By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Even Leonardo da Vinci didn’t think it was possible.
A perpetual motion machine, that is, whose construction had been attempted by Indian fakirs for five hundred years before a handful of medieval European conmen got the idea. Then Leonardo tried knocking it on its head: “O ye seekers after perpetual motion,” he scribbled in his notebook, “how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.”
Old Lenny hadn’t met an inventor of artillery and a banker financing the warmakers’ market of his day. For those fellows had invented the perpetual money-making machine. All they needed to kick it off was a war – a long one, thirty years or one hundred years, was best for their balance-sheets.
Losing wars, however, is very bad for the business.
Right now American, British, German, and French gunmakers are fighting among themselves for the profitability of the Ukrainian battlefield. Re-sellers and smugglers from Kiev and Lvov, too.
At the same time they have managed to drive the bad news of diminishing profit margins off the pages of the financial press. The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Der Spiegel and Die Zeit haven’t reported, for example, that the Russian Army has perfected the technology for targeting NATO artillery and rocket radars, killing their accompanying firing crews, and blinding the electronic reconnaissance systems flying above so that the Ukrainians don’t know what’s coming next in their direction, and what has hit them after it has.
One of the consequences is that the best of NATO anti-missile technology is being fired haplessly into the air and then coming down to destroy Ukrainian domestic buildings, kindergartens, etc. US and European gunmakers make the same profit from friendly fire; the friends don’t appreciate this. Another consequence is that the Ukrainian regime in Kiev is at war with itself – civilians versus generals – over acknowledging how blind they have become.
Facing the Russian military, the US and NATO general staffs are re-learning Old Lenny’s advice not to confuse their Russian-enemy wishful thinking, circa 2014-2021, with the reality of losing the war on Russian-enemy terms — now and into the foreseeable future. The US military industrial complex may believe it can afford to keep selling its alchemy for as long as the war can be prolonged on the Ukrainian battlefield. They and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington generals are calling this a “stalemate”. The German generals are not so sure American stalemate won’t amount to German rout in due course. Privately, they are trying to warn their friends and employers in the German military industrial complex. For a Swiss press report of these private talks, read this.
In public, the outcome is a display of German generals struggling to balance their 1939-45 mindset towards Russia with the prospect of losing, not only the war on the Ukrainian battlefield, but the escalation of Russian strategy against German and US-made weapons, forward NATO commands and US bases in Germany – and the future balance-sheets of the German gunmakers – that’s Kraus-Maffei, Rheinmetall, Thyssen-Krupp.
Gorilla Radio opens the discussion on what the good Germans are afraid of — and what the bad Americans behind them are risking in this war.
Four points of fact opened in the discussion can be amplified here.
The first is the role played in deciding the war against Russia by the general-flag officers – generals, admirals, and air marshals – of the US, UK, Germany, Canada (GOFO, general and flag officers), and Australia. These officers have turned into a military caste when grandfathers have been succeeded in the military academies, unit commands, and general staffs by their sons, and when this line of succession continues to their sons in the present lineup.
Australia is identified because it leads the war allies against Russia for having more generals commanding fewer troops. In military practice, if an Australian general had experience facing hostile fire, he would be the equivalent of a British, American or German captain. Such inexperienced and untested generals can afford to be more aggressive on the Ukrainian battlefield because they have far less to risk – of rank, pay, life and limb — than their North American and European counterparts.
HOW MANY GENERALS COMMAND HOW FEW SOLDIERS
The second point is the money shot. This is the profitability to the top-5 US arms manufacturers in the Ukraine war to date; and the double jump in their share prices in the first days after the start of the special military operation on February 24, and then in the October-November period.
THE LEADING US ARMS MANUFACTURERS BY REVENUES, 2021
Black=total sales; blue=total arms sales.
Source: https://www.statista.com/
SHARE PRICE TRAJECTORY OF THE US ARMS MANUFACTURERS, 2020-23
Key: black=Lockheed Martin; orange=Raytheon; brown=Boeing; yellow=Northrop Grumman; and green=General Dynamics.
Source: https://markets.ft.com/
With the exception of Boeing, each of the four leaders saw the tripling or greater increases in their share prices on the New York Stock Exchange between February and April; and then a second price advance between September and November, as the US escalated deliveries of US-made weapons to the Ukrainian battlefield, as well as to NATO allies in replacement of or substitution for their own arms deliveries to the Ukraine.
For Lockheed Martin, for example, the market capitalization at the February 23 share price of $4.17 amounted to $1.093 billion; on April 13, the corporation’s market cap had jumped to $6.730 billion with the share price at $25.68 – this is a sixfold gain worth more than $5.6 billion. There was a second, even more valuable increase in Lockheed Martin’s share price and market cap between September 30 and November 8, when the share rocketed from $3.47 to $32.59 and the market cap from $909.4 million to $8.5 billion. This gain was more than ninefold. The reason? The decision by the Biden Administration to supply the Ukrainians with the HIMARS multiple-launch rocket system built by Lockheed Martin. The corporation’s share price has not been higher in the past thirty years.
However, as Russian anti-rocket weapons have proved successful in intercepting the HIMARS rockets after launch and destroying radars, launchers, crews, and stocks, Lockheed Martin has been losing value.
The third point in the Gorilla discussion is the failure of the alternative internet media to report the war without propagandizing in favour of the Ukraine and against Russia. The British alt-media, for example, have been displaying the symptoms of what on the dairy farms of Scotland and England used to be called wooden tongue. When cattle catch it (actinobacillosis) they can’t swallow; if left untreated, they choke to death. On the topic of the war in the Ukraine, Craig Murray, The Canary, Tribune, Left Foot Forward, and the Daily Skeptic have already succumbed.
The fourth point is the first national test of an anti-war movement in the US next month. This will be the “Rage Against the War Machine Rally” at the Lincoln Memorial on February 19. Here is the 10-point programme of the rally; and these are the scheduled speakers.
Listen now to Chris Cook leading the hour-long discussion.
Since October, Gorilla Radio has been banned from broadcasting by Radio CFUV 101.9 FM in Victoria, British Columbia. The Gorilla Radio transcripts are published on the blog. For Chris Cook’s broadcast archive, click to open.
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