Category Archives: Military Affairs

Military Confrontation

Combined China-Russia Military Might Is Not Enough To Match U.S.: RAND Corp.

This is the basis of all of American hubris. The Covid BioWar, the financial sanctions against sovereign countries, the invasions of other countries, the kidnapping of foreign nationals, the stealing of other countries’ resources and treasuries, the posting of over 1,000 bases on foreign soil, you name it. This is the “science” that illuminates the octogenarian and nonagenarian sages of the Empire of Cancer.

Read what Rand Corp. peddles to the minds of policy makers in the US. It is like seeing it and not believing it. Really? They write that the US can overpower the combined military might of the Russian and the Chinese nations? – but wait a minute the US could not defeat the little 5 million Syria, never mind.

The RAND Corporation released a report claiming that Combined Russian and Chinese military power will approach, but not exceed, the US.

The report’s authors describe the growing relationship between Beijing and Moscow as one of pragmatism and based on “balancing” against “U.S. hard and soft power.” Additionally, China and Russia share a desire to counter a perceived U.S. ideology “of militarism, interventionism and the forcible imposition of U.S. values on other countries.”

The relationship between China and Russia has gradually developed and grown closer over two decades, according to the report. When Bejing and Moscow launched their first joint “field exercise” in 2003, it signaled that the two countries had moved from a relationship based on “calculation” to one of “cooperation.”

Between 2012-2017 China and Russia strengthened their relationship from “cooperation” to “collaboration” in large part due to “Western sanctions.” In particular, following sanctions placed on Russia in 2014 due to the annexation of Crimea, Moscow pursued “much closer ties” to Beijing.

Authors of the report suggest that one way to dial back the relationship between the U.S.’ two chief global competitors would be to reduce Western sanctions on the two nations. If done, “Russia might seek stronger relations with Europe and the United States,” which could cause the Sino-Russian relationship to “weaken or decline.”

Rand then concludes that these changes will likely not happen, and finally, the authors of the report state that, in particular, the military relationship between Moscow and Beijing will continue to develop, presenting an ever-increasing challenge to the U.S. on the global stage.

“With little, outside a significant policy shift, that the U.S. government can do to disrupt China and Russia’s growing relationship, the report’s authors suggested that the U.S. military prepare for greater cooperation between Beijing and Moscow.

“The U.S. military can prepare for the results of greater Sino-Russian cooperation, including by expecting further diffusion of Chinese and Russian military equipment, additional joint planning and exercises, potential joint basing, and eventually the possibility of joint military operations,” the report concludes.”

Microsoft, the Sinister Gangster Goon

By Dr. Mathew Maavak, a Malaysian expert on risk foresight and governance.

We may have had a more equitable and decentralized international system today if not for US intervention on behalf of Microsoft. Big Tech thereafter underwent a series of sinister functions at the expense of fundamental freedoms.

It was the 1980s. A resurgent Japan was colonizing one civilian market after another through sheer diligence and ingenuity. In terms of quantity and quality, Japanese manufacturers were bankrupting a variety of industrial strongholds, ranging from Swiss watchmakers to US auto giants. Whether it was school stationery, household appliances or nylon saris, quality with affordability could only be ‘Made in Japan’. America was in particularly deep trouble.

Land of the sunset industries

The United States was unable to stem the tsunami of Japanese exports. Trade deficits scaled new heights with each passing quarter and, for a time, Japan seemed poised to overtake the US as the preeminent economic superpower. It hardly mattered that the yen was not challenging the dollar as the global reserve currency.

The Reagan administration was in a quandary; its laissez-faire policies were benefiting Japanese firms at the expense of US corporations. A volte face was inevitable, beginning with a protectionist quota imposed on Japanese cars in 1981, followed by a steep 45% tariff on Japanese motorcycles two years later.

While the average American consumer wanted Japanese bang for the US buck, the automobile heartland of Detroit would have none of it. It even hosted a memorable “charity” saturnalia where participants could pummel a Toyota with a sledgehammer! (Yes, virtue-signaling had pseudo-conservative roots. And that sledgehammer today would be made in China!)

The only big markets Japan could not penetrate were the media (namely, the production of trashy Hollywood flicks) and the military-industrial complex (from which post-WWII Japan was barred from participating).

Bitter trade negotiations between Washington, DC and Tokyo yielded protracted concessions. Status quo nonetheless seemed to prevail until a new Japanese innovation threatened to derail US hegemony forever.

The rise of TRON

Tokyo had unknowingly crossed Washington’s red line when it unveiled The Real-time Operating System Nucleus (TRON) in 1984. Developed by Professor Ken Sakamura and his team at the University of Tokyo, TRON was hailed as the world’s first operating systemthat was based on “an ideal computer architecture and network, to provide for all of society’s needs.” It would have also rendered much disparate software redundant (mainly American) through a unified, open architecture that promised a “total computer environment.”

This was the kind of hydra which Washington elites regarded as their sole right and manifest destiny. The Japanese operating system would not only interlink a constellation of networked devices worldwide one day, but it would also democratize a new electronic medium for communications. The future of global domination – or alternately the Stygian mess we are in today – hinged on scuttling this project.

A technological casus belli was sought, and it was inevitably found in classic neoconservative fashion. After plumbing the underbelly of Japan in search of an incriminating offense, it was discovered that a subsidiary of Toshiba had joined a Norwegian consortium in selling submarine-related technology to the Soviet Union.

The stage was set for the usual theatrics. In one memorable episode, US congressmen vented their “righteous anger” on a Toshiba radio set with sledgehammers and a symbolic noose. True to the ‘80s zeitgeist, this was interspersed with the latest US-curated dispatches on an equally righteous Afghan mujahideen war against the “godless Soviets.” (For the record, this writer – who abhors communism – was rooting for the Soviets while in high school. Any Asian with two functioning brain cells could foresee the blowback from appeasing Islamic militancy).

The US deep state’s Japan-bashing was widely dismissed as an undisguised form of racism. That there was a deeper, more ominous game plan afoot was never countenanced by an unsuspecting public. After all, similar hissy fits were not thrown at the guilty Norwegian consortium. French, British, Italian, West German and even US firms that had transferred technology to the “Evil Empire” were given a relatively free pass. Hyper-mediated gaslighting and distractions were a neoconservative political art long before the Democrats elevated them into the cult of wokism.

One OS to rule them all

Operating systems were indeed the next great frontier in the race for full-spectrum dominance. By 1985, Japan had a 10-year advantageover the US in software development. TRON would have merged Japanese software with Japanese hardware on computers worldwide. While the internet had its genesis in the ARPANET in 1969, Japan had begun operationalizing the Widely Integrated Distributed Environment (WIDE) system from 1988 onwards. WIDE interlinked a consortium of companies, universities, and public institutions for wide-area communications via the TCP/IP protocol in use today. At this juncture, the World Wide Web (WWW) was still a concept.

TRON was a game-changer and that game had to be rigged. The US wanted future access to every networked device on Earth as a prelude to something more sinister. In 1989, after heavy lobbying from an upstart entity called Microsoft, TRON was subjected to theSuper 301 sanctions which effectively excluded it from the US market. Although this action was deemed “temporary,” Japan was forced to apply the brakes on the TRON project or suffer consequences that one can only hypothesise in retrospect. (As a consolation, Sony was allowed to acquire a chunk of Hollywood).

Nearly a decade later, in keeping with the software development time lag between Japan and the United States, Windows 95 was born. The world was changed forever and not for the better.

Alongside Microsoft, US start-ups like Yahoo, Amazon, Google and Facebook etc. rapidly coalesced into a monolithic global kraken that subsumed Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Government and big everything else. This was techno-communism on steroids. Maybe this was the reason why TRON had to be quashed before it went global in the late 1980s.

The final frontier

The little guy now has as much “choice” and “freedom” as the Covid-19 vaccines he is mandated to take. Special vaccine passports are now needed to cross state [country] lines or to enter malls, churches, schools, and government agencies. Or to keep one’s job! The world currently resembles a digitally systemized gulag thanks to US Big Tech.

But will the global kraken stop at that?

“War Is Almost Inevitable”

by   via: Dances With Bears

“The hegemony of the Anglo-Saxons in the world is seriously shaken, both because of their own internal weakness, and because of the growth of China, and the sabotage of their system of power by Russia. It is quite obvious they will not give up their power over humanity and the benefits resulting from this in a favourable fashion.”


Following last week’s meeting in Washington of Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne, the Australian defence minister and their US counterparts, a strategic military and basing agreement was announced between Australia, the UK and US (AUKUS). This is being reinforced with summit meetings in Washington this week.

The declared target of their war-making preparations is China.

Australian strategy against Russia in the Pacific region follows in lockstep with the US. But for the time being the Russian enemy, and Russian submarine and surface fleet operations in the Indo-Pacific region, are not being discussed by Australian officials in public; at least not to the extent when President Vladimir Putin last visited Australia in November 2014 with a nuclear-powered, nuclear armed naval escort.

Ahead of schemes for strategic warmaking in the Pacific, the US, the UK and Australia are also engaged in proxy war operations. These have accelerated recently in Myanmar, where Russia and China are allied in support of the military government of  General Min Aung Hlaing. Next, from both sides, state bribery, subversion, putsch-making, and other special operations are likely to accelerate in the Pacific islands from Fiji to Papua-New Guinea.

For the moment, the initial reaction to AUKUS from the Russian Foreign Ministry has been as close to uncritical as the ministry can be.” Spokesman Maria Zakharova said last Thursday:

“We noted the plans, announced by Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines as part of an ‘enhanced trilateral security partnership’ agreed yesterday by the United States, Great Britain and Australia. We proceed from the premise that being a non-nuclear power and fulfilling in good faith the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Australia will honour its commitments under this document, as well as the IAEA Safeguards Agreements along with its Additional Protocol. We hope that Canberra ensures the necessary level of cooperation with the IAEA in order to rule out any proliferation-related risks.”

The first detailed technical and strategic assessment of the AUKUS scheme has followed this week in Vzglyad, the leading strategy publication reflecting the Russian General Staff and GRU assessments. A translation from the Russian article by Alexander Timokhin follows.

In a few years, another country with a nuclear submarine fleet will appear in the world  – Australia. What kind of submarines will this country receive from its allies, what kind of combat capabilities do they provide, and according to what scenario can they be used to contain China’s military power?

Everything is learned by comparison. What are the eight multi-purpose nuclear submarines that Australia will receive (not to be confused with submarines armed with ballistic missiles)? Let’s compare them with other fleets.

First, take the example of China, against which (at least, so they say) everything is being planned. Now China has only nine multi-purpose nuclear submarines, with low stealth. Three of them are Project 091; these are old and noisy vessels  that have almost no combat value. The remaining six are Project 093, more modern boats, which, however, are inferior to modern American and British ones. In fact, only these six have a real combat value, and it is this number that should be taken into account.

I must say that the Chinese have made tremendous progress if we start from their initial level. Their submarines are already armed with good torpedoes and means of countering enemy torpedoes. But they are still very far from British ‘Astutes’ or American ‘Virginias’.

Theoretically, the ‘Virginia’ of the latest modification (the block, as the Americans say) will be able to be used when delivering a high-precision massive non-nuclear strike on Chinese territory. In this case, the Australians will be able to increase the American salvo. In the future, when the Americans finish their hypersonic missile program for the Navy, this strike may also be very fast.

It will be a separate story if the Americans again trample on international norms of behaviour and deploy nuclear weapons on Australian submarines before the war. Then, using cruise or hypersonic missiles, Australia will be able to cause China (and not only it) simply monstrous damage. And just ordinary Tomahawks with their fast, surprise launch can cause considerable damage to the side attacked – and the tactical and technical characteristics of the ‘Virginia’ will allow you to secretly approach even a well-guarded shore and deliver a sudden and unexpected blow.

Naturally, this is true if Australia builds ‘Virginias’ with vertical missile launch installations, and not ‘Astutes’, which can only use Tomahawks through torpedo tubes. There is no answer to this question yet.

In the event of a war more or less close to a classic naval war, these submarines will create an additional threat to China, and China will be required to allocate additional forces to this threat, which it will need very much in a war with the United States and Britain,  even without Australia.

The Chinese are taking care of their fleet and developing it. They have anti-submarine surface forces and anti-submarine aviation, but when performing combat tasks outside the combat radius of their base (coastal in colloquial language) aviation, the problem of combating enemy submarine forces will become quite acute for China. Chinese surface ships will be subjected to air strikes by Australian based and American carrier-based aircraft; anti-submarine aircraft will not be able to work without cover; in fact, all tasks will have to be solved by Chinese nuclear submarines. They do not reach the western (that is, the future Australian) level yet, and they will be forced to act against heterogeneous enemy forces (submarines, anti-submarine aircraft, surface ships) without support.

How will China respond?

China has hope – there are new multi-purpose nuclear submarines being created, designated in the foreign press as Type 095, and in China itself 09-V. According to visual assessment of images of the boat, it is clear that China is trying to introduce a large number of technical solutions that increase the stealth of the submarine and the range of detection for its underwater targets. It is clearly visible that the boat is being created specifically for combat.

But what success the Chinese will have is an open question, and most importantly, even these boats will not see superiority in quality;  ideally there will be approximate parity.  At the same time, if the current pace of updating the submarine forces in China continues, then China will be inferior to the Americans and the British in numbers even without Australia, and even more so with it. These new boats are still in the planning stage — China has not built any of them yet. And another hostile nuclear submarine fleet will definitely require the Chinese to invest very quickly and very seriously in expanding their production; that requires time, money, and resources.

Can China ignore this threat? No.

Here is just one of many examples. Geographically, Australia can completely block the connection between China and the Indian Ocean: there is a direct exit there and this is not controlled by China in any way. China only has the Strait of Malacca, which with its new submarines Australia will be able to block from the Indian Ocean. Or go past Australia itself, with the same submarines and its aircraft. There is no other road by which a large amount of oil can be supplied to China.

Australia would never have had these opportunities in this form if it had continued its work on the purchase of non-nuclear submarines from France.

A non-nuclear (in fact the same diesel-electric) submarine is not capable, for example, of going under water at a high speed, as the ‘Virginias’ and ‘Astutes’ can, and secretly, without a critical increase in noise.

A non-nuclear boat needs to deliver fuel to the combat service area, an atomic one does not need to – a nuclear submarine is not tied to nearby bases or to fuel, and it can operate disproportionately more freely than a diesel-electric one, even with an air-independent power plant.

In combat, a nuclear submarine also has a lot of advantages, up to the possibility of sometimes getting away from the enemy’s torpedo by running. For a hypothetical Australian-French non-nuclear submarine, this would be impossible. The hydroacoustic complex on the ‘Virginias’ is generally difficult to compare with something, and this is the range of target detection and the range of shooting at it.

Now China, in addition to measures to counter the submarine fleet of the United States and Great Britain, will also have to take into account Australia, which wants to get a nuclear submarine more powerful than anything that China has at present.

What does the battlefield look like in numbers? If we start from how many of the ‘Virginias’ are already built and under construction to go into service by 2036, when the Australians want to get their eight submarines, then we can assume that there will be about 20 units. And they will not be able to throw everything at China; some of the submarines will be needed in case of emergency operations against Russia.

Thus, an additional eight Australian submarines will increase the number of units opposing China by at least a third, compared only with American submarines. This is even more than the British will be able to give for the war with China. China will have to increase both the submarine and other fleet forces by a comparable number.

In general, for China, these eight additional enemy submarines are a fresh handful of bones in the throat. That’s about what the Americans planned to do with the British. That’s what eight nuclear submarines are.

This is what caused the reaction of the Chinese to the news. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that the transfer of nuclear submarine construction technologies to Australia harms the nuclear non-proliferation regime and ‘exacerbates the arms race’, as well as the fact that the United States and Great Britain ‘extremely irresponsibly’ apply double standards. These admonitions, of course, will not have any effect.

And what does this mean for Russia? If Australia wants to have eight multi-purpose submarines by 2036, then by that year we will ideally have four Yasen-class vessels in the Pacific Ocean – the ‘Novosibirsk’, ‘Krasnoyarsk’, ‘Vladivostok’ and, presumably, the ‘Perm’.

Is for the future boat of the project 545 with the code-name ‘Laika’, the form in which the ‘Laika’ was presented to the president in December 2019 indicates the deliberate obsolescence of the project. And most importantly – it is extremely doubtful that these boats will be in service by the mid-thirties. This is another example of how many there will turn out to be — eight nuclear submarines in one theatre of military operations.

However, the western ‘partners’ may have difficulties in implementing these wonderful plans.

Virginia class under construction

Is everything so simple?

There is one aspect in all of this that can complicate everything. The production of as many as eight nuclear submarines, stuffed with high-tech systems to the brim, is not an easy matter. If we assume that the Australians will build some kind of ready-made project, for example the ‘Virginia’, then in any event they will up to 14 years for the construction of eight nuclear submarines if they start next year. This is an ultra-fast pace for eight units; the Americans themselves take five years to build one ‘Virginia’ from the popint of laying the keel to delivery to the Navy.

Is it possible for the Australians to meet the deadlines? Yes, but only in an “expansive’ way – laying more submarines a year than the Americans. And this requires, firstly, shipyards in sufficient quantity to build submarines;  secondly, workers and engineers;  and thirdly, the supply of components from the United States, which can become the bottleneck of the project because of the existing crisis in American shipbuilding. Does Australia have all this in the right amount? The allies will not be able to help them there;  they do not have enough themselves.

And if the Australians build some kind of British project – either the ‘Astute’  or, as is now rumoured in Britain, the future project of a British multi-purpose submarine, which should replace the ‘Astutes’, then nothing will work out. Britain is barely coping with the construction of its submarines by itself, including the part played by related companies. In the case of the ‘Astutes’, some of the related parties are from France engaged by by the Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, the British can in this way compensate for the losses of the French from the broken Australian contract for non-nuclear submarines. Still, the problem of timing will also arise in  this case.

The Australians seem to understand this. On Sunday, September 19, the Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton said that Australia will not wait until its nuclear submarines are built, but will buy or lease British or American ones.

This is quite possible. However, not with British submarines, but more likely with American ones, although such a scheme would not lead to the desired increase in anti–Chinese forces; there would still be as many submarines against China, just some of the flags would change. But, firstly, by the time the construction of their series is completed (even if not all and with a delay), the Australians will already have experience working with nuclear submarines, and secondly, the United States now has problems with repairing its submarines (they do not pull, as they say), and renting some of their ships to Australia for the Americans will in fact mean their salvation as combat units, even under a foreign flag.

In general, it is possible to make Australia a country with a nuclear submarine fleet quickly. Moreover, the authors of this initiative have an extremely serious reason for all this. Such gigantic investments and sharp political turns are not carried out just like that. The hegemony of the Anglo-Saxons in the world is seriously shaken, both because of their own internal weakness, and because of the growth of China, and the sabotage of their system of power by Russia. It is quite obvious they will not give up their power over humanity and the benefits resulting from this in a favourable fashion.

It is worth recognizing that the world is on the verge of war. Australia’s agreement with the United States and Britain says exactly this. An ordinary world war with tens of millions of dead, as one option, or with hundreds of millions; after all, no one has canceled nuclear weapons. Such a war is almost inevitable.

Moreover, knowing what deadlines the ‘partners’ set for themselves, you can roughly understand the time for which they are preparing the ‘hot phase’. And looking at how other countries are preparing for the next world war, it’s time for us to take a critical, honest and non-biased look at how we are preparing for it.”

America’s Criminal Bombing Democracy

A B-52 drops a load of bombs in this file photo, date unknown. © API/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Maitreya Bhakal is an Indian commentator who writes about China, India, the US, and global issues. Follow him on Twitter @MaitreyaBhakal

A nation-state version of a psychopath, the US refuses to give up its addiction to bombing innocent people. In just over a month, it’s bombed Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan – and shows no signs of developing a conscience.

Kill anything that moves

March 15, 1968 was a normal day in America. The sun was shining. The birds were chirping. Race riots in Mississippi were entering their fifth day or so. And at the other end of the globe, in Vietnam, soldiers of the Americal Division’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, were being briefed by their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, about the exploits of the next day, which would later be dubbed the “My Lai massacre” – where 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were systematically butchered in over four hours, not counting a lunch break the soldiers took in the middle of the carnage. The orders were clear and explicit: the soldiers were to kill every single human being, burn all houses, kill all animals, destroy all food supplies and poison all wells.

As the briefing progressed, one incident stuck in the mind of artillery forward observer James Flynn, which he would recall years later. A soldier, whose name has been lost to history, expressed some apprehension about the wide-ranging nature of the orders. “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” he asked naively.

“Kill everything that moves,” came the reply.

Kill everything that moves. This same phrase would be repeated almost verbatim two years later by none other than Henry Kissinger himself while relaying US leader Richard Nixon’s orders: “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”

My Lais and my truths

That the popular US media is allowed to discuss this event is not exactly praiseworthy, nor some sign of speaking truth to power, as they claim. The reason why the My Lai massacre was allowed to enter the popular US imagination was to hide America’s much larger war crimes. As Nick Turse points out in his award-winning book Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam: “Today, histories of the Vietnam War regularly discuss war crimes or civilian suffering only in the context of a single incident: the My Lai massacre… Even as that one event has become the subject of numerous books and articles, all the other atrocities perpetrated by US soldiers have essentially vanished from popular memory.”

The strategy worked. And it continues to work to this day. After all, what better way to distract attention from your larger crimes than focus attention on your smaller ones? As a bonus, this also allows you to portray yourself as an enabler and respecter of “free speech” and “open debate”.

Bomber barbarians

Yes – America loves killing anything that moves. Like the nation-state version of the psychopathic serial murderer, it loves bombing weak, poor, defenseless nations that cannot fight back – nations that have done no harm to it and pose no threat to it.

The US regime wouldn’t dare touch North Korea, of course, because it possesses nuclear weapons and can fight back. America killed Muammar Gaddafi’s nuclear weapons program, and then killed the man himself as soon as they got the opportunity less than a decade later (he was sodomized and then murdered in the open by pro-US forces). Iraq was attacked not because it had WMDs – but because it didn’t. The US regime knew it couldn’t defend itself, and went in for the kill. Syria would have probably become another Iraq if not for Russia, who Syria explicitly invited in to counter the twin terrorist threats of Islamic State (IS/formerly ISIS) and the US (via its proxies).

Between 1965 and 1975, the “democratic” US and its allies carried out the largest aerial bombardment in human history, dropping more than 7.5 million tons of bombs in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, twice as many as those dropped on Europe and Asia during the Second World War. They turned Laos, one of the poorest, most defenseless nations on Earth, into the planet’s most bombed country. From 1965 to 1969, the US military dropped 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of North and South Vietnam – or 500 pounds for each man, woman and child. As America’s head of the Strategic Air Command General Curtis LeMay put it, America’s aim must be to “bomb the Vietnamese back to the Stone Age.”

During the “Korean War” (i.e. the US-led invasion of Korea), North Korea was bombed almost to oblivion without the batting of an eyelid. Around 85% of its buildings were destroyed. Literally only two modern buildings were left standing in Pyongyang after the US was done. They bombed and they bombed – they bombed so much that they had to halt for a while because there was nothing left to bomb. By the end of the campaign, US bombers couldn’t find targets and were often reduced to bombing footbridges or simply ditching their bombs into the sea. And when they got bored with that, they started bombing dams, causing widespread flooding. According to historian Charles K. Armstrong, the bombing of the dams and the resultant floods threatened several million North Koreans with absolute starvation; only emergency assistance from socialist countries prevented widespread famine.

The US has largely continued its destructive bombing campaigns even after the Cold War – socialism and the ‘Domino Theory’ had just been the excuse. It found other excuses.

In response [Editor: to the self-staged 9/11], it killed 1 million people and displaced 37 million, creating the largest refugee crisis in decades. No nation since World War II has had the power, or indeed, the desire, to cause such death and destruction. The “War on Terror” increased terrorism globally, and also created IS, the most dangerous non-state terrorist actor in the world.

In the last 20 years alone, the US and its allies have bombed West Asia (or to use the Eurocentric term, “Middle East”) and North Africa at the rate of 46 bombs per day. That’s not a typo – that’s almost two bombs every hour, every single day, for 20 years.

But US leaders aren’t perturbed – it isn’t white people they’re killing after all, they’re only killing the proverbial “other” who were coming to destroy “us” innocent people, and we are simply fighting the good fight. On the highly nationalistic US internet, images of US Marines saying goodbye to their kids at airports often go viral, as they fly away to slaughter children much like their own.

The more things change…

When Barack Obama became US leader, people were led to imagine that things would be different. They even gave him the Nobel Prize to cement his promised legacy even before it was created. He was painted as a peaceful president and a reluctant, cautious warrior, if at all. In truth, he was America’s drone-warrior in chief, pioneering the art of such warfare at scale – which allowed him to reduce boots on the ground. He calculated that by bringing US troops back, he could achieve popularity at home – no matter how many people he killed abroad. He was right.

Obama dropped more bombs than Bush did during his presidency. This included 26,171 bombs in 2016, his last full year in office. That’s about 72 bombs every single day – for one whole year. And these are just the publicly known bombings. Civilian deaths are rarely acknowledged by the US regime.

President Joe Biden, Obama’s former vice president, has sought to continue the bombings now that he is in charge. In late June, the US regime bombed Iraq and Syria. Again. This was one week after Congress had voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq.

Ostensibly, the attacks were against “weapons storage facilities” used by “Iranian-backed militias” – shorthand for any group that opposes US occupation. Just like Nazi Germany justified killing resistance fighters opposing its occupation by calling them “partisans,” the US regime dismisses resistance fighters opposing its occupation as “militants” or “combatants,” often referring to them as “Iran-backed” as a bonus. None of these statements can be trusted or verified, of course; the US regime has a long history of publicly lying and misleading the world.

Continuing its addiction, the US regime also recently bombed Somalia, one of the world’s poorest countries. The Pentagon’s “initial assessment” found that no civilians were killed, which is a standard US claim for all its bombing raids in that impoverished country. Human rights groups – the same ones that the US cites and trusts wholeheartedly when criticizing its enemies like China and Russia – disagree. In 2017, the US regime relaxed bombing rules for Somalia, increasing the risk of civilian deaths.

According to the regime’s bombing guidelines, the Pentagon is allowed to bomb only Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq without White House approval. Thus, it is likely that Biden personally approved the Somalia airstrike. Ostensibly, it targeted the Al-Shabaab militant group, and was carried out in “coordination” with the Somalian government.

A few days later, the US regime launched multiple airstrikes in Afghanistan too, a nation it is apparently withdrawing from, after being thoroughly trounced and defeated in a 20-year-old war. This time, it was ostensibly to come to the “aid” of the Afghan government against the Taliban. Lest anybody think that a US “exit” from Afghanistan means an end to its bombings, a top US general clarified that the regime had no such intention.

More bombings can be expected in the future. The US regime will not develop morals because it has no incentive to do so – it faces little criticism from the international community for its bombings and killings, and faces even less criticism at home, even from the “anti-war” lobby.

However, one thing is beyond doubt: it will continue claiming that it is the moral leader and guardian of the world; that the most war-mongering nation on Earth is the paragon of peace and virtue; and that it deserves the divine right to lecture others and hold them “accountable” for their “human rights violations”. Old habits die hard – and lie harder.

The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski Doctrine

by Thierry Meyssan via Voltairenet.org

For two decades, the Pentagon has been applying the “Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine” to the “wider Middle East”. Several times, it thought of extending it to the “Caribbean Basin”, but refrained from doing so, concentrating its power on its first target. The Pentagon acts as an autonomous decision-making center that is effectively outside the power of the president. It is a civil-military administration that imposes its objectives on the rest of the military.

JPEG - 45.3 kbJPEG - 46.8 kbThe maps of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2001, published in 2005 by Colonel Ralph Peters, still guide the actions of the US military in 2021.

In my book L’Effroyable imposture [1] [2], I wrote, in March, 2002, that the attacks of September 11 were aimed at making the United States accept :
- on the inside, a system of mass surveillance (the Patriot Act) ;
- and, externally, a resumption of imperial policy, about which there was no documentation at the time.

Things only became clearer in 2005, when Colonel Ralph Peters – at the time a Fox News commentator – published the famous map of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the map of the “reshaping” of the “broader Middle East” [3]. It came as a shock to all chancelleries: the Pentagon was planning to redraw the borders inherited from the Franco-British colonization (the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreements of 1916) without regard for any state, even an ally.

From then on, each state in the region did everything in its power to prevent the storm from falling on its people. Instead of uniting with neighboring countries in the face of the common enemy, each tried to deflect the Pentagon’s hand to its neighbors. The most emblematic case is that of Turkey, which changed its position several times, giving the confused impression of a mad dog.

JPEG - 45.6 kbTwo visions of the world clash. For the Pentagon since 2001, stability is the strategic enemy of the United States, while for Russia, it is the condition for peace.

However, the map revealed by Colonel Peters -who hated the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld- did not make it possible to understand the overall project. Already, at the time of the September 11 attacks, he had published an article in the US Army magazine, Parameters [4]. He alluded to the map that he did not publish until four years later, and suggested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to carry it out by means of atrocious crimes that they would have to subcontract in order not to dirty their hands. One might think that he was referring to private armies, but history showed that they could not engage in crimes against humanity either.

The final word on the project was in the “Office of Force Transformation,” created by Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in the days following the 9/11 attacks. It was occupied by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. This famous strategist had been the designer of the computerization of the armed forces [5]. One could believe that this Office was a way to finish his work. But no one disputed this reorganization anymore. No, he was there to transform the mission of the U.S. armed forces, as the few recordings of his lectures in military academies attest.

Arthur Cebrowski spent three years lecturing to all senior U.S. officers, thus to all current general officers.

JPEG - 34.3 kbThe target determined by Admiral Cebrowski is not only the “wider Middle East”, but all regions not integrated into the globalized economy.

What he was teaching was quite simple. The world economy was becoming globalized. To remain the world’s leading power, the United States had to adapt to financial capitalism. The best way to do this was to ensure that developed countries could exploit the natural resources of poor countries without political obstacles. From this, it divided the world into two: on the one hand, the globalized economies (including Russia and China) destined to be stable markets and, on the other, all the others that were to be deprived of state structures and left to chaos so that transnationals could exploit their wealth without resistance. To achieve this, the non-globalized peoples were to be divided along ethnic lines and held ideologically.

The first region to be affected was to be the Arab-Muslim area from Morocco to Pakistan, with the exception of Israel and two neighboring micro-states that were to prevent the fire from spreading, Jordan and Lebanon. This is what the State Department called the “broader Middle East. This area was not defined by oil reserves, but by elements of the common culture of its inhabitants.

The war that Admiral Cebrowski imagined was to cover the entire region. It was not to take into account the divisions of the Cold War. The United States no longer had any friends or enemies there. The enemy was not defined by its ideology (the communists) or its religion (the “clash of civilizations”), but only by its non-integration into the globalized economy of financial capitalism. Nothing could protect those who had the misfortune not to be followers, to be independent.

This war was not intended to allow the US alone to exploit natural resources, as previous wars had done, but for all globalized states to do so. Moreover, the United States was no longer really interested in capturing raw materials, but rather in dividing up work on a global scale and making others work for them.

All this implied tactical changes in the way wars were waged, since it was no longer a question of obtaining victory, but of waging a “war without end”, as President George W. Bush put it. Indeed, all the wars started since 9/11 are still going on on five different fronts: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen.

It doesn’t matter if allied governments interpret these wars in accordance with the US communication: they are not civil wars, but stages of a plan preestablished by the Pentagon.

JPEG - 45.8 kbEsquire Magazine, March 2003

The “Cebrowski Doctrine” shook up the US military. His assistant, Thomas Barnett, wrote an article for Esquire Magazine [6], then published a book to present it in more detail to the general public: The Pentagon’s New Map [7].

JPEG - 32.2 kb

The fact that in his book, published after Admiral Cebrowski’s death, Barnett claims authorship of his doctrine should not be misleading. It is just a way for the Pentagon not to assume it. The same phenomenon had taken place, for example, with the “clash of civilizations”. It was originally the “Lewis Doctrine”, a communication argument devised within the National Security Council to sell new wars to public opinion. It was presented to the general public by Bernard Lewis’s assistant, Samuel Huntington, who presented it as an academic description of an inescapable reality.

The implementation of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski Doctrine has had many ups and downs. Some came from the Pentagon itself, others from the people who were being crushed. Thus, the resignation of the commander of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, was organized because he had negotiated a reasoned peace with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran on his own initiative. It was provoked by… Barnett himself, who published an article accusing Fallon of abusing President Bush. Or again, the failure to disrupt Syria was due to the resistance of its people and the entry of the Russian army. The Pentagon has come to burn down crops and organize a blockade of the country to starve it; revengeful actions that attest to its inability to destroy state structures.

During his election campaign, Donald Trump campaigned against the endless war and for the return of the GI’s to their homes. He managed not to start new fronts and to bring some men home, but failed to tame the Pentagon. The Pentagon developed its Special Forces without a “signature” and managed to destroy the Lebanese state without the use of soldiers in a visible way. It is this strategy that it is implementing in Israel itself, organizing anti-Arab and anti-Jewish pogroms as a result of the confrontation between Hamas and Israel.

The Pentagon has repeatedly tried to extend the “Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine” to the Caribbean Basin. It planned an overthrow, not of the Nicolás Maduro regime, but of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It finally postponed this.

JPEG - 42.6 kbThe eight members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It must be noted that the Pentagon has become an autonomous power. It has a gigantic budget of 740 billion dollars, which is about twice the annual budget of the entire French state. In practice, its power extends far beyond that, since it controls all the member states of the Atlantic Alliance. It is supposed to be accountable to the President of the United States, but the experiences of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump show the absolute opposite. The former failed to impose his policy on General John Allen in the face of Daesh, while the latter was led astray by Central Command. There is no reason to believe that it will be any different with President Joe Biden.

The recent open letter of former US general officers [8] shows that nobody knows who is in charge of the US military anymore. No matter how much their political analysis is worthy of the Cold War, this does not invalidate their observation: the Federal Administration and the general officers are no longer on the same wavelength.

William Arkin’s work, published by the Washington Post, has shown that the federal government organized a nebulous group of agencies under the supervision of the Department of Homeland Security after the September 11 attacks [9]. In the greatest secrecy, they intercept and archive the communications of all people living in the United States. Arkin has just revealed in Newsweek that, for its part, the Department of Defense has created secret Special Forces, separate from those in uniform [10]. They are now in charge of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine, regardless of who is in the White House and what their foreign policy is.

JPEG - 60.5 kbThe Pentagon has a clandestine Special Forces of 60,000 men. They do not appear on any official document and work without uniform. Supposedly used against terrorism, they are in fact the ones who practice it. The classic armies are dedicated to the fight against Russian and Chinese rivals.

When the Pentagon attacked Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001, it used its conventional armies – it had no other – and those of its British ally. However, during the “endless war” in Iraq, it built up Iraqi jihadist forces, both Sunni and Shiite, to plunge the country into civil war [11]. One of them, derived from al-Qaeda, was used in Libya in 2011, another in Iraq in 2014 under the name of Daesh. Gradually these groups have replaced the US armies to do the dirty work described by Colonel Ralph Peters in 2001.

Today, no one has seen US soldiers in uniform in Yemen, Lebanon and Israel. The Pentagon itself has advertised their withdrawal. But there are 60,000 clandestine, i.e. non-uniformed, US Special Forces creating chaos, via civil war, in these countries.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] September, 11 2001 : The big lie, Thierry Meyssan, Carnot (2002).

[2] Contrary to popular belief, this book does not deal with the attacks of September 11. Only the first part (“Bloody staging”) demonstrates the material impossibility of the dominant version. The other two parts deal with the politics of mass surveillance (“Death of Democracy in America”) and the imperial project to come (“The Empire Attacks”).

[3] “Blood borders. How a better Middle East would look”, Ralph Peters, Armed Forces Journal, June 1, 2006.

[4] “Stability. America’s ennemy”, Ralph Peters, Parameters, #31-4, Winter 2001.

[5] Transforming Military Force. The Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and Network Centric Warfare, James R. Blaker, Praeger Security International (2007).

[6] “Why the Pentagon Changes Its Maps. And why we’ll keep going to war”, Thomas Barnett, Esquire Magazine, March 2003.

[7] The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, Thomas P. M. Barnett, Paw Prints (2004).

[8] “Open Letter from Retired Generals and Admirals”, Voltaire Network, 9 May 2021.

[9] Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, William M. Arkin & Dana Priest, Back Bay Books (2012).

[10] “Exclusive: Inside the Military’s Secret Undercover Army”, William M. Arkin, Newsweek, May 17, 2021.

[11] Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump, Chapter : “The fusion of the two “Gladio” networks and preparation of Daesh” 104#, Thierry Meyssan, Progress

Russia Poses “Existential Threat” From North To South Pole: US Intel Chief

Authored by Rick Rozoff via AntiWar.com,

Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, presented his agency’s annual World Threat Assessment before the Senate Armed Forces Committee late last week. The transcript of his testimony runs to fifty-seven pages and is broad in its scope and often detailed in its descriptions, so what follows is a précis and one that dwells on the overarching theme of his presentation, leaving aside, for example, his discussion of the threats posed by what were formerly termed terrorist organizations and are now called violent extremist organizations (VEOs).

His comments largely passed unnoticed as such generally are outside the American governing and military castes except for a CNN report of them that bears the title “Top US military intelligence official says Russian military poses an ‘existential threat’ to the US”.

Russian military exercise, file image.

His analysis of threats, military and non-military, to the US and its allies is entirely in keeping with those of other leading military, intelligence and foreign policy officials: four nations threaten the world, threaten it separately but mainly in conjunction with each other and threaten it on every continent and in every sea and ocean. The four nations, collectively the new Axis of Evil, are Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. To employ the terms now in vogue in American military, intelligence and what can loosely be called diplomatic circles, the four are divided into near-peer and non-near-peer challengers and adversaries. The US readily acknowledges it has no military equal in the world – and intends to keep it that way – except insofar as Russia maintains nuclear parity with it.

Russia and China are near-peer threats. Iran and North Korea aren’t at that level. But all four are presented as nuclear threats. His perspective is shared by other U.S. military, intelligence and foreign policy departments, commands and agencies as well as NATO:

Berrier started his testimony by accusing all four of the above of exploiting the global COVID-19 crisis.

China was dealt with first and was characterized as “a major security challenge [which] remains a long-term strategic competitor to the United States.” His description of that threat included the fact that “China undertook a range of military missions including power projection, sea-lane security, counterpiracy, peacekeeping operations, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.” Much as any more or less populous nation has done in recent decades.

But he reserved his main criticism for Russia, uttering the alarmist concern picked up on by CNN that:

The Russian military is an existential threat to the United States and a potent tool designed to maintain influence over the states along its periphery, compete with US global primacy, and compel adversaries who challenge Russia’s vital national interests.” (p.13)

That the above sentence would apply to the US far more than to Russia seems to escaped the director’s attention, but he did highlight Russia’s real threat: the potential to compete with US global primacy. That in itself poses an existential threat evidently.

He said that Russia presents a threat to the American homeland because it “continues to invest in its strategic nuclear forces, in new capabilities to enhance its strategic deterrent….”

It is further guilty of threatening Peoria or Kansas City because its “military strength is built on its survivable strategic nuclear forces and a conventional force largely postured for defensive and regional operations.” Please note the words deterrent, defensive and regional: words unknown to Washington and the Pentagon, or if known not in any manner limiting their self-aggrandized prerogative of global power projection.

Russia is accused of incorporating lessons learned in Syria for training and exercises. Every military power since Persia and Rome has done the same, of course.

It is also at least implicitly criticized for an exaggerated and irrational belief that its main threats are the US and NATO. That the latter two have ringed Russia in from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea with nuclear submarines, guided-missile warships, fighter jets, long-range nuclear-capable bombers, anti-ballistic missiles, armored vehicles, bases, troops and cyber warfare centers is simply the pretext, Berrier argued, for Moscow to exploit the issue for the “the preservation of the ruling regime.”

And to compound its threat to the US and NATO, Russia is “disrupting NATO’s cohesion and its ability to formulate effective policies to counter Russian malign influence.” That sounds very much like self-defense, a principle universally recognized in international as well as criminal law.

Russia is accused of particularly targeting NATO member states with “historical, cultural, or religious affinities” to it. (p. 14) That would suggest countries which primarily speak Slavic languages and practice Orthodox Christianity. Neither affinity is particularly favored by the West’s new rules-based international order.

He also repeated the oft-heard accusation that Russia employed the “military grade nerve agent” Novichok against Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Britain in 2018 and recently against Alexei Navalny at home. At NATO headquarters in March US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described the first incident as the use of chemical weapons on the soil of a NATO nation.

Russia is also denounced by Berrier for its role in Georgia since 2008 and in Ukraine since 2014, while he touted the fact that “Georgian, Ukrainian, and Azerbaijani security cooperation with NATO partners” is a source of Russian irritation; though he did point out that the Putin government ignored the Azerbaijani-Turkish attack on Nagorno-Karabakh and Russia’s Collective Security Treaty Organization ally Armenia last year; one which has resulted in Russia welcoming troops from NATO powerhouse Turkey into the South Caucasus. He also acknowledged Russia’s collaboration with Turkey in Syria and Libya, although the two nations back opposing belligerents in both instances.

In more abbreviated form, as otherwise the recital will be endless, Russia is accused of conniving with almost all the bad actors as they were formerly referred to, now malign influences, in the world, in most every part of it, by engaging in behavior including but not limited to:

Expanding military ties and engaging in joint exercises with China.

Maintaining standard state-to-state relations with Iran and North Korea. (p.19)

Continuing Soviet-era ties with Algeria and Angola in Africa. (p.18)

Doing the same in Central America with Nicaragua and in the Caribbean with Cuba as well as providing defensive weapons to Venezuela in South America. (p.19)

Not content to present Russia as being a threat to North America, Central America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, the Defense Intelligence Agency also portrays it as a rival and adversary in the Arctic –

Russia is…expanding its network of air and coastal defense missile systems, thus strengthening its anti-access/area-denial capabilities over key portions of its Arctic maritime zone (p.20) – and the Antarctic – Moscow is…expanding its fishing activities there and, alongside China, has blocked international environmental conservation efforts to limit fishing in the area. (p. 20)

Though Russia remains the sole “existential” threat to the heartland of America, to Midtown, U.S.A., it is also the ringleader of an international conspiracy directed against the US and its democratic allies around the world in the minds of Berrier and those he serves. That nefarious network of evildoers’ evil deeds include:

North Korea selling arms to Iran and Syria.

China supporting North Korea.

Iran’s involvement in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, where Berrier presents Tehran as the sole villain except for Russia in Syria. (Though Berrier admits that a Turkish military incursion there displaced 70,000 civilians, adding, “Another Turkish incursion in northern Syria would also likely displace hundreds of thousands of civilians, as witnessed in 2018 and 2019.” But Turkey is a valued NATO ally.)

China ensnaring Cuba in its Belt and Road Initiative.

Russian ally Algeria backing the Polisario Front in Western Sahara where there seems an imminent threat of a Western-supported invasion by NATO partner Morocco.

China and Iran conspiring with Russia to support the government of Venezuela, “which almost certainly mitigates the economic effects of international sanctions.” (See Chinese, Russian, and Iranian Presence and Security Influence in the Region. p.48. E.g., “Tehran seeks to leverage its recent sales with Venezuela to expand Iran’s regional footprint in Latin America.”)

Matters couldn’t be more clear to America’s civilian and military foreign policy planners and those of its NATO allies. All’s right in the world of 194 United Nations members except for threats posed by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Especially Russia.

“‘China Threat’:This Reflects a Mental Illness.”

via Sputnik

Speaking to members of the press on Thursday, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Senior Col. Wu Qian said provocative actions in and near Chinese waters have increased in 2021 and that the US needs to back off.

“Since the current US administration took office, the number of activities conducted by US warships and surveillance aircraft in the sea areas around China has increased by more than 20% and 40% respectively over the same period last year. The US frequently sends ships and aircraft to conduct activities in waters and airspace around China, escalating regional militarization and threatening regional peace and stability,” Wu told reporters.

“China is firmly opposed to that. We urge the US side to strictly restrain its troops on the ground, abide by the ‘Rules of Behaviour for Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters between China and the US’ and ‘International Maritime Collision Prevention Regulations,’ so as to prevent the recurrence of similar dangerous incidents,” he added.

Wu noted in particular that the recent patrol by the US Navy destroyer USS Mustin, which passed just miles from the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning in the Philippine Sea, had “seriously obstructed regular training of the Chinese side and threatened the safety of ships and personnel of both sides.”


Cmdr. Robert J. Briggs and Cmdr. Richard D. Slye monitor surface contacts from the pilothouse of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Mustin.

“It’s of an egregious nature,” Wu added. “The Chinese naval ships on site warned the US ship to leave. The Ministry of National Defense has lodged a solemn representation with the US side in this regard.”

The April 4 incident was accompanied by the release of a photo in which Cmdr. Robert Briggs, commanding officer of the USS Mustin, is seen sitting casually with his legs kicked up as he looks at the Liaoning just a few thousand yards away alongside his executive officer, Cmdr. Richard Slye.

Earlier this month, Biden forwarded a $753 billionnational security budgetrequest for fiscal year 2022, a 1.6% increase over Trump’s budget for fiscal year 2021. The US spends more on its military than the next several competitors combined, including China. However, even that increase wasn’t enough to satisfy hawkish Republicans, who demanded an increase of between 3-5%.

Wu spoke to this on Thursday, saying some in Washington are “getting really paranoid and keep playing up the so-called ‘China threat’ and “China challenge.’ This reflects a mental illness.

“This kind of behavior will only harm others and itself and lead to a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’ China has no intention to threaten or challenge any country. However, if someone insisted on threatening or challenging China, we would have no choice but to fight back.”

Also from: TASS

Washington’s intention of boosting its military budget is caused by a psychological disorder and paranoia plaguing certain members of the Biden administration amid the exaggeration of the alleged “Chinese threat,” Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said Thursday.

“For quite some time, certain representatives of the US administration have been unable to shake themselves loose from maniacal psychosis and delusions of persecution.They’ve become obsessed with speculation over the so-called Chinese threat, and they irrationally exaggerate the topic of ‘the challenge from China’,” he told journalists, commenting on Washington’s announcement of a military budget increase.

“This is the embodiment of some mental disorder, which can only result in harm to others, as well as to themselves, not to mention ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’. China has no intention of threatening other countries or posing any threat to them. However, should anyone threaten or challenge China, we will have no other choice but to respond,” he concluded.

On April 13, Jane’s reported citing the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that Washington plans to request $715 billion for military needs from the Congress. The OMB will reportedly request $753 billion for national defense funding, with the bulk of this sum intended for the Pentagon. Therefore, the US Department of Defense budget will increase by 1.6% compared to fiscal year 2021, from $704 billion.

Source: TASS

America Can Successfully Defend Taiwan Against China – But Only in Its Dreams

by Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

FILE PHOTO: A F-16 fighter jet lands on a highway used as an emergency landing strip during the Han Kuang military exercise in Madou, Tainan, southern Taiwan, April 12, 2011©REUTERS/Nicky Loh

The US military has deteriorated to the point that the only way it could win a simulated war game in which it was called on to defend Taiwan from a ‘Chinese invasion’ force was by inventing capabilities it does not yet possess.

In 2018 and 2019, the US Air Force conducted detailed simulated war games that had its forces square off against those of China. On both occasions, the US was decisively defeated, the first time challenging the Chinese in the South China Sea, and the second time defending Taiwan – which China sees as an integral part of its territory – against a Chinese invasion.

In 2020, the US repeated the Taiwan scenario, and won – but only barely. The difference? In both 2018 and 2019, it played with the resources it had on hand. Last year, it gave itself a host of new technologies and capabilities that are either not in production or aren’t even planned for development. In short, the exercise was as far removed from reality as it could get. The fact is the US can only successfully defend Taiwan from a full-scale Chinese invasion in its dreams.

What the current war games underscored is that, as currently configured, equipped, and deployed, the US Air Force lacks the required combination of lethality and sustainability necessary to wage full-scale conventional conflict against a peer-level foe. The mix of aircraft currently in the US Air Force inventory was unable to ‘compete’ in the war game – even the current model of F-35 was excluded as not being up to the task of fighting and surviving against the Chinese military. Instead, the wargamers completely altered the composition and operational methodology of the US Air Force, providing it with combat aircraft that are either still on the drawing board, or have not even been considered for procurement yet. They also completely altered the ‘layout’ of forces, manufacturing new airfields that do not exist, and connecting them with command-and-control capabilities just as fictional.

There was a time when the notion of US air superiority, if not supremacy, was virtually guaranteed on any battlefield that could be imagined. This was especially true in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the corresponding disintegration of Russian combat power. The US was able to hold onto this edge over the course of the 1990s simply by exploiting the advantages accrued from years of investment made in modern aircraft and combat systems during the Cold War, and the fact no other nation was able and/or willing to invest in their respective military to challenge the US in that arena.

The events of 9/11 proved to be seminal in the decline of American military power. The United States poured its entire national security focus into defeating the forces of ‘global terrorism,’ and engaged itself in the futile act of ‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, the needs of one combat command – US Central Command (CENTCOM), responsible for US military interests in the Middle East and Southwest Asia – took priority over all others.

Gone were the days when the US spent billions of dollars preparing to fight a major war in the Pacific, another major war in Europe, and a ‘holding action’ in the Middle East. In the post-9/11 world, the sole focus of the US military became low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency. Every aspect of military existence – recruiting, training, organization, equipment, employment, and sustainability – was defined by the needs of CENTCOM in fighting the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. If something did not further the CENTCOM mission, it was either discarded or modified so it would.

The US military spent itself in the CENTCOM area of operations – physically, fiscally, morally, and intellectually. Every single principle of war necessary for a military to prevail was sacrificed in the deserts and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Today, with the political decision having been made to depart Afghanistan, and a similar decision being brooded regarding Iraq and its corollary conflict, Syria, the US military is a fundamentally broken institution. It lost its ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East and Southwest Asia by not winning. As such, the senior leadership at the helm of the US military has been conditioned to accept defeat as de rigueur; it comes with the territory, a reality explained away by lying – either to yourself, your superiors, or both. Too many successful careers were created on the backs of lies repackaged as truth, of defeats sold as victories, as deficits portrayed as assets.

In many ways, the recently concluded US Air Force war game is a byproduct of this psychosis – an exercise in self-delusion, in which reality is replaced by a fictional world where everything works as planned, even if it does not exist. The US Air Force cannot wage a successful war against China today. Nor can it do so against Russia. Its ability to sustain a successful air campaign against either Iran or North Korea is likewise questionable. This is the kind of reality that would, in a world where facts mattered, cost a lot of senior people their jobs, in uniform and out.

The culpability of this systemic incompetence is so widespread, however, that there can be no serious accounting for what has transpired. Instead, the US Air Force, having been confronted by the reality of its shortcomings, ‘invents’ a victory. In and of itself, this ‘victory’ is meaningless. If China were to invade Taiwan, there is literally nothing short of employing nuclear weapons the US could do to stop it. But by ‘beating’ China using fictional resources, the US Air Force has created a blueprint of procurement that will define its budgetary requests for the next decade.

In doing so, however, the US Air Force is simply repeating the mistakes of the CENTCOM-driven ‘forever war,’ focusing on achieving ‘victory’ in one theater of operations at the exclusion of all others. By building a fictitious ‘model’ military for the purpose of prevailing in a simulated war game in which every advantage was conceded to the United States, the US Air Force is simply continuing the pattern of behavior built around lies, deceit, and self-deception that has guided it, and its senior officers and civilian leadership, for the past two decades. The end result will be that, even if the Air Force gets all the tools and capabilities it claims it needs to win in any ‘defense of Taiwan’ war game (and it will not), the only way it can prevail in any such conflict will be in its dreams.

TASS: Chinese Foreign Ministry Demands US Explain Ukraine Biolabs

by Seraphim HanischSeraphim Hanisch via The Duran

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This is a translation of a piece run by the Russian TASS News Agency. It is not likely that the American press is covering it, so we bring it to you. The attached videos are for the benefit of any viewers that speak Russian or Ukrainian fluently, but, curiously, the “AutoTranslate” feature common to YouTube is not available for this video. Interestingly enough, the video coverage is from Ukrainian sources, and considering the bad blood between Russia and Ukraine, it is curious that both countries seem aligned on this issue.

One wonders why.

The following is the TASS piece:


BEIJING, April 8. / TASS /. The US government should provide the international community with comprehensive information about the experiments that they are carrying out in the US military biological laboratories in Ukraine and at Fort Detrick. This was announced on Thursday at a regular briefing by the official representative of the PRC Foreign Ministry Zhao Lijian.

“We hope that the respective countries and the United States will take a responsible and open position, begin cooperation with the World Health Organization and invite its experts to carry out scientific research to find the sources of the coronavirus in the United States, as China did earlier. I noticed that Russia is not so long ago questioned the United States about its military and biological activities in Fort Detrick and in Ukraine. Other countries have also expressed similar concerns, “he said. “Take Ukraine, for example. The US has created 16 biological laboratories in Ukraine alone. Why is the US creating so many laboratories around the world, and what does it do there, including in Fort Detrick,” he asked.

An official representative of the PRC Foreign Ministry stressed that the United States is the only country that still blocks the creation of a verification mechanism under the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction. “We again call on the United States to take a responsible position and respond to the concerns of the world community, as well as provide comprehensive explanations of what they are doing in these laboratories, as well as respond to requests to create a verification mechanism for such activities,” he said.

The Walter Reed Army Research Institute is located in Fort Detrick, Maryland. It is run by the Pentagon and conducts biomedical research, including infectious diseases.

About US biolaboratories

In April 2020, a number of Ukrainian TV channels, including “1 + 1” and Newsone, reported that American military biological laboratories were operating in Ukraine, where experiments with pathogens of dangerous infectious diseases were carried out. In the same month, Verkhovna Rada deputies – the head of the political council of the Opposition Platform – For Life (Opposition Platform – For Life) party (Opposition Platform – For Life) Viktor Medvedchuk and Renat Kuzmin – reported that they had sent requests to government bodies demanding a report on the work of 15 American biological laboratories in the country.

They recalled that in August 2005, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and the US Department of Defense signed an agreement on cooperation in preventing the proliferation of technologies, pathogens and knowledge that can be used to develop biological weapons. The document provides for the collection and storage of all dangerous pathogens on Ukrainian territory in laboratories funded by Washington, and also obliges, at the request of the American side, to transfer copies of dangerous strains to the United States for further research.

Medvedchuk believes that the facilities in Ukraine that are subordinate to the Pentagon and carry out their assigned tasks are de facto US military bases, which is expressly prohibited by article 17 of the Ukrainian constitution. The HLE also expressed suspicions that laboratories could become the source of epidemics in the country, but they were rejected by the American embassy. In addition, the party found that the diplomatic mission was trying to hide information about the work in Ukraine of two centers engaged in the study of pathogens dangerous to humans.


The original text of this piece is available at this link. Given all the scuttlebutt about COVID-19, and its curious way of affecting the Americans most of all, this piece of news adds some intrigue to a situation that is already extremely murky and politicized. We cannot properly offer evaluation of this without more information, but it is worth it for people who do not speak Russian or Ukrainian to know that this is an ongoing story.