Thursday, July 28, 2022

Col Doug Macgregor - Ukraine Russia latest — interview by Judge Napolitano (video 24.06)

 


Col Doug Macgregor - Ukraine Russia latest
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom
https://youtu.be/niZQnX-pw5w

5 comments:

mike norman said...

Macgregor needs to stay out of the economic realm and focus on military stuff. Once he starts speaking economics, he sounds like one of these hard money Austrians like Schiff.

Peter Pan said...

Ukraine is experiencing deflationary pressures... to its territory.

Peter Pan said...

Finally, someone willing to describe the situation regarding Taiwan.

Matt Franko said...

“ he sounds like one of these hard money Austrians like Schiff.”

Everyone does…

I would say there are probably about 1,000 of us out of over 7B people on earth…

And the lefties in that 1,000 typically throw that all away to instead play in partisan Democrat/Labor gutter trash politics complete with “neoliberal conspiracy!” theories…

Tom Hickey said...

Everyone does…

Right. No one gets it.

One notable exception is Andrei Martyanov, who emphasizes the economics per so is about stuff (production) rather than nominal values, which now dominate in economics and finance painting a misleading picture. GDP rank is meaningless without deconstruction.

The nominal can also be very misleading as the difference between nominal GDP and PPP shows. (The CIA cautions that the Chinese economy became larger than US economy several years ago based on PPP and that PPP is a more accurate comparative metric.

The blowblack from sanctions reveals that Russia is largely self-sufficient in real terms (although not autarkic). China is the factory of the world and many supply lines originate there. The West is dependent economically on both.

Martyanov admits his lack of knowledge of economics but being a graduate in engineering and military science and having had experience as a Soviet military officer, he emphasizes that analysis of economic capability as it affects military power falls into his bailiwick.

National economic capacity as a military metric is not much concerned with nominal values but rather actual production capability. On this measure, Russia is very strong while Western countries are relative weak, even the US as the vaunted superpower. But as Michael Hudson has pointed out, the US economy is largely on FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate), that is, non-productive sources of income.

Another aspect of military science is actually bringing this economic capability to bear on a conflict in order to achieve the nation's political aims, which according to Clausewitz is the purpose of war. Part of his is having a solid educational system based on STEM and military that makes use of STEM applied to military operations.

Ever since the introduction of operations research into the military mix in 1915, war fighting has become highly technical. So most of what passes for analysis in the media is just ill-informed about reality and how things actually work, which is, of course, the criticism that MMT makes of conventional economics, which is chiefly formal, since MMT emphasizes the operational and is based on the availability of real resources.

Logistics is about the availability and deployment of real resources in warfare. Logistics is just as important as command and control and the fighting itself.

One would never know this reading or listening to most Western analysis, including retire three and four star US and UK generals. Martyanov does say that Macgregor does get most of this but occasionally slips up on military matters that exceed his own experience.