There’s Never Been a Better Time for NATO to confront Russia. As Long as You are Russia.

Uncle Volodya says, “All my misfortunes come of having thought too well of my fellows.”

Masquerading as a man with a reason,
My charade is the event of the season;
And if I claim to be a wise man, well
It surely means that I don’t know…

Kansas, from “Carry On Wayward Son”

“I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system—its government—had decided that it functioned best when broken.”

Edward Snowden, from “Permanent Record”

There are no great thinkers left in the west.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely accurate – but if there are, they are not in national leadership positions. Instead NATO nations are led by simpletons like Liz Truss, who did not know that Rostov and Voronezh are part of Russia, or perhaps thought that if Britain did not recognize Russia’s sovereignty over these regions the Russians might become confused, and give them up. This issue came up in February 2022, when Truss was Britain’s Foreign Secretary, and showing off her talking-tough chops by ordering Moscow to pull its forces back from Ukraine’s borders. The forces which were the subject of their discussion were inside Russia, which is a completely unsurprising place to find Russian forces.

Or Annalena Baerbock, who insisted Putin could completely change the unfolding of events in Ukraine if he would ‘turn by 360 degrees’ from his present course, which would of course put him exactly back where he had been.

Or Jens Stoltenberg, who claims it is ‘still not too late for Ukraine to win the war’ when Russia is pounding it with as much as a ten-to-one advantage in artillery and has more than three times the population. I don’t suppose I have to tell you that Jens Stoltenberg not only was never in the military, but never made any serious study of military history, or he would know that none of the realities of Ukraine’s present military situation argue in favour of anything that might look like success. But when reality might be too scary, you can always listen to the patter of happy talk coming from the Ukrainian government, which convinced US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo that Russia, in the opening stages of the war, had fallen so short of the semiconductors used to build precision-guided missiles that it was taking them from dishwashers and refrigerators. She heard that from the Ukrainian Prime Minister, Denis Shmyhal, who must have laughed his ass off to see such evidence of gullibility.

“She said she has heard anecdotes from the Ukrainian prime minister that some of the Russian equipment left behind contains semiconductors from kitchen appliances because the defense industrial base is having a hard time producing more chips on its own and is facing export controls that limit its ability to import the technology from other countries.”

Electronics at the level of precision-guidance systems is fairly exacting, which leads us naturally to the question of how the Ukrainians knew semiconductors in Russian military equipment came from kitchen appliances. Was ‘refrigerator’ coded into the circuit board somewhere? If not, are certain semiconductors perhaps common to both? The whole concept is bizarre – if high-level and hard-to-find chips needed to build missile-guidance systems are contained in home refrigerators, how are sanctions ‘working’? Couldn’t Russia simply import hundreds of thousands of refrigerators and dishwashers? They’re not sanctioned. Listen to what is coming out of your stupid mouth, how about? And while you’re being quiet, think about next time picking allies who are not clowns from a comedy show, although that doesn’t necessarily imply you need to repeat whatever they say without reflecting upon whether it might sound as if you are suffering from early-onset dementia.

In the real world, Russia is quite capable of dramatically increasing production of wartime materiel and weapons, and it is – from anywhere between double and up to tenfold increase for some items. Similar was the snicker-worthy wishful thinkiness peddled by the marginally intelligent at British Intelligence, whose ‘spy chief’ – yes, I know, everything that comes out of official Britain these days sounds like it was written for Boy’s Own Magazine – claimed that not only was Russia rapidly running out of supplies and munitions, the Russian population was starting to realize the war was too costly. I suppose it’s too much to ask for the Spy Chief to actually look at some statistics, because they suggest the Russian president’s popularity has barely budged from its 80%-plus rating since about 2014, and is currently as high as it has been in almost 25 years. I admit I did laugh out loud where he said “Russia’s forces are exhausted. The use of prisoners to reinforce, and now the mobilisation of tens of thousands of inexperienced conscripts, speaks of a desperate situation”, because that’s apparently only true when Russia does it. Ukraine is currently doing exactly that, and you can almost taste the awkwardness in the western press, because they don’t quite know how to report it. Is Ukraine desperate? Is the Pope Catholic?

But what I really wanted to talk about a little bit today is the Grand-Canyonesque gap between NATO leaders’ let’s-get-to-fightin’ rhetoric and the dismal state of NATO’s readiness to pursue an actual ground war that lasts, say, past suppertime.

I guess as good an example as any to start with is France’s petit-fou president, Emmanuel Macron. Using the technique of ‘refusing to rule it out’, he ran the possibility of sending French troops into Ukraine up the flagpole.

Never mind that nearly 70% of Macron’s voters oppose the notion of French soldiers fighting in Ukraine; like the rest of Europe’s military forces, France is struggling to find enough soldiers – 700 positions were unfilled by the end of 2021, and the situation has not improved, but worsened.

“The challenge of stabilizing the personnel numbers in the armed forces has been an ongoing issue for various reasons. Macron’s former defense minister Florence Parly had already addressed this by implementing “family plans” designed to enhance the daily lives of military personnel.

But the situation has worsened and now parallels those in other key state bodies, such as the police or the prison administration. “We are used to having turnover within our teams, but we have never seen this phenomenon on such a large scale,” said Thibaut de Vanssay, the director of human resources for the Ministry of the Armed Forces, during his hearing before Parliament for this report.”

Get it, NATO leaders? The British Army has not met its recruiting targets in any year since 2010. The German Army shrunk by about 1,500 in 2023, making plans to pump up the Bundeswehr from its current 181,500 to 203,000 by 2031 look like a plan to make bread dough rise using gravel instead of yeast. Why don’t Europeans flock to the colours when the bugles blow? Simple, says Vincenzo Bove, professor of political science at Warwick University. They don’t like war. Especially participating in a war that takes place in another country.

“According to Bove, the ideological distance between society at large and military forces has gotten wider in recent years.

“If you take a random sample of young Europeans, they are ideologically very far from a sample of soldiers from the same country in terms of how they see society, their aspirations, what they want to do,” Bove said. “And this distance is growing over time.”

Bove mentioned that recent surveys have shown that young civilians are overwhelmingly against wars, against increasing spending on the military and against military operations abroad; they are also more individualistic and less patriotic than those serving in the military forces.”

If you’re fond of demographics, the European population as a whole is both aging and shrinking. The military is competing with the higher-wage private sector for a smaller pool of young people. Some European countries are pondering the reintroduction of conscription, and that better not ever get past the pondering stage, because I don’t think I have to tell you it would have the social impact of a turd in the punchbowl. I suppose you could always get the Ukrainian Prime Minister to go on a European speaking tour to sell the idea, perhaps peddling common-sense truths like getting shot builds character, or a high number of casualties among your troops is a sign of good leadership – after all, he got the U.S. Commerce Secretary to believe that refrigerators contain the same components as missile-guidance systems that can hit a target 500 miles away. That, should you wonder, would be quite the over-engineered refrigerator. More to the point, it highlights how stupid some people in very important positions are. Perhaps we have finally arrived at that moment in history that I briefly glimpsed when I was 16, where young people are way smarter than mature adults.

Although recruiting and retention are serious problems, so too is combat readiness. In its Commons Defence Committee Report, “Ready For War?”, the British Defense Ministry (yes, the same deep thinkers who claimed Russia would run out of missiles and artillery rounds by Wednesday at the latest) claimed virtuously, “Our armed forces are always ready to protect and defend the UK, and we continue to meet all operational commitments.” But the Defense Committee apparently knew they would say that, and pragmatically recommended the department consider ‘retaining retired equipment even halfway viable for regeneration’. Certainly sounds a promising basis upon which to engage the current most-combat-experienced army on the planet, what?

Whoops! No money for regenerating wheezing equipment, I’m afraid; Britain must immediately spend squillions of pounds on air defense, which industry salesmen Northrop Grumman UK describes as presently ‘negligible’ in its capability, and unfavourably comparable to that of Poland. Yes, not only does Poland have better plumbers than the UK, it has better air defense as well.

Nor are things much rosier in The Exceptional Nation, where missed recruiting goals for the US Army have led to the smallest full-time force since 1940, the year before America entered the Second World War. Not a good position from which to agitate for starting the Third World War.

Here’s an off-the-wall thought – maybe it has something to do with your advertising.

The US Army recruiting ad ‘The Calling’ was a woke masterpiece which inspired The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh to despair, “we are the laughing-stock of the world”. Of course, not everyone hated it; it was very popular with liberal activists who almost never join the military. But it was in comparison with current recruiting advertising for the Chinese and the Russian armies that it really got torn up. If you’re offended by profanity, you might want to turn off the voice-over commentary on this review, but I think you will find the visuals alone make the point in quite compelling fashion. If the images of the massed formations of Chinese soldiers charging your position don’t make you shit your pants, your underwear is maybe too small. The frighteningly out-of-touch messaging in the US Army ad was underscored by a comment from one of the viewers:

“The Chinese ad makes me want to join the Chinese Army.

The Russian ad makes me want to join the Russian Army.

… The American ad makes me want to join the Russian or Chinese Army”

Quite funny, I think you’ll agree, and comedy certainly is welcome, but there’s a time and a place, and the optics of western recruiting overall are terrible; it’s like western leaders and planners have gotten as awful at reading their own populations as they are at reading their chosen enemies.

Which brings us to NATO’s woeful position in current technologies such as drones and electronic warfare. The rise of the drone in surveillance and engagement took NATO by surprise, as it leaped from a garage-hobbyist quirk to must-have mass production in just a few months, and whether or not it chooses to believe it, NATO forces are completely unprepared for battle in which even their rear-echelon maneuvering is visible to the enemy day and night. The effect this has on planning and coordination, to say nothing of the element of surprise, cannot be overstated. In its own oblique way, NATO admits this.

“Uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) have become essential elements of modern warfare and their role will expand in the future, raising the urgency of NATO and individual allies to rapidly adapt starting now.

Individual allied nations own a wide variety of UAS capabilities, and the alliance collectively owns and operates NATO’s Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS). Despite NATO efforts to encourage procurement and capability development and to promote common standards and enabling capabilities, NATO has too few drones for a high-intensity fight against a peer adversary. It would be severely challenged to effectively integrate those it has in a contested environment.

Several challenges hinder the development of robust and effective UAS capabilities across the alliance. These include limited interoperability, critical capability gaps, inadequate platform survivability, deficiencies in personnel and training, limits to intelligence processing, and more.”

You probably knew it already, but ‘severely challenged’ are two words you do not want to see when you are prancing and flinging your own poo over the bushes at a powerful adversary, while chattering to the other monkeys about how tough you all are. And there was another important word in there as well; did you see it? That’s right: interoperability. Western political leaders who fancy themselves to be military leaders and strategists as well like to puff up their chests about NATO’s combat-capability superiority…but if your systems and your ammunition and your command&signals and your maintenance routines and spare parts and communications equipment – and now, drone operations – are not interchangeable with those of your allies, it’s quite a bit like fighting on your own with a bunch of cheerleaders on the sidelines.

Russian electronic warfare is the most advanced on the planet, and in recent operations attempted by the Ukrainian military, it jammed Ukraine’s Starlink systems so that Ukrainian operators were blind to advancing Russian forces. From “Russia’s Electronic Warfare Capabilities to 2025: Challenging NATO in the Electromagnetic Spectrum” (PDF), by Roger McDermott;

“Russia’s growing technological advances in EW will allow its forces to jam, disrupt and interfere with NATO communications, radar and other sensor systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and other assets, thus negating advantages conferred on the Alliance by its technological edge. Be it in the air, maritime, land or cyber domains, NATO will encounter an increasingly capable adversary focused on developing and deploying a vast array of EW systems as “force enablers and multipliers”. Many of those systems are being introduced in units across all services stationed in Western Military District (MD) adjacent to NATO’s borders.”

This begs the question of whether you actually have a technological edge, if enemy systems can deny you effective use of it; it sort of presupposes they have a technological edge on your technological edge, so to speak, and as I am fond of pointing out, it is almost always cheaper to engineer a countermeasure that degrades a capability than it was to develop that capability in the first place. But simply blatting out a massive jamming signal will deny you the use of your own systems as well, won’t it? Au contraire.

“Russia is actively developing a “total package” of EW systems to include a broad frequency range and other systems; these seem advanced and capable. In addition to such systems covering surveillance, protection and countermeasures (jamming), they cover measures to protect Russia’s own usage of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). These systems also offer countermeasures against “Western” civilian and military usage of the EMS. Many of these Russian EW systems are highly mobile, including small systems deployable by UAVs, making targeting and neutralising them more complex and challenging.”

There’s that word ‘challenging’ again. You don’t want to see that, especially when you have not fought a peer adversary in living memory. NATO is used to triumphantly bashing the shit out of developing nations whose air defense system launches a flag which unrolls, and reads ‘Whoosh!!’, and minimizing its own casualties by sweet-talking other nations into fighting for them, or astroturfing a ‘rebel movement’ made up of mercenaries.

Be warned, NATO – you are rubbing up against something dangerous as a pit viper in your sleeping bag, and your political leaders don’t just fail to grasp the potential disaster they are sleepwalking into, they are resolutely committed to not seeing it. Completely leaving out the possibility of a nuclear war, and assuming that continuing belligerence would result in a conventional ground war confined to Europe, NATO has not in living memory been in a worse position to start and sustain a war against a capable enemy who has already amassed a couple of years of battle experience in warfare you don’t have the first idea how to fight. European leaders in an ecstasy of choler have upped their contribution to the Ukraine war from blankets and backpacks to tanks, with absolutely zero effect on eventual Ukrainian capitulation, and are – if reports are to believed – actually thinking about giving Ukraine fighter aircraft. I hope that’s just the Remy Martin talking, because going through with it would (a) imply NATO aircrew piloting the planes, nobody really believes the 120-or-so fighters Zelensky begged for to give Ukraine ‘parity’ would actually be piloted by Ukrainians, and (b) quickly result in such a humiliating casualty rate that NATO leaders would weep in frustrated rage.

Don’t do it. If you persist on this course, the boys who brought us in – Kansas – have some more advice for you from the same song.

“Carry on, my wayward son
There’ll be peace when you are done…”