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]

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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[Steve Middendorf]

Andrei Martyanov's style often obscures the value of his arguments. He writes as though every Western mistake is fatal, every Russian success decisive, and every American institution hopelessly corrupt. That rhetoric makes him easy to dismiss. Yet it also allows critics to avoid the more difficult question: once the exaggeration is stripped away, what is he actually right about?

The strongest version of Martyanov's argument is not that Russia is unstoppable or that America is on the verge of collapse. Rather, it is that America's military reputation was built during an era of overwhelming unipolar dominance; that it has rarely fought a true industrial peer; and that modern warfare has returned to being a contest of production, energy, logistics, missile manufacturing, and political endurance. In that environment, the West is discovering limits it spent three decades assuming no longer existed. That argument deserves consideration because recent wars increasingly support it.

America's Actual Record
Since 1945 the United States has fought with remarkable frequency, but most of its opponents were not peer competitors. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Serbia and numerous smaller interventions lacked the industrial, technological and military capabilities that could genuinely threaten American forces on equal terms. The United States enjoyed command of the air, secure logistics and little fear of retaliation against its homeland.

The opening campaigns were often tactically impressive. The long-term political outcomes were much less so. Again and again, overwhelming military superiority failed to produce durable strategic success. This does not suggest that the United States cannot fight. It suggests instead that much of its reputation was built under conditions that concealed important weaknesses. Success against weaker states does not automatically translate into success against Russia or China.

That is Martyanov's first important insight: the American military myth grew during an era in which the United States rarely faced opponents capable of imposing comparable costs.

Ukraine Changed the Discussion
Ukraine transformed what had been largely theoretical arguments into practical ones.

Russia's initial drive toward Kyiv clearly failed. Whatever Moscow expected—a rapid collapse of Ukrainian resistance or political capitulation—did not occur. But wars are rarely decided by their opening phase. Russia adapted. Rather than pursuing a short campaign, it shifted toward a war of attrition based on industrial endurance, territorial consolidation and sustained production. It formally annexed four Ukrainian regions, integrated occupied territories into its administrative system and reframed the conflict around protecting populations it considers Russian or Russian-speaking. Russia demonstrated an ability to absorb failure and adjust strategy.

Western assessments during much of 2022 and 2023 assumed that sanctions would cripple Russia, its industry would falter and its military would struggle to replenish losses. Those expectations have not been fulfilled. Despite unprecedented sanctions and massive Western support for Ukraine, Russia has continued producing munitions, maintaining military operations and sustaining a prolonged war more effectively than many analysts anticipated. That is not proof that Russia is invincible. It is evidence that the West significantly underestimated the material foundations of Russian power.

What Ukraine Has Revealed
Ukraine's most enduring lesson is that high-intensity warfare remains fundamentally industrial. Artillery shells, missiles, repair capacity, electrical generation, railways, manpower and manufacturing matter as much as advanced technology. For three decades much Western strategic thinking assumed that precision weapons, information dominance and sophisticated platforms could substitute for industrial depth. Ukraine has been a harsh corrective. Drones are plentiful. Artillery remains decisive. Missile defence is expensive. Attrition is unavoidable. Production rates have become strategic facts rather than accounting details.

NATO has not fought Russia directly, an important qualification. Nevertheless, the enormous Western effort supporting Ukraine has exposed weaknesses in munitions stockpiles, production capacity and assumptions about what technology alone can accomplish. The lesson is not that NATO has been defeated, but that Western military systems are less prepared for prolonged industrial warfare than they believed.

Iran and the End of Sanctuary
A similar pattern appears in the confrontation with Iran. For decades the United States and Israel operated from a position of overwhelming regional superiority. Iran could be sanctioned, sabotaged and contained while remaining unable to impose substantial direct costs. That assumption has weakened. Iran's missile and drone strikes demonstrated that even largely intercepted attacks can force expensive defensive responses and reveal a growing cost imbalance between relatively cheap offensive weapons and extremely costly interceptors.

More broadly, Gulf states have increasingly favoured caution and de-escalation rather than unquestioningly aligning with Washington's strategy. They recognise their own vulnerability to wider regional conflict and are apparently reassessing outsourcing their security to the US. Martyanov's broader point is not that Iran has defeated the United States militarily. Rather, it is that the era in which American bases, carrier groups and forward deployments could be treated as uncontested instruments of coercion is ending.

Carriers, Asymmetry and Modern War
Martyanov has been especially critical of aircraft carriers. He undoubtedly overstates his case. Carriers remain formidable tools of power projection, deterrence and naval aviation. Yet the missile age has altered the conditions under which they operate. Long-range anti-ship missiles, drones and precision strike systems mean that even if carriers remain survivable, they face increasing operational constraints. A platform carrying thousands of sailors and representing enormous financial and symbolic value cannot be risked casually. More broadly, America's recent wars have demonstrated the growing importance of asymmetry. Whether confronting insurgents, regional powers or peer competitors, the cost advantage increasingly favours the defender or denial power. The era of effortless military impunity has narrowed considerably.

The Economic War Beneath the Military One
The deepest level of Martyanov's argument concerns economics rather than battlefields. Russia has maintained wartime production despite sanctions. China contributes unmatched manufacturing capacity, technological depth and expanding financial influence. Iran participates through sanctions workarounds, energy exports and alternative payment systems.

The US dollar remains the world's dominant reserve currency, but alternatives are gradually expanding through non-dollar settlements, digital payment systems and growing financial cooperation among non-Western states. The process remains gradual rather than revolutionary, yet it points toward a more fragmented international financial system. Military power and financial power can no longer be viewed separately. Industrial production, energy, shipping, sanctions resilience, currency arrangements and manufacturing capacity have become integral components of strategic competition. The United States remains extraordinarily powerful, but it no longer enjoys uncontested dominance.

Conclusion
The sober version of Martyanov's thesis is that the unipolar era encouraged the West to mistake permissive wars for modern warfare. It fostered confidence that technological superiority, financial sanctions and narrative dominance could permanently substitute for industrial depth and strategic realism. He points out that history suggests otherwise. The Second World War ultimately rewarded the side capable of producing ships, aircraft, fuel, ammunition and equipment on the greatest scale. Today's missile and drone warfare similarly rewards sustained industrial output as much as technological sophistication. America still possesses enormous advantages, but its foundations—industrial capacity, economic leverage and military reach—face more serious competition than at any time in decades.

That alone makes Martyanov worth reading, provided he is read critically. Remove the triumphalism, the certainty and the civilisational rhetoric, and a more durable argument remains. The West underestimated Russia. The United States often confused coercive reach with lasting supremacy. The era of easy wars against weaker states is fading. The emerging strategic order will depend less on rhetoric than on production, endurance, resilience and the capacity to sustain prolonged competition. That is not a loud argument. Increasingly, it is the one events appear to support.

[Jungle Djinn]

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.

[Drazen Ruzic]

This is Martyanov's fourth book and the sharpest, because now he has a real war to test his argument against. His point across all the books is that America confused expeditionary wars against weak enemies with the real thing. Ukraine is where that gets measured — wars of scale, not police actions. That distinction is the heart of the book, and as a military man it's the part I respect most.
He's strongest on the hard stuff: air defense, hypersonics, industrial capacity, the boring arithmetic of who can actually produce shells and missiles at scale. He knows these systems and he doesn't hand-wave. His argument is that the West built a story about its own power and started believing it, and that the oldest rule — know your enemy and yourself — is the one everyone forgot. That lands.
It is one-sided, no question. He wants Russia on top and it shows; the tone turns triumphant in places, and you should read it knowing that. Take the analysis, leave the cheering. But even with the bias stripped out, the core warning — that the West may not be built for a long industrial war — is not something you can wave away.
Hard book, strong opinions, real expertise underneath. Read it with your eyes open and argue with it as you go.

[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]

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.