You
Say You Want a (Russian) Revolution?
Andrei Martyanov’s latest book provides
unceasing evidence about the kind of
lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a
possible, future war against real armies
(not the Taliban or Saddam Hussein’s).
By Pepe Escobar
December 25, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Once in a blue moon an indispensable book
comes out making a clear case for sanity in
what is now a post-MAD world. That’s the
responsibility carried by
“The
(Real) Revolution in Military Affairs,”
by Andrei Martyanov (Clarity Press),
arguably the most important book of 2019.
Martyanov is
the total package — and he comes with extra
special attributes as a top-flight Russian
military analyst, born in Baku in those Back
in the U.S.S.R. days, living and working in
the U.S., and writing and
blogging
in English.
Right from the start,
Martyanov wastes no time destroying not only
Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s ravings but
especially Graham Allison’s childish and
meaningless Thucydides Trap argument
— as if the power equation between the U.S.
and China in the 21stcentury could be easily
interpreted in parallel to Athens and Sparta
slouching towards the Peloponnesian War over
2,400 years ago. What next? Xi Jinping as
the new Genghis Khan?
(By
the way, the best current essay on
Thucydides is in Italian, by Luciano Canfora
(“Tucidide: La Menzogna, La Colpa,
L’Esilio”). No Trap. Martyanov visibly
relishes defining the Trap as a “figment of
the imagination” of people who “have a very
vague understanding of real warfare in the
21st century.” No wonder Xi explicitly said
the Trap does not exist.)
Martyanov had already detailed in his
splendid, previous book, “Losing Military
Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic
Planning,” how “American
lack of historic experience with continental
warfare” ended up “planting the seeds of the
ultimate destruction of the American
military mythology of the 20th and 21st
centuries which is foundational to the
American decline, due to hubris and
detachment of reality.” Throughout
the book, he unceasingly provides solid
evidence about the kind of lethality waiting
for U.S. forces in a possible, future war
against real armies (not the Taliban or
Saddam Hussein’s), air forces, air defenses
and naval power.
