the russians did not deploy enough troops to ever seize or siege a large population center in northern Ukraine. back of the envelope occupation math suggests 1 soldier for every 1000 civilians. the russians did not deploy that many troops on the entire Ukrainian front. big serge (my milblog goat) goes into more detail here

many news heads have rightly said that this pager (and now radio) attack makes sense only as a direct prelude to invasion, and the zionist entity seems to have wasted this opportunity. i also saw a comment, before the relevation that two hezbollah fighters had discovered the pagers, that “israel” has a tendency to pull the trigger on operations as soon as they are technically feasible. this sort of strategic flailing seems odd, but it also lines up with the conclusions of a US army analysis of the 2006 “israeli”-hezbollah war.

it’s about 60 pages of actual content, and it’s interesting for a number of reasons (there’s a good section on the missiles hezbollah used for people into that). now there’s a two decade sized grain of salt that should be taken here, but i doubt i could get access to current “israeli” planning, let alone in english. the biggest conclusion for recent events is that the zionist entity has focused on counterinsurgency and air power, degrading its combined arms capabilities and doctrine to the point that it does not have them.

specifically, “israel” has fallen for the US air force’s greatest lie - that air power and bombing can stand as a combat arm independently from ground operations. as such, the head of the military at the time was an airman, and the doctrinal changes created were both confusing and biased against ground combat. additionally, the long time focus on ‘counterinsurgency’ in Gaza (the phrasing is not mine) has led to reserve mechanized equipment not being replaced, tank and mechanized crews not being trained, and minimal training at the division or batallion level. the lack of training in large formations and the fact that doctrine became more confusing as the formations got larger led to failure, broadly.

to provide an illustration, i’ll run through the actions of two divisions in the last act of the war. the UN had passed a ceasefire resolution, and for reasons that are not completely clear, “israel” planned a last hurrah offensive. the symbolic goal was the litani river. division 91 of the iof was meant to be driving towards the mediterranean, but stalled out completely. In an inquiry after the war,

The investigation concluded that commanders within the division “did not fully understand their orders” and “were not present with their troops during important battles and even failed to fulfill basic missions.” The investigation also found fault “in the way tactical orders were composed, sometimes without a time element. Since the orders were not clear, they were changed, in some cases, on an hourly basis. Brigade commanders did not properly understand their missions. . . . They didn’t know what their goals were and how long they had to fulfill their missions.” Remarkably, according to the report, “an entire battalion sat in the same location for several days without moving and when the commander finally received orders to push deeper into enemy territory he was confused and failed to fulfill the mission.”

division 162 was looking to take Ghandouriyeh, a town that sat on a crossroads and high ground. they had to cross a valley, Wadi al-Saluki, to get there. first, the general sent air assault elements to secure the high ground over the valley. the air assault successfully landed near two towns, cleared several occupied buildings, did not take the high ground, and then reported that they secured the high ground. 24 tanks were sent up the road, and a collapsed building in front of them and an ied behind them had them trapped. each merkava had a smoke screen to make missile aim harder. dozens of anti-tank missiles then struck the column. not a single tank deployed smoke, and 11 tanks were hit. what infantry that was near was pinned by fire, and tank crew requests for artillery or air support were denied out of fear of friendly fire. the advance stopped at that town.

to me, this paints a clear picture of modern military material (tanks, electronics, aircraft, artillery, and infantry) manned by people who don’t know how to use them. there is no feature of the actions of these divisions where their equipment failed them. moreover, i would expect any competent force with air assault, artillery, and armor elements to be able to seize a lightly defended town 10 kilometers from their border.

so the iof is made up of a large number of uncoordinated small groups, and collectively has little sense of how to put these pieces together. and you might say, “well maybe they fixed some of that in the last twenty years”. i think the fact that modern merkavas have the trophy system answers whether or not that happened. it’s a very cool toy, designed to blow up an oncoming anti-tank missile mid air. strapping sensitive explosives to the front of your tank means that your infantry cannot be anywhere near it. so we see dozens of unaccompanied merkavas and bulldozers parked somewhere that a resistance fighter can run up to, unopposed. we also might see a hot shot intelligence officer cook up some pager plan, report it to his commanding officer, and have it approved without anyone thinking that operations are only effective in sequence and with support.

since 2022, there has been significant tension between the aims of the russian state and its military industry and the central bank. interest rates have been sitting at 18% since 2022 because the bank is run by neoliberal, USamerican educated economists. if the fact that russia’s central bank is serving as an obstacle or neoliberal holdout dooms the russian economy, they have never had a chance and we should have all stayed in our armchairs the whole time. you can spin anything out of anything; that same reuters article says that the current head of the russian imf, who brought russia in in ‘92, is stepping down and being replaced by someone sanctioned by the USA by name. shouldn’t a person who can’t legally enter USamerica have different personal, material interests than someone living in washington?

the US has had the complete control and buy in of every private and public bank in europe after 2009 and quantitative easing. they have been trying to get russia in since 1991. the US economy is based on formalized lying. the tried and true method is relying on powerful regulatory and legal bodies to exploit other countries. you like to point out how the USSR’s purported economic value was cut in half by the switch from gnp to gdp as some example of the awe inspiring abilities of USamerican finance. i think this misses the point that your chosen method of judging economic success grows out of the barrel of a gun. if various compradors hadn’t overthrown the government and gleefully participated in the looting, then the on paper decision to switch accounting methods would have done nothing. the existence of US-influenced economists does not represent subjugation.

the chinese banks complying with the sanctions was an L, i can’t disagree with that. but the USA has been ‘pivoting to Asia’ since 2015? 2014? it was definitely obama + hillary. the tpp fell through, and as it turns out the US has no actual interest in leaving SWANA. the idealized plan is to win and pivot and win and pivot. even the second invasion of iraq was meant to be a quick win before pivoting to war with iran. every single pivot has simply led to overextension. the war on terror has units deployed from central asia to the sahel. the nato-russia war seems set to cook at this pace for years. all of this is happening as the neoliberal hollowing out of the US starts to kill the logistical tail and manpower of the US military. every single service has missed recruiting targets for several years, and i don’t need to explain here how ‘cutting-edge’ US equipment is anything but.

it is in my view also a mistake to refer to a ‘focal point’ of imperialism. there is no oz beyond the red, white, and blue curtain. neocons and liberals and people who couldn’t articulate a view but like money all have different views of iran, china, and russia. there are also disagreements on which to get first and what order. the USA in its arrogance is convinced that it stands astride the world and will conquer all while it can’t complete freedom of navigation operations against a country without a fleet. it will continue to bluster and make announcements as if all is proceeding swimmingly. even in the last ten years, the decline of USamerican influence is palpable. even the screwing of the EU reflects this. if you can get your vassals to obey without force, they are loyal. if you have to force the point (like nordstream), that means they would not have listened otherwise.

i appreciate your perspective comrade, but we have to have hope. and there can be no hope without revolutionary optimism

the line is ‘strikes at the operational depth’ of russia, and the tit for tat response would be russian strikes on staging bases in hungary and romania. kursk and belgorod are not at operational depth for the russian military, even though ukraine has been bombing them. you are very right about atacms being used to strike russia the whole time; jassms are worse/ cheaper missiles, and the move to those suggests the USA is out of missiles or willingness to send them off. i think the US war department made an announcement a few days ago along the lines of “we’ll let ukraine make deep strikes if they can show an actual plan.” this reflects that ukraine is increasingly stuck with terror bombing without an actual plan for victory

a provocative headline and a bit of a negative tone, but an interesting article from strategic culture. just for clarity’s sake, the referenced lavrov announcement was in june.

i think the critique of the ‘fence-sitting’ or ‘playing both sides’ from a (i believe) leftist perspective is worth keeping in mind, especially because the material interest of every country trying to join brics is doing so to play as many sides as they can. diplomats and states are not set out towards de-dollarization or ending hegemony as such, but rather towards what they see as prosperity, peace, etc. i don’t personally see brazil’s venezuelan election comments or india’s military industry as a dagger at the heart of brics+. that said, if brics really is going to be a meaningful international and economic forum for the global south, as many of us hope, they will inevitably have to manage and incorporate countries that want economic relations with the USA, Russia, and China.

the ukrainians haven’t meaningfully damaged the russian fleet, and their success in attacking naval targets is not because of the end of the age of the big boat (though i do agree with you that the age is over). the article you shared said a third of the naval assets in the black sea were destroyed. i can’t say i know every boat that’s been hit, but at one point the ukrainians “nearly destroyed a submarine” and “blew a massive hole in the hull of a destroyer”. both were fully repaired within two or three months. the ukrainians lie about the damage they have done, and the western press repeats it. but you know this, i just feel the need to correct the time article.

i think that ukrainian success in attacking the russian navy is because of three reasons. (1) the ukrainians are indeed the best or second best drone forces in the world, by natural selection if nothing else. they have material and operators that most navies would struggle to deal with. the other best or second best drone force is russia though, which leads into the second reason. (2) naval assets have not been relevant to the war since the rumors of marine landings in odessa way back in ‘22. as such, the russians are not going to put the best electronic warfare or antiair up to protect five tugboats and the black sea anti-smuggling task force. so the russians have no reason to put up much more than the bare minimum, which connects with the third point. (3) the black sea is an active theatre for nato operations. i don’t mean nato “operations” or special forces or trainers. there are regular flights of american (and lapdog) recon drones and awac planes carefully following international boundaries starting in nato bases in romania and turkey. any and all possible toys that the USA sees as too valuable or too fragile for the stupid ukrainians but still worth using against russia are being sent over and under the black sea. they’d be sailing on top it if they could too, because the US has been begging turkiye to let warships in since ‘22. there’s probably no part of russia that ukraine is getting better information on than crimea and the black sea coast.

all this combines with ukraine’s habit of PR-based warfare, and big ticket naval strikes seem to be easy (and yet further evidence of the inevitability of the brutal putler’s defeat). i’m also not sure that the rise of hypersonic missiles means the end of all naval operations. the PLA navy don’t seem to think so. they’re building up a big green water/ coastal defense fleet. in a somewhat similar vein, iran just launched its first aircraft carrier, a design based on a container ship mostly designed for drone launching. modern day fire ships, drones, and missiles are a factor that all discourage concentration of force, but they don’t discourage having force. if there is ever a modern naval war that somehow doesn't go nuclear, i imagine we will see the naval equivalent of russia and ukraine no longer fielding multiple tanks together because concentrated armor columns are just cruise missile bait.

i think you’re spot on about zelensky and the kursk adventure. i wonder who’s got more of thirst for russian blood/ nuclear war, the banderites screaming in his one ear, or the natoists whispering in the other?

comrade, i want to preface this saying your analysis was thought-provoking, and i enjoyed your perspective. i hope this doesn’t come off as aggressive or attacking you.

trump will not fumble US imperialism so much as point it in a different direction. the difference between trump and biden represents a historic tension within the american bourgeoisie. you rightly point out that the factories of old were removed in the interest of finance capital, and true on-shoring would undo that economic trick. however, there are at least two sorts of bourgeois still around that have contrary interests to that. first, members of the military industrial complex and anyone who seriously wants a USamerican hot war wants/ needs industrial production in order to wage war. this is not going very well, as we can see with efforts to bring chip fabs to USamerica and in failures to scale up 155 mm shell production. the economic incentives for these bougies, as newsheads are well aware, encourage massive boondoggle wunderwaffe in order to shore up profit margins, not actually taking on the dirty work of making weapons.

the second group is the still existing national bourgeois of the US. while they don’t necessarily produce 80% of the world’s steel anymore, they are much more likely to be seen and heard in a community. a five person private equity firm can nominally produce most of the world’s seat belts, but local fields and factories provide jobs that feel more real to the common person, even if they don’t make as much money. additionally, the agriculture and manufacturing interests broadly support trump. to give an example local to me, a comrade of mine has been working software at Haas Automation for a few months now. the management and ownership support trump. they cannot produce machine tools that are price and quality competitive with chinese competitors, because of supply chain inefficiencies in southern california, the rising cost of materials, and radical shifts in the immigration and labor arena that mean they can’t pay assemblers minimum wage anymore. trump is offering to fix that, somehow. we know it won’t work, but the pitch is being made to people who really want to hear it.

if the cost of capital inputs in the US goes up in order to encourage offshoring out of the US and brain drain into the US, there are still bougies with an interest against those capital incentives. could the average cattle rancher or drone manufacturer explain this process? no, USamericans lack education and curiosity. while i agree with your analysis that finance capital has a dominant role in the US, it is not irrational for a group of bourgeois who feel they are being left out to try and break in. it’s unlikely they’ll succeed, but the resolution of the contradiction between financial and industrial interests will come to a head in USamerica if we keep playing chicken with china.

to your first point, i think you could more easily explain most of the BRI with china’s repeated commitment to win-win diplomacy and the real issue of producing more stuff than their domestic market can handle. if your nation’s company uses your excess steel to build essential infrastructure that you get to collect partial income from while the country you’re doing it in thanks you for it, then that’s in your self-interest. i will say i’m broadly skeptical of the idea of biden as a savvy operator, but specially how do railroads in laos and ports in kazakhstan build USamerican supply chains? i could be wrong about the numbers here, but i believe the reason 70% of the loans are in dollars is because the serious use of loans denominated in national currencies didn’t start until 2022, and the BRI started in 2013.

to your second point, educated immigrants are the cause of a labor crisis for some bougies. yes, finance capital sees the college educated coders of the worlds and wants them in SF and NYC. for decades, most of the states bordering mexico have in some way or another built parts of the economy on the assumption of cheap, readily available, fairly skilled labor. people expect to be able to hire latinos who are fully qualified, do not complain, and work for less than minimum. it’s a reflection of the deep seated entitlement and white supremacy of our culture. now, the real cause of the decline in this availability was a combination of labor organizing amongst migrants and improving material conditions in mexico. see the above about the education and curiosity of the USamerican people.

to your third point, i think you are completely correct about the actual long term consequences of lowering interest rates. to trump and the average USamerican and the average USbougie, the rest of the world does not exist and they miss cheaper mortgages/ loans for their companies. did biden meaningfully differ from this? i mean i know there’s the veil of ignorance between the fed and the president, but i think the USbougies, finance and otherwise, are legitimately split on whether to lower interest rates or not. the firehose of free money was really nice, even if some naysayers keep saying you can’t have infinite money forever.

to your fourth point, donald trump’s claims of being anti-war are complete bluster. he tore up the intermediate nuke treaty, he tore up the iran deal, he droned more people than obama, and he stopped reporting civilian casualties from drone strikes. yemen, somalia, iraq, and syria experienced no lightening in US imperialism under trump. he moved the USamerican embassy to jerusalem. afghanistan got several years of no change before a half-assed negotiated withdrawal. what trump understands is that the people are tired of war, or at least of this war on terror. they are especially tired of the wars where US soldiers are really officially present, which was just Afghanistan. USamerica is now postured with a dozen little tripwire forces around the world to stir things up, with no major casualty causing commitments. in theory, that’s all so we can better transition towards the pacific. that aligns with a faction of the intelligence and state apparati. biden’s emphasis on nato and israel are commitments unique to him, and people interested in one or the other have aligned themselves with him.

to your fifth point, during obama’ second term, 15.8 gigabarrels of oil reserves began extracting in the US in megaprojects (producing >20k barrels/ day). that’s using the best probable estimates of some of the reserves. this was broadly seen as restarting american oil production. under trump’s term, 440 gigabarrels of reserves began extracting in megaprojects. the amount of crude oil USamerica extracted tripled from 2010-2020. the north dakotan and texan shale fields over bet on oil prices, started overproducing, and accidentally brought the price of oil down. trump happened to be president. in terms of signing off permits for exploiting public land and gutting the EPA, the trend line of evermore oil and gas in the US increased just as stably under trump as obama.

to your sixth point, you claim trump is an incompetent imperialist for trying to force NATO to spend more on the military, but biden is a genius imperialist for aiding the brain drain of europe and the dismantling of its infrastructure. are these not dual processes? increasingly bellicose rhetoric makes europe ratchet up spending, which forces cuts on social services. declining standards of living and the increasing risk of having to make or wield weapons leads to the people who can afford to leave leaving.

i’ll readily agree that trump seems to be less bloodthirsty about russians and eastern europeans. but doesn’t he more than make up for that with how heinous his rhetoric and actions are towards latin americans? in terms of preserving imperial hegemony, it’d be smartest to cut bait on the failed ukrainian experiment. depending on whether you think we need a war with china or not, the next step people within the state and intelligence agencies could want is double checking that the US grip is secure under the incredibly chauvinist monroe doctrine. i do not think trump is the dark horse anti-imperialist-by-way-of-incompetence some claim.

It’s essentially just a shopping list that right wing cranks have wanted since at least the nixon administration. the heritage foundation was founded in ‘73, and it is heir to a tradition that includes things like the john birch society and the federalist society. the american far right has been advancing a plan of judicial capture for decades, and it’s finally coming to a head. the democrats argue we can either have it in 2025 or delay it to 2029.

the democrats are broadly not wrong to say that the contents of the project are bad. they will kick a lot of protections down to the state level, where obviously the red controlled state govs will gleefully strip away everything they can. the reason the democrats are bringing it up so much is because, rhetorically, they only have fear and negative claims to support them. there is no democratic platform, or anti-2025 project, or coherent vision of the future, or anything. the only pitch they have is the same pitch they’ve had for decades, except now it’s more tired than its ever been: the other guy is really bad, this is an important election, you have to vote blue. hunter s. thompson wrote about being tired of holding his nose for unpopular candidates in the 70s.

it’s closer to the fascists telling us what to do then agenda 21, but they’ve been telling us for eighty years. the recent emphasis on it is a combination of it playing well on tiktok to young people who are critically looking at the character of USamerican civil society for the first time and the utter intellectual bankruptcy of the democratic party.

prior to a few months ago, openAI was nominally beholden to a non-profit of the same name that had a board with the mission to maintain safe AI, what ever that means. they tried to fire sam altman, sam didn’t like that, the board got dissolved, and now the nsa guy is there. this article talks about how the moral/ altruism board tried to stop the money for moral reasons, and ultimately lost out

my best guess would be that this weekend is the swiss peace summit where they invited like ninety countries but not russia. putting out the barest, most basic sounding demands is an easy play when you aren’t even invited to the current version of peace talks. it’ll make ukraine’s demands for crimea, belgorod, kaliningrad, and billion dollar annual reparations look ridiculous in a few days, if the talks even get that far. you’re right that the west isn’t done, but the west is the one cooking up this swiss conference

I feel like it’s not that she doesn’t know the answers, it’s that the answers are not politically convenient. My understanding of the situation is that in the course of training the various GPTs, OpenAI and Microsoft have realistically scanned every piece of text and imagery that’s available on the internet. It didn’t matter how good or bad or who made it, the models needed every available data point. That was all well and good until covid led to a tightening of interest rates, which meant the VC overlords of Silicon Valley finally had to pay a bill. All the vapor ware companies that have never turned a profit are scrambling now, and we see the mass layoffs of the last three years. Microsoft, however, got to be King Shit of VC Mountain because one of their startups invented “AI”. Say what you will about it (and I will), the public interest in and corporate adoption of AI has meant that there is a positive revenue for a tech company. Now regardless of rationality, all tech executives must find a way to cash in on the Golden Calf. Some companies are designing new applications or creating new services. The majority are realizing that they some how, sort of kind of, are the original data the models were made from, and they’re trying to extract rents from it. For now, that’s really only for content in the future. If the CTO here publicly claims that their product relies on YouTube or anything, Alphabet or whatever parent would be stupid not to come and sue for whatever they might get.

If Maryland produced 60% of the worlds’ semiconductors and was the only place that could make 3 nm chips, then more countries might be willing to risk global catastrophe over Maryland. Taiwan is a golden goose for most of the US economy that positively contributes to the line going up, and semiconductor manufacturing is one of the last technological edges the “West” has. The Department of Defense and its corporate halo are perpetually in a contrived state of disarray when it comes to talking about things that need money, from their supply chains to research. While it’s true that price gouging and rent seeking probably don’t lead to good weapon systems, I think the people writing this article are assuming the average policymaker already is onboard with the necessity of Taiwan, and they are emphasizing a shopping list of things that need evermore endless funding. If we ever actually went to war with China, then all these weapons companies would need to start making more weapons and less money.