The Dangers of False Metrics and Nuclear Annihilation
I frequently hear references to industrial-scale warfare to describe the war in Ukraine, and it is a form of warfare for which the west is largely ill-equipped to handle and even ill-equipped to provide appropariate weaponry for. The logic of the situation is that money will now increasingly be spent by the western military-industrial Incubus - which appears to have privileged access to the minds and willpower of the western political class- for the re-industrializing of western warfare, even if it cannot reach productive capacity until after the immediate Ukraine crisis has past its peak. The misery for western volunteer fighter experience in this industrial warfare is captured in this piece by Dmitri Lascaris (Lascaris).
In the meantime, Brian Berletic continues his critical debunking of the value, relevance and capacity of western weapons supply (Berletic 01.16.2023). Note that amidst all this Russia has produced the first nuclear warheads for the self-powered Poseidon super torpedoes that are being developed for deployment on the Belgorod. On the Duran, the two Alexanders discuss the role of all of these weapons in a panorama of proxy war The Duran (01.16.2023)
Vad
There appears to be rising confidence on the Russian side that their weaponry is superior to anything that Ukraine can throw at it, in terms of quality and quantity. Yet western leaders are naively still of a mind that the right response is just to send in more and more weapons, even to the point of undermining their own security. Mercouris today (Mercouris 01.16.2023)suggests that the mentality behind the now-fashionable trend of sending in heavy tanks (initiated by the UK, which may rue the day when finally the EU blames it for leading Europe down a hopeless path out of its misplaced enthusiasm for US global hegemony) is simply to provide some kind of defense against the coming Russian offensive, without any real belief that these tanks will make any difference in the battlefield (they wont) or that they will be relevant to the calculations of a possible Ukrainian offensive in the spring (Mercouris elsewhere notes there is still talk of a Ukrainian offensive from Zaporizhzhia, but considers its chances are very poor).
Mercouris recounts an interview with German military officer, Erich Vad, a former military adviser to Angela Merkel and long-term supporter of Ukraine, by John Helmer. Vad casts doubts about the wisdom of Germany’s transfers of Madar tanks, and its military escalation. He does not regard the Madar as a miracle weapon but worse, he believes that by providing it, Germany is on the slide towards something it will no longer be able to control. We have a military stalemate that cannot be resolved militarily - and this is also the opinion of US Chief of Staff General Milley - unless the west is prepared to entertain Russian victory. Ukraine cannot win; the best it can hope for is stalemate, but stalemate is as good as conceding a Russian victory. Nobody in the Western establishment is willing to say this straight forwardly, as they will be simply shouted down, and they all hide behind the expression of “stalemate.”
Vad does not understand the transition of the German Green party from a peace to a war party [I would note that this is the kind of political transformation that neocons have excelled in over the past two decades. Look what happened to the British Labour Party]. He himself, he says, does not know of any Greens who have had military experience, and he is worried by the fact that such a party has manouvered the country into a policy of war.
The key to resolving this conflict lies in Washington and/or Moscow (he conspicuously ignores London, which has perhaps been the most bellicose flag waver of all). What is being waged is a war of attrition, a strategy that did not work in World War One (he talks as though the war of attrition is fought by the West against Russia).
People who have direct experience of war have no voice in this. Germany remains an endangered nation. He sees the wisdom of conceding to Russia certain interests that it has in the Black Sea area and recognizes that Russia has broader security needs that should be acknowledged and accepted by the west. He notes that Russia is the single most powerful nuclear entity in the world. Essentially, what he is saying is that Ukraine cannot win and that the real danger is that, if the west throws in more tanks, more weapons, Russia will still win. People like Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice chancellor, who have no military experience, dont seem to realize that they risk getting into conflict with the world’s largest nuclear power and transforming the conflict into a Third World War scenario. Vad sees that a settlement must deal with Russia’s legitimate security concerns. Helmer assumes that Vad speaks for the German military class.
Todd
Mercouris turns to another interview, about the Ukraine war, which is with Emannuel Todd, a French sociologist, who has previously examined about American decline in the 2000s (see After the Empire). Todd starts from the position that Russia sees this war as defensive, acting to protect Russians from the west’s inexorable advance into their neighborhood. Todd makes the point that in the west it was assumed at the beginning of the war that there would be a rapid economic collapse of Russia, but that the Russian economy has proved astonishingly resilient to an extent that nobody could have expected.
Yet Russia has the GDP of Spain, so his critics ask whether Todd overestimates Russian power? War, he says, is a great revealer of political economy. Russia and Belarus together have a GDP of just over 3.3% of aggregate European GDP. How is it possible that their military production can therefore compete with and even surpass western?
Because GDP is a hopeless measure, a fictional measure of production. If we take away from US GDP half of its overbilled health expenditure, and take away the wealth “produced” by lawyers and the most-filled prisons in the world, and the whole ill-defined wealth of that parts of its economy that is dominated by something called “services”, including such items as the “production” value of 15,000- 20,000 economists (whose average salary is $120,000), we begin to realize that a significant part of this GDP is water vapor. This brings us to the real economy. The real wealth of nations lies in the capacity for production, and therefore the capacity for war. Focusing on material variables we see Russia has increased its production from 40 million in 2014 to 90 million in 2020, whereas in the US it has fallen from 80 million tons to 40 million tons. Russia has also become the leading exporter of nuclear power plants. In 2007 the US considered that it had first strike capability; today things are very different.
For an economy to be flexible, one first needs an active population that knows how to do things. In the US 7% of young intelligent people study engineering, in Russia it is 25%. Russia trains 30% more engineers than the US with a much smaller population. The US fills the gap with students from India and China and can only deal with competition with China by importing skilled Chinese labor. The Russian economy accepts the rules of the operation of the market, albeit with a very large role for the State, depending for its flexibility on engineers. The US has advanced military technology but, when we go into the long term, in a war of attrition, the ability to continue depends on the production on less high-end weaponry. The west has outsourced so much of this that it does not know whether its production can keep up. It is also unclear if Russia can keep up either. Mercouris considers that in the highest end of military production, it is difficult to see, in western provision of weapons to Ukraine, any high tech weapons for which Russia has no equivalent. Russia does not have some of the satellite, communications sytems that the US has, but this is more to do with available resources than capacity.
Todd talks of the attractiveness of Russia today by comparison with the days of the Soviet Union, and considers that it benefits from a patrilinear, family tradition. From a geopolitical point of view it is a mistake to think that Russia is not attractive. Across the Global South, kinship is patrilinear. For the collective non-West, Russia presents a reassuring moral conservatism. The Soviet Union had a certain form of soft power, but communism basically horrified the Islamic world with its atheism and it inspired little in India outside of West Bengal and Kerala. Today, Russia has repositioned itself as the archtype great power, anti-colonialist, patrilinear and conservative, and oy can go much further. America, meanwhile, feels betrayed by Saudi Arabia which refuses to increase oil production and sides with Russia. Western newspapers tragically repeat the refrain of how Russia is “isolated,” while in fact 75% of the Global South sides with it.