The West is Learning the Wrong Lessons about Airpower in Ukraine

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The West is Learning the Wrong Lessons about Airpower in Ukraine

A recent article appearing in the US-based Business Insider titled, “Russia’s showing NATO its hand in the air war over Ukraine,” would provide a showcase of the deep deficit in military expertise driving increasingly unsustainable, unachievable foreign policy objectives. The article summarizes a number of interviews conducted with Western “airpower experts,” exhibiting a profound misunderstanding of modern military aviation, air defenses, and their role on and above the battlefield. 

The article claims:

Russia botched the initial invasion by failing to establish air superiority from the start, and it has been unable to synchronize its air and ground forces.

This is based on the assumption that Russia could somehow establish air superiority over the battlefield and infers that had the United States and the rest of NATO been in Russia’s place, air superiority would have been established. But this is false.

Fundamental Misconceptions 

At the onset of the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) Ukraine possessed a formidable Soviet-made integrated air defense network consisting of some of the most successful and effective air defense systems in the world. This included long-range air defense systems like the S-300 as well as mobile systems like Buk, Strela, and Osa, as well as a large number of Soviet-made man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS).

The United States and its allies have not operated in airspace as contested as Ukraine’s since the Vietnam War. Over the skies of Vietnam the US would lose over 10,000 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to Soviet-made air defenses employed by Vietnam’s armed forces.

In subsequent conflicts, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, US-led forces would face either no significant air defenses at all, or air defenses consisting of old equipment operated by poorly organized, poorly trained, and poorly motivated troops, as was the case in Iraq.

Amid the US proxy war against Damascus and the US occupation of eastern Syria, US military aviation has been confined by Syria’s relatively modern air defense network, forcing both US and Israeli warplanes to conduct the same types of stand-off strikes Russian military aviation is conducting in Ukraine.
The article would claim:

Russia has demonstrated that it’s unable to suppress or destroy enemy air defenses, fly effective counterair missions, or run complex composite air operations like those the US Air Force pulled off in the opening days of Desert Storm in 1991 and then in the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Beyond the factually incorrect nature of this statement, the obvious differences between Iraq and Ukraine appear entirely lost among the “airpower experts” interviewed by Business Insider.

The Business Insider, citing these same “airpower experts,” also claims:

On the battlefield, effective airpower should aid the advance of armored combat vehicles and infantry by striking an enemy’s strongpoints, as well as the reinforcements and supplies they depend on.

Because of the vast differences between previous US conflicts around the globe and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine now, the type of rapid maneuver warfare utilized by US-led forces in Iraq would not only be inappropriate in Ukraine, it would be disastrous. The 2023 Ukrainian offensive before which NATO trained, armed, and directed Ukrainian forces, ended in catastrophic failure, comprehensively defeated by Russian defenses utilizing land mines, artillery, multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS), long-range ballistic missiles, a wide variety of drones, and both infantry and attack helicopters utilizing anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) – all elements absent among the armed forces of the various nations the US has invaded and occupied since Vietnam.

Because Ukraine also possesses significant defense capabilities, including well-protected fortifications, minefields, artillery, and FPV (first-person-view) drones, NATO-style maneuver warfare would likewise result in catastrophic failure for Russian forces.

Russia has instead adopted a strategy of attrition. Instead of overwhelming Ukrainian positions with rapid maneuver warfare, it is grinding them down with huge amounts of artillery, MLRS, missiles, drones, and military aviation carrying out stand-off strikes using a variety of glide bombs ranging from 250 to 3,000 kilograms. While progress is slower than NATO-style maneuver warfare, it has allowed Russia to avoid the staggering losses Ukraine suffered last year during its offensive.

The conclusion that events unfolding in Ukraine demonstrate the capabilities of Russian military aviation have been “significantly overstated,” as one expert interviewed by Business Insider put it, is a dangerous misconception. US-NATO military aviation would (and already has in Syria) demonstrated it suffers from the same limitations in airspace as contested as Ukraine’s.

Admitted Russian Advantages  

Business Insider’s article concedes there are aspects of Russian military aviation that constitute success. It mentions Russia’s extensive use of stand-off weapons – both air-launched cruise missiles as well as glide bombs (just as the US and its allies are using in Syria to avoid Syrian air defenses). The article also acknowledges Russia’s significant air defense and electronic warfare capabilities, constructing an“umbrella” protecting Russian forces, infrastructure, bases, and civilian centers.

There is one significant difference, however, between Russian and Western stand-off capabilities. Russia’s military industrial base allows it to produce missiles and glide bombs in quantities the collective West cannot match. Russia’s air defense capabilities also exist on a scale the collective West is unable to replicate.

After first claiming Russia is, “unable to suppress or destroy enemy air defenses,” Business Insider eventually admits the depleted air defense arsenals of the collective West and the inability to replenish them in any meaningful manner precisely because Russia has been able to not only “suppress” and“destroy enemy air defenses,” but also because of Russia’s ability to saturate and deplete Ukraine’s supply of interceptor missiles.  

Claims in the article that Lockheed Martin is expanding Patriot missile production to 550 a year are made without explaining that Russia is firing 4,000+ missiles at targets across Ukraine over the same period of time, meaning that 550, 650, or even 750 interceptors manufactured a year represent an entirely inadequate quantity.

And despite this fact, the article would even claim:

In Ukraine, the world has seen that Western air defenses can shoot down incoming drones and missiles when they have sufficient coverage and enough ammo, and the performance has quelled doubts about the Patriot.

This is doubtful.

The US and its allies transferred Western air defense systems to Ukraine, in part, to protect Ukraine’s power grid. In April 2024, CNN would admit that up to 80% of Ukraine’s non-nuclear power production has been destroyed. This means that Ukraine has either run out of Patriot missile interceptors, or the interceptors they have are failing to protect Ukraine’s power grid. It should be noted that the efficacy of an air defense system lies now only in its ability to intercept incoming targets, but also to be produced in large enough quantities to continue intercepting incoming targets.

The high cost of the Patriot missile system inhibits larger-scale production to meet the requirements of a large-scale and/or protracted conflict, meaning that despite its supposed performance in combat, it is still a fundamentally ineffective means of air defense.

Even before Russia’s SMO began in February 2022, the previous month Saudi Arabia’s Patriot systems had exhausted their supply of interceptors amid its ongoing conflict with neighboring Yemen. The United States’ inability to increase production forced Saudi Arabia to “borrow” missiles from neighboring nations.

The limited number of Patriot systems and interceptors being manufactured represent a metric of the system’s overall “success” and, despite the Business Insider’s conclusion, should  continue to drive“doubts” regarding it.

NATO vs. Russia 

The Business Insider article admits that in a conflict between NATO and Russia, NATO military aviation would face serious challenges that simply did not exist in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and even Syria.

The article cites US Air Force (USAF) General David Allvin who noted, “in future fights, it may be possible for the US to achieve air superiority only in bursts — small windows in a specific time, place, and location where air defenses are missing, destroyed, or out of ammo.” 

USAF General James Hecker would tell Business Insider, “if we can’t get air superiority, we’re going to be doing the fight that’s going on in Russia and Ukraine right now, and we know how many casualties that are coming out of that fight.” 

Considering the advantages Russia also enjoys in land warfare capabilities, including the production of up to 3 times more artillery ammunition than the collective West, the outcome of that fight would likely mirror the same incremental defeat Ukraine itself is now suffering.

Western Failures in the Skies of Ukraine, a Microcosm of Wider, Irreversible Decline 

The same blind pursuit of profits and power that compelled the collective West to expand NATO up to Russia’s border in the first place, and deliberately create a national security threat forcing Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, has also created the crisis facing the collective West’s military industrial base making it impossible to achieve the geopolitical objectives this proxy war in Ukraine is a part of.

In order for the collective West to “succeed,” it should first reevaluate what it is even trying to achieve.

This blind pursuit of profits and power is not unlike a tropism in nature – like a tree, for example – reaching downward with its roots and upward with its branches and leaves to grow as large and as fast as possible. In the ideal environment, such a tropism can thrive. In times of drought, the means of sustaining the vast proportions that the tree took could jeopardize its own very survival.

Until the 21st century, the global “environment” was ideal for Western hegemony. The disparity in military and economic power between the West and the rest of the world favored the blind pursuit of profits and power, often in the form of empire. The West grew to gargantuan proportions. Today, the environment has changed – this disparity no longer exists – and now the West is collapsing under the unsustainable size of its own overreach.

While Western policymakers search for game-changing strategies and technologies to maintain generations of global primacy, the unsustainable nature of this pursuit becomes more precarious all while Russia, China, and the rest of the world continue to grow stronger relative to the collective West. Only a policy of shifting away from coercion and control over the rest of the world, toward constructive cooperation with the rest of the world, can avert the inevitable collapse all other stubborn empires have faced throughout history.

For the rest of the world, including Russia and its Chinese allies, the goal continues to be defending their individual and collective sovereignty from Western hegemony while carefully avoiding the triggering of a much larger conflict borne of Western desperation.

In the meantime, in the airspace above Ukraine, a microcosm of the wider failure of Western foreign policy continues to play out, not only lacking any possibility of reversing in Ukraine or its Western sponsors’ favor, but almost certainly to continue accelerating to their detriment.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.


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Politico Does Journalism: “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.”

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By MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA

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The Israeli savagery in Gaza has reached such levels of sociopathy that Western media—loyal tools of the imperialist oligarchy—are having trouble hiding the truth, as they usually do, and cracks are appearing in their coverage. This is one example. The reasons why they are doing this are complicated and belong in a separate article, which we hope to do in the near future. In any case, we are glad that Politico decided to run this material. It is desperately needed. And, of course, speaking for our audience, our gratitude and admiration for Drs Perlmutter and Sidhwa is beyond measure. —The Editor

PUBLISHED UNDER US COPYRIGHT FAIR USE STATUTES

None of this would have happened if the corporate media had been doing journalism instead of disinformation from the start.

 
PRIMARY SOURCE

We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.

American surgeons who witnessed the [Palestinian] civilian carnage of the Israel-Hamas war.


Illustration by Erin Aulov/POLITICO (source images via Mark Pearlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa)

By MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA
07/19/2024 05:00 AM EDT

GAZA — In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.

external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.

In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.

“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”

The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.

None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.

“the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”

We have always gone where we were most needed. In March, it was obvious that the place was the Gaza Strip.

The two of us had never met before this trip. But we both felt called to serve, so we packed our bags, leaving our lives behind in California and North Carolina.

We landed in Cairo around midnight and met up with the rest of our group of 12: an emergency nurse, a physical therapist, an anesthesiologist, another trauma surgeon, a general surgeon, a neurosurgeon, two cardiac surgeons and two pulmonary and critical care intensivists. All of us had volunteered to work with the World Health Organization through the Palestinian American Medical Association.

We find it instructive that the Gaza atrocities have reached such a level that, as expressed elsewhere, leading members of the Western mainstream media, including POLITICO, are now slowly publishing stories reflecting much of the truth about Gaza. CNN, usually a reliable megaphone for Zionist, imperial/warmongering propaganda, has done this already regarding Gaza (but not the Ukraine), and CBS, also a longstanding and highly reliable platform for hegemonist status quo lies, recently ran a segment that was certainly an example of what good journalism should be.  (Please see: Children of Gaza (CBS Sunday Morning—Jul 21-2024)).  We don't know if this trend will continue. Or how deeply this new, however sporadic, serious journalism phenomenon will go. The largely invisible powers that be have a huge investment in the current unipolar status quo, so narrative control is indispensable for the sustenance of their regime. They will surely find ways to keep manipulating this narrative to insure the perpetuation of their legitimacy.

who grew up in a Parsi household in Flint, Michigan and worked with a Palestinian-Jewish cooperative in Haifa after graduation from college. Neither one of us is religious. Neither one of us has any political interest in the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — other than wanting it to end.

The Rafah Crossing functions like a rural American airport: one baggage scanner, odd procedures and minimal facilities. Scanning the medical and humanitarian supplies from the dozens of aid teams one bag at a time was inefficiency defined. But it was the only reliable way to bring anything into Gaza.

noted on the Senate floor, the process for clearing aid with the Israeli authorities is opaque and inconsistent. “Items that are allowed in one day can be rejected the next….” For this reason, everyone simply brought whatever they could as personal luggage — even surgical equipment — paying exorbitant airline baggage fees instead of bulk shipping rates. Now that Rafah is closed, even this route for resupplying Gaza’s hospitals has been cut off. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shown no signs of backing off, is scheduled to address the U.S. Congress on Monday. He will also meet with Vice President Kamala Harris.)

famous “road of death.”

ineffective process called “deconfliction.” The fact that “deconfliction” is so unreliable explains why “Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be an aid worker,” according to the International Rescue Committee. It works something like this: COGAT — the office of Israel’s Defense Ministry that coordinates between the Israeli armed forces and humanitarian organizations — agrees it will not attack traffic on a specific route for a specified period.

This coordination is done through — what else? — a smartphone app. When the road turns green on the app you have 15 minutes to get on and off the specified route, and you can only request deconfliction of a particular route every three hours. After a 40-minute wait, we got the go-ahead and our drivers floored it, dodging foot and donkey traffic all along the road.

all shorter and thinner than they ought to have been. Even over their screams of joy at meeting new foreigners, we could hear Israeli drones humming overhead. We headed to our living quarters — half of our team slept in one room in the adjacent Palestine College of Nursing, while the other half slept in one of the hospital’s outlying patient-care areas — and spent our first night sleeping under continuous, room-shaking bombardment.

For our entire time there, we lived in constant fear that Israel would invade the hospital. Thankfully we never saw a single combatant, Israeli or Palestinian.

had been destroyed, while the remaining partially functioning hospitals operated at 359 percent of their actual bed capacity. The World Health Organization describes them as “partially operational.”

city of 419,000 people in southern Gaza. Now it functions as the only trauma center for well over 1.5 million people, an impossible task even under the best of circumstances. It is likely the safest and best-resourced city block in the entire Gaza Strip — and yet its horrors defy description.

We first noticed the overcrowding: 1,500 people were admitted to a 220-bed hospital. Rooms meant to hold four patients typically had 10 to 12, and patients were housed in every possible space: the radiology department, the common areas, everywhere. Next, we noticed the 15,000 people sheltering on the hospital grounds and inside the hospital — lining and even blocking the hallways, throughout the wards, in the bathrooms and closets, on the stairs, even in the sterile processing and food preparation facilities and the operating rooms themselves. The hospital itself was a displaced persons camp.

It’s what we imagine the first weeks of a zombie apocalypse would look — and smell — like.

left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.

Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.

We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces. 

(The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”)

acute hepatitis A infection in such overcrowded conditions.

Graffiti in the pediatric wing of Gaza European Hospital. Pearlmutter and Sidhwa quickly learned that their Palestinian health care colleagues were among the most traumatized people in the Strip. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa

500 healthcare workers and 278 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. Among them was Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate when Israel besieged the hospital in October.

After his home was destroyed and his family threatened, European Hospital’s director fled to Egypt, leaving an already overburdened hospital without its longtime leader. This sense of helplessness and disorientation was made worse still by the constant spread of hearsay about kidnappings, troop movements, food shipments, water availability and everything else of importance to survival and safety in a land under siege.

Cut off from the outside world and unable to access reliable information about the forces controlling whether they live or die, eat or starve, stay or run, rumors spread and amplified.

Several staff members told us they were simply waiting to die, and that they hoped Israel would get it over with sooner rather than later.

Images of Tamer from his Facebook feed that show him after he was shot and operated on (left), after he was released from Israeli custody (center) and after he was treated at Gaza European Hospital (right).

one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. When Israel raided Indonesian Hospital last November, he was assisting the orthopedics team in the operating room. He refused to leave his anesthetized patient. He said Israeli soldiers shot him in the leg, breaking his femur. His own orthopedic team cared for him, placing an external fixator to stabilize his shattered leg.

Next, Tamer told us, the Israelis came to his hospital room and took him, where exactly he doesn’t know. He told us he was strapped to a table for 45 days, given a juice box every day — sometimes every other day — and denied medical care for his broken femur. During that time, he told us, he was beaten so badly that his right eye was destroyed. As malnutrition set in, he developed osteomyelitis — infection of the bone itself — in his broken femur. Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him and brought him to European Hospital.

detainee abuse and torture at Sde Teiman. In it, the IDF denied mistreating detainees.)

When we met Tamer at the hospital for treatment, all that was left of him was the disfigured outline of a human being, his body crippled by violence, his eye surgically removed and his mind haunted by torture. A man who once healed others was reduced to constantly begging for pain medications, reliant on others for everything — and wondering if his wife and children were even alive.

Nearly all our patients arrived during mass casualty events. Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza, had been under siege and bombardment since December. By the time we arrived on March 25 the town was inhabited by a combination of displaced persons from the north and locals who had not fled south to Rafah despite Israel’s threats against them. (Israeli forces frequently drop flyers or send texts demanding that Palestinians in Gaza leave their homes or shelters.) Extended families often concentrate themselves in as few buildings as possible. They told us they hoped that gathering in numbers would keep them safe — or at the very least, that dying together was preferable to dying separately.

We noticed that bombing seemed to peak at iftar when families were gathered together to break the fast during Ramadan with whatever food they had available.

Left: Israa, a 26-year-old woman during her operation. The mother of four said her home was bombed without warning. Right: The list of ICU patients in the main ICU. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa

 

We took Israa to the operating room. In the United States or Israel this would have been a 5-minute transition, but in the most functional hospital in Gaza it took more than one hour to get her there — working in such a severely compromised space, there was simply no way to get a trauma patient into surgery quickly. During her surgery, we realigned her broken femur, tibia and ankle in external fixators, explored an injured artery, cut chunks of dead tissue out of the massive wound in her thigh and her burned hands (a procedure known as debridement) and stopped her bleeding. It took three experienced surgeons almost four hours to do all of this. For the next 24 hours we were at her bedside almost continuously, knowing the traumatized and exhausted local staff couldn’t be expected to care for her properly.

After three days in the hospital, Israa, a mother of four, told us how she was injured: Her home was bombed without warning. She saw all her children die in front of her when the ceiling collapsed on top of them. Her relatives confirmed that her entire immediate family was buried under the rubble of their home. We didn’t have the heart to tell Israa that some of her children were probably still alive at that moment, dying unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night.

One shudders to think how many children have died this way in Gaza.

Two days later, while we waited in the preoperative area, one of the nurses pointed to a slight and clearly sick little girl. “Can you operate on her?” she asked.

“Who is she? We’ve never met her before.”

“Debridement,” the nurse said, shrugging and walking away.

That’s how we met Juri, the 9-year-old girl with the horrific injuries.

After washing away the maggots, we positioned her on her right side and got to work. We cut away four pounds of dead flesh, washing her wounds as aggressively as we could. Then we bandaged her up and booked her for another debridement the next day.

He’ll come soon, we assured her.

“You’re lying,” she told us, calmly. “He must be dead.”

As it turns out, Juri’s father wasn’t dead. We found him waiting for her in the pediatric ward of the hospital. He was a loving and gentle man who spent all day every day scouring a land in famine for anything his precious daughter would agree to eat. He told us how Juri was maimed: The family evacuated from Khan Younis to Rafah, as Israel demanded. He and his wife left their seven children with their grandparents while they desperately searched for food and water. They came back to the house bombed and destroyed, their children all severely injured or killed. Juri’s surviving siblings were at another hospital with their mother.

no longer exists in Gaza.

And for Juri, “full recovery” means a lifetime of severe and permanent disability.

famine and. disrupted cellular services be damned!

CONTINUE READING WITH THE ORIGINAL SOURCE

Due to the inviolable sacred rights of property preceding moral duty in the collective West, and because we don't have a red sausage to buy legal counsel, nor can we trust that the recent ICJ verdict indicting Israel as the criminal party in the current conflict, and encouraging people to denounce and oppose its actions against Palestinians, will afford us any protection, we must stop this lengthy quote here. Please read the rest of the article on POLITICO.  We hope, however, that you got the message intended by these heroic doctors. Now it's up to you to act. 

<...>

Gaza European Hospital and the surrounding territory to be evacuated. European Hospital is now empty, and has been looted by desperate people trying to survive.

SOURCE: POLITICO

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  • Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
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Bye bye, Tel Aviv? Yemen’s promised retaliation against Israel could sink the state | Ep. 35

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Bye bye, Tel Aviv? Yemen's promised retaliation against Israel could sink the state | Ep. 35

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Jul 22, 2024 The Cradle News Round Up

How will Yemen pay Israel back for bombing Hudeidah | The Cradle News Round-Up Episode 34


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China has achieved escape velocity: it is now unstoppable

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Pepe Escobar
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July 24, 2024

The four-day, twice-a-decade plenum of the Communist Party of China that took place last week in Beijing, designing an economic road map all the way to 2029, was a stunning affair in more ways than one.

Let’s start with continuity – and stability. There’s no question after the plenum that Xi Dada, or The Big Panda, will stay on the helm until 2029 – the end of the current five-year economic drive.

And if Xi is healthy enough, he stays up to 2035: the fateful and uber game-changing target year for China to exhibit a GDP per capita of $30,000, with massive around-the-world reverberations.

Here we see the confluence between the progression of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the defining contours if not of a Pax Sinica, at least of the non-Hegemon-centric, multi-nodal world (italics mine).

The proverbial U.S. Think Tankland/Sinophobia axis has been hysterical on China not being able to sustain a 5% a year growth rate for the next few years – the target once again stressed at the plenum.

A Russian analysis by the Center for Geopolitical Forecasts makes a crucial point: “The Chinese themselves have not bothered about the growth rate for a long time, since in 2018 they switched to a strategy of so-called qualitative development, that is, not at the expense of traditional industries, but on the basis of high technologies and the creation of new areas, such as the production of new energy sources and artificial intelligence.”

Pres. Xi

Made in China 2025 – which is being implemented at breakneck speed: high-tech development leading the way towards a “high-level socialist market economy”, to be consolidated by 2025 and fully constructed by 2035.

The next step will be to attain the status of “modernized socialist power” by 2049, at the 100th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The plenum proved once more that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – or, for the recalcitrant, Chinese-modified capitalism – is “people-centric”. The supreme values are national interest and the people’s interests – attested by the fact that large private corporations remain under the strategic control of the CPC.

It’s idle to try to find in the final communique at the end of the plenum any restrictions on private capital on the path to “universal prosperity”. The key point is that the role of capital should always be subordinated to the concept of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Watch the reform ship steadily sailing

Everything is explained here in nearly didactic terms, chronicling the birth of the “Decision of the CPC Central Committee on further comprehensive deepening of reforms to promote Chinese modernization”.

What is now already referred to colloquially all across China as “The Decision” spreads across 15 parts and 60 articles, divided into three main sections, proposing more than 300 important reforms.

Take a look, for instance, at this passage:

“To ensure that the reform ship sails forward steadily, the ‘Decision’ proposes that further comprehensive deepening of reform must implement the “six principles”: adhere to the party’s overall leadership, adhere to the people-centered approach, adhere to the principle of maintaining the integrity and promoting innovation, adhere to system building as the main line, adhere to the comprehensive rule of law, and adhere to a systematic approach.”

Most of the “Decision” – 6 parts in a total of 13 – is about economic reform. Will China pull it off? Of course it will.

Just look at the precedents. In 1979 the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping started to transform a nation of farmers and peasants into a well-oiled machine of efficient industrial workers. Along the way, GDP per capita was multiplied by no less than 30 times.

Now the ramifications of Made in China 2025 are turning a nation of factory workers into a nation of engineers. Of 10,5 million university graduates a year, a third are engineers.

The emphasis on AI has led, among other examples, to the automobile industry being able to produce a $9,000 EV in complete automation and make a profit. China is already a global leader in EVs (BYD building plants in Brazil, Thailand, Turkey, Hungary), solar power, drones, telecom infrastructure (Huawei, ZTE), steel, shipbuilding – and soon, also semiconductors (thank you, Trump sanctions).

While the Hegemon spent at least $7 trillion – and counting – on unwinnable Forever Wars, China is spending $1 trillion in an array of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects across the Global South: the emphasis is digital/transportation connectivity corridors. Geoeconomic imperatives intertwined with rising geopolitical influence.

Hegemon hysteria aside, the fact is the Chinese economy will grow by a whopping $1.7 trillion only in 2024. That is more than in all but the last three years – because of the Covid effect.

Researcher Geoff Roberts has compiled a very useful list of what China is doing right.

And when it comes to the nitty-gritty, the numbers are staggering. Here are just a few, apart from GDP growth:

  • Foreign goods trade is up 6.1% to $2.9 trillion year-on-year.
  • The trade surplus is at $85 billion, up 12% compared to 2023.
  • China had a record crop, 150 million tons, of cereal grains.
  • The courier sector handled 80 billion parcels, up 23% year-on-year.
  • SMIC is the world’s number two pure-play foundry, after Taiwan’s TSMC.
  • China Telecom paid $265 million for 23% of QuantumCTek, patenter of Micius, the world’s first quantum communications satellite.
  • Commercial aerospace launched 39% of China’s 26 rockets.
  • Invention patents rose 43% to 524,000. China is the first country with 4 million domestic invention patents in force.
  • Baidu’s 1,000 robotaxis in Wuhan will break even in Q4, and will be profitable next year.
  • China has 47% of the world’s top AI talent. It added no less than 2000 AI courses to school and college curricula since 2019.
  • On world-class institutions doubling as research leaders, 7 out of 10 are Chinese, including the top one: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ahead of Harvard.

Exceptionalist China “experts” believe their own fantasy that the U.S. allied with occupied Japan, Germany and South Korea would be able to match and surpass China’s pull with the Global Majority, because they have more resources and more capital.

Nonsense. Even more nonsense is to believe that the Hegemon’s NATO “partners” – as in vassals – will follow the leader in creating cutting edge technology.

The high-speed train that matters has already left the station. The 21st century is shaping up to be the Asian, Eurasian, Chinese century.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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Noura Erakat: During Netanyahu Speech, Congress Cheered “What Is Essentially a War on Children”

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Guest: Noura Erakat

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Noura Erakat: During Netanyahu Speech, Congress Cheered "What Is Essentially a War on Children"

Democracy Now!

Jul 25, 2024 Latest Shows

Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de... We speak with Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat about Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress, in which he defended Israel's brutal war on Gaza, lied repeatedly about the dire humanitarian conditions on the ground and refused to talk about how to reach a ceasefire to end the bloodshed. Although more than 100 Democrats skipped the speech, Erakat says the jubilant reaction from lawmakers in attendance showed U.S. leaders cheering "for what is essentially a war on children."


Lili News 029
  • In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
  • Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
  • Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

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window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function() { if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") { sfsi_widget_set(); } });

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License • 
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS