Briefly Noted: NATO Fantasy Soldiers

Another quick follow up. This topic came up again recently in the comments. I had pointed out that American poodle, the UK, while yapping aggressively at the Russians was actually downsizing its military. A commenter questioned that, noting that a UK general had said they were “mobilizing”—aren’t “downsizing” and “mobilizing” somehow contradictory? The answer, of course, is no. You mobilize what you’ve got, even while maybe discarding some of what you’ve got. Thus when NATO supremo Stoltenberg recently claimed that NATO would increase its ready forces by 300k his remarks were widely greeted with scoffing and derision. And rightly so.

Helmholtz Smith discusses this NATO fantasy at Larry Johnson’s blog today, and it’s worth briefly reviewing, just because it tells us what to expect going forward. Note that two of the most rhetorically aggressive countries have decreased their militaries quite drastically. And that the the only one of the UK’s 33 battalions that’s actually full strength is … the 1st Royal Gurkha Rifles.

NATO FANTASY SOLDIERS

“We will increase the number of high readiness forces to well over 300,000” said its General Secretary after the latest NATO talkfest. Larry has already sneered at this preposterous assertion, Bernhard has scoffed at it too, but I want to jump in as well because such fatuity deserves more contempt. …

300K – where are they going to come from? This site – Macrotrends – gives numbers. To no one’s surprise, almost all of the NATO countries have reduced their military over the past twenty years. USA from 1575K-1379K, Poland 264K-196K, Spain 262K-196K, UK (especially belligerent if you pay attention to its utterances) 218K-148K, Netherlands 60K-41K, Turkey 850K-512K, France 411K-304K, Italy 521K-341K and Germany 331K-181K. And so on and so on.

I guess Stoltenberg expects this trend to reverse. But will it?

Let’s look at some relevant data from the USA, NATO’s largest and most important member. About half of the US population reads at grade seven level or below – how’s that going to work with some complicated weapon’s instruction manual? About a third are rated as obese (the rate’s doubled in a quarter century). Not likely bound for the infantry and tank hatches should probably be made bigger. Covid vaccination rules just took out about a Vietnam War’s worth of soldiers. …

How about the other chief cheerleader for more wars with more enemies? Well we were told about a year ago that only one of the British Army’s 33 infantry battalions was fully staffed – and that was the 1st Royal Gurkha Rifles. Gurkhas certainly are outstanding soldiers but they actually come from Nepal. Nothing to suggest that young Brits are very interested in joining up, And the British Army will be cutting further. But diversity numbers are up. I guess Stoltenberg had better not expect too much from the UK either.

And the same elsewhere in NATO. Recruiting crisis in Germany – maybe they can fix it by poaching in other EU countries. France is looking in Africa. Poland has brought back DOSAAF (not, of course, that it would dream of calling it that.)

The reality, of course, is that DC Neocons and Davos Globalists had convinced themselves that the real shock and awe against Russia would be delivered by economic sanctions, with NATO armed and trained Ukro-Nazis serving as a backup. That hasn’t worked, and seems increasingly unlikely to work as the West slides into recession and the non-NATO rest of the world increases its defensive coordination.

And, as Smith points out in conclusion, personnel numbers are only a small part of the story. The real story is far worse for mongers of war:

But the troops question is the least of NATO’s problems – just read The Return of Industrial Warfare. NATO has neither the stockpiles nor the manufacturing capacity to equal what Russia and its allies are doing in Ukraine right now.

As for Russia, Macrotrends says its armed forces numbers have held pretty steady from 1482K to 1454K in twenty years. But mere numbers miss a lot. There has been an enormous improvement in quality, training and equipment in two decades. The Donetsk and Lugansk forces have significant numbers of competent and equipped soldiers. Russia seems to be using a lot of Russian Guard troops as we see in the very visible Chechen, Cossack and Buriat formations. One can wonder, in fact, just how much of the Russian Armed Forces, strictly defined, are involved in the fighting. And they don’t have a supply problem – precision missiles and fire missions keep rolling out with no indication of concern.

Wars are a brutal reality test and NATO’s perception of reality isn’t holding up very well.

It seems that while the West has been indulging in navel gazing wokeness, the Russians have been preparing for the foreseeable future conflicts. Taking NATO and Davos bullying threats seriously. That preparation has taken place on a full spectrum of military and economic measures.

Finally …

Despite this obvious weakness, NATO is talking about expanding to the Pacific. Mike Pompeo is very much on board with that, as we saw the other day. Not content with losing on the Western front, Neocons are seemingly intent on starting a war with China. Yves Smith discusses all this in the context of a bizarre story I saw yesterday—waste of space FBI Director Chris Wray went overseas to preen with the UK MI5 Director and rattle their sidearms at China for stealing our intellectual property.

Think about that. Our elites enriched themselves at the expense of the rest of the country by shipping out manufacturing over to China—pretending that that didn’t mean shipping the know-how along with it. Now, having hollowed out America for their own benefit, they’re outraged that China doesn’t want to kow-tow to us anymore. Worse, when an American president sought to rectify this situation by restoring America’s manufacturing sector our elite rulers—with the notable assistance of the FBI—schemed to dump Trump. They would rather try to muscle China into line with threats of military action than actually MAGA.

Here’s the start of a long post:

FBI Now Joins in China Warmongering in Bizarre Speech in London with MI5 About Taiwan, Intellectual Property Theft

Posted on July 7, 2022 by Yves Smith

The US is continuing to escalate with China, and as with Russia, both the logic and the pretexts are close to unhinged.

Before we proceed to discussing speeches given in London yesterday at MI5 headquarters to “London business leaders” by FBI director Christopher Wray and MI5 chief Ken McCallum, let us point out what ought to be obvious but for some bizarre reason isn’t. The US and its Western allies cannot hope to come out well in a conflict with China on top of its proxy war with Russia. The fact that the US and its allies are losing the conflict in Ukraine against Russia, where Russia has sent in a peacetime army which it is able to regularly rotate out for R&R, is deploying massive artillery barrages, day after day, with no apparent concern about supplies, has used long-range missiles to great effect, while the West is scraping the NATO supply cupboards dry and Ukraine is suffering massive troop losses in Donbass, ought to be focusing a few minds. But no! Because we are so convinced of our superiority, despite massive evidence otherwise (starting with not having won a war in decades), we’re now gonna go show China who’s boss too!

So what was the excuse for this first ever joint FBI-MI5 briefing? That China plays dirty and steals Western intellectual property! And we are supposed to believe this is news? Back when US businesses eagerly started setting up shop in China in the early 2000s after China entered the WTO, your humble blogger could not make sense of it. This was a Communist country, meaning there was no reason to thing they’d respect property rights. The Chinese have not done anything as gauche as expropriate factories. But it’s been known from the get-go that Chinese partners have insisted on technology transfer, which often means the foreign entrant soon finds its co-venturer setting up a directly competing operation.

And why is this a surprise? If you’re going to deindustrialize, um, offshore, the knowledge goes with the operations.

As for China purloining intellectual property, that’s hardly news either. Intellectual property theft was one of reasons Trump gave for imposing tariffs against China.

The Neo-Gnostics of the West are living in a fantasy world. It’s a world that they mistake for reality, but the wakeup call will come in due course.