Telegraph Propaganda: Hamish de Bretton Gordon knows the score, for sure

“As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: I'm out on a limb."

“As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines. Ukrainian armoured formations are beginning to meet Russian forces in battle, and they are going to pulverise Russia’s defensive lines. I am confident for one simple reason: Ukraine will follow the Western ideology of manoeuvre warfare in a combined arms context, while the Russians will follow Soviet doctrine, relying on attrition and numbers. The Russians will find that the armour of Western tanks is far more resilient than flesh and bone, they will die in great numbers, and they will lose.”

So said a man on June 9th, whose picture makes him look like a 1960s Officer version of Action Man (the squaddie had a crew cut). You could be forgiven for thinking he’s Lee Majors’ bionically cock-eyed brother. He fares less well in other renderings.

Let’s break down Hamish de Bretton Gordon’s powerful opening paragraph.

As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain

Why and how does being a former tank commander enable him to assert with certainty what Russian troops (or Ukrainian ones) are or are not prepared for, as of today?

Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines.

The present Ukrainian offensive was never a shock. It was telegraphed for months and troop and materiel dispositions were known and attacked before the offensive, which suggests degrees of Russian preparation.

Ukrainian armoured formations… are going to pulverise Russia’s defensive lines.

pulverise: intransitive verb

1. To pound, crush, or grind to a powder or dust.

2. To overwhelm or defeat utterly.

3. To be ground or reduced to powder or dust.

The Ukrainians have not pulverised anything. They are still at the outer security zone of the Russian defences. Even Zelensky has admitted there’s no pulverising going on.

I am confident for one simple reason

Lee Majors’ cock-eyed sibling can boil the complexities and uncertainties of war, and this war down to one simple thing. That’s got to be a red flag, right there. Would you have a war planner on your table who said his one plan had one thing in it?

Ukraine will follow the Western ideology of manoeuvre warfare in a combined arms context, while the Russians will follow Soviet doctrine, relying on attrition and numbers.

“Manoeuvre warfare in a combined arms context” sounds impressive. Except that if that’s what Ukraine has been doing, it hasn’t been doing it like any western country has done it before. There is almost no air arms element. There is little air defence element. There are seemingly mismatched uses of what arms Ukraine has been given. For example, Ukraine is not replicating the US combined arms approach with the same proportion of Abrams to Bradleys as Douglas MacGregor used in Iraq.

Our Tank Commander asserts: western manoeuvre warfare is the preserve of the west and not Russia; it will certainly beat “Soviet doctrine”; Russia is still employing Soviet doctrine; Russia is only “relying on attrition and numbers”. This doesn’t stack up. Russia used manoeuvre warfare throughout the invasion to get forces into and out of the country, to cauldron and destroy Azov, Right Sector and the multiple militia, paramilitary and first Army units it engaged in the east. If Russia is now relying on attrition and numbers, its losses must be higher than Ukraine’s. They’re not and they never have been. Russia may be attritting Ukraine, but Our Tank Commander believes and wants you to believe that Russia is where it is because it has lost and can lose more troops than Ukraine and it still has more to go. This is not the case and is admitted by the West. Our Tank Commander appears to have missed the leaked intel memos and the many public statements and admissions of casualty numbers. Attrition can be achieved with zero losses, if you can establish positions, tactics and strategies that lead you to destroy an army without sustaining losses. Gordon deliberately oversimplifies the strategies obviously and possibly employed by either side.

He also fails to tell you anything about what doctrine Russia may be employing, even though it’s common knowledge. He claims they are using Soviet doctrine. If that were true, references to it wouldn’t appear in western doctine as valid defensive and offensive strategies. See here for Brian Berletic’s lay out with reference to that secret military journal, the New York Times. Below is a picture of layered defence from a western military source that's similar to that employed doctrinally by Russia in Ukraine. This contradicts Gordon's assertions.

More than 3 weeks into offensive manoeuvres, Ukraine’s still stuck in the security zone. Crimea is somewhere behind the third zone. Gordon's just lucky that he didn't put a specific timeframe on his specific claims of easy liberation of Crimea (see below).

The Russians will find that the armour of Western tanks is far more resilient than flesh and bone, they will die in great numbers, and they will lose.

Do you have to go to tank school to learn that a tank squashes a person? I learned that from logical deduction below the age of 7. And to think, Our Tank Commander is telling us that Russian adults fighting in a war don’t know this? Gulp.

Russians aren't dying in greater numbers than Ukrainians and they never have. Gordon is lying about the past and fantasizing about the future.

Back test

Let’s cut to the quick of Hamish de Bretton Gordon’s fantasy and back test his most outlandish claims.

Nearly 4,000 Russian tanks have been destroyed because they were not properly protected by infantry and air defence. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have died because they were not properly supported by artillery and tanks.

The Challenger and Leopard tanks leading the spearhead vastly outmatch what’s left of Russia’s heavy armour, while sophisticated precision artillery is providing withering fire for the advance.

Russian recruits appear to be given a few days of training, a little ammunition and are then thrown into the meat-grinder with a life expectancy surely measured in days.

The Russian air force should be a massive operational threat, but it seems that its pilots have opted to hide in the confines of the officers’ mess rather than face the excellent Ukrainian air defences.

With Ukrainian canniness, Western intelligence and equipment and a smattering of good fortune, I expect what’s left of the Russian army to be nothing more than a speed bump on the way to liberating Crimea, pushing to the Russian border and chucking Putin’s war criminals out of Ukraine once and for all.

What’s unfolding in Ukraine now could go down in history as one of the great tank actions, alongside Cambrai, Kursk and the Arras counterattack. It will certainly go down as the end of Moscow’s illegal invasion – and perhaps the beginning of the end of Putin.

Gordon claims 4,000 Russian tanks have been destroyed. Gordon is citing Ukrainian MoD figures, which are known to be bullshit. Wikipedia claims to have drawn data from the IISS and determined that in 2020 Russia had 4025 active tanks and 11,417 in storage. Even if the kill count was true, Russia’s still got 3/4s of its tanks left, and Ukraine’s been permanently running out since things kicked off.

The Leopard tanks have already been destroyed in the field by artillery, ATGMs and other tanks, proving that they are not superior. The Challenger has yet to make an appearance although some sources suggest they are definitely in country, but could have had their ammo blown up.

Gordon thinks that the entire Russian army’s achievements to date are based on its soldiers all being conscripts with just days of training.

Russian air power is, as we suggested previously, coming to the fore with massive missile and increasing aircraft attacks being reported. Even when Gordon penned this article, “Ukraine’s excellent air defences” were already admitted to be not excellent and running out, by none other than the Pentagon, then various actors across the west, then Ukraine itself.

Even the British Army doesn't agree with Gordon.

In the past decade, the number of regular soldiers in the British Army has fallen by 20 per cent from 97,000 and is to come down further to 73,000.

General Sir Patrick Sanders said the vehicles, including the Challenger 2 tank, were “outdated and not fit for purpose,” adding: “These are rotary dial telephones in an iPhone age.”

Gordon’s view that the Ukrainians would just roll over a speed bump and take Crimea is a total fantasy that has been ripped up in less than a month. Nothing Gordon has said comports with battlefield reality since the war began. What the present offensive will go down as is the dampest squib NATO could have ever tried to light.

de Bretton Gordon’s job is not to be right, it’s to put his name on awful propaganda

Take a look at these dBG articles:

Let’s break down the themes.

• Don’t let the Kremlin start a nuclear war

• Russians are all war criminals and incompetent

• The west should overthrow Putin

• Putin is done for

• Britain must further and constantly militarise against Russia and China

• Send all our old weapons to Ukraine

See the pattern? Be afraid. Be hopeful and grateful that the enemy is crap. We can and should depose our enemies. We can do this and save ourselves and be the masters if we just spend tons of money on new weapons and force expansion.

Trouble is, just looking at the headlines reveals how poor the propaganda is. Gordon is a neocon, and he's just as deluded as his USA counterparts.

Gordon doesn't even countenance what effective force the UK can put on a foreign battlefield. One to two brigades was stated as the UK capability. At the kill rate in Ukraine, that's less than a month of troops. How long would it take to recruit, train and maintain an Army of 150,000? That's twice as many as today, yet a tenth of Russia's present force.

On Nuclear War, Gordon is years behind the Doomsday Clock team - who’ve had the clock ticking down from 100 seconds to 90 seconds over 2 years ago - and Scott Ritter, who’s been screaming his head off about this since the start of the war if not before. Mearsheimer and Cohen alluded to serious consequences of war with Russia. Suddenly, Gordon is crying about nuclear war but only blaming Putin. It’s puke-inducingly transparent garbage that’s years late.

“Britain is sending the right tanks to Ukraine” doesn’t comport with “Britain needs new tanks to defeat Putin” (co-authored with Tobias Ellswood MP, psychotic militarist and 77th Brigade Propagandist). Nor does it tie up to “British-made tanks are about to sweep Russia’s conscripts aside”.

Ellswood and Gordon both state:

We can now clearly see that a squadron of Challenger II tanks alone is not enough to change the course of this war. Indeed, our land warfare capability including tanks, armoured personnel carriers and reconnaissance vehicles is in a sorry state of affairs. 

In short: our tanks are over 20 years old, soon to be reduced to 148 from 900 a decade ago. Our Warrior Armoured Fighting Vehicles are over 26 years old. Worse still, the Warrior is being replaced by the German-made Boxer; a wheeled, not tracked, vehicle that has no turret. Our Scimitar reconnaissance vehicle is over 50 years old. It should have been replaced by the Ajax three years ago, but a litany of procurement problems means it’s unclear if this will go ahead. 

And then Gordon claims that sending a few Challengers will lead to the retake of Crimea, and that we should send all our old naff weapons to Ukraine, even though they aren’t good enough to beat Russia.

The stuff is manic, incoherent, baseless and repeatedly proven wrong or directly contradicted by UK state actors, other friendly governments or events on the ground.

Ignorance isn’t their excuse

Gordon and Ellswood aren’t wrong because they don’t know enough or the right information. They are wrong because they are terrible propagandists who think that the audience reading their drivel are all dumb. Without doubt, plenty are. You’d be shocked to discover people’s reading comprehension and analytical capability when it comes to the news.

They are also wrong because they are meant to be. No one holds them or their output to account. The Telegraph should have sacked Gordon for being constantly wrong, but being right is not the point of The Telegraph. Its point is to propagandise its audience of dolts who choose to read and believe it.

The way to read Gordon's pieces is to invert them:

Modern warfare is a complex business, requiring the careful fusion and synchronisation of many different capabilities. Technology is being shown to be a significant force multiplier in this war, and though Ukraine lacks the astonishing numbers of conscripts Russia is prepared to sacrifice in battle, it does have access to the latest Western weaponry which is proving decisive, just as it did in the early months of the war. 

It is not enough for Ukraine to avoid defeat – Russia must lose. Hitherto, Western precision artillery and intelligence has prevented the Russian hordes from swamping Ukraine, and now Western tanks look like they will turn the tide. They're getting the tools, but it is Western air power that will finish the job. Otherwise Russia’s “quality of quantity” will win the day with far greater consequences for European security.

Here Gordon contradicts his future self in admitting war is complex. His future self would have us believe that anyone can be trained in 8 weeks to be fully competent in any role in combined arms manoeuvre warfare.

He claims that Russia is willing to just sacrifice men, despite the fact that it isn't. What it's doing is limiting its losses and shifting them away from the Army and onto PMCs and penal recruits. Ukraine is doing the exact opposite by literally force drafting every and any male up to 59.

He claims imported western weaponry is proving decisive, when there is no evidence of that and NATO admits it's running out of weapons, still won't commit men and that the offensive is failing and stalled.

Fortunately, people who have bothered to register occasionally remark in the comments:

Yep those NATO tanks are just sweeping those Russians aside ... tally ho!

https://twitter.com/Cyberspec1/status/1668054356107874304/photo/1

You are obviously in a different galaxy from most of us. Where do you get these outrageous figures from?

As the ex-second-in-command of a Challenger Squadron myself the minimal amount we've given them will have little or no effect in theatre.

Yet Russia has conquered 20% of Ukraine and seems to be dealing with a counter offensive with ease. Is de Bretton-Gordon an expert or a propagandist?

Wow this article has not aged well :-D

https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1667190618248847360

https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1667492400476954624

https://twitter.com/i/status/1667492898709950466

Pity Bill Deedes is not still with us, I very much doubt he would have printed this piece of jingoistic whimsy!

If you want to understand more about British propaganda as delivered by a specific agent of the state, start with Kit Klarenberg’s article, “British intelligence operative’s involvement in Ukraine crisis signals false flag attacks ahead”. The more you pull on this string, the deeper you get in to all of Britain’s foreign and anti-Russian operations.

VST partially agrees with dBG

VST remains committed to the notion that Ukraine needs to be resolved militarily past a point of negotiated ambiguity. Someone needs to win in order to set baselines that everyone accepts and works off. Gordon literally wants the west to dump all its fighters, tanks and guns into Ukraine then tool up at maximum speed, and militarily project around the globe as fast as possible in order to keep calling ourselves princes irrespective of how others see us or feel.

There's some overlap here. VST can countenance and would find it interesting to see full capacity NATO kit in Ukraine. Why? Because it puts everything on the line against the biggest war machine it could ever face on the same land mass. Russia is what NATO as built to fight. If NATO cannot do it when it needed to be done, NATO proves itself worthless. If it can win, it justifies itself. What we'll get to see is how all our gear fares against current and older Russian inventory, unambiguously, when operated by Ukrainian conscripts of today, many of whom will not fight maximally, effectively or at all.

Here's what may have happened to some Ukrainian conscripts who may have left their position:

– And I’ll take a fucking picture of you.

– What’s next? Who the fuck are you?

– Did you guys have an order from Condor? Was there an order to hold positions?

– We did. There are three of us.

– Where the fuck did you hold it?

– There are not enough of us, go there. We just came from there.

– Guys, I’m gonna fucking kill you.

– Kill yourself. Come on.

– Sheva! Give me a grenade! Give me another one! Fucking faggots. Here you go.

What we'll see is what we have been seeing: equipment that is mythologised and never tested despite the eye gouging costs. If both sides could hold off from using nukes while maximally testing the rest of the kit like dBG is desperate to see, wouldn't that be the greatest form of reality POV TV the world has ever seen?

That's what dBG is banging the drums for. More war, more war, more war. And yet his tactical and strategic analysis is repeatedly wrong. After all his begging for war, he ups the ante with nuclear fear mongering about prisoners getting their hands on nuclear arsenals. Pure fantasy that's insulting to even a child's intellect. The sad thing is that Gordon is showing you the basic form of British military and foreign policy. It's lacking in sense and it doesn't match up with reality. Britain literally cannot walk its talk. If it tries to, it abandons the genuine interests of its populace, as it is doing right now and has been for decades.

The best thing about Ukraine is that it has forced the beasts to take off their masks, put their money where their mouths are and slog it out in a limited cage fight. Now we are getting to see a show we've been paying for since 4th April, 1949. The worst thing is that all the death was totally unnecessary and avoidable. NATO ensured the deaths got baked in. At least we're finally getting a show worth all our money.

Gordon believes that western tech combines with NATO greatness into the Russia-beating pinnacle of jingoistic virtue.

Watch this eleven minute video of the latest, greatest Ukrainian troops trained by NATO to standards that Gordon thinks are adequate, using a Bradley and all their technological advantage to exit a minefield. Gordon doesn't bother to discuss such matters. What's more technologically advanced? A Bradley, a human being, the kit a soldier is issued or an anti-personnel mine? You'll see them all in this video. Gordon would have you believe that this doesn't exist and winning comes down to some tech and some training.

Bollocks.

You now have the privilege to see real war from positions of hi-fi advantage. It's nothing like the movies and it's nothing like Gordon's fantasies.

Here's a Ukrainian opinion of what the Ukrainian government strategy involves:

And here's a high tech French Caesar gun and crew being beat by a Lancet kamikaze drone that doesn't even hit it:

Here's another example of mixing Gordon's dream soldiers (American or Canadian) with landmines:

And here's a view from inside a turret while firing at bushes: