I ‘m glad to say that I wasn’t taken in
December 2017 https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2017/12/22/it-doesnt-make-any-sense/
April 2019 https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2019/04/18/putin-derangement-syndrome-after-mueller/
April 2021 https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2021/04/07/theyre-not-even-trying-to-make-sense-now/
My goodness! Trump’s done it again. From a mess of bloviation, trash talking, boasting, theatrical productions, deception and deflection, empty gestures and gas, he’s made something. The Israel-Iran war is apparently stopping (for now). And, part of the deal is that we are all supposed to agree that Iran’s nuclear program has been obliterated so we must all stop talking about it. (Interesting to see how that bit of mental gymnastics is handled.)
Some people whose analysis I respect (notably “Armchair Warlord” and “Simplicius”) suspected a theatrical production from the start (did any B2s even fly there?) and I was reminded of other wonderful, spectacular, powerful nothingburgers from Trump.1. For example in 2017 the loud and completely ineffective strike on Syria with a reprise the next year. Inconsistent inconsistencies I called them. The American strike was matched by Tehran’s equally theatrical production today: advance warning, loud bangs, victory claims and not much else. (But from Tehran’s perspective some more Patriot missiles used up: how many are left in the locker do you suppose? 600 to be produced this year they say but they keep needing more and more in Ukraine and there’s a lot to be replaced in Israel.)
So, what have we learned?
Questions for the future
My predictions.
One final observation.
For 500 years, the West has been confident that all the best, the most powerful, the most sophisticated weapons have been in its arsenal. That hasn’t been true for some time and now the world has seen so. I was fascinated that Israel would show these photos of F14s it had destroyed as if it had accomplished something. Manned aircraft? That’s so yesterday.
In what was no doubt intended to strike his listeners dumb with awe, the current NATO GenSek said today:
First “defensive”. Do you think Hispania, Britannia, Gallia, Germania, Aegyptus would agree? But, more to the point, most of the times you hear the Roman Empire mentioned these days, it’s in a sentence like this “the Roman Empire fell because it was doing what (insert name of country, or alliance.) is doing now.”
Not, perhaps, the most felicitous comparison.
But the other is even worse. As to defensive, see above. But has he forgotten a certain decision Napoleon made in 1812 that led to the Russian Army entering Paris two years later and inventing the bistro? And this while he’s ginning up a fear of Russia? Who briefs these guys: Alfred E Newman? (NOTE: You’d think that a guy who had wasted his youth reading Mad magazine would know it was spelled Neuman, wouldn’t you? Thanks to a reader)
My advice to the GenSek is that in his pleading for more money at the end of the month, he add that a Directorate of Scary Historical Analogies will be established that is actually competent.
One of the things I’ve often heard and seen Russians say is that the West has always hated Russia and always will. When it needs Russia it will pretend friendship but when the emergency is over it’s back to the same. Britain is often named as the chief hater. I’ve filed this away as something Russians believe to be true but may be exaggerated; after all, every nation is the innocent hero of its own stories. And as Palmerston (of whom more below) said “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests“. Take Britain for example. At the moment London is the principal actor in the anti-Russia/pro-Ukraine camp; before that Cold War opponent; then ally against Hitler; then variable; then ally against Germany; then opponent in the Great Game; then enemy in the Crimean War; then ally against Napoleon and back and forth we go until the first and reasonably amicable trade contacts in Elizabeth’s time. From one to the other as interests dictated.
But a month ago I read something that made me wonder if maybe the Russians had a point. It was Orlando Figes’ book on the Crimean War and I was astounded to see the same anti-Russia tropes that we see today. (All page numbers from Kindle edition)
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Back then Russia was an autocracy ruled by a man ruling by Divine Right (and the Brits happily allied with the last of the series in 1914); then it became “the world’s first socialist state” (and the Brits happily allied with that in 1941 – earlier if Churchill had got his way) and now it’s Russia again but without a hereditary ruler and an all-encompassing ideology. None of these changes, apparently, have made a bit of difference: still expansionist, all round nasty, contributing nothing good to the world, contumacious, better broken up but very unstable and soon to collapse. Our side, of course, from its morally immaculate position, is ever in defence of the Right. If you disagree, you’re “pro-Russian” and therefore “un-English/American/Canadian/European/everything good”.
We dealing with something here that doesn’t seem to be very fact-based. Maybe the Russians do have a point.
A couple of days ago I read a rather distressing discussion on X about US lend-lease to the USSR. Distressing because of the combination of impenetrable ignorance and unshakeable conviction. One side yelling that US lend-lease made no difference at all and you’re an idiot; the other yelling that it made all the difference and you’re the idiot. Like a bunch of drunks arguing about something in the Star Wars movies.
More ignorance on the Western side than on the Russian? Not sure actually in what I read although we have to agree that Trump just set the American bar pretty high. And it soon degenerated into who Hitler’s best friends were. Each was certain that he had all the facts and the other side had none.
Would the Soviets have beaten the nazis without US (and British and Canadian) aid? I’m inclined to think so although certainly at a greater cost and more years of struggle. Did the aid make a difference? Of course it did; in food and trucks especially. But you can make the argument that the Germans had lost their best chance after the Battle of Moscow in 1941 and after Stalingrad there was no chance. David Glantz has put it quite neatly I think: the Germans won the summers of 1941 and 1942 but the Soviets won the other summers and all the winters. Lend-lease took some time to build up and didn’t really peak until 1943 so less of an effect in those vital years of 1941 and 1942. (Years ago I was surprised to see a Canadian-made Valentine tank in a Berlin battle film. Apparently the Soviets liked the tank because it was well-armoured and easy to maintain, but I can’t think the 2-pounder gun was much use in 1945.)
Who won the war? The Allies did. But you can’t forget the 80/20 division. Who suffered the most? The Soviets undeniably. Where were the most important Axis defeats? On the Eastern Front, no question. (Except for the Battle of Britain.)
Who started the war? Well we all had a responsibility: Stalin spent six years trying to organise an anti-Hitler coalition but failed for various reasons and then became the last man to do a deal with Hitler. (It was infuriating in those X rants and counter-rants when some ignoramus threw out the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement as if that were the final word. The certainty of facts without context.)
Probably the most noticeable thing on the Western side was the incomprehension of the gigantic scale of the fighting on the Eastern Front. I remember remarking when I first read Liddell-Hart’s history 40-50 years ago on the disproportionate space given to the North African fighting versus the Eastern Front. I have some sympathy for him because the Soviets weren’t telling us much then but still. And that disproportion persists in the West although there’s no excuse any more. And so does the view that the Soviets had no skill: on the contrary, once they got going, they beat the Germans strategically and operationally and surprised them almost every time. These people should be required to read at least one book by Glantz before they’re allowed to open their months again. And listen to the lecture by Jonathan House about the three German alibis.
And from the Russian side the tiresome conviction that D-Day only happened because the Western allies saw that the Soviets were winning and felt they’d better jump in. No, D-Day happened as soon as it could. I don’t think the Soviets had any idea of how difficult a seaborne invasion is against a defended coast. And how would they? Have the Russians or Soviets ever done one?
The Europeans secretly supported Hitler. Yes, many did, but they lost that argument in 1939.
Or Allen Dulles fooling around in Switzerland. He did but it was a personal initiative by a guy whose whole career was based on the assumption that the rules were whatever he said they were. Unconditional surrender was primarily Roosevelt’s initiative and he and Churchill agreed to it in January 1943. That, not Dulles’ fantasies, was and remained official policy.
Operation Unthinkable. Well, maybe the name gives you a clue.
But over the years much has been forgotten. The clearest example is that opinion poll record that shows the French in 1945 knowing the Soviets had played the biggest part (80/20) but these days believing the USA had.
As for Trump’s recent assertion, I have a horrible feeling that most of my neighbours, few of whom have ever heard of Canada’s Hundred Days, would agree with him.
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I was there for the 50th. A different time. The Western Allies showed up to do honour. In those far-off days we knew the difference between Stepan Bandera and Lyudmilla Pavlichenko and which side which was on. Today the Canadian Parliament and British VE-Day ceremony organisers have forgotten.
Which, of course, feeds into the conviction many Russians already have that Marshal Zhukov got it right when he (reportedly) said “We have saved Europe from fascism and they will never forgive us for it”. (Did he actually say that? Certainly lots of Russians seem to think he did.)
Remember this from 2023? “Neither NATO nor NATO Allies are party to the conflict.” Or this? “In response, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin emphasized Thursday that U.S. is not at war with Russia”. How about this from 2024? “NATO is not at war with Russia and is not party to the war Russia is waging on Ukraine.” How many times did you hear “NATO is not a party to the conflict”? Hundreds. Why NATO itself officially told us that to say “NATO is at war with Russia in Ukraine” was “Russian disinformation”.
Well, fuhgeddaboudit it! While you were sleeping, disinformation became information and there’s a new Party Line now. And here it is. “Key Takeaways From America’s Secret Military Partnership With Ukraine: An investigation by The New York Times has revealed that America was woven into the war far more than previously known.“
Of course, as Larry Johnson has pointed out, the real purpose of this propaganda shift is the underbussing of the Ukraine disaster.
I can summarize the massive story in one sentence — Ukraine would have destroyed the weak, incompetent Russians if only the Ukrainian generals had followed the guidance from the US military. If you’re looking for a signal that the war in Ukraine is on its last legs, this article is it. This is a ridiculous attempt to burnish the image of the Pentagon and US European Command as strategic and tactical geniuses who could have beaten the Russians if only those damn Ukrainians had followed their advice.
It’s the signal for the sheep to start bleating a new tune (remember the scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four when, right in the middle of Hate Week, the Enemy becomes the Ally? Creepy how much Orwell foresaw, isn’t it?) As “Simplicius” remarks: “Of course, most of it is news only to the NPCs who’ve subsisted on main courses of MSM consumption.”
The real news is not what they say; it’s
that they say it.
I didn’t bother to read the whole thing but I saw enough to recognise a familiar tune. One of the principal themes of my writings in this site is that Washington and the West generally have very poor knowledge of Russia (here I am in 2018). Most of it is based on unexamined assumptions complacently adhered to. And here we see it again. Let’s start a short, victorious war. And we know that it will be short and victorious because Russia’s economy is weak and sanctions will collapse it in a couple of months; Putin’s underbosses will whack him out if we can make them hurt; their weapons are ancient junk; their generals are unimaginative clods; their tactics are inept; their soldiers are poorly trained dregs. We. on the other hand, are the greatest warriors with the best generals and the best weapons ever.
My very favourite example of this ill-informed self-satisfied overconfidence all in one go from a British source from 2023 just before the big offensive:
As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines. Ukrainian armoured formations are beginning to meet Russian forces in battle, and they are going to pulverise Russia’s defensive lines. I am confident for one simple reason: Ukraine will follow the Western ideology of manoeuvre warfare in a combined arms context, while the Russians will follow Soviet doctrine, relying on attrition and numbers. The Russians will find that the armour of Western tanks is far more resilient than flesh and bone, they will die in great numbers, and they will lose.
Whatever else it may be, war is the ultimate reality test and, when the confident assurance fades, step by step, the sunk cost fallacy will drag the West deeper into the bog. Babbling about Russia’s dependence on refrigerators is replaced by they’re out-producing us four-to-one. The years roll by and it’s suddenly time to get out however you can. Just like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And, like those, no lessons will be learned because we won or at least we would have if only the wind hadn’t blown so hard or our allies weren’t so useless or something else beyond our control. (Do they read Clausewitz at West Point? Ever heard of the Correlation of Forces? How about Sun Tzu’s famous quotation about knowledge?)
As the toilers at MiniTrue re-write and the Memory Hole burns, we wait for the next Russian disinformation to suddenly turn into information. Lots of NATO troops in Ukraine? “The Revolution of Dignity” was Made in America? NATO provoked the war? Every chance to settle the problem peacefully was torpedoed by Washington or London? Ukraine is full of Galician nazis actually making the big decisions? Bucha was a fake? So was the maternity hospital?
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(By the way, as most of you already knew, because propaganda is about impressions not details, there’s no penalty for failed predictions and the British guy quoted above is still at it: “Whisper it, but the tide might just be turning against Putin:The American president has lost patience with the Russian leader – so has his own people… within Russia’s top brass, the knives are out for their leader”. Evidence? A mis-interpretation, two false “facts” and the usual inflated casualty figures.)
I’m sitting here with a glass of Scottish mineral water thinking about the differences between the Russian civilisation state and the European civilisation. And one of my thoughts is that while European kings are calling themselves kings of a people, the Russians already have the concept of the Russian Land.
So I think to ask Grok.
First question: “When did the King of England stop being called Rex Anglorum and become Rex Angliae?”. Answer: King John (1200s), with lots of details.
Second question. Ditto for Rex Francorum and Rex Franciae. Answer (again lots of intelligent detail): Louis IX (1200s).
Third question. Русская Земля . Answer 800s.
That’s pretty impressive. I left out the very detailed and intelligent discussions of the questions and the developments over time. Do it yourself.
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My experience with Grok has been that it gives you the mean sea level answer to your question. But I guess that is to be expected, given that it is sifting the Web which is polluted by the MSM. But it’s much faster than Googling it and then figuring out the answer from the various pieces of information. (Let alone the good old days of spending hours in a library. I spent hours and hours in the Public Record Office when it was on Chancery Lane. Gadzooks – let’s see if Grok can do my PhD thesis!)
But as always – and if there is a golden rule to the Net, this is it – you have to have a solid basis of knowledge in your own head to start with to give context and, as well, the ability to sift wheat from chaff.
For those of you who fell asleep in language classes: King of the English, King of England, King of the French, King of France, Russian Land.
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A thought. Thanks to Grok, I write this short burble. In the Google days it would have been an essay. In the archive days, it would have been a thesis.
There’s a longstanding apothegm about war that says that amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics. To this I would add that beginners talk weapons (remember Saint Javelin, M777s, Leopard tanks, F-16s? Seen a lot of game changer weapons come and go haven’t we?)
Logistics is the really hard part of planning: it is the business of making sure that the fighting end of the effort has all the things that it requires where it needs them when it needs them. The end comes when your guy kicks in the door of the enemy’s leader’s office. Everything else: aircraft carriers, tank armies, artillery, air fleets, medical support, planning is about getting him there. Here’s the photo. If the infantryman at the tip of the spear doesn’t have rations and ammunition he’s useless and will soon be out of the game. Getting these (and many other things) to him is extraordinarily difficult and many popular accounts of wars leave this somewhat boring aspect of the war business out of the story.
But war is a combination of many things all of which have to work together. All are necessary but none is sufficient. It is, I believe, the most complicated thing humans do (and, depressingly, history shows that it’s our favourite outdoor sport.) Saying one part is the most important is plain wrong. War without purpose (grand strategy and strategy) is just killing people and smashing things. Soldiers without training are dead men walking. Tactics without logistical support is just Brownian movement. And so on. Everything has to be planned and coordinated and carried out hampered by what Clausewitz called “friction”; against an enemy who’s doing everything to upset and counter you. Once you’ve planned it all out, you have to start all over again on the fly because “No plan survives contact with the enemy“.
What’s going on in Ukraine is an industrial war which is consuming enormous amounts of ammunition and weapons with tremendous destruction and hundreds of thousands of casualties. NATO is used to flying over a target with no air defence and dropping bombs, or small infantry groups who call in air or artillery when somebody shoots at them. And, in the end, NATO loses the war anyway and goes home. Alex Vershinin got it right at the beginning in June 2022 in The Return of Industrial Warfare.
The winner in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers is still based on which side has the strongest industrial base. A country must either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can be rapidly converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer seems to have either.
And, it should be clear it could be much more: Moscow calls it a “special military operation” and therefore Kiev looks like this; if it were a full-scale war Kiev would look like this.
What do we hear from NATO? More money. Must get to 2% of GDP. That’s not enough, 3% is needed. Maybe 5%. Money.
NATO’s money talk and boasting (remember “taking chips from refrigerators” and “Russia’s industry is in tatters“; Russia is running out of weapons?) has been replaced by some recognition of reality. In January the current NATO GenSek told us “When you look what Russia is producing now in three months, it’s what all of NATO is producing from Los Angeles up to Ankara in a full year“. Russia is four-to-one against the whole enemy coalition.
It’s production, not money. You don’t fight wars by firing bundles of dollars at the enemy. One of the primal errors of Western intelligence was measuring Russia’s economy using the ruble to USD exchange rate. (NATO GenSek still believes it though: “Russia is not bigger than the Netherlands and Belgium combined as an economy“.) In 2017 I wrote Exchange Rating Russia Down and Out which I concluded by saying Russia had a “full service economy”. And, whatever the GenSek may imagine, the World Bank tells us that “the Netherlands and Belgium combined” with its “industry in tatters” has become the fourth-largest economy in the world.
There is nothing that money can do to remedy the four-to-one ratio except with a lot of investment in production over a long time. Thanks to offshoring manufacturing, the Western industrial base mostly has to be built from the ground up. Is that even possible? If you think about it, an apprentice machinist on an assembly line fifty years ago was being taught how to do it by a master machinist who had been taught by a previous master and so on back to the middle of the 1700s when industrial production was invented. Each in the series advanced the technique, of course, but it’s still a chain you could trace back, machinist by machinist, for all that time. If that sequence of teacher-learner-teacher is broken, if the teacher has retired or died leaving no apprentices, how long will it take to get it back? Putting a pallet of engraved paper in the floor of an empty building and hoping it will turn into a pallet of artillery rounds is magic thinking. We know this from history. By winter 1914 it was evident that artillery ammunition consumption far exceeded anybody’s expectations and Britain, a manufacturing giant then, started tooling up. Even so it took a year and a half to manufacture the vast number of artillery rounds for the Somme offensive and about a quarter of them did not explode because the fuses weren’t properly made. How far away is the West from meeting the real demand?
Meanwhile, the EU economy isn’t doing so well and, with a stagnant or shrinking economy, just keeping the same amount of money flowing means that the percentage will have to grow. So the planned 3-4-5-whatever percent GDP increase they’re all calling for may turn out to be just enough to maintain the existing inadequate amount. As the Red Queen told Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!“
The ends of “Last Summer’s Ukraine“, NATO and the EU are visible, don’t you think?
Beginners talk weapons;
Amateurs talk tactics;
Professionals talk logistics;
Idiots talk money.
(Miscellaneous comments from pieces dealing with Russia I’ve collected. Most of them anonymous or with pseudonyms. They are chosen to illustrate either rabid hostility to everything Russian or stone-dead ignorance of present reality. I post from time to time when I have enough, spelling mistakes and all.)
European nation need to start enriching Uranium and building nuclear weapons NOW!
Because once we are in a confrontation with russia it will be too late.
Because the moment putin’s spies tell him a European nation is producing fissile materials he will nuke European cities.
This (posted yesterday) from one of my favourite pro-Ukraine accounts on X. What I particularly enjoy is that he has pinned (ie the first thing you see on his X account home page) that Russia has already lost the war in Ukraine and that Putin is doomed and he knows it. This dated three years ago.
Think about what he’s saying above: Europeans have to start building nukes to protect themselves from Russia and, as soon as they do, Russia will nuke them.
https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2017/11/23/nato-a-dangerous-paper-tiger/.
And, now that it’s given up about half of its stuff to be blown up in Ukraine, what kind of tiger would you call it now?
Trump 1.0 was advised by the Blob. I think Trump 2.0 is being advised by people better clued in. After all, JD and Tulsi (Presidents 48 and 49?) have been there and done that.
Clocking off after another mind-blowing day and having a drink or two or three. The Trump Team is inside the enemy’s decision loop. Amazing to watch.
Russia Observer 