ISBN: 0998694762 9780998694764

Category: Political Science / Public Policy / Military Policy

Page count: 249

"Marytanov explains why and how the US armed forces have lost <br>the military supremacy they thought they once had and how Russia, <br>which supposedly had been defeated in the Cold War, succeeded <br>not only in catching up with USA, but actually surpassing it in many <br>key domains such as long range cruise missiles, diesel-electric <br>submarines, air defenses, electronic warfare, air superiority and <br>many others. Andrei Martyanov's book is an absolute 'must read' <br>for any person wanting to understand the reality of modern warfare <br>and super-power competition." <br>THE SAKER <br> While exceptionalism is not unique to <br>America, the intensity of their conviction and its global <br>ramifications are. This view of its exceptionalism has led the US to <br>grossly misinterpret—sometimes deliberately—the causative <br>factors of key events of the past two centuries. Accordingly, the <br>wrong conclusions have been derived, and very wrong lessons <br>learned. Nowhere has this been more manifest than in American <br>military thought and its actual application of military power. <br>Time after time the American military has failed to match lofty <br>declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre <br>record of military accomplishments. Starting from the Korean War <br>the United States hasn’t won a single war against a technologically <br>inferior, but mentally tough enemy. <br> <br>The technological dimension of American “strategy” has <br>completely overshadowed any concern with the social, cultural, <br>operational and even tactical requirements of military (and <br>political) conflict. With a new Cold War with Russia emerging, the <br>United States enters a new period of geopolitical turbulence <br>completely unprepared in any meaningful way—intellectually, <br>economically, militarily or culturally—to face a reality which was <br>hidden for the last 70+ years behind the curtain of never-ending <br>Chalabi moments and a strategic delusion concerning Russia, <br>whose history the US viewed through a Solzhenitsified caricature <br>kept alive by a powerful neocon lobby, which even today <br>dominates US policy makers’ minds. <br>Martyanov’s former Soviet military background enables deep <br>insight into the fundamental issues of warfare and military power <br>as a function of national power—assessed correctly, not through <br>the lens of Wall Street “economic” indices and a FIRE economy, <br>but through the numbers of enclosed technological cycles and <br>culture, much of which has been shaped in Russia by continental <br>warfare and which is practically absent in the US.