Free Republic

Defeated generals are sent home in disgrace, but it is most unusual to dismiss victorious ones. Kosovo: NATO’s war against Serbia ended in victory. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, was very much the victorious general of that war. So why was Clark fired? Officially, he wasn’t fired, but merely asked to step aside early. Clark was caught. The entire structure of the U.S. armed forces is built on: classic war, fought by Army infantry, Marines storming ashore, armored forces, artillery, attack helicopters, fighter-bombers that dive low to attack the enemy, as well as strike aircraft and bombers that operate more safely...

Nothing was more predictable about this most predictable of wars than the certain failure of Putin’s Coup de Main invasion to seize Kyiv and conquer Ukraine in one fell swoop. And yet its success was confidently predicted by Russia’s FSB domestic security service, which, instead of the SVR foreign intelligence, was given the task of sustaining the fiction that Ukraine is Russian. Perhaps it is not strange that Putin, himself a former FSB officer, did not question this reckless optimism. He knew that the CIA fully agreed with the FSB estimate, as did the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BDN) and the French...

Noted military historian Edward N Luttwak, who has penned numerous volumes on the grand strategies of empires, including that of the former Soviet Union, says that the Ukraine war will result in the political demise of Russian president and strongman Vladimir Putin due to a raft of reasons, including the prospects of an unwieldy occupation and the rising tide of discontent back home. Luttwak, a cold warrior now in his late 70s, had negotiated with Soviet generals and officials in his prime as an American interlocutor in the height of tensions between the United States and the USSR. He avers...