Do you think his assessment is accurate?

Lockheed Martin’s F-35—the most expensive fighter plane in history, still plagued with numerous performance issues.

“Do you think his assessment is accurate?” was the subject line of an email I got from a good friend recently. The email referred to the article by Paul Craig Roberts “One Day Tomorrow Won’t Arrive” which claimed that “the US military is now second class compared to the Russian military“. The article then went on to list a number of Russian weapons systems which were clearly superior to their US counterparts (when those even existed). My reply was short “Basically yes. The USA definitely has the quantitative advantage, but in terms of quality and training, Russia is way ahead. It all depends on specific scenarios, but yes, PCR is basically spot on“. This email exchange took place after an interesting meeting I had with a very well informed American friend who, in total contrast to PCR, insisted that the USA had total military supremacy over any other country and that the only thing keeping the USA from using this overwhelming military might was that US leaders did not believe in the “brutal, unconstrained, use of force”. (sic) So what is going on here? Why do otherwise very well informed people have such totally contradictory views?

First, a disclaimer. To speak with any authority on this topic I would have to have access to a lot of classified data both on the US armed forces and on the Russian ones. Alas, I don’t. So what follows is entirely based on open/public sources, conversations with some personal contacts mixed in with some, shall we say, educated guesswork. Still, I am confident that what follows is factually correct and logically analyzed.

To sum up the current state of affairs I would say that the fact that the US armed forces are in a grave state of decay is not as amazing by itself as is the fact that this almost impossible to hide fact is almost universally ignored. So let’s separate the two into “what happened” and “why nobody seems to be aware of it”.

What happened

Consolidated TB-32 on the assembly line. American production and almost unlimited resources soon dwarfed any other combatant in WW2. (U.S. Air Force photo)

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]et’s begin at the beginning: the US armed forces were never the invincible military force the US propaganda (including Hollywood) would have you believe they have been. I looked into the topic of the role of the western Allies in my “Letter to my American friend” and I won’t repeat it all here. Let’s just say that the biggest advantage the USA had over everybody else during WWII is a completely untouched industrial base which made it possible to produce fantastic numbers of weapon systems and equipment in close to ideal conditions. Some, shall we kindly say, “patriotic” US Americans have interpreted that as a sign of the “vigor” and “superiority” of the Capitalist economic organization while, in reality, this simply was a direct result of the fact that the USA was protected by two huge oceans (the Soviets, in contrast, had to move their entire industrial base to the Urals and beyond, as for the Germans, they had to produce under a relentless bombing campaign). The bottom line was this: US forces were better equipped (quantitatively and, sometimes, even qualitatively) than the others and they could muster firepower in amounts difficult to achieve for their enemies. And, yes, this did give a strong advantage to US forces, but hardly made them in any way “better” by themselves.

here or here) we can clearly see that the US military specialized in attacking defenseless countries.

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War and the Global War on Terror when US politicians clearly believed in their own propaganda about being the “sole superpower” or a “hyperpower” and they engaged in potentially much more complex military attacks including the full-scale invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars will go down in history as case studies of what happens when politicians believe their own propaganda. While Dubya declared victory as soon as the invasion was completed, it soon became clear to everybody that this war was a disaster from which the USA has proved completely unable to extricate itself (even the Soviets connected the dots and withdrew from Afghanistan faster than the US Americans!). So what does all this tell us about the US armed forces: (in no special order)

They are big, way bigger than any other

They have unmatched (worldwide) power projection (mobility) capabilities

They are high-tech heavy which gives them a big advantage in some types of conflicts

They have the means (nukes) to wipe-off any country off the face of the earth

They control the oceans and strategic chokepoints

Is that enough to win a war?

Actually, no, it is not. All it takes to nullify these advantages is an enemy who is aware of them and who refuses to fight what I call the “American type of war” (on this concept, see here). The recent wars in Lebanon, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq have clearly shown that well-adapted tactics mostly deny the US armed forces the advantages listed above or, at the very least, make them irrelevant.

If we accept Clausewitz’s thesis that “war is the continuation of politics by other means” then it becomes clear that the US has not won a real war in a long long time and that the list of countries willing to openly defy Uncle Sam is steadily growing (and now includes not only Iran and the DPRK, but also Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Venezuela and even Russia and China). This means that there is an emerging consensus amongst the countries which the USA tries to threaten and bully into submission that for all the threats and propaganda the USA is not nearly as formidable an enemy as some would have you believe.

Why nobody seems to be aware of it

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he paradoxical thing is that while this is clearly well understood in the countries which the USA is currently trying to threaten and bully into submission, this is also completely ignored and overlooked inside the United States themselves. Most Americans, including very well informed ones, sincerely believe that their armed forces are “second to none” and that the USA could crush any enemy which would dare disobey or otherwise defy the AngloZionist Empire. Typically, when presented with evidence that the USAF, USN and NATO could not even defeat the Serbian Army Corps in Kosovo or that in Afghanistan the US military performance is substantially much inferior to what the 40th Soviet Army achieved (with mostly conscripts!), my interlocutors always reply the same thing: “yeah, maybe, but if we wanted we could nuke them!“. This is both true and false. Potential nuclear target countries for the USA can be subdivided into three categories:

Countries who, if nuked themselves, could wipe the USA off the face of the earth completely (Russia) or, at least, inflict immense damage upon the USA (China).

Those countries which the USA could nuke without fearing retaliation in kind, but which still could inflict huge conventional and asymmetric damage on the USA and its allies (Iran, DPRK).

Those countries which the USA could nuke with relative impunity but which the USA could also crush with conventional forces making the use of nukes pointless (Venezuela, Cuba).

And, of course, in all these cases the first use of nukes by the USA would result in a fantastic political backlash with completely unpredictable and potentially catastrophic consequences. For example, I personally believe that using nukes on Iran would mark the end of NATO in Europe as such an action would irreparably damage EU-US relations. Likewise, using nukes on the DPRK would result in a huge crisis in Asia with, potentially, the closure of US bases in Korea and Japan. Others would, no doubt, disagree 🙂

The bottom line: US nukes are only useful as a deterrent against other nuclear powers; for all other roles they are basically useless. And since neither Russia or China would ever contemplate a first-strike against the USA, you could say that they are almost totally useless (I say almost, because in the real world the USA cannot simply rely on the mental sanity and goodwill of other nations; so, in reality, the US nuclear arsenal is truly a vital component of US national security).

Which leaves the Navy and the Army. The USN still controls the high seas and strategic choke points, but this is becoming increasingly irrelevant, especially in the context of local wars. Besides, the USN is still stubbornly carrier-centric, which just goes to show that strategic vision comes a distant second behind bureaucratic and institutional inertia. As for the US Army, it has long become a kind of support force for Special Operations and Marines, something which makes sense in tiny wars (Panama, maybe Venezuela) but which is completely inadequate for medium to large wars.

What about the fact that the USA spends more on “defense” (read “wars of aggression”) than the rest of the planet combined? Surely that counts for something?

Actually, no, it does not. First, because most of that money is spent on greasing the pockets of an entire class of MIC-parasites which make billions of dollars in the free for all “bonanza” provided by that ridiculously bloated “defense” budget. The never mentioned reality is that compared to the USA, even the Ukrainian military establishment looks as only “moderately corrupt”!

SIDEBAR: you think I am exaggerating? Ask yourself a simple question: why does the USA need 17 intelligence agencies while the rest of the world usually needs from 2 to 5? Do you really, sincerely, believe that this has anything to do with national security? If you do, please email me, I got a few bridges to sell to you at great prices! Seriously, just the fact that the USA has about 5 times more “intelligence” agencies than the rest of the planet is a clear symptom of the the truly astronomical level of corruption of the US “national security state”.

Weapons system after weapons system we see cases in which the overriding number one priority is to spend as much money as possible as opposed to deliver a weapon system soldiers could actually fight with. When these systems are engaged, they are typically engaged against adversaries which are two to three generations behind the USA, and that makes them look formidable. Not only that, but in each case the US has a huge numerical advantage (hence the choice of small country to attack). But I assure you that for real military specialists the case for the superiority of US weapons systems in a joke. For example, French systems (such as the Rafale or the Leclerc MBT) are often both better and cheaper than their US equivalents, hence the need for major bribes and major “offset agreements“.

French Dassault Rafale fighter—a formidable weapons system. Proven quality and priced at far more reasonable levels than comparable American craft.

The Russian military budget is tiny, at least compared to the US one. But, as William Engdahl, Dmitrii Orlov and others have observed, the Russians get a much bigger bang for the buck. Not only are Russian weapon systems designed by soldiers for soldiers (as opposed to by engineers for bureaucrats), but the Russian military is far less corrupt than the US one, at least when mega-bucks sums are concerned (for petty sums of money the Russians are still much worse than the Americans). At the end of the day, you get the kind of F-35 vs SU-35/T-50 or, even more relevantly, the kind of mean time between failure or man-hours to flight hour ratios we have seen from the US and Russian forces over Syria recently. Suffice to say that the Americans could not even begin to contemplate to execute the number of sorties the tiny Russian Aerospace task force in Syria achieved. Still, the fact remains that if the US Americans wanted it they could keep hundreds of aircraft in the skies above Syria whereas the tiny Russian Russian Aerospace task never had more than 35 combat aircraft at any one time: the current state of the Russian military industry simply does not allow for the production of the number of systems Russia would need (but things are slowly getting better).

So here we have it: the Americans are hands down the leaders in quantitative terms; but in qualitative terms they are already behind the Russians and falling back faster and faster with each passing day.

Do the US military commanders know that?

Of course they do.

But remember what happened to Trump when he mentioned serious problems in the US military? The Clinton propaganda machine instantly attacked him for being non-patriotic, for “not supporting the troops”, for not repeating the politically obligatory mantra about “we’re number one, second to none” and all the infantile nonsense the US propaganda machine feeds those who still own a TV at home. To bluntly and honestly speak about the very real problems of the US armed forces is much more likely to be a career-ending exercise than a way to reform a hopelessly corrupt system.

There is one more thing. Not to further dwell on my thesis that most US Americans are not educated enough to understand basic Marxist theory, but the fact is that most of them know nothing about Hegelian dialectics. They, therefore, view things in a static way, not as processes. For example, when they compliment themselves on having “the most powerful and capable military in the history of mankind” (they love that kind of language), they don’t even realize that this alleged superiority will inevitably generate its own contradiction and that this strength would therefore also produce its own weakness. Well-read US American officers, and there are plenty of those, do understand that, but their influence is almost negligible when compared to the multi-billion dollar and massively corrupt superstructure they are immersed in. Furthermore, I am absolutely convinced that this state of affairs is unsustainable and that sooner or later there will appear a military or political leader which will have the courage to address these problems frontally and try to reform a currently petrified system. But the prerequisite for that will probably have to be a massive and immensely embarrassing military defeat for the USA. I can easily imagine that happening in case of a US attack on Iran or the DPRK. I can guarantee it if the US leadership grows delusional enough to try to strike at Russia or China.

But for the time being it’s all gonna be “red, white and blue” and Paul Craig Roberts will remain a lone voice crying in the desert. He will be ignored, yes. But that does not change the fact that he is right.

—The Saker

PS: As for myself, I want to dedicate this song by Vladimir Vysotskii to Paul Craig Roberts and to all the other “Cassandras” who have the ability to see the future and the courage to warn us about it. They usually end up paying a high price for their honesty and courage.

This article was written for the Unz Review

ABOUT THE SAKER

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.

Russian TV Reports U.S. Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria

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

Vox populi, Vox Dei, except in the US and the rest of the "West" where the truth is murdered every day 24/7.

US led coalition airplanes over Syria: always up to no good.

Russian television headlined on September 1st, "Syrian rebel defector says his US-trained unit sold arms to ISIS”, and reported statements by a defector from — a man who had quit — the U.S.-backed Maghawir al-Thawra group (the remnants of America’s New Syrian Army. The CIA-organized New Syrian Army had, in turn, been the remnants of the Free Syrian Army, which the U.S. had formed in Syria in 2011, during the “Arab Spring” uprisings across Arabia.

So, this defector had quit from what was actually the straggling and failing end, of America’s proxy-army of Syrians, who were fighting to overthrow Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad. The U.S. Government had used the uprising in Syria to bring down Assad, who is allied with Russia. Ever since 1949, the U.S. Government has been trying to take over Syria. After the “Arab Spring,” the U.S. backed Al Qaeda in Syria in order to transform that Syrian uprising into that long-sought U.S. victory. What this defector said had caused him to quit, was America’s lies about what they were fighting for, and what they were fighting against. He didn’t want to be fighting for ISIS, against Assad. That’s what the Syrian war had now come down to, and so he quit.

This defector had been stationed at America’s Tanf military base inside Syria, ten miles north of (U.S. ally) Jordan, at which base the U.S. was claiming to be training “anti-ISIS” “moderate rebels.” Apparently, as the war progressed, America’s promises to its fighters in Syria changed from overthrowing Assad, to defeating ISIS, because even Assad’s opponents inside Syria came increasingly to abandon their efforts to overthrow Assad, while they increased even more their determination to conquer ISIS.

This is one of several military bases that the U.S. has set up inside Syria after having invaded that country subsequent to the “Arab Spring.” That U.S. base is illegal — it’s a hostile military occupation of Syrian sovereign territory — but all of America’s presence in Syria is that. The U.S. Government doesn’t care about illegality, except when it can be cited against a country that the U.S. wants to conquer, such as against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (his ‘WMD’ or weapons of mass destruction), to ‘justify’ invading it.

This defector, Assad As-Salem, says he defected because America’s statements and promises were all lies, and that, instead of fighting ISIS, the U.S. was training fighters to use U.S.-made weaponry which was being supplied to the base, but which the head of the base sold to ISIS; and that some Maghawir al-Thawra regulars, according to the article posted by Russian Television, "reported that to American base command, but following our report no action has been taken, the Americans only ramped up the support to the man who was appointed our commander and who was dealing with ISIS,' As-Salem said.” The U.S. had appointed their commander, who was actually assisting ISIS — a group the defector loathes. And the U.S. didn’t punish that commander, but instead "the Americans only ramped up the support to the man who was appointed our commander and who was dealing with ISIS.”

If that statement is true, then the countries which have been financing ISIS (mainly Saudi Arabia) are the actual buyers of these U.S.-made weapons; and, of course, the U.S. weapons-manufacturers were actually selling these weapons to the funders of ISIS, which funders then donated these weapons to ISIS, as their part of the U.S. coalition’s campaign to overthrow and replace Assad. Of course, the Sauds regularly receive training by the U.S. in how to operate U.S.-made weapons; so, this training can be passed along to ISIS, by their U.S.-trained Saudi troops.

What’s described here is, then, essentially, a sales-and-marketing campaign by the U.S. Government, to increase sales-volumes for U.S. weapons-makers (who, of course, heavily lobby Congress, so they’ve got support there to increase military funding). This is truly the free market at work, but relying heavily upon government, as any economy itself inevitably must (because without laws, etc., there can’t be any “market” at all). (To be against corruption is intelligent; to be against ‘government’ is not; government is necessary. The only question about government is “good or bad?” not “small or large.”) This sales-and-marketing campaign certainly isn’t the libertarians’ fantasy of creating zero government (anarchy), nor even just “to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” — as one mega-corporate lobbyist proudly proclaimed to be his goal. It’s the real world; it’s no libertarian (or any other) fantasy about things, at all.

A link to this news-report on RT, Russian Television, became posted at reddit, under the category “Syrian Civil War”, and reader-comments there were generally in the nature of “Corrupt Syrian soldiers sell arms to rebels and corrupt rebels sell arms to ISIS/Al Nusra.” Apparently, most readers were blaming the Syrians, not the U.S. Government. However, one comment was at least open-minded: “War and corruption go hand in hand. One should try to investigate here.” That “investigation” is our aim. But in order to investigate the situation, one must first know accurately what it really is. One can’t know that, without knowing the relevant context, which is what we are now focusing on.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his report, from RT, provides a very different picture than does a recent article by America’s CNN, on July 26th, headlined “US tells local Syrian allies they must only fight ISIS and not Assad, prompting exit of allied group”, which stated that:

(CNN)The US-led coalition fighting ISIS has told its local Syrian allies that they must be exclusively focused on fighting ISIS and not fight the Syrian regime, a directive that prompted one rebel group to depart a joint coalition base in Southern Syria, several coalition and US defense officials told CNN.

"The coalition supports only those forces committed to fighting ISIS," coalition spokesman US Army Col. Ryan Dillon told CNN.
..

But one US-backed group which calls itself "the Shohada Al Quartyan" has balked at the restriction, opting to leave the base to carry out independent operations against Syrian regime troops several US and coalition officials told CNN. The officials added that other local allies remain at the garrison and continue to cooperate with coalition advisers.

"The Shohada Al Quartyan have made it known that they may want to pursue other objectives. The coalition is making it clear to Shohada Al Quartyan leadership that if they choose to pursue other objectives, the coalition will no longer support their operations," Dillon said. …

Though both the RT report and the CNN report agree that the U.S. Government is telling its Syrian ‘moderate rebels’ that they are fighting against ISIS, the reports disagree in that RT’s says that quitters are leaving because America’s actual focus is on overthrowing Assad, whereas CNN’s says that quitters are leaving because there’s not enough focus on overthrowing Assad. Both reports could be true, because the two reports deal with different groups of ‘Syrian rebels’.

Perhaps, the U.S. is telling its fighters in Syria, their target is to be only ISIS, even at the same time that the U.S. is actually using those fighters as an excuse to bring into Syria U.S.-made weaponry that are secretly then to be supplied to ISIS. Of course, if that’s the real case, the Shohada al-Quartyan people might be leaving the U.S. alliance because they’ve been deceived by their American bosses to think their target to be ISIS instead of Assad. However, the Maghawir al-Thawra group are alleged to have quit the U.S. alliance on account of having been lied-to and themselves seen that the U.S. is actually selling U.S.-made weapons to ISIS. The CNN article alleges only that the Shohada al-Quartyan group had left because of what their U.S. bosses merely told them: that ISIS would now be the target. So, possibly, both articles are true; but, in that case, America is now telling Syrian rebels that their focus is to be on eliminating ISIS; and, some rebel-groups are abandoning the American effort because of this instruction, while other rebel-groups are abandoning the American effort because that allegation by their U.S. commanders is actually a lie and the U.S.’s real objective is to overthrow Assad.

Therefore, quite possibly, both RT and CNN are telling different aspects of the same narrative (though focusing on different aspects of it).

I have previously provided detailed documentation that the U.S. was relying almost exclusively upon Al Qaeda in Syria — called “al-Nusra” there — in order to lead and train virtually all anti-Assad forces there. However, apparently, the more successful the Syrian-Russian-Iranian coalition has been at defeating in Syria the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-UAE coalition, which employed Al Qaeda’s leaders in Syria to train fighters to overthrow and replace Assad, the more reliance the U.S.-Saudi-Qatari-UAE group has come to place upon ISIS, and the less they’re placing upon Al Qaeda in Syria.

I reported on this development — America’s increasing reliance upon ISIS after the decline of Al Qaeda in Syria — in several previous articles, especially these two:
..

12 December 2016, "Obama and Erdogan Move ISIS Terrorists from Iraq to Syria, to Weaken Assad”

30 April 2017, “How Obama & Erdogan Moved ISIS from Iraq to Syria, to Weaken Assad”

Those ISIS jihadists were being moved from the Iraqi city of Mosul, to the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor, otherwise called Der Zor, at the center of Syria’s oil-well territory. If ISIS wins firm control of that city, plus transit-routes out in order to sell the oil, they won’t need any more money from the Sauds. CNN starts their report with the false assumption that Syria doesn’t own Syria, that Syrian national sovereignty (the legal Government of Syria, which is headed by Assad) doesn’t exist; and, so, CNN continued their 26 July 2017 report:

Some time ago, Bashar al-Assad's forces — supported by Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah proxy militias on the ground, and Russian air force on the air — realized that ISIS was in retreat, so they moved quickly to grab as much territory as they could [notice the allegation here, that Syria’s Government is ‘grabbing’ this Syrian territory, which ISIS had stolen]: in the north to west of Raqqa; in the middle of the country moving east of Palmyra, toward Al Sukhna — a crossroads town considered a gateway to Deir Ezzor; and in the south along the Jordanian and Iraqi borders in Tanf, blocking the path to Deir Ezzor. It's obvious that Assad and his allies are eyeing Deir Ezzor. [This statement reinforces that Assad isn’t the legitimate head-of-state there.]…
..

If Assad and his allies reach Deir Ezzor and the strategic border town of Abu Kamal before the coalition forces advancing from north, then it's game over for the coalition.

CNN’s ‘news’ treats America’s attempted theft of Syria, from the Syrian Government, as being instead an attempted protection of the Syrian people, from the Syrian Government. (Never mind that America is backing jihadists to become the new Syrian government, as a supposed improvement upon Assad’s decidedly secular Government of Syria.) And America claims to be a law-abiding nation, ‘protecting the peace of the world’, instead of to be grabbing yet another piece of the world.

That CNN ‘news’-report is cited here only as being a contrast to the news-report on Russian Television. So, we’ll now briefly complete our discussion of the RT report:

In other words, America’s sudden determination, late in Obama’s Presidency, to oust ISIS from Mosul in Iraq, was intended specifically to provide this emergency-assistance by means of ISIS, to the U.S. coalition’s failing al-Qaeda-led effort to overthrow Assad. This is what we know of Obama as a strategic thinker. He was resourceful, and adapted to changing conditions, when he was faced with the failure of his existing strategy. There aren’t yet sufficiently clear signs to indicate Trump as a strategic thinker.
..
According to another RT news-article, on August 25th, Al Qaeda still remains intensely devoted to the effort to oust Assad. (Perhaps Al Qaeda still is getting enough support from the Sauds and UAE, even if the U.S. is no longer backing them.) RT headlined “New 25,000-strong Syrian terrorist force unites 70 gangs – Russian General Staff”, and reported that:

A new terrorist formation, Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, consists of 25,000 militants, with Jabhat al-Nusra jihadists at its core, the intelligence chief of Russia’s General Staff said. He also spoke of the terrorists’ favorite tactics, state-of-the-art equipment and ways of getting profit.

“Currently, more than 70 gangs, including those from the ranks of the opposition, which used to consider themselves ‘moderate,’ have banded together. The total strength of the Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham group exceeds 25,000 militants,” Col. Gen. Igor Korobov, the head of the Main Directorate of the Russian General Staff (the foreign military intelligence agency), said during a roundtable on Friday as part of the Army-2017 international military-technical forum, held in the Moscow Region.

The key role in the formation belongs to Jabhat al-Nusra (Nusra Front)

Here is what Peter Korzun, at Strategic Culture, said on September 1st, about Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham:

Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), an alliance led by al Qaeda's former Syrian branch, has consolidated its grip over large parts of Idlib after their main rival, the Kuwait-backed Ahrar al Sham, was ousted from the province's main towns and villages. The HTS is even crueler than Islamic State (IS). Its leadership rejects the very idea of dialogue with anyone. The group is a great spoiler and a hindrance on the way to Syria’s crisis management based on the [Russian-led] Astana peace process. No ceasefire or peace is possible as long as this Al-Qaeda affiliate controls the province and its border with Turkey.

On August 7th, al-Monitor, the news-site owned by Jamal Daniel of Houston, who is the head of Crest Investment Company, and a friend of the Bush family (who are buddies of the royal Sauds), reported about HTS, by saying that “the group’s aggressive behavior reflects the organization’s priority to expand its territory and consolidate its power, which would make it a de facto interlocutor in the cease-fire deals ongoing in Syria.” A reasonable assumption would be that HTS is extremely well-funded by outside sources.

Apparently, the U.S. still hopes to win this war: On August 19th, South Front bannered “US-LED COALITION WARPLANES BOMB SYRIAN ARMY IN KADIR VILLAGE IN CENTRAL SYRIA. ISIS ATTACK FOLLOWS – REPORTS”, and said that:

Warplanes of the US-led coalition have carried out airstrikes on the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) Tiger Forces in the village of Kadir in the province of Homs, according to pro-government sources.

America’s support of ISIS in Syria, is, in any case, becoming more overt. And, Al Qaeda’s failure, which caused the U.S. to turn to ISIS instead, has left the Saud-backed Al Qaeda competing with ISIS now, as the prime head-choppers against Syrians.

Regardless of what the explanations for America’s turn (at least temporarily) toward ISIS are, America’s weapons-makers will profit handsomely from it, just as they have profited enormously from the entire Syrian campaign since 2011. It’s probably an effective business-strategy for them, at the present stage.

About the author

They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

By subscribing you won’t miss the special editions.

The Lies of 9/11 Miracle Workers

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

A Review of David Ray Griffin’s Bush And Cheney: How They Ruined America And The World

“America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo subject for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.” Paul Craig Roberts, How America Was Lost

David Ray Griffin is an international treasure and truth teller, who, while being ignored by the mainstream corporate media (MSM) for his extraordinary series of books exposing the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001, will someday be lauded as a modern prophet. To those who know and have studied his work, he is an inspiration for his persistent insistence in a dozen books since 2004 that the truth about the US treachery of that infamous day is essential for understanding the violence, planned by neo-conservatives and embraced by neo-liberals, that the United States has subsequently inflicted on the world. He has consistently argued that to believe in the government’s explanation for 9/11, one has to reject logic, scholarship, and the basic laws of modern science.

Bush And Cheney: How They Ruined America And The World is Griffin’s latest, and probably last, effort to reach those people who, out of fear, ignorance, or laziness, have walled themselves into a cyclopean labyrinth of denial about the defining event of our time. Without the clarifying truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001, there will be no exit from the continuing nightmare the world is experiencing.

If you are reading this review, you are probably not one of those people Griffin is trying to reach. Ay, there’s the rub! As the title of his book suggests, he is using reversed logic to try and reach those who have accepted the official fiction that is The 9/11 Commission Report (No doubt without having read it. Outside of serious researchers, I have never met a person who has, except for some of my students) and all the antecedent and subsequent government and MSM propaganda.

To this end, the first three-quarters of the book is devoted to the “destructive transformations of America and the world as a whole” that were initiated and justified by 9/11, many of which have been accepted by innumerable people as being based on government lies, most notably the war against Iraq. Griffin’s hope is that if he can convince skeptical readers that the government would lie about Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, etc., resulting in the deaths and maiming of millions of innocent people and the destruction of their countries, it would also lie about the attacks of September 11 that “legitimized” such carnage and the ongoing shredding of the US Constitution.

The Will to Examine Miracles?

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s an ingenuous and compelling method, culminating with his concluding section on “15 major miracles” of 9/11, by which he means “violations of the laws of nature” in the strictest scientific sense. Astutely logical, deeply sourced, and scientifically compelling, the book’s conclusion can only be rejected by one adamantly closed to accepting the ugly truth about the US government and its media accomplices.

But getting skeptical people to read the book is the trick. I think that is very hard but much easier than to get the MSM to do so and give it a fair shake. People have friends whom they trust, and sometimes friends can convince friends to at least take a look. Speaking of the MSM, Griffin puts it thus:

However, while granting that the Bush-Cheney administration told big and

disastrous lies, which led to millions of deaths, most mainstream commentators

have considered the idea that this administration engineered the 9/11 attack

to be so absurd that they can render judgment without checking the evidence.

“Judging without checking the evidence” is the job of the MSM, who are stenographers for the government, but regular people might be persuaded to check the evidence before reaching a conclusion, if they can be led to that assessment one logical step after another. One can even hope that left-wing alternative media critics of the government, many of whom avoid this issue like the plague, might find the courage to reassess their anti-scientific denials in light of Griffin’s work. After all, “the laws of physics don’t lie,” and logical reasoning has generally been a strength of many dissenters, especially those well-skilled in the art of disputation.

The Birth of the Tangled Web

[dropcap]G[/dropcap]riffin is a master logician, so he begins with the obvious fact that the Bush-Cheney administration failed to prevent 9/11 and therefore failed to keep America safe that day, as Donald Trump said in a 2016 election debate, for which he was castigated by his opponents and the media. But he was right; it is a fact, whatever Bush-Cheney’s deceptive excuses. As a result of those attacks, the US attacked Afghanistan, claiming that was because Osama bin Laden orchestrated the attacks from that country. No evidence of bin Laden’s guilt was ever presented, though Colin Powell initially said it would be shortly forthcoming (he quickly reneged on the promise). The invasion of Afghanistan, planned well in advance of 9/11, was the start of the war on terror that’s been going on for 16 years with no end in sight. A 16-year-old war based on no evidence, just lies. Griffin shows how the alleged “evidence” that was eventually produced – the bin Laden videos – were fraudulent; that they were indeed “produced,” and not by bin Laden; they were “bogus” according to Professor Bruce Lawrence of Duke University, the leading academic expert on bin Laden. And the FBI reported that it had “no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.” But the administration and the media sang of bin Laden’s guilt in unison. The public, beaten down in fear and trembling, accepted the claim as a fact, as they were further traumatized by additional lies about the anthrax attacks that are a key component of the entire propaganda campaign of fear and intimidation that resulted in The Patriot Act. (Graeme MacQueen’s masterful analysis, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, should be required reading; for he shows how the often forgotten anthrax attacks are intimately linked to those of September 11 and when studied closely, prove that 9/11 was an inside job.)

So Griffin begins with the lie about bin Laden that led to the lie about Afghanistan that led to the illegal and immoral and ongoing war against Afghanistan and all the millions of deaths and destruction that have ensued.

So knowing how lie leads on to lie, let us count some of the lies that followed. Griffin documents these in deeply sourced details, but I will list them concisely:

US Government Lies Subsequent to the 9/11 Attacks:

That the 9/11 attacks were surprises, a “New Pearl Harbor.”
That there was solid evidence for bin Laden’s guilt.
That the invasion of Afghanistan (and Pakistan) was therefore justified.
That the “war on terror” and therefore The Patriot Act were necessary.
That Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, was developing nuclear weapons, and had weapons of mass destruction
That the attacks on Muslim countries were not based on Islamophobia
That the chaos and destruction unleashed throughout the Middle East were not pre-planned and intentional.
That the Obama administration’s attack on Libya was a humanitarian response to the “madman” Gaddafi, who adopted a rape policy fueled by Viagra drugged troops ready to unleash a blood bath.
That the war against Syria was not a CIA-instigated plan to overthrow Assad under the guise of “liberating” the Syrian people.
That the jihadists in Syria, including ISIS, were not armed and supported by the US, with many of those arms being shipped out of Benghazi, Libya, under the direction of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, General David Petraeus, and Chris Stevens, the US ambassador to Libya.
That the Syrian “White Helmets” are independent volunteer do-gooders, not a propaganda outfit funded by the US and UK governments.
That the wars against Muslim countries throughout the Greater Middle East are not connected to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and serve as American support for Israel’s agenda in the region.
That drone killings are legal and morally justified.
That the US Constitution has not been shredded.
That the coup d’état in Ukraine was not a US operation as part of a continuing US aggression toward Russia and a growing threat of a nuclear annihilation.
That the US buildup of military forces along Russia’s western borders and the massive transfer of US Naval forces to China’s east are not US acts of aggression making nuclear war more likely, but are acts of self-defense.
That the threat of ecological holocaust is not connected to a 770 billion dollar “defense” budget, a trillion dollar nuclear weapons modernization program, and US wars against countries containing vast amounts of fossil fuels and rare minerals.

That is only a sample of the lies that Griffin uses to lead the reader back to 9/11, the alleged reason for the death and destruction justified by such lies. If the US government would lie in all these ways, he is saying, why would they not have lied with the Big Lie that started this string of destructive deceptions.

September 11, 2001

Thus the last section of the book (a little more than 25%) is devoted to “9/11: A Miraculous Day.” Herein he explains why George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should not be trusted on 9/11. They did not want an investigation into the September 11 attacks; wanted the public to just trust them. They were eventually forced into an investigation by public pressure; originally named Henry Kissinger to head it (don’t laugh – ha! ha!); rigged its makeup and had Philip Zelikow, arch neo-con and Bush insider, appointed its Executive Director. In short, they did everything possible to prevent an honest investigation. And we know that the result was The 9/11 Commission Report that is a piece of legerdemain on a par with The Warren Commission Report. In other words, a cover-up

Griffin shows that “Bush and Cheney lied about their activities on 9/11” and that their relationship to the subsequent anthrax attacks, a key motivator for The Patriot Act and “the war on terror,” suggest that their administration was the source of those attacks and therefore the 9/11 attacks. (see Graeme MacQueen’s The 2001 Anthrax Deception). Griffin further notes how declassified official accounts refute “central features of the Bush-Cheney account of 9/11.”

And then – the coup de grace – he shows how the official account of 9/11 depends on “miracle stories.” Yet, “a look at the evidence shows that many people who accept science on tobacco, evolution, and global warming, accept miracles, implicitly, on the subject of 9/11, especially in relationship to the World Trade Center (WTC).” Herein lies the great stumbling block to convincing people of the truth of 9/11. Science, logic, careful reasoning, evidence, documentation, what you can observe with your own eyes, etc. – none of this matters when you are intent on being deceived (or pretending to be) because of the implications of examining the evidence and reaching conclusions that are deeply disturbing to your world view, ideology, or sense of self. To admit that you have believed a pack of lies for years is very difficult to accept. But regular people of good will can do so. These are the people Griffin is trying to reach. To convince those who have for years publicly and professionally dismissed those who have questioned the official version of 9/11 as conspiracy nuts is probably an impossible task. To convince the MSM that have worked hand-in-glove with the government to conceal the truth is preposterous. To convince those fine people who are devoted to truth in other areas to reconsider their positions on this core issue is conceivable. Surely the world is full of weird events that logic and science cannot explain. But when the defining event of recent history that has resulted in the world teetering on the edge of final destruction is explained by at least the following 15 miracles that Griffin lists, only a delusional person or one whose will to untruth is set in stone would not be moved to ask how these could be possible, and draw the obvious conclusions.

A Miraculous Precedent: The Assassination of JFK

I am reminded of that other foundational case in modern American history: the CIA-directed assassination of JFK. Dan Rather, the famous CBS news anchor, was in Dallas that day, and after seeing the Zapruder film (which was then kept from the American public for a decade), went on television to say that when the president was shot in the head he violently lurched forward, clearly implying that the shot came from Oswald from the rear. Of course once the public was able to see the film, it was obvious to anyone with eyes that he was violently thrown back and to his left, therefore having been shot from his front right, not by Oswald. Bingo: a conspiracy. Then in 2012, another famous TV personality, Bill O’Reilly wrote a book called Killing Kennedy in which he claims that he and his co-author watched the Zapruder film “time after time to understand the sequence of events,” but still concluded that The Warren Commission was correct and that Oswald shot Kennedy from behind despite the obvious visual evidence to the contrary. Miracles then, miracles now – they seem to define the two key events of modern American history for those wanting to obfuscate the truth.

Do you believe in miracles?

Here is a Summation of Griffin’s 15 Major Miracles:

The Twin Towers and WTC 7 were the only steel-framed high-rise buildings ever to come down without explosives or incendiaries.
The Twin Towers, each of which had 287 steel columns, were brought down solely by a combination of airplane strikes and jet-fuel fires.
WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, so it was the first steel-framed high-rise to be brought down solely by ordinary building fires.
These World Trade Center buildings also came down in free fall – the Twin Towers in virtual free fall, WTC 7 in absolute free fall – for over two seconds.
Although the collapses of the of the WTC buildings were not aided by explosives, the collapses imitated the kinds of implosions that can be induced only by demolition companies.
In the case of WTC 7, the structure came down symmetrically (straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline), which meant that all 82 of the steel support columns had to fall simultaneously, although the building’s fires had a very asymmetrical pattern.
The South Tower’s upper 30-floor block changed its angular momentum in midair.
This 30 floor block then disintegrated in midair.
With regard to the North Tower, some of its steel columns were ejected out horizontally for at least 500 feet.
The fires in the debris from the WTC buildings could not be extinguished for many months.
Although the WTC fires, based on ordinary building fires, could not have produced temperatures above 1,800℉, the fires inexplicably melted metals with much higher melting points, such as iron (2,800℉) and even molybdenum (4,753℉).
Some of the steel in the debris had been sulfidized, resulting in Swiss-cheese-appearing steel, even though ordinary building fires could not have resulted in the sulfidation.
As a passenger on AA Flight 77, Barbara Olson called her husband, telling him about hijackers on her plane, even though this plane had no onboard phones and its altitude was too high for a cell phone call to get through.
Hijacker pilot Hani Hanjour could not possibly have flown the trajectory of AA 77 to strike Wedge 1 of the Pentagon, and yet he did.
Besides going through an unbelievable personal transformation, ringleader Mohamed Atta also underwent an impossible physical transformation.

Griffin examines each of these “miracles” in detail. Taken together, they reduce the official explanation of 9/11 to a story told to credulous children who are afraid of the dark. One can only hope that Americans are ready to grow up and accept that the bogeyman is real and that he is out to devour them and the rest of the world if they don’t awaken from their hypnotic sleep.

The Overwhelming Consensus of Experts

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is important to note that David Ray Griffin is not alone in his assessment that 9/11 was an inside job done to legitimize disastrous policies at home and abroad. There are thousands of scholars, religious leaders, scientists, engineers, airline pilots, firefighters and countless others who agree with him after studying the evidence. Griffin names many of these experts in his conclusion. And they are not afraid of the absurd way the government and media accuse them of being “conspiracy theorists,” since they know “as Lance deHaven-Smith explained in his book Conspiracy Theory in America, [that] the CIA started using ‘conspiracy theory’ as a pejorative term in 1964 to ridicule the growing belief, contrary to the Warren Report, that President Kennedy was killed by people within the US government, including the CIA itself.” Thoughtful people know, and the evidence has long proven, that the US government is guilty of an extensive list of conspiracies, ranging from the alleged Gulf of Tonkin attack to its conspiracy to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and extending back through many CIA-engineered coup d’états, the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, etc. The name calling has lost its sting when the documentary records confirm that the name callers are the conspirators.

So if you care about truth, your country, and the world; if you hate to be lied to; if you care about the victims of American violence everywhere – you should read Bush And Cheney: How They Ruined America And The World. It is a brave and brilliant book. Look at the evidence. Show others. Pass the book on. Give it as a gift.

And tip your hat to David Ray Griffin, a truth teller extraordinaire, who for thirteen years has been asking us to wake out of the hypnotic state of denial that has allowed the liars to bring the world to the edge of destruction. Griffin’s persistence is the sign of hope we all need to join him in the fight against these unspeakable forces of evil.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, Ed Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He states: "I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding." His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/ .

David Ray Griffin is an international treasure and truth teller, who, while being ignored by the mainstream corporate media (MSM) for his extraordinary series of books exposing the false flag attacks of September 11, 2001, will someday be lauded as a modern prophet. To those who know and have studied his work, he is an inspiration for his persistent insistence in a dozen books since 2004 that the truth about the US treachery of that infamous day is essential for understanding the violence, planned by neo-conservatives and embraced by neo-liberals, that the United States has subsequently inflicted on the world.

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

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

Russia’s Calm, But Firm, Response to the US Shooting Down a Syrian Fighter Jet

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

by GARY LEUPP
Crossposted with Counterpunch

Approximate area where Syrian SU-22 was shot down by US warplanes.

Former State Department official Nicholas Burns told CNN Monday morning he’s surprised at Russia’s “calm” response to the shooting down of a Syrian government warplane (a Russian built SU 22 jet) in Syrian skies by a US F-18 Super Hornet. Moscow initially merely protested.

The Syrian government says its plane was bombing ISIL forces. (This could be perceived as an unequivocally good act, ISIL being what it is.) But the U.S. says the plane was bombing its proxies, who are themselves battling ISIL around Raqqa with embedded U.S. advisors. These proxies are mainly Kurds who want independence and other forces allied to the U.S. and its Arab allies in a common effort to ultimately topple the Assad government. And everyone paying attention knows these proxies include forces closely aligned with what used to be called al-Nusra. Forces the U.S. considers friends are considered by Damascus terrorists.

There are differences of opinion on this matter between the government of the aggressor imperialist country and the government of the country being assaulted by a host of foreign forces, and in the cross-hairs of this—what did Martin Luther King call it, so rudely, in 1967?—“greatest purveyor of violence in the world”?

In any case, Assad’s is an internationally recognized government, as legitimate as the Trump government, and the U.S. and its allies are plainly violating Syrian sovereignty by their presence. The Russian position is that the Syrian Arab Army (the national army) is the guarantor of Syrian unity and sovereignty, and the alternative is an Islamist government that would destroy Palmyra, blow up the churches of Damascus, behead children etc. (This is a rational position.)

The U.S. position has been that the Assad government, to which army is loyal, is the main problem to be solved. This position requires the curious argument that the Assad government is what has produced ISIL and al-Qaeda (al-Nusra, Fateh al-Sham), by producing opposition to itself, thus generating Islamist radicalism. (This is an irrational position.)

A battered Syrian Air Force SU-22 being maintained. After years of war against powerfully armed enemies, and lately even the advanced forces of the Anglo-Zionist empire, it's a miracle these planes are still flying.

ISIL (ISIS, the Islamic State) exists because a Jordanian Bedouin guy named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi organized an international jihadi group around Herat, Afghanistan circa 2000. Called Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (Organization of Monotheism and Jihad), it was a rival of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, whose camps were located on the other side of Afghanistan. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Zarqawi relocated to Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq (which recall was based entirely on lies, and produced horrible ongoing destruction and suffering) provided optimal opportunities for jihadis like him. In 2004 he pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda and established, as its Iraqi franchise, Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (commonly rendered al-Qaeda in Iraq).

That morphed into ISIL. It spread from Iraq to Syria, and back to Iraq, even as al-Qaeda continues to challenge it for influence and territory. It is a hideous product of U.S. imperialist interventions. In Syria it challenges a government that, however oppressive and corrupt, would surely be seen as the better alternative by most rational people. But the dominant view in the State Department has been that Assad needs to go. The debate has been over how to effect his ouster, through overt or covert means, and the main practical problem the lack of reliable allies willing to work with U.S. trainers and not defect to the other side after their training.

So on the one hand the U.S. pursues openly an anti-ISIL campaign in Syria (and Iraq), claiming plausibly that the sheer evil of ISIL justifies the drive to destroy it. Who could complain? (The Syrian government points out that any uninvited military presence is a violation of international law.) On the other hand the ultimate intent, which seems unchanged under the new administration, is government change.

Thus the State Department shapes the cable news coverage to insure that the Assad government is routinely vilified, assumed to be an evil. The Syrian army is presented, not as the most respected institution in the country, but as the enemy of its people, barrel-bombing them. So if it’s reported that a Syrian warplane was shot down by a U.S. warplane over Syria, what’s the problem?

Expert analysts are explaining that the U.S. was acting in self-defense in shooting down the Syrian plane in Syria. They appear to sincerely believe what they say, and perhaps persuade their audience—even after so many lies have been exposed and you’d think public skepticism at its height.

***

As I write there is more “breaking” news. It appears the Russians, while still “calm,” are also getting firm. The U.S. has gone too far, shooting down the plane of a Russian-allied force in a Russia-allied country. The Russians have consistently appealed to the U.S. to coordinate anti-ISIL, anti-al-Nusra efforts in Syria; a “memorandum on air safety” intended to prevent mid-air collisions has been in effect since last October, although the U.S. has violated it by bombing a Syrian army position. Now Russia is pulling out and announcing that it will treat U.S. jets in Syrian airspace as “targets.” (Barbara Starr—who you’ve noticed represents the Pentagon on CNN—however says the line’s still open, and there are apparently communications between Russian forces in Latakia and U.S. forces in Qatar.)

The Russian Defense Ministry’s calm statement reads: “All kinds of airborne vehicles, including aircraft and UAVs of the international coalition detected to the west of the Euphrates River will be tracked by the Russian SAM systems as air targets.” This is a clear warning to the Trump administration to back off from attacks on state forces in Syria.

Moscow is surely puzzled by conflicting signals from Washington regarding Syria and U.S. foreign policy in general. If there had been some optimism about a joint effort against terrorists in Syria, this incident may destroy it.

F-18 Super Hornet in flight. Advanced aircraft but not invulnerable to Russian missiles or equally advanced aircraft.

Let’s say a S-300 Grumble missile shoots down one of those Super Hornets today. A Super Hornet whose presence is rejected by the Russian-allied Syrian government. A U.S. pilot killed. Massive immediate outrage in this country—about a Russian attack on one of us, wicked just by definition. And it’s official truth that Russia hacked the election. Russia we are told is an adversary. Trump cannot be viewed as a Putin stooge. Retaliation needed, immediately, in a country becoming a free-for-all for Arab, Turkish, Iranian, Russian and U.S. and European intervention.

I think the calm temporary. Iranian missiles are hitting Raqqa in a retaliatory strike on ISIL, which has struck in Iran. Turkey is bombing U.S. Kurdish allies in Syria. The mix of forces that will take (and likely destroy) Raqqa are not clear. A young crazed Kim Jung-un type is in charge of Saudi Arabia throwing money at jihadis in Syria. Hizbollah Lebanese forces and Iraqi Shiite militia forces are fighting the ISIL and al-Qaeda forces with the government. It is a hellish situation that could become much more so.

The people should demand that the U.S. just back off. How can those who generated ISIL kill it?

Trump as I recall suggested during his campaign that the U.S. leave the defeat of ISIL to Russia, or at least to work with Russia against ISIL. He was of course vague, inconsistent, and using a sixth grade vocabulary, but he seemed to want to avoid something like this provocation. One has to ask, who does want it?

About the Author

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu

[premium_newsticker id=”154171″]

Nuclear War: Making sense of the “super fuse” scare

The Saker

For weeks now I have been getting panicked emails with readers asking me whether the USA had developed a special technology called “super fuses” which would make it possible for the USA to successfully pull-off a (preemptive) disarming first strike against Russia. Super-fuses were also mentioned in combination with an alleged lack by Russia of a functioning space-based infrared early warning system giving the Russians less time to react to a possible US nuclear attack.

While there is a factual basis to all this, the original report already mislead the reader with a shocking title “How US nuclear force modernization is undermining strategic stability: The burst-height compensating super-fuze” and by offering several unsubstantiated conclusions. Furthermore, this original report was further discussed by many observers who simply lack the expertise to understand what the facts mentioned in the report really mean. Then the various sources started quoting each other and eventually this resulted in a completely baseless “super fuse scare”. Let’s try to make some sense of all this.

Understanding nuclear strikes and their targets

To understand what really has taken place I need to first define a couple of crucial terms:

Hard-target kill capability: this refers to the capability of a missile to destroy a strongly protected target such as a underground missile silo or a deeply buried command post.
Soft-target kill capability: the capability to destroy lightly or unprotected targets.
Counterforce strike: this refers to a strike aimed at the enemy’s military capabilities.
Countervalue strike: this refers to a strike on non-military assets such as cities.

Since strategic nuclear missile silos and command posts are well protected and deeply buried, only hard-target kill (HTK) capable missiles can execute a counterforce strike. Soft-target kill (STK) capable systems are therefore usually seen as being the ultimate retaliatory capability to hit the enemies cities. The crucial notion here is that HTK capability is not a function of explosive power, but of accuracy. Yes, in theory, a hugely powerful weapon can compensate to some degree for a lack of accuracy, but in reality both the USA and the USSR/Russia have long understood that the real key to HTK is accuracy.

During the Cold War, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were more accurate than submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) simply because targeting from the surface and from a fixed position was much easier than targeting from inside a submerged and moving submarine. The Americans were the first to successfully deploy a HTK capable SLBM with their Trident D-5. The Russians have only acquired this capability very recently (with their R-29RMU Sineva SLBM).

Now that the USA has clearly become a rogue state whose contempt for international law is total, there is no legal mechanism left to stop the US from committing actions which endanger the future of mankind. This is what is really scary, not “super-fuses”.

According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists just a decade ago only 20% of US SLBMs were HTK capable. Now, with the ‘super-fuse’ 100% of US SLBMs are HTK capable. What these super-fuses do is very accurately measure the optimal altitude at which to detonate thereby partially compensating for a lack of accuracy of a non-HTK capable weapon. To make a long story short, these super-fuses made all US SLBMs HTK capable.

Does that matter?

Yes and no. What that means on paper is that the US has just benefited from a massive increase in the number of US missiles with HTK capability. Thus, the US has now a much larger missile force capable of executing a disarming counterforce strike. In reality, however, things are much more complicated than that.

Understanding counterforce strikes

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]xecuting a disarming counterforce strike against the USSR and, later, Russia has been an old American dream. Remember Reagan’s “Star Wars” program? The idea behind it was simple: to develop the capability to intercept enough incoming Soviet warheads to protect the USA from a retaliatory Soviet counter strike. It would work something like this: destroy, say, 70% of the Soviet ICBM/SLBMs and intercept the remaining 30% before they can reach the USA. This was total nonsense both technologically (the technology did not exist) and strategically (just a few Soviet “leakers” could wipe-out entire US cities, who could take such a risk?). The more recent US deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems in Europe has exactly the same purpose – to protect the USA from a retaliatory counterstrike. Without going into complex technical discussions, let’s just say that this point in time, this system would never protect the USA from anything. But in the future, we could imagine such a scenario—

The USA and Russia agree to further deep cuts in their nuclear strategic forces thereby dramatically reducing the total number of Russian SLBM/ICBMs.
The USA deploys all around Russia anti-ballistic systems which can catch and destroy Russian missiles in the early phase of their flight towards the USA.
The USA also deploys a number of systems in space or around the USA to intercept any incoming Russian warhead.
The USA having a very large HTK-capable force executes a successful counterforce strike destroying 90% (or so) of the Russian capabilities and then the rest are destroyed during their flight.

This is the dream. It will never work. Here is why:

The Russians will not agree to deep cuts in their nuclear strategic forces.
The Russians already have deployed the capability to destroy the forward deployed US anti-ballistic system in Europe.
Russian warheads and missiles are now maneuverable and can even use any trajectory, including over the South Pole, to reach the USA. New Russian missiles have a dramatically shorter and faster first stage burn period making them much harder to intercept.
Russia’s reliance on ballistic missiles will be gradually replaced with strategic (long-range) cruise missiles (more about that later).
This scenario mistakenly assumes that the USA will know where the Russian SLBM launching submarines will be when they launch and that they will be able to engage them (more about that later).
This scenario completely ignores the Russian road-mobile and rail-mobile ICBMs (more about that later).

Understanding MIRVs

Before explaining points 4, 5 and 6 above, I need to mention another important fact: one missile can carry either one single warhead or several (up to 12 and more). When a missile carries several independently targetable warheads it is called MIRVed as in “multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle”.

MIRVs are important for several reasons. First, one single missile with 10 warheads can, in theory, destroy 10 different targets. Alternatively, one single missile can carry, say 3-4 real warheads and 6-7 decoys. In practical terms what looks like one missile on take-off can turn into 5 real warheads, all targeted at different objectives and another 5 fake decoys designed to make interception that more difficult. MIRVs, however, also present a big problem: they are lucrative targets. If with one of “my” nuclear warheards I can destroy 1 of “your” MIRVed missiles, I lose 1 warhead but you lose 10. This is one of the reasons the USA is moving away from land-based MIRVed ICBMs.

The important consideration here is that Russia has a number of possible options to choose from and how many of her missiles will be MIRVed is impossible to predict. Besides, all US and Russian SLBMs will remain MIRVed for the foreseeable future (de-MIRVing SLBMs makes no sense, really, since the entire nuclear missile carrying submarine (or SSBN) is a gigantic MIRVed launching pad by definition).

In contrast to MIRVed missile, single warheads missiles are very bad targets to try to destroy using nuclear weapons: even if “my” missile destroys “yours” we both lost 1 missile each. What is the point? Worse, if I have to use 2 of “mine” to make really sure that “yours” is really destroyed, my strike will result in me using 2 warheads in exchange for only 1 of yours. This makes no sense at all.

Finally, in retaliatory countervalue strikes, MIRVed ICBM/SLBMs are a formidable threat: just one single R-30 Bulava (SS-N-30) SLBM or one single R-36 Voevoda (SS-18) ICBM can destroy ten American cities. Is that a risk worth taking? Say the USA failed to destroy one single Borei-class SSBN – in theory that could mean that this one SSBN could destroy up to 200 American cities (20 SLBMs with 10 MIRVs each). How is that for a risk?

Contrasting the US and Russian nuclear triad

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]trategic nuclear weapons can be deployed on land, in the oceans or delivered by aircraft. This is called the “nuclear triad”. I won’t discuss the aircraft based part of the US and Russian triads here, as they don’t significantly impact the overall picture and because they are roughly comparable. The sea and land based systems and their underlying strategies could not be any more different. At sea, the USA has had HTK capabilities for many years now and the US decided to hold the most important part of the US nuclear arsenal in SSBNs. In contrast, the Russians chose to develop road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles. The very first one was the RT-2PM Topol (SS-25) deployed in 1985, followed by the T-2PM2 «Topol-M» (SS-27) deployed in 1997 and the revolutionary RT-24 Yars or Topol’-MR (SS-29) deployed in 2010 (the US considered deploying road-mobile strategic missiles, but never succeeded in developing the technology).

The Russians also deployed rail-mobile missiles called RT-23 Molodets (SS-24) and are about to deploy a newer version called RS-27 Barguzin (SS-31?). This is what they look like:

Russian road mobile and rail mobile ICBMs

SSBNs and road and rail mobile missiles all have two things in common: they are mobile and they rely on concealment for survival as neither of them can hope to survive. The SSBN hides in the depths of the ocean, the road-mobile missile launcher drives around the immense Russian expanses and can hide, literally, in any forest. As for the rail-mobile missile train, it hides by being completely indistinguishable from any other train on the huge Russian railroad network (even from up close it is impossible to tell whether what you are seeing is a regular freight train or a missile launching special train). To destroy these systems, accuracy is absolutely not enough: you need to find them and you need to find them before they fire their missiles. And that is, by all accounts, quite impossible.

The Russian Navy likes to keep its SSBNs either under the polar ice-cap or in so-called “bastions” such as the Sea of Okhotsk. While these are not really “no-go” zones for US attack submarines (SSN), they are extremely dangerous areas where the Russian Navy has a huge advantage over the US (if only because the US attack submarines cannot count on the support of surface ships or aircraft). The US Navy has some of the best submarines on the planet and superbly trained crews, but I find the notion that US SSNs could find and destroy all Russian SSBNs before the latter can launch unlikely in the extreme.

As for the land-based rail-mobile and road-mobile missiles, they are protected by Russian Air Defenses which are the most advanced on the planet, not the kind of airspace the US would want to send B-53, B-1 or B-2 bombers in. But most importantly, these missiles are completely hidden so even if the USA could somehow destroy them, it would fail to find enough of them to make a first disarming strike a viable option. By the way, the RS-24 has four MIRVs (make that 4 US cities) while the RS-27 will have between 10 and 16 (make that another 10 to 16 US cities vaporized).

Looking at geography and cruise missiles

Finally, let’s take a look at geography and cruise missiles. Two Russian cruise missiles are especially important to us: the Kh-102 and the 3M-14K(?):

	KH-102	3M-14K
Range:	5500km	2600km
Launcher:	Strategic bomber	Aircraft, ship, container
Warhead:	Nuclear 450kt	Nuclear (unknown)

What is important with these two cruise missiles is that the KH-102 has a huge range and that the KM-14K can be fired from aircraft, ships and even containers. Take a look at this video which shows the capabilities of this missile:

Now consider where the vast majority of US cities are located – right along the East and West coasts of the USA and the fact that the US has no air defenses of any kind protecting them. A Russian strategic bomber could hit any West Coast from the middle of the Pacific ocean. As for a Russian submarine, it could hit any US city from the middle of the Atlantic. Finally, the Russians could conceal an unknown number of cruise missiles in regular looking shipping containers (flying Russian flag or, for that matter, any other flag) and simply sail to the immediate proximity to the US coast and unleash a barrage of nuclear cruise missiles.

How much reaction time would such a barrage give the US government?

Understanding reaction time

It is true that the Soviet and Russian space-based early warning system is in bad shape. But did you know that China never bothered developing such a space based system in the first place? So what is wrong with the Chinese, are they stupid, technologically backward or do they know something we don’t?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]o answer that question we need to look at the options facing a country under nuclear missile attack. The first option is called “launch on warning”: you see the incoming missiles and you press the “red button” (keys in reality) to launch your own missiles. That is sometimes referred to as “use them or lose them”. The next option is “launch on strike”: you launch all you got as soon as a nuclear strike on your territory is confirmed. And, finally, there is the “retaliation after ride-out“: you absorb whatever your enemy shot at you, then take a decision to strike back. What is obvious is that China has adopted, whether by political choice or due to limitation in space capabilities, either a “launch on strike” or a “retaliation after ride-out” option. This is especially interesting since China possesses relatively few nuclear warheads and even fewer real long range ICBMs .

Contrast that with the Russians who have recently confirmed that they have long had a “dead hand system” called “Perimetr” which automatically ascertains that a nuclear attack has taken place and then automatically launches a counterstrike. That would be a “launch on strike” posture, but it is also possible that Russia has a double-posture: she tries to have the capability to launch on warning, but double-secures herself with an automated “dead hand” “launch on strike” capability.

Take a look at this estimate of worldwide stocks of strategic nuclear warheads: While China is credited with only 260 warheads, Russia still has a whopping 7’000 warheads. And a “dead hand” capability. And yet China feels confident enough to announce a “no first use” policy. How can they say that with no space-based nuclear missile launch detection capability?

Many will say that the Chinese wished they had more nukes and a space-based based nuclear missile launch detection capability, but that their current financial and technological means simply do not allow that. Maybe. But my personal guess is that they realize that even their very minimal force represents a good enough deterrent for any potential aggressor. And they might have a point.

Let me ask you this: how many US generals and politicians would be willing to sacrifice just one major US city in order to disarm China or Russia? Some probably would. But I sure hope that the majority would realize that the risk will always remain huge.

For one thing, modern nuclear warfare has, so far, only been “practiced” only on paper and with computers (and thank God for that!)? So nobody *really* knows for sure how a nuclear war would play itself out. The only thing which is certain is that just the political and economic consequences of such assault would be catastrophic and totally unpredictable. Furthermore, it remains very unclear how such a war could be stopped short of totally destroying one side. The so-called “de-escalation” is a fascinating concept, but so far nobody has really figured this out. Finally, I am personally convinced that both the USA and Russia have more than enough survivable nuclear weapons to actually decide to ride out a full-scale enemy attack. That is the one big issue which many well-meaning pacifists never understood: it is a good thing that “the USA and Russia have the means to blow-up the world ten times over” simply because if even one side succeeded in destroying, say, 95% of the US or Russian nuclear forces, the remaining 5% would be more than enough to wipe out the attacking side in a devastating countervalue attack. If Russia and the USA each had, say, only 10 nuclear warheads then the temptation to try to take them out would be much higher.

This is scary and even sick, but having a lot of nuclear weapons is safer from a “first-strike stability” point of view than having few. Yes, we do live in a crazy world.

Consider that in times of crisis both the US and Russia would scramble their strategic bombers and keep them in the air, refueling them when needed, for as long as needed to avoid having them destroyed on the ground. So even if the USA destroyed ALL Russian ICBM/SLBMs, there would be quite a few strategic bombers in holding patterns in staging areas which could be given the order to strike. And here we reach one last crucial concept:

Counterforce strikes require a lot of HTK capable warheads. The estimates by both sides are kept secret, of course, but we are talking over 1000 targets on each side at least listed, if not actually targeted. But a countervalue strike would require much less. The US has only 10 cities with over one million people. Russia has only 12. And, remember, in theory one warhead is enough for one city (that is not true, but for all practical purposes it is). Just look what 9/11 did to the USA and imagine of, say, “only” Manhattan had been truly nuked. You can easily imagine the consequences.

Conclusion 1: super-fuses are not really that super at all

The super-fuses scare is so overblown that it is almost an urban legend. The fact is that even if all the US SLBMs are now HTK capable and even if Russia does not have a functional space-based missile launch detection capability (she is working on a new one, by the way), this in no way affects the fundamental fact that there is nothing, nothing at all, that the USA could come up with to prevent Russia from obliterating the USA in a retaliatory strike. The opposite is also true, the Russians have exactly zero hope of nuking the USA and surviving the inevitable US retaliation.

The truth is that as far back as the early 1980s Soviet (Marshal Ogarkov) and US specialists had already come to the conclusion that a nuclear war is unwinnable. In the past 30 years two things have dramatically changed the nature of the game: first, an increasing number of conventional weapons have become comparable in their effects to small nuclear weapons and cruise missiles have become vastly more capable. The trend today is for low-RCS (stealth) long range hypersonic cruise missiles and maneuvering ICBM warheads which will make it even harder to detect and intercept them. Just think about it: if the Russians fired a cruise missile volley from a submarine say, 100km off the US coast, how much reaction time will the US have? Say that these low-RCS missile would begin flying at medium altitude being for all practical purpose invisible to radar, infra-red and even sound, then lower themselves down to 3-5 m over the Atlantic and then accelerate to a Mach 2 or Mach 3 speed. Sure, they will become visible to radars once they cross the horizon, but the remaining reaction time would be measured in seconds, not minutes. Besides, what kind of weapon system could stop that missile type of anyway? Maybe the kind of defenses around a US aircraft carrier (maybe), but there is simply nothing like that along the US coast.

As for ballistic missile warheads, all the current and foreseeable anti-ballistic systems rely on calculations for a non-maneuvering warhead. Once the warheads begin to make turns and zig-zag, then the computation needed to intercept them become harder by several orders of magnitude. Some Russian missiles, like the R-30 Bulava, can even maneuver during their initial burn stage, making their trajectory even harder to estimate (and the missile itself harder to intercept).

The truth is that for the foreseeable future ABM systems will be much more expensive and difficult to build then ABM-defeating missiles. Also, keep in mind that an ABM missile itself is also far, far more expensive than a warhead. Frankly, I have always suspected that the American obsession with various types of ABM technologies is more about giving cash to the Military Industrial Complex and, at best, developing new technologies useful elsewhere.

Conclusion 2: the nuclear deterrence system remains stable, very stable

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the end of WWII, the Soviet Union’s allies, moved by the traditional western love for Russia, immediately proceeded to plan for a conventional and a nuclear war against the Soviet Union (see Operation Unthinkable and Operation Dropshot). Neither plan was executed, the western leaders were probably rational enough not to want to trigger a full-scale war against the armed forces which had destroyed roughly 80% of the Nazi war machine. What is certain, however, is that both sides fully understood that the presence of nuclear weapons profoundly changed the nature of warfare and that the world would never be the same again: for the first time in history all of mankind faced a truly existential threat. As a direct result of this awareness, immense sums of money were given to some of the brightest people on the planet to tackle the issue of nuclear warfare and deterrence. This huge effort resulted in an amazingly redundant, multi-dimensional and sophisticated system which cannot be subverted by any one technological breakthrough. There is SO much redundancy and security built into the Russian and American strategic nuclear forces that a disarming first strike is all but impossible, even if we make the most unlikely and far-fetched assumptions giving one side all the advantages and the other all the disadvantages. For most people it is very hard to wrap their heads around such a hyper-survivable system, but both the USA and Russia have run hundreds and even thousands of very advanced simulations of nuclear exchanges, spending countless hours and millions of dollars trying to find a weak spot in the other guy’s system, and each time the result was the same: there is always enough to inflict an absolutely cataclysmic retaliatory counter-strike.

Conclusion 3: the real danger to our common future

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he real danger to our planet comes not from a sudden technological breakthrough which would make nuclear war safe, but from the demented filled minds of the US Neocons who believe that they can bring Russia to heel in a game of “nuclear chicken”. These Neocons have apparently convinced themselves that making conventional threats against Russia, such as unilaterally imposing no-fly zones over Syria, does not bring us closer to a nuclear confrontation. It does.

The Neocons love to bash the United Nations in general, and the veto power of the Permanent Five (P5) at the UN Security Council, but they apparently forgot the reason why this veto power was created in the first place: to outlaw any action which could trigger a nuclear war. Of course, this assumes that the P5 all care about international law. Now that the USA has clearly become a rogue state whose contempt for international law is total, there is no legal mechanism left to stop the US from committing actions which endanger the future of mankind. This is what is really scary, not “super-fuses”.

What we are facing today is a nuclear rogue state run by demented individuals who, steeped in a culture of racial superiority, total impunity and imperial hubris, are constantly trying to bring us closer to a nuclear war. These people are not constrained by anything, not morals, not international law, not even common sense or basic logic. In truth, we are dealing with a messianic cult every bit as insane as the one of Jim Jones or Adolf Hitler and like all self-worshiping crazies they profoundly believe in their invulnerability.

It is the immense sin of the so-called “Western world” that it let these demented individuals take control with little or no resistance and that now almost the entire western society lack the courage to even admit that it surrendered itself to what I can only call a satanic cult. Alexander Solzhenitsyn prophetic words spoken in 1978 have now fully materialized:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life (Harvard Speech, 1978)

Five years later, Solzhenitsyn warned us again saying,

To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our hands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing. Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone. (Tempelton Speech, 1983)

We have been warned, but will we heed that warning?

—The Saker

This article was written for the Unz Review: http://www.unz.com/runz/making-sense-of-the-super-fuse-scare/

About the author

The Saker is a Russian-born former military analyst. Expert in Military analysis, intelligence issues, Russian geopolitics, traditional Orthodoxy (Christian) "The Saker" is the founding editor of the leading blog covering the Ukraine crisis, The Vineyard of the Saker, which gets an astounding 50,000 page views per day. (August - September 2014). His articles are some of the most popular on The Greanville Post, UNZ Review, Russia Insider, and other major sites. Of the many blogs covering the subject, his has shot far ahead of the others, due to his sharp analysis and insight. Readers thought it so important that volunteers have begun putting out French, German, Serbian, and Russian language versions. There is even a New Zealand edition. These editions add another 20,000 views per day to his global reach.