Every military needs an edge. That’s how you defeat an enemy. In this sense, Russia is showing us how not to fight. And Israel, in its response to Iran, has shown us the disproportionate advantage of modern ways of fighting

7 comments

1. An interesting read, sit up and pay attention NATO

2. By “modern” I presume you mean indiscriminate attacks civilians, starvation, kidnapping and sexual assault.

3. But Israel just levels everything!

4. Interesting read. NATO having greater military strength than Russian, China, North Korea, Iran, etc. is important as it can be a strong enough deterrent to avoid a potential war. The problems I see are not in our military capabilities, which do fall short when looking at how the war in Ukraine has evolved, but in our democratic incapacity and lack of strategy for dealing with authoritarian regimes. We take too long to make decisions such as how to support Ukraine. We are not doing well at handling misinformation and disinformation and our own politicians engage in post-truth behaviours. We let Russian bots run riot. The Western approach to Russia’s hybrid warfare has been to barely acknowledge it and not hyperventilate the way the Kremlin wants us to. I think that has been a fairly effective attitude, but Russia will escalate again and we need to be ready to respond and find a way to strike back. We need a strategy to defeat Russia, not *just* extra spending on military capabilities. Russia isn’t trying to fight us directly because they will lose, they are fighting us in ways that fall short of direct combat. The Putin regime is a mafia-like entity that survives through wealth, violence, and the threat of violence. Take away the wealth and the regime will unravel.

   My idea would be to use the seized Russian assets. Every time Russia escalates, commits an atrocity such as attacking civilians or civilian infrastructure, or gets caught carrying out actions just short of war, add new sanctions, then donate some of the seized Russian assets to Ukraine. The first donation would be worth US$1million. The next time Russia escalates, double the donation to Ukraine, then double it again, and again, etc. Make that donation really obvious to the Russian population too. It’s way past time for them to wake up to the regime they have allowed to exist through their detachment from politics

5. On a related but separate point, Israel should have followed up by kabooming Iran’s ballistic missile storages.

6. KGB was knowing USSR economy/technology would never match the West since the 60s.

   They knew the gap would only grow larger with time, showing in the « gigantification » of their weapons with time: the ever increasing size of Soviet weapon systems designed to match much smaller/cheaper/better Western ones.

   They also knew the West had other big weaknesses in opposing little resistance to disinformation and manipulation, the leading weakness being identified as the journalists.

   Pacepa also shows that western administrative/diplomatic/military/technological personnel were very resilient to manipulation because they were satisfied with their status and life and were passively resisting bribery. He recounts how KGB agents at the UN in NY were asking Moscow for more $ because they couldn’t match the parties their targets were already attending lol…

7. Israel showin how to stand up to a bully

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