What Are Black Hornet Nano Drones and Why is US Sending Them to Ukraine?
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 25.07.2023
American officials have announced another military aid package for Ukraine, this time including a batch of tiny Black Hornet reconnaissance drones. What exactly are Black Hornets? Who makes them? And why are they so expensive? Sputnik explores.
US officials have spent nearly a week touting a new $400 million weapons package for Kiev to assist in NATO’s ongoing proxy war against Russia, with the weapons, taken directly from the Pentagon’s own stocks, including NASAMS, Stinger and Patriot air defense missiles, Stryker armored vehicles, TOW and Javelin anti-tank missiles, howitzer ammo, HIMARS rockets and 28 million rounds of small arms ammunition.
On Monday, anonymous officials revealed to media that the arms package will also include Black Hornet Nanos, a pricy, sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicle about the size of a small bird.
What are Black Hornet Drones Used For?
Black Hornet Nanos are a micro UAV weighing in at just 17-18 grams. They can be carried around by troops and deployed to provide hi-res images and video of the surrounding environment using three separate onboard cameras. The drones resemble a tiny helicopter, are about 100 mm long and 25 mm wide, with their main rotor blade’s diameter measuring in at about 120 mm.
Who Makes Black Hornet Drones?
Black Hornets were developed by Norwegian nano drone helicopter startup Prox Dynamics in the early 2010s, and are now manufactured by FLIR Unmanned Aerial Systems, another Norwegian company, which bought out Prox Dynamics in 2016 for $134 million. FLIR specializes in surveillance and automated systems, equipment for armored vehicles, traffic detection systems, and firefighting cameras.
What is the Black Hornet’s Range and How Fast Do They Fly?
Black Hornets have a flight time of up to 25 minutes, are equipped with a digital data-link effective to ranges up to 1.6 km, and have a top speed of 21 km per hour.
How Much do Black Hornets Cost, and Why are They So Expensive?
Black Hornet drones had an estimated price tag of about $195,000. That figure is based on a 2013 contract by the UK’s Defense Ministry on the purchase of 160 Black Hornet sets (320 micro copters total) for the equivalent of $31 million. For 195k, you get a remote control, handheld touch screen, rechargeable battery pack, and a two-in-a-set pack of mini drones stored in a special portable, wearable bump resistant container.
Where Have Black Hornets Been Deployed?
Over 14,000 Black Hornets have been produced since their debut in 2011, with the drones purchased en masse by the Norwegian and NATO militaries, as well as by Algeria, Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and South Africa for military and police use.
The systems’ first combat deployment was reported in 2013, with the systems used by British troops during NATO’s occupation of Afghanistan. The US began using modified versions of the base drone equipped with night vision and improved navigation in 2015, reporting their deployment with Marine Corps Special Operations units; the US Army followed up with a $140 million contract for its Soldier Borne Sensor (SBS) program.
The US is not the first country to equip Ukraine with Black Hornets. In August 2022, the UK and Norway jointly purchased 850 Black Hornet Nanos, promising to deploy them by November of that year. Earlier this month, the Norwegian Defense Ministry announced that FLIR would supply another 1,000 Black Hornets, plus spare parts, and would train Ukrainian operators and instructors to fly them (a process which reportedly takes as little as 20 minutes).
Are Black Hornets the Smallest Military Drones in the World?
Black Hornets are touted as the smallest military drones in the world. UK Defense Media hinted back in late 2015 that the military was considering experiments using even smaller UAVs weighing as little as 5 grams, but additional information on these plans has yet to materialize.
Last year, a Chinese company known as Huaqing Innovation unveiled the Fengniao (lit. ‘Hummingbird’) drone at a defense expo in Abu Dhabi, with the UAV measuring in at 17 cm and weighing 35 grams, and capable of transmitting snapshots or real-time footage at distances of more than 2 km. It has a reported flight time of about 25 minutes, and is powered by replaceable batteries, rather than a battery pack. The Fengniao can reportedly be used in combination with up to 15 other drones of the same type to form a swarm, and controlled by a smart phone app. Huaqing Innovation has not revealed the drone’s likely price tag.
For the more budget-conscious buyers, there are commercially available helicopter-style drones fitted with cameras (which have already been used en masse in Ukraine), such as the Eachine E110 RC, which features a 720 pm HD camera with 90 degree rotatable lens.
These drones can be yours for as little as $95, meaning, in theory, that one can buy over 1,000 of the mass-market drones for the price of a single Black Hornet. But there are many tradeoffs, including a flight time of just 15 minutes, a 20 km per hour flight speed, and crucially, a transmission distance of just 50-120 meters. Eachines are equipped with automatic hover and stare modes, and user-selectable waypoint controls, and an automatic return feature. The drones are also substantially larger than Black Hornets, with a nose to tail length of about 30 cm and a similar rotor span. However, as the saying goes, in some circumstances quantity has a quality all its own.
What Weapons Can Be Used to Counter Black Hornet Drones?
Black Hornets’ tiny size and quiet operation make them basically impossible to destroy using conventional missile defenses, although small arms (or an aptly thrown bag of groceries) might just be able to do the job at close range.
Alternatively, they can be targeted by specially-designed countermeasures, such as the RLK-MTs Valdai, a special-purpose radar designed by Russian missile maker Almaz-Antey to detect, suppress and neutralize small drones with extremely low radar cross sections at close-in ranges of 2 km or less. The RLK-MTs’s detection systems include an X-band radar module, thermal imagers and cameras, and a radio signal source-finder module. But these systems are heavy. Heavy enough that they have to be mounted on a truck.
Alternatively, there are military-grade anti-UAV systems such as the PARS-S Stepashka, a 9.6 kg Russian anti-drone gun with the ability to hijack enemy drones and force them to land or return to their launch sites. These weapons have an effective range between 500 and 1,500 meters.
And if that doesn’t work, there’s the Stupor rifle, which uses electromagnetic pulses to suppress drones’ control channels and similarly force them down.
The coming Russian – Polish war
By Gilbert Doctorow | July 23, 2023
This evening’s News of the Week program on Russian state television opened with a 30 minute documentary survey of Polish-Russian relations from the end of WWI and during the period of the Russian Civil War, when the government under Marshall Pilsudski wrested substantial territory from Russian control. It also dealt extensively with Poland’s well documented role as aggressor and occupier of Czechoslovak, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarus lands from before the start of WWII and until Hitler overran Poland.
This reportage was all built around Vladimir Putin’s speech to the RF Security Council on Friday which was partly broadcast then. Excerpts from that speech were used to introduce segments of the overall documentary.
Let us recall that on Friday, Putin explained how and why we may expect the formal entry into the war of a Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian joint military force that will officially be presented as defending Ukrainian statehood by occupying the Western Ukraine. However, Putin described this as an occupying force which once installed in Lvov and Western Ukraine would never leave. This would in effect be a repeat of the sell-out of Ukrainian interests to Poles and cession of territory to Poland such as had been perpetrated by their leader Semyon Petlyura in April 1920 and has now been repeated in the secret agreements between presidents Zelensky of Ukraine and Duda of Poland.
However, that was not the only pending Polish aggression announced by Vladimir Putin on Friday. He said that Poland also had designs on Belarus land. The documentary this evening fleshed out that remark and reminded us of what Belarus territory Poland had grabbed by force in the 20th century when it had the opportunity. It also pointed a finger at those Belarus fighters abroad who will be used by Poland to spearhead their move against Minsk from Polish territory, and what armaments they are receiving from the United States and NATO member countries.
With respect to Polish designs on Ukraine, Putin did not tip his hand on what Russia’s response may be. But as regards Belarus, he stated directly on Friday that any act of aggression against Belarus will be considered an attack on Russia and Russia will respond with all the military force at its disposal. He warned Warsaw to consider the consequences of their actions.
Putin’s speech on Friday appeared to be directed at Warsaw. The program this evening was clearly directed at the broad Russian public, to prepare them for the onset of a possible Russian-Polish war in the immediate future.
This point was highlighted by the ongoing visit of Belarus president Lukashenko to Petersburg. There has been pomp and ceremony in this visit. Both presidents today visited Kronstadt, touring its principal church, which is the spiritual home of the Russian Navy. They also visited the about to be opened new museum of the Russian Navy, and its featured exhibit, which is Russia’s first nuclear submarine, the country’s answer to the American Nautilus at the time. And they held talks on the military and political threats their countries face. These talks unexpectedly will continue in the Konstantinovsky Palace outside Petersburg tomorrow. The reason for extensive consultations was clear from remarks that Lukashenko made to the press during his meeting with Putin: namely that Belarus military intelligence has been following very closely the massive build-up of Polish forces including tanks, helicopters and other heavy military equipment close to the Belarus border at several locations.
Tonight’s News of the Week program explained to the Russian public that the Poles’ new aggressive plans are proceeding only because of their confidence that Uncle Sam supports them. And they named the person embodying this link as former Foreign Minister of Poland Radoslaw Sikorsky (2014-15), who is today a Member of the European Parliament and delegate responsible for relations with the United States. A photo of Sikorski’s latest meetings with Pentagon officials and with Joe Biden and his advisers was put on the screen. For those who may wonder about Sikorsky’s political views, it pays to remember that he is the husband of neo-con, Russia-hating journalist Anne Applebaum, who is very well known to American audiences for her regular columns in The Washington Post.
From Russian talk shows of the past several days, it is easy to understand the Kremlin’s reading of the present proxy war in and around Ukraine: Washington sees that the Ukrainian counter-offensive is a complete failure that has cost tens of thousands of lives among the Ukrainian armed forces and has seen the destruction of a large part of the Western equipment delivered to Ukraine over the past months. Instead of suing for peace, Washington seeks to open a ‘second front,’ using Poland for this purpose.
One possible Russian response to any move against Belarus has also been discussed on air: to seize the Suwalki corridor that connects Kaliningrad to Belarus across Polish territory. Taking control of that corridor would have the effect of isolating the Baltic States from Poland and thereby put their security at peril.
The inescapable conclusion from the latest news is that Washington’s incendiary policies and continuing escalation of the conflict cannot secure Russia’s defeat. On the contrary, they may well lead to the total collapse of the NATO alliance once its military value is disproven in a way that cannot be talked away or papered over by the most creative propagandists in DC.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
Russia’s Surgical Strike On The Moldovan-Romanian-Ukrainian Tri-Border Sent Several Messages
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | JULY 24, 2023
Russia carried out a surgical strike early Monday morning against targets in the town of Reni on the Ukrainian side of the Danube River near the tri-border with Moldova and Romania. This video alleges to show one of the explosions at its port while this image purports to be of a grain warehouse that was supposedly destroyed in the aftermath. It can’t be ruled out that military and/or terrorist assets were hidden there, however, since Russia insists that it doesn’t strike purely civilian infrastructure.
In any case, Monday morning’s surgical strike was very important since it sent several messages that Russia’s opponents would do well to heed. For starters, Reni is located on the other side of the Danube from NATO-member Romania, which demonstrated that Russia will hit targets anywhere in Ukraine and can do so with maximum precision. Those military and/or terrorist assets based on the literal border of that bloc but just outside of Article 5’s jurisdiction can no longer take their security for granted.
The second message is that Russia is serious about cracking down on those threats to its security that were previously untouchable due to Kiev exploiting the grain deal to protect some of its aforesaid assets. Russia remained committed to that agreement in spite of that since it sincerely expected that the West would eventually remove those sanctions that impeded its agricultural exports. Since that didn’t happen and Russia therefore declined to extend the deal, Kiev’s selfsame assets are now fair game.
Third, carrying out a surgical strike on Reni proved that Russia had actionable intelligence regarding the Danube’s role in Kiev’s military logistical network, which many observers have suspected for a while. Related targets were previously untouchable for the abovementioned reason, but that’s no longer the case now that the grain deal expired. Accordingly, it can be expected that this won’t be the last surgical strike on the Danube, though it of course can’t be known when the next ones will occur.
The fourth message is that Russia now knows that NATO won’t extend its air defense umbrella over any part of Ukraine after no effort was made to stop its surgical strike in Reni on the Romanian border. The bloc either didn’t see the missiles approaching their air defense zone or detected them but declined to attempt an interception in order for Russia not to think they’re ready to get directly involved in this proxy war. Either way, NATO looks weak and Russia thus feels emboldened to continue striking near its borders.
And finally, this successful strike signifies that no part of Kiev’s military logistical network is safe, which could lead to Moscow’s edge in the NATO-Russian “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” growing even larger if it keeps up the tempo of these attacks against its opponent’s previously untouchable assets. In that event, peace talks might resume earlier than many expect if this accelerates the erosion of Ukraine’s military capabilities and thus forces its patrons to move up their timeline for freezing the conflict.
With these five messages in mind, there’s no doubt that Russia’s surgical strike against military and/or terrorist assets on the Moldovan-Romanian-Ukrainian tri-border is much more important than it might appear at first glance. Not only did Russia hit closer to NATO than ever, but that bloc didn’t even try to stop it, thus suggesting that they’re reluctant to get dragged even deeper into this proxy war. If Poland doesn’t unilaterally intervene by summer’s end, then peace talks might recommence shortly after.
Ukraine is ammunition-starved, and the West simply cannot keep up with its pledges
By Uriel Araujo | July 24, 2023
While Western discussions have focused on sending sophisticated weapons to Kiev, Hal Brands, a Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, argues that what Ukraine needs the most, besides air-defense systems, is artillery ammunition. He describes the current conflict as an artillery-centric one: “if Kiev can’t find enough artillery pieces and ammunition, especially 155mm shells, it will be at a dire firepower deficit along the conflict’s front lines.”
Already on March 29, Earle Mack, former US ambassador to Finland, writing in a piece for The Hill, described the current confrontation as proxy attrition warfare, that is one which seeks military victory by wearing down the enemy. He worried that Ukraine seemed bound to tire out first. Things have not gotten much better for Kiev, so far.
A July 23 New York Times story, by former Marine infantryman Thomas Gibbons-Neff, based on “dozens of visits to the front line” quotes a Ukrainian commander: “we’re trading our people for their people and they have more people and equipment.” According to the story, “Ukraine has made marginal progress in its ability to coordinate directly between its troops closest to Russian forces on the so-called zero line and those assaulting forward.” Moreover, the country’s artillery is in short supply, and “a mixture of munitions sent from different countries” is employed. The thing is that accuracy varies greatly between them and the Ukrainians need to use more ammunition. In addition, according to the same news report, “some of the older shells and rockets sent from abroad are damaging their equipment and injuring soldiers.”
Rather than using the complex military communication equipment, Ukraine’s troops employ “less sophisticated, but easier-to-use programs like smartphone messaging apps, private internet chat rooms.” Most of this system is dependent on Starlink satellite internet, and therefore it takes longer to communicate important military information when the units are assaulting and a Wi-Fi router is absent. In this case, unbelievably, “attacking troops have to reach someone with an internet connection to call for support.”
Regarding ammo, the problem is that US authorities themselves estimate that Moscow is capable of producing “1 million rounds of 152mm artillery ammunition per year.” The US, in contrast, produces merely a seventh of that, according to Hal Brands.
Right now, the US itself needs to purchase conventional artillery ammunition from its South Korean ally. In what Brands describes as a “desperate global scavenger hunt for munitions”, Washington has also been seeking ammo from Japan, as well as “repositioning rounds stored in Israel to Ukraine.”
Europe’s stockpiles are in no better shape. According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, NATO European states armed forces are “hollowed out, plagued by unserviceable equipment and severely depleted ammunition stocks.” Bloomberg’s journalist and military historian Max Hastings writes that, over a year ago, Berlin had committed itself to €100 billion to rebuild its worn out forces. So far, however, only an estimated 1% of that has been spent. The German National Security Strategy, last month, stressed the weakness of Germany’s economy. According to Hastings, the “political will” to strengthen their armed forces is “absent” not only in Germany, but also in other European countries.
As I wrote before, the problem for Europe goes way beyond depleted weapons stockpiles: for it to rearm itself, re-industrialization is badly needed, something which, quite ironically, Washington itself has consistently opposed via its subsidy war against the European bloc. In addition, Europe, with its heavily diffused and fragmented defense, lacks a European Union common defense market and a legal and bureaucratic framework, as Sophia Besch (a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow), and Max Bergmann (former member of the US Policy Planning Staff and Director of the Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) write.
Britain’s industry today faces many difficulties, and the same thing happens with other European nations – manufacturers badly need funding expansion and governments are increasingly growing “tired” of the conflict’s costs.
As for the US, lecturer in History at Yale Michael Brenes argues that America’s own “war machine” is “broken”, with privatizations and several problems. He paints a picture of “shortages in production”, and “interruptions in supply chains”, all of which have compromised Washington’s ability to “deliver weapons to Ukraine.”
To sum it up, the current state of affairs, with a Western deindustrializations crisis, makes it very difficult for the political West to pursue its proxy attrition war. It simply cannot produce all the weapons it is pledging Ukraine. For the West, in fact, it is already a challenge to provide Kiev with enough ammunition.
Discarding Illusions, Ending Wars
By Colonel (ret.) Douglas Macgregor, US Army | The Kennedy Beacon | July 20, 2023
From the moment the war in Ukraine started, Western reporting on the war was a radical repudiation of the truth. Washington and its NATO allies always knew that NATO expansion to Russia’s borders would precipitate an armed conflict with Moscow, but NATO’s ruling globalist class did not care. For them, Russia in 2022 was unchanged from the weak and incapable Russia of the late 1990s. The risk of failure seemed low. Ergo, Russia could be bullied into submission.
Americans and most Europeans did not bother to question or analyze. Widespread strategic ignorance about Russia and Eastern Europe ensured that most Americans and even West Europeans would react quickly and viscerally to the Western media’s distorted images and lies about Russia. At the same time, tolerance for criticism of Washington’s role in fashioning the corrupt and deceitful conduct of the Volodymyr Zelenskyy Regime and its war was disallowed in the press.
Washington’s ruling class was cheered when it dismissed Russian proposals for talks on any grounds that did not recognize NATO’s right to transform Ukraine into a base for U.S. and Allied Military Power aimed at Russia. Ukrainian flags sprouted from the lush grounds of America’s wealthier neighborhoods like flowers in an arboretum and wonders in the form of limitless military assistance, miracle weapons, and cash were promised to President Zelenskyy––promises that strategic reality did not justify.
In 2022 the Biden Administration no longer possessed the military and economic strength to wage high-end conventional warfare that it had in 1991. Waging a major war 10,000 miles from home on the Eurasian continent is impossible without the support of truly powerful Allies on the model of the British Empire during WWII. Washington’s NATO allies are military dependencies, not formidable strategic partners.
Whereas Russian Military Power is still structured for decisive operations launched from Russian soil, U.S. Military power is geared to project limited air, naval, and land power thousands of miles from home to the periphery of Asia and Africa. American military power consists of boutique forces designed for safari in Africa and the Middle East, not decisive combat operations against great continental powers like Russia or China.
Eighteen months later Ukraine is in ruins. Its latest counteroffensive achieved nothing. In the last three weeks, an estimated 26,000 Ukrainian soldiers died in pointless attacks against world-class Russian defenses ‘in depth.’ (Defenses ‘in depth’ mean a security zone of 15 -25 kilometers in front of the main defense, that consists of at least three defense belts twenty or more kilometers deep.)
By comparison, Russian losses were minimal.
Today, more than 100,000 Russian troops are conducting offensive operations along the Lyman-Kupiansk axis. These forces include 900 tanks, 555 artillery systems and 370 multiple rocket launchers. It does not take much imagination to anticipate the breakthrough of these forces to the North where they can encircle Kharkiv.
Once Russian Forces surround the city, they will become an irresistible magnet for Ukraine’s last reserve of 30-40,000 troops. Ukrainian Forces attacking to the East to break through to Kharkov will present the combination of Russian space and terrestrial-based ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets and Precision Strike Aerospace, Artillery, Rocket, and Missile Systems with a target array that only a blind man could miss.
None of these developments should surprise anyone in the West. Building a Ukrainian army on the fly with a hotchpotch of hastily assembled equipment from a multitude of NATO members and an officer corps of many courageous, but inexperienced officers had little chance of success even under the best of circumstances.
Wars are decided in the decades before they begin. In war, the sudden appearance of “Silver Bullet” technology seldom provides more than a temporary advantage and strong personalities in the senior ranks do not compensate for inadequate military organization, training, thinking, and effective equipment. A new, leaked memorandum from sources inside Ukraine illustrates these points:
“Units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are at such terrible states of degradation that soldiers are abandoning their posts, and whilst not mentioned in these documents, a flood of videos have been published from Russian sources claiming Ukrainian service personnel are surrendering at the first opportunity owing to the belief that they are being treated as ‘nothing more than cannon fodder.’”
Events on the ground are beginning to overtake the carefully orchestrated charade in Kiev. There is little that pontificating retired generals and armchair military analysts can do to halt the inevitable. Moscow understands that the war will not end without Russian offensive action. Whatever Washington’s original goals may have been, they are unrealizable. Russian Forces will soon fall on the Ukrainian forces with the momentum and the impact of an avalanche.
In view of these points, before all of Ukraine’s manpower is annihilated, or a “Coalition of the Willing” from Poland and Lithuania marches into Western Ukraine, Washington can arrest Ukraine’s downward spiral into total defeat, and Washington’s own irresponsible drift into a regional war with Russia for which Washington and its allies are not prepared.
Cooler heads can prevail inside the beltway. The fighting can stop, but a ceasefire, and the diplomatic talks that must proceed from a ceasefire, will not occur unless Washington and its Allies acknowledge three critical points:
First, whatever form the Ukrainian State assumes in the aftermath of the conflict, Ukraine must be neutral and non-aligned. NATO membership is out of the question. A neutral Ukraine on the Austrian model can still provide a buffer between Russia and its Western Neighbors.
Second, Washington and its Allies must immediately suspend all military aid to Ukraine. Doubling down on failure by introducing more equipment and technology the Ukrainian Forces cannot quickly absorb and employ is wasteful and self-defeating.
Third, all U.S. and allied personnel, clandestine or in uniform, must withdraw from Ukraine. Insisting on some form of NATO presence as a face-saving measure is pointless. The attempt to extend NATO’s “new globalist world order” to Russia has failed.
The point is straightforward. It is time for Washington to turn its attention inward and address the decades of American societal, economic, and military decay that ensued after 1991. It’s time to reverse the decline in American national prosperity, and power; to avoid unnecessary overseas conflict;and to shun future interventions in the affairs of other nation states and their societies. The threats to our Republic are here, at home, not in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Storm clouds gathering in the Black Sea
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | JULY 21, 2023
The NATO Summit in Vilnius (July 11-12) signalled that there is absolutely no possibility of talks to settle the Ukraine war in a foreseeable future. The war will only intensify, as the US and its allies still hope to inflict a military defeat on Russia although that is clearly beyond their capability.
On July 14, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of US joint chiefs of staff said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is “far from a failure” but the fight ahead will be “long” and “bloody”. Milley has a reputation for speaking what the White House wants to hear, no matter his professional judgment.
Indeed, on July 19, the Biden administration announced additional security assistance of about $1.3 billion for Ukraine. The Pentagon said in a statement that the announcement “represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority capabilities to Ukraine.” That is to say, the US will be using funds in its Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative program, which allows the administration to buy weapons from industry rather than pull from US weapons stocks.
According to the Pentagon, the latest package includes four National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) and munitions; 152 mm artillery rounds; mine clearing equipment; and drones.
Meanwhile, in an ominous development, no sooner than Russia let the UN-brokered grain deal expire on July 17, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky disclosed that he had sent official letters to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan suggesting to continue the grain deal without Russia’s participation.
On the very next day, Kiev followed up with an official letter to the UN’s International Maritime Organization spelling out a new maritime corridor passing through Romania’s territorial waters and exclusive maritime economic zone in the north-western part of the Black Sea.
Evidently, Kiev acted in concert with Romania (a NATO member country where the 101st Airborne Division of the US army is deployed). Presumably, the US and NATO are in the loop while the UN’s imprimatur is being arranged. It goes without saying that the NATO has been working on a new maritime route in the Black Sea for sometime already.
This is a serious development, as it seems a precursor to involving the NATO in some way to challenge Russia’s domain dominance in the Black Sea. Indeed, the NATO’s Vilnius Summit Communiqué (July 11) had forecast that the alliance is gearing up for a vastly enhanced presence in the Black Sea region, which has been historically a Russian preserve, where its has important military bases.
The relevant para in the NATO Communiqué said: “The Black Sea region is of strategic importance for the Alliance. This is further highlighted by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. We underline our continued support to Allied regional efforts aimed at upholding security, safety, stability and freedom of navigation in the Black Sea region including, as appropriate, through the 1936 Montreux Convention. We will further monitor and assess developments in the region and enhance our situational awareness, with a particular focus on the threats to our security and potential opportunities for closer cooperation with our partners in the region, as appropriate.” [Emphasis added.]
Four things need to be noted:
- one, the Ukraine conflict has been singled out as the context; the focus is on Crimea;
- two, “freedom of navigation” means an assertive US naval presence; reference to the 1936 Montreux Convention hinted at the role of Turkey, both as a NATO member country and the custodian of the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits;
- three, the NATO flags its intention to enhance its “situational awareness,” which as a military term involves 4 stages: observation, orientation, decision, and action. Situational awareness has two main elements, namely, one’s own knowledge of the situation and, secondly, one’s knowledge of what others are doing and might do if the situation were to change in certain ways. Simply put, the NATO surveillance of Russian activities in the Black Sea will intensify; and,
- four, the NATO seeks closer cooperation with “our partners in the region” (read Ukraine).
Most certainly, a new maritime route in northwestern and western regions of the Black Sea along Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey (all of whom are NATO member countries) will cut off the Russian garrison in Transnistria (Moldava) and would boost Kiev’s capability to strike at Crimea. The NATO involvement would complicate any future Russian operations to liberate Odessa as well, which is historically a Russian city.
Apart from the huge legacy of culture and history, Odessa is a port head for the industrial products of Russia and Ukraine. The Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline (which the Ukrainian saboteurs blew up recently) is one of the best examples. The 2,471 km pipeline, the longest ammonia pipeline in the world, connected the world’s largest ammonia producer, TogliattiAzot, in Russia’s Samara region with Odessa Port.
In strategic terms, without control over Odessa, NATO cannot have force projection in the Black Sea region or hope to resurrect Ukraine as an anti-Russia outpost. Nor can NATO advance toward the Transcaucasus and the Caspian (bordering Iran) and Central Asia without dominating the Black Sea region.
And for the same reasons, Russia cannot afford to cede the Black Sea region to the NATO, either. Odessa is a vital link in any land bridge along the Black Sea coast connecting the Russian hinterland with its garrison in Transnistria, Moldova (which the US is eyeing as a potential NATO member.) In fact, Crimea’s security will be endangered if hostile forces establish themselves in Odessa. (The attack on the Kerch Bridge in October 2022 was staged from Odessa.)
Clearly, the entire US project on the new maritime route is intended to pre-empt Russia from gaining control of Odessa. It factors in the strong likelihood that with the Ukrainian offensive floundering, Russia may soon launch its counter-offensive in the direction of Odessa.
From the Russian perspective, this becomes an existential moment. The NATO has virtually encircled the Russian Navy in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea (with the induction of Sweden and Finland as members). The freedom of navigation of the Baltic Fleet and the dominance in the Black Sea, therefore, become all the more crucial for Russia to freely access the world market round the year.
Moscow has reacted strongly. On July 19, Russian ministry of defence notified that “all vessels sailing in the waters of the Black Sea to Ukrainian ports will be regarded as potential carriers of military cargo. Accordingly, the countries of such vessels will be considered to be involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kiev regime.”
Russia has further notified that “the north-western and south-eastern parts of the international waters of the Black Sea have been declared temporarily dangerous for navigation.” The latest reports suggest that the Black Sea Fleet of warships are rehearsing the procedure for boarding foreign ships sailing to Ukrainian waters. In effect, Russia is imposing a sea blockade of Ukraine.
In an interview with Izvestia, Russian military expert Vasily Dandykin said he would now expect Russia to stop and inspect all ships sailing to Ukrainian ports. “This practice is normal: There is a war zone there, and in the past two days it has been the scene of missile strikes. We’ll see how this will work in practice and whether there will be anyone willing to send vessels to these waters, because this is very serious.”
The White House has accused Russia of laying mines to block Ukrainian ports. Of course, Washington hopes that the NATO moving in as the guarantor of the grain corridor, replacing Russia, would have resonance in the Global South. The Western propaganda caricatures Russia as creating food scarcity globally. Whereas, the fact of the matter is that the West didn’t keep its part of the bargain reciprocally to allow the export of Russian wheat and fertiliser, as has been acknowledged by the UN and Turkey.
What remains to be seen is whether beyond the raging information war, any NATO country would dare to challenge Russia’s sea blockade. The chances are slim, the daunting deployment of the 101st Airborne Division in next-door Romania notwithstanding.
Lockheed Martin Predicts Strong Profits as Global Instability Rises
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | July 20, 2023
Lockheed Martin believes global instability is driving demand and sees an increase in annual profits. Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine has caused an increase in arms spending among NATO members, boosting weapons makers’ stock prices.
On Tuesday, Lockheed raised its annual profit and sales outlook on strong demand for military equipment. After making the announcement, the company’s stock price increased by one percent. Reuters reports, “[Lockheed] expects full-year net sales to be between $66.25 billion and $66.75 billion, up from its earlier forecast of $65 billion to $66 billion.”
The billions in profit are driven by sales of big-ticket systems like the F-35. However, Lockheed has struggled to produce F-35s that can perform its promised abilities. In May, the government found the planes’ engines have a serious problem dealing with heat. “The F-35’s engine lacks the ability to properly manage the heat generated by the aircraft’s systems,” POGO reported. “That increases the engine’s wear, and auditors now estimate the extra maintenance will add $38 billion to the program’s life-cycle costs.”
The arms maker has additionally experienced a boost in demand for smaller systems, like the Javelin anti-tank missile. The White House has shipped thousands of Javelin systems to Kiev since Joe Biden took office.
As well as predicting future success, Lockheed announced it beat expectations regarding quarterly sales. According to Reuters, “Quarterly net sales rose 8.1% to $16.69 billion, beating expectations of $15.92 billion.”
Last year, Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, described the surge in the market for weapons as the highest since the Cold War. “This is certainly the biggest increase in defense spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” he said.
Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Lockheed’s stock price traded below $340 a share, the price increased to over $450 within a few months. On Thursday, Lockheed’s stock was valued at $456 per sale.
US presses Ukraine for decisive breakthrough despite stubborn Russian defences
By Ahmed Adel | July 20, 2023
US officials are concerned that Ukraine is not making enough progress in its much-heralded counteroffensive, The Washington Post reported on July 18, citing unnamed sources. According to the media outlet, the US is urging Kiev to commit to a decisive breakthrough as Ukrainian commanders are, supposedly, yet to employ the full-scale offensive tactics Western instructors taught them.
A US official explained on condition of anonymity to the newspaper that the West had trained Ukrainian forces in integrated offensive manoeuvres and provided them with mine clearance equipment. The source stressed that it was critical for Kiev’s troops to apply these capabilities to break through Russian defences quickly.
Western officials have reportedly criticised Ukraine’s armed forces for taking an attrition-based approach by firing artillery and missiles at command, transport, and logistics locations at the rear of Russian positions rather than using Western-style “combined arms” that involve large-scale attacks with tanks, armoured vehicles, infantry, artillery, and the air force.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War explained that Ukrainian commanders chose to adopt more discreet advances, involving groups of 15 to 50 soldiers to preserve the military contingent.
“Russian defensive operations in southern Ukraine follow a pattern in which one echelon of Russian forces slows and degrades attacking Ukrainian forces until a second echelon counterattacks from prepared defensive positions to roll back the Ukrainian advances,” the journal wrote.
In this way, Ukrainian forces are being methodically neutralised by the Russian military as they have turned the battlefield into a meatgrinder.
This situation will not improve for Ukraine, especially following the acknowledgment by the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff that Kiev will have a “long,” “difficult,” and “bloody” fight against Russian forces, even if he did go on to sell an illusion that Ukraine can still win the war and that the offensive had not failed.
“It is far from a failure… I think that it’s way too early to make that kind of call,” US General Mark Milley said on July 18. “I think there’s a lot of fighting left to go and I’ll stay with what we said before: This is going to be long. It’s going [to] be hard. It’s going to be bloody.”
Although he sold Kiev, once again, an illusion, he did have to begrudgingly acknowledge that it would take years and billions of dollars for the Ukrainian Air Force to gain parity with their Russian competitors.
“Ten F-16s are $2 billion. So, the Russians have hundreds of fourth and fifth-generation airframes. If they [the Ukrainians] are going to try to match the Russians, one for one or even two to one, you are talking about a large number of aircraft,” Milley said during the press briefing.
“That’s going to take years to train the pilots, years to do the maintenance and sustainment, years to generate that degree of financial support to do that. You’re talking way more billions of dollars than has already been generated,” he added.
In this way, he contradicts himself since he believes Ukraine can still win the war even though this is impossible without air superiority, something he acknowledges will take years and much more resources than the West has already committed to. Ukraine and the European Union do not have the years needed because their economic crises are only deepening, while the former faces significant manpower and labour issues.
To overcome this issue, Milley suggests that instead of supplying Ukraine with expensive aircraft, there should be a focus on air defences and tackling sort of offensive combined arms manoeuvres, i.e., artillery and long- and short-range artillery. But this, again, is problematic since any air defence systems that Ukraine receives from the West are destroyed almost immediately by Russian strikes.
It is recalled that Lieutenant General Douglas Sims, operations director for the Pentagon’s joint staff, said on July 13, “Conditions right now for the employment of the F-16s… they’re probably not ideal.”
“The Russians still possess some air defence capability. They have [air-to-air] capability. The number of F-16s that would be provided may not be perfect for what’s going on right now,” he added.
The three-star general’s comment came the same week as the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, during which a so-called “fighter coalition” of 11 European countries met to discuss providing Kiev with the American-made fighter jet. There, the US-backed European coalition announced its plans to begin training Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16s in August, with Dutch and Danish aviators leading instruction, first in Denmark and later Romania.
Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive was an utter failure. All attempts to break through by the Ukrainian military have failed, resulting in heavy casualties. Even though the situation will not change, in fact, it will only worsen for Ukraine, Washington is still pushing the Kiev regime towards further conflict, which will only lead to the unnecessary death of thousands of more Slavs.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Two-Thirds of Americans Don’t Support Supply of Cluster Munitions to Ukraine – Poll
Sputnik – 20.07.2023
WASHINGTON – Two-thirds of Americans do not support sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, according to a joint poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov.
According to the survey, 42% of respondents oppose such a move, while only 33% support it. In addition, about half of respondents would like the United States to either maintain the same level of assistance to Kiev (29%) or increase it (23%). On the other hand, one-third of respondents said that the level of assistance to Ukraine should be reduced.
The poll found that Americans are more skeptical than in the past about the “good idea” of potential NATO membership for Ukraine; 42% of respondents supported such a prospect, which is 10% less than in April.
The survey was conducted on July 15-18 among a random sample of 1,500 US adults using interview-based methods, with a margin of error not exceeding 3 percentage points.
Earlier in July, Washington unveiled a new military assistance package for Ukraine that includes cluster munitions, claiming they will provide useful battlefield capabilities.
Yet these weapons are banned by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which has been ratified by 123 countries, excluding the US and Ukraine. Russian officials stressed that US actually admitted committing a war crime by supplying Kiev with this type of ammo.
The Jig Is Up
This is how empire ends: not with a bang, but a whimper
By William Schryver – imetatronink – July 13, 2023
The member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — consisting of the teetering Masters of Empire and their tawdry entourage of class-stratified vassals — have just concluded a historic confab in Vilnius, Lithuania, capital of the alpha Baltic chihuahua.
In a shockingly transparent but otherwise rather banal series of events it became unmistakably clear that their grand plans to subject Russia to the “rules-based order” have come to naught.
Among others, the following consequences will ripple in the wake of this reality:
- Russia will achieve a decisive conclusion to the war on terms they dictate.
- NATO is shattered as a military alliance, and coming apart at the seams as a political alliance.
- Germany is on a trajectory of becoming a failed state, and as it goes, so will go the incoherent iron and clay mixture of the so-called European Union.
- The great myth of overwhelming US armaments supremacy has been exposed as little more than a modestly scaled boutique enterprise utterly ill-suited and ill-prepared to prosecute industrial warfare against a peer adversary.
Of course, many will immediately object:
“But the US hasn’t even employed its military in Ukraine! If the US entered this war with its awesome air and naval power, and its “best-in-class” army … well, the Russians would get pounded to dust within a few weeks.”
Well, I hope the thesis is never put to the test, because it will NOT end well.
I am now more convinced than ever that Russia’s specific strengths match and will consistently defeat the American military’s perceived strengths.
Russia admittedly does not wield an expeditionary military, but the concept and constitution of the military it has built renders it effectively unbeatable in its own neighborhood.
A little over a year has now passed since I published an essay entitled The United States Could Not Win and Will Not Fight a War Against Russia. I have recently revisited it. I felt no impulse to change a thing. Indeed, I am struck by how much it is more apropos now than it was a year ago. I believe it constitutes an essential element of understanding in relation to the geopolitical realities at work in our world circa 2023.
Since I wrote the article, there have been many twists and turns in the path of the continuing quasi-proxy war in Ukraine between the rapidly descendant American Empire and an increasingly resurgent Russia. But in early July 2022, it had, in my estimation, become undeniably evident that Russia had effectively wrecked the formidable original proxy army the empire had built, trained, and partially equipped on the foundation of Ukrainian flesh and blood, and a substantial collection of legacy Soviet implements of war.
Sure, there were still scattered potent remnants, but it had been degraded at least 60% by that point in time. Despite a few own-goals along the way, the Russians accomplished this using a force less than half the size of the one the Ukrainians arrayed against them, while inflicting severe equipment losses and at least a 7 to 1 casualty ratio.
So NATO was forced to up the ante. Aspiring to address the obvious Russian advantage in firepower, they shipped several batteries of M-777 155 mm howitzers to Ukraine, followed soon by a few dozen M-142 HIMARS rocket launchers.
M-777 155 mm Howitzer
M-142 HIMARS Rocket Launcher
Both weapon systems enjoyed a smattering of early successes that were ecstatically trumpeted by western media and their devout disciples around the world.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Ukrainian young men were being trained in NATO bases dotting Europe and the western hemisphere. They were instructed in the use of NATO equipment, and to fight the Russians according to NATO battlefield doctrine.
By mid-summer, a significant portion of this second iteration of the Ukrainian army had arrived back in Ukraine, along with hundreds of NATO infantry vehicles, mountains of ammunition — and perhaps most significantly — a substantial contingent of NATO-affiliated “volunteers” from many countries within the western alliance, notably Poland.
I am persuaded this escalatory step convinced the Russians they must immediately begin to more fully prepare themselves for the prospect that NATO would directly intervene in the war.
First they gave priority to learning how best to track down and destroy the limited-mobility M-777 howitzers. And rather than obsess unduly on targeting the elusive HIMARS launcher vehicles, the Russians instead focused on electronically jamming / spoofing the GPS sensors or otherwise shooting down the rockets with their short- and medium-range air defense systems.
(Their success in this respect has been nothing short of a revolution in military affairs. It is unprecedented in the age of aerial warfare. Yes, some missiles still get through, but not many, and typically only in the absence or on the outskirts of Russian ECM and air defense coverage areas.)
The Russians had, throughout early- to mid-2022, made significant offensive advances into the Novorossiya regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Kharkov. But as the summer waned, they began to perceptibly consolidate the entire line of contact. They then quickly brought to pass popular referenda in all but the Kharkov region — thereby formally assimilating the other four into the Russian Federation.
In mid-August 2022, the AFU began to advance against Russian forces on the western borders of the Dnieper River near Kherson. The Russians savaged the initial attacks, but then assumed a tactical-retreat posture. This continued for many weeks as they methodically contracted their lines into a bridgehead on the western part of Kherson city proper, all the while exacting severe losses on the attacking forces.
They would eventually effect an almost-flawless evacuation of twenty thousand troops and virtually all their heavy equipment to the eastern bank of the river, blow up the Antonovsky bridge, and then proceed to methodically destroy the AFU equipment, ammo, and troops on the other side with artillery and airstrikes that continue to this day.
As September rolled around, the Ukrainians (with significant numbers of NATO-affiliated “volunteers” in the vanguard) moved with an even more potent force in the Kharkov region, aiming for the strategic cities of Kupyansk, Izyum, and Kremmenaya.
Again, amid much triumphalism in the western punditsphere, as well as bitter recrimination and hyperbolic dooming from the Russian sixth column and its acolytes, the Russian high command effected what I observed to be an orderly, well-executed fighting retreat to the other side of the Oskol river, where they had prepared fortified lines and installed substantial reinforcements.
At that point, the Ukrainian offensive in the Kharkov region reached its high-water mark, and as autumn turned to winter and then to spring, every attempt to advance further — and there were a great many — was met with a decisive repulse.
Though consistently ignored by those who laud the “lightning advances” of the late-season AFU “counter-offensive” in Kharkov, the attacking Ukrainian forces were horrifically mauled between the first week of September and mid-October — and ever since.
As the Russians contracted their lines to much more defensible positions, they concurrently mobilized and commenced intensive training of several hundred thousand reservists and new volunteers; ramped up armaments production to completely unforeseen levels, and settled in for the next few months to fight a punishing war of attrition against Ukraine and its NATO benefactors — even as they simultaneously prepared to face the credible possibility of direct NATO intervention.
That said, despite a mostly defensive posture throughout late 2022 and early 2023, the Russians did launch an operation against the strategic cities of Soledar and Bakhmut that few foresaw would evolve into the bloodiest battle on European soil since the Second World War. “Surovikin’s Meat Grinder” would eventually consume many tens of thousands of Ukraine’s best remaining troops and equipment.
In the end, the second iteration of the Ukrainian army was degraded even more comprehensively than was the first.
Ukrainian air power has long-since been rendered effectively negligible. Provided with occasional but very sparse deliveries of old Soviet aircraft from the former Warsaw Pact nations, they have continued to manage occasional stand-off missile strikes, but close air support has been nonexistent.
Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in early 2023 served to rapidly deplete the legacy Soviet air defense systems. And all western shipments of would-be replacements have proven to be inferior to Ukraine’s old stocks of S-300 and Buk systems.
Fantastical Ukrainian and western media claims of 90%+ shoot-downs of Russian missiles notwithstanding, the Russians now routinely strike targets throughout Ukraine where and when they will.
Most debilitating of all, persistent ammunition shortages have now become acute. Original and supplemented stocks of Soviet-sized 152 mm artillery are nearly exhausted. And despite the US having coordinated the shipment of millions of NATO 155 mm artillery shells from every nook and cranny in the empire’s vast global network of bases and those of its obedient vassals, the cupboard is now bare.
What was widely (albeit fallaciously) believed to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of equipment and ammunition in the warehouses of the Pentagon and its various less-than-sovereign minions around the globe has been exposed as entirely inadequate to the demands of a real war.
It is an astonishing revelation in the eyes of a great many in the world.
And yet, it shouldn’t be.
In my July 2022 article, I prominently cited US Army Col. (Ret.) Alex Vershinin’s all-important analysis regarding The Return of Industrial Warfare, which had appeared in RUSI a couple weeks previous. If you have not already done so, I highly recommend this short but powerful essay. His entire argument has now been confirmed by events.
Here in mid-July 2023, almost everything that eighteen months ago was only seen through a glass darkly is now undeniably apparent to all with eyes to see:
Far from being massively attrited, as any number of empire-compromised NATO rent-a-generals and politicians have ludicrously argued from the first weeks of the war, the Russians have employed an extremely impressive economy of force to achieve their objectives. To be certain, they have suffered losses in men and equipment that would be far in excess of anything western nations could abide. But the fact remains that the Russians have inflicted the most disproportionate casualty ratio of any major war in the modern era.
My sense of the matter is that the aggregated total of Russian, Donbass militia, and PMC Wagner combat deaths is probably in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand.
On the other side of the line, Ukrainian combat deaths are now almost certainly in the range of 250k to 350k – at least 20k of that total occurring just since the first week of June.
The third iteration of the Ukrainian army, equipped predominantly with imported NATO armor, artillery, and ammunition, has been torn to shreds over the course of the previous six weeks of their last gasp offensive. The AFU very likely has been husbanding its scant remaining stock of NATO equipment and ammunition for one last “charge of the damned”, but otherwise Ukrainian offensive potential is played-out, and there will be no fourth iteration of a Ukrainian army to face the Russians on the field.
Meanwhile, upwards of four-hundred thousand uncommitted Russian reserves are champing at the bit to be turned loose. With Russian military industrial output now in high gear, these troops are better-equipped than any that have yet taken part in this conflict.
The Russian air force has received substantial numbers of new airframes from the production line. Attack helicopters roam the battlefield with near-impunity. Russian supply of strike drones, cruise missiles, and supersonic air-launched missiles appears to meet all its battlefield demands. Its so far modest deployment of hypersonic missiles has shown them to be extremely potent weapons that defy the attempts of antiquated western air defenses to interdict them.
This war is a lost cause for the empire and its hapless allies in Europe and around the world. And that, of course, is the unavoidable conclusion that has finally managed to seep into the otherwise dense skulls of the various participants at the recent NATO summit in Lithuania.
The Masters of Empire now face a no-win scenario. They must abandon their failed Ukraine gambit — and inexorably, over the next few years, yield to maximalist Russian demands regarding the roll-back of NATO to its pre-1997 borders — or else yield to the mad impulse of a futile attempt to subjugate Russia by force of arms in the form of direct US/NATO intervention into this war.
Either way, the decline of the empire will be radically accelerated; NATO will almost immediately cease to function as a credible military/political alliance; the EU will dissolve as a monetary/political “union”; the demise of the global dollar system will rapidly gain momentum.
And though many, if not most, find risible the assertion that these things could possibly come to pass in anything like the near- or medium-term (2 – 5 years), I increasingly expect they will be proven catastrophically mistaken.
A Bonfire of the Vanities
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 17, 2023
Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex.
The gist of it is that ‘we’ (the West) have compelling a narrative, whilst Russia’s is ‘clunky’ – ‘Us winning therefore, is inevitable’.
It is easy to scoff, but nonetheless we can recognise in it a certain substance (even if that substance is an invention). Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.
The obvious flaw to this hubris is that it requires you to be at war with reality. At first, the public are confused, but as the lies proliferate, and lie is layered upon lie, the narrative separates further and further from touched reality, even as mists of dishonesty continue to swathe themselves loosely around it. Public scepticism sets in. Narratives about the ‘why’ of inflation; whether the economy be healthy or not; or why we must go to war with Russia, begin to fray.
Western élites have ‘bet their shirts’ on maximum control of ‘media platforms’, absolute messaging conformity and ruthless repression of protest as their blueprint for a continued hold in power.
Yet, against the odds, the MSM is losing its hold over the U.S. audience. Polls show growing distrust of the U.S. MSM. When Tucker Carlson’s first ‘anti-message’ Twitter show appeared, the noise of tectonic plates grinding against each other was unmissable, as more than 100 million (one in three) Americans listened to iconoclasm.
The weakness to this new ‘liberal’ authoritarianism is that its key narrative myths can get busted. One just has; slowly, people begin to speak reality.
Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground. Even the western ruling classes can see their demand for a successful Ukrainian offensive has flopped. At the end, military facts are more powerful than political waffle: One side is destroyed, its many dead become the tragic ‘agency’ to upending dogma.
“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met … [however] unless Ukraine wins this war, there’s no membership issue to be discussed at all” – Jens Stoltenberg’s statement at Vilnius. Thus, after urging Kiev to throw more (hundreds of thousands) of its men into the jaws of death to justify NATO membership, the latter turns its back on its protégé. It was, after all, an unwinnable war from the beginning.
The hubris, at one level, lay in NATO’s pitting of its alleged ‘superior’ military doctrine and weapons versus that of a deprecated, Soviet-style, hide-bound, Russian military rigidity – and ‘incompetence’.
But military facts on the ground have exposed the western doctrine as hubris – with Ukrainian forces decimated, and its NATO weaponry lying in smoking ruins. It was NATO that insisted on re-enacting the Battle of 73 Easting (from the Iraqi desert, but now translated into Ukraine).
In Iraq, the ‘armoured fist’ punched easily into Iraqi tank formations: It was indeed a thrusting ‘fist’ that knocked the Iraqi opposition ‘for six’. But, as the U.S. commander at that tank battle (Colonel Macgregor), frankly admits, its outcome against a de-motivated opposition largely was fortuitous.
Nonetheless ‘73 Easting’ is a NATO myth, turned into the general doctrine for the Ukrainian forces – a doctrine structured around Iraq’s unique circumstance.
The hubris – in line with the Daily Telegraph video – however, ascends vertically to impose the unitary narrative of a coming western ‘win’ onto the Russian political sphere too. It is an old, old story that Russia is military weak, politically fragile, and prone to fissure. Conor Gallagher has shown with ample quotes that it was exactly the same story in World War 2, reflecting a similar western underestimation of Russia – combined with a gross overestimation of their own capabilities.
The fundamental problem with ‘delusion’ is that the exit from it (if it occurs at all) moves at a much slower pace than events. The mismatch can define future outcomes.
It may be in the Team Biden interest now to oversee an orderly NATO withdrawal from Ukraine – such that it avoids becoming another Kabul debacle.
For that to happen, Team Biden needs Russia to accept a ceasefire. And here lies the (largely overlooked) flaw to that strategy: It simply is not in the Russian interest to ‘freeze’ the situation. Again, the assumption that Putin would ‘jump’ at the western offer of a ceasefire is hubristic thinking: The two adversaries are not frozen in the basic meaning of the term – as in a conflict in which neither side has been able to prevail over the other, and are stuck.
Put simply, whereas Ukraine structurally hovers at the brink of implosion, Russia, by contrast, is fully plenipotent: It has large, fresh forces; it dominates the airspace; and has near domination of the electromagnetic airspace. But the more fundamental objection to a ceasefire is that Moscow wants the present Kiev collective gone, and NATO’s weapons off the battle field.
So, here is the rub: Biden has an election, and so it would suit the Democratic campaign needs to have an ‘orderly wind-down’. The Ukraine war has exposed too many wider American logistic deficiencies. But Russia has its’ interests, too.
Europe is the party most trapped by ‘delusion’ – starting from the point at which they threw themselves unreservedly into the Biden ‘camp’. The Ukraine narrative broke at Vilnius. But the amour propre of certain EU leaders puts them at war with reality. They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.
The EU Political Class have made so many disastrous decisions in deference to U.S. strategy – decisions that go directly against Europeans’ own economic and security interests – that they are very afraid.
If the reaction of some of these leaders seems disproportionate and unrealistic (“There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin”) – it is because this ‘war’ touches on a deeper motivations. It reflects existential fears of an unravelling of the western meta-narrative that will take down both its hegemony, and the western financial structure with it.
The western meta-narrative “from Plato to NATO, is one of superior ideas and practices whose origins lie in ancient Greece, and have since been refined, extended, and transmitted down the ages (through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and other supposedly uniquely western developments), so that we in the west today are the lucky inheritors of a superior cultural DNA”.
This is what the narrators of the Daily Telegraph video probably had at the back of their minds when they insist that ‘Our narrative wins wars’. Their hubris resides in the implicit presumption: that the West somehow always wins – is destined to prevail – because it is the recipient of this privileged genealogy.
Of course, outside of general understanding, it is accepted that notions of ‘a coherent West’ have been invented, repurposed and put to use in different times and places. In her new book, The West, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney takes issue with the ‘master myth’ by pointing out that it was only “with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the seventeenth century, that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge – one being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers”.
With the invention of the West came the invention of Western history – an elevated and exclusive lineage that provided an historical justification for the Western domination. According to the English jurist and philosopher Francis Bacon, there were only three periods of learning and civilization in human history: “one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe”.
The deeper fear of western political leaders therefore – complicit in the knowledge that the ‘Narrative’ is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false – is that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth.
They quake, not just at a ‘Russia empowered’, but rather at the prospect the new multi-polar order led by Putin and Xi that is sweeping the globe will tear down the myth of Western Civilisation.
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Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
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