General Cavoli is the commander of United States European Command (EUCOM) and Supreme Allied Commander Europe. He’s highly educated, with a BA from Princeton and MA from Yale, and specialized in Russia:
He entered the Russian Foreign Area Officer program in 1995, and graduated from Yale University with a Master of Arts in Russian and East European Studies in 1997.
Yesterday he gave testimony at the House of Representatives HASC (House Armed Services Committee) hearing, alongside Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Celeste Wallander.
I thought I’d share some of the more revealing of the responses.
Let’s go through the video together:
First he reveals to a stunned congressional audience that Russia has hardly taken any damage during the conflict. His attempt to appease his bosses doesn’t come across well, as he uncomfortably stammers through trying to qualify his description of Russian forces as ‘degenerated…somewhat.’ Although, he adds shame-facedly, they are bigger today than they were at the beginning.
But the fun only begins there.
The second side-splitter comes a moment later when he explains how the U.S. is learning a huge lesson in Ukraine as regards consumption rates of munitions. Once again this proves how utterly unqualified American generals, planners, military ‘experts’, and think-tankers were in ever estimating a near-peer type of conflict.
“They are off the charts!” - the bonehead concedes. For those who might protest at whether this is an admission on their part, he goes on to state that NATO has now ‘incorporated this lesson into their plans.” Conveniently, he adds this will now ‘drive defense spending higher.’ As if it wasn’t high enough already. It’s no wonder General Milley was forced to comically admit that if Ukraine loses, the U.S. will have to literally double its defense budget.
Which is already approaching an unprecedented, mind-boggling $1 trillion dollars.
At the 1:55 mark, Cavoli openly admits that NATO/U.S. has been moving east even before the start of the conflict, and is now moving further east. The congressman then thanks him, acknowledging the U.S. should continue moving east. Doh!
The next section is even more risible. The congressman notes that studies showed U.S. would run out of ammo in a week or two against China. He asks Wallander for some clarification, and she regurgitates her office’s standard boilerplate about Ukraine’s resupply being done with an eye on keeping U.S. stockpiles adequate for any potential encounter with China. But when asked to specify, she predictably can’t, and has no clue how long it would actually take to rebuild the critically depleted American supplies being drawn down to prop up the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine.
The next section should simply leave you speechless. The congresswoman has to remind clueless Wallander that only congress is supposed to have the power to declare war, as per the constitution. She references a new report from the recent leaks—which continue to trickle out—which had claimed that the U.S. considered assassinating Wagner commanders in Africa.
American officials have reportedly considered taking lethal action against senior officers from the Russian private military company, Wagner.
According to documents leaked by a US guardsman and obtained by The Washington Post, US officials have looked at a range of scenarios for “coordinated US and allied disruption efforts” against Wagner, including “kinetic” options, in an effort to curb the group’s growing influence in Africa.
The leaks also indicated that the US had considered providing information to assist Ukraine in targeting Wagner commanders in Africa.
In an awkward exchange, the congresswoman skittishly requests that Wallander consider notifying congress prior to striking Russia and starting WW3. Wallander smirks and gives some sort of smugly bureaucratic non-response in what I can only characterize as a bizarro-world satiric scene from something out of Dr. Strangelove.
The reason this absurd scene had me gobsmacked is because of how it gives a frighteningly eye-opening look behind the walls of power, and freights us with the realization that we are being led by actual craven, juvenile, and low-intelligence man-children and woman-children. The fact that the congresswoman has to remind the smarmy technocrat that the constitution in fact forbids their starting WW3 without congressional approval, and the fact that the congresswoman appears to have this milquetoast, servile whipped-dog mien to her entire exchange, is truly frightening. It seemed to me more like the congresswoman was asking the deep-state technocrat for permission, rather than vice versa. These are supposed to be the people representing ‘us’, yet they are cravenly cowed before a bunch of unelected technocrats who are playing not only with our lives, but with the fate of the entire world.
And consider the fact that this congresswoman, Ms. Jacobs, is a sitting member of the HASC committee responsible with the budgetary oversight of the DOD, which means she, like every member of these select military committees, is supposed to have the highest level clearance. Yet here she is asking Wallander about a story she read in the newspaper whose ramifications verge on WW3? How is a sitting member of a DOD oversight committee only just hearing about U.S.’s plans of assassinating Wagner commanders in a newspaper report about the leaks? Why is she and every other such committee member not already fully apprised of what the secret compartmentalized, unelected quadrants of the government are doing behind not only the taxpayers’ backs, but apparently behind the congress’s own back?
These are startling revelations given that normally we would brush them off, as countless such meetings and interactions have revealed similar things, but concerning geopolitical areas of much smaller consequence. It’s one thing for congress to be clueless as to what the secret cabinets of the government are doing in Syria or some backwater part of the globe, but when it concerns Russia, there is a distinct existentiality to the repercussions of something going wrong.
So it’s doubly infuriating that not only are these congress-people obliviously clueless, but that they address these technocrats in such tepid, nebbishly servile manners as if it was Wallander who was the elected representative of the people, to whom everything is accountable, rather than the undemocratically appointed technocrat that she is.
The next section sees Cavoli demurring from ‘publicly’ admitting to Ukrainian weaknesses as to the upcoming offensive. But, he claims, they are ‘ready’ and that the U.S. has meticulously modeled the offensive out and likes what they’d seen. He goes on to give the open admission that the U.S. is in fact commanding the Ukrainian forces when he says that they ‘worked on the surprise’ with the AFU; meaning, that the U.S. helped create the strategies and vectors of the upcoming ‘Grand Offensive’. Just another in a long line of admissions and exhibits for our record books of U.S./NATO’s complicity and guiding hands in this war.
The last segment is another doozy. The congressman catches the squirming Wallander betwixt rock and hard place when he forces her to explain the nonsensical duality she’s trying to play at, after she characterizes Russian forces as basically ‘destroyed’, yet in the same breath comically attributes such vaunted potency to them that she warns it would still take all of NATO to stop them.
The congressman here is perplexed and clearly skeptical. Wait, he seems to say, you’re telling us Russia is destroyed, can’t establish air superiority over Ukraine, has nothing left, yet over 31 of the world’s most advanced militaries combined should still be trembling in their knickers?
But the cunning woman is clearly playing a devious game. She’s invoking the infamous ‘Schrodinger’s Russian Cat’ paradox popular amongst all Galaxy-Brained AFU supporters on Twitter and elsewhere. It’s the absurd ‘have your cake and eat it too’ double-dip standard in characterizing Russia as a joke, a failure, an inept and incompetent force, etc., while at the same time, still begging for historic levels of funding to combat the ostensibly ‘greatest ever threat to Europe.’ In the eyes of the hucksters, Russia is simultaneously both the weakest and most powerful force in the world.
This is the bureaucrat slug’s way of trying to have her hand in both pies so she can on one hand report of her department’s brilliant ingenuity and success in ‘degrading’ and ‘destroying’ Russia, giving her resumé a sterling rating and earmarking herself for a promotion and raise, but on the other hand, to not allow that counterfeit ‘victory’ to actually lead to the pulling of the plug of U.S. government support. Because if that were to happen, she knows full well her lies would come undone, and that Russia would overrun everything, leaving her looking like a fraud.
It’s the ultimate real life example of the old Ukrainian joke:
Why is our army attacking Donbass? -Because the Russian army invaded there.
Why is our army not attacking Crimea? -Because the Russian army is really there.
It’s the same thing here. Bureaucrat slugs always give the selective answer most convenient to their agenda at any given time. Since the start of the conflict, Russia has repeatedly been described as an inept army in order to fluff up NATO/U.S. contributions, so they can say: “See how effective our mighty Javelins and HIMARs are!” all as a ploy to feed the MIC and arms manufacturers, so corrupt, treasonous officials with Lockheed stock can continue getting fat off the war.
But then when it suits them the other way, they will gladly prostitute themselves out as shills for Russia being the most powerful, scariest force on the planet—for which we need several MORE NATO members like Sweden and Finland just to fend them off.
The congressman in the above clip says Russia can’t even establish air superiority over Ukraine, why should we be worried? Yet the technocrat slug’s response is: “But they have a large airforce still!” But he just addressed the airforce. Logic has no meaning to her.
The point of my screed was to say that this is a first-rate example of why we should never trust the U.S. government or military’s assessments vis a vis Russia. They are clearly highly politicized, highly compromised, and thus completely illogical, irrational, and outright paradoxical. Reading between the lines, you can see the truth: that Russia is not ‘degraded’ in the way they’d like you to think, and that their actions—rather than their words—show us they are extremely worried.
The other last thing this exchange reveals to us, is how the U.S. ruling class are quietly struggling to juggle the two main axes of their global confrontation with Russia and China. The anxiously impatient congressman bridles at the fact the lagging Russian front is now taking resources away from the crucial Chinese one. He’s desperate to reorient U.S. resources to the looming threat of China before China’s able to completely run away with the situation while U.S. has its pants down.
Further startling is how clueless and uninformed these congressmen are. Demonstrated in these exchanges is the clear arc of exactly how the policy pipeline is formed behind the scenes of congressional power. A bunch of clueless, ape-like congressmen slouch and take dictation from the intelligence providers who are the true policymakers. They ask them questions, it seems, more for the sake of appearances, to have done their due diligence and collected their paycheck. But they rarely seem to challenge, nor appear to even have the power to do so, to the technocratic apparatchiks who are supposed to be, on paper, reporting to them in the hierarchy of things.
They are barely informed, and the intel apparatchiks or ‘military leaders’ who report to them are free to simply say whatever benefits them and their department most. There appears to be no type of auditing capacity or accountability mechanism in place to vouch for anything they’re reporting. The congress member is supposed to just nod along and take them at their word. Is there really no better system?
For those that wish, you can watch the full committee meeting here:
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Supreme EUCOM Commander Gives Eye-Opening Testimony on Russia in House HASC Hearing