Dmitry Orlov
A stunning announcement recently came from the White House over in Washington: the Department of Defense (DoD) is being renamed back to War Department with billions of dollars to be spent on signage, stationery, shingles and military swag.
The War Department existed for 158 years, from August 7, 1789, to September 18, 1947, when, under the National Security Act of 1947, it was split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force which, together with the Department of the Navy, formed the National Military Establishment, which, in turn, was officially renamed the Department of Defense (DoD) in 1949
DoD is a misnomer par excellence and an instance of rank hypocrisy. Not counting terrorist attacks, the last time the US was attacked by a foreign military, forcing it to defend itself through military action, was during the war of 1812, although even then it went on the attack and invaded Canada (unsuccessfully). Since then, it was all about attack. The US formally declared war against Mexico, Spain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Japan, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.
The US also attacked or invaded various other countries without a declaration of war: various Native American Nations, China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Guatemala, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Panama and Yugoslavia. To this already long list we could easily add Australia, Bahrain, Djibouti, Guam, Jordan, Kuwait, the Philippines, Poland, Qatar, Turkey and various others, which the US military occupied by placing permanent military bases on their territory, which is always a violation of national sovereignty. Therefore, the Department of Offense (DoO) or the Department of World Occupation (DoWO) would have been more appropriate names, but War Department will do.
But from the vantage point of 2025, this renaming seems nostalgic because the image of the world in which the US could attack random countries with impunity, hiding behind two oceans, is quickly fading. Of the last two major US military engagements, one — in Afghanistan — ended with a withdrawal that to most observers looked like a shameful rout, and another — in the Ukraine — is still ongoing but has turned into a process by which Russia is taking its time to humiliate not just the US proxy regime in Kiev but its US owners and all of NATO as well.
Russia has the luxury of doing so. After three and a half years of its Special Military Operation in the former Ukraine, Russia has made major strides in fine-tuning its military production to fit the reality of modern warfare, where the frontline is as much as a hundred kilometers wide and continuously scrutinized by drones and satellites and where the pace of technical progress in areas such as electronic warfare and AI-enhanced drones is measured in weeks, not years.
An essential point is that at present Russia’s Special Military Operation in the former Ukraine amounts to a huge and highly successful advertising campaign for Russia’s military-industrial complex. Its goal is to demonstrate to the rest of the world that it is quite possible to not just oppose or contain, but to defeat the US military in a war of attrition. The way for any self-respecting country to achieve this result is by buying Russian weapons systems and by sending its officers to Russian military academies. The Russians run this kinetic advertising campaign in a way that minimizes casualties on their side while showing gradual but constant progress.
The Americans provide weapons for the Russians to demonstratively destroy on the battlefield while enhancing their military superiority. For example, the Russians have safely disposed of most of the Bradleys, Abrams tanks and other US-provided armor using Lancet drones, which can now take care of their own targeting, picking out and destroying armored vehicles even when they are camouflaged. The Ukrainians’ only function at this point is to provide ample cannon fodder; their job is to simply die by one or two thousand a day, although surrendering or simply running away are increasingly popular options.
All the while, Russia has managed to build up trade with China, India, Vietnam and other eastern nations to replace its trade with the EU and to use US and EU sanctions as an opportunity for import replacement, including high-tech areas such as jet aircraft, gas turbines, helicopter and marine engines and much else. Russia’s position in the world vis-à-vis two of the world’s most populous and fastest-developing nations — China and India — is as a preferred trading partner and ally.
This was recently demonstrated by both China’s and India’s refusal to yield in response to US pressure for them to stop trading with Russia. On top of all that, Russia has done all of this while maintaining macroeconomic and political stability and steady economic growth and development of its social sector. A healthy majority of its population wants the Special Military Operation to end in outright victory while Putin’s approval rating hovers around 80%.
Russia is not alone in its opposition to US attempts to act from a position of strength and to project force around the world. The military parade which was held earlier this month in Beijing was meant to demonstrate China’s rapidly developing military might. It is on track to match the US in sheer numbers in another five years, perhaps sooner. However, unlike Russia’s military, China’s People’s Liberation Army is not battle-tested. Its last bout of hostilities was with Vietnam and was far from successful.<
Nevertheless, the ability of the US to contain China has become severely constrained. For instance, China (along with Russia, Iran and possibly others) now has anti-ship missiles which can reliably sink US aircraft carriers from a stand-off distance greater than the reach of the carriers’ on-board aircraft, making the US aircraft carrier fleet — the supposed pride and joy of the US Navy — worse than useless. However, it is politically impossible for the US to simply scrap its aircraft carrier fleet and so it is forced to maintain what is now essentially a toy navy at a staggering expense while having it sail about randomly, avoiding danger zones, in order to “show the flag.”
No longer able to project force in any meaningful manner, the US (and its proxy Israel) have been forced to resort to political assassination — a terrorist technique, essentially — recently killing the entire Iranian negotiating team and, even more recently, attempting to kill the Hamas negotiators near Doha, Qatar. Such non-Kosher negotiating techniques make negotiating with the US or its proxies a personally dangerous exercise and generally inadvisable, making it safer to act as a fearsome enemy to the US rather than as a partner or, perish the thought, a friend. As the US establishment gets hungry, its friends and partners will be first to be eaten, as is now happening to Europe and Japan.
It has gradually become clear that Donald Trump understands all of this. Although he produces a steady stream of nonsense, both via his social media posts and his press conferences, which randomly fluctuates from day to day in both content and character, this is all an effort to obscure his actual goals. He has realized that the US can no longer extract tribute from Russia, or China, or India, or any number of other nations, whose leaders have observed how America’s Ukrainian proxy is being decimated and humiliated on a daily basis and have drawn their own conclusions.
These can vary, but the overall impression must be that America can no longer deal with the whole world from a position of strength but is not psychologically ready to start dealing with it from a position of weakness; therefore, for the time being, it is not to be dealt with at all. India’s blanket refusal to stop buying oil from Russia was perhaps the final straw, signaling that it is time for Trump to stop trying to bully the world and to concentrate on his plentiful internal enemies instead.
But there is a bit of unfinished business that Trump is eager to attend to: the US still has a number of vassals: essentially, it is NATO/EU and the British Commonwealth. These can perhaps still be fleeced, having no ability to resist the US politically. In particular, the EU leaders have manipulated themselves into a wonderful political cul de sac with regard to the Ukraine: they cannot afford to admit that the Ukraine has been lost. And so Trump can force the hapless Europeans to continue feeding the Ukrainian black hole both through direct financial support of the Kiev regime and by buying weapons from the US and supplying them to the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the US can turn its attention to its own neighborhood, which appears to be ready to burst into a civil war.
It is here that the term “War Department” takes on a rich new meaning as “Civil War Department”: the US has lost its ability to meaningfully project force abroad but it may perhaps still be able to hold the country together, split up as it is into implacably opposed groups of states.
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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/8776fe46-acb3-4835-9c31-4c6372fa0a0c
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