Putin: Reinventing War

East and West: When The Twain Meet

In The Tao of Vladimir Putin, I connected Putin’s mindset to Eastern philosophy, underscoring not only his strategic genius but principles that set him apart from Western-type politicians.

With the Western Media trumpeting an amazing litany of lies such as Russian atrocities in  Bucha and Kramatorsk, Zelensky and his Nazi puppet-masters as “freedom fighters” and Russian military incompetence, not to mention the “illegality” of the “invasion”, Putin’s unique principles redefine this war, giving Russia an advantage – a moral one – integrity.   . 

The US media machine is huge, sophisticated and powerful — but it is still propaganda—and fundamentally amoral

 And oh, “what a tangled web we weave when we seek to deceive”.

 “The truth will out”?  Always.

We eventually learned the what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin — and about Saddam’s WMD.

At some point, there will be a lot of people denying that they were ever taken in by the stories. “I always knew that it rang false”.

People who accept obvious lies, are liars themselves.

It’s like a cheating husband and the wife who says “I always knew”, after those years of accepting that the lipstick stains on the collar and late night “meetings” were innocent, knowing that they weren’t but unwilling to confront.

Sadly, in the US it is denial  is what bonds us to each other from families to neighborhoods to small companies to  the governments — and beyond to the evil empire that supports our daily lives. .  We call it “trust”.  Another lie. And when the truth emerges as it always does, it is painful.  We get divorced.  From our husbands or wives. From our friends. And eventually from our governments. . Between the people and their governments.

 

Everybody LIes

Of course, some deceit is necessary as a social lubricant“Hi, how are you?”. “Fine thank you” is OK in a cocktail party. But “I feel like shit” is better with your partner.  Here in Japan where I live this kind of deceit is considered “tatemae” – really just good manners.

Propaganda, the propagation of lies on a mass scale, works best within a culture, exploiting the need of people to belong – to a group to which they have no actual personal connection, fostering a group identity.  “I’m American” people say, as though “American” was one thing. In fact, it is not a real thing – it’s an idea—and everybody has a different idea of what that is while assuming that everyone else thinks the same way.

As such, “American” is only attractive to  Americans or American-wannabes like the Brits or Japanese.

Propaganda is fueled by hate. 

We don’t like to hate people we know or who are like us. 

But as part of a group, we can hate other groups, not as “people” but as “other”. 

Hatred of this kind motivates, mobilizes and gives us purpose. Killing these “others” in some foreign country, including genocides--small and large-- is quite OK.  So, Barack Obama can post how good a “killer” he is for bombing wedding parties where they just might be a terrorist.

When the truth comes out , it will be denied. We fear the pain.

So it is that propaganda often blares (or as they say, in Little England, “Blairs”) loudest at the end of a war, when one side has lost, as was the case with Japan in WWII, which declared it would somehow win right up until the Emperor surrendered.

Now, it’s Ukraine saying it has Russia on the ropes as its people die in fruitless sacrifice.  Propaganda has a script. You follow it as it is written. In this case, the US does the writing.

For Russia, however, facts matter.

Their ‘war” was never a “war”, but an SMO –Special Military Operation.

Its forces are a massive SWAT team trying to protect Russian speaking Ukrainians from a Galician (“Ukrainian”) speaking NeoNazi -Fascist thugocracy.

 In the first two weeks, the RF established air superiority, deprived the UAF army of effective agency and mobility in in Donbass and started “demilitarizing” them and “denazifying” them.    

It was an amazing feat, almost unparalleled in the annals of military history, reflecting a different concept of “war” from the one popularized in the West and it depended on the genius of Vladimir Putin.

For the US, which has no altruistic principles, just an inchoate Darwinian imperative, the “war” is going strong — and will continue—in its mind anyway. 

It will try to “win” somehow, even when it loses the Ukraine and parts of Europe turn against it out of sheer necessity.  The US has no altruistic principles, just an inchoate   imperative that might be called “Darwinian” except that it mandates the Survival of the Unfittest.

American political culture is maladaptive if not  psychopathic – and doomed.

Putin may be saving the world, even as Biden seeks to take the world down the drain with the US in its failure.   

The US is less the Russia’s enemy than it is the world’s   It has immense power, the most advanced military that has ever existed. Thousands of bases. It has advantage. But this advantage is also disadvantage. It has tactics but no strategy.

40 Second Boyd: Turning the Tables

Putin probably does not know anything about John Boyd, a fighter pilot, known as 40 Second Boyd or Genghis Boyd --an amazingly diverse polymath and autodidact and the greatest military strategist of the 20th century.  Then again, most Americans don’t know who is he is either

Yet, Boyd’s theories explain the success of Putin’s SMO.  And more, his success in creating a multipolar world. It shows us why the US “advantage” is also disadvantage.

As a fighter pilot, Boyd had a standing challenge to any and all comers that he, starting from a position of disadvantage, could win in 40 seconds. The attacker had height, often a better aircraft.  So the results should not have been in doubt.  Yet, Boyd never had to buy beer.

When your opponent thinks they have the advantage, they are overconfident; they make mistakes.  That’s what happened with the US and Russia.

The advantage of height for example gives you speed but it reduces maneuverability even if your aircraft is nominally more maneuverable. If your opponent just hits the brakes as one Boyd-trained F105 bomb-truck pilot did in Vietnam when a Vietnamese dog-fighter attacked from behind and above, your attacker may overshoot right into your sights.  If he tries to turn, he may just spin out.    

Of course, if you miss killing or damaging your opponent the first time, the situation is different the second.  You must start all again.  You must adapt with a different strategy.   

  

Putin’s Strategy: Circles Within Circles

Since 2014 he has been observing and orienting as events unfold, making decisions and acting.  These actions were preparation—diplomatic, military and economic, tested and revised again and again as circumstances changed.  Minsk didn’t work.  Putin observed, oriented, decided, and acted in 2022.

The set things up so he had both a moral and legal basis for his actions.  It was, after all, the UAF attacking the DPR, overconfident that the US would back them. The US was overconfident that it could attack Russia economically too. . Putin had observed, oriented, decided.  He prepared for both an economic and military conflict 

In February he acted. OODA.  He had his enemy in his sights in the first week.

Then the West reacted and the loop started again.

Like Boyd, Putin’s sensibility is multidimensional and dynamic and like Boyd he understood “war” differently from the Western military establishment.  

 

 

What Is War?

Putin and Boyd are both orientalists. 

Boyd took Sun Tzu’s neo-Taoist theory of war to heart, keeping in mind that Sun Tzu’s theory of war is actually a theory of peace.  Putin’s SMO was designed to create and preserve peace – not to destroy.

Boyd defined three aspects of military conflict.

Physical or military—killing people and/ or destroying their infrastructures and economies. That’s what most people raised on video games assume when they think “war”. Total destruction.   Shock & awe!  Hooyah!   Kill, kill, kill!

Mental war means not only altering the enemy’s perceptions of events through information and communications—for Americans — lies—but an emphasis on facts – the truth.  Lird misfire. The truth hits the target. To win a mental war you have to win not just minds – but  also hearts which which predicates credibility and  a moral dimension.

So Boyd’s third category is “morale” or moral” war.

For Americans—that means” demoralizing” the “enemy” breaking down the human bonds and trust that are the glue of any group organization— again through lies, misinformation, dirty tricks such as false flags. This approach is a short-term tactic. Natural enough in a country with the attention span of a fruit fly.

Longer term, good strategy is showing that your intentions are just and honorable, like avoiding civilian casualties in the Ukraine, even at the cost of your own.  

You will notice that Putin does exactly what he says he will.  He doesn’t bluff. And his actions are principled.   

The Ontology of War

Boydian strategy is inductive, starting from particularity, then moving to conclusions that just plain work. The world is where truth resides, not the mind. That’s also Putin.

Boyd liked oriental logic because it focused on this world’s situations and challenges rather than on an imagined heaven; because it is a response to what-is, and what-is-not — rather than would we want-it-to-be.

The West is always inside its cultural box, with a top in place, and decorated with ideology.

The East has boxes too but not tops and people like Boyd and Putin outside and beyond.

Boyd was a minimalist. When he designed the F16 (he didn’t do it himself of course) he looked to create a simple, inexpensive, highly maneuverable fighter, with not too many bells and whistles. The weapons companies of course wanted to make more money so they “added value” and turned it into a bomb truck.

In “war”, the West, or rather the USA, which controls the “West”, thinks of military power as glitzy popular, costly symbols of strength — big aircraft carriers, hi-tech aircraft and systems, alliances and bases all over the place—regardless of whether these have specific applications or actual usefulness. A lot of this stuff is too expensive to use and too expensive to lose.

The first priority of American military design is to make money

All very well and good for huge companies like Boeing and Raytheon — not so much for the taxpayer who has to forego things like healthcare, housing support, education and the like. Hitech military systems are rarely put to the test except for bombing wedding parties and killing women and children. Like all bullies, the US avoids a fair fight and preys on the weak.

 Warfare in the Western (American) mind is not existential.

Which is natural because the USA has never experienced a real war, with an enemy who could fight back on an equal basis since the Civil War.

When actual damage occurs to the homeland, as with 9/11, Americans react with an irrational mixture of fear and anger all out of proportion to the circumstances — and misdirected as well.  Wars are not supposed to be “over here”.  They must always be “over there”.

So it was that war against Hitler was “over there”, with the Russians doing most of the work. The Pacific War as “out there” in the Pacific, against an enemy, who lacked the industrial and technological capability to compete — as it itself recognized.

Ultimately, the US of A is a large island, separate from the rest of the world geographically.

Its insularity, in some ways similar to that of America’s English forebears, is psychological too. Only Americans are really human; the rest of the world are “other”.  The British didn’t care when millions of brown people starved as a result of actions. The Americans don’t care about the 20 million people who they have killed since 1945.

By contrast, Eurasia cannot avoid existential facts – it is one huge land mass with crowded cultures and countries, different peoples constantly rubbing shoulders.

Here, wars are existential. And, propaganda is not misunderstood as information but in terms of its jingoistic content -- like flags or anthems, part of national mythologies, a rallying cry for the mob.

The Chinese and the Russians remember the USSR and Mao: they do not reflexively believe what the government says, as Americans tend to do.   

Putin and Xi have to keep their word.  They have to deliver real world benefits.  They have to continually demonstrate they care—above and beyond official rhetoric. 

They must demonstrate personal integrity and earn the trust of peoples not predisposed to trust governments.  If they don’t, they will fall as surely as the Soviet regime did or as all order did in China during the Cultural Revolution.

The Empire of Lies

While for Russians, your word is your bond, for the US, it is just an opening gambit. And there is always the fine print. Trust is litigated.

No nation in history, including the Third Reich, has been so deceptive nor has broken so many agreements willy-nilly, flouting international law and the principles of justice — assuming it can control facts abroad as it controls information through propaganda and manipulation of the media.

The US always needs an enemy but its real enemy is the Truth.

Which is why the USA must try to destroy whistleblowers like Assange or Manning, or even the unfortunate computer repair guy who exposed Hunter Biden’s secrets. It is why Putin and Xi are demonized. It is why the self-proclaimed Land of Liberty supports Ukrainian Nazis. It is why the American people have become one, very large, lynch mob urging on racists and fascists.  

It is why the US is not real—but virtual.

And the American “people” have become extensions of their TVs and smartphones, conditioned by the social media and the entertainment industry to willingly suspend disbelief to accept any official narrative that fits the decor of the boxes in which they live.

Just about every TV series tends to drop in the ratings over time as people get tired of it and it seems less compelling. In this respect “the Ukraine Story” is a one season mini-series. How long its sponsors, the CIA, US State Department, and congressional parasites will support it is unsure.   As time goes on fewer and fewer trust the media. And you have to bring in Bono

Despite celebrity endorsements, the ratings are dropping down, down, down.

By contrast, the Russians have been pretty boring, although honest. Compare the briefings of the Russian MoD with what you read in the NYT and WaPo or see on the BBC. The Russians obviously don’t tell everything — but they don’t parade lies as facts, as Western media do. They are too smart for that.   

That said, both the NYT and WaPo are beginning to hedge their narratives. As I said, the truth leaks.

Putin was trained to serve, not so much the State, but his and which is why his people support him in a way that Americans disbelieve.  Think of those remarkable 5-hour phone-in press conferences.  What American president would dare that?

Boyd knew “war” is not just guns; Putin does too:  he feels that cultures have souls, as do people. So now his “operation” is being carried out to win the soul of the Ukraine, although perhaps not of Galicia. It’s slow – but sure.

That’s the mental and moral “war”.   

The Banderites are finished.  

Biden is finished. The Democrats, too, if they lose congress.

The dollar is finished.

The EU is finished.

Beyond that, the “United” States of America is finished, “United” no longer.  It has lost its soul.

 

Julian Macfarlane

 Canadian media analyst / writer. 40 years in Japan. Has worked for every major Japanese company including Toyota as media advisor the middle east. More than 200 articles on political events and propaganda. Author of "Ageing Young: You're Never Too Old To Rock 'n Roll", a seminal study of evolutionary psychology.  https://julianmacfarlane.substack.com/