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"It. Must. Not. Fail"
Elefants, Tigers and Panthers, oh my!
By spring time 1943 das Dritten Reiches was in a hexen kessel of scary dimensions. In the last year Great Satan and Great Britain had driven the vaunted Afrika Korps into extinction, sortee'd several "Thousand Bomber Raids" that carpetly xformed ancient Deutsch cities into flaming craters, Battle for the Atlantic was looking kinda iffy and worst of all - the encirclement, destruction and ultimate surrender of wehrmacht's nearly 1 million (550K to 900K - depending on the source) combat truppen of vPaulus' 6th army at Stalingrad.
Despite the ferociously fearful mauling wehrmacht took on the Volga,
Deutschland recovered and thanks to savage fighting hooked up with vManstein's famous back hand b slap, the ultimate Aryans retook Kharkov and inflicted amazingly horrific losses on the best Red Army could juggernaut.
As spring's thawing muddy rasputitsa sunk in - both sides frantically roused themselves out of exhaustion and prepped for the coming summer campaign.
The forced reinstatement of the forced retired "Klotzen, nicht kleckern" cat - the newly minted Generalinspekteur der Panzertruppen tripped out on a ruthlessly relentless reinvigoration of the panzer franchise by blitzing factories, design firms, unit creation/rebuilding ubungsplatzes and shooting ranges in a new blitz of genius born of desperation.
Even Luftwaffe got all panzer happy - sexing up something something sturzkampfflugzeug Stuka
with dual 37mm rapid fire cannons and deploying Henschelicious Hs-129
STAVKA knew their bulging bulge in the lines around Kursk would prob be the spot the hated NSDAPers would schwerpunkt in the coming months and conscripted anyone they could get their hands on to erect a formidable deep defensive belt - 500 miles of barb wire, over a million anti ppl and anti panzer mines remixed in a web of of ditches, scarps, counter-scarps, hedgehogs, roadblocks, minefields, fixed artillery impact areas, bunkers and a myriad of panzer obstructions, traps and general purpose nastiness on a colossal scale. Plus Comrade Stalin had spy sources at the highest levels of enemy command.
Sev months of infighting at OKH/OKW bout doing another Kharkov backhand - allowing Red Army to attack first, roll with flow and launch a crushing counter attack - or doing the fourplay forehand pre emptive attack - conterminously coalesced with quality control/production probs with the Panther (her 1st production engines enjoyed bursting into flames at the most inopportune moments), stubborn refusal of the sturmgeschutz to die on the vine and manpower in general held up Operation Zitadelle for months.
Purveyors of pre emption won out and on 5 July Germany attacked. The southern front of Zitadelle featured a combat rock star line up of 3rd Reich's finest panzerteers - all rebuilt, rearmed and reconstituted to Generalinspekteur specs - Großdeutschland, 3rd, 6th, 7th, 9th and 11th Panzer divisions and the newly created II Waffen Ss Panzer Korps
Featuring the lavishly equipped and fully crunk Ss Panzer Grenadier divisions of Liebstandarte, Das Reich and Totenkopf - vManstein formed 'Panzerkeil" - an uparmored wedge with Tigers at the tip, Panthers and Mk IV's fanning out behind with a creamy centre of inf armed with automatic weapons, mortar mounted or SP gunned SdKfz looking thingies with the base built of heavily armed panzergrenadiers in tracked vehics.
In contrast Zitadelle's northern commander Model used Montgomery's El Alamein idea of using inf to poke holes for the panzers to exploit - with disastrous results for his 9th Army.
These panzerkeil wedges were designed to crack open tender, sensitive portions of the southern defensive perimeters, break free and fan out for a fun fast trek like France 1940.
And they did. Chopping through an immense junkyard of trashed Soviet material, General Hausser's Feldpolizei Po Po hauled off columns of dazed and defeated Russian POWs, the final breakthrough was at hand on the morning of 12 July when II Ss breached Psel river - the last obstacle to Kursk - and collided with the Russian armored reserves at a place called Prokhorovka.
For over 8 hours this enormous armored brawl raged unabated, slashing the orchards and churning the lush, green cornfields of a few square miles of upper Donetz river valley into a blackened inferno of exploding armor, wrecked burning vehicles and charred corpses - drenched intermittantly by downpours from violent thunderstorms.
The controversial climax of Zitadelle involving over 2K panzers - as the largest panzer battle in history - has acquired mythic stats - heroic Russian stories of Russians ramming Deutsch Tigers, the 3 premier Waffen Ss fighting shoulder to shoulder, death ride of the panzers and a glorious Soviet victory suffer from hard facts as Prokhorovka gets re examined.
"...Closer study of the losses of each type of tank reveals that the corps lost about 70 tanks on July 12. In contrast, Soviet tank losses, long assumed to be moderate, were actually catastrophic.
"...In 1984, a history of the Fifth Guards Tank Army written by Rotmistrov himself revealed that on July 13 the army lost 400 tanks to repairable damage. He gave no figure for tanks that were destroyed or not available for salvage.
"...Evidence suggests that there were hundreds of additional Soviet tanks lost. Several German accounts mention that Hausser had to use chalk to mark and count the huge jumble of 93 knocked-out Soviet tanks in the Leibstandarte sector alone. Soviet sources say the tank strength of the army on July 13 was 150 to 200, a loss of about 650 tanks.
Germany's Lost Victories indeed, nicht wahr?
Regardless of appearance - Deutschland lost the initiative and despite desperate counters like Zhitomer, Totenkopf's amazingly tenacious blunting blow outside Warzawa or Unternehmen Frühlingserwachen, never again held the initiative. Red Army did. And they never let it go until 3rd Reich died kicking and screaming.
And it happened today - at Prokhorovka.
Pic - "Backhand or the forehand?"courtesy of Uncle Theo
Since the new millennium and the Global War against you know whatism, savvy cats in Great Satan and especial bits of the Woman Worshipping West have came to look all down upon one of the most risible fakebelieve nation/states (of sorts) to get all crunk up since Great Britain retired from Imperium to focus on upgrading rock n roll to rock and then pioneer heavy metal.
The ever LOLable Land of the Pure is oft times LOL"d as an illiterate land of anti X's, girl haters, and terrorist loving cats who are often tormented by enabling creepy non state actor outers.
And it cuts both ways - Pakistan sees Great Satan as a K"Ran burning, dreamy blashphemy crusading X loving interventionist, nat'l sovereignity dissing drone dripping busy body that is totally queering the mix on righteous m"Hammedist superiority.
Fair enough!
Hold up tho - Roughly three-in-four Pakistanis (74%) consider Great Satan an enemy, up from 69% last year and 64% three years ago.
Why cause?
Who cares!
Is The Great Satan - Land of the Pure Hook Up coming unglued?
These statistics speak volumes about the true state of relations between Great Satan and her most troublesome South Asian partner. So does Pakistan's own view of its geopolitical position. In the latest Pew poll, only 45 percent of respondents said it was important to improve ties with the U.S.-down from the 60 percent that held such a view just last year. Pakistan's population, in other words, is increasingly thinking beyond partnership with the United States.
This is perhaps most pronounced on the counterterrorism front. Back in 2009, 72 percent of Pakistanis supported U.S. financial and humanitarian support for their government's fight against Islamic extremists, and 63 percent supported American aid on intelligence and logistical matters as well. Today, by contrast, only half of all Pakistanis approve of U.S. economic and humanitarian aid, and just a third (37 percent) supports intel sharing and coordination.
As for military assistance, the numbers are even worse. Counterterrorism combat operations (carried out through special forces deployments or-increasingly-via drone strikes) have never been popular with Pakistanis, who have tended to view them as an unacceptable encroachment on their national sovereignty. When surveyed by Pew in 2010, less than a quarter (23 percent) of those polled supported such forceful intervention. And a series of Coalition missteps over the past two years has soured the Pakistani public on U.S. military action still further.
This includes a tragic November 2011 operation by NATO forces in northwest Pakistan that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead, precipitating a fundamental political rupture and causing the country to close its borders to the Coalition. Ill-will still prevails; less than a fifth of Pakistanis (17 percent) now support U.S. military operations on their soil, despite the persistence of Islamic extremists in their country's unruly border regions.
At least some policymakers in Washington still hold out hope that Islamabad might come around. In time, the thinking goes, Pakistan will resume its role as a critical transport corridor for materiel to the Coalition in Afghanistan, and step up cooperation with the West against Islamist militancy.
The numbers, however, suggest that Pakistan's divorce from the U.S. isn't fleeting, or tactical. Rather, it reflects a slow but building sea change in Pakistani strategic direction.
That direction isn't necessarily "Slamist; the same Pew center poll found 55 percent of respondents to view al-Qaeda unfavorably (the same percentage as in 2011), and largely-negative attitudes toward the Taliban and its various factions to be more or less unchanged from previous years. China, by contrast, is seen by 90 percent of Pakistanis as an ally, particularly against regional rival India.
That's not good news for Washington, which currently could benefit from assistance - or at least political support - from Islamabad on a number of key strategic and security fronts. But, with an American disengagement from the War on Terror's first front now on the horizon, it's not too early for policymakers inside the Beltway to begin contemplating what a "post-Afghanistan" relationship with Pakistan might look like.
Clearly, the Pakistanis themselves are already doing so.
Pic - "Ready To Die!!"
As Collectivist China does her on and off again rowdy regional repercussin" the idea (and the boring assetted counter idea) pops up just as often about the League of Hot! Democrazies getting all amped up beyond repair on the diplopolititary front.
Pacifically, SoKo and Nippon.
It’s difficult to balance forces, though, without considering Japan, a commercial colossus that everyone knows could turn into a military power any time from within a few years to a few decades from now. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has managed to hold revanchist Japanese military aims in check while the Japanese pursued economic success.
The rise of China, however, poses a threat that Japanese militarists believe requires a response. Would a military build-up be what’s needed to jumpstart the stagnating Japanese economy?
South Korea and Japan might share a common cause considering China’s support for North Korea and the North’s hostile attitude toward the South. Great Satan supports both South Korea and Japan in military alliances that would seem to guarantee trilateral cooperation. So, why not support a super-alliance binding all three against North Korea and China?
The question seems so deceptively logical that I’ve heard experts who should know better about broaching the idea in gatherings of people who can’t seem to see why it wouldn’t work. For one thing, right off, no one can deny that such an alliance would strike others in the region as a deliberate effort to incite trouble.
How would China respond to a sense that these three powers, laden with the latest weaponry and getting stronger all the time, were ganging up on them? Could there be any better reason for the Chinese to respond by a massive buildup of its own? And what would China do to discourage North Korea from its own unpredictable military adventures if the Chinese had reason to fear such a clear and deepening confrontation of forces in the region?
Then there’s the historic question of the era of Japanese colonialism and militarism. Those days may be long gone, but the memory lingers on. Fears of a Japanese renaissance as an aggressive imperial power won’t go away. Under the circumstances, it’s easy to understand widespread worries in South Korea about the negative implications of a pact under which Japan and South Korea would exchange military intelligence information.
Pic - "Will the mere fact of democracies working together produce a new cold war? That is unduly alarmist. Yet, ideological competition is already under way!"
"See, the 1st thing is to, like, do no harm - right?"
The above mentioned mentionable is often heard in regards to dating, doctoring, playing doctor and diplopolititary interventions.
Like Syria.
As best understood, one of the caveating caveats 'bout chucking Syria's illegit Allawicious thuggocratic autocrazy led by the nearly 2 metre tall (wookie sized) Dr General President For Life Bashar al Assad on the same old wreck pile as Iraqi Ba"Athism, kamikazees and Waffen Ss - is ye olde "sump much worse could get all raised up."
Like You Know Whatism and itists.
In Syria, jihadists would be aided by logistical familiarity with the terrain and customs; at the beginning of summer, one is always struck by the throngs of young Saudi, Kuwaiti, and other Gulf males—usually the best regional recruiting pool for jihadists—patiently waiting for their passports to be stamped at Syrian overland border points
Jihadists have been managing and carrying out logistical operations in Syria for years, constructing networks of safe houses and figuring out which Syrian security officers can be bribed. While this know-how was devoted to sustaining the jihad in Iraq, it could easily be flipped towards a Syrian focus.
Should the jihadists take over Syria, they would disrupt the
strategic balance that Great Satan was trying to forge across the Middle East by giving the jihadists a base in the heart of the region,
within striking distance of Little Satan.
If the jihadists are not a spent force, and if they choose to concentrate their efforts on Syria, then it stands to reason that the Syrian regime may face a very grave challenge to its survival.
Money shot
The idea that a security regime can tether down the wild beast of jihadism misses the technological, financial, and recruiting innovations that have freed jihadists to a large extent from their past reliance on state sponsors. This newfound confidence accentuates the unwillingness of the “vanguard” to submit to any master beyond its revolutionary passions.
"Slamists arguing for a jihad in Syria believe that they have hit the trifecta: In the Syrian regime, they have an enemy that is at once tyrannical, secular, and heretical.
Which trigger pulls the trigger on Commonwealth Russia"s love affair with Bashar Bay bee - the hot hook up stems from Mockba’s hot desire to get all enriched from selling weaponry to the regime and keep her naval base at Tartus, right?
Nyet Tovarisch!!
These speculations are superficial and misguided. The real reason that Russia is resisting strong internat"al action against the Assad regime is that it fears the spread of you know what radicalism and the erosion of her superpower status in a world where Western nations are increasingly undertaking unilateral military interventions.
Since 2005, Russian defense contracts with Syria have amounted to only about $5.5 billion — mostly to modernize Syria’s air force and air defenses. And although Syria had been making its scheduled payments in a fairly timely manner, many contracts were delayed by Russia for political reasons. A contract for four MiG-31E fighter planes was annulled altogether. And recently it became known that Russia had actually halted the planned delivery of S-300 mobile antiaircraft missile systems to Syria.
To put it plainly, arms sales to Syria today do not have any significance for Russia from either a commercial or a military-technological standpoint, and Syria isn’t an especially important partner in military-technological cooperation.
The Russian Navy’s logistical support facility at Tartus is similarly unimportant. It essentially amounts to two floating moorings, a couple of warehouses, a barracks and a few buildings. On shore, there are no more than 50 seamen. It can’t serve as a support base for deploying naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea, and even visits by Russian military ships are carried out more for demonstrative purposes than out of any real need to replenish supplies.
In Moscow, secular authoritarian governments are seen as the sole realistic alternative to Islamic dominance.
The continuing struggles in Arab countries are seen as a battle by those who wear neckties against those who do not wear them. Russians have long suffered from terrorism and extremism at the hands of Islamists in the northern Caucasus, and they are therefore firmly on the side of those who wear neckties.
Pic - "Autocracies seek to make the world safe for other autocracies as well. Their so-called respect for other nations' sovereignty and policy of noninterference sits well with lesser dictatorships and they prefer to do biz w/each other"
WoW - the Watchers Council - it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.
Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers.
Thusly sans further adieu (or a don"t)
Council Winners
Non-Council Winners
See you next week! And don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter
Nakbah!!
Beleaf it or don"t - the most literate Arabs ever in World History (reckon Little Satan should get blamed for that too? LOL) have suicide bombed their own baby democrazies (your choice HAMAS Strip or Wester Bank) into something something resembling most of the failed nation/states in Arab League.
Autocrazy
A gov where like one cat has uncontrolled or unlimited authority over others;monarch or unelected cats.
Check the same cats 5 years on who dreamed up the Panty Police!
A focus on the legal and educational fields shows a pattern of short-term accomplishments married to a worrying long-term trajectory. In its governing project, Hamas has succeeded to a degree, though progress has been slow. Civil society in Gaza continues to function, but in a context that places limits on political activity and opposition. Gaza now has a fully functional if imperfect judicial structure and an improvised system that can draft a modest amount of narrow legislation. And the Palestinians’ education system not only has been revived but it is one of the few quiet areas of coordination with the West Bank.
Yet, these accomplishments are based on an authoritarian foundation. Much of Hamas’s you know what agenda has been put on hold for now, but the political system is completely bereft of any mechanisms of accountability. The media and domestic NGOs are carefully controlled. Opposition parties can do what they like privately, but they remain restricted in what they can do openly or publicly. And the process of rebuilding the legal system has sometimes enabled and rarely obstructed the authoritarian characteristics of Gaza governance.
Entrenching authoritarianism offers Palestinians few options. A spate of unity agreements between the West Bank and Gaza—most recently a May 2012 accord—cannot obscure the reality that real steps toward unity have not been taken. There is no easy route out of Palestine’s plight, but it is difficult to imagine much change without some pressure from below. And that is worrying, since elections are very difficult to imagine at present. As long as Gazans—and all Palestinians—remain voiceless in their own affairs, it is difficult to see any path forward.
Since 2007, the West Bank and Gaza have come under what appear to be sharply different forms of rule. Gaza’s Islamist government has a counterpart in the West Bank that is an uneasy mix of technocratic rule under Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and nationalist Fatah party rule under President Mahmoud Abbas.
For all the differences in detail, and perhaps in style, there is a marked parallelism between Gaza and what is emerging in the West Bank. In both places, Palestine seems to be entrenching a form of politics that has provoked uprisings elsewhere in the region. An Egyptian from the Mubarak years might find some eerie similarities in either half of the Palestinian polity. Even the resigned sarcasm of the inhabitants harkens to the Egypt of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Pic - "Neo Nakbah!"
Dongfeng!
Ebberdobby knows Collectivist China"s Naughtical Nautiness has been getting rowdy with her territorial sea claims - yet could events deliver one heck of a hello to reshape the face of Asia?
This spat over the Vietnam Maritime Law is merely one in a long line of conflicts between China and Vietnam. Vietnam’s origins are rooted in China’s history and its history is marred by periods of feudal strife, colonial oppression, and civil war. Although the ruling parties of each country fly the flag of Communism, at times necessary allies and enemies, there is little love lost between them.
Although wars have been fought between the two, the last to be fought between China and an independent Vietnam was the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, sparked largely by Vietnam’s invasion and overthrow of the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia a month earlier.
The Sino-Vietnamese War saw Chinese forces invade parts of northern Vietnam, ultimately transforming into a border war between the two countries. Vietnam, provided with intelligence from the Soviet Union (an ally of Vietnam and opponent of China), was able to react accordingly and keep the war from spreading farther south. Casualties were in the thousands and little had changed by the war’s end a month later. Both sides would claim victory, although small skirmishes continued well into the 1980s.
Deng Xiaoping’s assertion that it would teach Vietnam a lesson failed in its goal of sacking Hanoi, but it did reinforce hostilities between the two neighbors. Said hostilities lessened during the 1990s, but the Spratly and Paracel disputes continue to plague both nations.
China is clearly capable of carrying out similarly limited military operations against Vietnam. Since 1979, China has not only grown economically; it has also taken steps to improve its military capabilities. It is no longer a predominantly peasant nation but a modernizing state. That China could “teach Vietnam a lesson” is not the question. The question is whether China will impart said lesson.
Military force, however, is a brutish and costly approach to resolving matters better handled diplomatically and/or economically. Today, China has in its arsenal of responses the ability to impose its will economically. In 1979, China’s attempt to teach Vietnam a lesson involved sending soldiers across the border. In 2012 and beyond, one can assume that China might simply counter any perceived Vietnamese intransigence via threat of economic consequences. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that China could absorb Vietnam economically. No need for guns when one’s opponent could simply buy one out.
Beyond international perception of China, Beijing must also contend with the United States, which will not sit idly by should war come about. The US is unlikely to meet China openly on the battlefield; however, it would be foolish to assume that they will do nothing. It is quite possible that the US would fulfill the expected role of the Soviet Union during 1979 and perhaps more. American support can come in the form of diplomatic, economic, and intelligence assistance, leaving direct assistance to pro-American agents inside Vietnam.
Pic - "South China Sea dispute offers Great Satan a golden opportunity to come back to Asia, talk about friendship, energy deals and arms sales."
