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"
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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.
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The Lies And
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Do the Math
One of
the key takeaways is the failure of U.S.
mathematical models: and readers of the book
do need to digest quite a few mathematical
equations. The key point is that this
failure led the U.S. “on a continuous
downward spiral of diminishing military
capabilities against the nation [Russia] she
thought she defeated in the Cold War.”
In the U.S., Revolution
in Military Affairs (RMA)
was introduced by the late Andrew Marshall,
a.k.a. Yoda, the former head of Net
Assessment at the Pentagon and the de facto
inventor of the “pivot to Asia” concept. Yet
Martyanov tells us that RMA actually started
as MTR (Military-Technological Revolution),
introduced by Soviet military theoreticians
back in the 1970s.
One
of the staples of RMA concerns nations
capable of producing land-attack cruise
missiles, a.k.a. TLAMs. As it stands, only
the U.S., Russia, China and France can do
it. And there are only two global systems
providing satellite guidance to cruise
missiles: the American GPS and the Russian
GLONASS. Neither China’s BeiDou nor the
European Galileo qualify – yet – as global
GPS systems.
Then there’s
Net-Centric Warfare (NCW). The term itself
was coined by the late Admiral Arthur
Cebrowski in
1998 in an article he co-wrote with John
Garstka’s titled, “Network-Centric Warfare –
Its Origin and Future.”
Deploying his
mathematical equations, Martyanov soon tells
us that “the era of subsonic
anti-shipping missiles is
over.”
NATO, that brain-dead organism (copyright
Emmanuel Macron) now has to face the
supersonic Russian P-800 Onyx and the Kalibr-class
M54 in a “highly hostile Electronic Warfare
environment.” Every developed modern
military today applies Net-Centric
Warfare (NCW),
developed by the Pentagon in the 1990s.
Martyanov mentions in
his new book something that I learned on my
visit to Donbass in March 2015: how NCW
principles, “based on Russia’s C4ISR
capabilities made available by the Russian
military to numerically inferior armed
forces of the Donbass Republics (LDNR), were
used to devastating effect both at the
battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, when
attacking the cumbersome Soviet-era
Ukrainian Armed Forces military.”
No Escape From
the Kinzhal
Martyanov provides ample information on
Russia’s latest missile – the hypersonic
Mach-10 aero-ballistic Kinzhal, recently tested in
the Arctic.
Crucially, as he explains,
“no existing anti-missile
defense in the U.S. Navy is capable of
shooting [it] down even in the case of the
detection of this missile.” Kinzhal has a
range of 2,000 km, which leaves its
carriers, MiG-31K and TU-22M3M,
“invulnerable to the only defense a U.S.
Carrier Battle Group, a main pillar of U.S.
naval power, can mount – carrier fighter
aircraft.” These fighters simply don’t have
the range.
The Kinzhal was
one of the weapons announced by Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s game-changing March
1, 2018 speech at
the Federal Assembly. That’s the day,
Martyanov stresses, when the real RMA
arrived, and “changed completely the face of
peer-peer warfare, competition and global
power balance dramatically.”
Top Pentagon
officials such as General John
Hyten, vice
chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have admitted
on the record there are “no existing
countermeasures” against, for instance, the
hypersonic, Mach 27 glide vehicle Avangard
(which renders anti-ballistic missile
systems useless), telling the U.S. Senate
Armed Services Committee the only way out
would be “a nuclear deterrent.” There are
also no existing counter-measures against
anti-shipping missiles such as the Zircon
and Kinzhal.
Any
military analyst knows very well how the
Kinzhal destroyed a land target the size of
a Toyota Corolla in Syria after being
launched 1,000 km away in adverse weather
conditions. The corollary is the stuff of
NATO nightmares: NATO’s command and control
installations in Europe are de facto
indefensible.
Martyanov gets straight to
the point:
“The introduction of
hypersonic weapons surely pours some serious
cold water on the American obsession with
securing the North American continent from
retaliatory strikes.”
Martyanov is thus unforgiving on U.S.
policymakers who “lack the necessary
tool-kit for grasping the unfolding
geostrategic reality in which the real
revolution in military affairs … had
dramatically downgraded the always inflated
American military capabilities and continues
to redefine U.S. geopolitical status away
from its self-declared hegemony.”
And
it gets worse: “Such weapons ensure a
guaranteed retaliation [Martyanov’s
italics] on the U.S. proper.” Even the
existing Russian nuclear deterrents – and to
a lesser degree Chinese, as paraded recently
— “are capable of overcoming the existing
U.S. anti-ballistic systems and destroying
the United States,” no matter what
crude propaganda the Pentagon is peddling.
In
February 2019, Moscow announced the
completion of tests of a nuclear-powered
engine for the Petrel cruise missile. This
is a subsonic cruise missile with nuclear
propulsion that can remain in air for quite
a long time, covering intercontinental
distances, and able to attack from the most
unexpected directions. Martyanov
mischievously characterizes the Petrel as “a
vengeance weapon in case some among American
decision-makers who may help precipitate a
new world war might try to hide from the
effects of what they have unleashed in the
relative safety of the Southern Hemisphere.”
Hybrid War
Gone Berserk
A section of
the book expands on China’s military
progress, and the fruits of the Russia-China
strategic partnership, such as Beijing
buying $3 billion-worth of S-400
Triumph anti-aircraft
missiles — “ideally suited to deal with the
exact type of strike assets the United
States would use in case of a conventional
conflict with China.”
Because of the timing, the analysis does not
even take into consideration the arsenal
presented in early October at the Beijing
parade celebrating the 70thanniversary of
the People’s Republic.
That includes, among other things, the
“carrier-killer” DF-21D, designed to hit
warships at sea at a range of up to 1,500
km; the intermediate range “Guam Killer”
DF-26; the DF-17 hypersonic missile; and the
long-range submarine-launched and
ship-launched YJ-18A anti-ship cruise
missiles. Not to mention the DF-41 ICBM –
the backbone of China’s nuclear deterrent,
capable of reaching the U.S. mainland
carrying multiple warheads.
Martyanov could
not escape addressing the RAND Corporation,
whose reason to exist is to relentlessly
push for more money for the Pentagon –
blaming Russia for “hybrid war” (an American
invention) even as it moans about the
U.S.’s incapacity of defeating Russia in
each and every war game. RAND’s war games
pitting the U.S. and allies against Russia
and China invariably
ended in
a “catastrophe” for the “finest fighting
force in the world.”
Martyanov also addresses the S-500s, capable
of reaching AWACS planes and possibly even
capable of intercepting hypersonic
non-ballistic targets. The S-500 and its
latest middle-range state of the art
air-defense system S-350 Vityaz will be
operational in 2020.
His key takeway:
“There is no parity between Russia and the
United States in such fields as air-defense,
hypersonic weapons and, in general, missile
development, to name just a few fields – the
United States lags behind in these fields,
not just in years but
in generations [italics mine].”
All
across the Global South, scores of nations
are very much aware that the U.S. economic
“order” – rather disorder – is on the brink
of collapse. In contrast, a cooperative,
connected, rule-based, foreign relations
between sovereign nations model is being
advanced in Eurasia – symbolized by the
merging of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and
Road Initiative (BRI), the Eurasia Economic
Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO), the Asia Infrastructure
Investment Bank (AIIB), the NDB (the BRICS
bank).
The
key guarantors of the new model are Russia
and China. And Beijing and Moscow harbor no
illusion whatsoever about the toxic dynamics
in Washington. My recent conversations with
top analysts in Kazakhstan last month and in
Moscow last week once again stressed the
futility of negotiating with people
described – with overlapping shades of
sarcasm – as exceptionalist fanatics.
Russia, China and many corners of Eurasia
have figured out there are no possible,
meaningful deals with a nation bent on
breaking every deal.
Indispensable?
No: Vulnerable
Martyanov cannot but evoke Putin’s speech to
the Federal Assembly in February 2019, after
the unilateral Washington abandonment of the
INF treaty, clearing the way for U.S.
deployment of intermediate and close range
missiles stationed in Europe and pointed at
Russia:
“Russia will be forced to create and
deploy those types of weapons…against
those regions from where we will face a
direct threat, but also against those
regions hosting the centers where
decisions are taken on using those
missile systems threatening us.”
Translation: American Invulnerability is
over – for good.
In
the short term, things can always get worse.
At his traditional, year-end presser in
Moscow, lasting almost four and a half
hours, Putin stated that Russia is more than
ready to “simply renew the existing New
START agreement”, which is bound to expire
in early 2021: “They [the U.S.] can send us
the agreement tomorrow, or we can sign and
send it to Washington.” And yet, “so far our
proposals have been left unanswered. If the
New START ceases to exist, nothing in the
world will hold back an arms race. I believe
this is bad.”
“Bad”
is quite the euphemism. Martyanov prefers to
stress how “most of the American elites, at
least for now, still reside in a state of
Orwellian cognitive dissonance” even as the
real RMA “blew the myth of American
conventional invincibility out of the
water.”
Martyanov is one of the very few analysts –
always from different parts of Eurasia — who
have warned about the danger of the U.S.
“accidentally stumbling” into a war against
Russia, China, or both which is impossible
to be won conventionally, “let alone through
the nightmare of a global nuclear
catastrophe.”
Is
that enough to instill at least a modicum of
sense into those who lord over that massive
cash cow, the industrial-military-security
complex? Don’t count on it.
Pepe
Escobar
is correspondent-at-large at
Asia Times.
His latest book is
2030.
Follow him on
Facebook.
This article was originally published by "CN"
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