The Combat Capacity of Russian Soldiers in Ukraine.

Background.

The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army was victorious in the Civil War over the Russian White Armies. These were supported to a greater or lesser extent in it by the European Powers, the United States and Japan. Already then, the Soviet Politburo set its eyes on Europe, in order to spread the World Revolution. In this, the internationalist ideas of Leon Trotsky had a decisive role.

Leon Trotsky

To do this, General Mikhail Tukhachevsky would attack the recent Republic of Poland with his armed Eurasian Hordes. And he would win over the bourgeois Republic. Thanks to the fact that the Polish peasants would «fervently» join the socialist liberation offered by the Red Armies.

The imperialist attack on Poland.

The Reds reached the Warsaw Front, trying to overwhelm it from the nort.

General Mikhail Tukhachevsky, left, with other Senior Commanders of the Red Army

There, Marshal Josef Pilsudski, hero of the Liberation of Poland in World War I, toured his brigades and divisions. Raising and consolidating the combat morale of its forces and the identity of the Polish Nation, against communist Russian Imperialism.

And, he prepared with his General Staff and the commanders of his large units an in-depth mobile defense. Against the frontal and massive attacks of the enemy.

From Kyiv, about 500 km from the Front, Tukhachevsky encouraged his own, treating their hordes as despots, aided by their political commissars. And he directed his military operations on the maps of the situation of the war in his Command Post. That it was updated by unverified information from his large units at the Front.

The Operational Caedes.

Tukhachevsky had also tightened his Logistic Lines to the maximum. He was engulfed, touching in his imagination the triumph at hand.

Although they ate from looting the ground they walked on. From their distant rear they needed weapons, ammunition, equipment, clothes, shoes, medicines, troops replacement, pack mules and the essential Russian «cars of the country».

And, as a Miracle emerged from the concentration of the attacker’s Errors and the defender’s Effective Parameters, the attacker found himself without friendly ground under his feet. Without the essential operational rear area. To rest, maneuver, fight and consolidate after specific fights. And, he had to back off miserably.

The Soviets in arms, not effective military, retreated to the borders of the USSR.

And, the revolutionary dream of crossing the Polish plains and invading Germany. And free Europe from the capitalist or imperialist system, this as the culmination of capitalist development. It dissipated like the smoke of the tobacco that the Soviet troops smoked.

Current situation.

This idiosyncrasy of the Slavic military of the West of the Urals continues to influence the operations, needs and mental characteristics of the military of the Russian Federation.

The discipline of the troops in the barracks is deplorable. Free time, laziness, inane or risqué talks abounds.

Heavy equipment maintenance is poor. Some writer calculated that, from his military experience, half the tanks in battle would soon stop working and would be short of fuel and spare parts.

The Russian army lacks in its essential structure the framework of a corps of non-commissioned officers specifically formed for the immediate direction of the troops and the satisfaction of their needs. That they know them as well as their mothers. And with extensive military knowing and training, empathy and leadership skills. Respected by the soldiers and which recognize that without them and without obeying them, their chances of survival on the battlefield are much less.

Consequences for immediate operations.

This may be an insurmountable obstacle to Putin‘s plans, which Gerasimov is trying to fulfill.

And it could not be surpassed by the mere concentration of the mediocrity of equipment and men in the Fronts.

The Will of Defense of a Society. 2nd Part.

(FINAL)

And the Strategy, the Operational Strategy and the Tactics, as Levels of its Military Actuation.

 

The Levels of Military Actuation.

The first level of activity in the defense of a society is called national strategy or, also, in a some antiquated form, great strategy. In it are included the economic and diplomatic resources of the State. As part of the resources of a nation to get his great strategics aims in a war.

Resultado de imagen de montesquieu  THE BARON OF MONTESQUIEU.

 

Military Strategy, or simply Strategy, in a great second level of activity, refers to the definition of the larger aims of a war, of an operations theater or of a campaign, including the distribution of the generally scanty military resources used to fulfill them.

Tactics refers to the ideal execution of the combats with an enemy, who opposes with armaments, to the achievement of our strategic aims.

Between strategy and tactics exists an essentially practical space of prominent activity, called the operational level or operational strategy. Its mission is to optimize tactics and the means available in a campaign and in the theater of operations. As such, it defines and conceptualizes the battles, marches, etc., both the military operations and its correct succession, according to those decisive aims. It provides the tactics and the decision, a transcendence far beyond of the pursuit and the tactical exploitation of success. That is to say, operational strategy employs tactics as an essential instrument, combining them to achieve the ultimate objectives to which they are orientated and dedicated to achieving, forming then part of its strategic nature.

 

Thus, the operational strategy defines its own aims in the theater or in the campaign of action, which are the incapacity and disorganization of the enemy by exploiting his strategic and operational vulnerabilities. The first is orientated to reducing the enemy’s combat capacity, seeking to functionally or positionaly disable it, while protecting own’s combat capacity. The second is get by occupying or destroying the enemy’s critical vulnerabilities in the operations zone.

Resultado de imagen de refinería de petróleo OIL REFINERY: SYMBOL OF THE ECONOMIC STRENGTH OF A MODERN SOCIETY.

 

The critics vulnerabilities of the enemy are those whose occupation or destruction produces his serious disorganization and/or the loss of his will of defense. They are those elements, characteristics, possessions that give sense to the fight that he maintains. Its loss instills inevitably in the enemy a sensation of hopelessness and a sense of uselessness in continuing the fight at those moments, except for accumulating more losses.

The critics vulnerabilities are different in each one of the levels of military action, although the effects produced in the superior levels are transmitted to the inferior ones.

A strategic critical vulnerability, handled capably by the Spaniards in century XVI during the conquest of America, was the capture of the great chief or emperor of the indigenous confederations of the great invaded countries (Moctezuma in Mexico, Atahualpa in Peru). But, once turned hostage, the symbolic representation of a leader of this type plummeted, because the social vitality of the community which he directed, demands his renovation, as if he had died.

In II World War, the occupation of the capital and the fall of the government were strategic critics vulnerabilities, to which was acceded through an operational strategy of mobile warfare: spring campaign of 1,940 in the Western Front. The same tried Hitler in 1941 in relation with Moscow in the East front. Probably in that total war, almost of extermination, its fall had not the political importance that was attributed to it. But Moscow constituted a great hub, a railway communications center vital for all the U.R.S.S. at the west of the Urales and, in this sense, it had been a critical operational vulnerability.

To achieve these strategic intermediate aims, the operational level has some specific operational means that are the intelligence, the imbalance and the incapacity of the enemy, the time or speed of the operations and combats, the logistic organization and his physical support or line of supplies and the correct sense of the own command.

It uses these means to drive and to use ideally (and without squandering) the tactical-operational means at his disposition.

Resultado de imagen de reuniones sindicales grandes  THE NATIONAL MORAL FLOURISHES IN ALL THE PLACES OF SOCIAL COEXISTENCE.

These are:

The ground transitability (in the whole geographical dimension of the nature of the areas, climate, station and hour of the day),

the combat capacity (military means made concrete in men, equipment, supports and combat vehicles) and the capacity of operational movement (transport of great and small tonnage, the supplies of all kinds and combustibles and the warehouses and accessible parks in the zone) owns available,

the freedom of action and the «favorable interfaces of action» with the enemy (that exist and that they can also be created always, by means of the extension or decrease of the «field of action» on that, as a tactical operational zoom, or by means of his change to another front sector or in the depth of the enemy zone). With these last 2 «systems» we can act always according to our criterion and interest and not simply react to the actions of the enemy.

This way, the mentioned «operational systems» realize the employment and the functioning of all the levels of the national defense. And they go from the conception and the great creation of aims, interests and available resources, received from the command and the nation, up to its practical final accomplishment. Involving in this also the necessary and the inevitable and imposed by the enemy, tactical employments of the military means, as stages for the ideal achievement of those commended aims.

THE END.

The Will of Defense of a Society.

And the Strategy, the Operational Strategy and the Tactics, as Levels of its Military Actuation

The Ideology or Concept and its Range.

The “will of defense” of a nation is its capacity to cause, create, develop and maintain defense forces. The strength of the defense forces, in turn, rely on the necessary support of the economy of the country and the diplomacy of the state. The will of defense is an expression of the will of being and the vital capacity, even biological, of a society. This concept overcomes and perfects the so called hybrid war or of V generation. That implies and supposes the employment of all his «orthodox and heterodox means of intervention» by the social belligerent group.

Resultado de imagen de GUERRA V generación  IMPRECISE ALLEGORY OF THE FIFTH GENERATION WAR.

 

As the term implies, will of defense is healthy, normal and sufficient when defense forces and the strength of the country’s economy and the quality of state leadership and diplomacy are proportional and adapted to the political objectives of society. These must also be adequate to the possible threats that the country may have to oppose, both within and out the country, within its geopolitical region or other sources of threat. This capacity and its performance in different situations stems from a correct “national moral”.

The will of defense is shaped normally in the Armed Forces, in its capacity of specific instruments of the defense function. The resources of the Armed Forces include the human resources, psychological and intellectual resources and material resources. The basis for the will of defense, the source from which these resources flow is the society itself.

At the level of human resources, troops must have suitable training, the combat readiness and a certain esprit de corps. Human resources are shaped by doctrine, military direction and military moral. So, they can carry out the military operations withstanding the effort and the wear of them, while maintaining their conviction in the missions to which they are assigned.

Resultado de imagen de fuerzas armadas

Materials resources must support the military theory of the Armed Forces and have the necessary technological sophistication to serve the military’s objectives. They include the weapon systems and all the military hardware. All of these resources flow from a society that provides, maintains and nourishes them.

Which is operational about this natural phenomenon of the society’s capacity of defense?

In a modern society, the chain of transmission of the popular will to the Armed Forces, passes through a series of intermediate sociological gears of authorities and institutions. In them, crystallize and fulfill the popular will, albeit with all the shades, errors and deviations, derived from the degree of imperfection of society’s institutional system and of some authorities.

Resultado de imagen de misiles nucleares CHINESE INTERCONTINENTAL DF-41 MISSILES.

 

This implies that a direct military attack on the civil populace, does not debilitate the will of defense already shaped within its Armed Forces. So, military action is better focused on undermining the will of defense of the enemy armies, not on the society from which it springs.

To do this, the immediate goal would be the enemy’s Armed Forces, followed by the political system of the enemy’s country including its political objectives, plans, and alliances, as well as its military and auxiliary industries. Only finally would the focus of attack or pressure be on civilians of the enemy country.

The civil population, which is not intrinsically organized but is dominated by the ideological and institutional apparatus of the state, is capable of absorbing tremendous military blows. Examples of this are the bombing raids that Germany and North Vietnam endured for years. Ultimately, only the invasion of Germany forced its surrender. There is also the case of Iraq which was submitted to a kind of military siege in which its people were impoverished. Still, the Iraqi regime was even stronger than at the end of the allied invasion in the winter of l991, having suppressed internal opposition from Shiites and Kurds and having attracted the support or admiration of its resistance in the Arab world. Despite the first war against Iraq and the following siege, Iraqi’s did not rise against their political institutions and the content and expression of Iraq’s national will of defense was not altered. In the most radical case of a nuclear war, great civilian losses would occur initially, yet if the Armed Forces remained relatively intact due to defensive deployment and protection measures, it could prolong the defense of its country and even win.

This brings us to time as the environment in which the will of defense is expressed, and whose “effective factor” is “national moral”.

In effect, the will of defense is constructed in the time. And to destroy it requires actions within time. Those engaged in insurrection come to understand this point well. That a prolonged war directed at the source of the will of defense, the country’s people, will in effect attack the country’s national moral.

The National Moral, source of the Will of Defense.

The “national moral” is the collective conviction of how best to live by following historically-proven trends of peace, progress, own satisfaction, service and justice. This certainty is assumed by a society as its own vision, or conception of its destiny.

When individuals or groups do not subscribe this vision, or when they pervert it, the quality of national moral can deteriorates and often produces messianism. But, without illusion and enthusiasm, societies cannot achieve or create beneficial enterprises. Enthusiasm is a force of spirit, which conquers moral and ideological entropy (that is inevitably generated in societies), enlightened by a «reasonable illusion«.

Resultado de imagen de lideres mundiales THE DOCTRINE OF XI JINPING «illuminating» Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. IT WAS INCLUDED IN THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY. ONLY MAO AND DENG XIAOPING DESERVED SUCH AN HONOR.

 

When leaders also are in tune with the right social trend, and with the wishes of their people, a moral community is established between leaders and their people, that harmonizes and promotes national and social feelings. This process is the origin and creator of the national moral of societies and is at a different qualitative level than that of purely biased, ethnically-based or group-based interests.

There is an ideological creation from the people and to the people, which reason is that it most be in favor the people. Still, this process remains subject to deviations and historical aberrations.

The process of creating the national moral are positive when leaders act collectively with honesty and inspire their people to follow «correct ways» of living, within all the possible ways of living available to them. This implies and demands a certain ideological control on the part of the state’s leadership, which is one of its main functions. Abuses of this responsibility are best represented by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Mr. Goebbels; the political deputies and the party structure for the proletarian dictatorship with Stalin, etc.

Resultado de imagen de winston churchill

The natural organs for forming and transmitting the “national moral” are far removed from official propaganda offices. The reason is that the natural organs that generate national moral are found in the nuclei of society’s collective action and in its natural and institutional leaders. That is to say, the spaces in which national moral is created are homes, schools, churches, political parties, unions, working centers, and associations in general, etc.

After the battle of England, Churchill said that the future generations would say that «that one was our more glorious hour». This was possible thanks to an unbreakable social discipline, which was not ensuing from the study of manuals of civic education, but of the follow-up of a model spread by infinity of personal testimonies. The diffusion of the moral model of the citizen owed in a great extent to the educational labor of the Anglican Church.

The own Montesquieu admitted that the republican virtues only existed in the tales of the antiquity. This way, they were attractive to a leader minority, but his adoption by the citizens could not be done by legal or constitutional mandate. The moral theoretically proposed values, were seen as something artificial and remote. Without real connection with a practical and known moral code, highlighted with alive examples that could be follow.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

 

Reflections about Spain and Catalonia.

Introduction.

The nation is one and unique by essence. And it arises from the commitment of the citizens to live in community. And it is kept and preserves in the defense of this union, which is loved, against his enemies of inside and outside. A nation is provided with one social politics selfconsciousness. And collaborate to create and support it the history, the tradition and the customs, and the own language and moral sense. And contribute secondly to it the own ethnia and the territory, that not always exist, specially the first one. This way, the territory of a country is not a nation. Nor it is not the inarticulate population of a territory under an only one government.

Resultado de imagen de nacion fuerte «The Nation is stronger with the unity of his sons and the members of the families than by the military power».

Though the territory that occupies is necessary to give a nation the possibility of supporting a social administrative structure, that guarantees the exercise of his sovereignty. In spite of the «civilized» current times, all we know the problems and the discomforts that suffers the Kurdish people, deprived of a national own territory and «distributed» between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. One of the essential problems of the Kurds is that they form a part of despotic countries and, even, ethnically exclusive. This way, in these countries, they are considered to be citizens of secondclass, different, and, even, potentially dangerous, on having been always national minorities. But, endowed with a strong social cultural identity, which prevents his absorption by the rest of the national populations to whom they belong.

In a nation fit several not antagonists ethnias. Because his base is the life together conviviality, the respect and the rights and duties for all. And so long as they love this «harmonic set» of persons and his well-being, peace and jointly progress destinies.

When the nation is loved by his components and there exists in them the desire to serve and defend her in community, the concept of the motherland appears. Both ideas are interrelated essentially. And, the absence of the patriotism or the shame to practise it by members of a «social political community», leads to the defenselessness and the dismemberment of his nation, in major or minor degree. Being formed then «groups of associate individuals» with dissolvent ideas and interests of the naional group.

Resultado de imagen de fuerzas armadas símbolo patriotismo GUARANTOR OF THE UNITY AND SYMBOL OF THE PATRIOTISM.

It is not of surprising that the Defense Forces of a nation are, as institutions and in his members, which hoist, teach and practise the patriotism, as one of his essential virtues. Because it is possible only to die for what is loved. The Defense Forces of a nation are the specialized set of the «nationals or patriots» for the belligerent and complete Defense of his «national country«.

The common historical flow of live in unity, progress and peace.

In the XIVth and XVth century, the Castilian turns into the language of the State, entering in struggle with the educated Latin, to which it displaces. The «toledan dialect» will contribute the linguistic procedure to the Castilian. The Castilian prose spreads and puts the finished touches in the extensive literature of the High Middle Age. The advance of the Reconquest in the whole Andalusian territory, with his 4 small kingdoms of culture and Islamic religion, drived by the «unevenness in the centrifugal impulse» of the Christians, incorporated numerous words of Arabic root into the Castilian. Following a process of enrichment and idiomatic definition, progressive and extensive, similar to the already seen in previous stages. There appears Antonio Nebrija’s Grammar, which defines the new Spanish language.

During the 16th century, the Castilian, which happens to be the Spanish, turns into universal language. The Spanish is taking the role of literary language of the whole Spanish nation. Aragon, Valencia, Majorca, Catalonia and Navarre (incorporated in Castile in 1512), will keep an administrative autonomies tied to the Crown of Spain. The Spanish presence in Europe, for his character of great world power, and his expansion in the Americas, take to the incorporation in the Spanish of numerous European and indigenous words.In this final epoch, the Spanish acquires the essential of his current structure.

Reconstrucción del primer estandarte de España. /Hugo Vázquez Bravo y Ramón Vega Piniella. A reconstruction of the first known Spanish national flag carried by Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the Great Captain, in Naples.

In this multiethnic and polycultural Nation that emerges with an immense vital force, all the Hispanic peoples made themselves big. In the 16th century all the inhabitants wanted to belong and to follow the paths of the Spains. Nation that arose in the desire of the royal subjects to coexist in her. And that was kept with his commitment to defend her in his concept and integrity.

There were not easy for Catalonia and Spain the times of Philip IV and the Count Duke of Olivares, Gaspar of Guzman, the favorite minister of the king from 1621. This had proposed to reform and stimulate the idea of Spain in the whole Kingdom and to recreate the Empire of Philip II. Spain had an enormous and long task ahead. But the capacities and the means were not at the needed height.

Philip IV was an apathetic and pusillanumous person. The program hit with a conformist and slow bureaucracy, called to realize it, and with the national oligarchies, called to follow it. Spain had wars and armed conflicts in all the Western Europe: in Germany, France, the Netherlands or Flanders, Italy and in the east and west parts of Spain. The soldiers, not always with good controls, were not fighting well. The Thirty Years War was continuing and in France, the cardinal Richelieu was arising as intelligent, tough and shrewd enemy of Spain.

The revolts of 1640 in Catalonia and Portugal (in December, the uprising of his oligarchies led to his final separation of Spain) were disastrous for the plans of Olivares. The revolt and Catalan secession or «war of the peasants» extended until 1652. It developed with the reforms of the Count Duke, to distribute and confirm the efforts of the peninsular regions in favor of the common interest. Till then, Castile had paid in a disproportionate way the expenses of the external commitments of the Habsburgs. The immediate reason of the rejection to these plans was that the Catalan oligarchy saw them as a threat to his historical freedoms. That actually were an administrative privileges of the medioevo, centred on that they forbid the Catalan troops to serve out of the Principality.

Resultado de imagen de 1640 rebelión Cataluña The beginning of the «Peasants Revolt» on the Corpus Day.

The frictions between the population and the exiguous forces quartered in Barcelona took to the raising of June, 7 (day of the Corpus Christi), that was generalized and extended by the whole Catalonia. This derived in a revolution of the poor and peasants against the nobles and the rich ones or Catalan oligarchy. Soon, this one recovered part of the control and asked for help and protection to France. Richelieu did not lose the opportunity to debilitate Spain and supported the seditious.

But, the Frenchmen, with his protectorate, made themselves immediately more onerous and greedy for the Catalans that Spain. For example, flooding the region of French highly rival products. This way, the Catalan oligarchy, which without a few clear and pondered aims, proposed to damage the Spanish Empire, harmed, with his senseless action and without the minor consideration, the Catalan people and his Principality. The cooling of the shock with France and the end of the Thirty Years War, allowed to send a Hispanic army who occupied easily Barcelona, in 1651.

In the Succession War of Spain of 1714, Catalonia fighting close to Spain, supported the Habsburg candidate, who was the dynastic line of succession. If was reigning the Borbon, of the royal French dynasty, a new dynasty was accepted and imposed in the royal Spanish throne. This would join us to France for temporal «family agreements», which not always would be favorable or neutral for the Spanish nation. We have the case of Carlos III, with very useful prime ministers for the Kingdom and with a personal behavior that, for discreet, was good. Which, before, when he was king of Naples, was humiliated by the Royal Navy. And that immediately of ascending to the throne, established a family agreement with France, which took us in 1763 to an unnecessary and bad war with England.

Gained the civil war by Philip V, whose troops had access by our ground borders, Catalonia was occupied by his troops. But, again, Catalonia received the treatment that his importance was deserving in the Spanish nation. And, prompt, the Decrees of New Plant and other administrative dispositions were favoring it in the flow of life of the Hispanic peoples.

Resultado de imagen de 1714 Cataluña lucha contra Borbones Catalonia fights in 1714 for the dynastic continuity in Spain.

The Fathers of the Motherland are not his owners.

To believe themselves is a common perception of the despots and «modern national liberators«. It has his origin in the conduct of the satraps and absolute ancient monarches. And it is reinforced furthermore when, as in the Islam, the religion consolidates and sustains also the political power that they exercise.

The dynastic corruption of the Pujol family, implicitly accepted by his followers and extras, for being the visible promoter of the modern «Catalan sovereignty», is one of the parasitic ivies that took possesion of the Catalan public moneys.

The commissions of even more than the famous 3% indicated by Pascual Maragall in the Parlament, gathered methodically by Convergence and Union, the party of the Catalan bourgeoises, has managed to cover with mud the Palace of the Lyceum. Party that was dissolved in 2016, with his impeded headquarters, and it re-turned in the PdeCat.

And a provincial institution of State condition, as is the Deputation of Barcelona, destined to help in his management the small municipalities with minor structures, turned aside around 12 million Euros, assigned by the National budget, to the members of the PdeCat party. Of which, the last 2 millions were destined to the aims of the international cooperation and development (operation Estela of the Spanish National Police, on May 25).

(TO BE CONTINUED)