We never want to see another “Cold War” like we had with the Soviet Union and their massive assault military ready to roll over Western Europe in weeks, and knowing that the death and destruction and masses of Soviet forces would end up with nukes being used, a scenario that was widely recognized as ending life as we know it.
Keeping Russia from reassembling a vast empire and population and resources and a vast military, will prevent a paralyzing stalemate of a Cold War, Russia can be just another annoyed, moderately powerful, isolated nation that is an annoyance, but incapable of creating a Cold War II against the free world, and it’s ex Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO.
NATO seems to have gotten distracted in recent years from it’s primary purpose, and needs to move to accelerate it’s focus on Russia.
As far as Dempsey, you keep saying the obvious like it is some deep hush hush, penetrating insider insight, there is no need to keep being so melodramatic about his speech at the Aspen Security Forum, with U.S. Naval Chief of Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, and many more, it was for consumption by everyone interested, I loved the message.
I doubt that this was the big breakthrough, game changing messaging that Russian intelligence was waiting for.
No, it’s not a big breakthrough message...
It’s just one of many more to come.
I would expect the next message as they ramp this up, to be more subtle.
I would expect some arms shipments to our NATO allies. That would be one possibility among a thousand ideas..
Since WWII, war fighting and intelligence have co-mingled and in fact much of it is intelligence activity now. You keep dismissing it, but what Dempsey is doing is part of the intelligence efforts. Call it psy ops, call it propaganda, disinformation, call it whatever you like.
But the cold war lamp has been relit. From here you will see hundreds of other moving pieces, most of them you will not notice as you did not notice this one. Some will be quite obvious, others nobody but historians will ever talk about.
With some luck and intestinal fortitude, we might get it done.
Frankly, I don’t know how this will go. But I, as always, am prepared for anything.