Staggering Towards the Abyss

By William Schryver - July 29, 2023 at 09:56AM

General Mark Milley — a man who knew but said nothing as his country slouched towards Armageddon.

I have long asserted, and I continue to be convinced, that the US could NOT establish air superiority against Russia, China, nor even Iran — not in a week; not in a year. Never. It simply could not be done.

American air power would prove substantially inferior to the extremely potent and abundantly supplied air defenses arrayed against it in any of those three countries.

American suppression of enemy air defenses would prove woefully inadequate to the task.

And even if any of the US's aerial wunderwaffen were to prove, in ideal circumstances, to be potent weapons, US air power as a theater-wide undertaking could not be sustained in the context of a non-permissive regional and global battlefield.

In a high-intensity combat scenario in either eastern Europe, the China seas, or the Persian Gulf, the maintenance requirements for US aircraft could not be met. Mission-capable rates would plummet even lower than their notoriously abysmal peacetime standards.

The US would, quite literally after only a few days, see sub-10% mission-capable rates for the F-22 and F-35, and sub-25% rates for almost every other platform in the inventory.

It will be a huge scandal for the Pentagon ... but hardly a huge surprise.

And this is hardly hyperbole. It is more or less common knowledge among those who think about these aspects of war — the only aspects that really matter in the final analysis.

US supply lines would be severely attrited on both a regional and a global scale.

Russian and Chinese submarines and long-range anti-ship missile systems would wreak havoc on US seaborne logistics.

I repeat: The US could not fight an overseas war in a non-permissive environment against a peer adversary. It doesn't have the means, let alone the experience and competence, to do so.

In eastern Europe, Russia would savage NATO bases and supply routes. The Baltic and Black seas would effectively become Russian lakes where NATO shipping could not move.

And anyone who believes I am making unfounded hysterical assertions is either ignorant of the simple military, mathematical, and geographic realities of the situation, or so blinded by American exceptionalism and its attendant ills that they are unable to discern things as they really are.

I have come across relatively little discussion of the crescendo pace with which Russia, China, and Iran have been conducting military coordination in general and naval drills in particular over the past few years.

Russia and China are now engaging in joint naval patrols of the western Pacific!

Russia, China, and Iran are engaging in regular joint exercises in the Arabian Sea.

This is not meaningless posturing. These are the actions of countries who intend to engage in mutual defense in the event of an existential attack on any one of them.

I am increasingly persuaded that, if the US chooses to make direct war against either Russia, China, or Iran, it will result in a war against all three simultaneously.

As I wrote in a previous article:

Building the Perfect Beast

Even more significantly, in a development I and many others have predicted for several years now – in the face of almost universal ridicule, I might add – the empire’s seemingly endless string of hubris-driven blunders has rapidly accelerated the formation of what is quite arguably the single most potent military / economic / geostrategic alliance seen in modern times: the tripartite axis of Russia, China, and Iran.

In its misguided and short-sighted gambit to thwart the long-dreaded Russo-German rapprochement — incomprehensibly punctuated by the late September 2022 sabotage of the Nordstream gas pipelines — the empire has astoundingly managed to jump from the frying pan of a regional proxy war against Russia into the fire of a global conflict all three of its steadily strengthening adversaries now view as existential.

In my considered opinion, this is almost certainly the single most inexplicable and portentous series of geopolitical blunders in recorded history.

For the time being, the fighting will remain confined to Ukraine. But the entire complexion of this war has been irreversibly altered.

In conclusion, I return again to my initial argument: the US could NOT establish air superiority against Russia, China, nor even Iran — not in a week; not in a year. Never. It simply could not be done.

And that, amazingly enough, is just one of multiple hard truths that the #EmpireAtAllCosts cult, and those acquiescing to its delusional designs, ought to give more serious consideration as they continue staggering towards the abyss of a war they cannot win.

Reprinted with permission from imetatronink
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