The Pentagon has admitted it is providing the Ukrainian military with “actionable intelligence” in combat operations against Russian forces. If that is confirmed then the United States is at war with Russia. The implications are grave for two nuclear powers.

The admission came last week during congressional testimony by Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. He was speaking to the House Armed Services Committee, proudly telling Congress members how the Pentagon was helping the Ukrainian military fight Russian forces: “We are making a difference in accurate, actionable, and timely intel.”

That indicates the Americans are involved in providing information to the Ukrainians for lethal targeting of Russian troops.

It is an incredibly sensitive admission. Only two weeks before Moultrie’s testimony, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee had reportedly sought to downplay any such informational exchange between American and Ukrainian forces. “We are providing some intelligence” to Ukraine, but we’re “not providing the kind of real-time targeting,” said Representative Adam Smith who chairs the committee. The downplaying is understandable because such intelligence-sharing implies that the U.S. is a direct participant in the conflict.

One possible area where the Pentagon is “making a difference” is the reported high number of senior Russian commanders who have been killed on the battlefield. Since the Russian intervention in Ukraine on February 24, it is claimed in Western media reports that up to six top-ranking officers have been killed.

The latest reported victim was the deputy commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Andrey Paliy. The governor of Sevastopol, Crimea, was quoted by Reuters as acknowledging the death of the naval chief on Sunday. He was apparently killed during the battle for the port city of Mariupol.

Of course, in the conflict raging over Ukraine and with the information warfare at a fever pitch like never before, the NATO-backed Kiev regime and dutiful Western media are all too prone to exaggerate Russian losses. Claims of Russian generals being “picked off left and right off by snipers” are gleefully reported.

Some of the recent top Russian commanders named in reports as being killed in combat include Lt. Gen. Andrei Mordvichev who was shot at the weekend by a sniper at an airfield near Kherson.

Other senior officers reported killed in action include Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky and Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov. On March 3, Maj. Gen. Sukhovetsky was shot dead by a sniper claiming to be from the Azov Battalion, the openly Nazi paramilitary force.

The Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defense have not publicly confirmed all of the high-ranking casualties, but reports of funerals and death notices in the Russian media have emerged.

Even if all of the deaths among senior officers are being exaggerated by the Kiev regime and Western media as part of a disinformation campaign to weaken Russian morale, the adage of no smoke without fire suggests that there has been an inordinately high number of senior casualties.

That seeming killing efficiency of the Kiev regime forces could be due to the Pentagon’s intelligence being able to pinpoint Russian commanders.

If that is the case, then it takes American involvement in the Ukraine war to a whole new and dangerous level.

The Biden administration has been funneling military aid into Ukraine over the past year. So, too, have the British and other NATO members. Up to a point, Washington and its allies could claim that the provision of arms was for “defensive” purposes. President Joe Biden last week signed off on supplying more inventories of Stinger anti-aircraft and Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. However, it remains to be seen how those new weapons will arrive given that Russia has warned that any such supply from NATO is a legitimate target.

Biden is traveling to Europe this week to meet with other leaders of the NATO alliance. So far, Washington has quashed strident requests from Kiev and some Eastern European NATO members for the imposition of a no-fly zone in Ukraine. The U.S. president balked at that idea by saying it would mean sparking a Third World War.

For the same reason, the Biden administration recently put the kibosh on Polish proposals to send Soviet-era MiG fighter jets to Ukraine. That would have marked overt participation by the NATO alliance in combat against Russian forces.

Biden is in a tough place of his making. The Russophobic rhetoric of his administration – Biden personally labeled Russia’s President Putin as a “war criminal” – has fueled an intense media campaign condemning Russia. There is a moral panic and hysteria about alleged Russian barbarity in Ukraine, comparing Russia with Nazi Germany and Putin with Hitler. Reason and rationale are being obliterated.

Washington has unleashed a propaganda monster that it is barely able to control. The dubious reports of Russian airstrikes and artillery barrages against civilian centers in Ukraine – incidents that seem to be fabricated in an echo of false flag provocations by the White Helmets in Syria – are putting Biden under intense pressure to become more involved militarily in Ukraine as a matter of moral imperative.

There is a sense that the Biden administration is being trapped by its own contradictions and information warfare which is resulting in an inexorable slide towards U.S. and NATO war with Russia. The Western disinformation has raised the stakes so high that it is increasingly difficult to avert an open war under its own terms and condemnations of Russia. There is hardly space for any diplomacy. Maybe that’s what some people want.

In any case, the United States seems already deep into waging hostilities against Russia. If it transpires that the Pentagon is actually helping Ukrainian militants – the Nazi Azov regiments no less – to assassinate Russia’s top generals then a grim conclusion is we may have reached a point of no return.

An occasional series in which I attempt to illustrate, with historical examples, a “Russian style in warfare”. I have written about the “American style” here and here. In general, I believe that the Russian style is very effective while the U.S. style is not.

The “Brusilov Offensive” is the name given to a series of attacks by the Russian forces between June and September 1916 against Austro-Hungarian forces in the territory of today’s Ukraine commanded and planned by Aleksey Brusilov. Very successful initially, the attacks faded out over time. The numbers of soldiers, powers of the defence, difficulty of movement and enormous stockpiles of munitions meant that offensives, on any front, petered out because of physical exhaustion, heavy casualties and outrun supply lines. In essence, the war went on until one side simply couldn’t take any more. That point was reached by Russia in 1917 and Germany at the end of 1918. The last hammer-blow broke them, not the second-last.

But Brusilov’s offensive offers some insights into the Russian way of warfare and, in particular, stands in great contrast to the British offensive on the Somme at the same time. Brusilov used tactics which weren’t used on the Western front until the Germans in the March 1918 offensive and the Canadian Corps in “Canada’s Hundred Days.” I will start with the British Somme offensive in order to show how advanced Brusilov’s tactics were.

Like many wars, August 1914 saw confidence that victory would be achieved by Christmas. But, when Christmas came, tens of thousands had been killed and wounded and the fronts were stalemated. The Schlieffen Plan had failed, Plan XVII had failed, the “Russian steamroller” had failed: it was clear that it would be a long war; a war that would need millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of weapons, millions of tons of ammunition. No one had anticipated the casualties and the ammunition expenditure. Barbed wire, trenches, magazine rifles and – above all – machine guns, had given the defence tremendous power and for the Allies, the problem was how to overcome the defence and regain the territory that the Central Powers had secured at the beginning stages of the fighting.

The British Army undertook an enormous recruiting effort which brought in about one million men by early 1915. And that was still not enough – conscription was begun a year later. Conscription raised about two and a half million men: altogether nearly 5 million British men wore uniforms: an unimaginable number in 1914. All these had to be trained and equipped. The new armies needed stunning quantities of weapons and ammunition and factories were built and hundreds of thousands moved into them to make war materiel: a gigantic war industry was erected on the very small base of 1914. This took a great deal of time and it was only by the summer of 1916 that the commanders believed that the British Army war ready for a big offensive.

On the Western Front, the retreat from the Marne had left the Germans holding ground better suited for defence than the Allies and months of preparation and experience of failed attacks in 1915 had made their positions even stronger. The British solution to the problem was artillery – the attack would be preceded by the most powerful artillery bombardment ever carried out. One million, seven hundred thousand rounds were fired on the German positions over eight days: 150 per minute. It was expected – tests had been done – that this thunderstorm of high explosives would cut the barbed wire, collapse the trenches and annihilate the defenders. The first wave of infantry would have little to do but occupy the smashed enemy trenches and were, accordingly, heavily laden with weapons, equipment and rations. But, up to a quarter of the rounds were duds (it’s difficult to make fuses when you’re just starting), the wire wasn’t sufficiently cut, there were enough defenders to man the machine guns when the cessation of the bombardment gave them the cue to move; the British Army suffered 60,000 casualties on the first day. The battle dragged on until November with minor territorial gains and over 400,000 British casualties. The characteristics of the British attack in July 1916 were a week-long artillery bombardment and massed infantry moving forward from the existing trench line. The catastrophe resulted from the failure of the bombardment to do what it was supposed to do.

On the Eastern Front there was a similar deadlock. The Russian offensive in 1914 had failed and, as in the west, although not as densely manned, there was a long line of dug-in soldiers facing each other. The Allies had agreed that simultaneous offensives would be carried out against the Central Powers in 1916 and the Russians were the first to go. Operationally the object was to attack Austria-Hungary, correctly seen as the weaker, knock it out of the war and bring Romania into the war on the Allied side. Secondarily it was to relieve pressure on Italy and France.

The attack began a month before the Somme attack and ended a month earlier. Russian casualties were similar to the British but Austro-Hungarian losses were at least twice German losses. Territorial gains were much greater – while the Somme battle moved the front line a tiny distance, Brusilov gained much more ground. But, in the end, it was “a piece of tactical genius that had limited strategic results“. It was another second-last hammer-blow. Ironically, Romania did enter the war on the Allied side, but performed so poorly that it took Russian resources away from the main effort. The offensive’s comparative failure after the initial spectacular success probably contributed to Russia’s dropping out of the war the next year rather as a similar disappointment did for Germany in 1918.

But, operationally and tactically it was a stunning success. There are several points of difference between this attack and the British one which deserve notice and give us a perception of “a Russian way in warfare”. The use of deception to create surprise; maximising the effect of artillery fire; the use of forward saps to reduce infantry exposure to fire; the use of specialised advance troops for reconnaissance and fire correction.

(The following quotations come from Dowling’s The Brusilov Offensive.) We will begin, because it sums it up well, this account by an Austrian soldier on the receiving end.

In the dugouts of the first trench of the 82nd [Austrian] I[nfantry] R[egiment], because one still had the echo of the drumming fire in his ear, it was already five seconds after the artillery was no longer directed at the first trench. In the sixth second perhaps a spirited defender cried: to the trenches! In the seventh second he ran into someone in the stairwell, and under a low-hanging balcony that was splintered and torn to pieces a hand grenade skidded after him. And in the eighth second a voice from above called down to the men in the cellar that they should give themselves up.

Quite different from the experience of a German soldier on the Somme who, if he had not been buried or driven mad by the week of shelling, had enough time to get up to the fire step and aim his machine-gun at the heavily-laden infantry struggling through the wire towards him.

While the British had fired a continuous bombardment, Brusilov had a series of short but intense bombardments:

The Russian guns opened up at 4:00 AM along the entire front as ordered, but the display was far from impressive. After three hours of steady, concentrated, but not overwhelming shelling, the Russian guns fell quiet again. The Habsburg forces rushed to man their forward lines, anticipating the attacks their intelligence had been predicting. The Russians, however, remained in their trenches while observers checked the damage done to the Austro-Hungarian positions. Only a few weak reconnaissance patrols emerged to challenge the Habsburg forces; after an hour or so, the shelling resumed-slow, steady, and deadly accurate.

Consequently, the Austrians never knew when the bombardment had really stopped and the infantry assault would begin. On the Somme the Germans correctly assumed that the end of the shelling meant the beginning of the attack but, as our soldier relates, the Austrians only knew it when the Russians were already in their trenches: “Confused by the pauses between barrages, the troops were increasingly hesitant to man the front lines”. Second, Brusilov had his soldiers dig trenches – saps – forward so that they would only have 50 to 100 metres to run: “Brusilov wanted the point of departure for the Russian infantry assaults to be no greater than 100 meters, and he preferred that the distance be 60 meters or less”; the British had the whole distance to cover. Third, light reconnaissance teams went into no man’s land to check the accuracy of each phase of the bombardment and direct the next.

Artillery is most effective in the first few seconds – merely lying down significantly increases the probability of survival. Brusilov also understood that the cessation of fire will be taken by the enemy as a signal that the attack is about to begin. This will be seen again in Soviet artillery use in the Second World War and is the reason for the Soviet/Russian development of MLRS which produce tremendous explosive fire in very quick times (the BM-21 Grad can fire 40 rockets in 20 seconds. To say nothing of this.)

And, fourth, Brusilov used every means of deception available to him to make the enemy think the attacks were coming somewhere else:

overwhelming the Austro-Hungarian forces with information and options… Brusilov mounted a counterintelligence campaign, sending false instructions over the radio and by messenger while specific instructions concerning the offensive were relayed verbally… false artillery batteries…

There does not seem to have been any deception attempts used on the Somme – and, indeed, the enormous piles of artillery shells were in the open for all to see.

In conclusion, the Brusilov Offensive shows

• deception creating operational and tactical surprise;
• maximising artillery effects;
• reducing troop exposure;
• specialised reconnaissance troops.

Further essays will examine these and other factors in Russian war-fighting.

While it remains a hypothetical question as to whether Russia has surpassed the rest of the world in terms of fighting preparedness, it would be hard to name another seven days in recent history when the country has unveiled more potential game changers.

If anything demonstrates once and for all that Russia has dusted off the cobwebs of its Soviet past and moved boldly into the future, it was to be found at the MAKS-2021 Air Show in Moscow, held from July 20-25.

The star attraction of the international aviation salon, which draws thousands of visitors annually, was not seen roaring in the skies overhead, but rather it was tucked away inside of a mocked up pavilion. Resembling a premier of the latest Hollywood action flick, visitors lined up almost half a kilometer to catch a glimpse of the Sukhoi Su-75 ‘CheckMate,’ the new stealth fighter that state-owned United Aircraft Corporation touted as superior to Lockheed Martin’s F-35 joint strike fighter. All things considered, it seemed only fair that Russian President Vladimir Putin got the first preview of the aircraft.

YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNDrTSDmaZY

The rollout of the Su-75 is critical for Moscow on several fronts. First, it simply proves that Russia, if there was any doubt about it before, has broken the mold on technological breakthroughs achieved during the communist period. Up until now, the Russian Air Force has been dependent on two-engine warhorses, like the Su-35 and the MiG-35, formidable in their own right but expensive to produce and maintain.

By comparison, the streamlined and lightweight single engine Su-75 costs just $30 million dollars per machine and will allow Russia to close the aviation gap with NATO, which has been able to make up for its technological inferiority with raw numbers.

To quote an article by The Saker: “Russia’s main weakness when compared to the U.S./NATO is primarily quantitative: while they are much inferior, U.S./NATO aircraft are produced in huge numbers the Russian industrial base and finances cannot match, at least not by producing very advanced but also very expensive aircraft a la Su-35S.

“The RAF needs many cheap but highly effective combat aircraft and the Su-75 might well be “the” dream machine for Russia.”

Some of the main technological features of this highly anticipated aircraft include:

–     Top speed of 2400 km/h (about 1500mph or just under Mach 2);

–     Capable of engaging 6 targets simultaneously;

–     1500 kilometer combat range (932 miles);

–     The fighter is “open architecture,” which means it can be adapted to specific needs;

–     $25-30 million apiece to produce, which will make it attractive on foreign markets.

Aside from giving Russia a fearsome addition to its already airtight air defense system, it will also allow smaller countries to punch far above their weight. Insiders say that prospective state buyers of the state-of-the-art aircraft could include Egypt, Iran, Belarus, Venezuela and Syria, which nearly disintegrated into another Libya as multiple NATO states descended upon the country in a muddled attempt to dislodge Islamic State from the territory. Only with the participation of Russian forces – much to the dismay of the Western military alliance, by the way, which seemed content to let the extremist forces overrun the legitimate Syrian government of President Bashar Assad – was the terrorist cancer ultimately removed with surgical strikes.

Speaking of Syria, just this week the country came under consecutive attack by the Israeli Air Force, which has made a habit over the years of conducting airstrikes inside of the Arab republic with the excuse of acting in self-defense against “Iranian” forces operating inside of the country.

The Israeli Air Force is striking targets in Syria again. SAR Air Defense worked in the Syrian province of Homs@serious_war_eng pic.twitter.com/SJe79T0s4W

— Serious War (@serious_war_eng) July 22, 2021

According to reports by the Russian military, two Israeli F-16s launched four missiles from Lebanon airspace at Syria’s Homs province. All of the missiles were reportedly intercepted and destroyed by the Syrian Army using Russian-made ‘Buk’ air defense systems. Days earlier, Syrian air defenses, responding to yet another incursion, shot down seven of eight Israeli missiles during a July 19 raid. The missiles in that attack were launched over Syria proper, after the Israeli aircraft reportedly penetrated an area on the Jordanian border controlled by U.S. forces.

Coincidentally, just one day after the Israeli incursion into Syrian territory Russia released video of the new S-500 anti-aircraft system that is designed to shoot down fighter aircraft. The trials proved successful, with the missile seen obliterating a high-speed target as it streaked across the sky.

Earlier this month, Chief Commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, Sergei Surovikin, said the new system will be capable of taking down enemy aircraft and even hypersonic weapons in “near-Earth space,” making the S-500 the first generation of such defensive weapons, RT reported.

According to the Ministry of Defense, “after completing all the assessments, there are plans to deliver the first of the S-500 systems to air defense-missile brigades near Moscow.”

Now as if all that were not enough, that same week of muscle-flexing saw the Russian Navy successfully test fire the Zircon missile, which hit a target in the White Sea at a distance of 350 kilometers while traveling at Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound.

The test comes as competition in the Arctic is heating up, especially as climate change appears to be opening up the region to easier access to oil and gas deposits, as well as highly profitable shipping lanes.

In May, the Russian Ministry of Defense responded to increased U.S. and NATO activity in these frigid northern regions with the announcement that it would deploy a squadron of Su-34 fighter-bomber jets to an updated 14,000 sq. m military base located in the Franz Josef Land archipelago.

Whether or not the move will cool NATO’s engines in the region remains to be seen, but the newfound business and strategic potential in the Arctic remains simply too great for Russia to let down its guard.

On Sunday, July 25, the hyperactive week for the Russian military came to a festive close as Vladimir Putin formally kicked off the annual Navy Day parade in Saint Petersburg, where dozens of vessels – including the 186.4 meters (611 ft. 7 in.) cruiser Marshal Ustinov – sailed down the Neva River as huge crowds watched in awe from the banks.

“Today, Russia’s naval fleet has everything it needs for the guaranteed defense of the country, of our national interests,” the Russian leader proclaimed. “We can detect any enemy and, if necessary, carry out an unavoidable strike.”

Indeed, Russia has, in just one week, upped the military ante to such a degree that long-term peace in this part of the world is a very tempting thought. However, Russia’s long and turbulent history has taught it not to place too much hope on such elusive things. As the famous Russian proverb says, ‘Eternal peace lasts only until the next war.’

One of my most reliable guides to finding subjects to write about in these essays is to see what crimes the West is committing. It’s a very good bet that Russia will be accused of them. If the U.S. “accidentally” destroys an MSF hospital in Kunduz, then Russia must be routinely and intentionally bombing hospitals in Syria; if American officials pick the future prime minister of a foreign country, then Russia must be doing it more often and bigger; if Washington condemns reporters on dodgy evidence than Russians must do worse things. Likewise, Western deficiencies are minor at home but huge in Russia. (Admittedly it’s getting harder to say that – especially with the West’s dismal situation with COVID-19 but that doesn’t stop the trying; vide “U.S. takes the top spot on Bloomberg’s COVID Resilience Ranking as vaccine rollout speeds up return to normal.”) And so on: it’s all projection to deflect your attention.

It’s a simple rule that works either way: see what they’re accusing Russia of and it’s a pretty good bet the Western pot is calling the Russian kettle black; note the West’s crimes and misfortunes and expect Russia to be called worse and, if at all possible, twisted to all be Putin’s fault.

Infrastructure is today’s subject and here is Victoria Nuland telling us that

[Russia’s] citizens have grown restive as promised infrastructure spending never appears, and their taxes and the retirement age are going up.

I have written about her pallid effort elsewhere, because it and its companion piece demonstrate the sensational level of ignorance of Washington’s supposed Russian experts and policy-makers. No wonder they get everything wrong and are always surprised: they are only experts in wrongness.

But they’re not alone. Here’s the hoary old of chestnut “duraki i dorogi – fools and roads” hauled out: “After a thousand years, the Russian state still has not learned how to build safe and solid roads. Judge a government by its roads.” The rest of the piece is rather incoherent but the impression is left that Russian roads are still pretty bad. RFE/RL took the occasion of the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station in 2009 to tell us that “Creaking Infrastructure Evident From Siberia To The Streets Of Moscow” and “The accident has highlighted Russia’s faltering infrastructure and the government’s faltering attempts to deal with it.”

Others repeat that Russia hasn’t “reformed”, whatever that it is. (Parenthetically, in thirty years of hearing this, I have never ever heard anybody specify exactly what this “reform” is and precisely what Putin & Co have to do to do it. Other than resign, of course.) Today this “failure to reform” is often, following the “gas station masquerading as county” line, presented as failure to “diversify”. And, here we are in 2019:

While some might blame the vicissitudes of global oil markets, the real culprit is Putin himself, who has done little to diversify the Russian economy, or to tackle the rampant corruption that chokes entrepreneurship, investment and, ultimately, growth.

A variation on the decrepit gas station meme is that Russia is squandering money on weaponry instead of more useful things: Here’s’ the Moscow Times in 2015:

Against this background, Russia’s recent military spending binge is all the more notable, for it suggests that the government, desperate to retain popular support amid declining economic performance, is less interested in investing in the most modern equipment than in showing its support for the rebels in eastern Ukraine, even at the price of further economic hardship.

More: Russia Chooses Guns Over Butter, Is the ‘World’s Deadliest Tank’ Bankrupting Russia? Russia’s Defense Industry Finds Itself in a Tailspin.

Poor old Russia: under Putin’s mismanagement, its infrastructure is “creaking”, its unreformed economy is not “diversifying” and it’s blowing its patrimony on guns. Russia’s pretty doomed. As usual.

Or maybe not. It’s not difficult to see the projection and deflection: “America’s Infrastructure Scores a C-“. “U.S. manufacturing: Why 2020 was the bottom of a long decline.” “The spectacular and expensive failures of the U.S. military.” “How To Waste $100 Billion: Weapons That Didn’t Work Out.” As I said at the start: an enormous percentage of Western “analysis” about Russia is the mechanical projection onto it of the West’s “crimes, follies and misfortunes” in the hope that the audience will look over there and miss what’s right here.

So let’s have a look at Russian infrastructure – the military spending and its results are a subject for another paper but there doesn’t seem to be very much waste and ineffectiveness there: Russia has, in twenty years, stepped into the lead in a number of military areas as even Washington is starting to realise. But this spending has not been at the expense of infrastructure.

Let’s consider roads. An Awara report summarises the state of play as of the beginning of 2019. In twenty years expressways have grown from 365 kms to 2050 kms, the plan is that this number will have increased to 7600 kms by 2024. An impressive increase. Local and secondary roads have also seen great improvement. Russia is an enormous country and there is still much to do but no one can say that Putin & Co are ignoring roads. Even ten years ago things were better than the Western “experts” thought: two Russian men made a video of their drive from Moscow to Vladivostok; here’s the first day’s drive. Certainly not four-lane all the way but good two-lane for almost all of it (and where there isn’t, our drivers pass teams and equipment working on it). Roads need bridges and Russia has been constructing a lot of them too. Here is another Awara report on that subject with lots of illustrations. The Crimea railway/road bridge is the standout, of course, but there are plenty of other new bridges in Putin’s Russia. Here’s a list of the ten “most impressive” bridges – six of them built since 2000. If we are to judge governments by their roads, in the USA “40% of the system is now in poor or mediocre condition“. Projection and deflection. But who has the time to drive across such a huge country? Here’s the Awara report on all of Russia’s new airports. Moscow and St Petersburg of course, but also Kazan, Rostov and Sabetta.

Public transit has seen development too. Moscow’s Metro has seen a completely new line built in the period and construction on another new one has begun. Current rolling stock averages 15 years old and new trains are in process of construction. 63 new stations. The St Petersburg metro is also growing. Kazan has acquired a metro system since the fall of the USSR. (Even Russia’s fantasy metro lines are growing!) So there is certainly no lack of infrastructure renewal and construction in Russian’s underground transit systems (and many of them are remarkably decorated and immaculately maintained). Above ground, here’s a suburban train and one of Moscow’s spiffy new trams and not so spiffy trams in Nizhniy Novgorod.

The venerable Trans-Siberian Railway and the BAM line are both being improved to take more traffic at higher speeds: tonnage on the two is up about 50% since 2012. A century-long planned rail line to Yakutsk has opened making a train trip from London to Yakutia a possibility. The first high-speed rail between Moscow and St Petersburg has been operating for some time and a line is being built between Moscow and Kazan. Other links have been improved so as to be faster.

And that’s just transportation. We could equally mention the 19 COVID purpose-built hospitals, or the quick development of the Sputnik vaccine. Or the constriction of the world’s largest icebreaker, growth in shipbuilding, the world’s only operating floating nuclear power station. New power stations in Crimea – Russia’s “newest Potemkin village” as the usual “experts” call it. Housing construction has been about 80 million square metres a year for some years. Here’s a new housing development in Yekaterinburg. There’s a video series “Made in Russia“: it’s in Russian, but you’ll get the idea, Lots of things are going on. But enough enumeration: there is plenty of improvement and development of Russian infrastructure and Russians can see it. So much so as to make the America “expert’s” opinions proof that they are, after all, only expert at getting it wrong. But, as I said, it’s projection: “Amtrak’s flagship high speed service” averages 113.1 kph; the Sapsan averages 180 kph. (neither anything like China, of course.) Can’t have Russia doing better than the USA can we? Except, of course, for sanctions-proof rocket engines.

For those who are interested, there are lots of videos in which one can get an impression of the state of things. For example Spassk-Dalny, local Moscow store, “Russia’s poorest town“, a series on a small town Fryazino, a village store, a grocery store in Siberia. There’s a series of videos by an American Orthodox priest who’s moved to Russia and a blog by an American living there that talk about the situation they find. The picture is very far from a decaying clapped out and sagging structure in which the government, obsessed with buying guns, lets the whole thing decompose. Even the Moscow Times, when it’s not banging on about the “military spending binge”, “declining economic performance” and “further economic hardship” knows about “Russia’s Massive Infrastructure Overhaul, in 5 Examples“. Projection and deflection again.

Or we can maybe sum the whole thing up by saying that Putin drove a Russian-designed and -made luxury car along a newly-constructed highway.

Now this is not to dismiss the possibility that a good deal of what Russia is doing today is coasting along on Soviet left-overs. Anatoly Karlin argued, with much evidence, something along this line in 2018: Russia’s Technological Backwardness. Perhaps this is the case, but it certainly cannot be said that there has been no infrastructure built. We will learn over time whether Russia is just coasting along or gathering pace, but it certainly does seem that the West is slipping behind in infrastructure maintenance and construction – especially the USA. So, I repeat: when you see some Western piece saying that Russia is deficient in this or that, it’s wise, as a first step, to see it as nothing but a projection of the West’s shortcomings to deflect from facing up to them. These pieces are not really about Russia at all.

Major Russian officials today have warned of military threats posed by the U.S.-led thirty-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization to its western border: its entire western border. And its northern one as well.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced that Russia has redeployed two armies and three Airborne Forces units to its western border as part of what he termed an ongoing readiness inspection.

In one of the sternest warnings issued by a Russian official in the post-Cold War era, Shoigu added, “We’ve taken proper measures in response to the alliance’s military activities which threaten Russia.” Regarding the ground and airborne forces, the defense minister said: “The troops have manifested complete preparedness and the ability to perform their duties to guarantee the country’s military security. At the present time, these units are involved in exercises.”

He also warned that NATO is now concentrating over 40,000 troops and 15,000 items of armaments and military hardware as well as strategic aircraft near the Russian border, stating: “The troops in Europe are moving towards Russian borders. The basic forces are being amassed in the Black Sea area and in the Baltic region.” He also mentioned the preponderance of U.S. military personnel in those deployments, as the Pentagon is reinforcing troops in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

In addition he highlighted the fact that: “The alliance annually holds up to 40 large operational training measures of a clearly anti-Russian bias in Europe. In the spring of this year, the NATO allied forces launched Defender Europe 2021 drills, the largest exercise over the past 30 years.” (Estimates range as high as 37,000 U.S. and NATO troops involved in the several-weeks-long war games from the Baltic to the Black Seas and the Balkans.)

The Russian defense minister pointed out that Russia’s western border wasn’t the only location where the U.S. and NATO were threatening his nation. He also expressed alarm over the U.S. and NATO military build-up on Russia’s northern flank, the Arctic. He said: “The competition between the world’s leading powers for access to the Arctic Ocean’s resource and transport routes is increasing. The US and its NATO allies increase their naval and ground groups in the Arctic, increase the combat training intensity, extend and upgrade the military infrastructure.”

In general Shoigu stated that over the past three years NATO has increased its activity along Russia’s borders.

Also today Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that American warships deployed in the Black Sea off Russia’s coast were a provocation. He was speaking as two U.S. guided-missile destroyers, USS Donald Cook and USS Roosevelt, both equipped to carry 56 Tomahawk cruise missiles and an undisclosed number of Standard Missile-3 anti-ballistic missiles, are to enter the Black Sea tomorrow and the following day. Earlier this year the guided-missile destroyers USS Donald Cook, USS Thomas Hudner and USS Porter and the guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey were in the Black Sea for exercises, often two at a time. (The most, in terms of tonnage, allowed by the 1936 Montreux Convention, though Turkey’s proposed Ankara Canal may eliminate that limit.)

Ryabkov said that American warships sailing thousands of miles from U.S. naval bases “always involves a geopolitics element.”

His comments are worth citing extensively:

“I wouldn’t like to go too much into particulars of various interpretations of what freedom of navigation and freedom of the seas is, especially in this context. I know one thing: American ships have absolutely nothing to do near our coasts, and this is a purely provocative undertaking. It’s provocative in the literal sense of this word: they’re testing our patience and getting on our nerves. This won’t work.”

And he issued this stark admonition in the context of the Western threats to Russia over Ukraine:

“Apparently seeing itself as the queen of the seas […] the U.S. should understand after all that the risks of various incidents are very high. We warn the U.S. that it should steer clear of Crimea and our Black Sea coast. This would be to their own benefit.”

His warning is a timely one as Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is at NATO headquarters today, where U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrives tomorrow and Secretary of State Antony Blinken shortly after him.

Anti-Bellum

The Biden administration appears willing to get us into a fight we’re not ready for.

By Douglas MACGREGOR

Conflict with Russia may be inevitable. Kiev’s strident threats to resolve the crisis in Eastern Ukraine with force of arms, combined with Washington’s refusal to acknowledge that Moscow actually has legitimate national security interests in Eastern Ukraine, makes it so. Equally troubling, the president sees no particular reason why he should explain to the American people why Washington’s readiness to support Kiev’s use of force against Russia makes strategic sense for America. 

In 1937, when the Imperial Japanese government expressed sincere regret for attacking and sinking the U.S.S. Panay, an American gunboat that had been patrolling China’s Yangtze River, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew was not satisfied. He warned the Japanese Foreign Ministry that “Facts mean more than Statements.”

Grew was right. A Biden-Harris guarantee of support for the Ukrainian government’s plan to reconquer its lost territories, including Luhansk, Donetsk, or Crimea, is about as meaningless as the British government’s 1939 guarantee of assistance to the Poles in the event of a German attack on Poland. 

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided not to retaliate against the Japanese. FDR knew there was no public support in the United States for a war with Japan or any other great power. FDR also resisted pressure from the U.S. Navy’s admirals to retaliate because he knew America’s armed forces were not ready for a full-scale war. As for our British friends, they were not ready to weaken their fleet in the Atlantic to join a fight against Japan when the threat of war with Germany was growing. 

It is easy for presidents to moralize and posture in public about matters thousands of miles from America’s borders when it currently costs nothing in terms of American blood. Unfortunately, this condition won’t last. Fighting in Eastern Ukraine will produce heavy casualties on both sides. Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are courageous, intelligent, and ruthless. None of them are “woke.” All are motivated by patriotism, ingrained discipline, and a strong professional military ethos. 

Because the Russian military is larger and better armed, the most likely outcome is a Russian victory. Moscow is then likely to direct its forces to swallow Ukraine’s territory east of the Dnieper River making matters far worse for Kiev. As Angela Merkel observed in 2015, Putin is confident that the battle in Eastern Ukraine is one that he can definitely win. 

If Russian military power prevails, President Biden’s promise of support means U.S. or Allied NATO air or ground forces may intervene to rescue the Ukrainians from defeat. In Europe, U.S. Army and Marine ground forces are too weak to intervene 500 miles east of the Polish border, even if reinforced in a timely manner by armored brigades. None of NATO’s ground forces are ready to cope with Russia’s BM-30 SMERCH Rocket Artillery Formations. Rockets fired from just five of Russia’s BM-30 SMERCH rocket launchers can devastate an area the size of New York City’s Central Park (843 acres, or 3.2 square miles) in minutes.

Thus, if U.S. and allied forces do intervene, they are likely to do so with air assets. How effective Russian integrated air defenses will be is unknown, but it would be ill-advised to underestimate the impact of Russian IADs with phased array radars. Some of the newest air defense systems—like the Russian S-500—are so capable that many U.S. Defense officials privately worry that even warplanes like the F-22, F-35, and the B-2 risk destruction if they attempt to penetrate them. 

Since prevailing winds in Eastern Europe would spread nuclear fallout across Russia and Central Asia all the way to Korea, the Russian use of nuclear weapons is very unlikely—unless of course, U.S. forces use so-called “tactical nuclear weapons,” which would trigger Russian escalation to the strategic nuclear level with ominous consequences for planet Earth. However, virtually all U.S. and allied military installations, from Estonia to Spain, will be within range of Russian Kalibr Cruise Missiles carrying 1,000 pound, high explosive, conventional warheads.

President Biden’s apparent guarantee of U.S. support to Ukraine’s president suggests he’s also drinking deeply from the poison well of failed American statecraft and generalship, a wellspring of uncreative minds with no appreciation for real warfare. Twenty years of desultory battles against weak opponents (insurgents without armies, air forces, and air defenses) has not elevated much warfighting talent to the senior ranks of the armed forces to cope with a radically changed warfighting environment. 

Equally serious is America’s deteriorating societal cohesion, which was on full display during the summer of 2020. When added to the dramatic spike in illegal human and drug trafficking pouring across the southern border, it seems certain that a major war in Eastern Europe would expose not only serious vulnerabilities in the U.S. armed forces, but the fragility of American society to the whole world. 

It is worth remembering that when the Trump administration’s hawkish advisors and secretaries of State and Defense urged military action that threatened conflict with Iran in 2019, President Trump just said, “No.” Today, it appears that strategy sessions in the White House are little more than a façade behind which wish-based, “woke” ideology dominates discussions. The implication is there is no adult present in the Oval Office capable of just saying “No.”

In 1937, FDR was the adult in the Oval Office who understood that American public opinion exacts obedience. He knew the enormous demands war would place on America’s economy and its armed forces during a Depression. For FDR, these realities made military retaliation against Japan impossible. 

Unlike FDR then, now Biden, Harris, and their “woke” advisors are throwing caution to the wind. Whether they realize it or not, they are also playing with the survival of their own administration.

theamericanconservative.com

If we go back to 2017 there was one moment when Donald Trump truly “became President of the United States” according to Fareed Zakaria. On April 7^th, to Mainstream Media delight, Trump greenlit the launch of 59 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles at various targets in Syria. This was a rare act of true blunt aggression by Trump, but what was even more unusual was that there was no follow up strike, there was not step two on a roadmap, there was just nothing. After this strike there was no follow up of any relevance. The only thing American forces in Syria seem to have accomplished is playing chicken with the Russians out of boredom.

Image: This unassuming weapon could be an international game changer.

Perhaps the logic of a single large missile strike was to convince Assad to surrender like the Japanese after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Washington often follows its own logic but it is hard to imagine that any analysts would expect this type of strategy to pay off.

An alternative explanation for the missile launch was put forward by Gordon Duff of Veterans Today, who believed the strike was mostly done to test the capabilities of the Russian S-400 anti-missile/air systems in Syrian possession. Duff wrote the following…

“Veterans Today contacted the Syrian Ministry of Information regarding the bizarre news that 34 Tomahawk cruise missiles had simply vanished. VT had even surmised that some may well have been used against other targets, even going as far as to suggest a possible conspiracy to hit Palmyra to aid the ISIS attack there.

A possible confirmation is simply the number fired, 59. This is what would be required to overwhelm the Russian air defense system based on the number of launchers, both S300 and S400 and other “cruise-capable” systems out there…”

The theory that this was some kind of test seems much more reasonable than Trump expecting to one-punch knockout the Syrians through a show of force, or any other shot-in-the-dark answer. The S-400 systems have created a lot more news over recent years than most if not all other weapons systems. The Russians have a new main battle tank (the T-14 Armata) modernized the AK yet again (with too many versions to mention) and the “near future” COD-style Ratnik gear that is being issued to all their soldiers, but all of these only make the news inside of Russia. Besides military hardware fanboys nothing seems to be even close to the S-400 in terms of perking Washington’s ears. In fact, any nation considering buying these devices risks full blown sanctions from the United States. Interestingly enough a few countries have called Washington’s bluff and purchased the anti-air/missile systems anyways. Unnamed CNBC sources said the reason for the furor to get a hold of the S-400 system is that “No other U.S. system can match the S-400′s ability to protect large swathes of airspace at such long ranges” i.e. the Russians have created an affordable anti NATO intervention box.

Image: The Trump missile strike on Syria was a failed experiment.

So perhaps when Trump tested the waters in Syria the results came back negative, due to this affordable Russian anti-missile/air system. If 34 out of 59 Tomahawk missiles “vanished” that means there is a 57% fail rate due to the quality of the missiles themselves, their operators on the warships that launched them and/or the S-400s on the Syrian mainland knocked them out. That last factor is probably the most important.

In terms of the U.S. military budget, 59 missiles is chump change but perhaps this experiment proved that trying to dominate the air over countries like Iraq and Libya may become much more difficult and risk-heavy than it was 10+ years ago. The “wars of convenience” of the Post Cold War period were successful with extremely low American/NATO casualties due to total air dominance, which thanks to the Russians could be over, at least for the foreseeable future.

If the infamy of the S-400 systems inside the Beltway is deserved, then we should actually thank Trump for experimenting first rather than sending countless numbers of airmen to their deaths over Damascus. Throughout history various militaries have tried to fight their “grandfather’s war” and have paid the price for it. Unlike the French who marched into WWI in bright red pants expecting to be firing in tight rank-and-file formations, someone (possibly Trump) was able to see the potential of these missile systems in a real war and decided to pull back and rethink their strategy before it is too late.

Image: What exactly are limited U.S. forces accomplishing in Syria? Without total air dominance – not that much.

At the end of the day Trump was either an exceptionally peaceful U.S. President because he saw it as good for America, wanted to keep his campaign promises or the Syrian missile experiment proved that for now war is too costly. Regardless of which version of history has more truth, the usage of S-400 systems in nations that are the targets of Washington’s hunger could prove to be a game changer. Weaker nations are willing to risk crushing sanctions to get this means of self-defense, some of whom still have U.S. troops all over their country. The big question is that if air-superiority is now out the window, how will this affect American foreign policy going forward? This will either create a peace due to an unfavorable cost/benefit result for Washington or force the U.S. to fight wars with much higher human cost on their side.

An early example comes from 1992 when the then-Lithuanian Defence Minister called Russia a country “with vague prospects” while at the same time asserting that “in about two years’ time [it] will present a great danger to Europe” (FBIS 22 May 92 p 69). Vague prospects but great danger. Given the vague demographic prospects of his own country, it was a rather ironic assertion given that Lithuania’s future would appear to be a few nursing homes surrounded by forest. But he said it in the days of the full EU/NATO cargo cult. In 2014 U.S. President Obama immortalised this in an interview:

But I do think it’s important to keep perspective. Russia doesn’t make anything. Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking. And so we have to respond with resolve in what are effectively regional challenges that Russia presents.

Wrong on all counts: all he did was display how poorly advised he was.

Russia, Russia ever failing: will fail in 1992, finished in 2001, failed in 2006, failed in 2008, failing in 2010, failed in 2015. Russia’s failing economy, isolation, ancient weapons, instability; a gas station masquerading as a country. Doomed to fail in Syria and losing influence even in its neighbourhood in 2020.

A country with GDP comparable to that of Australia cannot afford to be a superpower, fight a protracted war in Syria, fight in the Ukraine and develop its own stealth fighter and other equipment to match the United States.

In 2016 Stratfor, predicting the world of 2025, thought it unlikely that the Russian Federation will survive in its current form. And neither will Putin. He was only a petty dictator with a Swiss bank account in 2000; a Lt. Col. Kije in 2001; another Brezhnev in 2003; facing his biggest crisis in December 2011, under dire threat and losing his leverage in January 2015; weak and terrified in July 2015; overextending his reach in May 2016; losing his shine in June 2017; losing his grip in October 2018; losing their trust in June 2019; losing control in September 2019; his house of cards was wobbling and he was the symbol of Russia’s humiliation in August 2019. His political demise was near in January 2020; more crises and coronavirus could topple him in April, another biggest crisis in May; losing popular support in June; running out of tricks in August; holed up in isolation, another gravest crisis in October. Soon gone. Russia’s economy won’t last much longer either: smaller than Spain’s or California’s in 2014; in tatters and facing a slow and steady decline in 2015; surprisingly small in 2017; about the size of Belgium plus the Netherlands and smaller than Texas’ in 2018; headed for trouble in 2019. Weak energy prices its Achilles heel in 2020. And on and on: really weak in 2006; its three biggest problems in 2013; Russia is not strong. And Putin is even weaker in 2015. Don’t fear Russia, marginalize it because it’s weak and has a rapidly aging and shrinking population in 2018. Still weak in 2019 and Paul Gregory tells us that’s it’s weak but with nukes in 2020.

Occasionally – very occasionally – someone, more acute than most, wonders How Did A Weak Russia Ever Become A Great Power Again? or why with less money than Canada and fewer people than Nigeria, it “runs the world now”. But the explanations are facile: too much butter spent on guns or a passing situation:

In the emerging post-Cold War-era Russia, no matter how poor it is in many key areas, can be #2 in the world for many years to come. Only when China rises in the next 20 years or a new kind of President emerges in the United States will that change. Until then Vladimir Putin can play his games to his heart’s content.

Of course all of these headscratchers assume that the exchange rate of the ruble is the true measure of Russia’s economy; which is a pretty silly and misleading idea.

* * *

But at the same time Russia is an enormous, dangerous, existential threat functioning with enormous effectiveness in all dimensions.

Far from having the deceptively weak military of 2015, it is developing the world’s most powerful nuclear weapon in 2018 and in future wars the U.S. will have nowhere to hide. The next January we’re told that it and China are building Super-EMP bombs for ‘Blackout Warfare’. Russia has imposed aerial denial zones and fields eye-watering EW capabilities; it has “black hole” submarines, a generational lead in tanks, an unstoppable carrier-killer missile and devastating air defence. It’s working on a new missile threat to the U.S. homeland. General Breedlove, former NATO Supreme Commander who did much to poke the bear, gives us a particularly striking example: he now fears that a war “would leave Europe helpless, cut off from reinforcements, and at the mercy of the Russian Federation.” The British army would be wiped out in an afternoon, NATO would lose quickly in the Baltics – NATO’s totally outmatched. The Russian threat is unlike anything seen since the 1990s. The worry is that Nato has under-reacted.

Putin was the world’s most powerful man and, linking up with China, could soon become more powerful than the U.S. in 2018. He was wielding Russia’s formidable military and powerful economic policies in 2019. And never forget Russia’s major hacking threat and deadly malware. Its interference and influence in Western voting is stupendous: the 2016 U.S. election; Brexit; Canada; France; the European Union; Germany; Catalonia; Netherlands; Sweden; Italy; EU in particular and Europe in general; Mexico: Newsweek gives a helpful list. And, long before Putin: “100 years of Russian electoral interference“. As a covert influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation Russia is the primary threat in the U.S. election.

Putin was a threat to the Rules-Based International Order in February 2007, May 2014, January 2017, February 2018, May 2018, June 2019 and many months before or since.

During two decades as Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin has rarely concealed his contempt for Western-style democracy and the rule of law. The poisoning of Russian political activist Alexey Navalny, amid a widening Russia-supported crackdown on opposition leaders in Belarus, indicates the lengths to which Putin and his cronies will go to silence their enemies and maintain power.

* * *

So, on the one hand Russia is a failing country, with a trivial economy, a greatly over-rated military led by someone who is always facing a catastrophe at home. Nothing to worry about there: presently weak and future uncertain. On the other hand, Russia has a tremendously powerful military, an economy that does whatever its ever-young autocratic permanent ruler wants it to. Its propaganda power is immense and unbeatable, the background determinant of the world’s action. Russophrenia.

And, out of the blue, COVID gives him another opportunity to bamboozle the helpless West and undermine its precious Rules-Based International Order. Somehow. See if you can make sense of this incoherence:

This should worry the West once the pandemic has passed. Not because Russia poses a serious long-term threat to our interests; it doesn’t, although Putin would prefer us to think that his shrivelled realm does. But because Russia is not the only authoritarian state seeking to learn lessons from the current crisis which could be used in a future conflict.

Russia’s Vaccine Stunt which experts worry is dangerous is being supported by attacks on the Oxford vaccine which Russia tried to steal. Russians, Russians everywhere!

Russophrenics are unaffected by reality. Russia’s success? Forget maleficence and try competence. Its military is designed to defend the country, not rule the world: a less expensive and attainable aim. Its economy – thanks to Western sanctions – has made it probably the only autarky in the world. Election interference is a falsehood designed to damage Trump and exculpate Clinton which has been picked up by Washington’s puppies. But don’t bother with mere evidence; As the author of this New Yorker piece explains:

Such externally guided operations exist, but to exaggerate their prevalence and potency ends up eroding the idea of genuine bottom-up protest—in a way that, ironically, is entirely congenial to Putin’s conspiratorial world view.

Or as the Washington Post memorably put it: “Especially clever is planting tales of supposedly far-reaching influence operations that either don’t actually exist or are having little impact.”

Scott Adams understands the process perfectly:

Absence of evidence is evidence.

Pretty crazy isn’t it? And getting crazier. All this would be funny if it were Ruritania ranting at the Duchy of Strackenz. But it isn’t: it’s the country with the most destructive military in the world and a proven record of using it ad libitum that is sinking into this insanity. And that’s not good for any of us.

(Click the image to enlarge)

Marshall Billingslea, May 2020

Billingslea is President Trump’s Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control and will presumably be in charge of Washington’s team in negotiating a new START treaty.

An outstanding example of American arrogance and ignorance, to say nothing of the implication that the only actual negotiation expected will be over how loudly the negotiatees say “Yes Master”. Hardly likely to entice anyone to the table, let alone China.

The Soviet Union went down for many reasons which can be pretty well summed up under the rubric that it had exhausted its potential. Its economy was staggering, nobody believed any more, it had no real allies, it was bogged down in an endless war. Buried in there somewhere was the expense of the arms race with the USA. Billingslea evidently believes that it was that last that was the decisive blow. Believing that, he thinks that the USA can do it again.

A snappy comeback immediately pops into mind: staggering economy, loss of self confidence, allies edging away, endless wars – who’s that sound like?

But there is a bigger problem than his arrogance and that is his ignorance. Washington likes to think that its intelligence on Russia is pretty good but actually it’s pretty bad – and the proof is that it is always surprised by what Moscow does next. Intelligence is supposed to reduce surprises, not increase them.

What Billingslea is ignorant of is the difference between the Russian Federation and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And he probably isn’t alone in this ignorance in Washington: yes they know it’s not communist any more – some of them do anyway – but that’s just the outward difference. The USSR was an exceptionalist state. As the 1977 USSR Constitution said:

the Soviet state, a new type of state, the basic instrument for defending the gains of the revolution and for building socialism and communism. Humanity thereby began the epoch-making turn from capitalist to socialism.

There’s a heavy cost to being an exceptionalist state – everything everywhere is your business, you are obligated to interfere all over the world, in the USSR’s case, any government that called itself socialist was entitled to assistance. The Soviet Union’s military was not just for self-defence, it was for power projection, assistance to allies and it sought full-spectrum dominance. Or, if not dominance in every imaginable sphere of warfare, at least capability. If Washington or NATO did something the USSR and the Warsaw Pact had to respond – no challenge could go unanswered. You can “spend into oblivion” a country with so expansive a self-awarded mission, especially one with a flaccid economy. And Washington tried to do so and, and I agree that the arms race made some contribution to the dissolution of the USSR and its alliance.

But Moscow has learned its lesson. Being the standard-bearer of the “bright future” brought it nothing; propping up socialist governments that deserted the moment the tanks went home brought it nothing. Exceptionalism was a bust for Russia and the Russians. It won’t do it any more. And that implies a much more modest military goal: defence. And defence is always cheaper than offence.

Moscow doesn’t have to match the U.S. military; it just has to checkmate it.

Washington can interfere in Africa as much as it wants, Moscow doesn’t care – and if it should care, it’s demonstrated in Syria how effective a small competent and intelligently directed force can be. Washington can have all the aircraft carriers it wants; Moscow doesn’t care as long as they keep away – and if they don’t keep away, they have plenty of Kinzhals. Washington can build a space force (complete with cammo uniforms) if it wants to; Russia doesn’t have to – it just has to shoot down what attacks it. Checkmate in one defined area of the globe is much easier and much cheaper than “full spectrum dominance”.

Full spectrum dominance is the stated goal of the U.S. military: supremacy everywhere all the time.

The cumulative effect of dominance in the air, land, maritime, and space domains and information environment, which includes cyberspace, that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or prohibitive interference.

In practice it’s unattainable; it’s like looking for the end of the rainbow: every time you get there, it’s moved somewhere else. The countermove will always be cheaper and simpler. The USA will bankrupt itself into oblivion chasing down supremacy over everything everywhere. Take, for example, China’s famous carrier killer missile. Independently manoeuvrable hypersonic powerful warhead; here’s the video. Does it exist? Does it work? Maybe it does, maybe it only works sometimes. Maybe it doesn’t work today but will tomorrow. But it certainly could work. How much would Washington have to spend to give its carrier battle groups some reasonable chance against a weapon that was fired thousands of kilometres away and is coming in at Mach 10? Certainly much less than it would cost China to fire five of them at that one carrier; only needs one hit to sink it or put it out of action. Who’s going to be spent into oblivion here?

Which brings me to the next retort to Billingslea’s silly remark. Before the U.S. spends Russia and China into oblivion, it must first spend to catch up to them. I’ve mentioned the Chinese carrier killer, Russia also has quite a number of hypersonic weapons. Take the Kinzhal, for example. Fired from an aircraft 1500 kilometres away, it will arrive at the target in quite a bit less than 10 minutes. When will its target discover that it’s coming? If it detects it 500 kilometres out (probably pushing the Aegis way past its limits) it will have three or four minutes to react. The Russian Avangard re-entry vehicle has a speed of more than Mach 20 – that’s the distance from Moscow to Washington in well under five minutes. How do you stop that? Remember that Russia actually has these weapons whereas all the U.S. has is a “super-duper missile“. Not forgetting the Burevestnik and Poseidon neither of which the U.S. has, as far as is known, even in its dreams. So, Mr Billingslea, before you get the USA to the point of spending Russia and China into oblivion, you’ve got to spend a lot to catch up to where they already are today and then, when you get to where they are today, even more to get to where they will be then and still more – much more – to block anything they can dream up in all of the numerous “spectrums”. Who’s heading for oblivion now?

In conventional war the U.S. military does not have effective air defences: this should be clear to everyone after the strikes on the Saudi oil site and the U.S. base. U.S. generals are always complaining about the hostile electronic warfare scene in Syria where the Russians reveal only a bit of what they can do. Russia and China have good air defence at every level and excellent EW capabilities. They do because they know that the U.S. military depends on air attack and easy communications. They’re not going to give them these advantages in a real war, Something else for Mr Billingslea to spend a lot of money on just to get to the start state.

The U.S. military have spent too many years bombing people who can’t shoot back, kicking in doors in the middle of the night and patrolling roads hoping there’s no IED today. Not very good practice for a real war or an arms race.

China and Russia, because they have given up exceptionalism, full spectrum dominance and all those other fantasies, only have to counter the U.S. military and only in their home neighbourhoods. That is much cheaper and much easier. What’s really expensive, because unattainable, is chasing after the exceptionalist goal of dominance in everything, everywhere, all the time. That’s a “tried and true” road to oblivion.

They’re just laughing at him in Moscow and Beijing.