Monthly Archive for March, 2022

Maskirovka

To add to my off used military saying of ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast’ I just picked up on this old Russian army saying that goes ‘never send a soldier somewhere that an artillery shell can go first’. Yet that is essentially what Putin’s fascist army has been doing for these first 3 murderous weeks.

But there’s always the particular for us to consider. In this case the peculiar envelope this internationally isolated second rate mostly old fashioned and joylessly unmotivated steam roller of an army has had to work in.

The working envelope in the pre-launch marshalling period, was the displayable limit of Russian resources in both men and ‘shells’. Yet even though it did not suck me in, it has to be said that Russian deception mostly worked. Further, I think it has also worked for the first-month requirement to hide what the fascists were and are up to for their next move.

It’s been very common (after week 1 or 2) to hear how Putin can’t win! But we all recall how little time Assad had left as the Syrian tyrant back in September 2015! That short time will be seven years this September! Perhaps it may be best to cast away all these soft headed illusions and prepare for the hard reality of struggle.

Putin’s fascists have had to do this massive invasion while they remain in plain sight under US spy satellites. Yet despite the size of the aggressive warfare they’re tasked with they have in these three short opening weeks achieved a lot. All of the Russian generals know that they are fighting a long war and also that it’s only ultimately directed against the spread of democracy into Belarus and Russia. Their job is to deal with the Ukraine issues and let Putin deal with the ‘ultimately’ bit down the track. Not that that will work mind!

So basically they have been pushing forward into the positions they actually require just in order to get started on their current main job! That job is a process. The drawn-out process is well known from Syria where as a result of the closure of the Bosphorus supply route I suppose Egypt might now be expected to step up to the HIRISE ‘leadership’ role. (HIRISE is my own acronym for the loose coalition that is involved in stopping the spread of democracy in Syria, it consists of Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Iraqi Shia militia, Assad’s own Syrian ‘Government’ forces and a token commitment from a regional giant Egypt)

Apparently ‘There’s a Russian word maskirovka which means military deception.’ Perhaps the first case of maskirovka was in the logistic train that was absent. ‘It must be a bluff’, most of the experts shouted in unison, because ‘they haven’t got the logistics in place to do it’. But the question was what was it? The ‘it’, turned out to be no more than deal with stage 1 and then set up the new logistics that are required for stage 2. These are very different logistical issues than were the so-called ‘disaster’ of stage 1. I’ve been informed that 60% of the Ukrainian masses were of the view that Putin would not launch this war and if that is true and I have no reason to doubt it, then the first maskirovka was remarkably successful.

At stage 1 the job appears to have been to funnel the troops forward despite the costs and ‘quickly’ get the artillery into position to pour fire on the cities where there is a strategic purpose for the war. The infantry is only now deployed to protectively screen the artillery and the -so far substantially held back air power- can now both screen the infantry and be the main general terror bombing instrument beyond!

Airpower does not win wars but terror bombing is a big part of what Russia has shown in Syria over the last decade. The cheapest method to drive the civilians out and into the democracies is the Assad barrel bombing process. All this is just one form or another of artillery.

Now we know from Napoleon that artillery conquers but only if infantry can and does occupy; otherwise, it simply drives off the people from the territory that’s been for the time being laid waste. Without infantry occupation, it leaves those that manage to somehow remain living in the zone in abject poverty but still randomly in the fight. In these enclaves, the defenders are subject to constant threat and intermittent terror attacks. These zones become too dangerous to report from and regions for the plausible denial of the various Putinesqe atrocities such as chemical weapons use; even extermination drives become ‘expected’. The Putin method is to establish what is then recognized as nothing less than a free-fire zone! The fascists then kill who they want when they want or can.

We have seen this process play out over many years in Syria. Vast tracts of territory were cleared by the barrel bombing of everything that sustains civilian life. Medical facilities, breadlines all are vulnerable and systematically attacked, until finally, the troops kill at close quarters as they occupy the territory.

The woke world looked on and after a time it was all normalized especially so after some well respected public intellect would point to the US ‘crime’ of illegally liberating the Iraqi people from Baathism! Then every good liberal can tut tut in unison and note that ‘they all do it’ and are ‘all as bad as each other’; so we see a modern fifth column is in this way working just as effectively as if they were paid to disrupt a useful enquiry into how any legitimate struggle for democracy is ever to be fought and won.

I don’t know the exact numbers but about half the Syrian population has in the course of a decade been displaced. At least half of those were driven out of the country altogether and if it were not for the intervention of a massive Turkish ground force the ‘Putin plan’ would have continued. Turkey the NATO no2 giant did the required job and the ½ theorists can’t even talk about it! Anyway I still do. But I digress.

The strategic purpose of this stage of the Putin plan is to terroristically level all the cities that are part of the currently unknown plan; they will be leveled over time to whatever extent is required to take control of them. The shelling required for that task has now started. So supply lines war is the answer and the Turkish and Israeli drones a big part of the effort. The putin plan is for murder in the countryside and mass refugee flows from the selected cities. Ukraine is going to be brutally ‘forced to sue for peace’.

Putin has real form and he does not play. It turns out he doesn’t really bluff either! The shelling will go on for as long as it takes to get the map looking like and also populated as the tzar of all the russians desires it. Make no mistake, as the fascist supply lines get disrupted and Putin’s demoralized troops get bogged down against a growing resistance to these occupation forces, the use of chemical weapons will come up. At some point we can be sure that he will escalate; he is that predictable! Just look at his form and how people got him wrong again and again!

The first 3 weeks of the resumption of this war was about positioning for the next 30 weeks. By about next September I wonder how Biden’s dementia will have progressed. That’s worth thinking about given who is ‘the leader’ and who’s the alternative leader of the free world! My giddy aunt, just how bad does this get?!

But for now the fascist army of Vlad Putin the Audacious is positioned to start driving the mass of unwanted Ukranians out of the territory that IS according to him in play. The rate they have achieved up to this point is 1,000,000 per week for a grand total of 3million. That rate is far in excess of what can be achieved for the next 10,000,000 that Putin wants to be rid of but he has shown what he has the stomach for and we can all recall the time spans that this takes. Syria has already resulted in more than that number of refugees! The fascists must be extraordinarily pleased with the rate of refugee generation at over 1 million per week when less than a month ago 2 out of 3 Ukrainians didn’t know this war was restarting in a big way!

The western world is now in a similar delusionary drift. I doubt that is true in the front line states of Poland, the Baltic 3 and so forth. The Turks under Erdogan will not be so delusionary! They know why they have all those millions of Syrians that the Europeans never wanted and did fuck all to stop being generated. Thank you mother Merkel for all your failed policies! Anyway we ought to know now that the fight is only starting in Ukraine but because it’s ultimately directed at preventing the spread of democracy it won’t stay there. So western democrats out of nothing more than long term self interest are in this fight and in it to the finish.

Comfortingly for me a majority of western generals I’m now hearing in my wide media wanderings are catching on to what’s at stake in this war and more often as not also beginning to express some measure of confidence in the West’s capacity to eventually prevail. Even the Americans! Consequently in the lower ‘ranks’ of the comentariate the will to fight spirit will soon begin to step over the pile of surrender monkeys of the realist right, pseudoleft and the hopelessly woke that have for virtually the entire 21stC dominated in western mainstream media.

The first problem was the phony pacifism snark complaining that the Western world would fight to the last Ukrainian often followed by the demand for a declaration of war against the Russians and declaring a no fly zone is declaring war! The notion that not only can the west help the unfortunate Ukrainian victims to resist until they eventually have to surrender, is however giving way to the view that the west can more slowly enter the fight and we can and will prevail provided we take the path of protracted war! There is no short term solution and there is nothing other than a military solution. It’s the Russians that want to talk while they terror bomb and drive out refugees. The sheer horror in the notion of surrender to what the MSM are now calling the ‘autocracy’ that is attacking them is what has stopped the rot. The ‘autocrat’ is demanding new maps and setting disarmament conditions while his people are not even in support of his adventure. That’s what it is, adventurism writ loud. He’s got more than enough rope now so I hope I live long enough to see him hang with it.

The west is not yet fit for the fight but at least we know we are in one on both sides of the world and we are capable of winning both!