I see that another of our Atlantic oast sailors has weighed in on our role in the Ukraine-Russia War and he is not at all happy with US under-performance in getting stuck deep into a meaningless, pointless, irrational and stupid war that demonstrates exactly what the merits of NATO are and just how meaningless NATO has become. Those of us on the Pacific Coast and Middle East Force had little trouble understanding that NATO was a pointless suck that drained our money and warships into shoring up the illusion that there was still some remaining shred of military might and competence still ashore in Western Europe. We saw it all as nothing but pure waste after the Cold War ended and everyone retired to their own corners and left each other to their own devices for awhile.
Some of us saw it clearly enough when the USN and America essentially eliminated Sixth Fleet and the Mediterranean became as harmless to the West as the Sea of Cortez. There were no menacing and dangerous cancers left to blight Europe's sudden freedom from the crushing burden of not actually supporting NATO with any meaningful military spending, training, or utility for over 30 years. They could relax and get ready to welcome all the boat people from Africa that NATO's cunning decapitation of Libya made so inevitable and well deserved.
It's fascinating to think that there really are military officers who believe and write about Russia's imperial ambitions which, they exclaim, showed Russia meant to expand upon by pouncing on a supine Ukraine and wrest it out of the hands of NATO or the EU. That's not really what happened and everybody who actually reads knows that's not what happened. A guileless, stupid and rapacious bunch of thugs in NATO and Ukraine thought they could vastly expand the corruption and flow of money into their own pockets by bringing Ukraine into NATO and they proposed doing that over the howling objections of a Russia that they had lied to and told that they would never do such a thing. They got caught red handed.
Putin tried for a simple coup-de-main but it never really stood much of a chance and I think he knew it going in. The teething problems generating a combat force out of an entire nation that had no blooded cadre of officers, men, doctrine, tactics or techniques for waging modern war was not a surprise to anybody versed in sudden war after a prolonged peace. You should read the butcher's bill for our Civil War, World War I and World War II and if you're a glutton for punishment, Korea. Expertise in battle only comes with battle. The next naval war is really truly going to suck. All the Royal Navy Falklands lessons bounced right off American naval staff and went nowhere.
They got so caught up in believing what their idiot POL/MIL and NATO planners told them about the 'correlation of forces and superiority of all military and political things Western,' that they let their ambition run away with them and left Russia no choice but to make it clear that buffer states must remain buffer states. That's a lesson that the idiots and fools in the Baltic are relearning as they make the pretense of gearing up and girding their loins and spending money they will never have to buy weapons to stave off the illusionary 'Imperial Russia.'
I am no longer so amused or tolerant of the idiots who told us a year ago that Russia was bled out and had lost the WAR because some failure of a 4 star American former general says so. What passes for the media in this country simply accepts anything that dribbles out of the mouth of men like Petraeus and the other monkeys privileged to wear 4 stars and they rabbit on about a Ukrainian Counter-offensive that will crush the Russians under the treads of the 40 or 50 NATO tanks that the NATO was able to generate and dispatch to Ukraine almost a year after placing the order and telling the Ukrainians to soldier on. How sickening and pathetic.
I got a kick out of this marvelous bit of news. See for yourself but here's a paragraph or two for your amusement:
Just think of that! The NATO bozos have spent the last 5 years planning an Air Deployment Exercise involving a mere 250 planes and 10,000 personnel! That pretty much defines NATO and the people who used to work for SACLANT to a T. This giant exercise will appear to require just 10 aircraft from each NATO member. I get the feeling most of them will be business jets and most of the participants, if they leave their home bases at all, will probably fly commercial air.
That's not the only insanity in the article, Consider: this is the latest help from a NATO member to Ukraine to encourage them to continue fighting and dying for no sound reason at all except that money flowing into the pockets of businessmen, our politicians and cronies of Ukraine's dictator and his sycophants. Read it and weep.
How can any sane American believe that by supporting war in Ukraine we are doing anything but evil?
What we are seeing is the rough Russian equivalent of the United States invading Mexico with just the forces we currently have stationed or based in California. The Economic Sanctions we levied on Russia have shattered the economic standards that we are so accustomed to that we hardly even notice and all the people that tell you that this war is ruinous to Russia and good for us have been lying or simply ignorant and foolish.
On the gripping hand, they are the same voices that pronounce that the United States must gear up now for the coming war with China. They never seem to be able to articulate the victory conditions that would have to apply to end such a war and given we haven't ended the last war we got into with China, it's presumptuous and stupid to think the second war won't turn out as badly or worse than the first. And it's never clear why we need to go to war with China anyway. All those Asian countries that share a frontier with China had the same knowledge we did about the buildup and did damn-all to prepare themselves so that means they're not sincere which means there really is no reason for us to fight their wars for them. There's also no real sign that Taiwan would lift a finger to reject re-absorption into one China. And as with Israel, what did Taiwan ever do for us that makes them an ally worth fighting a major war over?
3 comments:
You can forget about NATO's meaningful involvement in any European conflict, and especially German participation. And you can also set aside the idea that Putin has any intention of heading west. It has never happened, and never will. Putin has one goal, and that is to restore Mother Russia to what it once was. The only time in history Russia came west was at the end of WW2 when they rolled into Berlin, and for obvious reasons. And because of that, the West has made Russia Europe's boogie man ever since.
Any good reliable source will confirm the modern German Bundeswehr is a shadow of what it once was. Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen, former minister of defense (2013 to 2019) practically gutted the entire German military through lack of funding and pure neglect. Germany will be lucky to have a handful of aircraft flying in this upcoming NATO exercise given their poor operational status. The German military is barely able to participate in a large scale joint-forces exercise here in Germany, let alone an actual conflict given their low operational capability across the board; Army, Navy and Air Force.
General Carsten Breuer, like his predecessors, is about as brilliant as most US military leaders today. If you read his bio, the man has a degree in education, and two medals for flood relief. Like all German military leaders, his ideas of military operations are based on PowerPoint slides and theoretical debates.
The idea that Germany must "prepare for a defensive war" is simply nothing but hot air blown over cold beer. Conscription ended in 2011, so the only "professional" military are the few souls that were so desperate for work, that they joined up. And those who do join are not doing so out of some misguided sense of patriotism. It's because the majority of the enlisted, just like in America, are typically the socially disenfranchised; low social status and poorly educated and live where economic opportunities are far and few between.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius can talk all he wants about increased funding, but without people, you can forget it. And numbers speak volumes. With a combined force of less than 200k uniformed personnel, of which approximately 62k are in the army, Germany is simply incapable of dealing with any significant conflict. And those numbers have been dwindling for years given the bad reputation of the German military by the general population. Young Germans want nothing to do with the military. It is poorly funded, poorly equipped, poorly trained and there is no sense of national pride or conviction that what they are doing has anything to do with securing their country.
Considering the immigrant population and demographics changes in the past 20-years, nearly a third of the population are non-native Germans. And the number military age German males are at the lowest rate in decades. It would be interesting to ask General Breuer who exactly does he think is going to put on a German uniform and defend the country? It certainly won't be the millions of Turks and other middle-eastern residents who carry German passports and wave Turkish and Palestinian flags in the streets.
Papa had some thoughts about this:
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
Ernest Hemingway
Our announced national debt vs GDP is over 129%. That's Weimar Germany level issues.
I say announced because plenty of reliable sources claim a MUCH Higher debt level with Social Security and such added in.
Oh, I forgot the BOND Market is screaming bad news with the return of real interest rates. America's ability to loan themselves free money is done. Next year's debt service paying just interest will be more than ALL the taxes collected that year.
Source Forbes, Barrons and even US treasury department.
So, WAR is the distraction for the mismanagement and blame for the troubles feeding, sheltering and keeping the lights on for our families will be those DAMN "XXX" Not CONgress (spelling intentional).
Protect your families and trusted friends. Worth more than paper with dead presidents on it when things get hard.
I really don't understand all the people who think we need to prepare for a war with China and I also don't understand the people that are worried that Russia will attack. One thing the Korean War showed was that we literally cannot defeat China, nor they us and the one thing the Ukraine-Russia War demonstrates is that the Russians aren't imperialists, they just want to be left alone. Continuously poking them with a sharp stick is really stupid and needs to stop.
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