Afternoon: More Ukraine, More Politics ... But Briefly

Briefly? I’ve just sat down and put my fingers to the keyboard, so we’ll see …

The big news today is DU (depleted uranium) rounds to accompany M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Later this year. Will it ever happen? We don’t know. What does “later this year” mean? We don’t know that either. What we do know is that just raising this possibility is an indication of criminal intent. Or insanity. Anyway …

OSINTdefender

@sentdefender

According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Department of Defense is preparing to Approve the Transfer of M829 Armor-Piercing Depleted Uranium Shells to the Ukrainian Military alongside the arrival of M1A1 Abrams MBTs later this year; this comes after the United Kingdom announced in March that it will be providing Ukraine with Depleted Uranium Munitions for their Challenger 2 Tanks.

7:57 AM · Jun 13, 2023

A well known Russian “internet influencer” has this to say about that, but I don’t know whether it’s true or not. It’s plausible:

Victor vicktop55

@vicktop55

The Wall Street Journal today confirmed our information that the whole story with British sub-caliber shells with depleted uranium was organized to legalize the supply of the same shells to the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the United States.

http://t.me/vicktop55/15537

4:48 AM · Jun 13, 2023

Obviously this is a move, or at least an announcement, that is guaranteed to enrage the Russians. They have shown themselves to be quite shrewd in carrying out retaliatory actions and policies, so we’ll have to see how they react. The difficulty with this business, as I see it, is that these DU shells may prove to have limited utility. They will do nothing to defend against artillery, missiles, or mines. Therefore their use on the offensive will be limited. On the defensive, the Russian control of the skies, which is ever tightening, will against limit the use of such munitions—the Russian ‘Alligators’, drones, and fixed wing aircraft will be hunting the Abrams tanks down relentlessly.

Doug Macgregor has weighed in with an article at American Conservative that gets to the theme of home and abroad that I tried to sound this morning:

Democratic Backsliding

The Biden administration is subjugating its opponents at home and overseas.

Macgregor begins with a harrowing picture of what’s been happening with the Ukrainian offensive for the past week plus. It rings true to the carnage we’ve seen in videos online, and I found Macgregor’s presentation lucid, as usual:

Ukraine’s “spring” and now summer offensive operation is stalled, if not defeated. Exact numbers of Ukrainian dead and wounded are not yet available, but … Meanwhile, Russian losses in response to the offensive are reported to be relatively negligible, …

Americans must understand that that there is no more difficult and complex military operation than a deliberate attack to penetrate prepared enemy defenses. ...

Cracking deliberate defenses is so difficult, so time- and resource-consuming, that U.S. ground forces rarely practice it in peacetime, nor do U.S. Army officers study it in detail as Russian officers do. …

What Macgregor just told us is that the US and NATO advisers who planned this offensive for the Ukrainians and who are most likely in overall command of it certainly have not had experience of this type of operation and most likely have done relatively little study of this “most difficult and complex [of] military operation[s].” In other words, they’re winging it to some significant degree.

Predictably, Ukrainian forces were compelled to attack under persistent Russian surveillance through the 15 to 25 kilometer security zone in front of Russia’s main defensive belts. Again and again, Russian forces in the security zone withdrew from forward outposts to prepared defensive positions just ahead of the main defensive belt. Ukrainians moved forward only to be crushed by artillery supported by Russian attack helicopters firing precision rockets from behind Russian lines that have a longer range than U.S. Hellfire missiles.

The Russian ‘Alligator’ attack helicopter is able to loiter as much as 10km from the line of combat and launch missiles from there.

During the attacks, Ukrainian columns stumbled into minefields that canalized their movement into areas where a combination of massive drone and artillery strikes broke up the attacking formations. Meanwhile, Russian forces reportedly employed aerially delivered mines behind advancing Ukrainian forces. As a result, when attacking Ukrainian forces sought to disengage from the death traps and withdraw to their own lines, Russian forces employed loitering munitions to destroy the remaining Ukrainian troops stuck in minefields on all sides.

The question in Moscow: What happens next?

Macgregor’s view of what happens next—a view that he has repeatedly advanced—is that the Russians will launch major offensives of their own. Well, this time may be different. Macgregor’s view is based in major part on his view that NATO and Ukraine may now realize that the chances for a breakthrough against Russian prepared defensive lines is just about zero. They may choose to husband their remaining forces and adopt their own defensive posture, looking for a chance to attrit the Russians. Macgregor’s view is that the Russians need to quickly switch to the offensive to prevent the Ukrainians from settling in on the defensive—thus keeping casualties to a manageable level.

On the other hand, just this morning Scott Ritter expressed reservations about that possibility. Ritter agree that the modern Russian military, and certainly Putin, are averse to taking casualties beyond what is necessary, but believes this may dictate simply continuing the war of attrition using tried and true tactics. Time is on their side. Macgregor may be right about where things stand, but the Russians have repeatedly shown that they have their own views and that their actions cannot be predicted based on Western military doctrine—or on the Soviet past. At some point they will need to go on the offensive, and I assume the conditions that will set that off have been thoroughly studied, but for now we’ll have to wait and see. Follow the link for more discussion—Macgregor expounds his own view of how the coming Russian offensive will play out at some length.

At the end, however, Macgregor turns to the home front—the Zhou regime’s war on America:

Inside the United States, Americans are discovering that for President Biden and his administration, “democracy” really translates into Blue State Overlordship. This regime is buttressed by the destruction of U.S. election integrity and the transformation of the U.S. Justice Department into a Leninist instrument of social hygiene, aimed at suppressing or eliminating legitimate American political opposition. In an ingenious stroke only a Bolshevik could admire, the Biden administration transformed national strategy into a globalist struggle to subjugate opponents at home and overseas.

There is evidence that Americans are coming to their senses. The question remains, Will it be in time?

I’m thrilled to see that Substack has restored color coded links. That alone made my day.