Instead of deterring our enemies, making it clear that wars of conquest will be unprofitable, our leaders risk bringing us to the brink of WWIII step by step. Don’t think so? Then put yourself in the position of the Russians.
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian officials said they require coordinates provided or confirmed by the United States and its allies for the vast majority of strikes using its advanced U.S.-provided rocket systems, a previously undisclosed practice that reveals a deeper and more operationally active role for the Pentagon in the war.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-s-rocket-campaign-reliant-on-us-precision-targeting-officials-say/ar-AA17j6Ng
How does this role supposedly work?
The senior Ukrainian official described the targeting process, generally: Ukrainian military personnel identify targets they want to hit, and in which location, and that information is then sent up to senior commanders, who then relay the request to U.S. partners for more accurate coordinates. The Americans do not always provide the requested coordinates, the official said, in which case the Ukrainian troops do not fire.
Ukraine could carry out strikes without U.S. help, but because Kyiv doesn’t want to waste valuable ammunition and miss, it usually chooses not to strike without U.S. confirmation, the official said, adding that there are no complaints about the process.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-s-rocket-campaign-reliant-on-us-precision-targeting-officials-say/ar-AA17j6Ng
The article is from The Washington Post, and the article uses unnamed sources. Do I trust The Washington Post and their unnamed sources? No. However, we have satellite imagery, and the Ukrainians don’t. Without good intelligence, those rockets would not be very useful. With that data, however, the Ukrainians can do a lot of damage, including killing a lot of Russians.
Do we want to kill lots of Russians, or do we want to deter Russia from attacking other nations. Consider what deterrence means.
deterrence
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deterrence
noun
de·ter·rence di-ˈtər-ən(t)s -ˈter- -ˈtə-rən(t)s, -ˈte-; dē-
: the act or process of deterring: such as
a: the inhibition of criminal behavior by fear especially of punishment
b: the maintenance of military power for the purpose of discouraging attack
Of course, we want to deter the Russians. Instead, President Joe Biden created a situation where he let the Russians think they could get away with attacking and conquering Ukraine. Then, after Ukraine bloodied the Russia’s nose, Biden encouraged the Ukrainians to kick the Russians completely out of Ukraine, including Crimea, which is mostly populated by ethnic Russians.
Russia has been the dominant power in Crimea for most of the past 200 years, since it annexed the region in 1783. But it was transferred by Moscow to Ukraine – then part of the Soviet Union – in 1954. Some ethnic Russians see that as a historical wrong.
However, another significant minority, the Muslim Crimean Tatars, point out that they were once the majority in Crimea, and were deported in large numbers by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1944 for alleged collaboration with Nazi invaders in World War Two.
Ethnic Ukrainians made up 24% of the population in Crimea according to the 2001 census, compared with 58% Russians and 12% Tatars.
Tatars have been returning since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – causing persistent tensions with Russians over land rights.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26367786
To put it succinctly, Crimea is a mess, and we don’t know how fix it. It is not in the USA’s national interests to try to fix a mess like that. Moreover, President Joe Biden has called for Vladimer Putin’s removal from power.
- https://nypost.com/2022/03/27/bidens-call-for-putins-removal-while-in-europe/
- https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/26/politics/biden-warsaw-saturday/index.html
- https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-stands-comments-putin-shouldnt-remain-power-m-not-walking-anythi-rcna21875
Kicking Russia out of Crimea and removing Putin from power is not the same as deterring Russia; it is about crushing Putin. Trying to crush Putin is not a good strategy to maintain peace.
Our goal should be to encourage both parties to negotiate a settlement. We should make the Russians aware that we will punish them if don’t stop threatening the area. We should make the Ukrainians aware our generosity is not endless. Nobody benefits from a bloody stalemate, which, realistically, is the best we can hope for.
The Biden Administration, however, seems determined to remove Putin from power. Why? We have had to spend tens of billions teaching Putin a lesson (because our president is weak and corrupt). Now, when we have no idea who would replace him, we want to topple Putin?
Look at what happened in Libya. When President Ronald Reagan taught Muammar Gaddafi a lesson by bombing him(https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/15/reagan-bomb-libya-april-15-1986-1272788), what did he do? So long as Gaddafi restrained himself, Reagan left him in peace.
What happened after the Obama administration toppled Gaddafi? Libya became a mess.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36013703
- https://www.cato.org/commentary/obama-administration-wrecked-libya-generation
We have adopted a policy that only benefits China. Why? Is it because all of the money the Chinese Communists have paid the Bidens? Congress needs to finish digging into that before the nukes start going off.
Citizen Tom 
Tom,
Sadly, this mess reminds me of what I discerned to do after trying to stop teenagers engaged fighting each other with fists instead of guns and bombs.
After trying to stop the ruckus when it started and get hit myself a few times by angry teenagers still swinging in rage at each other, I purposely waited for each of them to feel the hurt from each other and then then went in to separate them. Most of the times, they did not resist my interning because they both experienced some pain from fighting.
Seems to me we need to find someone willing and capable of getting both sides to stop fighting and give them some time to think how to end the fighting and damage they both experienced. And to prevent their vanities of winning or losing to generate more hatred for generations to develop.
My explanation might seem simple comparison to the Ukraine Russia conflict going on with the relatively simple weapons compared to nuclear missiles or bombs.
However, the timing is right now in my opinion, to find someone who does the same thing as I found seem to work before I went in on my role to separate the teenagers at the right time.
Regards amd gppdwill blogging.
You solution makes sense, but the people we have in charge of our government have their own agenda. Ukraine and Russia have a similar issue with their leaders.
Because he risks losing power, Putin will quit fighting only if he believes the peace settlement as some sort of victory. Zelensky has a similar problem.
Can a peace settlement be contrived that brings peace and serves the interest of selfish leader. With skilled diplomats, the answer is yes. Unfortunately, our own leaders also have a selfish agenda. That agenda doesn’t seem to include allowing skilled diplomats to bring a peaceful settlement.
Tom,
History has often times found a man for the times.
Lets Hope History repeats itself.
Regards and goodwill blogging.
“That which is predicted on throwaway lines such as the “deep state”, is mocked and then discarded”
It most certainly is NOT. Among our ‘enemies’, Russia fully believes in it, and has Intel files on who they are. They’ve kicked foreign NGOs and agencies out of Russia for collusion with the Western Deep State. North Korea has said for years that the Unification Church was a Deep State asset pulling the political wires in South Korea and Japan: the scandal that broke after former PM Abe was assassinated proved they were right all along. Iran calls our Deep State, the ‘Great Satan’—at least they’re on the right track—there are heavy cultish influences of various kinds in our Establishment.
The popular opposition in Europe believes in it, and they’ve had more direct experience with it than anybody else abroad. US sabotaging the Nord Stream, sabotaging BREXIT, forcing our Cultural Imperialism on them, forcing our Economic Imperialism on them; forcing our Military-Industrial Complex on them—not to mention electoral interference (e.g. Austria), running psy-ops (e.g. Operation Gladio in Italy). staging coups (e.g. Turkey). Julian Assange once said of Australia that Canberra was nothing but a colonial outpost of the Beltway. One Chinese official once said that they can always gauge Australia’s reaction to their policies by watching Washington’s, because Australia’s is always the same.
Whether YOU believe in the Deep State or not is what’s irrelevant. The fact is our so-called ‘enemies’ believe in it and DO plan accordingly. The fact that in recent years they’ve checkmated us time and again ought to suggest that there might be some substance to their beliefs.
I don’t know much about all the foreign adventures of the deep state. The evidence I take most seriously is what the deep state has been doing to the USA. That includes the involvement of our nation’s security organizations in “Russian collusion,” covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story and censoring people in collusion with Big Tech, prosecuting the Jan 6, 2021 rioters at at the Capitol and ignoring the hundreds of George Floyd rioters of 2020, and so forth.
What is the deep state? Some point to the World Economic Forum, but I think the WEF is probably a symptom, not the problem. I think the real problem is our separation from our nation’s Christian heritage.
The Bible teaches us to love our neighbor as we love our self. We cannot do that well, but the people of a secular society don’t even make a serious effort. Utilitarianism is as close as they come, and Utilitarianism is just a fancy excuse to enlarge the power of the state.
The net effect is our society has become increasingly stratified. Too many of our elites don’t think of themselves as Americans anymore. They think of themselves as our ruling class, and the seek to rule over us, for our own good, of course.
Organizations like the WEF are a more recent development in Deep State politics. What they’re trying to is unify national Deep States: primarily America, the British Commonwealth, the Arab Gulf State royals—Japan and Singapore are also on board. The EU and Israel also are with it, though those two regions have general populations opposing it. Their purpose is to align these governments with crony capitalist interests and organized crime to obviate national borders and create a global, supranational State.
The evolution of the American Deep State grew out of various historical factors and always had some connection to the older and more entrenched British Deep State. They’ve always been a potential threat (and an actual one during the Civil War). Sometime after they failed then, they began to realize that taking over the West would be impossible unless they undermined the idea that Rights come from God and replaced it with the idea that Rights come from Consensus (which has since drifted into something more like ‘Consensus of the Experts.’)
The expression “deep state” is not well-defined. To most people I think it refers to the appointees and the civil servants who are working in concert for their own interests instead of the interests of the people they are supposed to serve.
What you are referring to is the aristocracy or the elites. Check out => https://citizentom.com/2018/11/25/the-grand-conspiracy-part-2/. Alexis De Tocqueville did a good job of describing the problem such people can pose.
The fact that you refer to OP Gladio as a PSYOPs campaign instead of an armed resistance unit is……interesting. Not to mention your reference of a ‘cult’………
This is something that I noticed changed radically after Reagan. Reagan had some military actions—they were all punitive actions or covert operations against various nations. Bush seemed to make it personal: for example, Grenada was about freeing some American hostages and teaching Cuba that the USSR wasn’t really going to start WW3 over them). In Bush’s case it was about ‘getting Noriega’ or ‘getting Saddam’. All of these petty wars we’ve fought for Wall Street since have been just like that: against Milosevic, against Saddam again, against Qaddafi, etc. And in Iraq’s and Libya’s cases, we saw how well just removing the leadership worked. These regime changes just created civil wars and even completely backfired in Syria because the Elites underestimated Assad’s popular support.
In the cases of Putin and Xi, our leaders don’t understand that these aren’t dictators of small countries, but are both upheld by parties. The people likely to succeed either one of them are hardliners. Putin said a few years ago that he plans to retire after his term runs out: his likely successor is either going to be VP Ragozin or former President Medvedev— both of whom often criticize Putin for being too soft on the West. Like Syria, the Elites underestimate that the Russians actually like their government. In Xi’s case, his opposition are Old Guard Maoists. If we took Xi out, it would just prove to the Party leadership that the Maoists were right all along about America’s intentions: and then we’re REALLY going to have problems with the Chinese. Just imagine combining Chinese ideology of the mid-20th Century with 21st Century technology.
Since Putin has publicly telegraphed his intention to occupy (or create a pliant vassal) Ukraine since at least 2010…….how did Biden “create the situation”?
Putin has always insisted that the border states remain neutral. Obama started the problem first by expanding NATO and then by staging a Color Revolution in Ukraine. The US has also attempted Color Revolutions in Belarus and Kazakhstan: their obvious intention is to encircle Russia. Biden is continuing the same policy: these NWO fanatics aren’t going to be satisfied until they have a Rainbow Flag flying over the Kremlin and Wall Street has control of Russia’s resources and cheap labor. Ditto for China, Iran, and the rest of our so-called ‘enemies.’
Ah yes, “so-called enemies”. I’m fascinated by what people choose to believe……dependent on which party is in the White House.
It doesn’t depend on who’s in the White House: the Deep State defines our ‘enemies’.
Russia and China don’t care about your theories of a “deep state”.
That is a meaningless statement.
Cool. As is yours.
To summarize your comments….
Anymore deep thoughts?
Cool story bro. You seem proud of yourself. It’s adorable.
Cute, but your “arguments” are starved for lack of substance. Where is the beef?
The point was clear though, our adversaries don’t tailor their strategies in accordance with whatever undefined themes that are popular at the moment. But you got to feel good about yourself……and that’s what’s really important here.
Now it is word games. We withdrew from Afghanistan in a virtual rout for no good reason. Our “strategy” in Ukraine has been publicly announced, and we are spending tens of billions. The themes made not make sense, but they have been defined by the actions of the Biden Administration.
You have quite obviously never read Sun Tzu work on war. Patton had an advantage because he read his opponent’s book.
Opponents gather intelligence on each other in part because they do tailor their strategies based upon how they will anticipate they adversaries will respond. It is silly to assert otherwise.
Opponents gather actionable intelligence on adversaries all of the time. That which is corroborated and actionable, helps to guide foreign policy, kinetic activities and non-lethal effects. That which is predicted on throwaway lines such as the “deep state”, is mocked and then discarded…..unless it will be used in deception and disinformation campaigns. It is silly to assert otherwise, which is why I didn’t.
We have plenty of evidence of what some refer to as the “deep state.” We also have plenty of that some people mock whatever it is that they have chosen to refuse to believe.
Mockery and ridicule are not arguments. They are just foolishness. The fact you feel compelled to resort to such foolishness speaks for itself.
I’m quite familiar with Sun Tzu, it was on nearly every Commanders Reading List. You may want to familiarize yourself with Dugin.
It took me a moment to remember the right phrase for it, non sequitur. Thanks. It is not every day I get to say that.