MoA Explains The Game Changing Consequences Of Oreshnik; Mearsheimer Disses Trump's Strategy

I can’t recommend highly enough the latest article by Bernard at MoA:

How The New Russian Missiles Are Changing The Game

What makes this article so essential for understanding the new lay of the land in Russia’s relations with the Anglo-Zionists is that it goes into two areas. First of all, it explains how Oreshnik allows Russia to break out of the strategic trap the Anglo-Zionists were setting for Russia:

… the missile with its 36 kinetic war heads is an unexpected response to the U.S. abolition of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty. The U.S. had hoped that the stationing of nuclear missiles in Europe might give it an advantage over Russia. Oreshnik denies that advantage WITHOUT resorting to nuclear force.

Read this next sentence—and then read it again. This is the Anglo-Zionist strategy behind the step by step escalations:

Any U.S. attempt to pressure Russia into a situation where it would either have to concede to the U.S. or go nuclear has been demolished.

This is most visible in Ukraine. Over the two plus years of the war the U.S. has used a 'boiling the frog' strategy against Russia. It increased the temperature by slowly increasing the reach and lethality of the weapons it has provided to Ukraine. In each such step, the delivery of tanks, of Himars, of ATAMACs, of allowing Ukraine to use these on Russian grounds, was declared to be a move across imaginary Russian red lines. Each such step was accompanied by propaganda which claimed that Russia was looking into a nuclear response.

The aim was to push Russia into a situation where it could either make concessions over Ukraine or use nuclear weapons. The U.S. was sure that Russia would refrain from the later because it would put Russia into the position of an international pariah. By going nuclear it would lose support from its allies in China and beyond. It would also risk an all out nuclear war.

The strategy would probably have worked if Russia had not found an asymmetric response against it. It now has non-nuclear weapons, (the Oreshnik will not be the only one), which allow it to apply the equivalent of nuclear strikes without the dirty side effects of actually going nuclear.

Russia's announcement that future Oreshnik deployments will come under the command of its Strategic Forces -which so far have only been nuclear. This is a clear sign that these new weapons are seen as having similar strategic effects.

Please note that Oreshnik is the first in what is envisioned to be a “family” of similar weapons which use the principle of force applied at hypersonic speed. What this means is that Russian scientists have solved some very archane and fundamental problems of physics. If you think back to when Putin first announced Russia’s development of hypersonic missiles, you may recall that there were naysayers who claimed authoritatively that this was impossible. They were wrong. And the Oreshnik and its family of missiles to follow ups the ante considerably. Worse, no Western country is close to where Russia is at this point. That’s the second big point in this must read article:

The kinetic concept of the Oreshnik payload is not a new one. Mass times speed is the amount of destructive energy these can deliver. Being hypersonic and hitting the targets with Mach 10 allows even small penetrators to have strong, explosive like effects.

In the early 1980s president Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative included several attempts to introduce kinetic weapons. 'Rods from God' (and later 'Brilliant Pebbles') were conceptualized as kinetic darts to be launched from satellites to hit Soviet ICBM missiles:

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No[thing] came from it. The envisioned penetrators had to be too large and too heavy to be positioned in space. The huge 'telephone pole' size of the penetrators was need because these would burn up during the hypersonic flight through the atmosphere.

The penetrators Oreshnik is using are much smaller.

Russia seems to have solved some general physical problems of objects flying at hypersonic speed. In March 2018 Russia's president Vladimir Putin announced the introduction of several new weapons designed to penetrate U.S. missile defenses. One of these was the hypersonic glide vehicle now known as Avangard:

The use of new composite materials has made it possible to enable the gliding cruise bloc to make a long-distance guided flight practically in conditions of plasma formation. It flies to its target like a meteorite, like a ball of fire. The temperature on its surface reaches 1,600–2,000 degrees Celsius but the cruise bloc is reliably guided.
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We are well aware that a number of other countries are developing advanced weapons with new physical properties. We have every reason to believe that we are one step ahead there as well – at any rate, in the most essential areas.

I have since been looking for what 'new physical properties' or principles Russian scientist might have discovered to solve the problems of guided hypersonic travel within a plasma envelope. Nothing has come up so far. But the fact that Oreshnik is using relative small guided projectiles at hypersonic speed makes it likely that the new physical properties or principles the Russians discovered have also been applied to this weapon.

Until those basic scientific discoveries become known in the west there will be no chance for it to make weapons that can match the characteristics of Oreshnik and Avanguard.

Oreshnik is, so far, a non nuclear weapon with a limited (5,000 kilometer) range. But there is nothing in principle that hinders Russia from equipping an ICBM missile with similar non-nuclear capabilities. It would make non-nuclear strikes by Russia on U.S. grounds, or more likely on U.S. foreign bases and aircraft carriers, possible.

But those facts, and their consequences, have yet to penetrate the minds of western decision makers.

Even after the Oreshnik strike happened the U.S. continued to pin prick Russia by guiding Ukraine to fire ATAMAC missiles against targets in Russia. Yesterday the Russian Ministry of Defense announced, uncharacteristically, that two such attacks had taken place:

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Militarily these strikes are irrelevant. But they demonstrate that the U.S. is still trying to 'boil the frog' even after [the frog] has escaped from the [pot]. Russia has, according to Putin, several Oreshnik and similar weapons ready to launch.

The potential target for such missiles are obvious:

In other words, by specifically going out of its way to note the continued ATACMS attacks after Russia’s warnings, the Russian MoD appears to be preparing for a drastic response.

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With the above in mind, let’s turn to Professor John Mearsheimer’s assessment of the prospects for Trump’s vaunted peace plan.

Prof. John Mearsheimer: Ignore Putin at Your Peril.

Prof: There's a real possibility--I don't think this is likely, but there is a real possibility that the Ukrainian military will collapse before January 20th.

Judge: Professor Mearsheimer, Donald Trump said at least a dozen times during the campaign that he will end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Is that even conceivable?

Prof: Well, it was not conceivable before he won the election, and since he's won the election--given the steps that he's taken in terms of appointing people and given the comments that some of those people have been making, like Gorka and Waltz, which we just talked about--the chances that he can shut this one down in the way that he described are zero. In fact, I believe that this war is going to be settled on the battlefield. I don't think that Trump matters much at all. In fact, I don't think Trump's going to have much effect on what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening in East Asia, or what's happening in the Ukraine War. Trump likes to think that he is remarkably clever and that he has a huge amount of power and that he can get things done in ways that others can't, but I think he greatly underestimates the extent to which he's in an iron cage here, and how little maneuver room he has. And what little maneuver room he did have he's basically eliminated by turning people like Waltz and Gorka loose.

In other words, in Mearsheimer’s view Trump has shot himself in the foot well before he’s even inaugurated. Most modern presidents, no matter their ambitions, end up being foreign policy presidents. Trump is drastically limiting his chances for success even ahead of inauguration. Can he defy the odds—and the RINOs who control Congress—and become a successful domestic president?