F-16s are not going to help. They need state-of-the-art F-35 stealth multirole fighters if they want to have a chance.
The US has more than 700 F-35s, and the Ukrainians need to have access to as many of them as possible for a coordinated strike to stand a chance against Russia.
How can F-16s engage without getting into Russian air defense range?
Mavericks air to ground has a 20km range. AMRAAM air to air is about 100km.
A Russian S-400 has 400km operational range. At the start of the war, a S-400 in south Belarus turned on its radar for a few minutes and shot down a Ukrainian MiG-29 all the way in Kyiv, which then crashed into an apartment building and the Ukrainians proceeded to blame the Russians for targeting civilian structures.
You are mistaken, at least partially.
The unprecedented growth of the USSR economy occurred under Stalin’s Five Year Plans from 1929-55, at 13.8% (minus 1941-45 during the war, which registered a minus 3.7%) over a 20 year period.
The numbers were calculated using gross national income from the Soviet archive as GDP was not calculated (at least not in the same way) during the Soviet times. Check out the Russian economics book “Crystal Growth” for more details.
For comparison with the other periods in the USSR and Russia:
The growth during the Tsarist Russian empire were 2.8% (1885-1906) and 5.2% (1908-13) respectively.
The NEP period (1921-28) also registered a high growth of 12.7%, but it was largely due to the recovery from an extremely low base that followed directly from the Civil War, and began to peter out near the end of the NEP period. From 1921-26, growth was 14.8% but it fell to 6.7% in 1927-28. (Note: WWI and the Civil War from 1914-20 saw a decline of -11.7%)
Stalin’s Five Year Plans were the true sustained economic growth model, which registered at 14.5% (1929-40) and then immediately after the war at 13.0% (1946-55).
Unfortunately, Khrushchev screwed up and the growth of the rest for the Soviet periods were pitiful:
7.8% from 1956-65;
5.3% from 1966-85;
0.3% from 1986-91.
Post-USSR period under Yeltsin saw a rapid decline: -12.0% (1992-94) and then -2.9% (1995-98).
Putin’s recovery were modest at best: 6.9% (1999-2008) then 1.0% (2009-19).
Note that post-1991 figures were calculated using GDP instead of gross national income (GNI), but the differences never exceeded more than 3%, so the comparison is still largely valid.
For comparison with other countries over a 20-year period:
USSR - 13.8% (1929-55) over 22 years (minus 1941-45)
Taiwan - 11.5% (1947-73) over 27 years
China - 10.4% (1983-2007) over 25 years
South Korea - 10.2% (1966-88) over 23 years
Japan - 9.7% (1966-89) over 24 years
Note that the difference between the USSR and Taiwan/China/South Korea is vast when you take into account the compound growth over 20+ years.
Note also that South Korea copied the Soviet Five Year Plans, among other things, to initiate its rapid economic growth model during the 1960s.
Let’s be fair here, it said:
Powerful Soviet-era weapons modified with fins and sat-navs
i.e., taking old Soviet-era dumb bombs and installing new flight control kits on them and converting them into glide bombs, which is now a new type of weapon. Kinda like JDAM but much cheaper.
But Ukraine is only a shit show for the US if you look at it militarily, and the US is certainly no stranger to losing in wars over the past century as a global hegemon.
The destabilization of Europe during the Ukraine war has effectively created a huge international capital flight into the US, mass de-industrialization and soon mass privatization of European assets as Europe pursues an austerity policy, the destruction of euro as a currency rival to the dollar, as well as the strengthening of the dollar as a result, the disruption of energy supply chain that netted huge profit for the American oil and gas sector, military buildups that grant billions of dollars of contracts to the American military industrial complex, and finally, dozens of billion of aid money to Ukraine that are laundered back to the American politicians and their proxies.
I’m not even going to go into the more conspiratorial territory like the eventual mass emigration of mostly white Europeans to the US as Europe inevitably sinks into fascism (which ironically is what the right wing conspiracy nuts feared about “The Great Replacement” except it’s a realistic plan under Biden to create a white supremacist state in America) to replace Chinese immigrants as the US prepares a war with China. All of these are projects underway that could eventually lay the groundwork for the Fourth Reich in America.
The strategy against China is going to be the same. De-stabilize the Asia-Pacific region, the blockade of which is going to block Chinese exports and shut down the global economy. This is why China couldn’t wait to speed up the Belt and Road Initiative and shift their entire transportation chain inland, to prevent the disastrous consequences of an imminent sea route blockade by the US.
However, the Belt and Road Initiative also has a critical flaw in that most (~70%) of its projects were funded in US dollar, which rendered the entire chain susceptible to US interference through financial warfare. This is why I always say that the only way for China (and the rest of the world) to come out on top is to de-dollarize aggressively. The longer they wait, the more vulnerable the entire system is to the threats posed by the global institutions controlled by the US.
Do not for a moment think that the US strategists are stupid. They may make mistakes (for example, they miscalculated and failed in defeating Russia), but they certainly have achieved a lot of their strategic goals (destroying Europe is a far bigger fish to fry than to defeat a weak economy like Russia, that is, a Europe-China alliance is far scarier to the US than a Russia-China alliance), and have a lot of cards left in their sleeves which they will ruthlessly dispense to make life harder for everyone else in the world. They’re not going to go down willingly, and if they had to, they’d rather take the whole world down with them.
Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question (~1913) was probably his best work.
Lenin loved it so much that he proclaimed it to be “the Bolshevik Party’s definitive declaration on the national question”.
Even Trotsky, his arch-nemesis, considered it a great work and had to throw in the jabs “hmm… why has Stalin never published another work of such quality before and after this? very suspicious… don’t you think… was it really written by Stalin himself??” lol.
Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question also became the theoretical foundation of the People’s Republic of China’s classification of its 56 ethnic nationalities, based on the criteria that Stalin had laid out.
Having said that, the Comintern did make a lot of mistakes when it comes to advising anti-colonial struggle in the third world. Mao’s theses were far more applicable to poorly developed colonies in this regard.
The economic growth and societal transformation under Stalin (in particular under his Five Year Plans from 1929-1955) registered the fastest growth in the history of humanity that has never been surpassed.
Not even China with all its achievements came close to what transformed the USSR from a poor feudal backwater of Europe into a space-faring nation within a single generation. And the USSR achieved all this while being isolated and without relying on cheap labor (workers rights were on par with Western European standards) and influx of foreign capital.
If you’re a Western capitalist, you’d be worried too. A country full of illiterate peasants and barely electrified, is now threatening to overtake us because of communism?
Khrushchev reversed much of Stalin’s policies that worked and marked the beginning of an end to the greatest socialist project of the 20th century.
Bloomberg also put out more or less the same thing (https://archive.ph/fAYpB) a week ago if you want a “credible” Western mainstream source.
If you don’t have health insurance in the US, Russia is better if you ever get sick. Not even an argument.
I think this is exactly the plan. Biden needs Europe to be at war to trigger a mass exodus of (mostly) white Europeans fleeing war and poverty to America to make the dream of the Fourth Reich possible. The purging of Chinese students, academics and immigrants cannot possibly be done without them being replaced by another group of immigrants at the same time.
I mean no offense to the people who think that Trump is someone who can turn America into a full-blown white supremacist state, but they’re dead wrong. Without the ruthlessness of Biden, Trump could never get it off the ground in a million years.
Space warfare is much closer to naval warfare on Earth, so naval tactics and strategies are more transferable when applied to space. For example: taking weeks to maneuver, and firing at your opponent 100,000 of kms away.
Air sorties are typically completed within hours, because it is ultimately limited by the fuel they can carry.
All I will say is this: most Westerner MLs I have seen (online) fall into the binary camps of “China is a capitalist hellhole” and “China is a socialist paradise that does nothing wrong”, and both trivialize the very real and complex challenges that we have to face.
It’s almost like you have one side that buys fully into Western propaganda and the other side over-corrects by going against everything Western propaganda is saying.
The fact is that China has had many great achievements and also made many critical mistakes (from the perspective of a communist), but most people aren’t interested in nuances and learning the complex history about China. They are more interested in vibes-based politics and things you can meme about.
Like, seriously, how many of you Westerners understand the economic history of China? What happened during the first 30 years under Mao? What changed under Deng? What happened in 1995? What happened during the first decade of the 21st century? What happened after the 2009 global financial crisis? What changed after Xi became president?
I can guarantee you that 95% of the Westerner leftists/MLs (and I’m being generous here) cannot adequately answer the questions above, when each phase marked a very distinct period of Chinese economic history in their attempt to navigate the changing global economic and geopolitical environments.
I think you are misunderstanding the contradictions here, and why people on the left “critically” support China.
The ultimate line is going to be drawn on whether the landlord/rentier class can be successfully purged by the industrial capital, which is mostly concentrated in China today, and finishing what the bourgeois revolution set out to but failed to achieve more than a century ago.
Whether you like it or not, China’s industrial capital still has not been fully financialized yet, its money creation is run by a state bank, not central banks run by private bankers as have happened in every Western country since the 1900s. This is why there is still hope for an alternative mode of economic system left that can lead to socialism, and one that directly competes with and ultimately replaces the neoliberal model of the West.
I think it would be very helpful if leftists starting thinking about the world’s problems in terms of contradictions. What is happening around the world today is simply the motions of material forces that will eventually and inevitably end with the clash between finance capital (dominated by the US) and industrial capital (dominated by China).
The question is who will prevail? Can industrial capital succeed in purging the landlord/rentier/financial class which as Marx had envisioned will lead to socialist revolutions? Or will finance capital - through the use of sheer money creation - crush industrial capital for the second time?
This is the principal contradiction of capitalism today. BRICS (mostly China) presents an alternative where socialism is a possibility (and if you believe Marx, inevitable even), to the neoliberal economy where socialism (as least in the form as envisioned by Marx’s knowledge of the conditions under 19th century industrial capitalism) is simply impossible to be achieved.
I realize I should have used “re-proletarianization” instead.
Marx defined the proletariat class as uniquely revolutionary because unlike slaves in antiquity whose exploitation was tied to being enslaved by their owners/masters, and serfs in the feudal era where their exploitation was tied to land, the proletariat class that emerged out of industrialization were free wage laborers whose exploitation was tied to production, which is what the capitalist class needed to make their profit.
The industrialization of the society made the price of labor goes up, and directly strengthened the bargaining power of the labor movement. This contradiction is what would lead to the overthrow of the bourgeois class.
Neoliberal economies are different from industrial capitalism in the sense that the exploitation of the working class is now tied to debt, which is why it is often equated as a regression towards neo-feudalism or neo-rentier economy. The finance capitalist class doesn’t care about the improving productive capacity, they only need to pay enough for the workers to service their debt while keeping them in perpetual debt peonage.
This is why the revolutionary potential of the working class in Western neoliberal economies is so low. In Russia’s case, it’s still more industrialized than financialized, but the mining/extraction industry allowed wealth to be accumulated without a strong participation of labor.
It’s from one of Mao’s poems: 《沁园春·雪》.
It’s a bit complicated to describe what the title means, but the first part 沁园春 is a 词牌 (lit. name cards, but more commonly translated to “to the tune of…”), a specific type of poem from the Song dynasty popularized by the famous poet Su Shi (Su Dongpo) that follows a specific set of rules. 沁园春 is characterized by its bitonic 114 characters with flat rhyme. 沁园春 derives its name from the Han Dynasty’s Princess Qinshui’s Garden, which translates to “Qin Garden Spring”. There are dozens of other name cards (which specify a specific style of poem) that have their own explicit set of rules.
Following the name card is the name of the poem, 雪, which literally means “snow”, or “snowscape”.
So, the first part specifies the name card (style?) of the poem (i.e. “To the tune of 沁园春“), followed by the title of the poem. Here, Mao’s poem is titled 雪 “snow”.
Others have translated the title to “ Snowscape - To the tune of Spring Garden Show” (see link below) which is fair I guess.
The poem was mostly about the beautiful scenery of Northern China and the patriotic fervor towards his country.
Supposedly written in 1936 when Mao led the Red Army arriving at Shaanxi to fight against the Japanese, and published in 1945 in Chongqing when Mao was negotiating with Chiang Kai-shek, and during his stay, the democrat activists he spent time with asked him to publish the poem in a local Chongqing newspaper.
Here is a translation that is quite decent: https://www.backchina.com/blog/257064/article-222619.html
One of the most important changes is in the re-industrialization of Russia.
Before the sanctions, Russia was comfortable with being a resource extraction colony of the West, where low labor-intensive mining and extraction industries enabled an accumulation of wealth which enriched their bourgeois class, but did not lead to the proletarianization of the working class, as value-added goods were simply imported from abroad rather than manufacturing their own.
Now, with all the sanctions, Russia is being forced to develop and relying on its own industries (import substitution) to replace the loss of Western goods. This re-industrialization is significant because it will lead to increasing proletarianization of the working class - the pre-conditions for the growth of socialist movements.
There is a reason why Western countries were so keen on de-industrializing themselves, not only because of the dominance of finance capital, but because they no longer have to deal with labor movements at home. The consequence of this is the fragmentation and dissolution of genuine left wing movements across the advanced Western countries.
What is quickly ending the war going to do for Russia, except for risking higher casualties and giving Europe the room to breathe, as the latter is already going into austerity mode due to their increased military spending?
Russia’s only win condition in this war is economic in nature.
Remember, this is an industrial war - Russia can keep doing this forever while the EU is constrained by its monetary system and fiscal rules. The eurozone will not survive this if they truly want to defeat Russia in military terms. Europe ultimately has to make a choice, and all options available are worse for them.
Russia has no interest in destroying the Ukrainian forces, because the latter is already a spent force.
For them, the only means of destroying NATO is when Europe increases their defense budget spending and leading to the crumbling of their own economy. This is already happening, and ending the war now gives room for Europe to breathe and rebuild their economy.
As you might have noticed, the militarization of European NATO states will paradoxically lead to the demilitarization of NATO instead.
Yes, and it has also destroyed Russia’s offensive capability against Europe for years to come.
America, by spending a mere drop in the bucket in terms of defense budget, saved Europe from an impending Russian invasion.
Russia’s reputation as a military “superpower” is now completely tarnished. The world will remember them as a failed state that took what, a year? to capture one Ukrainian village.
If the Patriots failed to shoot down Scuds designed in the 1950s, no way in hell they’re ever going to intercept a Kinzhal:
Intercepting a missile is not the same as an airplane that flies at a much slower speed and a much larger target.