Brief Roundup: Russia, Politics

I’m having a few busy days, so I’ll have to keep this brief.

First, simply as an overview of the geopolitical situation of Russia, I want to recommend a long tweet/essay by Will Schryver. Here’s the Intro:

The Myth of a Russia in Decline

I am very familiar with what John Mearsheimer was writing a decade ago, and I concurred with him on about 90% of his analysis. But he had then, and still has now a pronounced blind spot: his relative ignorance of macroeconomic realities. He believed then that Russia was locked into a steady decline.

Others, such as @DanielLDavis1 , believe Russia will resume its decline in the aftermath of the current war in Ukraine.

Mearsheimer, Davis, and many others continue to adhere to the fantasy that Russia is a "one-dimensional economy". This was false in 2014, and it is even more false now, as the past two years ought to have proven beyond dispute.

…

Alastair Crooke, in another outstanding essay, puts this in a global context in a brief aside. What Crooke is suggesting is that the geopolitical tables have been turned. For the better part of two centuries the goal of the Anglosphere—initially led by the British Empire, now led by the American Zionist Empire—the goal of the Anglosphere has been to take control of the Asian Heartland—Russia, China, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent—and despoil it. The Heartland was supposed to accept this more or less supinely at the hands to the hubristic Anglosphere. To the outrage of the Globalists, Vladimir Putin—through the BRICS movement—has spearheaded the movement of the Heartland and its peripheries to take control of their own affairs and to thwart the Anglosphere. Thus the hatred for Putin:

The Resistance’s Disruptive Military Innovation May Determine the Fate of Israel

Put plainly, we have experienced a Mackinder-style ‘pivot of history’: Russia and China – and Iran – are slowly taking control of the Asian heartland (both institutionally and economically), as the pendulum of the West swings away.

The Sunni world – ineluctably and warily – marches towards the BRICS. Effectively, the Gulf finds itself badly wrong-footed by the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’ that tied them to Israeli Tech (which, in turn, was channelling considerable Wall Street venture ‘free money’ their way). Israel’s ‘suspect genocide’ (ICJ language) in Gaza is slowly driving a stake into the heart of the Gulf ‘business model’.

On a purely military level, there’s an article that’s been attracting a lot of attention. It explains quite lucidly the nature of the Russian Special Military Operation—why it is necessarily (in terms dictated by technology) a war of attrition and how Russia is likely to conduct the war from this point on—these are excerpts, and I’ve eschewed ellipses. Hopefully this brief excerpt will provide an idea of why Russia’s strategy is suited to modern war, and the NATO led Ukraine strategy has been a catastrophic failure.

The Attritional Art of War: Lessons from the Russian War on Ukraine

Alex Vershinin

Wars of attrition are won by economies enabling mass mobilisation of militaries via their industrial sectors. Armies expand rapidly during such a conflict, requiring massive quantities of armoured vehicles, drones, electronic products, and other combat equipment. Because high-end weaponry is very complex to manufacture and consumes vast resources, a high-low mixture of forces and weapons is imperative in order to win.

Achieving mass is difficult for higher-end Western economies. To achieve hyper-efficiency, they shed excess capacity and struggle to rapidly expand, especially since lower-tier industries have been transferred abroad for economic reasons. During war, global supply chains are disrupted and subcomponents can no longer be secured. Added to this conundrum is the lack of a skilled workforce with experience in a particular industry. These skills are acquired over decades, and once an industry is shuttered it takes decades to rebuild.

NATO armies are highly professional, backed by a strong non-commissioned officer (NCO) Corps, with extensive peacetime military education and experience. In attritional war, this method has a downside. The officers and NCOs required to execute this doctrine require extensive training and, above all, experience. In an attritional war characterised by heavy casualties, there simply isn’t time to replace lost NCOs or generate them for new units.

The Soviet Union built its army for large-scale conflict with NATO. It was intended to be able to rapidly expand by calling up massed reserves. Every male in the Soviet Union underwent two years of basic training right out of high school. The constant turnover of enlisted personnel precluded creation of a Western-style NCO corps but generated a massive pool of semi-trained reserves available in times of war. The absence of reliable NCOs created an officer-centric command model, less flexible than NATO’s but more adaptable to the large-scale expansion required by attritional warfare.

Modern War

The modern battlefield is an integrated system of systems which includes various types of electronic warfare (EW), three basic types of air defences, four different types of artillery, countless aircraft types, strike and reconnaissance drones, construction and sapper engineers, traditional infantry, armour formations and, above all, logistics. Artillery has become more dangerous thanks to increased ranges and advanced targeting, stretching the depth of the battlefield.

In practice, this means it is easier to mass fires than forces. Deep manoeuvre, which requires the massing of combat power, is no longer possible because any massed force will be destroyed by indirect fires before it can achieve success in depth. Instead, a ground offensive requires a tight protective bubble to ward off enemy strike systems. This bubble is generated through layering friendly counter-fire, air defence and EW assets. Moving numerous interdependent systems is highly complicated and unlikely to be successful. Shallow attacks along the forward line of troops are most likely to be successful at an acceptable cost ratio; attempts at deep penetration will be exposed to massed fires the moment they exit the protection of the defensive bubble.

An example of this complexity is an attack by a platoon of 30 soldiers. This would require EW systems to jam enemy drones; another EW system to jam enemy communications preventing adjustment of enemy fires; and a third EW system to jam space navigation systems denying use of precision guided munitions. In addition, fires require counterbattery radars to defeat enemy artillery. Further complicating planning is the fact that enemy EW will locate and destroy any friendly radar or EW emitter that is emitting for too long. Engineers will have to clear paths through minefields, while friendly drones provide time-sensitive ISR and fire support if needed. Finally, artillery needs to provide support both on the objective and enemy rear, targeting reserves and suppressing artillery. All these systems need to work as an integrated team just to support 30 men in several vehicles attacking another 30 men or less. A lack of coordination between these assets will result in failed attacks and horrific losses without ever seeing the enemy. As the size of formation conducting operations increases, so do the number and complexity of assets that need to be integrated.

Turning to Palestine:

What they did last year in the West Bank they regularly kill children. They're demolishing the homes of civilians in East Jerusalem and forcing Palestinians— whom they make homeless, them and their children and their grandchildren—then they force them to pay the salaries of the police officers carrying out the eviction and for the cost of the demolition project. So imagine having your home taken, destroyed, because you're not Jewish and then being charged 20 or $30,000 for that. I mean, the idea that we share any kind of values with Israel! Certainly maybe America does now in its modern iteration, if you just look at our Congress—the most immoral and and evil people in our society! BUT—certainly the American people don't see themselves that way.

And the Israel Lobby advertizes their domination of what used to be our constitutional order:

AIPAC @AIPAC

Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics! 40 out of 40 AIPAC-endorsed Democrats have won this year, including:

36 ⁦@EqualityCaucus members

20 ⁦@CAPAC members

14 ⁦@HispanicCaucus members

11 ⁦⁦@USProgressives members

8 ⁦@TheBlackCaucus members

6:54 AM · Mar 20, 2024

Now, to be fair, the reason AIPAC is advertizing their success with the Dems they’ve endorsed is because what little Congressional opposition there is to genocide comes mostly from the Dem side. In fact, AIPAC is aggressively supporting challengers to anti-genocide Dems, so this ad is intended to scare those few Reps who may have qualms about supporting genocide. On the GOPer side AIPAC has fewer concerns. What a country!