just rings so true here. In Alan Clark’s book Barbarossa, The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45 he writes of Operation Citadel (Zitadelle in German):

    “That curious lack of imagination and adaptability which is a recurrent characteristic of German military attitude, and whose leaden influence upon the tactical planning of Zitadelle has already been the subject of remark, soon became uncomfortably apparent in its execution. Once again the old Blitzkrieg formula-Stukas, short, intense artillery bombardment, massed tanks and infantry in close contact-was fed into the computer, with little regard for the changed condition save for a simple arithmetical increase in the strength if the respective components.”

    TL:DR “They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.” – Duke of Wellington aka The Iron Duke.

    It’s a little scary we’re adapting the “Those Slavic Thugs can’t POSSIBLY read a map or counter our weaponry” view from the losing side of 80 years ago.

    The longer this goes on the dumber we look. Ah well, time to pivot to War With China anyway. 🤦‍♂️

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    • There’s a larger point in that metaphor in that totalitarian regimes brook no dissent. GAE keeps doing the same thing, even though it’s not working, for the same reason Japan and Germany kept doing the same thing, even though it wasn’t working: anyone who would suggest differently would be sent off to the camps.
      (And, so far as China goes, don’t kid yourself, their military is full of unimaginative yes-men as well, with their one advantage maybe being that they are slightly less incompetent).

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      • How do you know that about the Chinese military? There’s really only one way to find out for sure. Personally-speaking, I’d just as soon not go there.

        Given the general wrongness of the collective West’s judgement and worldview, I’d be very cautious about dismissing them.

        • I don’t think any sane person wants to go there, at least while other means of thwarting Chinese expansionism exist, but I’d be wary of *over-estimating* ChiCom military competence, given their reverence for Sun “all warfare is based on deception” Tzu, and the extent to which modern China is riddled with literal and figurative Potemkin villages.

    • “…time to pivot to War With China anyway…”

      And if you think Ukraine is bad, wait until we lose two, or three or four carriers in an effort to “win” that war with equally outdated weaponry, strategy, and tactics. And it will be that much worse because most of the American ignorati will have had no clue that such a thing was even conceivable.

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    • pivot to China…… hmmm…. what happens when the GAE calls off the war in Ukraine, but it doesn’t end?

  13. Lies. All lies. A couple more from the forebears of the Nuland cultists:

    “Germany hated the Slavics, saw them as untermenschen.”

    No. Germany and Uncle Dolphie were trying to save their Euro-Slavic brethren from the mongrelization being pushed by the Bolshies. Rather than black men/white women, the untermenschen were South Asian Turkic, Mongol, and gypsy. They, as does everyone, wanted spawn by white Russian women.

    “Germany scorned Christianity and was into the occult.”

    No. Germany officially embraced saving Christianity as the Third Holy Roman Empire, having seen the doom of “Christ’s Vicar on Earth”, the Tsar and the Orthodox. The “Wotan-cultists” were officially repudiated, the NSDAP regime publically refused to have anything to with them per policy.

    In revenge for the locals having burned Hirschfield’s 3400 books on perversion, the Allies burned 30 to 40,000 NSDAP and German books, hunting every copy down. Only a few copies remain; the couple with the above samples are slowly, laboriously resurfacing.

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    • Hilariously bad reading of German views regarding Russians and Poles.

      The Germans were not trying to save the Poles or Russians…

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      • It was the OFFICIAL STATE POLICY of the NSDAP goverment, publicized in book form, that they SAVE THE SLAVIC RACE.

        The creatures erase and rewrite history, always have. Why should we believe whatever slants they have told us? Why?

      • It was the OFFICIAL STATED POLICY of the NSDAP goverment, publicized in book form, that they SAVE THE SLAVIC RACE.

        The creatures erase and rewrite history, always have. Why should we believe whatever slants they have told us? Why?

        • “Germany Must Perish!”, the book, is well documented.

          Find me its equivalent in German, that the Slavs must perish or be enslaved, prior to 1945 and the Great Revision.

  14. According to Col Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army, Ret. Ukraine is pretty near the end. The best estimates he’s getting are that – thus far – Ukraine has sustained about 300,000 to 350,000 KIA. If you use the general rule of thumb that for every man killed you get 3 wounded, then that puts Ukie casualties somewhere around 1,050,000. He says the West has trained Ukraine basically to refight World War II with the “combined arms” approach & that ship – according to Col MacGregor – has sailed. The drone factor weighs very heavily; nothing the Ukies do goes unobserved. The Russkies are able to interdict & bring Ukie columns under fire early & break them up before & during their assault. Add to this that the Russians have prepared defenses in depth with extensive minefields & seems the Ukies can’t get thru them.

    He also notes that reportedly there are military press gangs operating in Ukraine, shanghaing men from 16 to 60 off the street & forcing them into the military. Has any of the corporate media reported this?

    Getting the straight dope is tuff; the corporate media is pushing total Ukrainian propaganda on behalf of Bai Den admin/Raytheon Inc & the Russians always play their cards close to the vest.

    He (MacGregor) also notes that all the hysteria about Putin striking into Eastern Europe are bunk; says Putin’s very measured military strategy is uncharacteristic of the Russians. They usually hit hard & go in big. They’re concentrating on the Donbas & the Donetsk & letting the Ukies hit them & bleed out, like what happened in Bahkmut – seemed a smaller, scaled-down version of Verdun 1916.

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    • Both you and our esteemed blog host and MacGregor must be right. Nothing else explains the current state of affairs. As you note, there will be no surprises on the battlefield because of drones and satellites. Someone, somewhere in our militaries – HAD to have seen the Russian build up of defences. They HAD to know the Uke attacks would be costly and fatal… and they did it anyways, knowing full well what would happen. I dunno if mere incompetence explains it, almost. Murder on that scale almost has to be premeditated, maybe?

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      • “Murder on that scale almost has to be premeditated, maybe?”

        Filthie, I don’t mean to be a school marm & a nag [nor a jackass], but for the sake of GOD ALMIGHTY if we are going to win any hearts & minds & souls in this psychological meta-war, then we simply have to ditch these wimpy squishy linquini-spined passive questioning tones of voice, and move instead into active & aggressive & masculine & testosterone-driven linguistic expository styles of Truthspeak.

        “Murder on that scale is necessarily premeditated, and the premeditators are sadistic psychopaths which experience literal ackshual licentious & lascivious thrills from observing the murderers as they murder, and from viewing the photographs of the mangled & dismembered & burnt & fried & boiled corpses.”

        tl;dr == The membership of the Council of the Sanhedrin literally ackshually m@sturbate to this stuff, and have been doing so for five thousand or moar years of recorded human history.

        And oh, by the way, Tater Joe is about to launder another $25 Billion to the Council of the Sanhedrin, which gives them all the moar reason to pop the top off the vaseline jar and start lubing up the palms of their grubby little reptilian paws.

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      • If you believe that your ancestors were unjustly sent to the concentration camps and their dachahs in Odessa wrongfully pilfered by the locals, sure, a war where a million of them are killed is no problem whatsoever.

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    • I’ve been getting the sneaking suspicion that part of this crap in the Ukraine has been having the added benefit of giving the evil ones a glimpse/blueprint for what will need to be done when the festivities kick off here.

      • I don’t think Ukraine is really their template for that. Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, UK, Italy, these have been the recent test runs for the new totalitarianism.

  15. I think that as long as there are thousands of Slavic men dying on the battlefield every month, Ukrainian and Russian, the Kagan cult is happy. Internally, Washington considers this a huge success.

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      • I still don’t understand why. Pure raging hate is the only explanation that makes sense to me. Is that really it?

        • Hun: “Is that really it?”

          As per my remarks to Filthie above…

          YES, THAT’S REALLY IT!!!!!

          ==========

          “Well, there is no famine.”

          – Meir Henoch Wallach Finklestein

          nom de guerre, “Maxim Litvinov”

          Gareth Jones’s Diary

          March, 1933

          https://tinyurl.com/k2tnsywx

          PS: Were none of you forced to stage productions of “Fiddler on the Roof” when you were kids?!?!?

          Watching “Fiddler on the Roof”, and being brutally honest with yourself as to what it is that you’re watching, is all you need to do in order to understand the last five thousand years of human history.

          WATCH FIDDLER ON THE ROOF!!!!!

          BONUS PRO-TIP: The standard psychological camouflage of the very moast viciously brutal & sadistic psychopaths consists of nothing more than, “Woe is poor little ol’ me”.

          The moment you let down your guard and start feeling sorry for them is the very moment they sneak around behind you and stab you in the liver.

          https://tinyurl.com/zxw9x3wj

          11
          2
        • They are evil. I do not know how many saw the news a couple weeks ago when some dumb jogger named Young Thug had a warrant served. The cops interrupted a goat sacrificing ritual. This jogger didn’t come up with this himself. They become famous by adhering to the religion of the TPTB and showing obeisance (e.g. one eye sign, serpent imagery, butterflies). Literally, they are Satanists.

  16. At the end of this war Ukraine won’t exist in any meaningful sense of the term. It’s already vanishing. The population of Ukraine was a little over 50MM when the Soviet Union collapsed. Last month I saw an estimate of approximately 28MM. The young women have decamped to the West as “refugees” and have no intent to return. The young men are dead. From a human perspective, Ukraine has no future.

    Regarding land, Russia will take anything they want East of the Dnieper. Poland has announced a joint border protection force to “protect” the areas near the border with Poland, which translates into Poland occupying the part of Western Ukraine that is historically Polish. Belarus will make a land grab in the Northern part of Ukraine, courtesy of Wagner, and Moldova will march to the sea in the South, with the assistance of Russia.

    There may be a small rump nation left, a sliver of land west of the Dnieper extending from Kiev to Odessa. I suspect the West will offer to repopulate the land with refugees from Africa, to give Ukraine the blessings of Diversity. Another possibility is that large numbers of Jews from Israel return to the Pale of Settlement, almost as if the Kagan cult had a plan.

    44
    • The Poles are dumb because they don’t seem to realize Ukes are getting the white glove treatment from Russia, who sees them as a brother people.

      No such courtesy will be extended to the Poles.

      14
  17. More disgusting than the Kagan cult are the Ukrainian generals. These oily forms of human diarrhea know they are sending men to die for nothing. What they should do is surround the Presidents Palace, arrest the war criminals running this fiasco, and allow the public to watch them go purple on the rope.

    48
    • My hunch is that the Uke generals and colonels are fine with the present state of affairs because they are making bank on it.

      I’d expect no less from a country so vacant that it’s considering adding US Thanksgiving to its official holiday calendar.

      12
      • TWGH: “My hunch is that the Uke generals and colonels are fine with the present state of affairs because they are making bank on it.”

        Or else they’re crypto-Khazarians themselves.

        10
      • Thanksgiving is probably our best holiday. I can understand if other people want to join in.

    • It is probably difficult to do what is morally correct, especially when it would likely put your Western bank balance and passport in jeapordy, to say nothing of your life.

  18. “the Russians have moved away from the Battalion Tactical Group to more flexible arrangements based on the situation, terrain, and their own resources.” — Imagine the vast labyrinth of Washington D.C. ever allowing this strategy. The American Soviet is out sovieting the old soviets. Amazing how wars are won when men at the sergeant and sergeant major levels are allowed to react to the situations in front of them.

    14
    • Divisions are expensive. Organizing around brigades is much cheaper, battalions even more so. I don’t think corps exist even on paper. They told themselves what they wanted to hear.

    • How true. I read an article from a retired British general years ago. He pointed out that the D-Day landings were successful at the end of the day because about four junior officers and several sergeants disobeyed orders and took matters into their own hands.

      After doing so their field commanders saw the truth in what they were doing and had the confidence to back them up. I doubt we would have any possibility of things going that way today.

      • It’s also been pointed out by historians in more recent years that, contrary to the unimaginative blockhead kraut stereotype, the Germans generally had much, much better NCOs and better unit cohesion than the Allies, at least until their manpower losses really started to catch up to them as the war neared its end.

  19. Good post by the Z-man but I’m not certain what “cannibalizing their lines” means. Perhaps, “withdrawals to shorter lines and more defensible positions?” A blogger named Big Serge noted early this year that the Russians had had difficulty with their battalion tactical groups (insufficient infantry) and were reorganizing into divisions. I think sometimes our politicians would get more accurate information from Gary Brecher, War Nerd than from the bureaucracy in the Pentagon.

    8
    2
  20. Posts like these almost make me mad because they’re so darn good. It means I need to pry open my wallet and look into the subscribe star thing.

    The Russians earned quickly that the nature of warfare had changed (yet again) and they adjusted to it. I don’t get the sense the Pentagon even has a preliminary glimmer that things have changed and that their playbook is 50 years old

    21
    2
    • Posts like these almost make me mad because they’re so darn good. It means I need to pry open my wallet and look into the subscribe star thing.

      Help Z buy those 40 acres in Montana. 👍

      10
    • Here is my favorite part of Z-man’s post: “The only way to get in the room to discuss the Ukraine war is to be fully on board with the dream of destroying Russia or be willing to humiliate yourself by telling these people what they want to hear.”

      If someone said “Let’s negotiate a peace”, they would be howled down as a hater.

    • The Russians are so shatp on the matter of war they realized the two US invasions of Iraq were anomalies, and that no significant warfighting lessons could be learned from them.

  21. “The only way to get in the room to discuss the Ukraine war is to be fully on board with the dream of destroying Russia or be willing to humiliate yourself by telling these people what they want to hear.”

    That’s really it, and ties into your recent musings on meritocracy or the lack thereof. Milley’s chest is festooned with ribbons and awards awarded for being a desk jockey who presided over military humiliation after humiliation. He will suffer no consequences when Ukraine goes tits up. Nuland is a straight up psychopathic war criminal. She also will suffer no consequences for instigating a money laundering operation that killed hundreds of thousands of Slavs and displaced millions.

    Affirmative action buffoon Lloyd Austin will sing “Ol’ Man River” for ol’ marse Ray-Fee-On and preside over the second military humiliation in a few years. He, too, will suffer no consequences. Anthony Blinken will LARF as a rock musician while Berlin shivers in the cold and China weighs letting the nukes rip. He also will suffer no consequences.

    The only way these and the other clowns will suffer is if they tell the truth to TPTB; that would cause them to be exiled from the figurative and literal tribes they inhabit. Lying and LARPing are the keys to the kingdom. Merit no longer matters.

    This is true about every aspect of the GAE. It is not wishcasting to see the handwriting is on the wall and blinking (Blinkening) red that it will not stand much longer. Hence, the accelerated looting and the conversion of dollars into hard assets, which is all the “Ukraine war” every was.

    It is all ending in the most grotesque and ludicrous ways imaginable.

    31
    • Regarding such accumulations of great fortunes is a quote from Balzac.

      https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137330277_2

      Usually one sees a shorter, and less accurate version of his quote; this full original and its translation amends that shortcoming. It also reveals the rationale for all of the obfuscation about the deeper truths and the extreme machinations to assure that they remain obscured.

  22. The main reason the Ukrainian offensive is a catastrophe is the side with the trillion-dollar annual budget has not updated their understanding of the Russian army since the last century.

    It really is strange how out of touch they’ve been, isn’t it?

    I have a personal anecdote in this regard. I’m not a particularly devoted follower of military hardware news, but I remember reading the Popular Science article way back in 2004 about Russia’s supercavitating torpedoes. I remember thinking right away, “the West has no answer for this,” and then in the timespan of about one breath, I realized that all the Tom Clancy stuff was hogwash. Russia was already far in advance of Western military tech way back then, and the gap has only widened since.

    Hardly anybody seems to have grokked this, not even the folks in the vast national security establishment, whose job it is to do so. The few people who are aware of the situation find that they are powerless to do anything about it, because the greater society simply is in no mood to acknowledge external threats or to contemplate putting the nation on a war footing. America will never again wage, or be capable of waging, war against a peer adversary. We have become an unserious nation, obsessed with domestic affairs and fantasies.

    This loser society is immensely frustrating to anybody who feels, or even who once felt, that he was called to a higher and nobler life, where preparing oneself to fight real enemies was supposed to be the point, the guiding start for right and virtuous actions. “That which weakens society in its soul is ipso facto wrong,” or so thinks every healthy and warlike man. By that measure, our society has been on a headlong plunge to ruin for decades. Had we kept first things first, the whole history of my lifetime would have looked very different.

    What does one do when faced with such a prospect? I have said in the past that our generation faces what is perhaps the most impossible task ever visited upon man, that of “fighting the Nothing, with nothing.”

    The enemy we face is a Nothing. Not a phalanx of enemy soldiers, monsters, and demons, but an all-consuming blob of apathy, mediocrity, and entropy that shrugs off every attack with an infinite ability to remain oblivious. Our weapons are also nothing: no understanding, no good conscience, no self-evident basis for a new creation. Our destiny seems to be not glorious defeat, but the bathetic ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail as we are whisked off to the lunatic asylum.

    It requires one set of tactics to go off and fight for a grail. It requires a very different set of tactics to be the only one left in society fighting for the freedom to insist that a grail even exists amongst a sea of grail-deniers, which is where we are today.

    48
    • “America will never again wage, or be capable of waging, war against a peer adversary. We have become an unserious nation, obsessed with domestic affairs and fantasies.”

      I have thought the same, and view the inability to wage war as a good thing. The United States is just as incompetent doing so by proxy. Again, a good thing.

      Long term, though, the graft and corruption and incompetence will swallow alive those of us who had no hand in the madness. Those Ukrainians fleeing the devastation of war are harbingers of things to come here, whether due to kinetic action or dysfunction or both. The die is cast.

      Great comment, by the way. I often disagree with you but lucid writing and clear thought somewhat mitigate your errors 🙂

      16
      2
      • Agree. The problem is GAE still believes itself capable of waging war. To everyone’s destruction.

    • With respect to its primary purpose, the Tom Clancy stuff was Grade A agitprop. Got a whole generation or two of grillers believing in the myth of the selfless patriotic CIA analyst working to save the country from the forces of evil, while simultaneously out in the real world the same CIA was taking over everything, and by the time much of anybody began to wake up to what had actually happened it was a fait accompli.

      Of course the dialogue and characters were laughably cartoonish, but kind of like Garth Brooks to country music, you don’t generate massive household name level sales by being too highbrow.

    • I read the same article(s) back in the early ought’s, and came to similar conclusions.
      Not long ago, I pointed out to a “‘Murica! Redneck” in a rural Florida roadhouse: “Consider, bro, that we haven’t been in a fight with anybody in our weight class in a long, long time. Tell me again – when’s the last time we got into the ring with WhiteMen?”

      10
  23. It has truly been astonishing to watch the Ukrainian Army fling themselves at a brick wall at 90 miles per hour, crash and burn and just keep doing it over and over. The Russians must be quite perplexed but are not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

    The West makes much of the lack of air power for Ukraine as the main problem. However remember that the Ukrainians were assured that the lack of air power was not a problem. Boris Johnson and a bunch of generals told them so. They were told that with U.S./NATO equipment and information systems, “Total battlefield dominance” would be achieved regardless of the lack of air power.

    I read an article about a month ago that basically said that one of the big problems was that the U.S. underestimated the performance of the Russian attack helicopters. These people can’t look at a photo of a KH52 and think, hey that might be a dangerous platform? They bought their own hype that all Russian equipment is inferior?

    I suspect/guess that the Russians will keep on depleting the Ukraine Army as long as the UA keeps sending them to be slaughtered. By next summer the Russians will have over one million men available for service in Ukraine. At some point they will press forward along a broad front and finish off what is left of the Ukraine Army.

    The sickening thing is that all of the death and destruction is due to the sociopaths running our country. I saw a photo recently of two women who had been near the front lines. One had one missing leg and the other lost both legs. I am sure these young women will take pride in knowing they fought for the Global American Empire and Victoria Nuland.

    52
    • The people that rule over us are not good at noticing. The war in Russia was always crazy because they acted like Russia with filled with a bunch of retarded drunks and not a country that has produced some of the top chess players and mathematicians in the world. These people can think two steps, or 20, ahead, they can strategize. It’s crazy that that western ‘leaders’ are so blind

      38
      • WE (as a people) are the ones not good at noticing or we might have noticed the peculiar last names of the people that have siezed power and used it to lead us to humiliating disaster after disaster.

        23
        • I disagree. I’m early gen x like z-man and I was raised to have a great admiration and respect bordering on reverence for the small hats. It takes a lot of noticing to overcome relentless childhood programming

          22
          • Same here. My mom was a Judeophile. Dad certainly was not, but he basically buttoned his lip on that subject.

          • It sure does. Most of the people I know are in denial. I can show them a personnel chart of the top government positions, a personnel chart of the top financial institutions and a personnel chart of the top corporate leaders.

            I can point out that most of them are dual citizens but not dual loyalty. They just don’t want to accept the truth.

            25
          • I’m only a couple years younger than you guys and feel the same way. Twenty years ago I sat in a room in Chuck Hagel’s office suite and listened to him speak pointedly about the Israeli influence on Washington. I walked out of that room fuming at what I’d heard and his alleged treachery at saying those things.

            If that happened today I’d at least nod along, and possibly ask why he doesn’t say those things publicly?

            18
    • “It has truly been astonishing to watch the Ukrainian Army fling themselves at a brick wall at 90 miles per hour, crash and burn and just keep doing it over and over.”

      There is hatred for Russia in the Ukraine. The Holodomor has not been forgotten. (Never mind that Stalin was Georgian, not Russian. Khrushchev, who orchestrated much misery in the Ukraine, however, was.)

      • All true but the Holodomor killed a lot of Russians as well. Old Uncle Joe was a very evil man.

        11
        • True enough. But when the people doing it to you–Russians–are seen as quasi-foreigners, the hatred is redoubled. Russians don’t hate Russians, but a great many Ukrainians do and have for a long time. Same goes for the Warsaw Pact peoples.

      • One must remember that Ukraine was a stronghold of resistance against the Bolshevik revolution. People who would slaughter the Czar, his family, and his ministers would not hesitate to do likewise to the Ukrainians who fought against them so hard and for so long. The hate was only stoked by whatever was done during the Holodomor; yet it should also be recalled that the communists’ disregard and hatred was not limited to the Ukrainians.

    • “It has truly been astonishing to watch the Ukrainian Army fling themselves at a brick wall at 90 miles per hour, crash and burn and just keep doing it over and over. ”

      The were doing what they were told by America’s Best and Brightest.

  24. I’m hoping for collapse. Rght now in the west, you can kill white people with impunity. We are not allowed free association so we can’t tribe up at all but if this war brings the West to its knees all that changes. I think that is our best hope for survival. Though I don’t expect that to be pleasant for me personally.

    39
    • They just killed a 75 year old man in Utah. Yes he was making some indirect but obvious threats. But since they had him under surveillance up to and including in the church he attended they could have arrested him anywhere at pretty much any time. Instead they used a vehicle mounted battering ram to knock down his door at 6AM and then shot him dead.

      It reminds me of that scene from “The Great Escape” at the end where the camp commandant informs the remaining prison leadership that all the prisoners were shot and killed while trying to escape. How many were wounded trying to escape? None of them.

      36
      • 300lbs, walked with cane and took care of his adult disabled son. They killed him because they wanted too.

        46
        • He was 75, 5’4″ and weighed 300 pounds. He walked with a cane and couldn’t get out of bed without help. He was murdered because he could be. Got to teach those dirt’s a lesson about “free speech” without permission. Think of how different the next attempted murder might go if the 75 year old decides to actually arm up and take some with him when he goes. Hell, I’d rather go down fighting at 75 than wheezing away in a home being looked after by the vibrants.

          14
      • Civilian murders foreign and domestic also are a trademark of the GAE and nothing new. From what I have read this is just one of many recent civilian murders and civil rights outrages. Putting 80 year old political prisoners in leg irons is a hallmark of sociopaths and psychopaths; these atrocities are to instill terror and to facilitate the myth that Biden and other “elected” puppets actually matter in an increasingly totalitarian shithole of a country. It was stupid of the guy on several levels to threaten public officials, not the least of which is that The Help are powerless and mere window dressing.

        Still, this murder will cause more people to hate the GAE with the passionate intensity it deserves, so it wasn’t all bad.

        18
        • They love to kill dogs as well. Two videos this past week show one thug shooting a Golden Retriever as it was running forward, tail wagging, to greet and play with the cop. The cop shot the dog and then when the dog attempted to run away he shot it again in the back.

          The cop claimed that the dog ” charged him.” A Golden Retriever.

          The other instance showed the cop shooting a barking Pomeranian or something close. He missed the dog and shot a woman in the leg. He then can be heard to say: “I didn’t shoot her!!”

          17
        • Someday soon, one of these incidents is going to precipitate an American Arab Spring. It will be a little thing, just a routine day for the cops, but the people will have had enough.

          It’s unusual when the DR and BLM agree on anything, but “defund the police” is one of those times.

          15
          • II don’t know how routine the day would be. I fear a day is coming when lawmen be well advised to keep in mind the suggestion of the just-wants-to-be-left-alone protagonist in Springsteen’s haunting “State Trooper”:

            “Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a pretty wife.”

    • Here’s the problem (as I see it). The GAE seems to have no consequences and therefore no incentive to learn nor improve. As with Covid, the same lackies—or their ilk—remain in power, right or wrong. There will be no firing of the generals, nor NeoCons like Nuland. No house cleaning. This is the first step to meaningful *change*.

      16
    • sad to say you are right, white tribal identity can’t form under current rule.

      sometimes i think usa will become to whites what roman empire represents to j**s, a symbol of evil, “that empire that enslaved us and made us hate ourselves”. At the end of roman empire people hated j**s cause they killed Christ(the old ultimate sin), now people hate whites cause they’re racist(the new ultimate sin).

      • Enslaved them? The royal house of Israel was the third richest family in the known world.

        Who do you think ran the slave markets? Their labor contracting overtook the Roman economy.

        • p.s.- please tell me about their “enslavement” in New Babylon. Were they building pyramids for their grain along with the other citizens in the off season?

          No. They betrayed and sold the ten Aryan tribes, making them rich enough to move to the capital and open up loan-sharking, err, banking houses and a mercantile quarter with slave auctions.
          The same as with Egypt and the Viking economies.

  25. The military is a “team sport”. People succeeding in this environment are generally consensus-seekers. Mavericks rarely make it to the general-officer level (just like the movie). We have a preponderance of skeptics and dissidents here at the Z-Blog (obviously), so it’s often hard for us to understand the “selection pressure” for consensus in the military.

    This is why we’re never getting any pushback from the military leaders in this Raytheon/Beltway Bandit era. These guys, team players by nature, are never jeopardizing lucrative post-retirement gigs by ticking off powerful politicians. Every so often, a guy like McChrystal pushes back and gets crushed. Others take notice and play ball. Since there is no consequence for a consensus-backed failure (see Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya), the machine rolls forward by co-opting or crushing any skeptics.

    Meanwhile, all the Soviet-era Russia experts have retired long ago. The new “tickets” for aspiring general officers in recent years were “Counterinsurgency”, “ISR”, “cyberwarfare”, “low-intensity conflict”, “WOD/drug interdiction” etc. Nobody was studying conventional Russian capabilities etc and worrying about the adequacy of our 155mm Howitzer shell production.

    We didn’t get here by accident. The Founders understood the dangers of standing armies.

    31
    • > Every so often, a guy like McChrystal pushes back and gets crushed. Others take notice and play ball.

      Remember the right slobbering over “Mad Dog” Mattis? What a crock that guy was.

      36
      • Another great Trump selection. Mattis: Known for his whining when he didn’t get his way and the father of women in combat roles.

        12
    • Amen to that!!!

      If you’re a bit of a free thinker, you can be seen as a danger to the program, the farther up you get. For the more senior field grades, who spend most of their later career in staff jobs, one lives and dies in actions around the commander’s conference room table. Unless you’re terribly competent interpersonally, the sort who bucks the currently accepted paradigm is often taken out, or maneuvered into irrelevance (assignment-wise), then retired.

      But, they can still maneuver themselves into a moderately cushy contractor gig ….

      As for McChrystal …. he may have stepped outside of the chalk line with his “off the record” comments. But he is/was just another managerial elite / governing class aspirant, in any case. Don’t make the mistake of seeing him as anything other than a supporter of the long game of the ruling elites.

      16
    • Sorry, but firing McChrystal was one of the best things Obama did. Like many in our spoiled, entitled military, he forgot who signs his paychecks: the civilian taxpayers.

      Not only that, but he was a big proponent of the disastrous “Surge” strategy in Afghanistan. Obama should have listened to Holbrooke instead of the generals.

      3
      1
    • Captain Willard: “selection pressure”

      The selection pressure has been so severe for the last couple of decades that the personalities now being selected for are very difficult for us normies to imagine, a priori, without, as of yet, having had any personal experience interacting with the personalities.

      Point being that, at least early on, when the gloves come off, we won’t have a strong sense of the psychological pathologies we will be dealing with.

      And those pathologies will be cold, brutal and vicious.

      [Until we finally begin to seize the upper hand, at which point the pathological personalities will go into camouflage mode, and stage the “poor little ol’ me” gambit, to try to fool us into misunderestimating them.]

    • I remember back in the early 90’s before the Clintonistas deactivated my unit, was right around the time of killings in Waco. That was when the pentagon began to circulate the questionnaire to the top brass/senior enlisted people in military units with the question being, “If given the order, would you fire on American citizens?”
      I remember our CSM and 1st Sgt. stating that this cannot be answered without placing the question in context. Everyone who answered “No” was given their walking papers, I cannot recall any of the senior people saying “Yes” but a few probably did. It was a moot point then anyway because most of the unit put in their papers before the axe fell. I remember my Sgt. Major telling a few of us “You don’t want to be here this time next year with this crew down in DC in charge.”
      I still occasionally speak with a few people who stayed. To a man, they wish they hadn’t. The days of crews like this are unfortunately long gone. My XO alone would have wound up in jail, never mind asked to retire. He did two tours in Vietnam with 5th Group and I believe he was ordered to go home, otherwise the Army would have kicked him out. He was the type of guy who refused to leave a job unfinished and protected his men like they were his own kids. He died a few years ago and he would have puked had he lived to see this.

  26. RE: the loathsome L Graham and his recent tete a tete with Zelensky wherein he made the imbecilic statement: “best money we ever spent”. Wonder if he still stands by that?

    21
    • Of course he does those guys in the managerial class are never wrong, never apologize, I never surrender.

      22
      • If only we had the Japanese tradition of hurling oneself out a tall window if shame and failure is brought to one’s organization. The Imperial Capital would have to purchase meat wagons and shovels in bulk.

        13
        • Nah, easy suicide is for persons of “low” station. Seppuku was for the big boys and everyone in the management class thinks they’re badass.

        • If there were this much “honor” left in this culture, we’d not be in our current predicament. Just another result of DIE.

    • Absolutely that degenerate m****r f****r would. After all… it wasn’t HIS money… its yours and mine.

      13
  27. The collapse of the Ukraine narratives du jour won’t have a consequence in America. Both parties in the US will support the next war and voting doesn’t matter at the federal level.

    In Europe things may be different though. A collapse in Ukraine won’t help with war or upgrades to the economic warfare with China. As much as the women want war, European economies are tied tight with China. Will be interesting to see if women’s desire for war overrides the economic necessarity of trade with China.

    Young Taiwanese want to be the new Ukraine. They still think Ukraine is winning because “America has a free press so the nyt must be telling the truth.” (I heard that all the time when I lived there.) curious as to whether they will rethink that if the nyt ever has to admit the Ukraine war was a blunder for the West and Ukraine.

    18
    1
    • You have put your finger on something here, which will be how the domestic and foreign reactions to the pending Ukraine humiliation will diverge dramatically. Domestically little will change as long as the checks can be kited. In Europe and East Asia, though, the pending demise of the GAE will be patently obvious, and courses will be changed. The United States’ descent into totalitarianism has made plain its days are numbered because it does not act like a competent empire. This is truly a hinge point now and Europe and East Asia apprehend it even if TPTB here do not.

      25
      • “United States’ descent into totalitarianism”

        I imagine some of the Eastern Asian ruling class gets what is going on in America but America still owns the brands of democracy and free press here. That seems to have changed in China and Singapore but not in Taiwan or Thailand (where I live now).

        The US has been pushing a cplor revolution in Thailand and is making headway. The US wants to do away with the monarchy and military and get Thailand to distance from China. The top vote getter in the last election received a lot of money from USA ngos and advocated what the US wants. The thai ruling class (many of whom are Chinese Thais) don’t want that so simply ruled he can’t take office.

        In Eastern Asia there is a war going on between the US and the natural self interest of the people. The winner isn’t clear.

        2
        1
  28. Just weeks after freezing bank accounts from the Freedom Convoy, invoking the highest dictatorial power in the land to clear out the protestors, and dropping COVID vaccine restrictions, that narrative dropped and we were demanded to have undying loyalty to Ukraine, for “Freedom”.

    Loyalty is earned, not given. I still spit on Ukraine as well as every member of the corrupt (and evil) cult running this war and our countries.

    I would like to see Ukraine steamrolled by Russia, not because I particularly care about Russia or Ukraine, but because I want “our” “elites” to suffer another humiliating failure.

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    • As mentioned, the clock is ticking. Still have not heard a good excuse as to why Putin has not pressed hard on the gas to put an end to this war. Seems draining NATO of resources is not beneficial if after this war, NATO simply learns and restocks for the new paradigm in the field.

      • > Seems draining NATO of resources is not beneficial if after this war, NATO simply learns and restocks for the new paradigm in the field.

        Who is going to restock? Europe is rapidly deindustrializing and the United States military is awash in graft and corruption. The only NAO country truly serious about it military is Poland, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they gambit to take a piece of Ukraine by the time this is over.

        15
        • They will restock and increase their pitiful military spending. They of course have the industry. Germany is an export economy and was heretofore one of the big three. It’s a matter of *will* not ability. A weakened USA can only strengthen their incentive to move to some sort of self-sufficiency wrt a separate military aside from the USA.

      • I’m with you on this one, Compy.

        I was patient with the SMO for about the first 18 months. I do recognize that Putin has a complicated geopolitical game to play, that he wants to avoid unnecessary escalation and cement partnerships around the world, and that there are legitimate reasons for treading carefully in Ukraine.

        However, times change, and war and politics must change with the times. What was a good strategy yesterday may not be such a good strategy today. I think the time for patience is over. A good show of strength from the Kremlin would probably be about the best outcome for everyone now. The longsuffering Russians deserve to feel validated and the Ukrainians/West deserve a blistering humiliation for what they’ve done. But I’ve grown weary waiting for Mr. Vladimir “not a wartime consigliere” Putin to exchange the solicitor’s cufflinks for a pair of boxing gloves.

        • I can concede that if I were Putin, I’d not trade one Russian life for a 1000 Uke’s lives. However, as you are getting at, this hesitation is costing waay more life—perhaps on both sides—than decisive action taken to end this war. There lies the moral (?) conundrum at this point.

          • Totally agree on this. It’s understandable that Putin was trying to prevent harm to civilians and he really went out of his way in this regard. However, not making the destruction of infrastructure and communications in Kiev an early priority may have caused this to drag on longer than necessary. In other words, by immediately destroying the population’s morale and will probably would have ultimately saved lives. Of course the ultimate problem for Ukraine (and Putin) is Ukrainian nationalism. Who knows what Putin’s internal rivals counsel.

        • Macgregor has started openly worrying, in the past couple of days, that Putin’s “measured approach” may be sending the wrong signals to the West, and they are reading it as weakness, not restraint.

          Which could result in the GAE doing something really rash in Europe. Like seeding Polish formations with standing U.S. military formations, and sending the package into western Ukraine.

          At which point Putin would really have to pull the trigger, or watch his own government fall.

      • The Russian Army is still not that large even after the latest mobilization. It has only been in the last several months that the Russians have close to the same number of troops as the Ukraine forces. Russia has to maintain a reserve in case of a NATO attack.

        The Russians are however making great advances. By next year they will have a reserve and about one million men to commit to Ukraine.

        • More importantly, they will have a notch under their belt wrt military prowess. Perhaps Russians are different, but such actions have always rebounded to the GAE benefit—at least in the short term. When Reagan went into Grenada, the MSM rejoiced in the headline, “America is Back”, then we went on a 20 year ass kicking spree.

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    • This is the only way, the only thing they understand. Even so, it will take mane, many more humiliations before any critical thinkingmight begin.

  29. Every time I see Milley, I think of the problem they have at Basic Training brigades when kids graduate. Not satisfied with their “Global War on Terror Badge” (we called it the “pulse and respiration ribbon,” since you get it no matter what) they go to the PX and load up on awards. Pretty soon you have platoons full of young men walking around with their families showing off the “fruit salad” on their breasts. It’s all fun and games until someone asks them how they served in the Kosovar Campaign before they were born, or Vietnam twenty-five years before that. One thing I’ll give Milley: he would be a hell of a lot harder to chuck out a window than that little fop.

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    • ZMan ref to Braveheart movie reminded me of the defenestration scene.
      The queue is long for those military ‘experts’ who merit that same fate.

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    • Everyone gets a “participation” trophy. Could be worse, seen those North Korean generals lately? 😉

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  30. The only way Ukraine had a chance in this war was Western air support that could at least be on par with Russian abilities. Once the Uke’s air force and defenses were decimated the writing was on the wall. The Kagans don’t care, as they get off on slav deaths, but the guys in the Pentagon had to have known this.

    The only plausible answer at first is they thought the trade sanctions would cripple the Russians in the beginning, but that clearly didn’t work and they are still working doggedly ahead. Now the only answer is they just want to weaken Russia’s military, but if anything the Ukraine conflict has created a class of tough, battle hardened men with minimal casualties. This entire war has probably dramatically increased their military prowess just from a human capital standpoint.

    The U.S. is still far superior in a total war scenario, but in that world there are hundreds of millions dead. The scary part is if they decide if they can’t win wars of attrition anymore, they decide the only option is to push the button

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    • “ This entire war has probably dramatically increased their military prowess just from a human capital standpoint.”

      Certainly. It was one of the reasons we’ve done so well. We take our army off of the shelf every so often and exercise it—albeit never against a 1st world foe. 😉 We will for the next couple of decades face a Russian foe like we’ve never faced since the collapse of the USSR.

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    • To be superior in a total war scenario, the GAE would have to be willing to take casualties to take and hold objectives. I’ve seen no evidence in the last quarter century that it is willing to take any significant casualties at all. It can deal with the slow drip drip of one or two dead a day, i.e. Iraq, but the moment things get bloody, i.e. Somalia, withdrawal is ordered. Can you imagine the GAE accepting hundreds of casualties per day? Me neither.

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      • Yep, that’s somewhat of a “guns or butter” scenario. I’ve said for a long time, we need to get serious or stop fooling around. My proposal has always been to bring the pain home to the people immediately, through taxes. Surcharge everyone for the costs of military adventure. Conscript troops once again. Folks seem to forget Vietnam. Proposed surcharge for the war got us out pretty fast.

    • “the guys in the Pentagon had to have known this.”

      Yes, but think of all the weapons sold to those panicking Euros!

    • Based on what we’ve seen so far, I think the Russians would do just fine in a scenario where the GAE took the lead in a direct intervention in Ukraine.

  31. Understandably at this point, it is simply keystrokes on the Federal Reserve monetary mainframe, not hard currency backed by tangibles such as gold or other resources. Still, this WaPo article detailing the amount frittered away in this useless NeoCon foreign field trip is revealing, and another phase in the looting stage of the Global American Empire. (Take note of the DOD budget 2023 – 1.77 Trillion.)

    ‘A look at the amount of U.S. spending powering Ukraine’s defense.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/04/ukraine-war-us-spending/

    66.2 Billion (so far)

    “The funding includes weapons, training, medical supplies, generators and rebuilding. And experts view the amount as a massive investment in a U.S. ally not seen since at least World War II.

    “These are off-the-charts numbers,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He likened the figures to U.S. commitments to European countries at the end of World War II. The Marshall Plan, when adjusted for inflation, came to about $150 billion over three years.

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  32. It was idiotic to start a modern offensive with no air power. Especially against what now is the world’s premiere land army. All those brave men died for the demented Kagan ideology.

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  33. If I were living in Taiwan, I’d seek to get the hell out ASAP. The disciples of Cain, aka the neocons, will likely soon drop the Ukraine like a disposable razor and latch onto Pacific War 2.0 as their next great crusade.

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    • The one thing the Taiwanese have going for them is that The Tribe has no historical enmity toward the Chinese.

      • Not sure that it cuts both ways. The Chinese recall the role of Sasoon in their opium problems. They have seen how the little hats play.

        • It’s hard to believe that anyone takes Chinese pretentions to being “peaceful” seriously when the ChiComs display such psychotic aggression towards a tiny island inhabited by the remnants of the losing side in their civil war. Then again, considering the raging hate-boner that the American Left has for any physical remnants of the Confederacy, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised…🤔

    • I suspect the elite of Taiwan have already settled here. Back in the 90’s I got seated at a table with a number of Chinese faculty. One was anxious to hear my thoughts on how much money his cousin should bring to the USA. There I learned we had a program for permanent VISA status for immigrants who would start a business in the USA. At that time I believe it was $1M investment (like open a McDonalds). His cousin was waiting another year until he had $1.5M!

      Sigh….

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