CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias. The assumption that because a disaster has not happened in the past it will not happen in the future, even though you keep doing things to make it increasingly likely, is just being a fucking idiot. It’s like Wile E Coyote jumping up and down on the land mine until it explodes because it didn’t explode when the Roadrunner ran over it.
VASSAL STATES
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Tactics without Strategy is the Noise Before Defeat
19 minutes readANDREI RAEVSKY—The title of this article is a quote by the famous Chinese general, strategist, philosopher, and writer Sun Tzu who lived 2500 years ago. And while it is true that warfare has dramatically changed over the past millennia (for example, operational art was added as an intermediate level between tactics and strategy), the fundamental logic of Sun Tzu still applies. To grossly oversimplify this issue, you could say that tactics are the means toward an end that has to be defined and the definition of that end goal is strategy. Again, this is ridiculously oversimplified, but for our purposes that is good enough.
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LARRY JOHNSON—Ignore the fact the Russia has stepped up its missile strikes on key infrastructure during the past two months. If Ukraine’s tanks are moving and the Russians are losing, according to Lipson, then why does Ukraine desperately need hundreds of tanks from the West? If Ukraine is winning and Russia is being defeated on the battlefield, why is the West not preparing its victory party? Cobbling together a failed NATO summit in Ramstein this past week is not a sign that the West is confident of Ukraine’s military prospects.
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Lula Just Became The First BRICS Leader To Publicly Condemn Russia’s Special Operation
12 minutes readANDREW KORYBKO—In remarks that he made while in Buenos Aires on Monday, one of the literal founders of BRICS shockingly declared that “In the same way that I am against the territorial occupation, as Russia did to Ukraine, I am against too much interference in the Venezuelan process.” Quite clearly, Lula was implying that Russia’s military efforts to restore the integrity of its national security red lines in Ukraine after NATO crossed them there are morally equivalent to the US’ unprovoked Hybrid War aggression against Venezuela.
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BIG SERGE—Russia’s surprise decision to voluntarily withdraw from the west bank of Kherson in the first week of November, there has been little in the way of dramatic changes to the frontlines in Ukraine. In part, this reflects the predictable late autumn weather in Eastern Europe, which leaves battlefields waterlogged and clogged with mud and greatly inhibits mobility. For hundreds of years, November has been a bad month for attempting to move armies any sort of significant distance, and like clockwork we started to see videos of vehicles stuck in the mud in Ukraine.
The return of static positional warfare, however, also reflects the synergistic effect of increasing Ukrainian exhaustion along with a Russian commitment to patiently attriting and denuding Ukraine’s remaining combat capability. They have found an ideal place to achieve this in the Donbas.