The Russian Art of War.

By Romegas

Most people who get their information from the mainstream media simply cannot comprehend why Ukraine is losing the war despite the support of the collective West. After all, they have been told ad nauseum that Russia has a GDP smaller than that of France, its leaders corrupt, its weapons inferior junk and its army incompetent.

We are currently going through a series of justifications with the latest being the lack of ammunition but these all miss the fundamental reasons.

It is very hard to explain to these people that the West is simply incapable of beating Russia and the reasons why this is so are ultimately systemic. The West is doctrinally, culturally, and institutionally incapable of waging sustained continental warfare on such a scale.

NATO’s military is simply not armed to fight such a war and its decision-making institutions are likewise incapable of comprehending the Russian art of war let alone countering it.

There are very few people with the qualifications and more importantly, the ability to convey in words that most can understand the fundamental differences between NATO’s and Russia’s understanding of warfare and what these translate to on the battlefield than Jacques Baud, a former Swiss intelligence officer who also served with NATO in various capabilities including in Ukraine and is above all a life-long student of Soviet and Russian military doctrine.

This is a must-see interview for those who are interested in acquiring some actual understanding. Those who want to learn the difference between the tactical, the operational and the strategic and why whilst in the West we are obsessed with the first, the Russians have turned the second and the third into both a science and an art.

It is a must-see interview for those who want to learn why – contrary to what they are told in the Western media, Putin not only does not act as some arbitrary tyrant but to the contrary works entirely within the Russian collective decision-making structure of which the Stavka (the Russian General Staff) is an important component among others. Jacques easily explains why Russian weapons are better suited for real warfare and why while we in the West think of our armed forces as a subset of our society for Russia the army is the entirety of Russian society itself. Above all Jacques explains why our leaders continue to get every decision wrong. In most of my articles, I make the point to state that our leaders are simply incompetent – but perhaps Jacques Baud actually nailed it – when he states our leaders are “tweeters and not thinkers” – and they simply do not have the institutional structures to prevent them from making monumental mistakes.