One Weird Trick And--Hey Presto--World Hegemony!

Courtesy of Armchair Warlord. Buried in here is a link to a Doug Macgregor presentation from 2015. In it Macgregor is a huge proponent of this One Weird Trick. As Armchair Warlord says, all this is very relevant today because Putin revealed to the African peace delegation the terms of the treaty that Ukraine wanted to accept, but that the US insisted must be rejected. As I understand the treaty, it had in essence two extremely reasonable provisions:

1. Boundaries are frozen as is, meaning: Russia keeps Crimea and the parts of Donbass it occupied at the time (April, 2022);

2. Ukraine guarantees that it won’t join NATO.

No doubt there were other provisions in support of those two key provisions, but that was supposedly the essence of it.

So the US rejected that deal, despite early evidence that sanctions shock and awe weren’t going to work. Why?

It appears from this presentation, below, that the US believed they could win this thing militarily by providing advanced weaponry to Ukraine and inflicting massive casualties on the Russians. They really thought they could win. Woops! The Neocon geniuses—and, in fairness, possibly also our professional military—misunderestimated Russia. And Putin. And now the opposite to what they expected seems to be happening. It’s like one of those bad dreams where you’re being chased down by a T-Rex or something, even after you thought you had the perfect solution to that problem.

According to Armchair Warlord, the key to getting Zelensky to stiff Putin on the treaty was the US promising him the HIMARS wunderwaffen. Uh, oh. And don’t forget—all this advanced weaponry is being operated largely by NATO personnel, who can link it all to the C4ISR system.

Now Blinken is scrambling for a Plan B—keep the war going while the folks at Rand or some other think tank come up with a new war fighting strategy. Could take years. If ever. In the meantime, how about a war with China? Putin would never help China out, would he?

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Putin HATES it!

How NATO tried to use ONE WEIRD TRICK to destroy the Russian Army!

This is very apropos today because Putin revealed details of the April 2022 Russo-Ukrainian peace treaty to the African peace delegation today.

NATO seems to have promised Zelensky not just unlimited support but a war-winning superweapon to get him to denounce the agreement.

This led directly to the provision, starting in late April 2022, of vast quantities of Western precision weapons linked to the full glare of NATO's intelligence and surveillance apparatus.

No other escalation in Western support has remotely approached this one in significance.

This explains why HIMARS - America's most dangerous surface-fired weapon and an enormous leap up the escalation ladder from the previous shoulder-fired missiles - arrived in Ukraine so early and when the AFU still had substantial rocket and missile forces remaining.

This also explains why NATO (read: the US) has been willing to expend so much of its stock of precision-guided MLRS munitions in Ukraine.

This war was to have been the first test of Western next-generation battle doctrine, focused on persistent surveillance and precision strike.

This is a concept that has been mooted for decades now, going back to the original Future Combat Systems concepts of the late 1990s.

The idea is that light Western forces will be able to use "information dominance" and precise long-range fires to win with minimal losses.

Col. Douglas Macgregor (a far higher profile military commentator than myself) has presented precisely such a concept as the "Light Reconnaissance Strike Group," essentially an off-the-shelf FCS Brigade. You can read the whole presentation at:

The Light Reconaissance Strike Group

This thinking was also influential in designing the United Kingdom's new Strike Brigade concept, mounted in wheeled APCs but intended to square off with Russian armored formations by using standoff fires and precision missiles.

See:

Strike Brigades - More than Just a Medium Weight Capability

Nicholas Drummond takes us on a deep dive into how the Strike concept can provide much more than just a medium weight capability.

The provision of exactly these capabilities to Ukraine was intended to enable them to target and destroy Russian forces at an absolutely industrial scale, day after day after day, leading to their military collapse and defeat. A "strategy of corrosion" if you will.

The war planners at NATO thought this would work because, as explained above, this was exactly how they themselves intended to fight in the future - stiff-arming heavier enemies with precise fires from standoff distances.

Unfortunately for them, there are no shortcuts in war.

The Russians quickly adapted to the new threat by dispersing, hiding and digging-in their forces, interdicting launchers and missiles, deploying effective GPS jammers, and revealing that their air defenses can do missile defense.

Video: Pantsir shooting down 12 GMLRS missiles.

The end result of this has been much like the end-result of most life hacks - wasted time, effort and money, with the problem remaining very much unsolved.

NATO is running out of precision weapons and the Russian position in Ukraine is probably better now than it has ever been.