Notes on Stormtrooper Syndrome August 2, 2023 John Michael Greer For some time now I’ve been looking for a way to talk about one of the most common bad habits of thought in the modern industrial world. Habits like this are far more important that a casual glance might suggest. Plenty of pragmatic factors are piling up crises for our civilization just now, but many of those could be solved—or at least faced in a more constructive way—if our government and business elites could think clearly about them. It’s the fact that they don’t seem to be able to do this that makes the crisis of our time so overwhelming. Another overpriced round of vacuous drivel laced with bad policies. It’s really quite remarkable, when you think of it. These days, if a government bureaucracy or one of those dreary panels of multibillionaires get together to try to solve some problem, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll either do nothing or make the problem worse. It’s not that the people in question aren’t educated—they have the best education you can get in a modern Western society. It’s not that they lack resources—for example, the money and energy that go into those climate conferences each year, put to some productive use, could have contributed considerably to mitigating the effects of climate change. No, the problem is that the people in question are stuck in habits of thought that make it impossible for them to do anything useful in a crisis. I know that this is a controversial claim these days. Quite a few people have become convinced that our government and corporate elites can’t possibly be as stupid as they seem. No, it’s got to be a sinister conspiracy! It’s easy to understand why that sort of thinking has become popular. It certainly makes more sense than the claims being pushed by government and corporate media, which basically amount to saying that the world’s smartest people are making our lives steadily better, and the mere fact that our lives are getting steadily worse doesn’t matter. Yet I’d like to suggest that it makes even more sense to suggest that “the world’s smartest people” aren’t as smart as they like to think they are. In particular, they suffer from habits of thought that make them pursue policies that are doomed to fail. Worse still, those same habits keep them from learning from their mistakes, and guarantee that the only thing they can think of when one of their gambits fails is to make the same mistake over again on an even larger scale. There are a fair number of these wellsprings of total failure. The one I want to talk about today is a bad habit I call Stormtrooper Syndrome. The worst shots in the galaxy. Do you remember, dear reader, the Imperial Storm Troopers from the Star Wars movies, lurching around in their white plastic armor? When Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original movie said that no one else was as precise as Imperial Storm Troopers, he was clearly making a joke that Luke Skywalker was too wet behind the ears to catch. The one thing those movies make plain about Imperial Storm Troopers is that they couldn’t hit the broad side of a Death Star even if they were standing the length of one womp-rat away from it. Their job is to fill the air with blaster fire and miss. They do that job very effectively. Those of my readers who know anything about actual firefights involving professional soldiers know that this isn’t what happens. (First-timers in combat, sure, but Imperial Storm Troopers are supposed to be competent.) In other words, Imperial Storm Troopers aren’t there to do anything useful. They’re there to provide the illusion of deadly peril so that the fake heroics of the protagonists look a little less unconvincing to movie audiences. There’s a reason for this kind of absurdity, of course. Popular entertainment in Western industrial nations today is as thickly larded with moral posturing as anything Victorian parents inflicted on their children. In most popular genres, the Good People always win, and the Bad People always lose. Oh, there’s often a Good Person who dies heroically so the other Good People can emote on camera, and there’s often a Bad Person who turns out to have a heart of gold, but the basic principle remains: Good People win because they’re good, Bad People lose because they’re baaaaad. J.R.R. Tolkien. He can’t be blamed for the stupidities of his imitators. That colossus of the modern imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, has some responsibility for all this. In his programmatic essay “On Fairy-Stories” he discussed one of the central plot schemes of fairy tales, which he called “eucatastrophe:” in plainer English, a sudden improbable turn for the better that saves the day when all is lost. As you’d expect from a devout conservative Christian like Tolkien, this theme is ultimately religious in nature—he described the resurrection of Jesus as the ultimate eucatastrophe—and it provided the frame he used for his two gargantuan fairy tales, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. To give him due credit, Tolkien went out of his way to make his eucatastrophes as plausible as he could. Most of the ninth-rate Tolkien imitators whose fetid output bathes the brains of today’s mass media consumers stopped worrying about such petty concerns a long time ago. It doesn’t matter how much stronger and smarter and better armed the Bad People are, they have to lose because they’re the Bad People. Nor does it matter how idiotic the plan the Good People decide on, the Bad People are required to make the mistakes that will enable it to succeed. When the chips are down, you know that Harry Potter will infallibly drop the One Ring from his X-wing into the cooling port of Mount Doom and bring the reign of Emperor Palpasauronvoldemortine crashing down, because he’s a Good Person and the Good People always win. This sort of silliness makes for dreary storytelling, but I’m convinced that it can also cause serious cognitive disabilities. Children who are raised a steady diet of this kind of schlock are apt to end up thinking that this is how the world works. If they get out into the real world and bloody their noses a few times, they generally learn better, but if they live in a society that doesn’t let them fail, they may well reach adulthood without ever encountering that salutary lesson. Notice that he’s not even looking at his target. Talk about phoning it in… Furthermore, if they belong to a social class in which the most ironclad rule is that nobody must ever suffer the consequences of their own choices, no matter how cretinous those choices might be, they can end up in important positions in government and business without ever realizing that the universe is not set up to hand them victory just because they think of themselves as the Good People. That’s Stormtrooper Syndrome: the conviction that no matter what, you’ll inevitably win because you think you’re morally superior to your enemies. There’s no shortage of examples of Stormtrooper Syndrome these days, but I’m going to focus on the most important of the lot, the one that bids fair to transform the world’s political and economic landscape in the years immediately ahead. Yes, we need to talk about Ukraine. That emphatically does not mean we need to talk about who gets to claim the roles of Good People and Bad People in the Russo-Ukrainian war. May I whisper an unwelcome truth in your ear, dear reader? The outcome of this war does not depend on which side is morally better than the other. In the real world, in terms of military victory and defeat, who’s right and who’s wrong don’t matter two weak farts in a Cat-5 hurricane once the cannon start to roar. That being the case, let’s set aside moral posturing for a bit and talk about something more relevant. The roots of the Russo-Ukrainian war go back a very long ways, but for present purposes we can begin in 2014. That’s when the US and its European allies sponsored a coup d’etat in Ukraine, overthrowing the elected pro-Russian government and replacing it with a pro-NATO one. Once the new regime settled into place, the US and its allies began funding a military buildup that gave Ukraine the second largest army in Europe. That army was armed and trained with an eye toward a massive shift in military affairs that was then underway. Somehow, that time, it didn’t work so well. In 2006 the Israelis launched one of their periodic incursions into Lebanon. To the surprise of many people, the Hezbollah militia dealt the Israelis a bloody nose and forced them to withdraw with their main goals unachieved. The Israelis, like every other modern army at that time, used the tactics that had been pioneered by the Wehrmacht in 1939 and 1940, and perfected by Soviet and US militaries in the years immediately following: massive assaults by tanks and mobile infantry supported by air superiority, driving deep into enemy territory to get behind the defenders’ lines, disrupt their supply and communication routes, and cripple their ability to resist. What Hezbollah demonstrated is that those tactics had passed their pull date. Having built a network of underground shelters and urban strongholds, they lay low while the Israeli vanguard moved past, then popped up and started clobbering Israeli units with sudden ambushes using state-of-the-art weapons. The Pentagon watched the whole business closely, and planned on using the same tactics against an eventual Russian incursion into Ukraine. That’s why the Ukrainian military built a massive network of defensive works just west of the Russian-held areas of the Donbass, the easternmost, ethnically Russian part of Ukraine. In retrospect, it’s clear what the Ukrainian government and its NATO allies had in mind. Once war with Russia came, the Ukrainian army would draw the Russians into a grueling stalemate that would deny them an easy victory and cost them more than the Russian economy could afford. Meanwhile sweeping economic sanctions would finish wrecking Russia’s economy and force Russia into a humiliating withdrawal and an internal political crisis. The long-range endpoint was regime change, leading to the often-stated Western goal of breaking up the Russian Federation into a gaggle of weak, unstable states. These could then be absorbed by the EU, in the run-up to the final confrontation with China a few decades further down the line. “We’ll just have Harry Potter fly his X-Wing to Mount Doom. That’ll take care of it.” As grand strategies go, this was fairly good, but it had two serious weak points. The first was that the sanctions had to have the effect on the Russian economy that Western economists predicted. The second was that the Russians had to stick to pre-2006 military doctrine no matter how badly things went. That’s where Stormtrooper Syndrome first showed up. The decisionmakers in Washington, Brussels, and Kiev convinced themselves that those weak points didn’t matter because the Ukrainians were the Good People and the Russians were the Bad People. Then war broke out last February. Those of my readers who watched the news will recall how closely things followed the script, at first. The Russians launched a classic blitzkrieg operation, driving deep into Ukrainian territory, only to find that the Ukrainians fell back on prepared defenses and urban strongholds. Some Russian units suffered embarrassing defeats; others found themselves overextended in hostile territory and retreated. Meanwhile the US and the EU slapped sanctions on the Russian economy…and that’s when the plan ran straight off the rails. The first difficulty was that most of the world’s nations didn’t cooperate with the sanctions. There were several reasons for that. Nations such as Iran and China that are hostile to the US saw the situation as an opportunity to extend a middle finger to their enemies. Nations such as India and Brazil that are nonaligned powers saw the situation as a chance to demonstrate their independence. Still other nations wanted Russian oil and grain and weren’t willing to forgo them, so they acted in accordance with their interests rather than ours. This used to be a McDonalds. All the profits are now staying in Russia. How exactly did that help Ukraine? Yet there was another difficulty with the sanctions. Do you remember all those big corporations that loudly announced that they were leaving the Russian market? They couldn’t take their outlets and infrastructure with them, and so the Russians simply rebranded those and kept going. The Russian subsidiary of Coca-Cola, for example, now produces something called Dobry-Cola. Yes, it tastes just like Coca-Cola, and it’s in a very slightly different red can. The crucial point is that the profits from sales of Dobry-Cola and similar products and services aren’t flowing out to stockholders in the US, they’re staying in Russia, where they’ve given a timely boost to the Russian economy. This presumably wasn’t what US and NATO elites had in mind. But the worst news for NATO came from the battlefields. What happened there has an odd personal dimension for me Some years ago I wrote a paper, “Asymmetric tactical shock: a first reconnaissance,” about what happens when an army becomes too dependent on complex technologies and its enemies figure out how to monkeywrench those. The example I used came from the end of the Bronze Age, but the lesson applies more broadly: the monkeywrenched army faces total disaster unless it does something most people these days can’t even conceive of doing. My essay circulated quietly among people interested in such things, and finally saw print in my 2020 collection Beyond the Narratives. I have no reason to think that anybody in Stavka (the Russian General Staff) pays the least attention to obscure American fringe intellectuals like me. The fact remains that when the Ukrainians monkeywrenched the Russian version of blitzkrieg, the Russians did exactly what I suggested an army in that situation had to do: they fell back on an older form of warfighting that wasn’t vulnerable to the monkeywrenching tactics. How the ancient Egyptians defeated the Sea Peoples. Massed spearmen were considered obsolete in 1300 BC, but they did the job. That was why the Russians abandoned their deep thrusts into Ukrainian territory, retreated from vulnerable areas around Kharkov and Kherson, launched a mass mobilization of troops and a major expansion of their already large munitions industry, and got to work building entrenched defensive lines to guard the territory they’d seized. Meanwhile the Russian government got very friendly with Iran and North Korea. Why? Because both nations have large munitions industries that don’t depend on access to Western technology and capital, and both are eager to sell weapons and ammunition to their Russian friends. That is to say, since the new Ukrainian tactics made it impossible for the Russians to refight the Second World War, the Russians switched to First World War tactics instead, . The defensive lines and urban strongholds on which the Ukrainians relied to defeat Russian tank columns didn’t provide anything like the same defense against massed Russian artillery bombardment. While the Russian Army was retooling for the new (or rather old) mode of war, mercenary units—Wagner PMC, most famously, but there were others—took over the brunt of the fighting, tested out First World War tactics against entrenched Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut, and won. That put Ukraine and its NATO backers into a very difficult position. In First World War-style combat, the winner is the side with the largest munitions industry and the biggest pool of recruits to draw on. Russia has a huge advantage on both counts. First, NATO countries no longer have a political consensus supporting mass military conscription, while Russia does. Second, while the US and its allies dismantled most of their munitions factories at the end of the Cold War, Russia didn’t, and it also has those good friends in Tehran and Pyongyang. All these give the Russians an edge the NATO nations can’t match in the near term. This wasn’t the kind of battle NATO was expecting. This wasn’t a message that NATO was willing to hear. To a very real extent, it was a message they weren’t capable of hearing. It’s been 70 years—since the end of the Korean War, in fact—since the United States and its allies last fought a land war against a major power. The entire NATO officer corps got its training and experience in an era when they had overwhelming superiority over their enemies, and they have no idea how to fight without it. (Even with that—cough, cough, Afghanistan, cough, cough—they aren’t too good at winning.) That’s when Stormtrooper Syndrome really came into play, because it never occurred to NATO that Ukraine could lose—after all, our government shills and corporate media have defined them as the Good People! That’s why the elites in Washington, Brussels, and Kiev convinced themselves that the Russians couldn’t possibly ramp up their munitions industry to a pitch that would permit them to carry on trench warfare for years at a time. (Remember all those confident news stories that insisted the Russians were about to run out of shells and rockets?) They convinced themselves that the Russians were using mercenaries because the Russian army was too demoralized and brittle to stand up to the rigors of combat. They drew up plans for a grand Ukrainian offensive to turn the tide of the war, and funneled more arms to Ukraine, along with big contingents of NATO mercenaries to fill out the ranks of the depleted Ukrainian army. Meanwhile, European politicians made public statements admitting that the previous ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia had been a sham, none of the Western nations that signed onto it ever intended to fulfill their parts of the bargain, and the whole point was to give Ukraine time to build up an army that could take on the Russians. Those statements weren’t made by accident. Their purpose was to convince the Russians that negotiation was a waste of time, thus making it impossible for a peace faction in Ukraine to go behind NATO’s back and negotiate with the Russians. So NATO got the grand Ukrainian counteroffensive it wanted. Those armored vehicles used to be full of Ukrainian soldiers. You don’t want to think too much about what happened to them. The counteroffensive began on June 4th. Two months on, it’s clear that it has failed. A successful assault against fortified positions in modern war requires a three-to-one advantage in soldiers on that region of the battlefield, a large advantage in artillery, and air superiority. Ukraine has none of these things, and somehow or other no eucatastrophe showed up to save the day. That’s why tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers lie dead in the mud of Zaporhizhzhye amid the charred remains of hundreds of NATO armored vehicles, and the Russian defensive lines remain unbroken. One of the defining battles of the 21st century has just been fought in southern Ukraine. The short version? NATO lost. Now of course the Russo-Ukraine war isn’t over yet, and the fortunes of war may yet favor the Ukrainian side—though this looks very improbable just now. Meanwhile, history is not waiting around for the details to be settled. Last week the heads of state of 40 African nations gathered in St. Petersburg to sign agreements giving Russia a leading position in the economic and military affairs of the world’s second largest continent, while Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu was in North Korea negotiating further arms deals. The Russians know better than to wait for miracles to save them from the consequences of their own actions. Only our leaders are that stupid. The mess in Ukraine isn’t the only way that Stormtrooper Syndrome has shaped recent history. It’s because of Stormtrooper Syndrome that so many people suffered nervous breakdowns when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016—their reaction amounted to “he’s a Bad Person, he’s not supposed to win!”—and the same factor also kept them from wondering why so many people had lost so much faith in the political establishment that they were willing to settle for Trump, of all people, as an alternative. Nor, to be fair, is Stormtrooper Syndrome in short supply on the right, where shrill moral dualism is far more common than thoughtful discussions of how to deal constructively with the cascading crises overwhelming America today. Meanwhile in Russia, they’re tipping back Dobry-Colas. Really, it’s hard to name anything in contemporary life in the Western industrial nations that hasn’t been twisted bizarrely out of shape by the efforts of our privileged classes to pretend to be the heroes of their own Star Wars sequels, posturing nobly while the Imperial Storm Troopers fill the air around them with harmless faux-blaster fire. Yet the lesson being whispered by the winds from Ukraine is that nobody and nothing else is required to play along. That lesson may end up costing a great many people bitterly in the not too distant future. https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-stormtrooper-syndrome/
Apperently China made a (better) copy of the Shahed drones. Maybe soon it will be clear if China helps Russia or not. Ukraine just has to shoot down one Chinese drone to find out. Or wil China sell them to Ukraine too?
They were bringing in ammo for Russians & on the way back, stealing UA grain, but then (Sadly, it's shown only after events took place)
The U.S. has cleared the way for the Netherlands to deliver F-16 jets to Ukraine, Dutch authorities said Friday, a potentially significant boost to Ukraine in the medium term as it seeks to expel Russian troops from its territory,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “So far, Ukraine has received none of the supersonic F-16s, cutting-edge jet fighters that can engage in air-to-air combat and conduct air-to-ground strikes.” New York Times: “Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which began two months ago, has a chance of prevailing without the fighter jets, experts say, but it is likely to be far more difficult.”
NYT: "Russia’s military casualties, the officials said, are approaching 300,000. The number includes as many as 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injured troops. The Russian numbers dwarf the Ukrainian figures, which the officials put at close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded." ... I am still thinking the Russian casualties are undercounted. There are many tens of thousands of "MIA"s who are deliberately not counted by Russians to avoid payments.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-forces-shoot-down-another-110300214.html Ukrainian forces shoot down another Russian Ka-52 helicopter, this time in Zaporizhzhya Oblast
According to the three memoranda,[6] Russia, the US and the UK confirmed their recognition of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine becoming parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and effectively abandoning their nuclear arsenal to Russia, and that they agreed to the following: Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders (in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act).[7] Refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of the signatories to the memorandum, and undertake that none of their weapons will ever be used against these countries, except in cases of self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind. Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used". Not to use nuclear weapons against any non - nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a state in association or alliance with a nuclear weapon state.[8][9][10] Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments So according to the signed agreement, each country that signed this Memorandum had to immediately help the countries that where mentioned under this protection. Reality is that NOBODY did anything for a very long time. And even till today the assistance is hugely limited as Ukraine receives with it a lot of delay, and never the weapons they need. The first months not a single participant of the Memorandum gave help. That made the situation dramatically worse. The Memorandum was not respected by ANY country that signed it. Russia attacked Ukraine, which they agreed on never to do. And all the other countries did not help, which they agreed on never to do. They just watched how the Ukrainians had to fight with inferior material against Russia. Now they are making a new agreement with a lot of countries to protect Ukraine in the future. We know now already how that will go, we see confirmation of it already for almost two years. Ukraine getting destroyed completely and Russia trying to execute the entire Ukrainian population while the whole world is watching it. Lavrov now threatens with nuclear too, as the Russians see that it works. If the West continuous to reduce/limit help because of this threat, Russia will see that this blackmail is working. After they can catch Ukraine they will use the same nuclear threat for the next country. The Western countries opened the box of Pandora. The West should explain that nuclear works in both ways. So it means that Russia will have a nuclear threat from the West too. Will Russia take the risk being destroyed completely in the attempt to catch a part of Ukraine? Russia would have to pay a huge price. If the West can make that clear to Russia, they will never use nuclear as they know what will be the result. The end of Russia, then caused by Putin will be in all history books. At least if there will be still something left from the earth. If the West will not immediately react on any kind of nuclear attack from Russia, the West will have decades of problems with Russia. And probably also with China (this sentence is for the Americans who think that they are not and will not be involved in future threats). This is not a fight between Russia and Ukraine. This is a fight between democratic countries against dictatorial regimes. The winner will eventually take the whole world.
It is the Ukrainian soldiers who are now forced to wade into minefields and try to disarm numerous mines to preserve their tanks, Bradleys and other apcs from being targeted by Russian artillery and drones. Not a wonder the Ukrainians are dying by the thousands in their counter offensive. They keep attacking fortified Russian positions and they are not even getting into the Russians first layer of defense. Russians have 3 layers of defense plus a buffer zone before the first layer. That is, on the frontlines. Ukraine has lost this war and they are only racking up more and more dead Ukrainians. Russians have not even gone on their own counter offensive yet.
Russian spies and collaborants are in every country. So don't say that the Ukrainian war is of no importance for the US. Former high-level FBI official pleads guilty in connection to scheme working for sanctioned Russian oligarch https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/15/politics/charles-mcgonigal-fbi/index.html