By Eric Zuesse
Though the U.S. Government spends about $1.5 trillion annually for the military — around half of that being spent in the Department of ‘Defense’ — and Russia spends annually less than 5% as much on its total military costs, America’s ‘news’-media blame Russia’s alleged corruption for Russia’s alleged military failures, but do not blame America’s actual military failures upon America’s actual corruption. Here is how that happens:
The neoconservative Democrat Pierre Omidyar, who was one of the main private funders of America’s 2014 coup in Ukraine, subsequently founded The Intercept website in order to serve as a way-station to career-oblivion for progressive investigative-reporting stars such as Glenn Greenwald and Mark Ames (both of whom were then soon forced out), and now the neoconservative former New York Times reporter, James Risen, who hasn’t lost his job there, is reporting, on October 5th, that “THE CIA THOUGHT PUTIN WOULD QUICKLY CONQUER UKRAINE. WHY DID THEY GET IT SO WRONG? High-tech surveillance may have blinded the U.S. to how corruption has weakened the Russian military.”:
When Putin invaded in February, U.S. intelligence officials told the White House that Russia would win in a matter of days by quickly overwhelming the Ukrainian army, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information. …
The U.S. intelligence community’s stunning failure at the beginning of the war to recognize the fundamental weaknesses in the Russian system mirrors its blindness to the military and economic weaknesses of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when Washington failed to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. …
U.S. intelligence did not recognize the significance of rampant corruption and incompetence in the Putin regime, particularly in both the Russian army and Moscow’s defense industries, the current and former intelligence officials said. U.S. intelligence missed the impact of corrupt insider dealing and deceit among Putin loyalists in Moscow’s defense establishment, which has left the Russian army a brittle and hollow shell.
“There was no reporting on the corruption in the Russian system,” said the former senior intelligence official. “They missed it, and ignored any evidence of it.”
No evidence was provided in Risen’s ‘news’-report, except those allegations by those “current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who asked not to be named.”
If Risen’s report is news, then it is news that rhymes with five-month-old news from Yahoo News, whose finance columnist Rick Newman headlined on 1 April 2022, “Why Russia’s military is so shabby”, and he did name sources:
Western analysts obviously failed to notice many fundamental problems with Russia’s military, with many estimating before the invasion that overwhelming firepower and a deep kit of military tools would help Russia steamroll Ukraine. They had reason to believe that, however. For the last decade, Russia has increased defense spending and embarked on an aggressive modernization program, … One thing that’s extremely difficult to diagnose from a distance, though, is the cancer of corruption and inefficiency. Russia has adopted some market reforms since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but it has also become a kleptocracy with endemic graft and plodding state agencies that make America’s federal bureaucracy look like a whiz-bang startup. In Ukraine, those shortcomings may have metastasized into disaster.
“Corruption is part of the political and economic system in Russia, and what we are seeing in Ukraine is part of the explanation,” Katarzyna Zysk, a professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo, tells Yahoo Finance. “The problem is there’s no accountability. We assume this continues to be part of the problem in the Russian military.”
Russia’s annual defense budget is around $62 billion — less than one-tenth what the United States spends. Even then, secret bidding for military contracts and an overcomplicated military bureaucracy leave ample room for graft. In a couple of rare admissions, Russian military leaders have estimated that 20% to 40% of Russia’s military budget is stolen. Former Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, who now lives in the United States, said on Twitter on March 6, “the Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus.” …
Putin himself is responsible for those problems. As Russia’s leader or de facto leader for 22 years, he has fashioned the entire economy according to his liking, and probably purloined more of the nation’s wealth for himself than anyone else.
“Putin is the corrupter-in-chief,” Barry Pavel, director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, tells Yahoo Finance. “In autocratic systems like Russia, China or North Korea, it’s much easier to skim a lot of money off the top. The same thing is happening in the military. Each branch of the military gets a certain budget, and it seems to me there are chunks off the top that go for the aggrandizement of those leaders.”
Dude, I stole your army
U.S. intelligence officials have deduced that Putin’s deputies are reluctant or afraid to tell him the truth about Russia’s shoddy military and its halting war in Ukraine. That might be because those are the same people who plundered the military budget in the first place, leaving poorly equipped troops to deal with the deadly consequences on foreign turf against a determined defender. Nobody wants to tell Putin, dude, I stole your army.
If Russia is spending annually a total of “around $62 billion” on defense, then ten times that would be $.62 trillion, and 20 times it would be $1.24 trillion, which would be a bit less than America spends on it each year. So, if Russia’s military is “no accountability” and “there are chunks off the top that go for the aggrandizement of those leaders,” and “Nobody wants to tell Putin, dude, I stole your army,” then how corrupt is America’s military?
Are we to believe that the best the U.S. intelligence community can do in order to explain their long and amazing record of false ‘intelligence’ is for U.S. intelligence officials to blame it on the corruptness of Russia’s military? How stupid do they think we are? Or: ARE ‘we’, that stupid?
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
