America's Final War

by Andrei Martyanov

Washington’s eight years of preparing Ukraine and its armed forces for war with Russia was a mistake of historic proportions, due to its misperception of American military power based on its 1991 Gulf War victory against a minor military player. Washington believed its own propaganda about crippling sanctions on Russia, about the viability of its Ukrainian proxy army, and the economic and military weakness of Russia, spelling doom for the American empire and its “rules-based order”.

By 2023 the Kiev regime could no longer exist without the West’s support, both financial and in war materiel. By 2024 Russia will have not just exhausted Ukraine, but also demilitarized NATO as a whole, exposing the industrial and military impotence of the US and its European vassals.

The United States military as a whole, and the USAF in particular, have no resources or means to close the ever widening gap in capability between American and Russian Air Defenses, insofar as such systems as the S-500 are already being produced serially in Russia with their immense range of more than 500 kilometers against aerial targets, not to mention their full integration with Russia’s Air Force and Air Defense. The air space of Russia is becoming increasingly prohibitive to penetration by any combination of USAF and NATO forces.

The US has fallen behind, and it won’t be able to catch up.

Genres: History

245 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 1, 2024

Reviews

[Pedro L. Fragoso · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has to be one of the most important books to be published this year in the United States, but it won't be consequential, because it will be largely ignored. Lamentable, but it's what it is. However, it is written and published, that's something surely.

The book, which focus mainly in the military aspects of our current dispensation, should be read in dialog with at least 3 other contributions about the transition we are living to a multipolar new world order, our own “time of monsters.” These being:

* Emmanuel Todd's “La défaite de l'Occident“ (provides high-concept context and explains the big picture; it's a masterpiece for the ages)
* Glenn Diesen's “The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order” (historical perspective)
* Fadi Lama's “Why the West Can't Win” (economic considerations)

Andrei Martyanov's obsessions (or worries...) are well presented here, and brilliantly structured, in a powerful and forceful argument that is probably politically polemic for most readers (there's something about identifying and sharing the unvarnished truth before anyone else that normally doesn't bode great results for the messenger...)

So, the United States. “The United States has been at war since the end of WW II practically non-stop, being involved in conflict on 18 occasions ranging from major conflicts like Korean or Vietnam wars to involvement in Afghanistan and Yemen. America loves war, precisely because American society is militarily illiterate yet narcissistically bellicose. (...) The glue which is supposed to keep the United States together through its elites is no longer there. The American political and “intellectual” class has betrayed Americans by failing to look out for their wellbeing. The current American political system is utterly corrupt and is in pockets of foreign and domestic lobbyists, who do not care about the fate of the majority of Americans— they pursue their own best interests, and they are not tied to the happiness of the American masses, who are drowning in drugs and alcoholism. American deaths from overdose reaches 70,000 annually—this is more than the United States lost in 10 years in Vietnam War. (...) Today, 21% of adult Americans are illiterate, 54% of adults in the U.S. have literacy levels below sixth grade.353 These numbers are devastating and are those of a third world country—this is a national emergency and disgrace. But not so for the American globalist elites—an illiterate uneducated population is much easier to manipulate and that is the only thing the present American political class can or seeks to do. In such a case, war or the threat thereof provides an excellent whip with which to eventually corral modern Western societies into a dystopian world of mind control, inducing people to do what no normal civilized and literate person would ever do or approve of. (...) It is a salad; it is not a melting pot in any way if it ever was. It’s a salad of races, ethnicities, confessions and cultures and it has stopped working in any kind of unison. (...) The United States to which I and my family immigrated in the 1990s is no more. It is now an insecure nation, whose economic and political systems have ceased to function. America’s only tool of enriching itself, the U.S. Dollar, had its foundation—the myth of American military supremacy—obliterated, exposing one weakness after another, ranging from malicious corrupt elites to an inability to develop a realistic strategy and procurement policy for its bloated military, which is not designed to fight a modern war against a serious enemy. That such an “enemy” might not want to attack the U.S. is beyond Washington’s think-tanks comprehension. (...) why should a bankrupt nation, which has failed to adapt to the new technological paradigms in warfare and which faces physical disintegration, plan for war with China, which the United States considers its main “challenger”? The only explanation is this is either wishful thinking, a desperate attempt to grasp at the last straw of greatness past without any attempt to reconsider and maybe reverse suicidal policies which brought the United States to her knees, or simply yet another effort to direct resources towards its militarized economy.”

And the West. “Today’s West is an increasingly dystopian society based on non-stop political theater. Its public narratives are fashioned by unscrupulous corporate media, run often by sociopaths, busy with brainwashing an increasingly ignorant and illiterate public. (...) This terrorist atrocity [“the events in Moscow’s Crocus-City Music Hall massacre of innocent civilians, including children”] has all hallmarks of Anglo-American backing, which, when one considers America’s support for genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza by Israel, indicates the complete moral degeneration of their political conduct by the United States, and its European lapdogs, both domestically and in the international arena. The West has lost all remnants of its moral authority globally. (...) This proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room which can no longer be ignored—the West’s miscalculation of Russia is of epic proportions—is driven by utterly incompetent elites, most of whom have no background in warfare, diplomacy or economics. They built the empire of lies and now they cannot do anything to stop the West’s degeneration into a dystopia of whatever passes for suicidal policies. I warned of this crisis in my previous three books and now it is upon us and not going to end well for the combined West.(...) At this stage, however, the main task which Russia’s leadership faces is how to prevent the West and its crazed leadership in the United States from unleashing a global conflict, not least through sacrificing Europe, whose population will inevitably be brainwashed into a desire to fight Russia, once again. This plan by the globalist cabal is based around primitive, ignorant views of the modern economy, resources management and warfare. It is not surprising once one begins to look at the backgrounds of those people who are either the globalist elite or are its servants. None have the educational, professional and life experience backgrounds which are imperative for achieving tangible successes in economy, in science or on the battlefield. Hence their inability to achieve or generate anything but white board ideologies which breed destruction, including of the realm wherein they reside, which is geographically anchored in Western Europe and the United States. (...) The West doesn’t know how to cope with this new reality—its lies have been exposed; its myths have been dispelled. The rest of the world, however, foresees a more stable and prosperous future in the event of the demolition of the West’s real and perceived hegemony.”

About the hatred of Russia: “I will make this simple—America’s hatred of Russia has its roots in the U.S. Government’s post-WW II embrace of Nazis.” In the absence of a serious military history study field, with the exception of a few notable scholars, and against the background of a precipitous intellectual decline of the American ruling class, what is left is largely a hatred for any power which asserts its own right to behave as it deems necessary for the preservation of its own people and culture. Russia here checks all the boxes as the candidate for hatred, par excellence. (...) They know they cannot defeat Russia on the battlefield, nobody can, but they still dream about making Russia spend its resources so that in the end, their dream of regime change in Russia might be realized, whatever the cost. As insane as this plan is, it is also very instructive. It demonstrates that Russia cannot talk to anyone in the West, which has become a euphemism for the United States, which has already turned European states into its lapdogs and, possibly, into cannon fodder.”

The media. “While Western mainstream media have become the butt of jokes around the world, not to mention the fact that they are viewed primarily as propaganda outlets for Western governments, it is also worth pointing out that the large strata of Western journalists, especially at the start of Russia’s SMO, demonstrated themselves to be utterly incompetent people in matters of warfare, strategy, the real economy, and geopolitics. This is not a new phenomenon. But the current time and circumstances have made it possible to finally arrive at a precise diagnosis of the West’s intellectual class, and it is not an optimistic one. I have warned for years of the West’s impending intellectual collapse and the fact that its “elite manufacturing machine” is utterly broken.” (...) By then most of what was being published by the corporate, also known as legacy, media in the West was usually met in Russia with sarcastic smiles and it is worth noting that most of what these media produced as “reporting” or “analysis” was fast becoming memes both in Russia and among many westerners.”

All that is fabulous, granted, but he true indispensability of the book lies in its analysis of the current military realities...

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The most important one is the historic defeat of the combined West and its leader, the United States. How it was defeated militarily is obvious—NATO countries found themselves totally impotent in the face of an opponent with a massive and sophisticated economy and, as it stands now, the most advanced armed forces in the world.

The U.S. Armed Forces TOE (Table of Organization and Equipment) is that of the legacy force stuck in the 1990s. The realization of this fact by some in the United States has delivered a profound shock to the system which has been heretofore incapable of learning and adapting due to its falsified military history and the increasingly low standards of the American top brass. Their record speaks for itself—it is one of numerous lost wars. The current U.S. economy and military will not be able to fight Russia conventionally; it would face defeat if it tried. So, the United States and combined West have resorted to terrorism—the weapon of the weak.

As determined by the U.S. Army itself, the projected losses of the U.S. Armed Forces in a real conventional war with Russia are of a scale which is beyond the comprehension of any Western political leader and most military professionals. Projected at 3,600 casualties daily, the U.S. Army will surpass the number of casualties it suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan in two decades in about two weeks.

This was a military delusion on a grand scale, one which would have a terminal effect on America’s foreign policy and ensured a dramatic departure of the United States from the world arena as a self-proclaimed hegemon, having bought into own military supremacy mythology and rejecting all indications to the contrary.

Even against the raging economic crisis in the 1990s Russia and the chaos which ensued in the wake of the barbaric U.S.-directed economic reforms and the essential demolition of the Soviet Armed Forces, the military-technological heritage of the Soviet Union was preserved to a very substantial degree. This is precisely the point which the overwhelming majority of American geopolitical thinkers, even those who pass for the so-called realists with whom Brzezinski was mistakenly identified, cannot grasp because they do not have a proper background, reliable information, or both. Already in 1996–97 it had become clear that the truncated Russian military-industrial complex was still engaged with a backlog of highly advanced Soviet military R&D which was much more impressive than America’s “technologically peerless military establishment” as proclaimed by Brzezinski, in the wake of euphoria from beating a backward third world military.

Russia continued to build advanced submarines of both types, diesel-electric and nuclear ones, even through the calamitous 1990s. This fact, among many other similar ones, went unnoticed by Brzezinski and his colleagues working on creating white-board geopolitical theories and waxing strategic without understanding the operational and technological implications. Yet, the strategic and geopolitical meaning of those developments which didn’t fit the overall narrative of American military omnipotence, was immense.

The real game changer, however, was the fact that, initially cautiously and then increasingly assertively, many Russian military thinkers and serious analysts working in the defense field began to accept the fact of the West not just being generally badly informed about Russia in general, and its Armed Forces in particular, but to their surprise, discovered the growing incompetence of America’s decision-making circles and the U.S. military in questions related to modern warfare. Not only geopolitical American thinking turned out to be a collection of hollow white-board doctrine mongering theories, but U.S. military performance even against subpar opponents elsewhere, as well as disastrous procurement policies, revealed a deep systemic crisis within America itself.

Russia, whose military history and record dwarfs that of the United States ["especially so, in military affairs, which saw the United States producing a 70 years long record of lost wars marked by an inability to adapt to the everchanging realities of modern warfare"]

His example inevitably leads to the conclusion that strategies are viable only when they account for a wide spectrum of economic, historical, cultural, technological, political, and very many other factors, which must be taken into account thus allowing the analyst to make the proper generalizations required for developing strategies which work in attaining political objectives, whether of the war or of national goals in a larger geopolitical context.

Undoubtedly, aircraft carriers changed this paradigm during World War Two, but even their ability to reach much further into the continental mass was immediately arrested by the development of increasingly efficient air defense means and, in case of major powers, the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons and means of their delivery, which relegated aircraft carriers primarily to the function of power projection against weak nations.

This retort by Cropsey was a classic American military argument since it continued to assume that America’s consistently losing all its wars since Korea was somehow a good indication of America winning the next war, despite the obvious fact that a major part of America losing its grossly overstated military supremacy was precisely due to what Cropsey extolled as a virtue—the power of services who didn’t win a single war in 60 plus years—precisely because neither the American political leadership nor America’s National Security Council and its tentacles could come up with a proper strategy and policy which would ensure America’s survival as a great nation, but rather paraded itself as an impotent military power incapable not only to fight a peer, but exposing its political and military top brass as people who wouldn’t meet even rudimentary requirements for political and military leadership as formulated by Svechin. (...) The audacity with which Cropsey defended the indefensible was startling and typical of the neocons who even in July 2023 continued to maintain their increasingly laughable position entertaining the idea that with NATO’s help Ukraine still could defeat Russia, especially with Ukraine’s suicidal “counter-offensive” which completely exposed the American establishment as geopolitically, economically and militarily illiterate and strategically inept, which led the United States into the strategic dead-end where it was handed a geopolitical defeat of historic proportions and ramifications.

This, however, doesn’t apply to the American political class whatsoever—it is utterly illiterate in matters of international relations and military affairs. As General Robert Latiff noted, most of what the U.S. public and political class know about war is primarily from the utterly incompetent and malicious media and entertainment industry.

Pifer’s admission, however, was not enough. Such rare manifestations of strategic common sense, primarily among the narrowest of strata of informed people in the West, could not avert a catastrophe which would reshape human civilization and dramatically shift the balance of power in favor of Russia and her strategic partner, China. With it, the geopolitical power of the combined West would be greatly diminished. But this scenario, which meant a calamity for the West, couldn’t have been comprehended, let alone acted upon, even if the captains of the combined West had—as difficult as it is to imagine—been competent people, because understanding alone is not enough.

The American wars’ media circus, also known as “war porn,” and the election cycle in the U.S. create imperatives which prevent the United States Armed Forces from internalizing a simple fact that military victories are won not by relentlessly blowing things up with impunity and showing it on TV, but on the operational and strategic levels.

Nothing changed for the U.S. military ever since and creeping arrogance remains one of the main engines behind America’s non-stop military debacles, and, to a very large degree, inability to view 21st century warfare for what it is and what it is evolving into.

This date [April 9, 2022, Johnson’s visit to Kiev] can be marked as the official start of the slip of the combined West, headed by the U.S., from its 500-year long supremacy toward a long descent into global obscurity.

Here, we have to view war as it was always viewed and is still viewed by Russian military—war is the war of economies. Real ones. Modern war is the war of steel, iron, energy and manufacturing capacity as a foundation of military power. (...) In other words, Russia had enough strategic natural and economic resources to fight a major war in Europe without experiencing any serious strain on her civilian industries and consumer market.

As NATO militaries proved again and again in the late 20th–early 21st centuries, they were only good at fighting third rate enemies and losing even to them, having primarily developed PR skills and media manipulation through narratives.

It is very telling that a small American military-technological idiosyncrasy of using the term “sophisticated” instead of “effective” when passing the judgment on the quality of its weapons systems, took such a profound hold inside American military culture.

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[Jungle Djinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martyanov is as ever spot on with his diagnoses and prognoses of the military and political ennui that has precipitated the long term - and increasingly accelerated - downfall of Western dominance, and even the decline of the West itself. He puts his finger on something many of us have long suspected, that Western leadership is an oxymoron with no easy remedy for an increasingly failing and fragile "alliance" (ie American empire).

His other books are also well worth reading and have not dated since their publications dating back to 2018, well before the current Ukrainian war started but which already anticipated the outcome of such adventures by the West.

[Jim]

It's Martyanov isn't it.

Andrei Martyanov is superb on military affairs, solid on international politics, silly and trivial on domestic politics and completely silent on economics.
The absence of any discussion on the enormous significance of China in the new multi-polarity world is striking.
Always worth reading though, because on military matters he's first class.

[Sarang Mahajan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrei Martyanov is an arms expert and served in USSR navy. His book delineates how America lost the arms race to Russia and lacks behind at least 2 generations as of 2024. Along with the book I cannot recommend enough his youtube channel (smoothiex12) and blog (smoothiex12.blogspot.com).

He laughs out loud while looking at the useless degrees American politicians and journalists graduated in.