Feckless

From The Princess Bride

Feckless says it all regarding US foreign policy and the lack of understanding why The Art of War matters. In every way, this once great nation has floundered as the endless pursuit of money and it's connect to the military industrial complex had tossed aside the notion of common sense and competence when it comes to understanding the great game and the significance of the World Island as explained by Alfred W. McCoy, complete with an illustration by Sir Halford Mackinder.

To whit ...

On a cold London evening in January 1904, Sir Halford Mackinder, the director of the London School of Economics, “entranced” an audience at the Royal Geographical Society on Savile Row with a paper boldly titled “The Geographical Pivot of History.” This presentation evinced, said the society’s president, “a brilliancy of description… we have seldom had equaled in this room.”

Mackinder argued that the future of global power lay not, as most British then imagined, in controlling the global sea lanes, but in controlling a vast land mass he called “Euro-Asia.”  By turning the globe away from America to place central Asia at the planet’s epicenter, and then tilting the Earth’s axis northward just a bit beyond Mercator’s equatorial projection, Mackinder redrew and thus reconceptualized the world map.

Combine this with the stewardship of Ronnie to see why the word feckless applies ...

In The Princess Bride, a man playing a deadly game said, “Ha-ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia.’” I thought this was received wisdom, but apparently not. Today America is involved in not one, not two, but three land wars in Asia. A real blunderbuss.

America is involved in Korea (still going on), Ukraine (ongoing), and Taiwan (getting going). One frozen war, one hot, one they’re desperately trying to order. The United States is actively messing with three nuclear powers, two of them highly industrialized. America is encircling these countries with military bases, fomenting coups in and around them, imposing sanctions (white word for sieges), actively arming and training their enemies, and openly calling for them. While North Korea has been a supine punching bag for decades, Russia and China are in America’s weight class. The bully empire has finally picked on someone their own size, and they’re about to fuck around and find out.

Given that America has lost every war — for decades — to dudes in Toyota Hiluxes, they really shouldn’t be fucking around with China and Russia, let alone both at once. China makes trucks, Russia has oil, and neither of their explosive devices are improvised. Picking a fight with either would be real war, and America is really not ready for land war in Asia, let alone two.

The prerequisites to do war correctly involves having enough men & material to do the job let alone having an intelligent plan and enough logistics in hand to properly conduct the war in question.

Photo: (ADAMS Diagram) U.S. Marine Corps; (Crates) Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0); (M864 Diagram) U.S. Marine Corps

Men

The US Army is facing a dire combination of a recruiting shortfall and a shrinking Individual Ready Reserve. This recruiting shortfall, nearly 50 percent in the combat arms career management fields, is a longitudinal problem. Every infantry and armor soldier we do not recruit today is a strategic mobilization asset we will not have in 2031. The Individual Ready Reserve, which stood at 700,000 in 1973 and 450,000 in 1994, now stands at 76,000. These numbers cannot fill the existing gaps in the active force, let alone any casualty replacement or expansion during a large-scale combat operation. The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment. The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription. Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Material

The prime artificial resource required for war is matériel, ie hot shit to throw at each other. And America, which has deindustrialized both itself and now Europe, simply can’t make enough shit anymore. Don’t take my word for it. As the empire’s own Center for Strategic and International Studies says, “According to the results of a series of CSIS war games, the United States would likely run out of some munitions — such as long-range, precision-guided munitions — in less than one week in a Taiwan Strait conflict.” America doesn’t have enough ammunition to last a week against China, and if they want to make more, they have to ask their Chinese suppliers.

& this

NYTimes - As a result of the push, Russia is now producing more ammunition than the United States and Europe. Overall, Kusti Salm, a senior Estonian defense ministry official, estimated that Russia’s current ammunition production is seven times greater than that of the West.

Russia’s production costs are also far lower than the West’s, in part because Moscow is sacrificing safety and quality in its effort to build weapons more cheaply, Mr. Salm said. For instance, it costs a Western country $5,000 to $6,000 to make a 155-millimeter artillery round, whereas it costs Russia about $600 to produce a comparable 152-millimeter artillery shell, he said.

It's all about the money ... yet again.

The ‘safety and quality’ bit is just sour grapes. Western artillery shells are not $5,000 better, they’re just produced in a more corrupt and inefficient way, outsourced to war profiteers. Western production lines cannot scale up, and cost 10x more if they do. It’s a losing proposition and it shows. Joe Biden himself said the US is running low on ammunition. This is why they released widely illegal cluster bombs, to poison supposedly Ukrainian soil for years. As the Chair of NATO’s military committee said, “The bottom of the barrel is now visible.”

Missing the point ...

Quantity is its own quality in war. When a tank ‘depreciates’ in days or hours, who gives a shit about the frills? In World War II, the Soviets were able to produce a much higher quantity of ‘good enough’ weaponry, and that (along with rivers of blood) won the thing. And in many cases, the Soviet weapons were higher quality as well. They invented the AK-47 after all, and the Katushya, the first multiple rocket launcher.

You can't make this shit up.

Russia is producing more than ever, whereas the West is at the bottom of the barrel, in their own words. And now the West is trying to open another front, against another industrialized power in China? This is nonsensical, especially since they need Chinese resources to attack China.

Don’t take my word for it, ask war profiteer Greg Hayes of RTX (née Raytheon). He said Raytheon has “several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling… is impossible. More than 95% of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative.”

Stupidity as art form applies, does it not?

Greg Hayes: ‘If we had to pull out of China, it would take us many many years to re-establish that capability either domestically or in other friendly countries’ © Samuel Corum/Bloomberg

St. Ronnie strikes yet again.