As usual, Sal, a ton of wisdom. But we will always disagree on this language young Sal wrote and old Sal hasn't repudiated: " We should not have any of our naval forces based in the ports of foreign nations, on a permanent basis." If we could fly ships forward and place them in the water where we want them, I'd be more sympathetic to this. But we can't. And so if we wish to tend to our traditional mercantilist knitting, we will have naval power forward. Having some of it based forward is a compromise with cost, as a Navy able to do the things we need it to do (or we think we need it to do) doing those things solely as a cruising force (without any forward based structure) would be decidedly bigger and more expensive than the force we have. I'd be all for what you suggest above IF I had any confidence that we would make the strategic mindset shift necessary to build the Navy that such a posture describes. I will not hold my breath.
I think good people with well-meaning intentions can disagree on this point. I love me some Rota & Naples … and Japan ain’t that bad either … but on principal and acknowledging the reality of distance, in 2024 USN ships should not be stationed in ports where our allies should have their ships build and funded by a properly capitalized navy. Deployed and staged to combined facilities on a rotational basis as exercises & real-world contingencies demand? Sure, that’s great. Permanently stationed until the crack of doom? No.
CDR, Since you mentioned Europe and Japan, I did the math. At a 20-year reproduction age (fairly typical for military personnel) the great-great-grandsons of the post-WWII occupying forces are now stationed in Europe and Japan. Do 5 generations of U.S. forces on foreign soil suggest that we might be an empire?
Edited to add: Even as I write this, a 6th generation of U.S. citizens (young military dependents) are growing up in Europe and Japan.
Now that I think of it, my Mom, with no trace of irony or self-consciousness, always referred to the foreign-born Moms in our stateside neighborhood (just outside an Army base in the 1950s) as "war brides." They were young women from England, France, and Germany who married U.S. GI's. Was that possibly also an aspect of empire? I'm not suggesting empire was ever part of the plan, but the past 80 years might resemble an empire, depending on perspective.
We have a pretty good maintenance situation in Japan. Could dry dock a carrier until they were CVN size. Value per dollar there is real good.
Flying the ships reminds me of when he navy was thinking about using Traadewinds seaplanes as transports and tankers for Seamaster nuclear bombers. Makes me think investing in a real seaplane has a place in DMO and not just search and rescue and special ops.
If we had an adequately sized navy, maybe we could homeport some outside the US. But, the fact of the matter is that we do not have enough warships and it appears as if we lack the ability to build more.
You covered so much ground that I felt I was rereading both Herodotus and Thucydides.
Here are the strategic mistakes I think we made for which we are now paying dearly:
1. We ignored Tiananmen Square and welcome China as a partner in the global economy.
2. We proclaimed a New World Order, but failed to reach out to Russia following the implosion of the USSR and treated her like Germany at Versailles.
3. We proclaimed that history had ended, but ignored the threat from radical Islam despite Somalia, USS Cole, Khobar Tower, bombing of African embassies and the first attack on the WTC.
Now, combine our strategic mistakes with open borders, climate change and the Marxist DEI CRT claptrap and you end up having a ship heading toward Niagara all engines ahead full.
I actually think we did almost the opposite of #2, in continuing to coddle Russia and encouraging their pretensions of still being a Great Power.
It's not surprising in retrospect, and I even agreed with the idea at the time that a Russia freed from communism could become a free democratic partner of the West. In retrospect we underestimated the poverty of Russian culture, which *never* had any traditions of democracy that could be re-cultivated. They more or less went straight from autocracy to communism, and it shouldn't have been a surprise they quickly went straight back to autocracy.
Poverty of Russian culture like Tolstoy, Chekov, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mendeleev, Stravinsky, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, ...
Between 1914 and 1945, Russia was devastated by war, civil war, purges, etc. and yet somehow emerged as a great power. It seems that is what is happening once again.
What pretentions are we suffering from? The idea that we can impose our way of life on the rest of the world. How well did Pride Month work out in Kabul?
The Russian people had no concept of freedom or how to deal with that responsibility. They had been mainly serfs under the Czars for hundreds of years - kings and warlords before that - and then were essentially serfs or apparatchiks under Communism. But they certainly never had to deal with choices in their life - beyond the limited number allowed by their systems. Suddenly they were thrust into a democracy, and laissez faire capitalist economy (that the Oligarchs certainly took advantage of) and had no way to deal with that. They didn't have a bunch of Founding Fathers, nor were they already philosophically on board with John Locke, Montesquieu and were far removed from the Enlightenment and the Austrian School of Economics!
We needed to help them through that, but we didn't - except for businesses taking advantage where they could. Hence, a significant number of folks wanted Communism back to tell them what to do and a bunch more were/are happy with a strong man doing the same at the head of a bunch of criminals and Oligarchs.
So what about all the Warsaw pact nations? How did they make the cut of western cultural values but the Russians didn’t? Every former Warsaw pact member of government alive today had a parent or family member or even served themselves as part of the apparatchik. Why do they get a pass on capacity and capability to think western while the Russians are toadies and barbarians?
I actually think there's an answer to that. Pretty much all the other nations of Central and Eastern Europe had *some* liberal traditions, and within the lifetimes of people who were still alive in 1989. Unlearning the communist-era ways wasn't easy (and in some ways the process remains ongoing), but there was a fairly well-known alternative in living memory.
Well, Poland (as an example) had been rebelling against Communism for some time, for instance, with their Solidarity movement prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those Eastern European countries didn't willingly join the USSR, they were dragooned, claimed, appropriated by the USSR after WWII....they didn't choose it. They also had somewhat of a history of evolving democratically and economically before and through WWI to WWII...especially between the wars. So they were a different "cat" than the Soviets in Russia going straight from the Czars to the Communists after 1918. So they had some ideological basis and yearnings toward a free society.
In many ways, the Warsaw Pact satellites had already started to devolve from the USSR due to Western influences, economics, etc. So they were better prepared and, once the rapprochement with the West was underway, we did substantially help them, guide them, and absorb many into the West/NATO.
The same can't be said for Russia writ large - and, of course, they were the reason we HAD NATO, so they weren't joining THAT. But we really didn't do enough to help Russia navigate establishing lasting governmental, democratic institutions built along with the separation of powers envisioned by Montesquieu that we adopted in the US.
I would add that this situation is not unique to Russia. Europe is very much the same, to a lesser extent, as they evolved substantially after WWII. The ancestral monarchies of Europe were deposed, but they merely devolved into a bureaucratic state after WWI/WWII where Aristocrats were replaced with the Elites (many part of those same Aristocratic families) in Europe and the people are relegated to lesser roles (if their families aren't historically part of that elite system) - doing what they are told and serving the government.
That is why socialism/communism is still so huge with the left in Europe. They have governments that have people not people who have a government. They want government to take care of them through a nanny state. There is no real system or hierarchy of rising up to higher levels based on ones own talents and skills - there are more than glass ceilings.
Even Britain, with their long history of parliamentary government, is subject to these socialistic forces - and is really still a government that has people, with their many restrictions on rights and limitations on advancements vs a meritocracy.
To some extent, this outlook has infected OUR government too as many in our government feel the same way - they see themselves as a political class that you can only enter if your family/contacts are FROM that class, through family, connections, the right schools, etc. That is why they object so much to outsiders and "amateurs" interfering with "their" policies - even if they are elected as President.
So these tendencies toward strong men and nanny states exist even in the West, in the US, and are only checked by our system of government and our economic system - the checks and balances built into our system and Constitution which was fashioned based on the principles of the Enlightenment and still guides and protects us.
But, of course, we can still vote ourselves into the same predicament of our own free will. Even WITH our deep history as the only truly democratic Republic to survive this long. So the Russian people really had very little chance when they went from massive control by government to deciding things for themselves - they were not historically, emotionally, philosophically, ideologically, or intellectually prepared to make that transition.
The haphazard dissolution of the Soviet Union mucked a lot of things up. Western Europe leaders were more interested in looking after their current fiefdoms than they were about insisting that lands taken by the USSR were restored. Sure Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania got their pre Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact borders pretty much restored but what about the Constitutional Monarchy of Romania or the Polish Republic? What about the damage done to the Romanian and Polish peoples left to the mercies of their new Soviets and culturally (and most time physically) scrubbed out of existence by Stalin?
True, but moving forward is/was easier than putting all of that toothpaste back in the tube. The problem today, as we see in Ukraine, is that Russia (at least Putin and his crowd) sees those former, temporary satellites that were appropriated by the USSR, as historical territorial possessions to BE regained rather than the "prizes of war" that Stalin claimed. Ukraine being, perhaps, the greatest exception as Russia was born there in the first place.
> what about the Constitutional Monarchy of Romania
To be fair, the Romanian royal family was a German royal house that was parachuted in because during the late 19th century constitutional monarchy was the "respectable" form of government.
IIRC, Alexander Solzhenitsyn thought Russia would do best under a constitutional monarchy. As a temporary measure, to buy the time needed to grow more democratic institutions.
In hindsight I think some of our optimism was tied to their lingering religious community and that wasn't a trustworthy partner in bringing Russian society ahead either. We should have seen that one coming rather than listen to some Reagan constituents as much as Reagan did.
That’s why America had a war for independence and not a revolution—over decades we had developed representative democracy while the British ignored us and then one day they wanted to tax us to pay for their wars. We just wanted to return things to the way they were in which we governed ourselves.
We did not treat Russia like Germany at Versailles.
Germany was required to disarm, to make territorial concessions, to extradite alleged war criminals, to agree to Kaiser Wilhelm being put on trial, and to recognize the independence of states whose territory had previously been part of the German Empire. Worse, she was required pay reparations to the Entente powers, IN AN AMOUNT SHE COULDN'T PAY.
When making historical analogies, accuracy counts.
After Napoleon was defeated, the Allies made every effort to bring France back into Europe and there was relative peace for a century
After WWI, Germany was to be punished and the result was another war.
After the collapse of the USSR, we reneged on our promise not to expand NATO and we saw Russia as a place to strip mine. We even tried to turn the Black Sea into a NATO lake.
You may take my analogy or not, but that is where I leave it. Bye.
I can't disagree with your list of mistakes, but I do find it lacking. May I be so bold as to add a couple?
The passage of the 17th Amendment tops my list. That set the stage for my second suggestion. Allowing FDR to singlehandedly create what has become the 4th branch of government, the administrative state.
The uniparty we have because of the 17th amendment seems to be more interested in maintaining the status quo than trying to clean up the mess they step in every day...
16, 17, and 18 were the death knell of our erstwhile Republic. Although 18 was repealed, the idea that the Federal government could outlaw a common chemical that had been consumed for 10,000 years, and the military-like forces constituted to enforce that ban, never went away.
Since females have the legal right to vote in every country, why only Western countries? Two U.S. states allowed women to vote even before New Zealand became the first "nation" to officially enfranchise females.
Feminism hasn’t polluted non-Western countries in any significant way. That’s why “Passport Bros,” men going abroad for wives, is a thing. No thinking man wants a Western, more particularly, an American wife who will just shit on him, dye her hair purple, get fat, refuse to BE a wife, then initiate a divorce (70% by women), take his savings, home, kids, future salary…
Randy Bachman was right decades ago when he wrote “American Woman.”
My view is pretty simple. There's going to be a war between NATO and Muscovy in the next decade or so. I'd actually say there already is such a war, but everyone's pretending there isn't for varied reasons.
The question is whether we'd prefer that war to be in Poland or Lithuania or Finland, or The War of the Russian Succession, over whether Muscovy can continue to subjugate its imperial subjects indefinitely.
I regretfully agree. I say "regretfully" because I do not want my grandchildren to be drafted into a war forced upon us by the Russian oligarchy. But then, my grandparents were probably pretty pissed off at having their sons dragged into WW2 by foreign aggression.
The difference is that the current generation of American veterans is willing and able to blow up a local draft board or 2 if someone tries to Shanghai their kids to go fight Russia.
Not necessarily, but it's that potential that regretfully means NATO will have to be involved, since that risk will likely be lower than that of a bunch of post-Russian warlords gaining control of nuclear weapons to do who-knows-what.
(An alternative risk consideration I don't see many people talk about - partly because any known details would be highly classified - is what the *actual* state of the Strategic Rocket Forces is. Have they been able to maintain their elite and presumed-incorruptible status, or have their rocket and guidance components been replaced with the equivalent of discount Chinese truck tires?)
A valid point, but I'm not sure the equivalence is there. Most of the ground force leaders had experience with chemical weapons, likely hated them viscerally, and possibility didn't see them as a true tactical advantage.
There are plenty of people who've never seen any kind of combat working at think tanks or in government who might see a nuclear attack in a more positive light.
Even if not "nuclear" we can expect some extended power outages. It is optimistic to think Chinese, Persians, and various Islamists are the only likely adversaries to have forces already established here in ConUS. Of course, we might respond to such an attack in an energetic fashion.
A strong supporter of NATO all my adult life, I was convinced by the 1990s we should stop basing forces (SOF excepted) in Europe (Iceland might be an exception with permission). We have dangerously few response forces. We also should base some of them on Taiwan - as we did long ago.
Ian Easton of the 1049 Institute says I have that right.
I agree with everything you said, Sal. I’ve been of a similar mindset since the early 90s. A part of it is simply the common mindset of Americans, who historically have been pretty anti-interventionist (I like that term better than “isolationist,” thanks for pointing it out.) in “the great game” that the empires liked to play. Looking back through the years, it appears most of our foreign war activities tend to have started under the Democrat Party. Methinks that party likes what they see in Europe a tad too much.
Wow...a tour de force, Commander. A lot to agree with, some to niggle with over the details, some areas of disagreement. Definitely smart to bleed Russia in Ukraine while we can - as they did (along with China) by funneling resources to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan to keep us busy, bleed our resources, sow strife, and take our eye off the ball (also NK, North Vietnam, and ME terrorists since the KGB started training them in the 60s).
In general, we have to be more nimble with our forces. Yes, we can have basing agreements, but we need to bring forces home or closer to home and then do exercises with our forces - keep them moving around, in and out, ready to coordinate. But moving, not stationary, targets. Don't fall into routine that puts you in easy targeting of missiles. I'd say we need a robust reactionary force that can be quickly brought into action on the land, but generally we need a Navy to guard those ocean moats (best investment in our own security) and a long-range strike capability in our air arms. The B-21 goes a long way in this regard in conjunction with an appropriate weapons suite. We can support our allies with stand off capabilities that both deter our adversaries and, in the event of war, will effectively blunt and destroy their forces at a reduced hazard to our own forces.
A good example is the AIM 174-B variant of the SM-6, giving our legacy aircraft (Hornets) an air-to-air missile with hundreds of miles of range. Combining this with forward deployed stealth platforms/ISR, it enables those planes to fly outside opponents missile and radar range, fire missiles, and have the AIM 174-B guided in by those other assets...quite the force multiplier and, given the speed and range, quite the deterrent against China. That is, as long as we keep those assets within operating range of Taiwan - which means being deployed in the region and having bases to operate from with allies. They just have to be mobile or in a position to avoid first-strike elimination and/or have the ability to rapidly move to the FEBA. Just an example.
Likewise the LRSM-ER with the B-21. Get enough in the air and you can run multiple sorties and launch hundreds to thousands of these semi-stealthy anti-ship missiles at an invasion fleet in the Taiwan Strait. No Naval fleet, China isn't much of a threat to Taiwan - or at least not a chance they would want to take. It complicates things and deters them.
Requires production of these capabilities as a priority, of course, but we are heading in that direction. Not optimal, but could be an effective stop gap until we get the rest figured out.
In the end, though, all of that comes down to leadership as you observe, and as I stated in these comments a couple of weeks ago (if I may say). So we agree. Be mobile. Make enemies unsure....keep them guessing. Reform our reputation in the world to return to the ideal of that shining city on the hill - holding a big hammer if we HAVE to use it, but willing to talk, help, and support where we can.
I served in the Cold War, Desert Storm and the GWOT. I was once an ideological zealot of the American way. I had my epiphany when after coming home from the summer 2001 post 9/11 deployment (we were the first to respond and conduct attacks) after punitively and righteously avenging our nation for the 9/11 attack. I was having a conversation with the new captain of the CVN getting prepared for work ups and my time was running out as one of the last TAO’s from the last deployment. We had been getting a steady diet of desensitization / “intel” and drum beating for the case to go war with Iraq. A case that even Stevie Wonder could see was going to be the wrong war and the wrong fight for us. Yet the drum beat continued. My Skipper was trying to convince me to “sail with me to go fight Saddam!” He had missed the 9/11 deployment and wanted to get his bonafides in for the flag board. I simply said “no thanks Captain, I have had enough war”. He approved my detachment. I could see the second and even the third order effects we are possessed with. I have seen shipmates lose their children in the GWOT. Yes the war went long enough that parents served in that war and their children grew up and enlisted and some killed in battle only to have our government pull the old Lucy and the football trick and bailout after declaring “victory”. So forgive me for not supporting our neo imperial wars.
Regarding Ukraine:
I can’t see Russia in the same light as Nazi Germany in your question of abandonment of Britain. Russia isn’t the same nation or government it was in the Soviet Union. The opportunities we missed in the 90’s and 00’s to truly forge relationships with Russia both militarily and economically shouldn’t be downplayed. We screwed the pooch on that.
I don’t see Russia as the existential threat the west makes it out to be. I see a nation worried about an encroaching NATO (which goes against the very principles you lay out Phib about the standing army and all). I see retarded western “leadership” literally poking the nuclear armed Russia. I see Russia having zero faith in the motivations and credibility of what any western nation says. I see the second order effects of what this will look like if it continues. Your pull quote “ In such an aftermath, Central and Eastern European NATO will be under renewed pressure by a more confident Russia. USA & Western standing in the world will be compromised going into mid-century, ” is the actual proverbial Gordian Knot. You can say the same thing about how Russia views a potential loss to the West, encroached borders by NATO at Finland and Sweden and Poland all have and will lead an emboldened NATO won’t make the world any less safe or more safe than a Russian victory. NATO is suffering from a psychosis of hubris. Regarding the Ukraine people and their motivations for defending or not defending, I must point out the large number of military aged males who fled Ukraine. The literal press gangs of Ukraine police rounding them up to go fight. Sure the same could be said about our draft dodgers during the Vietnam War but Ukraine isn’t and never was a nation like the United States. The facts that many westerners gloss over or outright dismiss disingenuously, is Ukraine shares culturally and genetically more with Russia than the Western Europe nations. We can’t defeat that. Much of Russian Humint is provided by Ukrainians. Ukraine is losing this war. I know that will cause apoplectic responses from a few here but I was never a go along with the crowd to go along guy.
As I have stated firmly, I don’t believe this is our war. We are culpable in the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Ukrainians and the tens of thousands of deaths of Russians by our indirect and direct involvement. When this fight is over, both Russia and Ukraine will hug and dance and will then, when sober, blame the west and in particular the United States for the loss of generations of Ukrainians. We contribute at our own peril. BTW: all of the former Warsaw Pact nations that joined NATO, suffer from the same accusations made against Russia; Imperialistic ambitions, control over the population, limited freedoms and power. They just simply hide it better under the auspices of the WEF and Davos but make no mistake they are as or more dangerous than Russia.
Regarding China:
We are out of time. This has and will be our existential threat. We are bleeding our bunkers of our ammunition, we are wearing out our forces and our weapons and we are not a serious nation knowing the existential threat we face from China and yet our “leadership”, yes the same ones goading us into the fight in Ukraine, dithers and plays away the day. China is the threat.
So If we want Europe to lead, then we need to get out of the way. Leadership will occur as a result of our vacuum. Let it. We need to focus to the west.
So I would say using your criteria of your original opening salvo I am in the prioritizer camp. But much more than that, I am a realist and deeply love our republic and can see that sometimes the best way to win a game (Ukraine vs Russia) is simply not play.
It’s hard to distill into a comprehensible paragraph. Each are different and each have different motives and outcomes and opportunities. You can be against one war and be clear headed about and prepare and support another. It’s pragmatic. I see it for what I believe it to be. Russia isn’t the enemy. China is.
As a general statement, Americans are generous people. The problem is that some of them are most generous when they are doling out treasure they did not earn. We see that on the Left in the form of open borders and welfare checks freely given without regard to the capability of work. We see that on the Right, at least among neocon Congresscritters who throw our money and young people at wars we should not be a part of. Once again, the U.S. has half-heartedly entered a war without a well-defined definition of the end game. The war in Ukraine could be resolved this very week if the Ukrainian government could be convinced to accept a new eastern boundary and were promised NATO membership based on that new line - with the full backing of all current NATO members to defend that line with great prejudice.
As Sal notes, we are at our best when we live up to the role of mercantile republic, not that of a quasi-empire.
I think our "right" and "left" congress critters (an apt term if ever there was one) are generally all on the government team and try to fund raise off one thing or another that scares the people. I aw a comment the other day that expresses the thoughts of most of them:
They'd unplug a constituent's life support just to charge their cell phone.
"Containment" was the geoplotical strategy whose objective was to keep the Soviets in check until, as Kennan understood, the contradictions inherent in the soviet brand of socialism would eventually lead to its collapse. NATO was the military arm whose aim was to deter war, or if war broke out, to stop the soviet advance.
NATO was consequently formed as a defensive alliance. But, when the USSR collapsed (Kennan provide right), NATO nations (led in large part by the Clinton admin) decided the best way to prevent a Russian resurgence was to push NATO boundaries east. In a way understandable, but also arrogant. And NATO failed (or was indifferent to) looking at that expansion through Russian (note, not soviet) eyes.
And so NATO (and the EU) became the offensive vanguard of the liberal "New World Order." The alliance transitioned from a defensive to an offensive/imperial mission (see AFG). However, as the NWO moved east, even albeit altruistically, the Russians did not view it as such.
So we ought to consider the Russian invasion of UKR as a response to the west encroaching on the last line of Russia's sphere of influence. The annexation of Crimea, IMHO, was the first step in creating a new buffer against the west. And yet NATO continues marching east. I'm not in the camp that believes that Putin, even had he been successfull in cutting of Kiev, was planning on restablishing the old Warsaw Pact. The eastern European cointries which joined NATO are now covered under Article V. Perhaps the failed attempt to take Kiev, was a feint to create another (and the last) buffer in eastern UKR.
I any event, given how the lines have solidified, combined with significant Russian losses over the last years, I do not see evidence that the Russians have the capability now, or even in the future, to push west, even though that's what we're being fed as a reason to keep this war going.
To bring UKR into NATO would only further enable Russia's historical paranoia of the west. The current buffer in eastern Ukraine, to me, is Putin's last line. Threatening it puts us closer to nuclear exchange than we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Rather than poking the bear and putting us all in extremis, perhaps it's time to recognize the limits of globalism, and seek an end to this war. It will suck for UKR, as that would mean permitting the Russian buffer in the east. (Although it can be argued that the eastern poritons of the country are probably more Russian than Ukrainian). Trade NATO membership for Russian guarantees (yeah, I know, what's a Russian guarantee worth?) to not push west. Construct defenses in eastern UKR that would make a Russian offensive too costrly to mount. Build a UKR army and air force (tough sledding; you have to wean out the old soviet influnces in UKR high command) that can deter any further attempts by the Russians to push the buffer west.
I understand I'm clinging to a Realist School paradigm. Call me old fashioned, but I still believe the world is an anarchic place; strong nation states bully the weak. Weak nation states understandably look to the strong for help, yet do not see (or care) about the larger geostrategic consequences. As a superpower, and leading a formidable (and nuclear-armed) alliance, it's imperative that we help, but not at the expense of creating conditions where the strong wind up in direct conflict with each other.
1. Bring the armies home. Station them HERE for training, and then demobilize them into the Reserves.
2. Rebuild the Navy, with real ships. Reclaim obvious Navy bases like Mare Island.
3. Rebuild American ship-building functions. Build our own merchant vessels.
4. More fundamentally, get back to a federal government based on the Constitution. 95% of the Federal government is unconstitutional, and needs to be restrained to the 18 enumerated powers of Article 1, Section 8. Devolve other issues like education and health care to the States, which should have been doing that stuff all along.
CDR Sal, I salute your honesty and detailed recounting of your relatively constant positions on the interests of our nation, and how our leaders in government, DoD (part of the government but very task specific) and industry (defense related and more) SHOULD behave to "support" those interests. Interests of the governed and those who govern can be difficult to discern, and sadly, don't always align as they should. When those who govern also control the levers of accountability, the constraints on them behaving in their own interests vs. those of the nation vanish. That seems to be where we are now. Hard to have accountability for failure when those who failed investigate themselves and find no fault worth mentioning. That can range from petty accounting errors and money finding its way into private accounts to massive acquisition failures to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. This has happened in past and current administrations. Looking to the future, lacking any meaningful systemic changes, things are not rosy.
The idea that Ukraine is a democracy or that it is fighting for its survival or that the United States has any interest in its survival is as big a lie as the Bush/neocon claims that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Ukraine is a corrupt post Soviet dictatorship, the current regime of which was installed by the CIA and George Soros controlled NGOs, and which depends for its existence on neoNazi volunteer battalions. It's fight is not an existential one, but rather a will to dominate and oppress the ethnic Russian oblasts east of the Dnieper that Comrade Kruschev transferred from the Russian Soviet Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic 70 years ago for reasons that have never been articulated. As for the idea that the West has established some sacrosanct norm that countries don't get to change their borders by force of arms anymore, I would kindly refer you to the Republic of Serbia regarding its thoughts on NATO and the Republic of Kosovo. Finally, NATO was created to deter and combat the worldwide revolutionary communist movement. There are now more communists in the French parliament or a typical Ivy League institution than in all of Moscow--what the hell does NATO give us, the American people?
This "corruption" nonsense is parroting Russian propaganda. How is Ukraine any different from Florida. We are as "corrupt" as Ukraine. And, why does "corruption" mean that a nation is not entitled to territorial integrity? Ukraine is a a sovereign state, corrupt or not. She has a right to defend her borders and all territory in them from another state.
Russia is an enemy of the US. If Ukraine wants to bleed Russia, then give her a blank check.
Maybe, just maybe, the reason the Iraq and Afghan veterans are pissed off is because of unAmerican assholes like you who accuse them of being Russian trolls every time they express an opinion at odds with the DC foreign policy consensus. I bet you still believe in Russian election interference, too?
Imagine reading a report that claimed that a foreign intelligence agency tried to influence the outcome of a US Presidential race by spending a million dollars or so to advertise Looney Toons memes on social media and to use 2 year old malware available to anyone on the dark web to hack and dump Debbie Wasserman Schultz's emails and saying to yourself afterwards, "yeah that sounds like something an actual intelligence agency would do and not like the ramblings of a deranged, fabulist retard." Even Mueller wasn't willing to defend his report when given the chance--pretending to have dementia any time a Republican asked him questions during his Congressional testimony. But thank you for identifying yourself as someone who should not be taken seriously.
So anti-American that I volunteered to serve as a commissioned officer in the United States Army Infantry in the years after 9/11. How was your Afghan tour, Tom?
Eloquent as usual, and I agree with most of it. On Ukraine I put it much more simply, as is my usual want.
"We will end up with in war with a group of allied nations consisting of the PRC, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, plus lesser players. It is inevitable, unless we make them unable to conduct the war. It's not that we want war, but they want what they want, and we stand in the way of that.
The only way we keep this war from coming is to make ourselves too damn scary to try and move, and them too weak to attempt the effort. Every Russian soldier, every Russian tank, bomb or missile that Ukraine destroys is one less that we have to face. Even if in the end Ukraine loses, if they bleed Russia white in the doing, it's a good thing."
Well that's nonsense. The only reason "we" have to fight such an alliance is that we cut off Russia from the world financial system so that they had to form an alliance with Communist China. Putin isn't a communist and he damn sure doesn't like playing second fiddle to anyone; any reasonably intelligent diplomat or intelligence operative would be trying to separate the Sino-Russia alliance and ally with Russia against the communists. Unfortunately, the West doesn't have any of those.
Mark, you're naive. Putin may not be a communist (dictators know no true ideology) but he is a Russian. Russia has never been happy unless they have a LOT of buffer states between them and the world.
We tried to "separate the Sino-Russia alliance" once before. Maybe you're old enough to remember, but probably not.
That was the Nixon/Kissinger plan. "Lets bring the PRC into the 20th century, and make them our friends, thus separating them from the USSR." Do you remember this, or were you still a babe in arms?
How did that work for us? Oh wait, I know the answer, NOT WORTH A SHIT.
Russia and China both want a world where they can take what ever they damn well please. It's not that they are natural allies, they're not. Eventually, if they win, they will fight it out between themselves. That won't matter to us, because we will be dead, or a client state.
Russia and the PRC are much like IJ and Nazi Germany. If those guys had won, they would eventually have gone to blows. They were not natural allies, as each thought the other one was subhuman. That didn't keep them from being allies against the democracies now did it?
Read the Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union, written by Edward Luttwak in 1982. By that date the Sino-Soviet border had gone from largely undefended to requiring over 80 Soviet Tank and Motorized Rifle Divisions, with a commensurate number of aviation assets. Almost 1/3rd of Soviet Combat power was unavailable to the Warsaw Pact because it had to defend Siberia from a fellow communist nation. But yeah, "NOT WORTH A SHIT." OK, boomer.
Nixon's "grand strategy" got us where we are today, with the PRC quite probably able to push us back across the dateline, and end up owning a resurgent "South East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." OK Millennial it's your kids that are going to do the dying.
Maybe if the Bushes hadn't pretended that the Cold War was won and the PRC wasn't really communist, America could have shifted it's efforts to containing them instead of shipping all of our manufacturing capacity over to the communists.
As usual, Sal, a ton of wisdom. But we will always disagree on this language young Sal wrote and old Sal hasn't repudiated: " We should not have any of our naval forces based in the ports of foreign nations, on a permanent basis." If we could fly ships forward and place them in the water where we want them, I'd be more sympathetic to this. But we can't. And so if we wish to tend to our traditional mercantilist knitting, we will have naval power forward. Having some of it based forward is a compromise with cost, as a Navy able to do the things we need it to do (or we think we need it to do) doing those things solely as a cruising force (without any forward based structure) would be decidedly bigger and more expensive than the force we have. I'd be all for what you suggest above IF I had any confidence that we would make the strategic mindset shift necessary to build the Navy that such a posture describes. I will not hold my breath.
I think good people with well-meaning intentions can disagree on this point. I love me some Rota & Naples … and Japan ain’t that bad either … but on principal and acknowledging the reality of distance, in 2024 USN ships should not be stationed in ports where our allies should have their ships build and funded by a properly capitalized navy. Deployed and staged to combined facilities on a rotational basis as exercises & real-world contingencies demand? Sure, that’s great. Permanently stationed until the crack of doom? No.
CDR, Since you mentioned Europe and Japan, I did the math. At a 20-year reproduction age (fairly typical for military personnel) the great-great-grandsons of the post-WWII occupying forces are now stationed in Europe and Japan. Do 5 generations of U.S. forces on foreign soil suggest that we might be an empire?
Edited to add: Even as I write this, a 6th generation of U.S. citizens (young military dependents) are growing up in Europe and Japan.
Now that I think of it, my Mom, with no trace of irony or self-consciousness, always referred to the foreign-born Moms in our stateside neighborhood (just outside an Army base in the 1950s) as "war brides." They were young women from England, France, and Germany who married U.S. GI's. Was that possibly also an aspect of empire? I'm not suggesting empire was ever part of the plan, but the past 80 years might resemble an empire, depending on perspective.
Well, we do get top tier maintenance on those ships in Japan, which we rarely do in CONUS.
We have a pretty good maintenance situation in Japan. Could dry dock a carrier until they were CVN size. Value per dollar there is real good.
Flying the ships reminds me of when he navy was thinking about using Traadewinds seaplanes as transports and tankers for Seamaster nuclear bombers. Makes me think investing in a real seaplane has a place in DMO and not just search and rescue and special ops.
If we had an adequately sized navy, maybe we could homeport some outside the US. But, the fact of the matter is that we do not have enough warships and it appears as if we lack the ability to build more.
"....If we could fly ships forward and place them in the water where we want them,...."
Hey! whata we got here..... a potential convert? heh heh!
yep, we got ya......AIRSHIPS my friend! (well, as an ADDITION to the fleet)
CDR Sal,
You covered so much ground that I felt I was rereading both Herodotus and Thucydides.
Here are the strategic mistakes I think we made for which we are now paying dearly:
1. We ignored Tiananmen Square and welcome China as a partner in the global economy.
2. We proclaimed a New World Order, but failed to reach out to Russia following the implosion of the USSR and treated her like Germany at Versailles.
3. We proclaimed that history had ended, but ignored the threat from radical Islam despite Somalia, USS Cole, Khobar Tower, bombing of African embassies and the first attack on the WTC.
Now, combine our strategic mistakes with open borders, climate change and the Marxist DEI CRT claptrap and you end up having a ship heading toward Niagara all engines ahead full.
I actually think we did almost the opposite of #2, in continuing to coddle Russia and encouraging their pretensions of still being a Great Power.
It's not surprising in retrospect, and I even agreed with the idea at the time that a Russia freed from communism could become a free democratic partner of the West. In retrospect we underestimated the poverty of Russian culture, which *never* had any traditions of democracy that could be re-cultivated. They more or less went straight from autocracy to communism, and it shouldn't have been a surprise they quickly went straight back to autocracy.
Poverty of Russian culture like Tolstoy, Chekov, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mendeleev, Stravinsky, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, ...
Between 1914 and 1945, Russia was devastated by war, civil war, purges, etc. and yet somehow emerged as a great power. It seems that is what is happening once again.
What pretentions are we suffering from? The idea that we can impose our way of life on the rest of the world. How well did Pride Month work out in Kabul?
The Russian people had no concept of freedom or how to deal with that responsibility. They had been mainly serfs under the Czars for hundreds of years - kings and warlords before that - and then were essentially serfs or apparatchiks under Communism. But they certainly never had to deal with choices in their life - beyond the limited number allowed by their systems. Suddenly they were thrust into a democracy, and laissez faire capitalist economy (that the Oligarchs certainly took advantage of) and had no way to deal with that. They didn't have a bunch of Founding Fathers, nor were they already philosophically on board with John Locke, Montesquieu and were far removed from the Enlightenment and the Austrian School of Economics!
We needed to help them through that, but we didn't - except for businesses taking advantage where they could. Hence, a significant number of folks wanted Communism back to tell them what to do and a bunch more were/are happy with a strong man doing the same at the head of a bunch of criminals and Oligarchs.
So what about all the Warsaw pact nations? How did they make the cut of western cultural values but the Russians didn’t? Every former Warsaw pact member of government alive today had a parent or family member or even served themselves as part of the apparatchik. Why do they get a pass on capacity and capability to think western while the Russians are toadies and barbarians?
I actually think there's an answer to that. Pretty much all the other nations of Central and Eastern Europe had *some* liberal traditions, and within the lifetimes of people who were still alive in 1989. Unlearning the communist-era ways wasn't easy (and in some ways the process remains ongoing), but there was a fairly well-known alternative in living memory.
Well, Poland (as an example) had been rebelling against Communism for some time, for instance, with their Solidarity movement prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those Eastern European countries didn't willingly join the USSR, they were dragooned, claimed, appropriated by the USSR after WWII....they didn't choose it. They also had somewhat of a history of evolving democratically and economically before and through WWI to WWII...especially between the wars. So they were a different "cat" than the Soviets in Russia going straight from the Czars to the Communists after 1918. So they had some ideological basis and yearnings toward a free society.
In many ways, the Warsaw Pact satellites had already started to devolve from the USSR due to Western influences, economics, etc. So they were better prepared and, once the rapprochement with the West was underway, we did substantially help them, guide them, and absorb many into the West/NATO.
The same can't be said for Russia writ large - and, of course, they were the reason we HAD NATO, so they weren't joining THAT. But we really didn't do enough to help Russia navigate establishing lasting governmental, democratic institutions built along with the separation of powers envisioned by Montesquieu that we adopted in the US.
I would add that this situation is not unique to Russia. Europe is very much the same, to a lesser extent, as they evolved substantially after WWII. The ancestral monarchies of Europe were deposed, but they merely devolved into a bureaucratic state after WWI/WWII where Aristocrats were replaced with the Elites (many part of those same Aristocratic families) in Europe and the people are relegated to lesser roles (if their families aren't historically part of that elite system) - doing what they are told and serving the government.
That is why socialism/communism is still so huge with the left in Europe. They have governments that have people not people who have a government. They want government to take care of them through a nanny state. There is no real system or hierarchy of rising up to higher levels based on ones own talents and skills - there are more than glass ceilings.
Even Britain, with their long history of parliamentary government, is subject to these socialistic forces - and is really still a government that has people, with their many restrictions on rights and limitations on advancements vs a meritocracy.
To some extent, this outlook has infected OUR government too as many in our government feel the same way - they see themselves as a political class that you can only enter if your family/contacts are FROM that class, through family, connections, the right schools, etc. That is why they object so much to outsiders and "amateurs" interfering with "their" policies - even if they are elected as President.
So these tendencies toward strong men and nanny states exist even in the West, in the US, and are only checked by our system of government and our economic system - the checks and balances built into our system and Constitution which was fashioned based on the principles of the Enlightenment and still guides and protects us.
But, of course, we can still vote ourselves into the same predicament of our own free will. Even WITH our deep history as the only truly democratic Republic to survive this long. So the Russian people really had very little chance when they went from massive control by government to deciding things for themselves - they were not historically, emotionally, philosophically, ideologically, or intellectually prepared to make that transition.
While I don’t agree will all of what you posted, I appreciate your time in creating it.
The haphazard dissolution of the Soviet Union mucked a lot of things up. Western Europe leaders were more interested in looking after their current fiefdoms than they were about insisting that lands taken by the USSR were restored. Sure Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania got their pre Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact borders pretty much restored but what about the Constitutional Monarchy of Romania or the Polish Republic? What about the damage done to the Romanian and Polish peoples left to the mercies of their new Soviets and culturally (and most time physically) scrubbed out of existence by Stalin?
True, but moving forward is/was easier than putting all of that toothpaste back in the tube. The problem today, as we see in Ukraine, is that Russia (at least Putin and his crowd) sees those former, temporary satellites that were appropriated by the USSR, as historical territorial possessions to BE regained rather than the "prizes of war" that Stalin claimed. Ukraine being, perhaps, the greatest exception as Russia was born there in the first place.
> what about the Constitutional Monarchy of Romania
To be fair, the Romanian royal family was a German royal house that was parachuted in because during the late 19th century constitutional monarchy was the "respectable" form of government.
IIRC, Alexander Solzhenitsyn thought Russia would do best under a constitutional monarchy. As a temporary measure, to buy the time needed to grow more democratic institutions.
In hindsight I think some of our optimism was tied to their lingering religious community and that wasn't a trustworthy partner in bringing Russian society ahead either. We should have seen that one coming rather than listen to some Reagan constituents as much as Reagan did.
That’s why America had a war for independence and not a revolution—over decades we had developed representative democracy while the British ignored us and then one day they wanted to tax us to pay for their wars. We just wanted to return things to the way they were in which we governed ourselves.
We did not treat Russia like Germany at Versailles.
Germany was required to disarm, to make territorial concessions, to extradite alleged war criminals, to agree to Kaiser Wilhelm being put on trial, and to recognize the independence of states whose territory had previously been part of the German Empire. Worse, she was required pay reparations to the Entente powers, IN AN AMOUNT SHE COULDN'T PAY.
When making historical analogies, accuracy counts.
I think you missed my point.
I assumed your point was invalid because your analogy was so far wrong.
It wasn't wrong. You are merely mired in details.
After Napoleon was defeated, the Allies made every effort to bring France back into Europe and there was relative peace for a century
After WWI, Germany was to be punished and the result was another war.
After the collapse of the USSR, we reneged on our promise not to expand NATO and we saw Russia as a place to strip mine. We even tried to turn the Black Sea into a NATO lake.
You may take my analogy or not, but that is where I leave it. Bye.
We did not punish Russia. The Europeans punished Germany. It was a bad analogy. As Adams said, "facts are stubborn things."
I can't disagree with your list of mistakes, but I do find it lacking. May I be so bold as to add a couple?
The passage of the 17th Amendment tops my list. That set the stage for my second suggestion. Allowing FDR to singlehandedly create what has become the 4th branch of government, the administrative state.
The uniparty we have because of the 17th amendment seems to be more interested in maintaining the status quo than trying to clean up the mess they step in every day...
You'll get no argument from me,
The income tax, the Fed and fiat money are the foundations of the Deep State.
I was just trying to limit my argument to the timeframe of when we won the Cold War/ Desert Storm.
16, 17, and 18 were the death knell of our erstwhile Republic. Although 18 was repealed, the idea that the Federal government could outlaw a common chemical that had been consumed for 10,000 years, and the military-like forces constituted to enforce that ban, never went away.
16 & 17 remain huge mistakes. But the existential mistake now destroying Western Civ was 19.
Since females have the legal right to vote in every country, why only Western countries? Two U.S. states allowed women to vote even before New Zealand became the first "nation" to officially enfranchise females.
Feminism hasn’t polluted non-Western countries in any significant way. That’s why “Passport Bros,” men going abroad for wives, is a thing. No thinking man wants a Western, more particularly, an American wife who will just shit on him, dye her hair purple, get fat, refuse to BE a wife, then initiate a divorce (70% by women), take his savings, home, kids, future salary…
Randy Bachman was right decades ago when he wrote “American Woman.”
lol
My view is pretty simple. There's going to be a war between NATO and Muscovy in the next decade or so. I'd actually say there already is such a war, but everyone's pretending there isn't for varied reasons.
The question is whether we'd prefer that war to be in Poland or Lithuania or Finland, or The War of the Russian Succession, over whether Muscovy can continue to subjugate its imperial subjects indefinitely.
I regretfully agree. I say "regretfully" because I do not want my grandchildren to be drafted into a war forced upon us by the Russian oligarchy. But then, my grandparents were probably pretty pissed off at having their sons dragged into WW2 by foreign aggression.
The difference is that the current generation of American veterans is willing and able to blow up a local draft board or 2 if someone tries to Shanghai their kids to go fight Russia.
If a war of NATO vs Russia breaks out, it won’t be limited. It will be total and will be nuclear. Think Omaha and Moscow ceasing to exist.
Not necessarily, but it's that potential that regretfully means NATO will have to be involved, since that risk will likely be lower than that of a bunch of post-Russian warlords gaining control of nuclear weapons to do who-knows-what.
(An alternative risk consideration I don't see many people talk about - partly because any known details would be highly classified - is what the *actual* state of the Strategic Rocket Forces is. Have they been able to maintain their elite and presumed-incorruptible status, or have their rocket and guidance components been replaced with the equivalent of discount Chinese truck tires?)
Great questions. I don’t think we should trust our “leadership” to gamble on a corrupt Russian Missile launch officer.
I disagree. During the Second World War, both sides had chemical weapons...and would not use them. I suspect nukes will be the same way.
What it does affect is the need to allow the other side reasonable terms.
A valid point, but I'm not sure the equivalence is there. Most of the ground force leaders had experience with chemical weapons, likely hated them viscerally, and possibility didn't see them as a true tactical advantage.
There are plenty of people who've never seen any kind of combat working at think tanks or in government who might see a nuclear attack in a more positive light.
And our orders will be given by civilians.
Even if not "nuclear" we can expect some extended power outages. It is optimistic to think Chinese, Persians, and various Islamists are the only likely adversaries to have forces already established here in ConUS. Of course, we might respond to such an attack in an energetic fashion.
It will be a short war: at best ending NATO, at worst nuclear exchanges.
Who is "we" kemosabe?
A strong supporter of NATO all my adult life, I was convinced by the 1990s we should stop basing forces (SOF excepted) in Europe (Iceland might be an exception with permission). We have dangerously few response forces. We also should base some of them on Taiwan - as we did long ago.
Ian Easton of the 1049 Institute says I have that right.
Well said, Sal. Concur 99%. I am allowed 1% I trust.
I’ll allow 15% for the Front Porch.,
I agree with everything you said, Sal. I’ve been of a similar mindset since the early 90s. A part of it is simply the common mindset of Americans, who historically have been pretty anti-interventionist (I like that term better than “isolationist,” thanks for pointing it out.) in “the great game” that the empires liked to play. Looking back through the years, it appears most of our foreign war activities tend to have started under the Democrat Party. Methinks that party likes what they see in Europe a tad too much.
Wow...a tour de force, Commander. A lot to agree with, some to niggle with over the details, some areas of disagreement. Definitely smart to bleed Russia in Ukraine while we can - as they did (along with China) by funneling resources to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan to keep us busy, bleed our resources, sow strife, and take our eye off the ball (also NK, North Vietnam, and ME terrorists since the KGB started training them in the 60s).
In general, we have to be more nimble with our forces. Yes, we can have basing agreements, but we need to bring forces home or closer to home and then do exercises with our forces - keep them moving around, in and out, ready to coordinate. But moving, not stationary, targets. Don't fall into routine that puts you in easy targeting of missiles. I'd say we need a robust reactionary force that can be quickly brought into action on the land, but generally we need a Navy to guard those ocean moats (best investment in our own security) and a long-range strike capability in our air arms. The B-21 goes a long way in this regard in conjunction with an appropriate weapons suite. We can support our allies with stand off capabilities that both deter our adversaries and, in the event of war, will effectively blunt and destroy their forces at a reduced hazard to our own forces.
A good example is the AIM 174-B variant of the SM-6, giving our legacy aircraft (Hornets) an air-to-air missile with hundreds of miles of range. Combining this with forward deployed stealth platforms/ISR, it enables those planes to fly outside opponents missile and radar range, fire missiles, and have the AIM 174-B guided in by those other assets...quite the force multiplier and, given the speed and range, quite the deterrent against China. That is, as long as we keep those assets within operating range of Taiwan - which means being deployed in the region and having bases to operate from with allies. They just have to be mobile or in a position to avoid first-strike elimination and/or have the ability to rapidly move to the FEBA. Just an example.
Likewise the LRSM-ER with the B-21. Get enough in the air and you can run multiple sorties and launch hundreds to thousands of these semi-stealthy anti-ship missiles at an invasion fleet in the Taiwan Strait. No Naval fleet, China isn't much of a threat to Taiwan - or at least not a chance they would want to take. It complicates things and deters them.
Requires production of these capabilities as a priority, of course, but we are heading in that direction. Not optimal, but could be an effective stop gap until we get the rest figured out.
In the end, though, all of that comes down to leadership as you observe, and as I stated in these comments a couple of weeks ago (if I may say). So we agree. Be mobile. Make enemies unsure....keep them guessing. Reform our reputation in the world to return to the ideal of that shining city on the hill - holding a big hammer if we HAVE to use it, but willing to talk, help, and support where we can.
"All of it comes down to leadership." Well in that case, America is well and truly fucked.
I served in the Cold War, Desert Storm and the GWOT. I was once an ideological zealot of the American way. I had my epiphany when after coming home from the summer 2001 post 9/11 deployment (we were the first to respond and conduct attacks) after punitively and righteously avenging our nation for the 9/11 attack. I was having a conversation with the new captain of the CVN getting prepared for work ups and my time was running out as one of the last TAO’s from the last deployment. We had been getting a steady diet of desensitization / “intel” and drum beating for the case to go war with Iraq. A case that even Stevie Wonder could see was going to be the wrong war and the wrong fight for us. Yet the drum beat continued. My Skipper was trying to convince me to “sail with me to go fight Saddam!” He had missed the 9/11 deployment and wanted to get his bonafides in for the flag board. I simply said “no thanks Captain, I have had enough war”. He approved my detachment. I could see the second and even the third order effects we are possessed with. I have seen shipmates lose their children in the GWOT. Yes the war went long enough that parents served in that war and their children grew up and enlisted and some killed in battle only to have our government pull the old Lucy and the football trick and bailout after declaring “victory”. So forgive me for not supporting our neo imperial wars.
Regarding Ukraine:
I can’t see Russia in the same light as Nazi Germany in your question of abandonment of Britain. Russia isn’t the same nation or government it was in the Soviet Union. The opportunities we missed in the 90’s and 00’s to truly forge relationships with Russia both militarily and economically shouldn’t be downplayed. We screwed the pooch on that.
I don’t see Russia as the existential threat the west makes it out to be. I see a nation worried about an encroaching NATO (which goes against the very principles you lay out Phib about the standing army and all). I see retarded western “leadership” literally poking the nuclear armed Russia. I see Russia having zero faith in the motivations and credibility of what any western nation says. I see the second order effects of what this will look like if it continues. Your pull quote “ In such an aftermath, Central and Eastern European NATO will be under renewed pressure by a more confident Russia. USA & Western standing in the world will be compromised going into mid-century, ” is the actual proverbial Gordian Knot. You can say the same thing about how Russia views a potential loss to the West, encroached borders by NATO at Finland and Sweden and Poland all have and will lead an emboldened NATO won’t make the world any less safe or more safe than a Russian victory. NATO is suffering from a psychosis of hubris. Regarding the Ukraine people and their motivations for defending or not defending, I must point out the large number of military aged males who fled Ukraine. The literal press gangs of Ukraine police rounding them up to go fight. Sure the same could be said about our draft dodgers during the Vietnam War but Ukraine isn’t and never was a nation like the United States. The facts that many westerners gloss over or outright dismiss disingenuously, is Ukraine shares culturally and genetically more with Russia than the Western Europe nations. We can’t defeat that. Much of Russian Humint is provided by Ukrainians. Ukraine is losing this war. I know that will cause apoplectic responses from a few here but I was never a go along with the crowd to go along guy.
As I have stated firmly, I don’t believe this is our war. We are culpable in the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Ukrainians and the tens of thousands of deaths of Russians by our indirect and direct involvement. When this fight is over, both Russia and Ukraine will hug and dance and will then, when sober, blame the west and in particular the United States for the loss of generations of Ukrainians. We contribute at our own peril. BTW: all of the former Warsaw Pact nations that joined NATO, suffer from the same accusations made against Russia; Imperialistic ambitions, control over the population, limited freedoms and power. They just simply hide it better under the auspices of the WEF and Davos but make no mistake they are as or more dangerous than Russia.
Regarding China:
We are out of time. This has and will be our existential threat. We are bleeding our bunkers of our ammunition, we are wearing out our forces and our weapons and we are not a serious nation knowing the existential threat we face from China and yet our “leadership”, yes the same ones goading us into the fight in Ukraine, dithers and plays away the day. China is the threat.
So If we want Europe to lead, then we need to get out of the way. Leadership will occur as a result of our vacuum. Let it. We need to focus to the west.
So I would say using your criteria of your original opening salvo I am in the prioritizer camp. But much more than that, I am a realist and deeply love our republic and can see that sometimes the best way to win a game (Ukraine vs Russia) is simply not play.
You put into words a lot of what I have been feeling about Russia, Ukraine, and China. Thank you.
It’s hard to distill into a comprehensible paragraph. Each are different and each have different motives and outcomes and opportunities. You can be against one war and be clear headed about and prepare and support another. It’s pragmatic. I see it for what I believe it to be. Russia isn’t the enemy. China is.
As a general statement, Americans are generous people. The problem is that some of them are most generous when they are doling out treasure they did not earn. We see that on the Left in the form of open borders and welfare checks freely given without regard to the capability of work. We see that on the Right, at least among neocon Congresscritters who throw our money and young people at wars we should not be a part of. Once again, the U.S. has half-heartedly entered a war without a well-defined definition of the end game. The war in Ukraine could be resolved this very week if the Ukrainian government could be convinced to accept a new eastern boundary and were promised NATO membership based on that new line - with the full backing of all current NATO members to defend that line with great prejudice.
As Sal notes, we are at our best when we live up to the role of mercantile republic, not that of a quasi-empire.
I should have said “neocons and modern Democrats”, both of whom appear to gladly throw away the lives of others.
I think our "right" and "left" congress critters (an apt term if ever there was one) are generally all on the government team and try to fund raise off one thing or another that scares the people. I aw a comment the other day that expresses the thoughts of most of them:
They'd unplug a constituent's life support just to charge their cell phone.
And some of them would try to make it all about reducing his carbon footprint, or combatting the patrimony, or helping to eliminate oppressors.
"Containment" was the geoplotical strategy whose objective was to keep the Soviets in check until, as Kennan understood, the contradictions inherent in the soviet brand of socialism would eventually lead to its collapse. NATO was the military arm whose aim was to deter war, or if war broke out, to stop the soviet advance.
NATO was consequently formed as a defensive alliance. But, when the USSR collapsed (Kennan provide right), NATO nations (led in large part by the Clinton admin) decided the best way to prevent a Russian resurgence was to push NATO boundaries east. In a way understandable, but also arrogant. And NATO failed (or was indifferent to) looking at that expansion through Russian (note, not soviet) eyes.
And so NATO (and the EU) became the offensive vanguard of the liberal "New World Order." The alliance transitioned from a defensive to an offensive/imperial mission (see AFG). However, as the NWO moved east, even albeit altruistically, the Russians did not view it as such.
So we ought to consider the Russian invasion of UKR as a response to the west encroaching on the last line of Russia's sphere of influence. The annexation of Crimea, IMHO, was the first step in creating a new buffer against the west. And yet NATO continues marching east. I'm not in the camp that believes that Putin, even had he been successfull in cutting of Kiev, was planning on restablishing the old Warsaw Pact. The eastern European cointries which joined NATO are now covered under Article V. Perhaps the failed attempt to take Kiev, was a feint to create another (and the last) buffer in eastern UKR.
I any event, given how the lines have solidified, combined with significant Russian losses over the last years, I do not see evidence that the Russians have the capability now, or even in the future, to push west, even though that's what we're being fed as a reason to keep this war going.
To bring UKR into NATO would only further enable Russia's historical paranoia of the west. The current buffer in eastern Ukraine, to me, is Putin's last line. Threatening it puts us closer to nuclear exchange than we have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Rather than poking the bear and putting us all in extremis, perhaps it's time to recognize the limits of globalism, and seek an end to this war. It will suck for UKR, as that would mean permitting the Russian buffer in the east. (Although it can be argued that the eastern poritons of the country are probably more Russian than Ukrainian). Trade NATO membership for Russian guarantees (yeah, I know, what's a Russian guarantee worth?) to not push west. Construct defenses in eastern UKR that would make a Russian offensive too costrly to mount. Build a UKR army and air force (tough sledding; you have to wean out the old soviet influnces in UKR high command) that can deter any further attempts by the Russians to push the buffer west.
I understand I'm clinging to a Realist School paradigm. Call me old fashioned, but I still believe the world is an anarchic place; strong nation states bully the weak. Weak nation states understandably look to the strong for help, yet do not see (or care) about the larger geostrategic consequences. As a superpower, and leading a formidable (and nuclear-armed) alliance, it's imperative that we help, but not at the expense of creating conditions where the strong wind up in direct conflict with each other.
Mostly agree with that.
1. Bring the armies home. Station them HERE for training, and then demobilize them into the Reserves.
2. Rebuild the Navy, with real ships. Reclaim obvious Navy bases like Mare Island.
3. Rebuild American ship-building functions. Build our own merchant vessels.
4. More fundamentally, get back to a federal government based on the Constitution. 95% of the Federal government is unconstitutional, and needs to be restrained to the 18 enumerated powers of Article 1, Section 8. Devolve other issues like education and health care to the States, which should have been doing that stuff all along.
I need a super "like" button.
CDR Sal, I salute your honesty and detailed recounting of your relatively constant positions on the interests of our nation, and how our leaders in government, DoD (part of the government but very task specific) and industry (defense related and more) SHOULD behave to "support" those interests. Interests of the governed and those who govern can be difficult to discern, and sadly, don't always align as they should. When those who govern also control the levers of accountability, the constraints on them behaving in their own interests vs. those of the nation vanish. That seems to be where we are now. Hard to have accountability for failure when those who failed investigate themselves and find no fault worth mentioning. That can range from petty accounting errors and money finding its way into private accounts to massive acquisition failures to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. This has happened in past and current administrations. Looking to the future, lacking any meaningful systemic changes, things are not rosy.
The idea that Ukraine is a democracy or that it is fighting for its survival or that the United States has any interest in its survival is as big a lie as the Bush/neocon claims that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Ukraine is a corrupt post Soviet dictatorship, the current regime of which was installed by the CIA and George Soros controlled NGOs, and which depends for its existence on neoNazi volunteer battalions. It's fight is not an existential one, but rather a will to dominate and oppress the ethnic Russian oblasts east of the Dnieper that Comrade Kruschev transferred from the Russian Soviet Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic 70 years ago for reasons that have never been articulated. As for the idea that the West has established some sacrosanct norm that countries don't get to change their borders by force of arms anymore, I would kindly refer you to the Republic of Serbia regarding its thoughts on NATO and the Republic of Kosovo. Finally, NATO was created to deter and combat the worldwide revolutionary communist movement. There are now more communists in the French parliament or a typical Ivy League institution than in all of Moscow--what the hell does NATO give us, the American people?
This "corruption" nonsense is parroting Russian propaganda. How is Ukraine any different from Florida. We are as "corrupt" as Ukraine. And, why does "corruption" mean that a nation is not entitled to territorial integrity? Ukraine is a a sovereign state, corrupt or not. She has a right to defend her borders and all territory in them from another state.
Russia is an enemy of the US. If Ukraine wants to bleed Russia, then give her a blank check.
Maybe, just maybe, the reason the Iraq and Afghan veterans are pissed off is because of unAmerican assholes like you who accuse them of being Russian trolls every time they express an opinion at odds with the DC foreign policy consensus. I bet you still believe in Russian election interference, too?
Of course I do. I read the Muller report; part II. Putin has a puppet.
Imagine reading a report that claimed that a foreign intelligence agency tried to influence the outcome of a US Presidential race by spending a million dollars or so to advertise Looney Toons memes on social media and to use 2 year old malware available to anyone on the dark web to hack and dump Debbie Wasserman Schultz's emails and saying to yourself afterwards, "yeah that sounds like something an actual intelligence agency would do and not like the ramblings of a deranged, fabulist retard." Even Mueller wasn't willing to defend his report when given the chance--pretending to have dementia any time a Republican asked him questions during his Congressional testimony. But thank you for identifying yourself as someone who should not be taken seriously.
And you have identified yourself as an anti-American. Just another one of Putin's puppets.
So anti-American that I volunteered to serve as a commissioned officer in the United States Army Infantry in the years after 9/11. How was your Afghan tour, Tom?
Eloquent as usual, and I agree with most of it. On Ukraine I put it much more simply, as is my usual want.
"We will end up with in war with a group of allied nations consisting of the PRC, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, plus lesser players. It is inevitable, unless we make them unable to conduct the war. It's not that we want war, but they want what they want, and we stand in the way of that.
The only way we keep this war from coming is to make ourselves too damn scary to try and move, and them too weak to attempt the effort. Every Russian soldier, every Russian tank, bomb or missile that Ukraine destroys is one less that we have to face. Even if in the end Ukraine loses, if they bleed Russia white in the doing, it's a good thing."
Well that's nonsense. The only reason "we" have to fight such an alliance is that we cut off Russia from the world financial system so that they had to form an alliance with Communist China. Putin isn't a communist and he damn sure doesn't like playing second fiddle to anyone; any reasonably intelligent diplomat or intelligence operative would be trying to separate the Sino-Russia alliance and ally with Russia against the communists. Unfortunately, the West doesn't have any of those.
Mark, you're naive. Putin may not be a communist (dictators know no true ideology) but he is a Russian. Russia has never been happy unless they have a LOT of buffer states between them and the world.
We tried to "separate the Sino-Russia alliance" once before. Maybe you're old enough to remember, but probably not.
That was the Nixon/Kissinger plan. "Lets bring the PRC into the 20th century, and make them our friends, thus separating them from the USSR." Do you remember this, or were you still a babe in arms?
How did that work for us? Oh wait, I know the answer, NOT WORTH A SHIT.
Russia and China both want a world where they can take what ever they damn well please. It's not that they are natural allies, they're not. Eventually, if they win, they will fight it out between themselves. That won't matter to us, because we will be dead, or a client state.
Russia and the PRC are much like IJ and Nazi Germany. If those guys had won, they would eventually have gone to blows. They were not natural allies, as each thought the other one was subhuman. That didn't keep them from being allies against the democracies now did it?
Read the Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union, written by Edward Luttwak in 1982. By that date the Sino-Soviet border had gone from largely undefended to requiring over 80 Soviet Tank and Motorized Rifle Divisions, with a commensurate number of aviation assets. Almost 1/3rd of Soviet Combat power was unavailable to the Warsaw Pact because it had to defend Siberia from a fellow communist nation. But yeah, "NOT WORTH A SHIT." OK, boomer.
Nixon's "grand strategy" got us where we are today, with the PRC quite probably able to push us back across the dateline, and end up owning a resurgent "South East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." OK Millennial it's your kids that are going to do the dying.
Maybe if the Bushes hadn't pretended that the Cold War was won and the PRC wasn't really communist, America could have shifted it's efforts to containing them instead of shipping all of our manufacturing capacity over to the communists.
That's adorable. Also inaccurate. The behavior you describe started under Clinton. Yes, It continued under Bush JR.
Ummm… “Russia and China both want a world where they can take what ever they damn well please.”
… and this differs from the GAE… how?
Alexander, if you have to ask, you'll never hear the answer. I don't have time for you.
He's busy visiting his doctor to ask about his diabeetus!
Exactly right. Unfortunately we've been establishing a reputation for decades of "treacherous as a friend, harmless as an enemy."
Sad, but accurate.
Louis XVI remains unavailable for comment.
"Yes, agreed, but there is a clear purpose in Ukraine. Three main ones, actually;
Help a people fighting for self-determination in an existential battle against one of the major bad actors on the world stage.
Reinforce the rather recent international standard that one nation cannot take the territory of another through aggressive force of arms.
While executing #1 & #2, we degrade Russian power to being a secondary actor on the world stage for at least two decades."
Says it all - also says "opportunity".
Mexico feels that way about Texas.
“No American or NATO military formations are engaged in combat in Ukraine, nor are there plans for such.”
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Go back to 1963 and switch out "Ukraine" with "Vietnam."
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