2023-01-26

War is a racket!

Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine… Nothing changes. Warmongers make money no matter who is in power. This would not have happened if Trump was president.

Some days ago, I brought attention to a battlefield analysis on RT.com of the new move of NATO countries to supply Ukraine with Western tanks.

How many tanks does Kiev need?

To simplify calculations, we’ll be using an armored division, the main structural and tactical unit of armored forces in the former Soviet republics, as our yardstick. According to Soviet manuals, an armored division must have 296 tanks, 230 infantry fighting vehicles, 54 self-propelled artillery systems, over 2,000 regular vehicles, and almost 12,000 soldiers and officers.

How many divisions does Kiev need? At least one per each of the three main fronts — in Lugansk, Donetsk, and Zaporozhye. The line of contact in the special military operation zone right now is 815 km long, making three divisions too modest an amount to make a difference, but let’s disregard this for the time being.

Three armored divisions combined would have a total of about 900 tanks. Apart from that, another armored division may be necessary on the Belarusian front, which could see some very heavy fighting. In case of an escalation there, an armored division or a similar unit in reserve is a must, which drives the number of required tanks up by 300 to 1,200.

Finally, no commander-in-chief can do without his own reserve, the so-called reserve of the supreme high command. Without at least one armored division, this reserve cannot really count as such, which means another 300 tanks for a required total of 1,500.

Another thing to consider is probable Ukrainian losses during offensive operations. The average daily losses of an armored unit in this case stand at 10 to 15%. About 15 to 20% of incapacitated tanks are typically irrecoverable losses, while the rest require repairs (general maintenance for 30 to 50%, medium-level repairs for 15 to 30%, and an overhaul for 10 to 20%).

Simply put, at least another 300 tanks are required to offset losses during combat operations. This gives us a figure of 1,800 tanks, which must be considered an absolute minimum.

In an NBC report, I found a strange bit of information of the 31 tanks that the USA is going to donate:

… with Russian forces entrenched in 20% of its territory — the tanks will present huge new logistical challenges. Personnel must be trained and the resources found to repair, maintain and recover the tanks if something goes wrong. Plus each tank model has its own unique issues: Abrams runs on jet fuel, not diesel like the Leopard 2.

Will these tanks be able to challenge Russian military? It does not matter. What matters is the tanks be bought and sold. The warmongers want to sell weapons. Their profits is the only thing that matters. Just last year, the USA abandoned billions of dollars US weaponry in Afghanistan. Did it make any difference? Ha!

Code

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2004-07-03

CIA Iraqi Rewards Program

In February 2004, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) caused worldwide amusement when they published details of their Iraqi Rewards Program on their website at: http://www.cia.gov/cia/english_rewards.htm

Through this program, the top spying outfit of the U.S. government attempted to solicit intelligence information from the public about “recently-made” Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

The Iraqi Rewards Program is no joke. (See this CNN Report.)

The CIA waited for the fuss to die and took down the English version of the page. However, I had a copy of the web page saved in an e-mail. So, I promptly published it as an archive on Moral Volcano.

Timeline

• 10 February 2004: The CIA posts information on the Iraqi Rewards Program on its website at http://www.cia.gov/cia/english_rewards.htm. It contains a feedback form (“secure online form”) through which members of the public can send information to the CIA.

• 12 February 2004: News spreads world over.

• 12 February 2004: I make a backup of the web page in an e-mail.

• Interim: The page at http://www.cia.gov/cia/english_rewards.htm vanishes from the CIA website. Almost all the links now point to the Arabic version at http://www.cia.gov/cia/arabic_rewards.htm. The secure online form is now available only in Arabic at https://comm.cia.gov/cgi/arp_form.cgi.

• July 2004: The Moral Volcano site log contains information about a visitor who had visited the site after typing “Iraqi Rewards Program” english translation in Google. I check the CIA website and find that the English version has been taken down. I then use e-mail back of the English web page and publish it as an archive of the CIA web page.

• 17 September 2004: I forward the e-mail to John Young, who maintains an archive of leaked secret government documents. Now, the English version of the Iraqi Rewards Program web page is available on his Cryptome.org website.

• 7 October 2004: A CIA report, authored by Charles Duelfer, who advises the director of central intelligence on Iraqi weapons, said Iraq’s WMD program had essentially been destroyed in 1991 and Saddam ended Iraq’s nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War. U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney later rejected the reports findings and said he believed Iraq may have moved its WMDs across the border into Syria.

• 13 December 2004: I notice that the CIA contact page at http://www.cia.gov/cia/contact.htm still points to the missing english_rewards.htm page. Will someone tell them?

  

  Well, I did? I use their contact form to tell them about the broken link. I also give them my e-mail address.

• 23 December 2004: The CIA replies (“We removed the English-language versions of the Iraqi Rewards Program because the pages were being used inappropriately by visitors.”) that it will update the broken link. They use a different domain to send e-mail. ucia.gov seems to stands for Unclassified CIA.

  [

  The CIA replied from the domain ucia.gov. I have blurred the name of the webmaster in the above image. In those days, Gmail was in beta and was available on an invite-only basis.

• 13 January 2005: U.S. officials announce that the 1,700-strong Iraq Survey Group had wrapped up physical searches in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. They have concluded that prewar Iraq had no WMD stockpiles.

• 26 April 2005: CIA has officially ended the search for Iraqi WMD. CIA man Charles Duelfer posted an addendum to the October 2004 report. The addendum stated that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria was unlikely. It could not, however, rule out an “unofficial” transfer of WMD material.

• 28 July 2008: The CIA has given their website a makeover to their website. The English and Arabic links to the Arabic version (the only one) of the Iraqi Rewards Program page is still on the home page but they are broken. I use their “contact CIA” page to notify them about the broken link.

• 29 July 2008: The CIA has fixed the link. Maybe, one day, the CIA will remove the link in a covert action.

• 12 January 2014: CIA has moved to an all HTTPS website. The old link to Arabic version is still there on the home page. The Arabic version is now at: https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/iraqi-rewards-program.html

  

• 2 February 2023: I checked the above URL and it finally shows a missing link error.