On Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at 3:53:18 PM UTC-4, Nick wrote:
Наясно съм с епистемологията на публикацията, както с импакт фактора и h-
индекса на автора, за това предлагам на Ивайло да наблегне на текста - има
върху какво да мисли.
САЩ е свободна страна и всеки има право на лично мнение, но според проф. Бренър
до седмици ВСУ ще се разпадне и през зимата Русия ще стигне до Днепър (предполагам
иска да каже, че ще вземат всички територии на изток от Днепър), та моя въпрос
към теб е колко би заложил, че това ще се случи? Защото аз бих заложил много, че няма да
се случи.
Defeat
By Dr. Michael Brenner
The United States is being defeated in Ukraine. One could say that it is facing defeat – or, more starkly, that it is staring defeat in the face. Neither formulation is appropriate, though. The U.S. doesn’t look reality squarely in the eye. We prefer to look at the world through the distorted lenses of our fantasies. We plunge forward on whatever path we’ve chosen while averting our eyes from the topography that we are trying to
traverse. Our sole guiding light is the glow of a distant mirage. That is our lodestone.
It is not that America is a stranger to defeat. We are very well
acquainted with it: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – in strategic terms if not always military terms. To this broad category, we might add Venezuela, Cuba, and Niger. That rich experience in frustrated ambition
has failed to liberate us from the deeply rooted habit of eliding defeat. Indeed, we have acquired a large inventory of methods for doing so.
…
Before examining them, let us specify what we mean by ‘defeat.’ Simply put, defeat is a failure to meet objectives – at tolerable cost. The term also encompasses unintended, adverse second-order consequences.
First, hat were Washington’s objectives in sabotaging the Minsk peace plan and cold-shouldering subsequent Russian proposals, in provoking Russia by crossing clearly demarcated red lines, in pressing for Ukraine’s membership in NATO; in installing missile batteries in Poland and Rumania; in transforming the Ukrainian army into a potent military force deployed
on the line-of-contact in the Donbas ready to invade or goad Moscow into preemptive action? The aim was to either pin a humiliating defeat on the Russian army or, at least, to inflict such heavy costs as to cut the
ground from under the Putin government. The crucial, complementary
dimension of the strategy was the imposition of economic sanctions so onerous as to implode a vulnerable Russian economy. Together, they would generate acute distress leading to the deposing of Putin – whether by a cabal of opponents (disgruntled oligarchs as the spearhead) or by mass protest. It was predicated on the fatally ill-informed supposition that he was an absolute dictator running a one-man show, The U.S. foresaw his replacement by a more pliable government ready to become a willing but marginal presence on the European stage and a non-player elsewhere. In the crude words of one Moscow official, “a tenant-farmer on Uncle Sam’s global
plantation.”
…
Third, ancillary benefits for the United States from a war over Ukraine
that would bring Russia low were a) to consolidate the Atlantic alliance under Washington’s control, expand NATO and open an unbridgeable abyss between Russia and the rest of Europe that would endure for the
foreseeable future; b) to that end, the termination of the latter’s heavy reliance on energy resources from Russia; and c) thereby, substituting higher-priced LNG and petroleum from the United States that would seal the European partners’ status as dependent economic vassals. If the last were a drag on their industry, so be it.
The grandiose goals stated in (1) and (2) manifestly have proven
unreachable -indeed, fanciful – a blunt truth not as yet absorbed by American elites. Those in (3) are consolation prizes of diminished value. This outcome was determined in good part, albeit not at all entirely, by
the military failure in Ukraine. We now are about to enter the final act. Kiev’s vaunted counter-offense has gone nowhere – at an enormous cost to the Ukrainian military. It has been bled white by massive losses of manpower, by the destruction of the greater part of its armor, by the ruin of vital infrastructure. The Western-trained elite brigades have been mauled, and there no longer are any reserves to throw into the battle. Moreover, the flow of weapons and ammunition from the West has slowed as American and European stocks are running low (e.g. 155mm artillery
shells). The shortage is being aggravated by newfound inhibitions about sending Ukraine advanced weapons which have proven highly vulnerable to Russian firepower. That holds especially for armor: German Leopards,
British Challengers, French AMX-10-RC tanks as well as Combat Fighting Vehicles (CFV) like the American Bradleys and Strykers. Graphic images of burnt-out hulks littering the Ukrainian steppe are not advertisements for either Western military technology or foreign sales. Hence, too, the slow- walking of deliveries to Kiev of the promised Abrams and F-16s lest they suffer the same fate.
The illusion of eventual success on the battlefield (with its envisaged wearing down of Russia’s will and capacity) is founded on a mistaken idea of how to measure winning and losing. American leaders, military as well
as civilian, are stuck to a model that emphasizes control of territory. Russian military thinking is different. Its emphasis is on the destruction of the enemy’s forces, by whatever strategy is suited to the prevailing conditions. Then, in command of the battlefield, they can work their will. The aggressive tactics of the Ukrainians entails the throwing of its resources into combat in relentless campaigns to evict the Russians from
the Donbas and Crimea. Unable to achieve any breakthrough, they invited themselves to a war of attrition much to their disadvantage. It has been succeeded by this summer’s all-out last fling which has proven suicidal. They thereby played into the Russians’ hands. Hence, while attention is fixed on who occupies this village or that on the Zaporizhhia front or around Bakhmut, the real story is that Russia has been dismantling the reconstituted Ukrainian army piece by piece.
…
In historical perspective, there are two instructive analogies. In the
last year of WW I, the German high command launched an audacious campaign (Operation Michael) on the Western Front in March 1918 using a number of innovative tactics (featuring commando squads, stormtroopers, equipped
with flame-throwers) to punch holes in allied lines. After initial gains that brought them across the Marne, attended by very heavy casualties, the offensive petered out and allowed the allies to roll over their gravely depleted forces – leading to the final collapse in November. More pertinent is the battle of Kursk in July 1943 wherein the Nazis made a massive attempt to regain the initiative after the disaster at
Stalingrad. Again, after some noteworthy success in breaching two Soviet defense lines they exhausted themselves short of their objective. That battle opened the long, bloody road to Berlin. Ukraine, today, has
suffered huge losses of even greater (proportional) magnitude, without achieving any significant territorial gains, unable even to reach the
first layer of the Surovikin Line. That will clear the road to the Dnieper and beyond for the 600,000 strong Russian army equipped with weaponry the equal of what we have given Ukraine. Hence, Moscow is poised to exploit
its decisive advantage to the point where it can dictate terms to Kiev, Washington, Brussels et al.
…
There is a new narrative that is scripted to stress these talking points:
о It is Russia that has lost the contest because heroic Ukraine and a steadfast West have prevented it from conquering, occupying and reincorporating all of the country
о By contrast, Sweden and Finland formally have joined the American
camp by entering NATO. That complicates Moscow’s strategic plans by forcing a dispersion of its forces across a wider front
о Russia has been politically isolated on the world scene (MB: that is because North America, EU/NATO EUROPE, Japan, South Korea, Australia & New Zealand have backed the Ukrainian cause. Not a single other country has agreed to apply economic sanctions; the “world” does not include China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa et al).
о The Western democracies have displayed unprecedented solidarity in responding as one to the Russian threat
This narrative already has been given an airing in speeches by Blinken, Sullivan. Austin and Nuland. Its target audience is the American public; nobody outside the Collective West buys it, though – whether Washington has registered that fact of diplomatic life or not.
…
Americans have become masters in the art of memory management.
Think about the tragic shock of Vietnam. The country made a systematic effort to forget – to forget everything about Vietnam. Understandably; it was ugly – on every count. Textbooks in American history gave it little space; teachers downplayed it; television soon disregarded it as retro. We sought closure – we got it.
In a sense, the most noteworthy inheritance from the post-Vietnam
experience is the honing of methods to photoshop history. Vietnam was a warm-up for dealing with the many unsavory episodes in the post-9/11 era. That thorough, comprehensive cleansing has made palatable Presidential mendacity, sustained deceit, mind-numbing incompetence, systemic torture, censorship, the shredding of the Bill of Rights and the perverting of national public discourse – as it degenerated into a mix of propaganda
and vulgar trash-talking. The “War on Terror” in all its atrocious aspects
Cultivated amnesia is a craft enormously facilitated by two broader trends in American culture: the cult of ignorance whereby a knowledge-free mind
is esteemed as the ultimate freedom; and a public ethic whereby the nation’s highest officials are given license to treat the truth as a potter treats clay so long as they say and do things that make us feel
good. So, our strongest collective memory of America’s wars of choice is the desirability – and ease – of forgetting them. “The show must go on” is
taken as our imperative. So it will be when we look at a ruined Ukraine in the rear-view mirror.
…
Цялата публикация -> https://neutralitystudies.com/2023/10/defeat/
--
«地 球 誕 生 在 牛 市 的 小 時 — Earth is born in the Bull's hour»
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)