From Russia With Love

The principal problem facing the US electorate for principally the next election cycles is the polarization thingie.  And that goes back to Alexander Nevsky to the Oil Patch to the Rhine.

 

That we have AltRights crawling out from rocks long since forgotten is the direct result of AltLefties who failed to crawl back under theirs leaving choices with nothing in between, sounding like a domestic squabble between a stoked-up nag and a drunken braggart.  Even judging what was being argued over drowned out by the echo chamber on steroids. 

 

The Pro-VietCong of the Sixties and Seventies



The Bitch Cycle to Trade Psycho Stamps to Cash in on a Free Terror

The breach in the sanity cycle for this old soldier was when the Communists on Campus came out of hiding back in the Sixties and effectively sapped the will of the people to fight Communism over there where I was, and done with the same methods used on the French in 1940 to support the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Stalin and Hitler.  At that time, the commies in the US were sabotaging US war production and blocking shipments to Britain...which was suddenly reversed when Hitler invaded Russia. 

French PoW's policed up by the German in their invasion of France

 

Now the Communist and the Hippy Dippy Campus Commies have served their purpose to Soviets by supporting Russian Defense and Energy industrial sectors, but have left NATO on Moscow's doorstep, the need of the Russian state for Lebensraum and restore the borders of Mother Russia to those held in 1914 and again in 1946.  The shift of the NATO borders 800 miles to the Right from the Oder to the Dneiper restored Russian borders last held in 1654 when the Ukrainians seceded from Poland. 

I was one of the guys in the front rank of the 3rd Amored Infantry Bn, 36th Infantry, 3rd Armored Division (Spearhead)

The destruction of American resolve tied to the Anti-War Anti-Energy Anti-Anything "Libtard" Democrats has run its course, and as such created a storm of Anti-Anti-ism which provides the Russians with a two gun approach to restoring the glorious borders of Mother Russia to the Rhine this time long desired since Muscovy is has no defensible borders at its core.

 

 

A little history is never too late.

 

Plug and Play Not

The tepid response of the Pentagon to the Russian invasion of Georgia should not have come as a surprise to readers of my humble blog for it has been obvious that the Rotational Expeditionary Modular force which was created without regard to changing conditions of battle wouldn’t fit facing bears in Georgia. It should be equally obvious that the Russians took this into consideration. In short, it’s time we ought to review the usefulness of the “plug and play” rotational modular mentality.



The fact that the US failed to act decisively in this particular case has added to a growing sense in the world that the US isn’t up to it anymore. As a corollary, many are going through the decision process of whether to rearm, or realign. Kazakhstan is considering pumping their oil and gas through Russian pipelines instead of the BTC pipeline to the Mediterranean. Some of the other “stans” are less inclined to host US forces in the War on Terror. Even some of our older NATO allies have allowed their military establishments to wither, and are no longer able to posture with power, while the newer East European NATO members are feeling threatened.


Aside from my diatribes against the Light Transformational, the key question professionals should ask is why did we take so long to adapt to counterinsurgency warfare? It usually takes two years to get up to speed and another to start running the table, based on our record since the Mexican War through Vietnam. The learning curve in Vietnam for conventional forces started in late 1965 and by the Tet Offensive in January 1968 had stabilized and by the end of 1969 had driven the enemy main force units out of Vietnam.


The US started to mobilize for WW 2 in the summer of 1940 after the Fall of France with the passage of a National Defense Act calling for a 35 division Army and a two ocean Navy. The draft started and the National Guard mobilized in October 1940. After Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway was in June 1942, and the Marines landed on Guadalcanal in August a month later. A year later, we invaded Sicily. From a sleeping start to Sicily in three years!



We had a running start at Iraq, plus experience in counterinsurgency, and it took from March 2003 to late 2007, four years, to adjust, and another year to start running the table. The failure to plan for a post invasion strategy, of governance, and for counterinsurgency was not for the lack of experience or trained units in those areas, but of the adaptation of the Light Transformation of plug and play modules.

Consider how long it took to plug the brigade communications systems to higher levels to give both reach back and reach down information access for those in the field and in the chain of command. Consider how long it took to get a truly responsive fire support system by using UAVs in the traditional role of the FAC in a bird dog.

Relocating combat forces from forward areas where they were mission oriented to stateside bases brought them closer to the flagpole than the battlefield. This becomes an open invitation to micromanagement and competing staff driven requirements that can render an infantry unit inert. It took less than four years for our victorious and mighty forces of WW 2 to become poorly trained, led and equipped on deployment to Korea.

This degeneration was repeated after Korea which was arrested by JFK to prepare for a more vigorous Soviet presence. After Vietnam, the Army adopted mission oriented performance based training that stressed a holistic tactical environment described as Condition, Action, and Standard for Mission Essential Tasks. Training was concurrent, as opposed to the failed concept of the building block approach.


Were it not for the constant stress of battle over the last six years and of the operations in the Balkans, our forces would not be combat ready in any realistic sense. The concept of plug and play modules makes it difficult to deploy forces quickly at levels larger than a brigade and most likely would result in “pick up” teams, the kind the Navy found wanting in the early stages of WW 2.

War is an awful mixture of the profound and the profane, of genius and the idiotic, and it is hard to tell then or later which was which.

Bears and Cossacks

The bear that invaded Georgia isn’t the same bear that we faced during the Cold War. It’s much older and shaggier bear, a bear that Catherine the Great would recognize. This bear doesn’t follow orders from the Kremlin like the Cold War Red Bear. A couple of calls on the Red Phone or over coffee in Georgetown, and nuclear submarines or border guards would respond immediately. Both Kremlin and White House knew that in a few minutes, both could be incinerated under nuclear mushrooms.


What makes this different is the use of irregulars from outside Georgia. In the Cold War, irregulars would have been taken from disaffected elements inside Georgia as was done when the Red Army conquered the Caucasus during the Russian Civil war. This time, a call went out for the Tsar’s favorite irregulars, the Cossacks. This time, even the Chechens were invited as well as the familiar thuggery of Serbian irregulars used in ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.


The open invitation for Cossack participation in the “return” of the Caucasus to Russian hegemony is a significant signal of the Kremlin’s interest in restoring the historic connection between Russian ambition and the Cossack Hosts that served well in the original conquests between the Ukraine and the Caspian region. Under the Romanov’s the Cossacks formed special units for internal security and personal protection of the Tsar.

During the Russian Civil War, the Cossacks fought on both sides, with a majority favoring the White forces. At the end of the war, the Cossacks were persecuted savagely by Stalin in what were called Decossackization, a classic Soviet style genocide of death and deportation. During WW 2, many of the surviving Cossacks joined the Germans in revenge, and others joined the Russians to regain some post war benefits. After the war, thousands of Cossack POW’s were returned to the Soviets in accordance with an Allied-Soviet agreement where they were promptly executed.


The Kremlin’s best interests lie in controlling the delivery of oil from the Caspian Sea basin, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, control they lost to enterprising oilmen from the West returning to the birthplace of global oil, and the newly unchained people of those lands who wish to benefit from their own oil. The Kremlin’s objective is to force the delivery of that oil through Russian pipelines. The actual destruction of a key railroad bridge that controls the delivery of oil by rail cuts the Georgians out of the fuel delivery business, at least for now.


But the control of pipelines does not need ethnic cleansing, terror tactics, or direct confrontation with the West. The addition of Balkan, Chechen and Cossack tactics is a terror tactic, and terror tactics often backfire. Britain did not fold in the face of the Blitz, nor did Hanoi fold in the face of massive B-52 strikes, nor did Hitler fold in the face of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, nor of the Red Army at the gates. Pearl Harbor was intended to scare the US to negotiate a peace with Japan, which was done …, in Tokyo Bay.


That Georgia bit off more than it could chew is clear, but whether the bite was induced by desperation, deception or delusion, is of less importance than maintaining an open global market for oil. This time, diplomacy with the Kremlin may not work as well as in the old days, as it appears that the Kremlin doesn’t have the control of the military establishment which has been expanded by the use of independently minded Cossack, Chechen, and other factions in the fractious Caucasus region.



Georgia needs to be rearmed, reinforced, and admitted to NATO posthaste and forthwith. Nothing less than a Western military presence will do, be it NATO and/or US. The Soviet’s Kremlin could be dealt with given harsh alternatives, but this Kremlin doesn’t have the same control and, as a result, is relying on the unreliable, unpredictable, and irrepressible in a strife addicted mountainous region. And mountain people are notorious for contention and conflict. Even ours.