The Financial Jigsaw Part 2 (48) - RUSSIA'S WAR STRATEGY - Pre-emptive Attack; A Planned MIC Op? - Strait of Hormuz - UK RAF Brize Norton - [06-21-25]

"Come, now, you rich men, weep over the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothing has become moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted away." [James 5:1,3]

The War in Ukraine Has Shattered the West’s Digital-Age Delusions [edited from an essay by David Betz and Michael Rainsborough. David Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London. Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security.] For all the breathless commentary, one awkward truth has loitered beneath the surface of the Russia-Ukraine war: that of people beyond the immediate theatre of conflict who don’t have any clear sense of what’s actually happening on the ground. The fog of war includes not only competing narratives and fragmentation in YouTube clips etc, but with something more persistent in Western wishful thinking.

For almost three years a chorus of commentary by pundits whose proximity to the war, geographically and intellectually, has offered a diet of optimism lacking evidence. The West, from Anne Applebaum to Timothy Snyder, along with just about every op-ed in the Daily Telegraph, have reliably assured readers that a Ukrainian victory is in sight, or that Putin’s regime has been humiliated or teeters on the edge of collapse. These forecasts, rarely reflecting battlefield realities, have functioned less as expert analysis and more as morale management designed to reassure rather than inform.

This faith-based commentary sits uneasily alongside the equally confident illusions that once prevailed in post-Cold War Western military thinking. Western politicians and strategists imagined war, in the digital age, would be light, precise, and swift being waged by lean expeditionary forces wielding smart weapons and networked command systems. The result, they opined, would be relatively bloodless victories achieved from a polite distance, preferably before lunchtime.

Instead, Bakhmut happened. The war in Ukraine has shattered a generation of digital-age delusions. It has exposed the brittle realities beneath Western military thinking and underscored the extent to which the strategic balance has shifted, not due to enemy cunning, more than to Western self-delusion. The return of artillery, using proven blitzkrieg tactics, has shattered the digital approach to 21^st century warfare.

Digitalisation, once considered as the West’s ultimate strategic advantage, has failed to deliver the returns its proponents anticipated. The concept was deceptively simple: combine precision weaponry with real-time data and operational mobility to achieve swift, efficient and low-cost victories. In the words of one discourse in the mid-1990s, explained the aim as applying massive shock with minimal force, so the enemy is stunned into compliance.

Yet war, as the Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz long ago observed, remains a clash of wills, reciprocal, unpredictable and fundamentally political. It is not a frictionless exercise in systems management, nor a technological showcase. It is organised violence pursued for political ends. Always messy and brutal. And always resistant to tidy solutions.

What Western strategists overlooked was a basic fact: adversaries adapt. And many of them have invested, not in apps or digital platforms, but in mass, resilience, and industrial depth.

The presumption that digital superiority would render conventional war obsolete, where the future of war belongs, not to mass armies and tanks, but to decentralised networks and precision strikes, has not merely proven false, it has been inverted. Russia and others have appropriated these same tools, stripped them of their idealistic framing and employed them pragmatically, effectively, economically, and at scale.

The West, by contrast, became increasingly enamoured with the imagined virtues of a digital society; a realm where information moves at light speed and liberal pieties hitch a ride on the algorithm. Nowhere was this more evident than in the enthusiasm for cyberwarfare; an area long hyped, but whose strategic effects have been minimal. Figures, such as then UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson notably proclaimed that such high tech was transforming the nature of conflict.

The practical outcome of actual warfare, however, has not been the digitalisation or dematerialisation of war, but rather its real-time mediation live streamed, framed and packaged for distant audiences. In an interconnected world, conflict is increasingly staged for global spectatorship. But if the medium has changed, the consequences have not; war remains bloody, destructive and for all the intrusion of high-tech drones and AI onto the battlefield. “Technology may change how we kill, but not why we kill or what killing does to us.”

Fortresses in the age of fibre optics offer an intellectual mirage in which Western military thinking once basked in a time of post-Cold War euphoria when history had allegedly ended and borders were passé. Francis Fukuyama serenely advised that ideological conflict was over. When Zygmunt Bauman waxed lyrical about ‘liquid modernity’, Michael Mandelbaum speculated about the obsolescence of major wars, and Kenichi Ohmae proclaimed the borderless world, flattened by markets and lubricated by technology. These ideas have not prevailed in the real world of a ground war.

Far from dismantling fences and ushering in a frictionless utopia, the digital age has made fortification fashionable. Border walls, missile shields and fortified strongholds are proliferating and Bunkers are booming. And on the battlefield, from Gaza to Donbas, it isn’t data packets, viral hashtags, networks or narratives that are seizing territory. It’s bulldozers, concrete and men in trenches or ankle-deep in artillery shell casings.

The war of the future would be weightless, networked, almost antiseptic. While it is true that drone warfare has made a dramatic appearance as highly advanced form of surveillance and precision guided artillery, these new technologies have serviced very traditional modes of warfare. Instead of some new conception of war in the digital age, instead was a flashback to steel, trenches and the long, grinding calculus of attrition. War hasn’t dematerialised, it has reindustrialised, only with high-definition targeting and better graphic design.

Ukraine is a cautionary tale in three Acts and no Exit Plan. The Ukraine conflict was supposed to be a masterclass in Western strategic superiority, designed as a proxy war in which Ukraine would draw upon NATO’s high-end technology, soft power, economic leverage and moral confidence to reduce Russia’s ambitions to rubble. Instead, it’s begun to resemble a doomed product launch, overpromised, under-delivered and still limping along on the exhaust fumes of its own marketing, too costly to cancel, and too impossible to acknowledge as a failure. These are some miscalculations:

• Soft Power: Meant to win hearts and minds. But hearts, as it turns out, aren’t for sale and minds are busy doom-scrolling through drone footage on TikTok, or more often tuning out altogether. Influence, it seems, doesn’t flow so easily from Pride-flag waving embassies and finger-wagging hashtags.

• Economic Warfare: The so-called ‘sanctions from hell’ were supposed to crush the Russian economy in record time. Instead, Russia’s GDP has outpaced much of the Eurozone, while Germany’s once-vaunted industrial base has gone into self-induced hibernation, it's collateral damage in a moral crusade that forgot to run the numbers.

• Strategic Credibility: Once burnished by Cold War mystique, NATO’s reputation now wobbles somewhere between ceremonial relic and a crisis PR firm. The alliance increasingly resembles a séance for departed strategic purpose, hands clasped around the table, muttering slogans, hoping the ghost of 1991 will manifest and tell them what to do. It lurches between virtue-signalling and threat inflation, unsure whether it’s meant to deter adversaries or simply reassure itself that it still matters.

The unspoken truth in all this is bleak but not particularly complicated; strategically, Ukraine has already lost. Also, albeit less dramatically and more expensively, has Europe. This wasn’t an unpredictable ending. It was the opening scene, played out exactly as the script always hinted it would. Viewed alongside the other glittering triumphs of Western statecraft: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and Syria it raises the uncomfortable question: why does strategic failure keep happening and who keeps hiring these people? At this point, a moderately alert observer could have produced a more coherent grand strategy, if only by knocking the relevant documents off the table before they reached the rulers.

Realignments in a shattered rules-based order is one of the most egregious strategic miscalculations and one that yet again should have been foreseen; it was the West’s attempt to isolate Russia. In practice, this stand for the ‘rules-based order’ only served to hasten the very multi-polarity it once dismissed as a paranoid fantasy. China and Russia are now closer than ever since the Brezhnev era. BRICS+, once dismissed as a loose acronym in search of a purpose, is gaining unexpected traction with countries like Turkey and Indonesia now eyeing membership as a potential advantage. De-dollarisation, once confined to fringe economists and survivalist blogs, is gradually edging into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, the West’s effort to denigrate the ruble left it suspiciously intact, at times more stable than some G7 currencies. Meanwhile, the grand strategy to ‘cancel’ Russia economically has largely backfired, inflicting more damage on Western industry than even the Kremlin plotters might have dared to dream and German manufacturing is in decline.

Geopolitically, the unintended consequence is a slowly forming Eurasian compact: one increasingly convinced that the West, at least in its EU-NATO format, is decadent, distracted and no longer capable of setting the global agenda. It’s not yet an overturning of the world order, but it’s one where states feel they have greater options than merely to choose between Western modernity and return to poverty. It is not the new world order envisaged by Washington, London, or Brussels believing they are still running.

For years, Western military doctrine enshrined speed, agility, and precision as the hallmarks of modern war. Mass, by contrast, was treated as a dusty artefact, as something best left in museums next to the flintlock and the bayonet. According to one set of commentators: “Mass is no longer a requirement for victory. Information superiority and speed of command will displace attritional warfare.” Large-scale mobilisation, in other words, was seen as a clunky relic of industrial wars: too slow, too costly, and too reminiscent of the bad old days when wars actually lasted much longer. Then came Ukraine and Gaza. With them came the blunt truth reasserting itself: mass matters. Industrial capacity, measured not in white papers but in shells, drones, and replacement parts but it still wins wars. The hard numbers from Ukraine are telling:

• Russia is producing artillery shells at a ratio of roughly 3:1 over the combined output of the West.

• It manufactures more armoured vehicles, drones and missiles than all of NATO put together.

• It’s done this without running up colossal debts or collapsing its domestic economy, relying instead on retrofitted Soviet factories and a grimly effective wartime mobilisation.

By contrast, the West struggles to supply even its own forces let alone those of its Ukrainian proxy. The US production rate of SM-3 interceptor missiles, for example, is a grand total of 12 per year. That’s not a misprint. It’s barely enough to protect a single aircraft carrier, let alone a continent. What we’re witnessing is not just a clash between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a collision between two theories of war: the Western model of information-age finesse, and the industrial-age brute force as its strategists once declared "obsolete looks like it’s winning."

Western military theory has long exalted manoeuvre warfare, which is rapid, fluid operations designed to outpace the enemy, strike weak points, and collapse morale before a secure defence can even form. It's swift and elegant but attrition, by contrast, is treated as a kind of doctrinal embarrassment being too crude, too slow, too First World War. However, the battlefield tells a different story.

Ukraine’s much-vaunted counter-offensives have bogged down in kilometre-deep minefields and trench networks that look like they were lifted from 1916. Russia’s static defences, dismissed early on as archaic, have proven not only resilient but maddeningly effective. Gaza, too, offers little comfort to the manoeuvrists: less lightning war, more bloodied crawl.

The promised revolution in precision warfare with guided missiles, smart bombs, and real-time targeting hasn’t rewritten the rules so much as underlined the old ones. ‘Smart’ weapons may hit what they aim at, but they don’t change the fact that the other side is still dug in, still shooting back, and often still there after the smoke clears. What has emerged isn’t the war of tomorrow, but the war thought to have been left behind, less networked lethality and more Verdun with drones. Despite the glossy brochures, war it turns out, still favours the side that can take a punch, not just throw one.

Speed, assuredly, kills the enemy. Victory belongs to the swift. Wars must be fought fast, finished faster, and ideally wrapped up in time for the next election cycle. The longer they drag on, the more politically toxic and strategically incoherent they become. But once again, theory has collided with reality and reality, as usual, has no interest in being tidy, televised, or tactically convenient.

From Iraq to Afghanistan to Ukraine, the West’s ‘fast’ wars have displayed an unfortunate tendency to turn into drawn-out strategic purgatories. Initial momentum gives way to mission creep, political drift, and tactical improvisation presented as doctrine. Tempo without purpose quickly devolves into noise. Being able to react faster doesn’t help much if you have no idea what you’re reacting to or why.

What's left is movement masquerading as progress. Digital velocity, for all its dashboards and situational awareness apps, is no match for old-fashioned things like strategic patience, industrial resilience, or political staying power. The West has become excellent at starting wars quickly but rather less when it comes to finishing them

Few phrases have received more adoration in recent years than ‘information war’: the idea of gaining advantage by protecting access to information flows, while destroying and disrupting those of the adversary. Think tanks, officials and consultants have extolled the virtues of strategic communications, narrative shaping and viral content as if policy papers and social media posting could substitute for tanks.

Ukraine, by almost every Western measure, has won the information war hands-down: cinematic footage, clever memes and Zelensky’s branded defiance are all flawlessly packaged for global consumption. Most recently, this spectacle was crowned in early June by the daring drone strike against Russia’s strategic bomber fleet deep inside its own territory.

Launched from modified civilian lorry containers, the operation thrilled the op-ed writers but carried rather less charm for anyone concerned with nuclear stability, risking as it does, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and practically inviting Russian reprisals against Western targets. One can only hope Moscow, or any other future adversary, isn’t tempted to return the favour in kind. After all, there is a certain irony in Western commentators applauding such actions as bold and justified while assuming that their own military bases will be sacrosanct.

The point is that none of this moves the needle in Ukraine’s favour. It is Russia that occupies territory, fires more shells and steadily dictates the tempo of the war. The paradox is hard to ignore while Western commentators celebrate Kyiv’s narrative dominance and drone-delivered showmanship, Moscow focused on artillery. One side perfected the aesthetics of resistance; the other brought bulldozers and blasting tactics. It turns out that shaping perceptions doesn’t stop projectiles and going viral is no defence against shrapnel. Winning the narrative, in other words, is not the same as winning the war. It may not even be relevant once the shells start falling.

Since the Cold War, Western wars have rarely been existential. They’ve been gestures, emotional reactions to tragedy, terrorism or televised horror. The political logic has been consistent, if not exactly strategic, to be seen to act. It’s foreign policy seen as theatre with enough engagement to look principled, but not enough to get really hurt or seriously imperil the national homeland. The results speak for themselves. Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq all launched with moral fanfare and media buzz, all ending in fatigue, withdrawal or the polite burying of lessons left unlearned.

Ukraine however, is different. The stakes are higher and the adversary is stronger, yet habits remain the same. The West’s response has been a familiar mix: morally emphatic, logistically improvisational, and industrially unsustainable. It’s as if NATO is attempting to wage a 20th-century land war on 21st-century terms with 1990s stockpiles and attention spans measured in quarterly press briefings rather than prolonged campaigns.

Many of these interventions seem designed not for the battlefield more for the curated stage of liberal respectability, crafted to win plaudits in opinion pages, panel discussions, and policy forums where moral posturing always trumps material constraint. They are calibrated for the approval of the right-thinking, not the requirements of strategic success. Here, victory is optional, while virtue-signalling is mandatory.

Conclusion: We were told the digital age would flatten borders, replace firepower with fibre optics, and swap armies for narratives. Instead, we got trenches, mass mobilisation, and a resurgent Eurasian bloc. It’s not quite the holographic future imagined by the PowerPoint prophets. The West’s military models aren’t failing for lack of virtue, but because they’re built on expired assumptions. The future didn’t arrive on schedule and the past refused to stay buried. What are some of the lessons to emerge?

1. Industrial capacity matters: You can’t tweet your way to artillery shells.

2. Mass still wins wars: Precision is nice, but only if you have a lot of it.

3. Soft power is not eternal: A civilisation unsure of itself can’t expect others to follow its lead.

4. Digital illusions are just that: Cyberspace didn’t transcend the battlefield; it just added lag, disinformation, and another excuse for inaction.

In the end strategic success depends, not on who reacts fastest or trends hardest, but on the dull, unglamorous actions that underlie modern war: production, patience, and purpose which are in short supply west of the Dnieper.

ISRAEL v IRAN WAR CONTINUES THIS WEEK

Former CIA officer Larry Johnson opines: I believe that Israel’s attack was part of a planned international intelligence and military operation, which included the participation and support of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. We got the first clue on May 31, when a UN watchdog issued two reports designed to create a narrative that Iran is a rogue nuclear state:

This tactic was employed in 2002-03 to create a justification for an attack on Iraq, which the US insisted had weapons of mass destruction. We now know it was a lie, but the propaganda was effective in producing support in the US and Europe to invade Iraq. There is a similar effort today, only this time Iran is being accused of enriching uranium to build a bomb. The Iraq WMD lie, like the current calumny against Iran, only has one purpose: to justify military action in order to achieve regime change. Previously detailed is the current IAEA operation to blame Iran over some alleged nuclear contamination which were found more than two decades ago. Original Article: https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/06/15/lies-used-to-justify-war-on-iraq-get-reused-to-wage-war-on-iran/

ISRAEL v IRAN - Iran Threatens Energy Market Meltdown as it “Reviews” Closure of Strait of Hormuz. [Extracts from article by Dr Tilak K. Doshi who is the Daily Sceptic Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition, and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack]

The world’s energy nerves are fraying. Central is a narrow strip of water 21 miles wide at its narrowest point — the Strait of Hormuz, the jugular vein of global energy trade. The Strait presents a nightmare scenario. Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshide Suga, stated in May 2019, after the tanker attacks in the Strait, that it is a “matter of life and death of our country in terms of energy security”

In 2024, approximately 20 million barrels of crude oil passed through the Strait every day. That’s around 20% of global petroleum liquids consumption, and about 30% of all seaborne crude oil trade, together with natural gas at nearly a fifth of the world’s LNG exports. BUT The closure of Hormuz would mean cutting off Iran's own oil exports, which pass through the Strait to reach Asian markets. A blockage of the Strait would undercut Iran’s own revenues. Moreover, such a move would alienate Gulf Arab states: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar all of which depend on Hormuz as a vital trade route.

Natural gas, Qatar’s LNG exports, for example, remain entirely dependent on Hormuz. Closure of Hormuz would certainly invite a possible military response from the US, together with its Gulf Arab allies. This is well known to the Iranian leadership, and it would be reluctant to risk a war with the US to its own detriment.

Neither the US nor Iran would want to initiate an oil price shock. Israel has not attacked Iran’s Kharg Island, a critical hub for over 90% of Iran’s oil exports, likely due to a combination of strategic, economic and geopolitical considerations. The probability of a full shutdown remains low. More likely are limited disruptions: Iranian naval manoeuvres. The world must listen, not with alarmist dread, but with strategic clarity. Source

• When Iran’s leadership, in a fit of strategic bravado or calibrated brinkmanship, threatens to block it, global oil and gas markets jolt awake https://dailysceptic.org/2025/06/19/iran-threatens-energy-market-meltdown-as-it-reviews-closure-of-strait-of-hormuz/

UK NEWS FLASH - THE UK’S ROLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

The RAF Brize Norton incident is set against the backdrop of the UK’s complex involvement in the Middle East. While the Labour government, under Starmer, suspended 30 arms export licenses to Israel in September 2024 due to concerns over international law violations, the UK continues to supply components for F-35 jets accessible to Israel.

The activist group, 'Palestine Action' argues that Britain’s reconnaissance flights over Gaza and refuelling support for US and Israeli jets make it an “active participant” in the conflict. A senior RAF source, however, said, “The UK is not supporting Israeli operations, and these aircraft have not been used in support of Israeli forces.” This discrepancy fuels the activists’ narrative and public debate, with sentiments on X ranging from outrage at the security breach to support for the protesters’ message. Source

• Security review launched after activists break into RAF base https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx24nppdx0lo

COMING NEXT:

• BOOM's Weekly Global Review on Sunday, June 22, 2025 (now on Substack)

• Letter from South Africa - EMIGRATE? - Saturday, June 28, 2025

REFERENCE - My Books: “The Financial Jigsaw” Parts 1 & 2 Scroll: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358117070_THE_FINANCIAL_JIGSAW_-_PART_1_-_4th_Edition_2020 including regular updates.