173 thoughts on “The Singularity Of War”

1. Heard you on Pete Quinones’s show. Good analogy of Trump to Soviet bloc characters like Havel and Walesa. A couple of my friends back then were occasionally imprisoned “dissident” slav musicians. They didn’t think of Havel as their leader, but they considered him necessary in the same way a lot of us think of Trump. We *let* him be president/king/whatever just to jab them in the eye.

   Trump was a similar character in ’90s NYC. All the losers/”losers” there (rappers especially) loved that he was the richest man in town, because he was so offensive to the other richest men. Supposedly he’s getting some of that support back, now that he has a mugshot.

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2. The answer is to set off those mines.

   If minefields are keeping you from advancing, deploy robo-walkers to “walk over the mines” and set them off, clearing a path.

   It seems a simple enough solution. (Click on my name to read my blog.)

   • You lost me at “kill all the dogs in the future”.

3. WW1 “ Neither side ever developed tactics for breaching entrenched positions without suffering heavy casualties.”

   This isn’t quite correct, the trenches were breached many times, the problem was that reserves were moved in from the rear to stop the breakout into maneuver warfare. The Cavalry traditionally did this, the problem the tanks actually solved was they could keep pushing through and gutting the second echelons and support troops.

   Nothing in the Great War has the maniacal evil of the Ukraine side of this… not even the Italians charging up into mountains against the Austrians.

   The real can’t learn fools of WW1 were actually the French at the opening battle of the Frontiers but after 2-3 weeks and 300,000 dead they learned not to make frontal bayonet charges with Red Pants and Elan. That’s not a failure to appreciate technology, that’s the Academic domination of the French Officer Corps and a mad doctrine.

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4. Drones were the gamechanger in the Azeri war against the Armenians. The smart officers and planners were watching. The Armenians had been mopping the floor with the Azeris despite inferior equipment. Once a mix of expensive overwatch drones operated by Israel and cheaper kamikaze drone swarms were unleashed by the Azeris, and the Armenians were found to have no effective defenses and they were crushed, their troops hapless. The Israelis had practiced on the Arabs but Artsakh was their proving ground with both the Ukies and Russians adopting a mix of drone technologies and tactics. The next major world exchanges will be suites of unmanned drones pitted against one another and combined with other technologies. Submarine-launched swarm attacks against surface equipment. Micro drones with human recognition and shotgun shell payloads deployed like cluster bombs to wreak terror against dense civilian populations. Engineer versus engineer and everbody else. Who has the will and gets there first wins, ask the Armenians, who despite inferior numbers are now acolytes and striving to develop indigenous drone tech. (and as a fellow Christian, I am with the Armenians)

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   • The Armenians are the mortal enemies of the Khazarians.

     Early in the 20th Century, the USA received millions upon millions of Armenian & greater Assyrian refugees who were fleeing the genocide which the Khazarian intelligentsia of the Ottoman Empire had unleashed upon Armenia.

     To this day, the Khazarians continue to rain despair & destruction & death upon greater Assyria.

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   • The Azeri War shows in full the cynicism and duplicity of our greatest ally. Supporting their supposedly mortal enemies the Moslems against their greatest supporters in the world. That’s why we should dump them and leave them to their fate.

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     • The following is the most interesting news item I have seen in forever; is the coalition of the Scofield Heresy beginning to crumble?!?!?

       Israel to review visa policy for Evangelical Christian organizations amid concern over rising tensions between religious communities in the country.
       https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/4178052/posts

       The eradication & abolition of Scofield would be the moast important sociological victory of our era.

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   • I should have said “autonomous” instead of “unmanned,” which is redundant. I have substantial training and industry experience with autonomous systems and “AI” (or most anything digital for that matter). I am a lousy thumb typist and hurried my post. Wups.

     I have individual Israeli’s and their families who are “friends” to the extent we co-exist well enough. They are mostly Mizrai “rockin’ Moroccans” and generally good people if not entirely trustworthy. I have never encountered an Ashkenaz, especially the American ones, that weren’t of the devil himself with exception of a former mentor. We should nuke them all from orbit, just to be sure.

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   • Who has the will and gets there first wins

     The firstest with the mostest?

   • How do drones perform against emp devices?

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5. Ike – the LAST American General Officer to win his war – understood all of this. It’s why his foreign / defense policy was called “Massive Retaliation:” You hit us or our allies, we nuke you. It ought to be the standard. If war is about changing the behavior of an adversary (it is) and if that change of behavior is deemed to be worth killing and dying for – go big or don’t go. The bigger you go, the fewer die, on both sides. In 1945, the Army and Navy both predicted 1M American KIA in an invasion of Japan. The Navy predicted 9M Japanese civilian deaths, the army 5M. Total killed in the two nuke attacks and radiation aftermath? 220K. Nukes saved about 8M lives.

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   • All the folks who say Japan would have surrendered anyway, all that has been written about that, have never convinced me. They have convinced me that there were some individuals in the Japanese hierarchy who wished to surrender, but they haven’t convinced me that those individuals had the power to make that surrender a reality.

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     • From what sources I have read, surrender was not the issue, but rather unconditional surrender. We couldn’t just beat them and let them be; we had to remake them in our own image and likeness (we believe ourselves gods after all). There is no question in my mind that the nuke bombing was, and was stated to be, a terrorist attack – clear as day in Truman’s own words.

       Plus, we wanted to show the Ruskies our new toy. In any event, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pale in comparison to what we did to Dresden et al.

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       • There is no question it was a terrorist act. Deliberately targeting civilians to achieve a political goal is the definition of terrorism. There is also little question that the GAE wanted to show the Russkies their new toy. But these are still separate from whether or not Japan was ready to surrender. The GAE had lots of good reasons, and precedents, to suggest that Japan wasn’t going to submit easily. The GAE’s cause may not have been as righteous as its propaganda would have us believe, and Japan’s cause may not have been as evil, but these factors are still beside the point.

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         • What’s the point of invading an *island* that’s been so denuded of military hardware that their plans for homeland defence revolved almost entirely around arming civilians with bits of sharpened bamboo?

   • I absolutely abhor military minds who sit around “estimating” casualties. It’s not only vulgar, it’s a scare tactic — vicious propaganda. When you are at war you better be damned sure you are using the best strategy and employing the most effective people available. And for along time the U.S. has been, and remains, severely lacking.

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     • “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.”

       General ‘Buck’ Turgidson

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       • “Mr. President, if I may speak freely, the Russkie talks big, but frankly, we think he’s short of know how. I mean, you just can’t expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys. And that’s not meant as an insult, Mr. Ambassador, I mean, you take your average Russkie, we all know how much guts he’s got. Hell, lookit all them Nazis killed off and they still wouldn’t quit.”

         General “Buck” Turgidson

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   • Just more burnt-offering grist added into the mill to help reach the magic number.

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   • We just went through a global dress rehearsal for biological warfare. The next bio-weapon will be faster and more lethal.

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   • It’s funny how every adversary of the US gets characterized as suicidal lemmings that need to be slaughtered en masse and its ok if we do that because they like dying in the first place.

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   • In August 1945, my father was 20 years old, and a Pacific Campaign combat veteran (Guadalcanal).
     I have a photograph taken of him in the very first days of that month, in San Francisco; he’s in the company of a few other Marines, all of them (very) young men wearing (very) grim expressions.
     A few weeks later, they were all no doubt “standing down” at Mare Island, and at other West Coast bases – “wrapping things up,” as it were.

6. They need to be able to attack behind enemy lines but at an altitude above air defenses. Low orbital aircraft? It’s something we have the ability to create, or at least we once did.

7. It is hard to Monday morning quarterback when we might not be anywhere near halftime. But…

   It seems that the Russians should have paid more attention to the way an outnumbered and vastly outgunned Hezbollah was able to bloody noses and run the Jews out of southern Lebanon in 2006. Or the way they were able to hit the Hanit out in the Med with a subsonic missile.

   For myself, I completely misunderstood the role drones woud play in this conflict. I failed to factor in what mass production and miniturization (if that’s the right word) would mean. My mind had been fixed on the last war, i.e. what we saw during the sand wars: large aircraft either carrying out strikes on their own or serving as a survelliance platform.

   Of course, I can also just vaguely remember a not so distant past in which some bloggers were claiming hypersonic missiles didn’t actually exist.

   We all get it wrong about everything most of the time. Perhaps in war more than anything.

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8. The aircraft carrier has been a de-facto clipper ship for years, even before hypersonic missiles. We lost 12 carriers in WW2, a time of primitive pre jet engine technology. Carriers are only good for parking near poor countries with no navy to do as we please, not for any enemy with any wherewithal. The definitive feature of the next major conflict will be seeing them at the bottom of the ocean.

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   • Despite the fact that the battleship was growing obsolescent by WW2, the victors did not lose many battleships in that war, even though they possessed and employed quite a few. Outside of Pearl Harbor, the USA didn’t lose any. The UK lost 4. Not coincidentally, the US admiralty was more in tune with the new carrier age than was the UK admiralty.

     There was a time when I would have said that if people like you and me were aware of the obsolescence and vulnerability of the aircraft carrier, then the people in charge would be even more aware, and planning accordingly. But today I’m not sure if that is true. Haven’t seen much evidence of it. There was a rough 50/50 split among US admirals prior to WW2 about the centrality of the carrier to naval doctrine, vs the outdated centrality of the battleship, so the new way already had a lot of support before any shots were fired. I see no such “new way” among US naval leadership today.

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     • Yes. Even if there was a case for the carrier, mid-air refueling should have closed that chapter. But the military being a government agency, will charge into the next battle on today’s version of horseback. Everyone will be shocked and stunned when “our best” trannies are at the bottom of the South China Sea. Divers will one day go down there with camera crews a half century from now, and find bunk areas full of fabulous ladies foot ware.

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     • I think the battleships come back once the rail guns come online. They are much more viable when they aren’t floating bombs, and they don’t give a good damn about air defenses.

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       • The Russian Navy is predominantly selecting for smaller surface ships, but ships that are armed to the teeth with advanced missiles, and possessing sophisticated radars, and powerful ECM (electronic counter measures). Also a focus is on linked ISR, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaisance. I am assuming also that they are quite capable in anti-submarine warfare, too. These ships are designed to be competent in both blue ocean and littoral combat situations, and the smaller ones can navigate the rivers and canals in Russia. This gives them the ability to launch powerful missile attacks from Russian territorial waters, and they have used these capabilities to good effect in the Syrian war, and probably also in the SMO in Ukraine.

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     • Carriers were not as significant in the European theater because land was not at such a premium as it was in the Pacific theater. US ,Japan,UK did not appreciate role of carriers in war. The Us lost so many ships at Pearl that navy had to use the carriers much more aggressively than doctrine demanded. No military really appreciated how significant floating airbases would be in the Pacific until they had to.

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       • I think that the Japanese did appreciate the game-changing effects of carrier-based aviation in blue water naval conflicts, witnes their success at not only destroying capital ships, but also their attacks on land-based aviation at Hickam Field. When they lost four carriers at Midway they took a hit from which they never recovered, particularly in the loss of a great number of their best naval pilots and crews. They lost their ability to engage the US from forward deployments of their navy. This was a boost to the island hopping strategy that the US embraced, particularly in tandem with the submarine warfare that was patterned after the German Navy’s use of U-boats to disrupt long range supply lines that the Japanese did not respond effectively to with convoy tactics in support of island outposts, and increasingly, of the home islands.the dearth of carrier based aviation handicapped their ASW efforts. Contrast the Allied situation in the Atlantic, where carriers became elements of convoys, obviating the earlier midocean gap where land-based aircraft did not have the range for ASW.

   • Frigates, light cruisers and destroyers have always been the last line of defense for carriers. It’s a mighty big ocean, but they can be found with some determination. Depends on the capabilities of the adversary. If the battleship were to be reinvented for the era in which we find ourselves … well then there might be a new navy.

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   • Yes, and now our entire blue water Navy is obsolete, with 12$ billion carriers that can be sunk or totally disabled by a single hypersonic missile or a swarm of cheap drones costing .01% of the carrier’s cost…China has wisely avoided that, and has a large coastal navy at a much smaller cost…

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   • this is all acedemic. ALL the wests vessels are crewed by trans seaman pufpus and comanded by captian pup ravage .

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9. We have not achieved the singularity in warfare and never will. One can still profitably study Sun Tzu, Thucydides and Clausewitz and apply their insights to the 21st Century. Insofar as the present Russian/Ukraine-NATO war is concerned, I predict that the end will resemble the latter stages of World War I (I’m not certain why Z-man uses the British designation of “The Great War”). The best way to see World War I is that of a giant siege by the Allies against the Central Powers. For example, one of the reasons that the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 was that the potato harvest in Germany had failed in 1916. By 1918, Germany had knocked Russia out of the war, but the situation in Germany and Austra-Hungary was getting desperate because of the British blockade. So Germany adopted the high risk strategy of attacking in the West, before the Americans could put a million man army in France and Belgium by 1919. The offensive gained ground, but failed to capture anything particularly important.

   Here’s where the situation becomes similar to the situation confronting the Russians today. The Allies knew that the Germans were in trouble, but the ability to break through trench lines and mutually-supporting German defensive positions remained difficult. The Allies hit upon a sort of “incremental” solution; they gave up on their idea of the “Big Push” (forcing a breach in the lines to be exploited by cavalry (yes they still thought of that)), and instead attacked a specific German position with intensive artillery, then occupied it with infantry that could resist the inevitable German counterattacks. Once those counterattacks had been repulsed, they repeated the procedure on a different segment of the front. Then again on another segment. The casualties were high (the Americans suffered 110,000 dead in about six months of serious battles on the western front in 1918), but the Germans had no answer for the new Allied tactics/strategy. In November of 1918, they asked for an armistice even though German troops still occupied most of Belgium and fairly extensive areas of France. (Another factor was that Allied troops were advancing from Thessalonika and threatening both Vienna and Constantinople, threatening to end the participation of Austria-Hungary and Turkey in the war.)

   I think Russia will adopt a similar approach vis-a-vis the Ukrainians–suppress Ukrainian defenses with intensive artillery and never get tanks and other vehicles beyond the coverage of Russian air defenses. Once those defensive positions are occupied and the Ukraininan counterattacks are repulsed, the Russians will do the same thing in a different area of the front. Eventually the Ukrainian will to fight will collapse and they’ll ask for an armistice/cease fire and serious negotiations will start; the Ukrainians will have to make significant territorial concessions and agree to neutral status. The Global American Empire will have suffered a seriouis set back.

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   • Diversity Heretic: “Eventually the Ukrainian will to fight will collapse…”

     My guess is that the Ukraine has long since lost the will to fight.

     Sadly, however, the Ukraine is not governed by Ukrainians, but rather is governed by Khazarians.

     And the Khazarians are the single most bloodthirstily sadistic tribe of psychopaths which have ever set foot upon God’s Green Earth.

     So long as Khazarians are allowed to continue breathing oxygen, there will be no peace.

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   • Major difference- the military leadership in WW1 was comprised of Europeans of intelligence & character who knew the horrors of war and had skin in the game in the form of their own countrymen & sons. The Ukranians are being puppeted by sociopathic tribals with a century long blood libel who could absolutely care less if they are grinded down to the last man and have publicly said so. Any precedent from 100 years ago has no relevance when you are dealing with (((vendetta))).

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   • I disagree…Russia is rapidly depleting the Ukraine’s, and NATO’s weapons stock, and also the Ukraine’s manpower, at relatively little cost to itself..The Ukraine will simply run out of both at some point, likely early next year, and the war will end….

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   • I’m surprised no one has ever attempted an epic film depicting the Kaiserschlacht — the last ditch spring and summer German offensive in 1918 to win the First World War.

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     • The second half of “The Blue Max” (1966) deals with this campaign. Good movie, by the way…

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   • I agree on your assessment of Ukraine but, and 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 landing was welcomed by a cannonade and a flypast of planes painting the sky in the colors of the Chinese flag. The Saudi King went to the airport to greet him; The king an old and infirm man who walks with a cane, not MBS. The three day visit mapped out the energy future for the World, the future of the Petro-Yuan and the death of the Dollar.
     Who knew that demonizing as a murderer the most influential player in the commodity that props up one’s hegemony and sending carny barkers like Blinken to upbraid him for insufficiently celebrating sodomy would have consequences?

     Xi got the welcome he did because the Saudi’s are going into partnership with the Chinese. The Chinese approach to International Affairs is Win-Win, a contrast with the US’s Because We Said So.
     Among the projects, one of many to develop the country away from oil production. Saudi Arabia has energy up the wazoo in the form of Solar as well as hydrocarbons so mega-watt guzzling server farms (And BitCoin Miners) are a great fit. The excess heat, of course, will be used in the desalination plants that Saudi needs. So this is a triple win- Saudi, China and the asshole Greens.
     MBS’s main concern is, I’m sure, avoiding being murdered by the Washington Filth. ( I’ve always thought that’s what the DC Baseball Team should be called).
     Here’s everything you need about the US economy

     https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17448.jpeg

     The US imports everything it needs on a day to day basis. It exports cardboard. (The Koch industries entry is because they own Georgia Pacific)
     The petrodollars got a decade at most. The US is fucked.

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10. I think it was known prior to the war in Ukraine, by anyone who is capable of assessing such things, that neither NATO nor Russia could conventionally achieve a WW2 style victory against the other. The notion that either could is nearly as ludicrous as the idea of conquering mainland China. Although I think the west probably clung to the myth that its supposedly superior tech would allow it to win any particular battle it chose.

    The sanctions were supposed to work. The sanctions were supposed to bring Putler down. They failed. So here we are. Somewhere in DC, the whiz kids who concocted that plan are still clinging to the hope that the sanctions will still work, that they just haven’t given them enough time yet.

    It is no doubt underreported, if reported at all, how much economic/industrial warfare is being waged. In meat space as well as market space. How many factory/refinery/railroad/power grid accidents that weren’t really accidents.

    There are unknown unknowns, to us, that are not unknown to the Powers That Be. Threats that have been made, red lines drawn. The media feigns (or possibly actually possesses) ignorance over matters on which the truth is well known by the principal actors on both sides. Such as who blew up nordstream. Just to pick one well known example.

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    • Are you suggesting all these apparently random refinery, food, energy, and whatever plant burnings and explosions around the US may not be orchestrated by our own government? Why wouldn’t they blame Russia then to gin up support? Or are you saying it is only the US government doing to Russia?

11. According to Col Douglas MacGregor, USA, Ret., the Ukies have lost upwards of 400,000 men with Russian casualties about 50,000. This Intel comes from his sources inside Ukraine & Belarus & apparently because Ukie casualties get a lot of coverage on SM. If accurate, that level of casualties is unsustainable for Ukraine. Moreover their Officer & NCO cadre must be taking a hell of a beating. How much longer can they hold out? Add to this the reported use of Ukie Press Gangs forcing men between 16 & 60 into the military. Has a certain Volkstürm feel to it.

    The drones are what have created the dramatic shift in the type of warfare – I.e positional – currently engaged. There’s no movement that can’t be seen & broken up. Artillery & missiles rain down on assembly areas busting up an attacking force before it even gets going. Hence the long game Putin is playing.

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    • Every war is a war of attrition. Some just take longer than others. A year and a half is not so long, relatively speaking. If it takes another year and a half, then that’s not really that long. It just seems long relative to the Thunder Run to Baghdad.

      However, I cannot envision a point at which this war ends. And I don’t think Putin can either. Hence he is in no hurry. What I mean by that is, even if Kiev “falls,” even if Russia “conquers” Ukraine, what, is the GAE just going to say, “well, tough break, we’ll get em next time”? Of course not, and he knows that.

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      • Jeffrey Zoar –

        It can’t go on forever especially if the Ukies are drafting those 16 to 60; that’s a pretty wide net that smacks of desperation. Again, the most debilitating aspect of these losses whatever the actual numbers are is the losses in experienced infantry officers & NCO’s. Those are very hard to replace & are the core of any armed force.

        @ one point during the Russo-German War 1941-45 the Germans were losing like 200 experienced infantry officers per week. And in the German Army they operated on the Fahnenjunker concept which officers served in the ranks first for a certain period then went to OCS. So that took a good amount of time.

        Time will tell of course but the clock is ticking & not in Ukraine’s or the West’s favor.

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        • The fall of Ukraine, whatever that looks like, is not the end of the war.

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          • This, in spades. Hence the Russian efforts to fully mobilize their military industrial capabilities, while simultaneously selectively, but comprehensively working to ready a large body of soldiers trained as well as possible, in anticipation of further trouble from the Khazarians and their golems.

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      • No…Within a year, this war will be over, as the NATO allies realize it’s hopeless, and stop providing assistance..Also, Ukraine is running out of manpower rapidly and will have to go to purely defensive tactics soon, at which point it will be just a shooting gallery..

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        • Maybe.

          When can Russia comfortable enjoy the Donbas lands? Nato can layback, shoot some missiles into civilian areas. Repeat.

          Poland is arming up big time. Back 1600s 1700s poles held the ukraine. It was tax farmed by the askezars. They’d like it back.

          So someday, but, the ‘west’ has a ways to go before it bleeds out.

      • Well, yes, you are correct. But in that sense, at least since WW II (and probably WW I) the Khazarians have been waging war against the world, and these confrontations can be seen as conveniently grouped battles. Ukraine is just the latest battel in the never ending war for Khazarian world domination, a war fought on many fronts.

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    • “According to Col Douglas MacGregor, USA, Ret., the Ukies have lost upwards of 400,000 men with Russian casualties about 50,000.”

      How can someone believe such crap propaganda?

      Both side hard-believers have faith in those absurds numbers.
      It’s 1914 again.

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      • Very hard to know pasaran

        there was an article in the NY times a while back, that said there were now 50 or 60K Ukrainian with missing limbs, well thats from artillery, dead from artillery is probably an even bigger number. the Russians have a big artillery advantage, so they are killing far more Ukrainians

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      • Note that the basis for such figures seldom is given.

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      • Why is the Ukraine building more cemetaries and evicting old dead from current cemetaries? They’ve cleared minefields or tried to with bodies, they’ve reinforced losing battles until the Russians finally evict them from little villages by leveling everything. Russia has been very casualty averse and has avoided battle unless they had absolute superiority. Don’t let your cynicism get the best of you.

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        • Mike: “Why is the Ukraine building more cemetaries and evicting old dead from current cemetaries… Don’t let your cynicism get the best of you.”

          Bro.

          Four simple words:

          “Fiddler on the Roof”.

          That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

          “Fiddler on the Roof”.

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      • The lost limbs–prosthetics numbers indicate more like 500k KIA and over a million casualties…You don’t pay much attention to the daily reports, do you….

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        • Russian figures seem extremely low…

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      • It is difficult to tell, war is deception. But, from what I have read the Russian war psyche is to paint things rather gloomy – I don’t know if that is a “tactic” (look weak when you are strong”) or just the Russian character. The West tends to paint things overly optimistic. Again maybe as a tactic (look strong when you are weak) or just typical Murrican/Anglo “can do, stiff upper lip, etc.” hubristic character.

        Given those attitudes, it would not surprise me if the West underestimates Uke’s losses and overestimates Russia’s, and if Russia did the same. Thus, I would venture that Uke is doing worse than reported.

    • No one knows the real numbers for either side.

      However, Mediazona, which is a pro-Ukrainian site affiliated with the BBC, does try to calculate Russia dead using public announcements, obituaries, social media posts, etc. Obviously, this is going to miss a fair amount of casualties but it’s a good starting point.

      Mediazona has “confirmed” Russian dead at ~30,500, it wouldn’t be surprising if the actual number was 40k to 50k. They’re own estimated in May put the number at 47,000, so 50k is probably in the ballpark. Wounded is probably double that at 100k. So, total casualties is ~150k for Russia.

      Given the artillery advantage that Russia has (anywhere from 5-to-1 to 10-to-1) and that Ukraine has bizarrely been on the offensive for much of the war – Kherson, Kharkiv and the spring offensive – it’s a pretty safe bet that their casualties are much higher than the Russians.

      The 400k dead figure seems high. That’s an 8-to-1 kill ratio. But I could easily see 150k to 250k dead for Ukraine with 300k to 500k wounded for a total casualty count of 450k to 750k.

      That’s not sustainable. Ukraine had a population of 40 million before the war, but 6 to 8 of that was ethnic Russia and ~8 million have left, so it’s down to ~24 million. Half of that (the men) is 12 million. Maybe a third is fighting age, so 4 million men.

      But I’d guess that this number is a bit high because almost everyone who left the country was young, so let’s 3 million fighting age men. Of those, a quarter probably can’t fight for a variety of reasons, so you have 2.25 million.

      If Ukraine has lost 500k, that’s ~1/5 of the available men. And those would be the best men that you have. The next group will be far less motivated and capable. They’ll be less trained, less well-equipped, poorly led and coming under even more fire because Russia is beginning to use its air force and missiles more due the depletion of the Ukrainian air defenses.

      Basically, Ukraine can’t take another 18 months like the last 18 months.

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      • My wife has family in Ukraine. Three male cousins. Two already dead. The 400k may not be high.

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        • 😥😥😥

          I’m sorry Eloi. That’s a real tragedy. How’s the family holding up?

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          • It is sad for my wife. I do not know the people, so it is nothing to me. The one left a pregnant wife and 18 month old. Things have been bad there since 2014, of course. Now, the bodies pile up.

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      • The graveyard counts have also been used to estimate casualties…they’re at least 400k and probably much more…The Ukrainians are now being ordered to incinerate their dead on the battlefield to prevent such counting…

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        • Maybe they bought some of those mobile Russian crematoriums (supposedly put into service to hide the massive casualties that they were reportedly incurring, reliably of course) that our media bugmen were going on about in recent timesin order to comply with that directive.

          Black humor at its finest…

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          • Well it only takes a couple small ovens to dispose of the bodies and of millions in a very short time. So good tactical move there! The bones (which are not burned in cremation, despite common belief) will also never ever be discovered or documented.

            Fiendishly clever plan!

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12. then the long planned war with China over Taiwan become mutual suicide.

    One could argue that’s a feature, not a bug. The more I read up on WWI, and the turn of the 20th century in general, the more I’m forced to conclude that Sigmund Freud, that old cokehead, was right all along — the human race has a “death instinct” and will indulge it, especially when there seems to be no obvious civilizational path forward.

    In 1913, we’d gone as far down the road to Fabian Socialism as has ever been possible. And that was the all-but-universal opinion of Europe’s best and brightest: That Socialism is the future, and it will arrive well within our lifetimes… but it’s being held back by un-exorcised ghosts from the past. George Orwell captured the sentiments perfectly in his review of Mein Kampf, and apologies for the long quote:

    Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.

    He’s not wrong, but look at that list of items Orwell called “common sense.” Orwell was born in 1903. He is essentially an Edwardian man; he missed trench service only by a few years. What he calls “progressive thought” since the last war is actually a bang-on summary of the cultural consensus just before the war. Guys like Orwell assumed there’d be no war, because the Workers of the World would finally Unite and simply stay home. The fact that they didn’t — that they sacrificed themselves in their millions in the trenches — broke their brains; they never recovered.

    But then Hitler did them the enormous favor of becoming the Deplorables’ avatar. In another essay from about the same time (“Hitler, Wells, and the World State”) Orwell writes:

    Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But…Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, the common-sense World State, as seen by a nineteenth-century Liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles, must triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler cannot be a danger. That he should finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.

    It’s the dilemma every Progressive faces, and has faced since Wells was born (1866, for the record) — either “common sense” triumphs, or the world ends. And if the world has to end so that “common sense” can triumph over atavism, well… so be it. We’re at a similar point now. We’ve been hearing about The End of History since the first year of the administration. It hasn’t happened, simply because it can’t… so there’s only one solution left.

    32

    1

    • *since the first year of the Clinton administration.

      8

    • Todestrieb/destruktion was Freud’s post-libertarian moment. “The pleasure principle” had been his “follow the money,” a rational pursuit (however perverse its manifestations) that explains everything. Eventually he noticed it only explained a few things.

      He first conceived of the “death drive” as approximately what would be called “suicidality” now, a longing to return to non-life. A present political equivalent would be the idea that white anti-whiteness and billionaire socialism are guilt-motivated or “self-hate.”

      Eventually he understood that that wasn’t quite a thing, except in cases of literal self-destruction. His final refinement of destruktion (*half* of human motivation, remember) was non-reproductive violence directed outward. Not rape, but rape-murder.

      He must have finally met a politician.

      3

      • Fellow whiteness explains far more “self” hate than “self hate” does.

        It’s people who resemble a wish.com version of you if you squint… they hate YOU. They think they themselves are pretty grand and that you had better get on with serving them

        4

        • I would argue though, that there *is* a real phenomenon of “white self-hatred” that cannot all be explained away by putting several layers of parenthesis around “White”. Understanding — and defeating — this is the key to White survival.

          I see it all around me here in the Pacific Northwest and far more than I ever did back East. Growing up in Baltimore (just like Z himself) I knew a lot of people who authentically hated me. I knew lots of blacks and quite a few Jews. Neither group made much of an attempt to pretend they liked me or my people. Even the Jews mostly didn’t play the “fellow White” game probably because they knew the working class Italians, Poles, and Irish in the old hood weren’t going to fall for it.

          The Northwest, though, really does seem to be full of shitlib Whites who authentically hate themselves and the achievements of their race. A lot of my coworkers are like this. Of course, this make me hate them as well. You might think that they must simply valorize anti-White Whites but I wonder if this is really possible. I suspect that part of the price for hating your own tribe is hating yourself and anyone close to you no matter how much you try to limit the contempt to “deplorables”.

          I wonder if this begins to explain the self-destruction these people engage in. Do all the hiptrash tattoos really just read “please kill me” no matter what the explicit writing in them says?

          7

          1

          • If you watch how much these people get nervous and squirm when they have to discuss something political among themselves, you can tell they’re all walking on eggshells not to say anything that could get them denounced because they’re also all chomping at the bit to denounce one of their fellows.

            I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve listened to some young people talking about how they had to ostracize someone from their group, speaking with such a serious tone that you first think the malefactor must have done something truly horrible. Then when finally pressed to explain what had happened, it turns out to be just have been some trivial comment.

            The other tell that they aren’t the nicest people in the world is that they make such an elaborate production out of trying to show how much they care about others and are super sensitive to everyone else’s needs. Much in the same way a fat person will make sure you hear about that one time they ate a salad.

            6

13. I believe China can blockade Taiwan. Taiwan is right off the Chinese coast. Its outer islands were regularly shelled by Chinese artillery back in the day—until the U.S. threatened to nuke them if they didn’t stop. Missiles, whether launched from land or over the horizon by aircraft, can succeed in doing to Taiwan what German U-boats could not do to England during two world wars, starve them into submission. What Greek shipowner is going to send his cargo ship into Taiwanese waters only to risk their being sunk by missiles?

    Meanwhile, the U.S. through its rash sanctions on Russia has gotten countries like Saudi Arabia begging to be paid for oil in anything but dollars. Should U.S. dollar loses its reserve currency status, other countries such as China will not be so eager to send us our manufactured goods (quite apart from our sanctioning or waging war on them). Off-shoring our industry, which is already having ramifications for our inability to keep up with Russian weapons production, will then become a serious problem.

    We shouldn’t ignore China’s very real economic and social problems. They’ve copied the U.S. economic development model after all, and are influenced by American culture. But the U.S. could ultimately find itself in a similar position to North Korea: constantly threatening nuclear annihilation on all and sundry; but largely ignored because our economy cannot match our ambitions.

    16

    • China was shelling Taiwanese islands that lie only a couple miles off the coast of the mainland. They could have hit the islands with bottle rockets. That’s not to say they can’t shell anywhere in Taiwan, but to affect a blockade of the island would be far more difficult than launching ordnance into Kinmen.

      • Recent military exercises around Taiwan suggest what
        China’s strategy will be:
        https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/08/asia/china-taiwan-military-exercises-what-we-learned-intl-hnk-ml/index.html
        They succeeded in disrupting Taiwan’s sea lanes and air corridors. Closing the entire island and its territorial waters, which China claims sovereignty of and most other nations already de jura recognize, would take this to a whole new level.

    • I still think the Uke war has given China pause for thought. Russia has a long, long history of expeditionary warfare and yet are engaged in a slog whose end is still in question (though less so than a year ago); all but the most oblivious in China has to know that they wouldn’t have fared nearly as well.

      1

      • China is treading water and biding their time over Taiwan, while the U.S. is circling the drain in Ukraine.

        8

        1

      • The main lesson that all observers should have learned from Ukraine, is that it’s not going to be what you think it’s going to be

        9

    • If I would be leader of China and considering the facts than I know (which, of course, are ridiculously far lower than those of Xi), my strategy would be as follow

      1-waiting time when my economy is larger than the US one, not only in PPP, but in usual (even if we all know GDP isn’t a very accurate indicator, it shows us at least a trend)

      2-organize a blocade of the Island

      3-use drones to kill some influente taixanese elites.
      Elites tend to be bellicist… When blood isn’t theirs. But if the risk for their lifes get critical, I think they would suddenly becoming hard pacifists.

      ****

      I would use such slow strategy because Taiwan is actually a giant blockhaus, even more prepared for defense than Ukraine 2022 or German lines 1915.

      • But why take over Taiwan at all? What’s the benefit that offsets the costs? (Nobody is thinking of the costs when they assume that’s what China is up to.)

14. Exactly this. I have been astounded at how reserved Putin has been. There should have been a swift, personal response to the murder of Aleksander Dugin’s daughter, the murder of the Russian submariner, and to Prighozin.

    The murder of Dugin’s daughter was particularly heinous, and should have set the precedent that the assassination of civilian targets is fair game in this war. Zelensky and his entire family are fair targets.

    25

    • The above comment was intended to be a reply to Intelligent Daesin’s excellent comment. My apologies for any confusion.

      5

    • Well you have to sort out which murders are actually Ukraine and which murders are the Kremlin saving their “our democracy” from their deplorables.

      7

    • If Putin wanted Zelensky dead he’d be dead. He doesn’t think it’s in Russia’s interests… and unlike a western leader his interests overlap significantly with his country’s.

      You really think Ben Stiller can find him but Putin can’t?

      Agree Zelensky richly deserves the worst, but absolute best case he gets it after he stops killing Ukranians and crawls back to his own folks in Tel Aviv.

      7

      • I didn’t say Putin should kill Zelensky. I said Zelensky and his entire family are fair targets after the murder of Dugin’s daughter. Zelensky has a wife, two kids, and parents.

        I credit Putin for not sinking to Zelensky’s level of moral turpitude, but I agree with Intelligent Daesin that Putin is going to have to respond. The war thus far has been a yuge! win for Zelensky. God only knows how many billions of US aid dollars he has taken off the top. His tune might be different if he were made to feel some pain.

        3

        • He could target Hunter B, but then everyone would just thank him.

          2

          • We need to be very very careful with the smart-aleck talk.

            That’s the kinda rhetoric that’ll get Z staring down the barrel of a Ruby Ridge situation in his very own kitchen.

            4

          • Indeed. This has got to be a YUUUGE problem for Putin. He must constantly be asking himself how to strike at America but in a way that doesn’t actually make the US stronger and better. Since killing most of our political (and economic) “leadership” would be a win for just about everybody here…

            4

    • Terrorist actions such as these are intended to make the Russians see red, and perhaps to fall into a trap, such as undermining the constraints of legality, or more insidiously, committing their nation to a military involvement that outruns their preparations for major combat, thereby giving the GAE time to get their shit into one sock, and giving away the Russian advantages in their military industrial capacity.

      Cool heads win prolonged multiphasic conflicts. The Russians will not be drawn by this stuff, but rthey sure will be taking notes about responsible parties for future retaliations, even if postponed for years. A dish served cold.

      1

      • I’ve frequently thought that our supremely competent and accountable leaders are trying to bait Russia in a Muh Pearl Harbor or Muh Twin Towers event so as to stampede the Murrikan public into WW3.

        1

    • Terrorist actions such as these are intended to make the Russians see red, and perhaps to fall into a trap, such as undermining the constraints of legality, or more insidiously, committing their nation to a military involvement that outruns their preparations for major combat, thereby giving the GAE time to get their shit into one sock, and giving away the Russian advantages in their military industrial capacity.

      Cool heads win prolonged multiphasic conflicts.

      1

15. If technology is limiting/eliminating war as a means of achieving political goals, that leaves economic warfare. If that’s the case, Ukraine has been an utter disaster for GAE and the neocons.

    I’m still very skeptical of the BRICS coming up with some trade currency, but there’s no doubt that the seizing of Russian assets lit the biggest fire under the asses of every world leader to find a way to get out from under then thump of the dollar and trade sanctions.

    The war sped up the process of countries creating alternatives trading mechanisms by at least a decade, even if it still takes a decade or two.

    27

    • Watching Jeffrey Sachs right now talking about it. BRICS is a way to avoid the weaponization of the U.S. dollar. The EU and U.S. froze and are literally trying to steal Russian assets.

      Whether using a BRICS currency or just agreeing to trade in Rubles and Yuan, the idea is for the money to never move through any western bank where it can be stolen.

      9

      • Yeah, I don’t think that any of those countries wants to unseat the dollar. They just want to set up alternate routes for money to flow.

        Even the BRICS currency isn’t really meant to unseat the dollar. In a sense, it kind of is a dollar. Let’s call the “currency” the BRIC. If one BRIC is worth one ounce of gold and one ounce of gold is worth a certain amount of dollars, a BRIC is sort of a dollar.

        If A=B and B=C, then A=C. If a BRIC = 1 ounce of gold and 1 ounce of gold = $2,000, then a BRIC is $2,000. Deals would still be done in dollar terms, but just not in dollars. If I want to buy $1 million worth of a commodity, I’d just pay with 200 BRICs instead of $1 million.

        The world would still use dollars as the pricing mechanism but would be able to substitute BRICs for dollars in payment.

        But that’s a very tall task to complete in the real world. However, if you have enough countries in the BRIC universe it could theoretically work. It’d be a dollar system within the closed BRIC community.

        4

        2

        • The dollar is done. It’s in its zombie years now. The US deficit increases and fewer and fewer countries are buying the bonds.- have a look on the Treasury website. There are two alternatives:
          The Treasury creates the money through the Fed and expands the money supply to buy the debt and guarantee hyperinflation.
          World War to “reset” the debt.

          9

          • Tell me, what is the alternative to the dollar?

            What other country has so much better rule of law than the US (and, yes, I realize that seizing Russia’s assets put a massive dent in our claim to have rule of law)?

            Do China have better rule of law? Russia? India?

            What other country has a debt market deep enough and safe enough to handle the huge amounts of money that would need to buy that debt to store away when needed?

            The dollar isn’t the world currency because we force people to use the dollar. It’s the world currency because businesses and banks – private actors – want to use it. Central banks can stop buying treasuries all they want, if their banks and businesses continue to use the dollar, it doesn’t matter.

            In a fiat currency system, the world will always gravitate towards one currency just as the world gravitates towards a single language as the world language. It’s just a lot easier.

            Also, you realize that there’s more dollar-denominated debt outside the US than in the US. Also, 80% of trade is done in dollars.

            Governments and central banks can talk all they want about moving away for the dollar, but their businesses and banks can’t. They need those dollars to trade and, more importantly, to service their debt. They have to have dollars.

            If by some miracle the world did move away from dollars too quickly, we’d have a monster problem. The number of dollars in circulation would start to fall, but the need for dollars – due dollar-denominated debt servicing – would barely budge.

            This would cause a dollar shortage, causing the dollar to strengthen against every other currency, which would make it extremely difficult for all those borrowers to service their debt, which means they default, which means even fewer dollars circulating, causing the dollar to strengthen even more and so on and so on. The global financial system would collapse.

            Look, I take a back seat to no man in my hatred for GAE, but this talk about the dollar getting crushed is way off. If anything, the big danger is the dollar going up in value. At best, it will take decades to unwind the dollar debt system in place, mainly because there’s nothing to replace it with.

            4

            3

    • Warfare is human nature. Technology will never eliminate war. “Economic warfare” is redundant — meaningless. War IS economy but by an accelerated, violent means. It’s the breakdown of more polite, easygoing economy.

      1

      • I agree. But what other country is better situated in terms of natural resources, natural defenses, friendly neighbors, a large and developed economy and deep financial markets than the United States.

        That said, we no longer dominate like we used to. Our leaders are writing checks that our economy can’t cash.

        3

        • Read you loud and clear … right on.

16. Battleships evolved to take infinite punishment in slug matches. They became obsolete when the carrier out ranged them. Airplanes could strike well before the guns could get in range over the horizon.

    Carriers seem to top out at 100 aircraft. This has held since WW2. Carrier aircraft range seems ti have topped oit as well. In an ocean where missiles can out range aircraft. Maybe the battleship concept returns? That or submarines start duking it out with missiles.

    8

    • Subs seems to be our last big advantage – the Russians and Chinese are cooperating on a new fleet of attack subs.

      7

      • Actually, we’ve lost much of the advantage we once had in this area. Half our sub fleet is either docked or in need of upgrades and repair. Consider that our finest subs are a design dating back half a century. Russian subs are newer, and in many regards, better. They now have drone subs which can remain submerged indefinitely…and come to life when needed…armed with nuclear missiles. They can park these things right off our shores.

        21

        • A decade ago the US Navy rented out a Swedish Gotland-class sub to study because the thing was so quiet:

          https://jalopnik.com/sweden-has-a-sub-thats-so-deadly-the-us-navy-hired-it-t-1649695984

          I believe it based on the Swedish engineers I’ve known. All had razor sharp minds and near-native English proficiency.

          7

          • Good comment! I’ve read that the Swedish submarines are amazingly quiet; more so than a nuclear boat that must run pumps constantly to keep the reactor cooled. A diesel-electric boat in a coastal defense, as opposed to an open-ocean, role is a serious adversary for a nuclear-powered submarine.

            3

        • Russia has a pretty good sized diesel-elctric boat fleet. They’re generally quieter and harder to detect than the nuke boats and would be very effective against just about anything. They have the range to get out to our carrier battle groups too and wreak havoc.

          1

        • A few years back I watched a YouTube vid by one of these super excellent bigly elite operating operationally (hat tip Severian) ex special forces operators.

          This highly-evolved specimen of humanity was graciously permitted to film on a USN ballistic missile sub and got all misty-eyed and weak at the knees because their new secret weapon was… wait for it… female crew members. On.A.Fucking.Submarine.

          He was disappointed to learn that this was not yet the case on the attack submarines because they were still working out the logistics of how to jam extra heads and nuclear-powered tampon incinerators into these smaller boats.

          This was before Year Zero of the Troons. So he may have had to update his priors in the years since it was filmed.

          3

          • Women on a US Navy submarine? Terrible for morale!

            Who will the male sailors have sex with now?!?

            10

    • Yeah, aircraft carriers stopped being the key ship for pier-level naval combat shortly after the end of WW2. Great for projecting air power to parts of the world that lack their own navies, but otherwise obsolete. I want to know how our submarine fleets line up to theirs.

      7

      1

      • A few years ago a diversity CO, diversity XO, and diversity navigator drove one of ‘our’ submarines into an undersea mountain. There are NO hidden or undiscovered undersea mountains in our operating areas. If it comes to war, you can count on our historic nautical competence to reveal itself as no longer extant.

        This is all for the best, because there is no ‘our’ anymore. We are a conquered people ruled over by enemy aliens and their domestic collaborators. Collapse is the cure, and planet-wide battlefield defeat will hasten it.

        43

        • I wish there was a way the US could suffer the most humiliating military defeat in US history WITHOUT the deaths of the fine southern white Christian boys who have become the front line mamluk fighting force of the empire.

          The jab thinned the ranks and younger ones are starting to wise up… but a lot of the fighting men are still of this type.

          8

    • You’d think a carrier might start carrying a couple thousand drones instead of 100 planes, but this doesn’t solve its vulnerability problems. So the short term answer is a cheaper, more expendable, less manned ship to carry the couple thousand drones. Perhaps many such ships. A cheap old rusted out Liberian flagged freighter would suffice, truly. Although it wouldn’t keep the Raytheon shareholders as happy.

      8

17. Eh, the most diplomatic thing that can be said about Western air defense and electronic warfare is that neither is very good.

    The people running the West have had the meetings, budgetary line items, and the will to ramp up industrial production.

    Unfortunately the West does not have the supply chains or human capital to actually realize their desired ramp up in industrial production.

    16

    • Not with the traditional MIC grift system, but perhaps other heavy industry converted to military industrial use. The same CNC machine that completely automated precision machines a cylinder head can just as easily machine a missile and do so MUCH faster than traditional machining. Missiles need a ton of machine work.

      The real question in this is does the political will exist to pull an FDR and start ordering businesses to re-tool. A sunk carrier with thousands dead would do a lot to change the political will situation.

      Don’t get me wrong, there will still be a lot of challenges. We don’t have 10s of thousands of these high precision machines and they probably require parts we don’t make. OTOH, machinery is the last vestige of US manufacturing power. Machinery is our number one manufactured export product.

      13

      • I understand your point, but I don’t agree that the US has the sort of broad industrial base that can be repurposed similarly to the way it was during WW2.

        9

        • You’re leaving out our vast number of Rosie the Riveters.

      • Thanks for the laugh. The US produced 14,000 155 mm shells last year, with herculean effort they’ll get that to 24,000 this year. The goal is 240,000 by end 2024
        That’s a slow 10 day’s number fired by Russia during the Bakhmut operation alone. Brian Berletic and the Doran guys have gone over the numbers regularly over the past 18 months and their numbers are probably pretty accurate.
        The West no longer has an industrial manufacturing capacity of any size. China’s is bigger than the US, Europe and Japan combined.

        9

        • The Duran guys are complete and total shills.

          You will notice my comment is contingent on the political will changing in the US.

          When things change, things change. The US is still a world class power of building production machinery. It’s fairly still low volume, but the added value is very high.

          These machines are amazing. They can take a basic casting and turn it into a precision head in few minutes.

          2

          1

18. I believe that the Russians have worn down the Ukrainian air defenses to the point where they could switch to mobile warfare if they wanted to at this point. For an American commander, the temptation to use air-mobile units to jump over the minefields and carve up the underbelly of Ukrainian supply lines and rear-echelon units would be irresistible.

    I think the Russians have held off for two or three reasons.
    1. They don’t want a lot more Ukrainian territory (other than Odessa)
    2. They don’t want NATO to jump in if the Ukraine suddenly collapses
    4. They are casualty adverse and as long as the Ukrainians keep attacking, they can keep the casualty ratio in their favor by a huge margin.

    26

    • And Putin does NOT want to be seen as an aggressor. He’s going to carve out Russian-speaking areas and turn the rest over to a government friendly to Russia. The idea is to demonstrate to NATO members that Russia is no threat to Europe and to coax Germany out of their shitty alignment with NATO. Germany is the lynchpin in all of this. As Germany goes, so goes the world.

      21

      • There may be no more cucked country in the world than Germany. They ain’t going anywhere.

        They’ll ride the Woke train right over the cliff.

        29

      • Yes to Putin’s desire to appear territorially no threat . Come on, Russia isn’t big enough already? They don’t want to be repeating the own goal of domination of unwilling populaces that we saw during the Cold War. If our ZOG would have not finked on every promise made during the final days of the USSR, none of this would be happening (but what are the chances that our ZOG would be honorable, eh?). All that Russia needed was a buffer to replace their occupied nations, but no-o-o, our ZOG wanted to pursue their traditional game, and destroy Russia in the bargain.

        So now, everyone can see that the ZOG is comprised of greedy, sociopathic liars whose word can NEVER be trusted, and the ROW besides our cucked “allies” are making haste to shake off the ZOG’s hegemonic designs, and as the critical mass of viable rearrangements progress, the downward spiral will only accelerate.

        As to Germany waking up to how they have been taken over the barrel and ass-raped, I hold out no hope for that. The Germans are dissolving themselves as a people, closely followed by much of Europe. Without the dissolution of the EU as the shot caller, this is inevitable.

        12

        • Germans are undergoing a selection event like Europeans worldwide. The current generation is more chaff than wheat and at some instinctual level this portion knows it shouldnt reproduce, just porn IV drip till euthanasia and hell.

          The white people having children and making it through all this are a the coterie and built totally different. World isnt ready for the future theyll bring.

          4

    • 5. They are deliberately prolonging to war to bleed NATO of money and weapons in the same way the U.S. bled them out by siding with the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s..

      19

    • > They don’t want a lot more Ukrainian territory (other than Odessa)

      From what I have read, they definitely want Kharkiv, and maybe everything else East of the Dnieper too.

      6

      • And welcome to it. Russia has several times paid in blood to rescue that area from the domination of entirely incompatible rulers, and going all the way to the Dneiper seems correct.

        11

      • If you read some of Putin’s speeches instead of the bullshit from the West’s corporate media whore’s you know that Putin wants no part of Western Ukraine.

        5

        • We’d be better off if he the western hemisphere actually… but Russia seems content being Russian

19. We tend to think of drones as aerial toys/tools. But we’ve had remote controlled toy cars for far longer. We’ll eventually see ground based drones to trigger the mines. Or low flying drones that can hover just above the ground an generate a pressure wave or EM signal to trigger mines.

    Eventually, war becomes robot armies trying to counter other robot armies.

    I tend to agree with the singularity argument. Irregular warfare and attrition have made the economic and political costs of war too high. These Afghanistan type wars are unwinable. Is China better off invading Taiwan and killing tens of millions of people or just taking the money and living with it? It’s not just Taiwan at stake. China knows that the US could quickly sink every ship in the Chinese navy – commercial and military – in short order and clog all their ports. China can no longer trade. They’re not a self contained economy like the US is.

    Ukraine is yet another example of Trump being right. His basic policy is that these wars benefit no one, the weapons are too complex, and the human cost is too high for what you gain. So respect borders and we’ll all get rich together. The Government Party, because apparently they cannot exist without war, lives like it’s 1915 or 1943, unable to comprehend a war that cannot be won.

    In the US, the reason we are hearing about lockdowns again has nothing to do with COVID and everything to do with restricting movement. The Government Party is justifiably fearful of the damage a few hundred men could do just quietly moving around Northern VA at night to kill Government Party apparatchiks. No open warfare. Just a wave of fatal muggings and government officials going out for a jog and never making it home. The James Comey’s of the world are starting to realize how truly vulnerable they are. Then Lefty gets in on the action, and you get a war like the Balkans in the 1990’s where people on the Democrat side of the river position snipers to kill people on the Republican side of the river. And vice versa.

    At some point the military would have to get involved, but those cross-dressing sissies would struggle to maintain loyalty in their own ranks. Desertion levels would be very high, and forced conscription would only increase the likelihood of assassinations inside the walls of the fort. In 1944 you could count the number of 4-star generals with one hand. Today, in a military a fraction of the size? 40+ You can’t swing a cat on a military base these days without hitting a flag officer. Numbers like that become a liability in an irregular war.

    The biggest lesson we’ve learned in Ukraine is that Russia isn’t Nazi German which rolled up Europe in a few months. Because modern weapons have made that largely impossible. And in the West we have neither the manpower, nor the hardware, to land at Normandy and push out the invaders. It’s pointless. Of course, if you’re a Lockheed-Martin shareholder, business is booming, but again to what end?

    That may be the other reason for COVID. The military-industrial profit center is losing its growth potential. So Governments are on the hunt for another unwinable war with higher profit margins.

    30

    1

    • and supply lines

      4

    • This has all been modeled extensively. And yes, the serious wars of the future will be heavily biased toward smaller, cheaper, mass-produced robotic weapons that duke it out in the battlespace. But the NextGen wars of the future will be fought using bioweapons and cyber attacks on electronic networks. The ideal is to undermine the homeland population such that core capability to wage war is absent or degraded. The latter is key because resiliency is what ultimately wins long wars. But to your main point, as a nation, we have never been more poorly led than at present. The worst of us now inhabit nearly every seat of power and decision-making in DC and that will not change via the charade of voting harder. There is going to have to be a purge and it will be a vigorously contested dynamic. And it will be won by the nobodies that nobody notices.

      11

    • ” They’re not a self contained economy like the US is”

      You do realize you are f*cking insane, don’t you?

      3

      • You mean BESIDES the fact that China can’t produce enough food to feed its own people?

        We can.

        We can also produce 100% of our own energy.

        China can’t.

        We have the raw materials to build our sun stuff.

        China doesn’t.

        3

        1

20. It always comes down to attrition.

    5

21. This war is already over, Z. It was over about 6 months ago. There was never any doubt who would win it or how. Mine clearing technology is nothing new; the Americans blew gaping holes through the minefields of Iraq and charged through them with aplomb.

    What we are seeing here is flat out incompetence. Western leaders misjudged Russian capabilities, badly. Likewise they misjudged their intent and resolve; and they are still doing it today. The field elements of the Ukrainian army are long gone, the guys in the field now are poorly trained, motivated and supplied. Back in America, the diversity freak show is firmly in charge of our govt and military and it shows on the battlefield. The only reason there is still a “war” is because Russia is operating with great restraint, waiting for us to come to our senses.

    Given the guys we have on the job now… they are in for a long wait.

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    • From the looks of it, coordination of the various Ukranian military groups of atrocious in the last few offenses and keeps getting steadily worse. I take that a sign Russian special operations teams have been busy doing knock-knocks against the Ukranian command elements. Man, what a fun job that’d be to have. Because you know those guys wouldn’t be limited to just the main objective of trying to strike at command units, then exfiltrate back, but harassing “targets of opportunity” that come along. “Capt. Vlad, the intel nerds got word the 12th Motorized тарган Laundry Brigade is passing through, whuddya think?” “Cool beans, Sgt. Major Pisstoffatzya, let’s go knock off for a bit. Come on, boys, it’s laundry time.”

      16

    • The stated aims of the war were to militarily weaken Russia and to isolate it economically. By those metrics, it has been a spectacular defeat and another in a long line of humiliations for the Global American Empire.

      The actual aims of the war were to strengthen the GAE’s grip on its European vassals and to allow Western oligarchs and their whores and help to plunder their treasuries and convert shaky fiat into hard assets. By the actual metrics those goals have been met.

      The fly in the ointment is what Z wrote there at the end. Does anyone think the psychopaths in charge would hesitate to start a nuclear war if they thought their survival was possible and it could prove lucrative?

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22. No podcast this week?

    • Vaca

      filler filler

      3

      • Damn damn. If you’re a green door dude, the free stuff is new stuff. lol.

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    • In last week’s podcast Z said he’s taking the next two Fridays off.

      He’s earned it. The man gives and gives. He’s entitled to kick back and chill. 😎🍹

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      • Z-man has a life–he’s entitled to live it!

    • At least give us a mailbag show, Z! I like those.

    • No show this week or next week. Need to tidy up some things before the end of summer. Needed to make some room in the schedule. Thinking about it, I should have said the podcast is being held hostage until I break 700 subs.

      10

      1

      • Cool, got it. Dude needs a break here and again.

        3

23. Ever war America has fought, and then lost (all of them) since 1945 has been blamed on “politicians handicapping” the military.

    Except they don’t, the Ukraine war is no exception. The US always has great initial success by directly attacking civilian infrastructure (they call this attacking command & control), which is to say the power grid, water distribution etc.

    The Kakovka Dam and the Russian/German pipeline destruction (and Europe’s largest nuclear power plant is under constant threat with at least one commando raid repulsed already) are signature moves of a nation that has only known victory through total war persecuted first and foremost against civilian populations to “break the will” of the enemy.

    That Russia has nukes is the only reason the US I hasn’t been using their proxy to level every Russian civilian infrastructure within reach is extremely problematic for the US.

    This war will bring to a halt and we’ll once again be told that it’s because we never allowed the military to “take the gloves off” and it had to fight “with one hand tied behind its back”.

    Rinse, repeat, let’s “pivot to China” and see if the same tactics produce a different result.

    26

    1

    • Washington often give near-free reign to special forces and infantry to conduct warfare in support of accelerating the military abandoning a war. The irony is they often start seeing tangible results. A common lamentation in the SoF community was along the lines of “why weren’t we allowed to do this ten years ago?” Rinse, wash, repeat for Afghanistan, Iraq, whatever else they’ll get into next.

      9

    • War is like a project. You better have a really clear objective and business case going into it. What was the objective of any of our recent adventures (other than making money for the connected)? Why are we in Syria other than to steal oil and grain?

      10

      • Because that’s what Israel wants, and what they want, they get.

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24. You have to wonder if there is a limit and maybe we have reached it. Short of nuclear weapons, the West cannot hope to beat the Russians on the battlefield and the Russians cannot hope to beat the West.

    There is another tactic that does not require nuclear weapons, that has not been employed yet, that will redound to the victory of the first side to employ it, and that is already well within Russia’s technical capabilities and seems to be left unused due simply to a failure of imagination or a misplaced sense of decorum. That tactic is called “taking out the leadership.”

    A country without a leader, and an army without a general, is simply a disorganized mob with no ability to mount any effective resistance. It is baffling to me, as it no doubt is to a great many Russian citizens, why Kiev is not being targeted. Why is Zelensky still alive? There hasn’t even been an attempt to kill him. He flies in and out of Kiev all the time, visiting world leaders and crashing their soirees asking for weapons. This is intolerable.

    In the interests of time, I’d like to recycle a comment I wrote yesterday on Unz, which some of you may have seen. It concerns the Prigozhin murder and is pertinent to the subject at hand. To wit:

    Anybody who thinks Putin had anything to do with Prigozhin’s murder is a bigger idiot than I thought the average Stevist to be, which is not something easy to do.

    This was obviously a Ukrainian intelligence operation, but the Ukrainians couldn’t have pulled it off without assistance from someone inside the Russian security apparatus. That means that Russian security is alarmingly full of holes, which ironically is the very problem Prigozhin was trying to draw attention to with his rebellion.

    Unfortunately, Putin’s vacillation when it comes to fighting this “existential” war has gotten yet another Russian patriot killed. Russian warriors are being assassinated inside Russia while Zelensky and his Western contacts are free to traipse around the world with impunity, drumming up more money and weapons for a seemingly limitless campaign that sets no reasonable bounds to the cost.

    This is where the Russian strategy needs to be amended. Russia claims to be winning the war of attrition because it destroys Ukrainian armed forces much faster than its own forces suffer casualties. However, this doesn’t matter quite so much when the other side is being resupplied continuously. There is no shortage of obsolete junk and mercenaries that the West can dump into Ukraine, enough to keep the war going for years.

    The only way to stop this is to cut off the head of the serpent. It is high time—it was high time long ago—to destroy the regime in Kiev and interdict the flow of Western weapons into Ukraine. Why this is not being done is an enduring puzzle verging upon a scandal.

    In response to continued escalation and provocation by the West, Putin’s countermeasure thus far has been to make war upon grain silos. “The pain in Ukraine stays mainly with the grain,” my fair lady.

    If Putin does not respond forcefully to the Prigozhin martyrdom with high-level attacks upon Kiev and the elimination of regime figures including Zelensky, then his government will split and his days in command of Russia will be over. These are very dark times indeed. The war just became a lot more existential for Russia than it ever had been before, and Putin has no one to blame but himself. He is a capable man, an intelligent man, a great manager and a superb diplomat, but he’s not a wartime consigliere.

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    4

    • > It is baffling to me, as it no doubt is to a great many Russian citizens, why Kiev is not being targeted.

      Because the only thing Zelensky does is go on TV and beg for money. The entire Ukrainian government and military organization — right down to orders for individual units — is being coordinated remotely from U.S. bases in Germany, and the Russians know it.

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      • I think Generic is spot on, but I would add one point. Kyiv is probably the toughest fortress in the world right now. Yes, satellites and drones are nice, but I have little doubt that Zelensky is never above ground but for a few minutes, and I have no doubt NATO has stocked, stacked, and fortified Kyiv in an unprecedented manner.
        Further, I would not be surprised if Russia is moderating its use of munitions. Missiles do not get replaced overnight. At any time, this fight could escalate dramatically, and I am sure there exists the desire to hold reserves for unforeseen escalations.
        To be clear, this doesn’t mean Russia wins the 3d chess award; I don’t huff Putin’s musk as others do. They have made several miscalculations, and they are paying for them.

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      • I would also like to remind people of the propaganda we used to get during Operation Desert Ham Sandwich Part Deux where the newsbots at Fox would talk about how the US had once again killed “The number 2 guy in Al Qaida”. These #2’s were seemingly as numerous as what you would expect from a cow with irritable bowel syndrome. You would always find out their names 5 minutes after they had been vaporized in a missile strike and then never hear about them again. It was always a glorious victory for the US! Murrica!

        I suspect the Russians know that “Zelenskies” are quite dense on the ground in Ukraine and don’t place much of a priority on eliminating them. Zelenskiiii is hugely important – to Western propagandists targeting Western audiences.

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    • “This was obviously a Ukrainian intelligence operation, …”

      I don’t how accurate it is, but I have read that the flight originated in Africa where Wagner commands elements were presumably strategizing with clients. I have first hand experience with African airport ‘security’ or rather its lack. If they didn’t want a CIA-paid assassin to plant bombs in the wheel wells of their aircraft, then they should have brought their own guys to maintain 24 hour surveillance. Yes, it would cost more: cost of continued breathing while doing business.

      You’d think Wagner would get by now that they are at war, and lack of attention to detail means death. Globohomo will never stop attacking. It used to be ‘our’ assassins were supposed to get Presidential approval for these kinds of operations, but one wonders if they bother anymore (I doubt it), or if Biden would even remember if they did.

      10

      • I also doubt approval by Biden is required, or is even possible. He’d think the request is for ice cream, and on this cue perhaps take a “scoop” out of his diaper. I don’t see his administration full of circus freak show specimens as really being any more capable either.

        Now, whether approval is required from Schwab, Soros, Kissinger, etc., et al. is an interesting question. It very well may be; this very well may be where actual power within the Globohomo Empire lies, already at present. This may already be entrenched and formalize, and they’re now only waiting for post-ratification implementation of the WHO treaty to go overt with it, to come all the way out of the closet with it.

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    • I’ve only seen this note in one spot, but it looks like Prigozhin also ran the notorious Russian bot farm that caused Hillary to lose in 2016.

      3

      • Perhaps you forgot to end your comment with /s.

        Shrillary’s loss was an own goal, and her admitting such a gross failure was always an impossibility. Hence “The Russians done it!” as seen in the Russia, Russia, Russia ploy and all the attendant mayhem arising from Her Nibs’ blame-shifting efforts. Vicious she is, competent she is not.

        3

        • The whole thing was so ridiculous I didn’t think worth noting. If western democracy can be invalidated by a couple servers in a Russian basement then it doesn’t deserve to survive.

          2

          • Well, the Uniparty would know, wouldn’t they? I rather suspect that they themselves, for their own reasons, did indeed build in back doors into the increasingly vulnerable electronic basis for voting. Blaming the Evil Russkies for the presence of such vulnerabilities was merely a way to get out in front of the story should any genuine investigation of their gamed electronic voting systems find and question these vulnerabilities and their origin by planting the seed that Russkie hackers had done this.

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    • If you take out the leadership, with whom do you negotiate an end to the war?

      1

      • You don’t negotiate an end to the war. You destroy the puppet regime in Kiev and replace it with something else.

      • The leadership is never in vacuum for long. But the point is well made, who follows? Better or worse? I’ve heard musings that Hitler could have been taken out, but the attempt was never made as his leadership of the German army was so bad as to be an asset to the Allies. On the other hand, such tactics were applied in the Pacific theatre with Yamamoto—mostly for revenge of the Perl Harbor attack, but no one I’ve read seems to argue it shortened the war.

        Likewise, I’ve heard folk saying that Putin gone would only bring in a more extreme element to conduct the war. As for Zelensky, he’s NATO’s puppet, so he’s probably safe if he follows orders.

        2

    • You and other Turbo Patriots, such as Strelkov, hold the same opinions.

      Putin and his most informed ministers operate with a now fully developed sense that the ZOG and its puppets are psychopaths, as evidenced by some of the very incidents that you have outlined (Dugina, etc.), and they are trying to avoid an uncontrolled escalation to a nuclear exchange through their own intemperate, and stupid actions. They have already wacked some command centers staffed with ZOG minions, and interdicted resupplies inside Ukraine’s territorial borders, lately escalating to a functional blockade of Ukrainian commerce and resupply via their Black Sea ports. That seems to be their limit at this point, but a pretty aggressive set of actions it already is. They also warned off the Poles in no uncertain terms.

      Full scale global warfare is being avoided. But if it were to get that far, we would all be fucked. This would be suicidal, and as a believing Catholic is this not forbidden? Give that some consideration, along with Just War doctrines emanating from the Church, I implore you.

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      1

    • I’ve posted something similar previously, but I’ll reup it here. This is speculative but I think about right.

      Putin was a KGB agent stationed in East Berlin as the Cold War drew to a close. The West he experienced was the same one we did back then–confident and overly idealistic, loud and materialistic, vibrant to the point of vulgarity, but still relatively sane amongst its peoples and its ruling classes. The West changed dramatically after he left East Berlin and has since became utterly insane.

      At least at the outset of this war, and even aware the GAE had become different, normalcy bias still did not allow Putin to fully apprehend how utterly unhinged and dangerous it had become. Not killing the enemy’s civilian leadership was something normalcy bias compelled.

      Others have touched on other practical reasons, including having someone in place to negotiate a settlement or surrender. Still, normalcy bias likely looms large even now. Yes, the hesitancy is a mistake, but even we suffer normalcy bias here from time to time so it is understandable.

      2

      • There is no doubt some merit in this description. Putin seems unable to let go of the siren song of actually joining the West and he doesn’t seem to realize that Russia’s historical destiny is to destroy it. There are others who do realize this, and Putin’s authority will be transferred to them in due time. The clock is ticking on Putin’s reign and he’s almost out of chances to do the right thing.

        1

        • As a consequence of his delusions about the West, I really believe there is a great possibility this is leading to nuclear war. Putin still doesn’t believe the contemporary West will go there, otherwise he would speed things along because every day that passes the odds of nukes flying go up.

          The Regime’s fanatical pursuit of Trump and its obsession with Putin have to be seen as of a piece. They have torn apart the social compact domestically with the arrests, and they will not hesitate internationally to reduce much of humanity to rubble. It is literally destroying everything for…reasons.

          3

        • Why do you say that Russia’s historical destiny is to destroy the West?

          Bolshevism and the drive for world revolution was imposed on the Russian people, it was not of the Russian people.

          Although I’m not an expert on Russia, I guess that if we would stop hassling them, they wouldn’t hassle us.

          They may envy our greater ability to build prosperous civilizations, but I don’t see in them a desire to destroy us.

          2

    • Seems Putin is in a similar conundrum as patriots. Should he retaliate as you suggest it would likely escalate to where he does not want to go. Much like J6ers and the like – getting baited so they can justify harsher measures against you. Only Russia appears to be meeting objectives if at a higher cost than desired. So why change it unless needs require?

      1

    • I agree with you that I’m somewhat flabbergasted at how many people believe Putin did it without question. Not just western media outlets, but scroll down the comment sections of both “left” and “right” sites and there’s nary one disagreement. However, I disagree with you on many fronts.

      1) I don’t agree that it’s “obviously” Ukrainian SBU. I’d place them at the top of a list of suspects, certainly. However, Larry Johnson has a great article out now, where he also makes strong cases for 1) Russian Air Force personnel getting revenge for the deaths of their friends during the coup. 2) Dissatisfied Wagner personnel/ ex-cons that had issue with either the coup or the way he threw convicts into the battle of Bakhmut with minimal training. 3) Other Russian oligarchs that thought he was punished to softly for his crimes (again, 7 dead Russian Air Force soldiers).

      2) Here’s a hypothesis that I’ve thrown at others following the war: what if Putin’s war of attrition is aimed at bankrupting NATO? Think of it as Reagan’s “outspending the soviets” into collapse, except used on us. Many countries in the west are teetering on serious economic problems with skyrocketing inflation, massive budget deficits, rising interest rates, and with Germany seeing its industrial base collapsing. Russia is out producing all these countries in artillery and tanks. All the NATO countries are talking about their stocks being bone dry. Again, perhaps he’s trying to give that final push.

      3

      • The fact that Russia is engaged in an economic war against NATO has been clear since Day One; there’s no dispute about that. That’s what the BRICS group is all about and it’s one of the reasons why Russia has been so restrained in prosecuting the war. I get all that.

        However, it’s impossible for anyone to entirely predict or control these forces. That the West will collapse economically seems inevitable, but it doesn’t mean it will do so on anyone’s timetable. Nations have often gone on fighting wars for years after all economic considerations predicted they “should have” collapsed.

        Look, the Art of War 101 says that you need to strike at the enemy leadership and disrupt his supply lines, and the only reason people are coming up with all these 4D chess scenarios about “bleeding out NATO” is because the clear and simple strategy is not being followed, or even being attempted. It leaves you scratching you head wondering why, and I am no longer willing to spackle over that gap with 4D chess theory.

        In fact, there isn’t much mystery as to what’s going on. This is classic Putin; he always fights wars this way. He wins the battle at maximum cost to himself and then gives the enemy everything he wanted anyway. It worked in Chechnya, but not so well in Georgia, and it’s not going to work at all in Ukraine.

        As for Larry Johnson, I don’t consider him a serious individual. His take on the Prigozhin rebellion was off-the-wall stupid and he spends much of his time complaining about how he was treated by the Agency. He has no real insight to offer.

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        • “He has no real insight to offer.”

          And neither do you.

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        • Do you think trying to win a war of attrition and bankrupting the enemy is akin to 4d chess? Doesn’t seem all the complicated to me.

          1

      • What if Putin’s war of attrition is aimed at bankrupting NATO?

        This. A hundred times over. What Russia and China are doing is uniting the global south against the G7 with the eventual aim of bankrupting them and making their currencies worthless.

        A conventional and nuclear war cannot be won by either side. But bankrupting the enemy is a possiblity. And the GAE started the economic warfare by confiscating Russia’s reserves and sanctions.

        Nobody talks about who is winning that war.

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