I tend to think that here in America we have forgotten the "Powell Doctrine".
Now, I am not saying that we ever hewed to it closely, but it was a start and simple enough that the folks out there could get their brains aroud it.
“The Powell Doctrine states that a list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States:
1.) Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2.) Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3.) Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4.) Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5.) Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6.) Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7.) Is the action supported by the American people?
8.) Do we have genuine broad international support?
Now, my memory is that Powell espoused the doctrine when he was the Chair of the JCS, but ignored it when he was Secretary of State. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct me.
This is an excellent analysis, I wish more people would read analysis like this, or, frankly, any analysis of the Russian/Ukraine war that doesn’t rely on on tired “opinions “ as put forth by the MSM. It seems everyone I talk to just spouts whatever they heard on MSNBC, or read in the NY Times. People appear to have such short memories and does no one read history anymore?
> In spite of the almost-irresistible temptation to believe that “this was planned,” the reality is that nobody in the West remotely imagined, a couple of years ago, that we might be where we are.
Both Merkel and Hollande have recently indicated in interviews that Minsk was a ploy to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military forces, with NATO turning it into a NATO ally in all but name. The current generation of Anglo-Saxon neocons consciously pursued this conflict, not so differently from the way Zgibniew Brezinski back in the day tried to lure the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan (this was to be, in his words, "their Vietnam"). Your statement may be true in the narrow sense that no one in the West expected to be *losing a proxy war* against Russia. Those that thought about it, and wanted it, and worked to see it happen, the aforementioned neocons, blithely assumed Russia would fold like a cheap suit, that we would have had regime change in the Kremlin.
I don't personally watch or read any MSM publications - zero since 1991 (Desert Storm).
My take on what's happening in Ukraine is as simple as 123.
A war (low or high intensity) is a dynamic process that can only be sustained and won if the rate of replacement of manpower and equipment is greater or equal to the rate of attrition.
Based on what I know about this war since 2014, NATO (Ukraine) cannot win because their loss of manpower is not sustainable and I don't know anybody in Europe who would want to go and die for UkroNazistan. Only Poland and the Baltic states are supplying manpower and weapons but they don't have an unlimited pool. With an average of 700 soldiers lost per day, they should be training and fielding at least 700 soldiers per day. If not, they're doomed.
As far as the equipment is concerned, UkroNazistan lost all their assets before June 2022. They're currently using the equipment that NATO shipped from the former communist countries - virtually all their Soviet era tanks, fighter jets, etc... They've been destroyed with cheap drone and UkroNazistan now needs Western equipment (Patriot batteries, German, French and US MBTs, etc...)
The Nazis in Ukraine may think that it'll make a difference, they're fooling themselves. The new equipment has already been proven useless in Lebanon (2006 vs Israel), in Syria (Kurds vs Turkey), in Iraq (ISIS vs NATO), in Saudi Arabia (Houthis vs Saudis). And you're not even dealing here first class armies like Russia.
The Houthis crippled the PAC2/PAC3 patriot systems in Saudi Arabia using drones and stone age ballistic missiles worth $5000-$15000!!!
NATO no longer have anything in stock for another round of requests from Kiev and the equipment manufacturers can't even produce the weapons that they're sending now - they send Vietnam era equipment that is outdated from their warehouse.
Raytheon Technologies can produce a maximum of 250 PAC-2/PAC-3 missiles per YEAR.
and Kiev needs 2000 of them in order to protect its newly acquired assets and reconquer Crimea!
The vague and occasionally optimistic bullet-point lists, that lie scattered throughout this article, are disturbingly reminiscent of the Underpant Gnomes' oft-memed, 3-stage business plan, from the 'Gnomes' episode of South Park.
For people who may be unfamiliar with the episode, the gnomes are sneaking into bedrooms at night and stealing underpants, with the intention of somehow enriching themselves. Their business model is as follows:
Phase One: Collect underpants
Phase Two: ?
Phase Three: Profit
If memory serves, by the end of the episode, the gnomes have failed to nail down the elusive Phase Two that will make their business financially viable, but continue to steal underpants anyway.
"medias who are themselves usually disastrously ill-informed on anything of importance . . . nor any adequate intellectual capacity to understand".
This is not the case. The mass media are only ill informed because they choose to be, and they certainly (in most cases anyway) have the capacity to understand. The case is, in fact that if, as Noam Chomsky has observed, they displayed the opposite of these above mentioned qualities then they would soon find themselves either in niche portals, or unemployed. Often it is probably hardly even a conscious decision, but they know consciously or unconsciously which side their bread is buttered on. Many of them probably see it in terms of 'our' side and 'their' side, and are either too cowardly or too instinctively partisan to want to look any further at any particular question.
It would have once been called decadence, but I think a key feature of the modern west is that its too rich and secure. The US in particular can afford to make mistakes that in previous times would destroy empires, or currently would destroy small to medium powers. Ironically, the older model of this would be China, which has gone through repeated historical cycles of internal decay due to an isolated and narcissistic elite assuming that its power could last forever. A failure by a great power to develop and maintain intellectual structures that allows for clear thinking on strategy will usually lead to disaster. Maybe not in the short term, but eventually. And it may, like debt, come along slowly, and then all at once.
This is great : I like the sandwich boy routine, un chouïa Kingsley A, but bravo
That the EU élites are as incompetent and as ignorant as this beggar’s belief, but your description, as those given in the past, is so credible as to defeat all previously held notions
Your suggestions as to the aims goals of the Russians is less complete – it raises the question as to the extent they realise what you realise : how to deal with delusion on this scale, how to defeat those who self defeat, how to kill those who commit suicide
Then along came Madeleine Albright, who could see in the Powell Doctrine an inconveniently high bar for using military force. Colin Powell says this about events in 1993:
"My constant, unwelcome message at all the meetings on Bosnia was simply that we could not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective," Powell wrote in his memoir. Albright, he wrote, "asked me, `What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?' I thought I would have an aneurysm." Powell said Albright was treating American GIs as "toy soldiers." https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-01-10-0101100176-story.html
Of course, Powell failed to advocate for his own doctrine before the Iraq war, which pretty much relegated it to the dustbin (alas, it's a great doctrine). Powell, known for prudence in the use of military force, was the perfect front man for giving a deceitful message to the U.N. on WMD's in Iraq. He let GW Bush and Cheney play with so many soldiers in Iraq like "toys." How does Powell reconcile himself to his role in playing with so many lives, to say nothing about playing the entire country and world, cashiering the reputation of the USA and that of every President since, including Joe Biden, who was always cheering for these interventions first as Senator, then VP. And still, he was elected President?
One reason Clausewitz is so often cited is that the opposite of his dictum is so often true: nations wander into wars without a clear sense of what they are fighting for, expecting, or even hoping, that "victory" would allow them to dictate whatever they could conceivably come up with. This is exactly the recipe for wars that drag out and become tragedies on massive scale. World War i was, in a sense, such a conflict, or, at least evolved into one, per AJP Taylor: regardless of the causes, the scale of the war outgrew anything the powers had planned when they entered the war, assuming that they were given careful thought in the first place (Taylor, in his wonderful phrasing, described Alsace-Lorraine and the Straits "an illusion of realism," or something like that, that got overtaken by actual reality, if I remember right.). I tend to think United States, especially in the last 70-80 years, though, has been more prone to fall into this trap: US consistently got involved in wars without a real plan for the endgame, except a mixture of some vaguely defined "master plan" ("remake the Middle East", "bleed the Russians," "contain Communism" without any sense of who exactly would be playing what role when, grand slogans that double as profession of Faith (tm) ("defend democracy" "stop 'genocide'"), and unstated short term pecuniary gains for bit actors (I don't think these are all that important for anything "big"--Smedkey Butler did not have experience with any "big" wars, just a bunch of small expeditions overthrowing and protecting tiny dictstorships around the Caribbean: once a war becomes big enough, profits for MIC don't drive events--even if they might make money as a byproduct and become convenient scapegoats for political entrepreneurs.). "Complete Victory" is necessary when you have no clear goals because it enables you to make any demands you want to. But, if you can't get to that "Complete Victory," you are lost because you don't have a starting point for negotiations. I always wondered why US could not wrap up the "first" Gulf War: the only conclusion I could come to was that we didn't know what we wanted so could not even start negotiating with the Iraqi government for the endgame so the state of war, under some guise or other had to be kept up until some "Complete Victory" could be achieved...except that that wasn't "Complete" enough either, so, the war is still continuing in a way more than three decades later (There were accounts by journalists back then how American generals had no clue about anything besides defeating the Iraqi army, like what roles an army of occupation was supposed to do and so forth--this struck me as oddly Teotonic: van Creveld had a description of the German officer corps during World Wars as having this sort of mentality.) .
I worry that we are heading towards, if not already past the point where the conflict has gotten "too big.". Russian leaders may be content with a realistic and concrete terms that grant Russia well-defined security in military, political, and economic terms. But these terms can only be negotiated with the West, not Ukraine, and since the West does not know what it actually wants (in concrete terms), there is no one to negotiate with. Maybe, the Western leaders may realize, like the Germans in 1918, that there is no way to "win" (whatever that means to them) and surrender (not a total surrender--just giving the Russians their Alsace-Lorraine, essentially) is only option--but we may be a few million dead Westerners short of that point--but even that may not be enough to hit the Western publics, at least enough of them,that the war is lost: we know what happened in Germany after 1918, and the Germans back then had far more evidence that they had lost in front of them than the Westerners of 2023 or, probably, even 2024, will.
I think Clausewitzian dictum is a cautionary tale that people should listen to, because, far too often they don't. "There is no substitute for victory" is too big an illusion, especially when you don't know what you want to do after the fighting is over.
This all argues for the ancient practice of rulers having a family preceptor, aka a sage (theologian) who may or may not also be a priest. This is the person(s) given time and sustenance to delve quietly in relative seclusion into what is actually going on and what is a stake and why. This person(s) grasps the new framework that is required by new conditions, and if such in fact is required.
Good work.
I tend to think that here in America we have forgotten the "Powell Doctrine".
Now, I am not saying that we ever hewed to it closely, but it was a start and simple enough that the folks out there could get their brains aroud it.
“The Powell Doctrine states that a list of questions all have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States:
1.) Is a vital national security interest threatened?
2.) Do we have a clear attainable objective?
3.) Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
4.) Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
5.) Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
6.) Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
7.) Is the action supported by the American people?
8.) Do we have genuine broad international support?
Now, my memory is that Powell espoused the doctrine when he was the Chair of the JCS, but ignored it when he was Secretary of State. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct me.
This is an excellent analysis, I wish more people would read analysis like this, or, frankly, any analysis of the Russian/Ukraine war that doesn’t rely on on tired “opinions “ as put forth by the MSM. It seems everyone I talk to just spouts whatever they heard on MSNBC, or read in the NY Times. People appear to have such short memories and does no one read history anymore?
Thank you for this.
> In spite of the almost-irresistible temptation to believe that “this was planned,” the reality is that nobody in the West remotely imagined, a couple of years ago, that we might be where we are.
Both Merkel and Hollande have recently indicated in interviews that Minsk was a ploy to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military forces, with NATO turning it into a NATO ally in all but name. The current generation of Anglo-Saxon neocons consciously pursued this conflict, not so differently from the way Zgibniew Brezinski back in the day tried to lure the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan (this was to be, in his words, "their Vietnam"). Your statement may be true in the narrow sense that no one in the West expected to be *losing a proxy war* against Russia. Those that thought about it, and wanted it, and worked to see it happen, the aforementioned neocons, blithely assumed Russia would fold like a cheap suit, that we would have had regime change in the Kremlin.
Thanks.
I don't personally watch or read any MSM publications - zero since 1991 (Desert Storm).
My take on what's happening in Ukraine is as simple as 123.
A war (low or high intensity) is a dynamic process that can only be sustained and won if the rate of replacement of manpower and equipment is greater or equal to the rate of attrition.
Based on what I know about this war since 2014, NATO (Ukraine) cannot win because their loss of manpower is not sustainable and I don't know anybody in Europe who would want to go and die for UkroNazistan. Only Poland and the Baltic states are supplying manpower and weapons but they don't have an unlimited pool. With an average of 700 soldiers lost per day, they should be training and fielding at least 700 soldiers per day. If not, they're doomed.
As far as the equipment is concerned, UkroNazistan lost all their assets before June 2022. They're currently using the equipment that NATO shipped from the former communist countries - virtually all their Soviet era tanks, fighter jets, etc... They've been destroyed with cheap drone and UkroNazistan now needs Western equipment (Patriot batteries, German, French and US MBTs, etc...)
The Nazis in Ukraine may think that it'll make a difference, they're fooling themselves. The new equipment has already been proven useless in Lebanon (2006 vs Israel), in Syria (Kurds vs Turkey), in Iraq (ISIS vs NATO), in Saudi Arabia (Houthis vs Saudis). And you're not even dealing here first class armies like Russia.
The Houthis crippled the PAC2/PAC3 patriot systems in Saudi Arabia using drones and stone age ballistic missiles worth $5000-$15000!!!
NATO no longer have anything in stock for another round of requests from Kiev and the equipment manufacturers can't even produce the weapons that they're sending now - they send Vietnam era equipment that is outdated from their warehouse.
Raytheon Technologies can produce a maximum of 250 PAC-2/PAC-3 missiles per YEAR.
and Kiev needs 2000 of them in order to protect its newly acquired assets and reconquer Crimea!
Let's be serious, that will NEVER happen!!
An excellent piece that needs to be shared widely. An intelligent perspective that is sadly missing in much of the media.
Excellent analysis. Should be printed on the front page of the New York Times.
The vague and occasionally optimistic bullet-point lists, that lie scattered throughout this article, are disturbingly reminiscent of the Underpant Gnomes' oft-memed, 3-stage business plan, from the 'Gnomes' episode of South Park.
For people who may be unfamiliar with the episode, the gnomes are sneaking into bedrooms at night and stealing underpants, with the intention of somehow enriching themselves. Their business model is as follows:
Phase One: Collect underpants
Phase Two: ?
Phase Three: Profit
If memory serves, by the end of the episode, the gnomes have failed to nail down the elusive Phase Two that will make their business financially viable, but continue to steal underpants anyway.
War really is more sports than war. It always has been. They actually have it right.
"medias who are themselves usually disastrously ill-informed on anything of importance . . . nor any adequate intellectual capacity to understand".
This is not the case. The mass media are only ill informed because they choose to be, and they certainly (in most cases anyway) have the capacity to understand. The case is, in fact that if, as Noam Chomsky has observed, they displayed the opposite of these above mentioned qualities then they would soon find themselves either in niche portals, or unemployed. Often it is probably hardly even a conscious decision, but they know consciously or unconsciously which side their bread is buttered on. Many of them probably see it in terms of 'our' side and 'their' side, and are either too cowardly or too instinctively partisan to want to look any further at any particular question.
It would have once been called decadence, but I think a key feature of the modern west is that its too rich and secure. The US in particular can afford to make mistakes that in previous times would destroy empires, or currently would destroy small to medium powers. Ironically, the older model of this would be China, which has gone through repeated historical cycles of internal decay due to an isolated and narcissistic elite assuming that its power could last forever. A failure by a great power to develop and maintain intellectual structures that allows for clear thinking on strategy will usually lead to disaster. Maybe not in the short term, but eventually. And it may, like debt, come along slowly, and then all at once.
This is great : I like the sandwich boy routine, un chouïa Kingsley A, but bravo
That the EU élites are as incompetent and as ignorant as this beggar’s belief, but your description, as those given in the past, is so credible as to defeat all previously held notions
Your suggestions as to the aims goals of the Russians is less complete – it raises the question as to the extent they realise what you realise : how to deal with delusion on this scale, how to defeat those who self defeat, how to kill those who commit suicide
Then along came Madeleine Albright, who could see in the Powell Doctrine an inconveniently high bar for using military force. Colin Powell says this about events in 1993:
"My constant, unwelcome message at all the meetings on Bosnia was simply that we could not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective," Powell wrote in his memoir. Albright, he wrote, "asked me, `What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?' I thought I would have an aneurysm." Powell said Albright was treating American GIs as "toy soldiers." https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-01-10-0101100176-story.html
Of course, Powell failed to advocate for his own doctrine before the Iraq war, which pretty much relegated it to the dustbin (alas, it's a great doctrine). Powell, known for prudence in the use of military force, was the perfect front man for giving a deceitful message to the U.N. on WMD's in Iraq. He let GW Bush and Cheney play with so many soldiers in Iraq like "toys." How does Powell reconcile himself to his role in playing with so many lives, to say nothing about playing the entire country and world, cashiering the reputation of the USA and that of every President since, including Joe Biden, who was always cheering for these interventions first as Senator, then VP. And still, he was elected President?
And now, like Scott Ritter, I'm very worried we may stumble into nuclear war under this President. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8TNIpQfOH0
I disagree that the West was not planning for a war with Russia.
I think leading with the 3rd paragraph would have been better, but an excellent writeup overall.
One reason Clausewitz is so often cited is that the opposite of his dictum is so often true: nations wander into wars without a clear sense of what they are fighting for, expecting, or even hoping, that "victory" would allow them to dictate whatever they could conceivably come up with. This is exactly the recipe for wars that drag out and become tragedies on massive scale. World War i was, in a sense, such a conflict, or, at least evolved into one, per AJP Taylor: regardless of the causes, the scale of the war outgrew anything the powers had planned when they entered the war, assuming that they were given careful thought in the first place (Taylor, in his wonderful phrasing, described Alsace-Lorraine and the Straits "an illusion of realism," or something like that, that got overtaken by actual reality, if I remember right.). I tend to think United States, especially in the last 70-80 years, though, has been more prone to fall into this trap: US consistently got involved in wars without a real plan for the endgame, except a mixture of some vaguely defined "master plan" ("remake the Middle East", "bleed the Russians," "contain Communism" without any sense of who exactly would be playing what role when, grand slogans that double as profession of Faith (tm) ("defend democracy" "stop 'genocide'"), and unstated short term pecuniary gains for bit actors (I don't think these are all that important for anything "big"--Smedkey Butler did not have experience with any "big" wars, just a bunch of small expeditions overthrowing and protecting tiny dictstorships around the Caribbean: once a war becomes big enough, profits for MIC don't drive events--even if they might make money as a byproduct and become convenient scapegoats for political entrepreneurs.). "Complete Victory" is necessary when you have no clear goals because it enables you to make any demands you want to. But, if you can't get to that "Complete Victory," you are lost because you don't have a starting point for negotiations. I always wondered why US could not wrap up the "first" Gulf War: the only conclusion I could come to was that we didn't know what we wanted so could not even start negotiating with the Iraqi government for the endgame so the state of war, under some guise or other had to be kept up until some "Complete Victory" could be achieved...except that that wasn't "Complete" enough either, so, the war is still continuing in a way more than three decades later (There were accounts by journalists back then how American generals had no clue about anything besides defeating the Iraqi army, like what roles an army of occupation was supposed to do and so forth--this struck me as oddly Teotonic: van Creveld had a description of the German officer corps during World Wars as having this sort of mentality.) .
I worry that we are heading towards, if not already past the point where the conflict has gotten "too big.". Russian leaders may be content with a realistic and concrete terms that grant Russia well-defined security in military, political, and economic terms. But these terms can only be negotiated with the West, not Ukraine, and since the West does not know what it actually wants (in concrete terms), there is no one to negotiate with. Maybe, the Western leaders may realize, like the Germans in 1918, that there is no way to "win" (whatever that means to them) and surrender (not a total surrender--just giving the Russians their Alsace-Lorraine, essentially) is only option--but we may be a few million dead Westerners short of that point--but even that may not be enough to hit the Western publics, at least enough of them,that the war is lost: we know what happened in Germany after 1918, and the Germans back then had far more evidence that they had lost in front of them than the Westerners of 2023 or, probably, even 2024, will.
I think Clausewitzian dictum is a cautionary tale that people should listen to, because, far too often they don't. "There is no substitute for victory" is too big an illusion, especially when you don't know what you want to do after the fighting is over.
This all argues for the ancient practice of rulers having a family preceptor, aka a sage (theologian) who may or may not also be a priest. This is the person(s) given time and sustenance to delve quietly in relative seclusion into what is actually going on and what is a stake and why. This person(s) grasps the new framework that is required by new conditions, and if such in fact is required.