A significant mechanism in politics is blame. By blaming something on someone or something else, you can create a reason to do another thing. Therefore you have to work out what thing you want to do, then identify the primary event, then pick a blame target. Or, if something pops up, you use the Blame Game to deflect responsibility.
The Blame Game is widespread and common across most fields of power, including international politics that drive war. It’s literally the entire basis for the Ukraine conflict. Russia has been blaming NATO for the reducing choices it had that culminated in the invasion. NATO blames Russian imperialism and lack of respect for the Rules-based Order for the invasion. Like it or not, both sides derive benefit from the Blame Game. War is a fact of life so when your turn in the shooting range comes around you can play for keeps or half-arse it. If you're playing for keeps, you'll take a glass half full approach and maximise the opportunities war presents while maintaining a sombre and serious tone, even if no one believes what you're saying.
There are different grades of Reality Engine, from 0 up to 7, but it could go higher and the classification is likely to get rejigged when the next gen is released. The grade indicates the kinds of data that the Engine processes. A grade 7 engine has access to at least some military intelligence grade data, information and intelligence that would typically be at or above TS/SCI classification. Any Engine can be of a grade with a “/S” designator, which means it has some data feed from social media sources. We NEVER use a /S engine for operational uses. We only use a specifically compartmentalized /S engine as a means to retrospectively monitor aspects of the impact of our work by looking for evidence of how what we put out into the world circulates in social media naturally or synthetically. Everyone knows that a Reality Engine with a /S feed becomes “dumb” because the social media data poisons the Engine and wrecks its integrity and reliability. Why? Brecause social media interaction is largely stupid, garbage, corrupted or fake. It's the lowest quality of human generated data you can get. There's a reason why humans have a private internal monologue and woe betide anyone who lets that into a complex system. We've learned this both the right way, through careful testing, and the wrong way, through attempts to operationalise social media data.
Putin's called our bluff. His timing's good. He's offered us an escape path. Offering an end to the war for the full boundaries of the four oblasts isn't as bad as what they'll keep fighting for. There's no DMZ in the offer and the country wouldn't be landlocked. Of course, this is rejected immediately by US top brass; the slice of humble pie is way too big for us to swallow. By refusing, we double down and so by default we all accelerate. Acceleration doesn't work in our favour because we are behind on every curve.
This is a major inflection point. Russia is telling us that the level and scope of the violence will increase. It has to because the only way for the war to end is for an undeniable military situation to come about. We are refusing the offer because we are claiming that the situation is more ambiguous than it really is. Therefore, more fighting and destruction must occur to remove the ambiguity. Russia's violence is unrestricted. Ours must still flow through the Ukraine proxy structure unless we force an error from Russia that opens the door. The way Russia keeps the door closed is by tolerating our strikes into Russia and keeping its fight inside Ukraine.
We've declared some hairbrained fantasy scheme for operating F16s. Remaining airfields inside Ukraine are likely to be annihilated by Russia with heavy runway denial munitions to prevent any aircraft movements. This will nullify our supposed plan for F16s, which was never real anyway. Yet again we declare intentions and in doing so tell the Russians what they should do and when, even though they already worked this out for themselves. Every stage of the war has been run like this, by both NATO and the Ukrainians. It's almost as if NATO wants the Russians to stand the greatest chance of destroying all the equipment we sent and killing all the men we trained. But why? War is to be won, isn't it? This war must be won by Ukraine. That's our claim.
Scenario C2 now branches. Scenario D is the branch where permutations of Yes/No responses to the Russian offer start plotting. We can keep running with C2 because “No” is considered to have changed nothing material, for the sake of the scenario. Of course, that's not true, but data updates to the entire Reality Engine will take this into account.
The problem with Reality Management is it's too fucking complicated. Because ou’s complicated, it's unreliable and difficult to adequately program. I mean program in multiple senses because Reality Engines are programmed in a few different ways.
Putin's offer came just before our monthly TEMPO meeting in a secure Ramstein operation room. The fifteen bonded pairs, two NATO junior commanders and four CIA heads who all manage LIQUID TRACTION are here. Four of the pairs work solely on the Ukrainian theatre. The rest run pan-European operations.
TEMPO is a LIQUID TRACTION senior management interface. The bonded pairs turn up - fifteen in total - with NATO Command and CIA. The NATO heads are just two US European junior commanders - Colonel Hagman & Lt. Colonel Borovich - not top brass. Four CIA heads ensure we have access to everything we need. There are no other NATO nations represented in TEMPO because LT is a US black op that interfaces with Europe through deliberate subterfuge. Hagman & Borovich are the two real NATO leaders because they are fully operational, not just political. That see the realities of LT and their job is to feed that into the political military machine that the rest of the NATO leadership are involved with. Unfortunately, political NATO doesn't have to listen so we also take action that forces them to act.
DARK ANVIL is the LT sub project that covers the actual Ukraine conflict. There's four pairs working on it. Since 2012, DARK ANVIL helped convert a military suppression strategy against Russia into internal political and military actions that covered the Maidan coup, sponsorship of the reemergent right wing and the installation of Zelensky via Kholomoisky. Underneath all that, DARK ANVIL established the inbound and outbound networks that are used to shift people and stuff in and out of the country, mostly off the books. Those essential networks are synonymous with how the money is washed back out of Ukraine. Most of the money just circulates around the NATO countries but the stuff that enters Ukraine needs a way to get back out. The police, SBU, armed forces, militia and dark political operators all have a reporting and authorisation relationship to DARK ANVIL, even if they don't know who they're really dealing with.
Its staff were recruited from across Europe, but we all report to the US and have positions above any official or covert European role. In a dark corner of the State Department there's a note that references EUINTEROPS (EU Intelligence Inter Operations & Operatives) and that's what we are. No one knows about it except the senior management who released us bonded pairs from our national services while still allowing us to appear to be part of them. We are servants and agents of the Empire, not its vassals.
This offer registers as a decision event and a new branch is created at that point. The Engine plots potential scenarios along it. If leadership were doing proper thinking, they'd have listened to us about the new branch with its scenarios for acceptance and rejection, but they didn't.
Scenario A was our overrun of DLPR using the militia-led assault in Feb 2022 that the SMO interrupted, so it was dead the moment Russia advanced. Scenario B was a Russian retreat due to effective fighting, sanctions and double the political pressure than we actually managed to build. The SMO fucked B up as well because it proactively took out all the militias in the first phase of combat, meaning that we never got to fight from a balanced Eastern front with deployments and formations that Scenario B hinged upon. Scenario C1 was a mod branch of B that was made once we saw Russia fully engage the militias in sustained combat. C1 died when Russia won at Azovstal then Bakhmut. C2 was a containment scenario with emphasis on defence that we've been in since Summer 2023. It's 50:50 in terms of who's to blame for how fucked up things have gotten. NATO leadership and forces aren't fully compatible with the Ukrainians. We never embedded NATO integration since 2014 so there was never true interoperability and NATO leadership is actually a mess, as the world now recognises. Ukrainian armed forces have done stuff on the ground that we didn't control, and they aren't disciplined. There's too many crazies in there, as has been well exposed in the non mainstream coverage. So the blame goes both ways. But all this isn't even half the picture.
A Reality Engine isn't war gaming. It's way beyond that. It's a tool to manage change at massive scale; a means to map a future vision then define ongoing task lists that manifest that vision in the real, complex world. The engine doesn't create a strategic objective or broad strategy per sé. Rather, it enables objectives to be realised and in doing so, may describe tactical wand strategic actions or choices to make.
Putin's offer came just before our monthly TEMPO meeting in a secure Ramstein operation room. TEMPO is a LIQUID TRACTION senior management interface. The bonded pairs turn up - fifteen in total - with NATO and CIA command. The NATO command is just two US European junior commanders, not top brass. Four CIA heads ensure we have access to everything we need. There are no other NATO nations represented in TEMPO. LT is a US black op that interfaces with Europe through deliberate subterfuge. Its staff were recruited from across Europe, but we all report to the US and have positions above any official or covert European role. In a dark corner of the State Department there's a note that references EUINTEROPS (EU Intelligence Inter Operations & Operatives) and that's what we are. No one knows about it except the senior management who released us bonded pairs from our national services while still allowing us to appear to be part of them. We are servants and agents of the Empire, not its vassals.
Long story short: we're accelerating cognitive operations across Europe. The DARK ANVIL pairs have released the stories about Ukrainian terrorist operations against Russia. These Ukraine stories condition people again to the idea that Ukraine does terrorism. That's Daria Dugina, Nord Stream, Vladlen Tatarsky, Gonzalo Lira, these Russian attacks and soon it'll be mainland Europe attacks. There has to be enough precedent stories of Ukrainian terrorism to justify a massive policy swing across Europe against Ukrainian refugees and the government when the time comes.
NATO is a political military organisation that's ossified to the point of being feckless and inept. No one knew how bad it was until Russia crossed the border and put its money where its mouth is. The single biggest mistake we made was to think we fully understood Russia in mind, motivation and capability. The ones who did understand were ignored by the neocon ideologues in power. Regardless, our jobs remained the same. We maintain the LT networks, capabilities and supplies across Europe to maintain control over the bloc by whatever means.
The other eleven work across Europe on other projects. Ren and I are the only ones managing BRILLIANT FORGE and its sub projects, which is how we like it. We're efficient and good at using Reality Engines to manage outcomes.
The war and therefore all DARK ANVIL work has always been about selective Russian force application. Engagements have always traded off the speed of killing with the peripheral damage. The first phase cauldroning of ground forces and the big city engagements in Azovstal, Bakhmut and so on were necessary for Russia to fully secure key territory and decisively destroy our troops. Then it was about absorbing our attacks on the defensive line. Now it's about forcing us to engage to be picked off without getting heavily bogged down in every town or city. They've got air superiority now but they don't carpet bomb Kyiv. The Ukraine air force has gone. The airfields are largely unusable. F16s aren't going to appear and don't matter anyway. We have generally fucked up the entire way we supplied the war from 2022 and everyone knows it. It doesn't actually matter because winning was never a top level objective. NATO management think it is but in LIQUID TRACTION the war is just a means to an end.
The problem with Reality Engines is that they're actually too complicated for NATO management to use. They are so much more than a battle simulation that they can cripple human decision making unless you develop a fluidity with the Engine and also set up the right balance between the models you have in your head and the model in the Reality Engine. If you've ever played Sim City or Civilisation, imagine combining the two then making the whole thing the size of the globe, strapping on a whole battle engine as well and then filling it up with the internet's worth of data, minus the idiocy of social media.
The weakness in a Reality Engine is pretty straightforward: the quality, depth and limitations of your intelligence on enemies means you must tolerate gaps or the inaccuracies that come with assumptions. This is a problem inherent in any war game. However, two other factors come into play. The scope of the Reality Engine goes way beyond battles, into the whole world model in the Engine, including politics, economics and more. Also, the Engine is frequently updated with real world events so what you saw in it yesterday can suddenly shift tomorrow if the real world inputs are profound enough. This sounds simple and obvious, but the purpose of a Reality Engine isn't to just mirror events but to allow you to set a vision of the future you want to attain then calculate actions you should take to make that future happen, all while constantly taking into account real events as they unfold on an ongoing basis, which then updates the calculated actions. If you or your opponents take actions
If I had to pick one factor that's had the most influence on the state of the war and why we're behind, it's Russia's initial pace of decisions. Entry positioned them to engage the militias immediately and pressure for a deal. Then they snapped into full combat to kill the militias. They were key decisions that took post huge amounts of key troops. That happened so fast
Our TEMPO meeting in Ramstein is very pointed.
NATO won't let Zelensky stop fighting; the garbage Zelensky peace plan is nonsense junk designed to be rejected and NATO won't do a deal with Russia. This is a corner. Putin's giving us a somewhat humiliating way out because he's winning the fight.
Meetings have changed a lot over the last few years. We spent years up to 2015 in maintenance mode, maintaining sleeper networks while we translated strategic objectives into legal and policy frameworks to push down and out across the continent, bit by bit. The post Maidan situation in Ukraine escalated more than anticipated. Russia was determined not to compromise on its base demands, which is why it launched the SMO but up to that point, we had escape vectors. We believed we could win because we didn't understand Russia. I say “we”, but I mean “them”. Ren & I had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Most of us here did but we don't have the final say on policy or action. We still take orders.
TEMPO is based around a Reality Engine focused on Ukraine. It pumps out dashboards and displays built off complex modelling and real world data and intel. This stuff is way beyond war gaming.
Ukraine is net negative and unrecoverable. The manpower issue can't be fixed. Jets aren't a new weapon, they're a new liability.
“Russian priority on loss minimization remains the determining factor of progression,” says Col. Hagman. “That's mainly affected by our drone units, some engagement with our remaining experienced mechanized infantry and Russian tactical decisions about where on the line to advance. That's down to geography and strategic returns, rather than the immediate fight. When they make a decision, they apply force across the line to spread us out. We have no choice but to concede either land or a fight. By autumn we expect a sign of direct push to Odessa, the whole line to have moved up to 100 km West and an increasing abandonment of the Ukrainian peace forum.”
Hagman brings up the escalation hot spots and forecasts. At this moment, Ukraine is like an elbow joint between the bicep of Russia and its forearm and hand reaching out around the globe.
“If Russia doesn't overreact to anything we hit in Ukraine or Russia, there's nothing we can do apart from claim she's weak. We really pushed it by striking at the OTH radar site but Russia held her nerve. Recent Russian fleet movements in to Cuba are a co-operation flex for PR. Underneath that, we still only know the location of 22% of the subs, which is the real flex. We assume they want us to know that 22% so we assign visible resources tackling and chasing them. This Florida sub hunt activity is a fuck up. We got spoofed. The rest are probably either evenly spread around our priority bases or with a 25% bias towards mainland USA. The British embarrassed everyone with their fucked up Trident launch that nearly took out their own sub. Last year, Russia showed its gear still works. What we expect next are more flexes with other global allies, by moving ships and troops into other ports. While they're reaching out further and further, they're still winning in Ukraine. As per last month, we're still well inside the Scenario A track. Political NATO has decided on initial F16 deployment…” Hagman barely hides his disdain in his tone. “So…” he rolls his eyes, “in practical terms, all Ukrainian runways will be annihilated within two weeks, maybe a month of these flights commencing operations. Russia may want to tolerate some sorties to get shots off at the jets. Nothing complicated here; we've fucked this up and there's no hiding it.”
Larry Sanmore, a CIA manager, takes over to run though the Volodometer - a graphical overview of political support for the now dictator. Citizen discontent 70%, internal political dissent 55%, military dissent 50%. Sponsored coup boundary is at 60% so we could launch one any time.
We’re keeping attack dogs at bay via our payroll. We've got a choice of the remnants of Svoboda crews or other combat elements from a mixture of units who are no longer in the field. We can push them over the edge any time to take over but we couldn't have them stay in power. They would try to and they're not competent so it wouldn't end the fighting. Quite the opposite. A front runner is Budanov who's agreed to take over the dictatorship on a temporary basis, initiate elections then escape for $500m, provided Zelensky is taken out in a CIA joint venture, which makes it trickier for us to just blame Budanov and take him out as well.
We'll keep cycling through three themes in the Anti-Z campaign. We've gone from his corruption to stress and paranoia, to reducing friends. We just told people he bought a $200m hotel. There's plenty more where that came from. Zelensky's still on script begging and feeding the frontlines with younger meat. We'll be forcing up the heat across the continent to start moving Ukrainians back in as well. Zelensky will bear all the stress of that while we continue to ready a replacement. He's got no choice and diminishing actual power.
I suggest we give Mrs Zelensky more air time to show off her disconnectedness and apparent sociopathy. She did well the last couple of times in making their popularity slump.
They used to call this war gaming but it's way past that. War gaming didn't include multi layer socioeconomic and narrative interlocks, it was just about the fight. Reality engines are how we move reality itself towards strategic objectives on any front we care to include and can model and measure.
A war game is a funnel. It starts out with all the guns, men and tactics at the wide end. As the fight works through, options and resources narrow like a funnel until one side wins and the other loses. The strategic objective is to militarily win within given constraints, unless it becomes about limiting a loss. Either way, that's a funnel for both sides. Reality engines aren't like that.
Imagine making champagne with more than one grape. You're blending two or more wines, with all their variability. That's like combining political, military, social, economic and cognitive wines together, then activating the blend with yeast and sugar. The yeast is all your analysis and decision-making skill. The sugar is the enemy action and reaction. You put all that into bottles and leave it to ferment. Screw up any of the wines or the blend and it'll go from a grand cru to anything as bad as junk. Not enough yeast and it'll taste wrong and lack booze. Misjudge the quality or amount of yeast or sugar and a grand cru becomes junk, taste wrong, lack booze, or bottles start blowing up in the cellar.
Reality engines are how we plan then manage reality on long, medium and short timelines, on a reflexive basis. They use advanced implementations of military AI and LLMs, while sucking in big data and intelligence data. What gets spat out are scenarios that are versions of deviations from a hoped for future.
The speed of narrative change, and the difficulty and quantity of the objectives have increased. The resulting step up in stress has become palpable in TEMPO amongst very cool colleagues.
From inside TEMPO the world looks very different to how it looks from inside “normal” NATO, never mind civvie street. There's a big problem with NATO that's always been there but has now been fully exposed: it's not fit for actual fighting. But what does that mean and how could that be?
Sure, individual military forces are capable of fighting. They're also capable of fighting together. Now, a proper ground war in Ukraine with massive losses and conventional combined arms warfare reminds everyone that they're all behind that curve, and that they neglected that curve for decades because they all got lazy and bought into the wrong threat narratives for too long. Or that's how it is meant to appear.
This is the problem with war economies. The profits totally destroy clarity of vision, purpose, and objectives. Purity in national priorities and mission evaporates. NATO was always a kind of politicization of the military, which is why Gladio existed in the first place. Military subterfuge that tricks your own people into believing or being scared of false realities is pure politics. That's got nothing to do with really fighting a peer enemy on the battlefield using everything and everyone you've got.
There were tons of clues about all of this. Defence procurement is a huge giveaway. It's inept and corrupt. That's all you need to know. If you make stuff that blows up, you want it to be as cheap as possible while being effective. Why's a Javelin missile cost anywhere up to $250k? There's no way that the seeker head and guidance tech should cost that much considering how old it is. In simple terms, Lancet drones are just like Javelins in end capability (a self or operator guided ATGM) and they cost $35k for cutting edge fireworks.
The high level personnel all live in a non existent reality where the war they were meant to be ready for didn't exist, so they were never tested. Literally never tested. Testing yourself using computer games you built and know isn't a valid test. Exercises aren't real fighting and inside an exercise there is no adaptation driven by real mortal threat and other tangible forces. This is why senior personnel say and do things that are just so far disconnected from provable reality. The wars of the last 40 years have not been peer level engagements using combined arms. 40 years spans three generations of military leadership, so you can guarantee skills and knowledge loss or stagnation if you aren't fighting the way you were created to fight.
Put simply, NATO is a layer of military political management that lives in a silo, even if its constituents are fighting armies. Under the NATO umbrella, members have let skills, manpower and gear languish and shrink while the management lied to itself and the world at parties paid for by the MICIMATT. And so, we walked further and further into a reality that didn't really exist until our faulty strategy and notion of superiority put us head to head with Russia as it dug its heels in and called us out.
TEMPO knows this. We also know what's largely real and we know what unrealities our side has created. That makes us more competent than NATO management, except for the fact that we're nothing to do with the large scale fighting. This is actually fucked up when you think about it. The guys who have a better handle on truth have much smaller remits and their job is to bend reality, create fake realities and warp the future by manipulating people to manifest that future. What would NATO be if it just dealt in cold, hard reality of getting ready for big fights while being adult about trying to prevent any fighting? It'd probably be a mix of military destructive power and constructive services that went around the world building stuff when it wasn't practising blowing it up.
“Clawback is ramping up in country. Outside, policy is going in but hasn't been publicised or activated yet,” Colonel Manley says. “Current rate of replenishment is 4 to 10,000 a month but that gets zero competence heads onto the line in around 3 weeks average.” This means two things: conscripts are in short supply and they're not being trained. It was bad enough to give them 6 weeks training in Europe. An average of three weeks means they're not really getting any training. This information is coming from NATO heads on the grinds who filter the Ukrainian bullshit. It's as close to true as we'll get. Clawback is everything being done to keep men entering the Ukrainian armed forces. Internally, they're dropping the age of conscription, hunting harder, training less. Outside, all the policies to push people back to Ukraine have been drafted and practically implemented on the quiet. Zelensky cut people's passports, damaged taxes and all that stuff ages ago. None of it will have enough effect. All these things are too little, too late. This is bad military politics coming home to roost.