The Implications of Russia’s New Weapon Systems

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By The SAKER & ANDREI MARTYANOV
CROSSPOSTED WITH THE UNZ REVIEW and THE SAKER
ANDREI MARTYANOV

During the August 2008 Russo-Georgian War, the operations of Russia’s 58th Army were termed as “coercion into peace”. It is an appropriate term once one recalls what truly was at stake then. Russians did win that war and, indeed, coerced Georgia into a much more peaceful mood. In Clausewitzian terms the Russians achieved the main object of the war by compelling the enemy to do Russia’s will. Russians, as the events of the last 19 years showed, have no illusions anymore about the possibility of any kind of reasonable civilized conduct from the combined West, least of all from the United States which still continues to reside in her bubble which insulates her from any outside voices of reason and peace. The American global track record of the last few decades does not require any special elaborations—it is a record of military and humanitarian disasters.

Vladimir Putin’s March 1st, 2018 address to Russia’s Federal Assembly was not about Russia’s upcoming presidential elections, as many in the election-obsessed West suggest. Putin’s speech was about coercing America’s elites into, if not peace, at least into some form of sanity, given that they are currently completely detached from the geopolitical, military and economic realities of a newly emerging world. As it was the case with Georgia in 2008, the coercion was based on military power. The Pre-Shoigu Russian Army, for all its real and perceived shortcomings, disposed of the US-trained and partially equipped Georgian force in a matter of five days—the Russian Army’s technology, personnel and operational art was simply better. Obviously such a scenario is not possible between Russia and the United States; that is unless the American myth of technological superiority is blown out of the water.

Russia’s actions are dictated by only one cause–to pull a gun on a drunk, rowdy, knife wielding bully in the bar and get him to pay attention to what others may have to say. In other words, Russia brought the gun to a knife fight and it seems that this is the only way to deal with the United States today.

American power elites, the majority of whom have never served a day in uniform nor ever attended serious military academic institutions and whose expertise on serious military-technological and geopolitical issues is limited to a couple of seminars on nuclear weapons and, in the best case scenario, the efforts of the Congressional Research Service, are simply not qualified to grasp the complexity, the nature and application of military force. They simply have no reference points. Yet, being a product of the American pop-military culture, also known as military porn and propaganda, these people—this collection of lawyers, political “scientists”, sociologists and journalists who dominate the American strategic kitchen which cooks non-stop delusional geopolitical and military doctrines, can understand one thing for sure—when their poor dears get a bulls-eye on their backs, or foreheads.

Putin’s message to the United States was extremely simple: he reminded the US about its condescending refusal to even consider Russia’s position on the ABM Treaty. As Jeffrey Lewis, in a surprising moment of sobriety for Foreign Policy magazine put it:

The real genesis of Russia’s new generation of bizarre nuclear weapons lies not in the most recent Nuclear Posture Review, but in the George W. Bush administration’s decision in 2001 to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the bipartisan failure by both the Bush and Obama administrations to engage meaningfully with the Russians over their concerns about American missile defenses. Putin said as much in his remarks. “During all these years since the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty,” Putin explained, “we have been working intensively on advanced equipment and arms, which allowed us to make a breakthrough in developing new models of strategic weapons.” Those technological breakthroughs are now here. Sadly, we’re never got the diplomatic ones we needed.

Putin’s message was clear: “You didn’t listen to us then, you will listen to us now”. After that he proceeded with what can only be described as a military-technological Pearl-Harbor meets Stalingrad. The strategic ramifications of the latest weapon systems Putin presented are immense. In fact, they are historic in nature. Of course, many American pundits, as expected, dismissed that as bluster—this is indeed expected from the US military “expert” community. Others were not as dismissive and some were, indeed, deeply shocked. The overall impression today, a day after Putin’s presentation, can be described in simple terms as such: the missile gap is real and, in fact, it is not a gap but a technological abyss. Paradoxically, this abyss is not where many do admit it—such as the RS-28 Sarmat ballistic missile, whose existence and approximate characteristics were more or less known for years. It is, undeniably, an impressive technological achievement of having a ballistic missile with not only practically unlimited range but also capable of trajectories which render any kind of Anti-Ballistic Defense useless. In the end, to be attacked from the South Pole, through South America, is not a contingency the US military is capable of facing. Probably not for very many years.

Nor is the Russian M=20+ hypersonic glider weapon system called Avangard, which is already in series production, an unexpected development—the United States has its own, albeit not successful yet, program for such types of weapons and those ideas were being floated in the US since the mid-2000s under the tutelage of the PGS (Prompt Global Strike). Yes, these are stunning technological achievements by Russia with Jeffrey Lewis’ term “bizarre” being a euphemism for “we don’t have anything comparable”, but it wasn’t even here where the real shock should be. Several of my articles on this resource have been focused precisely in the area where the United States was more than lagging—cruise missiles, all kinds of them. I predicted the American real military decline coming namely by this path many years ago, today it is patently clear that Russia holds an overwhelming military-technological advantage in cruise and aero-ballistic missiles and leads the US by decades in this crucial field.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile Western punditry was discussing all those exotic and, no doubt, stunning weapon systems designed for the delivery of nuclear weapons to any point on the globe with very high precision, many true professionals were gasping for air when the Dagger (Kinzhal) was unveiled. This is a complete game changer geopolitically, strategically, operationally, tactically and psychologically. It was known for some time now that the Russian Navy was already deploying a revolutionary M=8 capable 3M22 Zircon anti-shipping missile. As impressive and virtually uninterceptable by any air defenses the Zircon (the Kinzhal),  is simply shocking in its capabilities. This, most likely based on the famed Iskander airframe, M=10+ capable, highly maneuverable, aero-ballistic missile with a range of 2000 kilometers, carried by MiG-31BMs, just rewrote the book on naval warfare. It made large surface fleets and combatants obsolete. No, you are not misreading it. No air-defense or anti-missile system in the world today (maybe with the exception of the upcoming S-500 specifically designed for the interception of hyper-sonic targets) is capable of doing anything about it, and, most likely, it will take decades to find the antidote. More specifically, no modern or prospective air-defense system deployed today by any NATO fleet can intercept even a single missile with such characteristics. A salvo of 5-6 such missiles guarantees the destruction of any Carrier Battle Group or any other surface group, for that matter–all this without use of nuclear munitions.

The use of such a weapon, especially since we know now that it is deployed already in Russia’s Southern Military District, is very simple–the most likely missile drop spot by MiG-31s will be in the international waters of the Black Sea, thus closing off the whole Eastern Mediterranean to any surface ship or group of ships. Russia can also close off the Persian Gulf completely. It also creates a massive no-go zone in the Pacific, where MiG-31BMs from Yelizovo in Kamchatka or Centralnaya Uglovaya Air Base in Primosrky Krai will be able to patrol vast distances over the ocean. It is, though, remarkable that the current platform for the Kinzhal is the MiG-31–arguably the best interceptor in history. Obviously, the MiG-31′s ability to reach very high supersonic speeds (well in excess of M=2) is a key factor in the launch. But no matter what the procedures for the launch of this terrifying weapon are, the immediate strategic consequences of Kinzhal’s operational deployment are as follows:

  1. It makes classic CBGs as a main strike force against a peer or near-peer completely obsolete and useless, it also makes any surface combat ship defenseless regardless of its air-defense or anti-missile capabilities. It completely annuls hundreds of billions of dollars investment into those platforms and weapons, which suddenly become nothing more than fat defenseless targets. The whole concept of Air-Sea Battle, aka Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons (JAM-GC), which is a cornerstone of American global dominance becomes simply useless—this is a doctrinal and fiscal catastrophe.
  2. Sea Control and Sea Denial change their nature and merge. Those who have such weapons, simply own vast spaces of the sea limited by the ranges of the Kinzhal and its carriers. It also removes completely any crucial surface support for submarines in the area, thus exposing them for Patrol/ASW aviation and surface ships. The effect is multiplicative and it is profound.

Russia has many of those carriers—the program of modernization of MiG-31s to BM was in full steam for some years now, with front line Air Force units seeing a considerable inflow of these aircraft. It is clear now why such modernization was undertaken–it made MiG-31BMs into launch platforms for the Kinzhal. As Marine Major General James L. Jones went on record in 1991, after the First Gulf War, “All it takes to panic a battlegroup is seeing somebody dropping a couple of 50-gallon drums into the water.” The Kinzhal effectively removes any non-suicidal surface force thousands of miles away from Russia’s shores and renders its capabilities irrelevant. In layman’s lingo that means only one thing—the US Navy’s whole surface component becomes a complete hollow force good only for parades and flag demonstration near and in the littorals of weak and underdeveloped nations. This can be done for a tiny fraction of the astronomical costs of US platforms and weapons.

It is very difficult at this stage to fully predict the political fallout of Putin’s speech in the US. What is easy to predict, however, is the use of the beaten to death cliché of asymmetry. The use of this cliché is wrong. What happened on March 1st this year with the announcement and demonstration of new Russian weapons is not asymmetry, it was an acknowledgement of the final arrival of a completely new paradigm in warfare, military technology and, as a consequence in strategy and operational art. Old rules and wisdom have ceased to apply. The United Sates was not and is not prepared for this, despite many real professionals, including in the US itself, warning about the new unfolding military-technological paradigm and a complete American myopia and hubris in anything military related. As Colonel Daniel Davies was forced to admit:

However justified that pride might have been at the time, it quickly mutated into distasteful arrogance. Now, it is an outright danger to the nation. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this threat better than the Pentagon’s dysfunctional acquisition system.

It is prudent to predict today, against the background of an American approach to war that there will be no sensible technological American response to Russia in the foreseeable future. The United States simply has no resources, other than turning on the printing presses and completely bankrupting itself in the process, to counter. But here is the point, Russians know this and Putin’s speech was not about directly threatening the US which, for all intents and purposes, is simply defenseless against the plethora of Russia’s hyper-sonic weapons. Russia does not pursue the objective of destroying the United States. Russia’s actions are dictated by only one cause–to pull a gun on a drunk, rowdy, knife wielding bully in the bar and get him to pay attention to what others may have to say. In other words, Russia brought the gun to a knife fight and it seems that this is the only way to deal with the United States today.

If warnings and the demonstration of Russian military-technological superiority will have an effect, as was the Russian intent from the beginning, some sensible conversation on the new world order may start between key geopolitical players. The world cannot afford any more a pretentious, self-aggrandizing and hollow bully which knows not what it does and threatens the world’s stability and peace. American self-proclaimed hegemony is over where it really matters for any real and perceived hegemon—the military field. It was over for some time now, it just took Putin’s speech to demonstrate the good old Al Capone truism that one can get much further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. After all, Russia did try a kind word alone, it didn’t work and the United States has only itself to blame. 

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Newly revealed Russian weapons systems: political implications
THE SAKER

 

For those interested in the military implications of the recent revelations by Vladimir Putin about new Russian weapon systems I would recommend the excellent article entitled “The Implications of Russia’s New Weapon Systems” by Andrei Martyanov (ABOVE) who offers a superb analysis of what these new weapons mean for the USA and, especially, the US Navy. What I want to do here is something a little different and look at some of the more political consequences of these latest revelations. 

The first two of the five stages of grief: denial and anger

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ight now, the AngloZionists are undergoing something very similar to the first two of the Five Stages of the Kübler-Ross Grief model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Mostly this manifests itself in criticisms of the quality of the videos presented by Putin and by simple incantations about “these weapons only exist on paper”. This is absolutely normal and will not last too long. That kind of denial is a normal coping mechanism whose primary function is to “soften the blow”, but not something one can base any actual policy or strategy on. However, it is worth looking into why exactly these revelations triggered such a powerful reaction as things are a little more complicated than might first appear.

First, a stunning revelation of sorts: the deployment of these weapons systems does not fundamentally change the nuclear balance between Russia and the USA, at least not in terms of first strike stability (for a detailed discussion see here). Yes, it is true that the US nuclear arsenal is becoming increasingly antiquated, especially when compared with the Russian one and, yes, it is true that in an entire family of technologies the Russians are now clearly many years ahead of the USA. But no, this does not mean that Russia could get away with a first strike against the USA (neither could, for that matter, the USA could get away with a first strike against Russia). Both countries possess more than enough nuclear warhead delivery capabilities even if their forces were to be reduced by a full 90% in any putative disarming (counterforce) strike. The point of Putin’s warning was not at all to threaten the West or to suggest that Russia could prosecute a successful nuclear war, far from it! First and foremost, his speech was a much-needed case of public psychotherapy. You could say that his intention was to force the Empire to eventually enter the next, more constructive, three stages of grief: bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Bringing a sense of reality to a deeply delusional Empire

The leaders of the Empire, along with their brainwashed ideological drones, live in a world completely detached from reality. This is why Martyanov writes that the USA “still continues to reside in her bubble which insulates her from any outside voices of reason and peace” and that Putin’s speech aimed at “coercing America’s elites into, if not peace, at least into some form of sanity, given that they are currently completely detached from the geopolitical, military and economic realities of a newly emerging world ”. Martyanov explains that:

American power elites, the majority of whom have never served a day in uniform nor ever attended serious military academic institutions and whose expertise on serious military-technological and geopolitical issues is limited to a couple of seminars on nuclear weapons and, in the best case scenario, the efforts of the Congressional Research Service are simply not qualified to grasp the complexity, the nature, and application of military force. They simply have no reference points. Yet, being a product of the American pop-military culture, also known as military porn and propaganda, these people—this collection of lawyers, political “scientists”, sociologists and journalists who dominate the American strategic kitchen which cooks non-stop delusional geopolitical and military doctrines, can understand one thing for sure, and that is when their poor dears get a bulls-eye on their backs or foreheads.

The fact that in the real world these elites have had a bulls-eye on their backs for decades doesn’t change the fact that they also managed to convince themselves that they could remove that bulls-eye by means of withdrawing from the ABM treaty and by surrounding Russia with anti-missile launchers. The fact that some (many? most?) US politicians realized, at least in the back of their minds, that their ABM systems would never truly protect the USA from a Russian counter-strike did not really matter because there were some uniquely US American psychological factors which made the notion of an ABM system irresistibly attractive:

1) An ABM system promised the USA impunity: impunity is, along with military superiority, one of the great American myths (as discussed here). From Reagan with this “weapons which kill weapons” to the current crisis in Korea, US Americans have always strived for impunity for their actions abroad: let all countries drown in an ocean of fire, murder and mayhem as long as our “homeland” remains the untouchable sacrosanct citadel. Since WWII US Americans have killed many millions of people abroad, but when 9/11 came (nevermind that it was obviously a false flag) the country went into something like clinical shock from the loss of about 3’000 innocent civilians. Soviet, and then later, Russian nuclear weapons promised to deliver many tens of millions of deaths if the USSR/Russia was attacked and that is why spinning the fairy tale about an ABM “shield” was so appealing even if it was technologically speaking either a pipe-dream (Reagan’s “Star Wars”) or an extremely limited system capable of stopping maybe a few missiles at most (the current ABM system in Europe). Again, facts don’t matter at all, at least not in American politics or in the US collective psyche.

The zombified US general public won’t be told what is going on, those who will understand will be marginalized and powerless to make any changes, as for the corrupt parasites who have been making millions and billions from this total waste of taxpayer money, they have way too much at stake to throw in the towel…”

2) An ABM system promised a huge financial bonanza for the fantastically corrupt US Military-Industrial Complex for which millions of US Americans work and which made many of them fantastically rich. Frankly, I suspect that many (most?) folks involved in the ABM programs fully realized that this was a waste of time, but as long as they were getting their bank accounts filled with money, they simply did not care: hey, they pay me – I will take it!

3) The US military culture never had much of an emphasis on personal courage or self-sacrifice (for obvious reasons). The various variations of the ABM fairy tale make it possible for US Americans to believe that the next war would be mostly fought by pressing buttons and relying on computers. And if real bombs start falling, let them fall somewhere else, preferably on some remote brown people who, well, ain’t quite as precious to God and humanity as us, the White “indispensable nation”.

Add to this a quasi-religious belief (a dogma, really) in the myth of American technological superiority and you understand that the Russian leaders began to realize that their US counterparts were gradually forgetting that they did have a bulls-eye painted on their backs. So what Putin did is simply paint a few more, different ones, just to make sure that US leaders come back to reality.

The goal of Putin’s speech was also to prove both Obama (“the Russian economy is in tatters”) and McCain (“Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country”) wrong. The Russian message to the US ruling elites was simple: no, not only are we not lagging behind you technologically, in many ways we are decades ahead of you, in spite of sanctions, your attempts to isolate us, the dramatic drop in energy prices or your attempts at limiting our access to world markets (the successful development of this new generation of weapons systems is a clear indicator of the real state of fundamental research in Russia in such spheres are advanced alloys, nanotechnology, super-computing, etc.).

To the warmongers at the Pentagon, the message was equally clear and tough: we spend less than 10% of what you can spend on defense global aggression; we will match your quantitative advantage with our qualitative superiority. Simply put, you fight with dollars, we will fight with brains. US propagandists, who love to speak about how Russia always uses huge numbers of unskilled soldiers and dumb but brutal weapons now have to deal with a paradigm which they are completely unfamiliar with: a Russian soldier is much better trained, much better equipped, much better commanded and his morale and willpower is almost infinitely higher than the one of the typical US serviceman. For a military culture used to mantrically repeat that everything about it is “the best in the world” or even “the best in history” this kind of new reality will come as a very painful shock and most will respond to it by going into deep denial. To those who believed in the (historically completely false) narrative about the USA and Reagan bankrupting the USSR by means of a successful arms race, it must feel very strange to have sort of “traded places” with the bad old USSR and being in the situation of having to face military-spending induced bankruptcy.

Nothing will change in the Empire of Illusions (at least for the foreseeable future)

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]peaking of bankruptcy. The recent revelations have confirmed what the Russians have been warning about for years: all the immense sums of money spent by the USA in ABM defenses have been completely wasted. Russia did find and deploy an asymmetrical response which makes the entire US ABM program completely useless and obsolete. Furthermore, as Martyanov also points out, the current force structure of the US surface fleet has also been made basically obsolete and useless, at least against Russia (but you can be sure that China is following close behind). Potentially, this state of affairs should have immense, tectonic repercussions: immense amounts of US taxpayer money have been completely wasted, the US nuclear and naval strategies have been completely misguided, intelligence has failed (either on the acquisition or the analytical level), US politicians have made disastrous decisions and this is all a total “cluster-bleep” which should trigger God knows how many investigations, resignations, and numerous sanctions, administrative or even criminal ones. But, of course, absolutely nothing of this, nothing at all, will happen. Not a single head will roll…

In the “Empire of Illusions,” facts simply don’t matter at all. In fact, I predict that the now self-evidently useless ABM program will proceed as if nothing had happened. And, in a way, that is true. The zombified US general public won’t be told what is going on, those who will understand will be marginalized and powerless to make any changes, as for the corrupt parasites who have been making millions and billions from this total waste of taxpayer money, they have way too much at stake to throw in the towel. In fact, since the USA is now run by Neocons, we can very easily predict what they will do. They will do what Neocons always do: double down. So, after it has become public knowledge that the entire US ABM deployment is useless and outdated, expect a further injection of cash into it by “patriotic” “Congresspersons” (<<== my attempt at being politically correct!), surrounded by flags who will explain to the lobotomized public that they are “taking a firm stance” against “the Russian dictator” and that the proud US of A shall not cave in to the “Russian nuclear blackmail”. These colors don’t run! United we stand! Etc. etc. etc.

As for the USN, this won’t even be a topic. So some Russian guy (I mean Martyanov) wrote some stuff for the Unz Review. Who cares? That is just more “Russian propaganda” of course. It will be dismissed even before it is actually parsed and inevitably the reassuring conclusion will be, as always, “we are #1”, “Britannia America rules the waves” and all the rest of the usual jingoistic nonsense US admirals have been feeding the public for decades. Also, keep in mind that the smart folks in the USN, and there are plenty of those, knew what was going on all along, but they either had no influence or kept their silence for obvious career reasons.

The reality is that what Martyanov calls “the American myth of technological superiority” is so deeply ingrained in the US collective psyche that it has become part of the national identity and it cannot, ever, be successfully challenged. Even if Putin decided that videos and speeches simply aren’t enough and decided to make a live firing demonstration, the flag-waving zombies in the media, government and public will find a way to deny it all, pretend it did not happen, or put a mysterious smile on their faces and reply something along the lines of “yeah, cute, but if you only knew about the super-weapons we are not showing you!!” (as one drone actually wrote, “ there has to be weaponry up the USA’s sleeve that would be used in the event of an attack.”). So, for the foreseeable future, expect the collective denial to continue.

“When your head is in the sand, your ass is in the air”

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]nd yet, reality exists. No matter how US propagandists have tried to spin it, deny it, obfuscate it or dismiss it, something very fundamental has changed for the United States. One such element of reality which, with time, will start to slowly seep into the minds of the people of the USA is that their beloved “homeland” and they themselves are now personally and directly at risk. Indeed, for the first time in history, the United States is now targeted by powerful conventional weapons which can reach any target inside the United States. Not only that but unlike the bad old ICBMs, the launches of the weapons systems, which can now strike anywhere in the United States, the cruise missiles, are extremely hard to detect and can give the US little or no warning time. We already knew about the Russian cruise missiles 3M-54 Kalibr and the KH-101/102 with ranges of 2600km and 5500km (or more). Vladimir Putin has now announced that Russia also has nuclear-powered cruise missiles whose range is essentially infinite. Keep in mind that these missiles are very hard to detect since their launch does not generate a strong thermal signal, they fly most of their trajectory at subsonic speeds (only accelerating at the end), their thermal signature is therefore very low, their shape results a very low radar cross-section and they can fly very low (nap of the earth) flight courses which further conceals them. Best of all, however, is that they can be launched from what externally appears to be a regular commercial container. Please take a look at this short propaganda video showing how such missiles could be concealed, deployed and used.

What Putin has now officially added to this arsenal are cruise missiles with an infinite range which could, in theory, destroy a command post in, say, the US Midwest, while being fired from the southern Indian Ocean or from the Tasman Sea. Even better, the launching platform does not need to be a Russian Navy ship at all but could be any commercial (cargo, fishing, etc.) ship, even a cruise ship. Russian heavy transport aircraft could also deliver such “containers” to any location in, say, Africa or even Antarctica and strike downtown Omaha from there with either a conventional or a nuclear warhead. That is also a fundamental game changer.

Conversely, you can think of the new nuclear-powered torpedo as a kind of “underwater cruise missile” with similar capabilities against surface ships or coastal installations. Except that this “underwater cruise missile” could “fly” under the polar ice cap. Needless to say, all of these cruise missiles can, if needed, be armed with nuclear warheads.

But it is not only the US mainland which is now targetable. All US military installations worldwide can now be attacked leaving the US very little or no reaction time.

It is not an exaggeration to say that this is truly a radical change, even a revolution, in modern warfare. I hate to admit it, but this is also an undesirable development from the point of view of first-strike stability as this places a good segment of the US nuclear triad in danger, along with almost all vital US military and conventional sites. Having said that, the entire blame for this situation is to be placed upon the arrogant and irresponsible policies of the United States since its disastrous US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002. Furthermore, I am confident that the Russians will gladly sit down with the Americans and explore reasonably any means to come to a mutual agreement to restore first-strike stability between these two countries. Nobody, besides the corrupt leaders of the US MIC, of course, needs any kind of arms race between Russia and the USA or the immense costs associated with such an endeavor. But since this arms race will probably continue (as said above, Neocons always double down), Russia has a huge advantage in this race for two key reasons

1) Unlike Russia, the USA will, for absolutely idiotic prestige reasons, categorically refuse to scale down its useless ABM and carrier centered naval procurement programs and all the monies allocated to actually trying to counter these Russian capabilities will be spent on top, not instead of, these useless and obsolete programs. Russia, in contrast, will spend her money on programs which actually make a real difference.

2) The USA is now dramatically lagging behind in many key areas all of which have long development cycles. Frankly, I can’t even begin to imagine how the US is going to extricate itself from such design-disasters as the littoral combat ship (LCS) or, even the worst of them all, the F-35. Just like Russia in the 1990s, the USA is nowadays ruled by corrupt incompetent cowards who simply don’t have what it takes to embark upon a real, meaningful, military reform and, as a result of that, the US armed forces are suffering from problems which are only going to get much worse before they get better again. For the time being the difference between Putin’s Russia and Trump’s USA is as simple as it is stark: Russia spends her money on defense, the USA spends its money on enriching corrupt politicians and businessmen. With that set of parameters, the USA doesn’t stand a chance in any arms race, irrespective of the talent and patriotism of US engineers or soldiers.

Russia and the USA are already at war and Russia is winning

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ussia and the USA have been at war since at least 2014 (I have been warning about this year, after year, after year). So far, this war has been about 80% informational, 15% economic and 5% kinetic. But this could very well change, and very suddenly. Russia has therefore embarked on an immense effort to prepare against both a conventional and a nuclear attack by the AngloZionist Empire. Here are some of the measures which have been taken in this context: (partial, non-exhaustive list!)

In response to the conventional NATO threat from the West:

  • Putin has ordered the re-creation of the First Guards Tank Army. This Tank Army will include two Tank Divisions (the best ones in the Russian military – 2nd Guards Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division and the 4th Guards Kantemirovskaya Tank Division), and a total of 500+ T-14 Armata tanks. This Tank Army will be supported by the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army (in progress). This will be what was called a “Shock Army” during WWII and the Cold War.
  • The deployment of the Iskander-M operational-tactical missile system (completed)
  • The doubling of the size of the Russian Airborne Forces from 36’000 to 72’000 (in progress).
  • Creation of a National Guard: which will include troops of the Interior Ministry (about 170’000 soldiers), personnel from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the OMON riot police forces (about 40’000 soldiers), the SOBR rapid-reaction forces (about 5000+ soldiers), the Special Designation Center of the Operational Reaction Forces and Aviation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs including the Special Forces units “Zubr”, “Rys’” and “Iastreb” (about 700+ operators) for a total of about 250’000 soldiers which will probably reach the 300’000 men figure in the near future.
  • The procurement and deployment of advanced multi-role and air superiority fighters and interceptors (MiG-31BM, Su-30SM, Su-35S and, soon, the MiG-35 and Su-57).
  • Deployment of S-400 and S-500 air defense systems along with very long range radars.
  • The adoption of about 70% of new, modern, systems across all the armed forces.

In response to the ABM “encirclement” of Russia by the USA:

  • The deployment of the RS-28 Sarmat ICBM with hypersonic maneuverable reentry vehicles
  • The deployment of conventionally armed very long-range cruise missiles
  • The deployment of a nuclear powered cruise missile with a basically unlimited range
  • The deployment of a nuclear powered unmanned submersible with intercontinental range, very high speed, silent propulsion and capable of moving a great depths
  • The deployment of the Mach 10 hypersonic missile Kinzhal with a 2’000 kilometer range
  • The deployment of a new strategic missile Avangard capable of Mach 20 velocities

This list is far from being exhaustive, there is much more missing from it including new submarines, (air-independent propulsion, conventional diesel-electric, nuclear attack and SSBNs), strike aircraft, new armored vehicles of various types, new advanced (high tech) individual soldier equipment, new artillery systems, etc. etc. etc. But by far the most important element in the Russian readiness to confront and, if needed, repel any western aggression is the morale, discipline, training, and resolve of Russian soldiers (so powerfully illustrated in several recent examples in Syria). Let’s just say that in comparison US and EU servicemen (or their commanders, for that matter) are not exactly an impressive lot and leave it at that.

Si vis pacem, para bellum

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he reality is, of course, that nobody in Russia plans for a war, needs a war or wants a war. In fact, Russia as a country needs many more years of (even relative) peace. First, because time is obviously on Russia’s side and that the military balance with the USA is very rapidly shifting in Russia’s favor. But no less important is the fact that, unlike the USA which strives for conflicts, wars, and chaos, Russia badly needs peace to deal with her still very numerous internal problems which have been neglected for all too long. The problem is that the entire US political system and economy are completely dependent on a permanent state of war. That, combined with an imperial hubris boosted by an increasingly vocal russophobia is a potent and potentially dangerous mix leaving Russia no other options than “bare her fangs” and engage in some saber rattling of her own. So will Putin’s speech be enough to wake up the Empire’s ruling elites from their delusional slumber?

Probably not. In fact, in the short term, it might have the opposite effect.

Remember when the Russians deflected Obama’s planned attack on Syria? The US reaction was to trigger the Maidan. Sadly, I expect something very similar will happen soon, most likely in the form of a full-scale Ukronazi attack against the Donbass this Spring or during the World Cup this summer. Of course, regardless of the actual outcome of such an attack (already discussed here), this will not in any way affect the actual correlation of forces between Russia and the Empire. But it will feel good (Neocons love revenge in all its forms). We can also expect further provocations in Syria (already discussed here). Hence and for the foreseeable future, the Russians will have to continue on their current, admittedly frustrating and even painful course, and maintain a relatively passive and evasive posture which the Empire and its sycophants will predictably interpret as a sign of weakness. Let them. As long as in the real world the actual power (soft or hard) of the Empire continues to decline, as long as the US MIC continues to churn out fantastically expensive but militarily useless weapon systems, as long as US politicians are busy blaming everything on “Russian interference” while doing nothing to reform their own, collapsing economy and infrastructure, as long as the USA continues to use the printing press as a substitute for actual wealth and as long as the internal socio-political tensions in the USA continue to heat up – then Putin’s plan is working.

Russia needs to continue to walk a very narrow path: to act in a sufficiently evasive manner as to avoid provoking a direct military confrontation with the USA while, at the same time, sending clear enough signals to prevent the US Americans from interpreting Russia’s evasiveness as a sign of weakness and then doing something really stupid. The Russian end-goal is simple and obvious: to achieve a gradual and peaceful disintegration of the AngloZionist Empire combined with a gradual and peaceful replacement of a unipolar world ruled by one hegemon, by a multipolar world jointly administered by sovereign nations respectful of international law. Therefore, any catastrophic or violent outcomes are highly undesirable and must be avoided if at all possible. Patience and focus will be far more important in this war for the future of our planet than quick-fix reactions and hype. The “patient” needs to be returned to reality one step at a time. Putin’s March 1st speech will go down in history as such a step, but many more such steps will be needed before the patient finally wakes up.

—The Saker

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ANDREI MARTYANOV is a geopolitical and military analyst with expertise in US/Russia/NATO affairs.  • THE SAKER  is the nom de guerre of a former Russian-born military and geopolitical analyst, working at one point for the West. He has described his former career as that of "the proverbial 'armchair strategist', with all the flaws which derive from that situation.  Explaining his transformation, he states: "Before the war in Bosnia I had heard the phrase "truth is the first casualty of war" but I had never imagined that this could be quite so literally true. Frankly, this war changed my entire life and resulted in a process of soul-searching which ended up pretty much changing my politics 180 degrees. This is a long and very painful story which I do not want to discuss here, but I just want to say that this difference between what I was reading in the press and in the UNPROFOR reports ended up making a huge difference in my entire life. Again, NOT A SINGLE ASPECT OF THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE WAS TRUE, not one. You would get much closer to the truth if you basically did a 'negative' of the official narrative.”  Like The Greanville Post, with which it is now allied in his war against official disinformation, the Saker's site, VINEYARD OF THE SAKER, is the hub of an international network of sites devoted to fighting the "billion-dollar deception machinery" supporting the empire's wars against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and any other independent nation opposing or standing in the way of Washington's drive for global hegemony.  The Saker is published in more than half a dozen languages. A Saker is a very large falcon, native to Europe and Asia. 



Four Russophobic Senators Call for Strategic Dialogue with Moscow

BE SURE TO PASS OUR ARTICLES ON TO KIN, FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES

Virtually all US House and Senate members, and most everyone else in Washington, are Russophobic – solely for its sovereign independence and opposition to Washington’s imperial agenda, not for any threat it poses.

Following Putin’s revelations about Russian super-weapons, surpassing any in America’s arsenal, the administration, Pentagon and Capitol Hill have been scrambling frantically on how to react. For the first time ever, Russia is the world’s dominant super-power, a reality not going down well in Washington.

Its military technology surpasses America’s. It’s likely to maintain super-weapon superiority no matter what new ones US defense contractors develop, keeping a step ahead, preserving its advantage. Unlike Washington, Russian weapons are solely for defense, not offense, not for aggressive wars, not for raping and destroying one nation after another, not for intimidating other countries the way America operates.

Four US Russophobic senators wrote Rex Tillerson, urging strategic dialogue with Moscow – none meaningful since the Reagan/Gorbachev era over 30 years ago.  Obama’s reset with Moscow was head-fake deception. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev earlier blasted his administration, saying “US-Russia relations completely fell apart” during his second term in office, adding:

“Everyone is aware that the United States has always tried to (control) global processes, brazenly interfering in the internal affairs of various countries and waging multiple wars on foreign soil.”

“Iraq, the Arab Spring, Ukraine, and Syria are just a few examples of such reckless policies in recent years.”

“We can still see their consequences, which range from the complete collapse of the political systems in these countries to wars which claimed tens of thousands of lives.” [Actually, more like hundreds of thousands to millions.—Eds.]

“There is only one explanation for such actions: the interests of the United States” at the expense of targeted countries.

Few figures in the American political class incarnate better the treachery and corruption of Washington than Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat. These people are rotten to the core and only fools can trust them.

Trump was co-opted to continue the same imperial agenda, waging war on humanity, tolerating no sovereign independent countries. Dark forces in Washington reject normalizing Russia/US relations. Four undemocratic Dems (Feinstein, Markey, Merkley and Sanders) won’t change longstanding US posture toward Moscow.

They support America’s imperial agenda, its wars of aggression. They’re part of the Russia-bashing chorus in Washington. Their letter reflected hostility toward Moscow, repeating long ago discredited Big Lies, wrongfully accusing Russia of “brazen interference in the 2016 US elections,” violating the INF Treaty, invading Ukraine, annexing Crimea, and destabilizing Syria.

All of the above accusations turned truth on its head, showing these senators and most others US officials reject normalizing relations with Russia, assuring bilateral talks on all major issues won’t change the disturbing status quo. Their letter is a knee-jerk response to learning Russia is now the world’s dominant super-power, displacing America for the first time.

What’s coming in Washington is clear – pouring more money into militarism and weapons development, multiples more than Russia spends, yet yielding far less bang for the buck like it’s been during the post-9/11 era.

Moscow spends wisely, Washington wastefully – trillions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse since the 1990s alone, enriching its military/industrial complex, a policy agenda likely to worsen ahead, not improve, in the aftermath of Putin’s revelations.

Washington bears full responsibility for dismal Russia/US relations, not Moscow, supporting world peace, stability, and mutual cooperation among all nations – polar opposite America’s agenda.

MAIN IMAGE: Russian 5th generation fighter bombers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 Screen Shot 2016-02-19 at 10.13.00 AMSTEPHEN LENDMAN was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient. His new site is at http://stephenlendman.org

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No More Mr. Nice Guy: Putin Unveils Next Gen Russian Nukes

MAKE SURE YOU CIRCULATE THESE MATERIALS! BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE DEPENDS ON YOU.

a dispatch from sputnik

© SPUTNIK/ GRIGORIY SISOEV

COLUMNISTS

 

In one short, simple sentence written some years ago, US scholar and Russia expert Stephen F Cohen got to the heart of the matter: “The Cold War ended in Moscow, but not in Washington.”

This indispensable context is how the section of Russian President Vladimir Putin's March 1, 2018, address to the Russian Federal Assembly, dealing with foreign policy and security, has to be understood. In what arguably stands as the most significant public address of the Russian president's tenure in the Kremlin, the world, particularly Washington, was left in no doubt that Moscow possesses the ability and willingness to meet any threat to its security that the US and its allies may seek to impose.

Putin identified the decision of the Bush administration to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 as the point when the US moved from a stance of mutual trust and respect in its relations with Russia to one of disregard and disrespect, exploiting Russia's internal problems during this period to assert its dominance as a unipolar power. "We did our best to dissuade the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty," the Russian leader announced. "All in vain. The US pulled out of the treaty in 2002. Even after that we tried to develop constructive dialogue with the Americans. We proposed working together in this area to ease concerns and maintain the atmosphere of trust. At one point, I thought that a compromise was possible, but this was not to be. All our proposals, absolutely all of them, were rejected."

President Putin Reveals Two Cases When Russia Can Use Nuclear Weapons

Russia may potentially use nuclear weapons only in the event of an impending nuclear attack, or if there is a threat to the country's existence, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with the NBC broadcaster.

"There can be two reasons that can make us use nuclear weapons: an attack against us with nuclear weapons or an attack on Russia with conventional weapons. But the second case is only if it threatens the existence of the Russian state," Vladimir Putin said.

Putin said he had offered to collaborate on the joint improvement of missile defenses with the United States but had been rebuffed, so he had to act in Russia's best interests.

In a dramatic video presentation, the Russian president went on to unveil the next generation of the country's nuclear missiles, developed with the objective of circumventing and overcoming Washington's missile defenses and existing nuclear capability.

The defiance with which Putin revealed the country's new and enhanced missile technology was unmistakable. It was perhaps illustrative of the years of broken promises, bad faith, duplicity and encroaching and enveloping military pressure exerted by the US and its allies against the Russian Federation. Returning to Cohen: "The most fundamental [error by Washington upon the demise of the Soviet Union] was to treat post-communist Russia not as a strategic partner but as a defeated nation, analogous to Germany and Japan after World War II."

In contradistinction, in the parallel universe that Western hawks and neocons inhabit, responsibility for the breakdown in relations between Moscow and Washington is ascribed to "Russian aggression." It's a charge that throws up the question of what kind of aggression is it that sees US troops on Russia's border but no Russian troops Washington's border, US warships patrolling the Black Sea on Russia's shore but no Russian warships patrolling the Gulf of Mexico on theirs? And this is before we come to the missile defense shield deployed in Romania in 2016, or the attempt by Washington to use Georgia as its cat's paw in 2008 with the aim of NATO expansion, followed by Ukraine in 2014.

What has been made abundantly clear by its actions since the early 1990s is that economic and military might is for Washington the first and final arbiter of international affairs.

‘No One Has Anything Like That’: Russia’s New Missiles Are Game-Changing

That we have arrived at such a parlous juncture in relations between East and West is, per Talleyrand, worse than a crime it's a blunder — an indictment of the conclusions drawn in Washington in response to the end of the Soviet Union. Here we are obliged to cite the sage lament of former US President Dwight D Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

Yet guns, warships and rockets, more than diplomacy, have underlain US foreign policy since the day the hammer and sickle was lowered over the Kremlin. As for those 800 military bases established by Washington in 70 countries, are we really meant to believe they did so with the objective of making the world safe for democracy? Credulity, as they say, only stretches so far.

Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter once described the Roman Empire thus:

"There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest — why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality."

Substitute Washington for Rome in that passage and you have yourself the nuts and bolts of America's relations with the world throughout the era of unipolarity.

Putin's address and unveiling of Russia's advanced nuclear missile capability provides empirical evidence of the failure of US and Western foreign policy since the Soviet Union was consigned to history. Rather than embrace this world-historical event as an opportunity for peaceful coexistence, for stability and cohesion, the US sought to impose on its former Cold War adversary a Carthaginian peace.

And lest anyone forget what this Carthaginian peace entailed for Russia's people, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" is required reading: "By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt and roughly 70,000 state factories had closed creating an epidemic of unemployment… By the time the shock therapists [of the West] had administered their ‘bitter medicine in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank."

When we consider that in 1989 the number of people living in poverty in Russia was 4 million, we are left with the monstrous fact that the free market economic reforms imposed on Russia in the 1990s led to the impoverishment of 72 million people in less than a decade.

Given this history and given Moscow's repeated attempts to reach a modus vivendi with the West, Putin's address to the Russian Federal Assembly was that of a leader left with no choice other than to adapt to the verities of a US hegemon, for whom peaceful co-existence is anathema.

Thus, for Russia, it is now a case of meeting might with might.

The views and opinions expressed by John Wight do not necessarily reflect Sputnik's position.

 John Wight is the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir – Dreams That Die – published by Zero Books. He’s also written five novels, which are available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1  

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Did US intelligence totally miss Russia’s incredible advances in nuclear parity?

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

By Gilbert Doctorow | Consortium News
A FRATERNAL SITE

The Avangard weapons system. A game changer.

NOTE: Consortium News ran this piece under the name: Missile-gate: U.S. Intel Misses Russia’s Big Advances in Nuclear Parity

President Vladimir Putin's two-hour long address on March 1 (2018) to the Federal Assembly, a joint session of both houses of Russia's bicameral legislature - plus large numbers of Russia's cultural, business and other elites - constituted his platform for the upcoming presidential election on March 18. This, in lieu of participation in the televised debates on all federal television channels in which other seven candidates are busy these days.

But as is the case with many of Vladimir Putin's major presentations, the speech yesterday was addressed to a far broader audience than the Russian electorate. Many of the estimated 700 journalists invited to attend were foreign correspondents. Indeed, one might reasonably argue that the speech was directed abroad, precisely to the United States.

The final third of the address, devoted to defense and presenting for the first time several major new and technically unparalleled offensive nuclear weapons systems, established Russia's claim to full nuclear parity with the United States, overturning the country's withdrawal from superpower status dating from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992. Some Russian commentators, in a burst of national pride, claimed that the power of the Soviet Union had now been restored and the wrongs of the 1990s were finally undone.

In its own way, this speech was as important, perhaps more important than Putin's talk to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 at which he set out in length Russia's grievances with U.S. global hegemony installed in the 1990s and the utter disregard for or denial of Russia's national interests. That speech was a turning point in U.S.-Russian relations which headed us to the deep confrontation of today. Yesterday's speech suggested not the onset of a new arms race, but its conclusion, with outright Russian victory and U.S. defeat.

Putin's address was a "shock and awe" event. I leave to others, more competent than I in military technology to comment on the specific capabilities of the various systems rolled out yesterday. Whether short range or unlimited range, whether ground launched or air launched, whether ballistic missiles or cruise missiles, whether flying through the atmosphere or navigating silently and at high speed the very depths of the oceans, these various systems are said to be invincible to any known or prospective air defense such as the United States has invested in heavily since it unilaterally left the ABM Treaty and set out on a course that would upend strategic parity.

Since 2002, U.S. policy has aimed at enabling a first strike knocking out Russian ICBMs and then rendering useless Russia's residual nuclear forces which could be shot out of the air. Russia's new highly maneuverable and ultra-high speed (Mach 10 and Mach 20) missiles and underwater nuclear drone render illusory any scenario based on non-devastating response to the US homeland following a US strike on Russia. In passing, the new systems also render useless and turn into sitting duck targets the entire US navy, with its aircraft carrier formations.

U.S. and Western media response to Putin's address was varied. The Financial Times tried its best at neutral reporting, and midway through its feature article gave a paragraph each to two of Russia's most authoritative politicians with special expertise in relations with the West: Konstantin Kosachev and Alexei Pushkov, both former chairmen of the Duma's Committee on Foreign Affairs.

However, their reporters and editorial supervisors were out of their depth, unable to reach a consistent view on what the Kremlin is doing. On the one hand Putin's statements about Russia's "unstoppable" nuclear weapons are reduced to "claims," suggesting a certain skepticism; on the other hand, the consequence is to "fuel concern about a new arms race with the U.S." They cannot fathom that the race is over.

The Washington Post was fairly quick to post a lengthy article in its online edition yesterday. An unusually large part consisted of quotes from Putin's speech. The editorial line tells it all in the title assigned: "Putin claims Russia is developing nuclear arms capable of avoiding missile defenses." I would put the accent on "claims" and "is developing." The reporter and newspaper management seem not to have gotten the point: that one of these systems is already deployed in the Russia's Southern Military District and that others are going into serial production. These systems are not a wish list, they are hard facts.

The New York Times was characteristically slow in posting articles on a development which caught its staff and management totally unprepared. In the space of a couple of hours, it put up two articles in succession dealing with the defense section of Vladimir Putin's address. In both, but more particularly in the article co-authored by reporters Neil MacFarquhar and David E. Sanger, the stress is on "bluff."

It is blithely assumed that Putin was just delivering a campaign speech to rouse "the patriotic passions of Russians" and so consolidate his forthcoming electoral victory. The writers take solace in the notion that "deception lies at the heart of current Russian military doctrine," so that "questions arose about whether these weapons existed."

These speculations, especially in the New York Times tell us one thing: that our media willfully ignore the plain facts about Vladimir Putin. First, that he has always done what he has said. Second, that he is by nature very cautious and methodical. The word "carefully" (?????????) is a constant element in his speech vocabulary. In this context, the notion of "bluff' in a matter that would put Russian national security at risk and possibly cost tens of millions of Russian lives if the bluff were called - such a notion is utter nonsense.

I would like to believe that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington will not be so giddy or superficial in judging what they heard yesterday from Mr. Putin. If that is so, they will be urgently recommending to their President to enter into very broad negotiations with the Russians over arms control. And they will be going back to their staffs to completely revise their recommendations with respect to the military hardware and installations which the United States is financing in 2019 and beyond. Our present budget, including the trillion or so being appropriated for upgrading nuclear warheads and producing more low-yield weapons is a waste of taxpayer money.

However, still more importantly, the implications of Vladimir Putin's address yesterday are that U.S. intelligence has been asleep at the wheel for the past 14 years if not longer. It is a national scandal for the country to lose an arms race it was not even aware was occurring. Heads should roll, and the process should begin with proper hearings on Capitol Hill. For reasons that will be clear from what follows, among the first witnesses called upon to testify should be former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In the past such a revelation of a vast security gap with the country's main geopolitical and military competitor would lead to political recriminations and finger pointing. What came up yesterday is far bigger than the "missile gap" of the late 1950s that brought Jack Kennedy to the White House in a campaign to restore vigor to American political culture and wake it from the somnolent Eisenhower years with their complacency about security matters and much else.

Moreover, the roll-out yesterday of new Russian weaponry that changes the world power balance was just one in a chain of remarkable Russian achievements over the past four years that caught US leadership entirely by surprise. The explanation has till now been the alleged unpredictability of Vladimir Putin, even if absolutely nothing he did could not have been foreseen by someone paying close attention.

One prime example was the Russian capture of Crimea in February-March 2014 without a shot being fired or a single fatality in circumstances where the 20,000 Russian troops based in their leased Sevastopol enclave confronted 20,000 Ukrainian forces on the peninsula. Western media spoke of a Russian "invasion" which amounted to nothing more than the Russian troops leaving their barracks. The Russians had used nothing more exotic than psychological warfare, old-fashioned "psy-ops" as it is called in the States executed to perfection by pros, all dating from the time of Von Clausewitz.

Comment: "Capture of Crimea"? "Psy-ops"? How about just plain old defense of Crimea from the murderous Kiev regime that would have them stay with Ukraine under the point of a gun?

Then the Pentagon was caught with its pants down in September 2015 when Putin at the United Nations General Assembly announced the dispatch of Russian warplanes to Syria for a campaign against ISIS and to support Assad that would begin the next day. Why did we suspect nothing? Was it because Russia was known to be too poor to execute such a challenging mission abroad to precise objectives and timelines?

In the same war theater, the Russians again "surprised" Americans by setting up a joint military intelligence center in Baghdad with Iraq and Iran. And it further "surprised" NATO by flying bombing missions to the Syrian theater over Iran and Iraqi airspace after being denied flight rights in the Balkans. With thousands of military and diplomatic staff based in Iraq, how is it that the United States knew nothing about the Russian agreements with Iraqi leadership in advance?

My point is that the confusion over how to interpret Putin's announcement of Russia's new defense capability is a systemic failure of U.S. intelligence. The next obvious question is why? Where is the CIA? Where are the intel bosses when they are not investigating Trump?

The answer is not to be found in just one or two elements, for sure. Nor is it a failure that developed recently. There is a good measure of blinding complacency about Russia as a "failed state" that has cut across the whole US political establishment since the 1990s when the Russia was flat on its back. One simply could not imagine the Kremlin rising to the challenge of its missions in Crimea, in Syria, in development of the world's most sophisticated high-tech armaments.

Comment: Putin's firm message to the US: You brought it on yourselves by ignoring our concerns and pushing Russia around

And it is not only blindness to things Russian. It is a fundamental failure to grasp that state power anywhere is not dependent only on GDP and demographic trends but also on grit, patriotic determination and the intelligence of thousands of researchers, engineers and production personnel.

This conceptual poverty infects some our most brilliant Realpolitik political scientists in the academic community who in principle should be open to understanding the world as it is, not the world as we wish it to be. Somehow we seem to have forgotten the lesson of David and Goliath. Somehow we have forgotten the Israeli numbers of 4 or 5 million standing up militarily to 100 million Arabs. It was unimaginable to us that Russia would be the David to our Goliath.

Comment: Bingo. The US intelligence agencies and military and government have largely fallen under the spell of wishful thinking in regards to Russia - even if they sometimes give lip service to Russian capabilities. The arrogance of the American Empire just will not permit it to back down from its aggressive and destructive stance - to the point of being dangerous even to itself.

But there are more objective reasons for the utter failure of US intelligence to grasp the scale and seriousness of the Russian challenge to US global hegemony. Specifically, we must consider the gutting of our Russian intelligence capabilities in the days, months, years following 9/11.

There are those who will say, with reason, that the decline of US intelligence capabilities on Russia began already in the second administration of Ronald Reagan, when the Cold War came to an end and the expertise of Cold Warriors seemed no longer relevant. Surely numbers of Russia experts were allowed to decline by attrition.

And yet, when 9/11 struck, many of those in higher positions in the CIA had come to the Agency as Russia experts. It was the CIA's lack of skills in the languages and area knowledge of the Middle East that was glaring in the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers that guided the reshaping of priorities for intelligence. Clearly this deficiency and the necessary re-profiling of expertise could not augur well for the continued employment of holdovers from the Soviet desk.

But a still greater factor in the sharp decline in Russian expertise within US intelligence agencies was the shift from dependence on civil service employees to use of outside service providers, i.e., outsourcing of intelligence work. This was totally in line with the preferences of the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who introduced outsourcing in a generalized way to deal with the new challenges of the War On Terror.

The same phenomenon affected the U.S. military, especially beginning in 2003 following the invasion of Iraq. Operational security tasks of the U.S. military were outsourced to companies providing mercenaries like Blackwater. And normal procurement arrangements for materiel were short-circuited by the Vice President for the sake of quick satisfaction of urgent field requirements: hence the procurement of non-traditional but much needed fleets of armored troop transport and the like.

Several articles in Consortium News and elsewhere in recent months have called attention to the phenomenon of intel outsourcing. However, what was happening, why and to what effect was already clearly known a decade ago and promised nothing good.

In a sense, the commonality of all these changes in supply of intelligence, equipment and military force has been a quick-fix mentality and direct political intervention into processes that had been insulated in the civil service with its bureaucratic procedures. Political intervention means ultimately politicizing methods and outcomes. Outsourced intelligence is more likely to meet the demands of the paymaster than to have some intellectual integrity and broad perspective of its own.

To better understand the phenomenon, I refer the reader to an outstanding and well documented article dating from March 2007 that was published by the European Strategic Intelligence Security Center (ESISC) entitled "Outsourcing Intelligence: The Example of the United States."

The author, ESISC Research Associate Raphael Ramos, tells us that at the time 70% of the budget of the American intelligence community was spent via contracts with private companies. At the time he wrote, outsourcing was said to be greatest among the agencies reporting to the Defense Department. The CIA was then said to have one-third of its staff coming from private companies.

Besides the changing priorities for foreign intelligence resulting from the end of the Cold War and the onset of the War on Terror, another factor in the changing structure of US intelligence was technologically driven. This relates to the modern communications technologies, with many start-ups appearing in the specialized fields of Signals Intelligence and Imagery Intelligence. The NSA availed itself of these new service providers to become a pioneer in outsourcing intelligence.

Other Pentagon agencies which followed the same course were the National Reconnaissance Office, responsible for space based systems of intelligence and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, charged with producing geographic intelligence from satellites. Add to that the changing intel practices coming from the development of the internet, which prioritized open source intelligence. OSINT could flourish in the private sector because it does not require special security clearances. This soon accounted for between 35% and 90% of intelligence procurement.

As noted above, outsourcing enabled the intelligence community to modernize, gain skills quickly and try to meet urgent new needs. However, judging by the results of intelligence with respect to Putin's Russia it seems that the outsourcing model has not delivered the goods. The country has been flying blind while taking outlandish and unsupportable positions to bully the world as if we enjoyed full spectrum dominance and Russia did not exist.

BELOW WE PRESENT A SAMPLE OF SELECT COMMENTS FROM THE ORIGINAL THREAD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gilbert Doctorow, an independent political analyst based in Brussels, is serving as an international observer to the March 18 presidential election in Russia. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future? was published in October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Making sense of the Russian 5th generation fighters in Syria

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE SAKER

[This article was written for the Unz Review]

killing about “2000 Americans“. This was truly some crazy nonsense so I decided to find out what really happened and, so far, here is what I found out.

First, amazingly enough, the reports of the Su-57 in Syria are true. Some say 2 aircraft, some say 4 (out of a current total of 13). It doesn’t really matter, what matters is that the deployment of a few Su-57s in Syria is a fact and that this represents a dramatic departure from normal Russian (and Soviet) practice.

Introducing the Sukhoi 57 5th generation multi-role fighter

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Su-57 (aka “PAK-FA” aka “T-50”) is the first real 5th generation multi-role aircraft produced by Russia. All the other Russian multi-role and air superiority aircraft previously deployed in Syria (such as the Su-30SM and the Su-35S) are 4++ aircraft, not true 5th generation. One might be forgiven for thinking that 4++ is awfully close to 5, but it really is not. 4++ generation aircraft are really 4th generation aircraft upgraded with a number of systems and capabilities typically associated with a 5th generation, but they all lack several key components of a true 5th generation aircraft such as:

  • a low radar cross-section (“stealth”),
  • the capability to fly at supersonic speeds without using afterburners,
  • the ability to carry weapons inside a special weapons bay (as opposed to outside, under its wings or body)
  • an advanced “situational awareness” (network-centric) capability (sensor and external data fusion).

To make a long story short, the difference between 4th and 5th generation aircraft is really huge and requires not one, but several very complex “technological jumps” especially in the integrations of numerous complex systems.

The only country which currently has a deployed real 5th generation fighter is the USA with its F-22. In theory, the USA also has another 5th generation fighter, the F-35, but the latter is such a terrible design and has such immense problems that for our purposes we can pretty much dismiss it. As for now, the F-22 is the only “real deal”: thoroughly tested and fully deployed in substantial numbers. The Russian Su-57 is still years away from being able to make such a claim as it has not been thoroughly tested or deployed in substantial numbers. That is not to say that the Russians are not catching up really fast, they are, but as of right now, the Su-57 has only completed the first phase of testing. The normal Soviet/Russian procedure should have been at this time to send a few aircraft to the Russian Aerospace Forces (RAF) base in Lipetsk to familiarize the military crews with the aircraft and continue the testing while getting the feedback, not from test pilots but from actual air combat instructors. This second phase of testing could easily last 6 months or more and reveal a very large number of “minor” problems many of which could actually have very severe consequences in an actual combat deployment. In other words, the Su-57 is still very “raw” and probably needs a lot of tuning before it can be deployed in combat. How “raw”? Just one example: as of today, only one of the currently existing Su-57 flies with the new supercruise-capable engines, all the others use a 4th generation type engine. This is no big deal, but it goes to show that a lot of work still needs to be done on this aircraft before it becomes fully operational.

The notion that the Russians sent the Su-57 to Syria to somehow compete with the F-22s or otherwise participate in actual combat is ludicrous. While, on paper, the Su-57 is even more advanced and capable than the F-22, in reality, the Su-57 presents no credible threat to the US forces in Syria (if the Russians really wanted to freak out the Americans, they could have, for example, decided to keep a pair of MiG-31BMs on 24/7 combat air patrol over Syria). The Russian reports about these aircraft flattening Ghouta or killing thousands of Americans are nothing more than cheap and inflammatory propaganda from ignorant Russian nationalists who don’t seem to realize that flattening urban centers is not even the theoretical mission of the Su-57. In fact, as soon as these crazy reports surfaced, Russians analysts immediately dismissed them as nonsense.

Utter nonsense is hardly the monopoly of Russian nationalists, however. The folks at the National Interest reposted an article (initially posted on the blog The War is Boring) which basically dismissed the Su-57 as a failed and dead project and its deployment in Syria as a “farce” (I should tip my hat off to the commentators at the National Interest who immediately saw through the total ridiculous nature of this article and wondered if Lockheed had paid for it). On the other hand, in the western insanity spectrum, we have the UK’s Daily Express which wrote about Vladimir Putin sending his “fearsome new state-of-the-art Su-57” into the Syrian war zone. Just like with the Kuznetsov, the Ziomedia can’t decide if the Russian hardware is an antiquated, useless pile of scrap metal or a terrifying threat which ought to keep the entire world up at night. Maybe both at the same time? With paranoid narcissists, you can’t tell. Finally, the notion that Putin (personally?) sent these 4 aircraft to Syria to help him in his re-election campaign (peddled by the Russophobes at Ha’aretz) is also devoid of all truth and makes me wonder if those who write that kind of crap are even aware of Putin’s popularity numbers.

So what is really going on?

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ell, frankly, that is hard to say, and Russian officials are being tight-lipped about it. Still, various well informed Russian analysts have offered some educated guesses as to what is taking place. The short version is this: the Su-57s were only sent to Syria to test their avionics in a rich combat-like electromagnetic environment. The more detailed version would be something like this:

The Su-57 features an extremely complex and fully integrated avionics suite which will include three X band active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar (one main, two side-looking), another two L band active electronically scanned array radars in the wing’s leading edge extensions, plus an integrated electro-optical system location system (working in infra-red, visible and ultra-violet frequencies). All these sensors are fused (5 radars, 2 bands, plus passive optics) and they are then combined with the data received by the Su-57’s advanced electronic warfare suite and a high-speed encrypted datalink, connecting the aircraft to other airborne, space, as well as ground-based sensors. This is not unlike what the USA is trying to achieve with the F-35, but on an even more complex level (even in theory, the F-35 is a comparatively simpler, and much less capable, aircraft). One could see how it would be interesting to test all this gear in a radiation-rich environment like the Syrian skies where the Russians have advanced systems (S-400, A-50U, etc.) and where the USA and Israel also provide a lot of very interesting signals (including US and Israeli AWACS, F-22s and F-35s, etc.). To re-create such a radiation-rich environment in Russia would be very hard and maybe even impossible. The question is whether this is worth the risk?

The risks of this deployment in Syria are very real and very serious. As far as I know, there are still no bombproof shelters built (yet) and Russia recently lost a number of aircraft (some not totally, some totally) when the “good terrorists” used mortars against the Khmeimim base. So now we have FOUR Su-57s (out of how many total, maybe 12 or 13?!), each worth 50-100 million dollars under an open sky in a war zone?! What about operational security? What about base security?

There is also a political risk. It is well known that the USA has been putting immense political pressure on India to withdraw from the joint development between Russia and India of the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) or Perspective Multi-role Fighter (PMF) program. To make things worse, India currently has too many parallel aircraft programs and there are, reportedly, disagreements between the Russians and the Indians on design features. With the apparently never-ending disaster of the F-35, the very last thing the USA needs is a successful Russian 5th generation competitor showing up anywhere on the planet (especially one which has the clear potential to far outclass both the successful F-22 and the disastrous F-35). One can easily imagine what the AngloZionist propaganda machine will do should even a minor problem happen to the Su-57 while in Syria (just read the National Interest article quoted above to see what the mindset is in the West)!

The Su-57 also has formidable competitors inside Russia: the 4++ generation aircraft mentioned above, especially the Su-35S. Here we have a similar dynamic as with the F-22: while on paper the Su-57 is clearly superior to the Su-35S, in the real world the Su-35S is a well tested and deployed system which, unlike the F-22, also happens to be much cheaper than the Su-57 (the F-22 being at least twice as expensive than the Su-57). This issue is especially relevant for the internal, Russian market. So the real question for the RAF is simple: does Russia really need the Su-57 and, if yes, in what numbers?

This is a very complex question, both technically and politically and to even attempt to answer it, a lot of very debatable assumptions have to be made about what kind of threats the RAF will face in the future and what kind of missions it will be given. The biggest problem for the Russians is that they already have an array of extremely successful combat aircraft, especially the Su-35S and the formidable Su-34. Should Russia deploy more of these or should she place huge resources into a new very complex and advanced aircraft? Most Russian analysts would probably agree that Russia needs to be able to deploy some minimal number of real 5th generation combat aircraft, but they would probably disagree on what exactly that minimal number ought to be. The current 4++ generation aircraft are very successful and more than a match for their western counterparts, with the possible exception of the F-22. But how likely is it that Russians and US Americans will really start a shooting war?

Furthermore, the real outcome from a theoretical Su-35S vs F-22 (which so many bloggers love to speculate about) would most likely depend much more on tactics and engagement scenarios than on the actual capabilities of these aircraft. Besides, should the Su-35s and F-22s even be used in anger against each other, a lot would also depend on what else is actually happening around them and where exactly this engagement would take place. Furthermore, to even look at this issue theoretically, we would need to compare not only the actual aircraft but also their weapons. I submit that the outcome of any Su-35S vs F-22 engagement would be impossible to predict (unless you are a flag-waving patriot, in which case you will, of course, be absolutely certain that “your” side will win). If I am correct, then this means that there is no compelling case to be made that Russia needs to deploy Su-57s in large numbers and that the Su-30SM+Su-35S air superiority combo is more than enough to deter the Americans.

[This is a recurrent problem for Russian weapons and weapon systems: being so good that there is little incentive to produce something new. The best example of that is the famous AK-47 Kalashnikov which was modernized a few times, such as the AKM-74, but which has yet to be replaced with a fundamentally new and truly different assault rifle. There are plenty of good candidates out there, but each time one has to wonder if the difference in price is worth the effort. The original Su-27 (introduced in 1985) was such an immense success that it served as a basis for a long series of immensely successful variants including the ones we now see in Syria, the Su-30SM, the Su-35S and even the amazing Su-34 (which still has no equivalent anywhere in the world). Sometimes a weapon, or weapon system, can be even “too successful” and create a problem for future modernization efforts.]

Whatever may be the case, the future of the Su-57 is far from being secured and this might also, in part, explain the decision to send a few of them to Syria: not only to test its avionics suite, but also to score a PR success by raising the visibility and, especially, the symbolical role of the aircraft. Russian officials admitted that the deployment to Syria was scheduled to coincide with the celebration of the “Defender of the Fatherland” day. This kind of move breaks with normal Soviet/Russian procedures and I have to admit that I am most uncomfortable with this development and while I would not go as far as to call it a “farce” (like the article in the National Interest did), it does look like a PR stunt to me. And I wonder: if the Russians are taking such a risk, what is it that drives such a sense of urgency? I don’t believe that anybody in Russia seriously thinks that the US will be deterred, or even be impressed by this, frankly, hasty deployment. So I suspect that this development is linked to the uncertainty of the future of the Su-57 procurement program. Hopefully, the risks will pay-off and the Su-57 will get all the avionics testing it requires and all the funding and export contracts it needs.

Addendum:

Just as I was writing these words, the Russians have announced (see here and here) that the Israeli satellite images were fakes, that the the Su-57 stayed only two days in Syria and that they have been flown back to Russia. Two days? Frankly, I don’t buy it. What this looks like to me is that what looks like a PR stunt has now backfired, including in the Russian social media, and that Russia decided to bring these aircraft back home. Now *that* sounds like a good idea to me.

—The Saker

ABOUT THE SAKER
 THE SAKER is an ex-military analyst who was born in Europe to a family of Russian refugees. He now lives in Florida where he writes the Vineyard of the Saker blog and is a regular contributor to  The Unz Review. Like The Greanville Post, with which it is now allied in his war against official disinformation, the Saker's site, VINEYARD OF THE SAKER, is the hub of an international network of sites devoted to fighting the "billion-dollar deception machinery" supporting the empire's wars against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and any other independent nation opposing or standing in the way of Washington's drive for global hegemony.  The Saker is published in more than half a dozen languages. A Saker is a very large falcon, native to Europe and Asia. 

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