NATO is a virtual adversary
An interview with the Georgian General Georgy Kalandadze, the former head of the Joint General Staff of the Georgian Armed Forces of Georgia, who has been working in Ukraine since the end of 2014, has been working in Ukraine, helping her army, was recently published in the Ukrainska Pravda publication The most interesting moment in this interview is a story about the transition of the Georgian armed forces to NATO standards. We have written a lot of nonsense about these standards, even many military believe that this, for example, implies the mandatory immediate rearmament of the new member of the alliance with the “NATO equipment” (is it unclear just which - American, French, German?). In fact, these standards relate primarily to the management system. The key point of this story is as follows:
“They are very attentive to losses, because the state then bears a financial liability.
Roughly speaking, you can get involved in a battle when there are three of us per enemy. And at the same time we have support aviation.
- That is, there is no such thing as “keeping strategic heights to the last soldier”?
- We will not go into details, because there are different situations. It is important to understand that the NATO general first of all thinks about losses, and then about tasks. This is a different type of management. ”
It must be added here that this is not only a different type of government, it is a different type of thinking which is a sentence for the army. And this confirms that the talk about the "NATO threat" so popular in our country is either stupidity or propaganda, or both.
BOTTOM POTENTIAL
One could once again give figures showing how many times the NATO military potential has decreased since the end of the Cold War, but this reduction is only a consequence of a new type of thinking. NATO can no longer fight because their armies are no longer armies (which is why they are massively reducing Tanks, artillery and even aviation, which are still no longer needed). And this, in turn, is a reflection of the processes taking place in Western societies.
Of course, there is nothing good, if the combat task is solved at any cost, the enemy is "overwhelmed with the corpses" of the soldiers. But if the army refuses to solve the problem at all in order to avoid losses, then it is no longer an army. It is much more honest to simply dissolve it than to feed this senseless, but costly parasite. There is no doubt that in the foreseeable future some European countries will take this natural and logical step.
Here we can not give an example of Israel. This country from all points of view is a classic Western democracy. And they treat the life of their servicemen in the Israeli army as anxiously as they probably have nowhere else in the world. Nevertheless, the Israeli general thinks first of all about the tasks, and then how to solve them with minimal losses. And almost always decides, and with just minimal losses.
Discussion of what happened with Western (first of all European) societies is a very big and completely separate topic. Apparently, two opposing factors had the greatest impact on these societies. On the one hand, two world wars struck the psychology of Europeans, plowing this part of the world physically and mentally. On the other hand, too high a level of wealth also seems to deal a very strong blow to psychology: people have nowhere to strive for and nothing to desire. The result was a cumulative effect, confirming that any idea brought to the point of absurdity turns into its opposite.
NUTRING DEMOCRACY
In Europe, one very specific type of democracy prevailed - left-liberal with its characteristic hypertrophied indulgence of any minority at the expense of the normal majority (this is called tolerance and political correctness). The extent to which the suppression of the majority by minorities is democracy is an extremely interesting question. It should be noted that this very left-liberal ideology becomes, in fact, totalitarian (although its slogan is maximum freedom), since a person who does not agree with this ideology is immediately declared a fascist without any intermediate steps. In fact, the European parties, on which the left-liberal mainstream has labeled fascist (for example, the French National Front), are the classic right-wing parties of the first half of the twentieth century. It was in such parties that the two main European anti-fascists — Churchill and de Gaulle — consisted. But in their times in Europe there was democracy in its classical, natural understanding, and not its present perversion.
The situation developing in Europe with migrants from the Near and Middle East and from Africa is highly indicative in this regard. This migration, of course, did not begin with the current wave of refugees, it has been going on for a very long time. Migrants are one of the main objects of tolerance and political correctness. As a result, for some reason, an increasing majority of migrants perceive these remarkable European ideological attitudes as weakness and stupidity (and one gets the feeling that this perception is quite fair). At the same time, it is not customary to ask the tolerant and politically correct European politicians the question: what right do they, when accepting migrants en masse, put at risk the security and material well-being of their own citizens, voters and taxpayers? What right do they have to allow the creation of growing migrant regions in European cities where no European laws are in place (despite the fact that equality of all before the law is one of the pillars of classical European democracy)? In the end, it is inhumane even in relation to the same migrants. And it certainly has nothing to do with democracy. It has to do with weakness and stupidity.
Here again it is impossible not to refer to the experience of Israel and not to bring in the opinion of its specialists (they were published by the Kommersant newspaper after the Brussels attacks). For example, Yoram Schweitzer, senior researcher at the Israel Institute for National Security, said: "We in Israel ... there are places where there are more Arabs and less Jews, but we don’t have places where the law does not work." And Lt. Col. Mordechai Keidar, who served in Israel’s military intelligence, said: “If the Europeans continue to adhere to the principles of political correctness, they will end up in the grave. Democracy must learn to defend itself. Europeans need to finally decide who they are - democracy under siege or democracy on the road to suicide. ”
There is a strong suspicion that the second answer to the question of Lieutenant Colonel Kaydar will be correct. In Russia, many people seriously hope that parties like the National Front will soon begin to come to power in European countries in large numbers. Alas, it is an illusion. At any anti-immigrant rally in any European city, the answer is at least not the smallest pro-immigrant rally. For all European freedom of speech, left-liberal propaganda has been very effectively brainwashing people for decades. Therefore, for the normal right, to which the label of the “fascists” is firmly attached, even the 30% of votes is a practically unattainable ceiling. They can be quite strong opposition, but they will not come to power anywhere and never.
A European citizen, who has firmly mastered the principles of tolerance and political correctness, is absolutely not ready to fight with anyone for anything. A very high level of material well-being also drastically reduces a person’s desire to go to war. Finally, postmodernism is an indispensable element of a left-liberal ideology, within which, for example, readiness for self-sacrifice (without which the military profession is fundamentally impossible) is not something that is not welcome, but is recognized as something shameful. For all these reasons, the European armies are able to fight only against those who have nothing to answer at all (as General Kalandadze said). For all these reasons, talking about the NATO threat to Russia is at least absurd. But Russia is obliged to draw the most important lessons from the European experience.
LESSONS FOR RUSSIA
One of them, for example, is that a gross mistake is the self-disengagement, moral and physical, which is demonstrated by Europe. This error should never be repeated. Accordingly, from the fact that the current NATO does not pose a threat to us, in no way does it follow that we can be disarmed. First, NATO is not the only potential external threat to us. Secondly, NATO is not a threat at the current balance of power between them and Russia, this is a matter of principle. With a different balance of power, it will become a threat, as the examples of Yugoslavia and Libya have shown. Therefore, for any reduction in the state budget, the two areas of expenditure must be “sacred and inviolable” - for defense and security and for science and education. Any current talk about Russia spending too much on defense should be nipped in the bud.
Another lesson is that the army must always remain an army and in no case should it turn into the present ugly European synthesis of the punitive detachment and almshouse. Therefore, in particular, it is necessary to completely and permanently forget the idea of a “professional army”, and to include a military appeal with a service in peacetime of one year into the Constitution of the Russian Federation.
There are lessons not only military, but also political. Representatives of the Russian liberal opposition propose that the above-described European “strangeness” be considered the highest achievement of human civilization, which must be introduced without understanding and discussion in our country. Perhaps there is no surer way to quickly and effectively destroy Russia. However, the answer to European deformities in no case should not become their own deformities, that is, the confluence of the frank archaic in the style of "Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality", signs of which we are now seen more and more. Unfortunately, Russia is very much lacking the classical right-wing party of the Churchill-DeGoll type and classical democracy without bringing it to the point of absurdity.
Russia needs to learn the lessons not only from the European, but also from the Ukrainian experience. Most Russians regard the events in this country as the result of "the machinations of the State Department." Many Russian opposition leaders manage to see in Ukraine the construction of either a wonderful European democracy, or a wonderful nation state, or a magnificent synthesis of these two phenomena. In fact, Ukraine is Russia brought to the grotesque. That is, all our shortcomings there are brought to a hypertrophied, caricature scale. Only in this country could the criminal-oligarchic coup, which took place in February 2014, be called the “revolution of dignity”. The current Ukrainian catastrophe shows the consequences of merging power and oligarchy to complete indistinguishability, coupled with propaganda brainwashing to the public until they completely lose their ability to think. This has nothing to do with democracy or national construction, but it is necessary to see analogies with us.
If you go back to the beginning of the article, you can remember that in August 2008, the Georgian army, which successfully switched to NATO standards, when confronted with the Russian army, which these standards are absolutely alien, not only lost, but instantly collapsed and fled, throwing armament and technique. And despite the fact that the Russian group had no numerical superiority over the Georgian armed forces (at least on the ground). The Ukrainian army, collapsed by all four previous presidents of this country, in the past two years has demonstrated the ability to somehow fight solely because it remains inherently deeply Soviet. The transition to NATO standards for the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be equivalent to their immediate collapse. At least, there can be no talk of any war in the Donbass after this. Accordingly, it remains only to wish Kiev to carry out this process as quickly as possible, so successfully and frankly described by the Georgian general.
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