The ferocious wolves are coming!!!!

When these days I hear people - including or rather, even more so, those who have never had and still have no fucking idea about the subject - talk with great emphasis and a certain vehemence about Russian threats, the capabilities of their war materials of all kinds and their real possibilities of invading the territory, I am reminded of those bygone days when, as a quasi-beardless commander, a first-year student at the Army General Staff College (in the eighties), we had to study and even memorize reams of regulations with red covers - to make an even greater impression - which were a detailed compendium of what was then called the Conventional Enemy and which had arrived in Spain a few years earlier when we began to open up to NATO. 

The aforementioned books, known as “red” - because of the aforementioned color of their covers - were nothing more than a direct, total and complete translation of what the Americans introduced into the minds of all Westerners (military or not) regarding what they and their intelligence and espionage systems claimed to have identified and defined as the Great Units (Brigades, Divisions, Army Corps, Armies and even Army Groups) of the USSR and mainly Russian Army.

Those overwhelming figures for equipment and personnel and the capabilities of the equipment they reflected were the worst concerns and bad dreams or nightmares and even sleepless nights of all of us who had to learn them by heart and work with those figures and capabilities to face them and even defeat them, in a supposed all-out combat against our units, which, of course, were neither as numerous nor as well equipped.

Few realized, or at least said so, that it was nothing more than a story and a vile political and economic hoax of great magnitude, invented by the omnipotent “protector”, Uncle Sam, so that our governments would fervently embrace total dependence on them for defense and security through NATO and, at the same time, spend huge amounts of money on the acquisition of the necessary war material, which basically came from American companies, from the surplus of their armed forces or was assembled from scratch in the old continent, although always under their license or tutelage.

This was a very well maintained and praised ruse by certain perks that were difficult to discover in those times, hidden agreements between states on both sides of the Atlantic and, above all, by the propaganda and the war film industry, which was very popular after World War II, which kept us very or totally entertained and convinced all those in whose veins no Soviet blood flowed and whose brains did not think or distill the same ideas as theirs.

The vast majority of people were convinced that they had to be prepared for a hypothetical Soviet invasion, that they had to build shelters and even maintain a kind of individual and collective strategic reserves to hold out for a certain period of time. 

In any case, with the break-up of the USSR after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we learned that those red books were nothing more than an enormous lie, that no such units existed and that the scarce material they possessed was old, obsolete or completely out of use. We had been deceived like children for years, but no one, or very few, said anything when the truth came out.

At the same time, the gradual accumulation of knowledge about nuclear weapons and their means of transportation or projection, and the great advances in the struggle for the conquest of space also led to a race for the manufacture and storage of such materials or the simple acquisition of those manufactured by others.

So great was this race that it was necessary to put a stop to the development, manufacture and stockpiling of these weapons. This mission was apparently entrusted to the UN, but was actually based on bilateral agreements and conventions between the USA and the USSR and, subsequently, with Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Something similar also happened with the rest of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and more specifically with biological, chemical and radiological weapons, which have caused the world many headaches as they are considered by many to be the “poor man's nuclear weapons” due to their low cost and the great effects they produce in comparison with these. 

It was enough for Putin to launch himself into the conquest of Ukraine three years ago and for Donald Trump, as a consequence of his discomfort at the length and cost of the war, began to open his big mouth to hurl his many insults and make gestures or outright threats about the real role of NATO and its future depending on the degree of participation and commitment to spending on security and defense of its European allies - who, by the way, have been living off the income for eighty years - so that everyone would get back on track.

The passage of time, the continued neglect of some increasingly less prepared and important European leaders had led the old continent to think that everything was hunky-dory, that we could dedicate ourselves to the dolce vita without worrying about anything other than regulating everything, that nothing was ever going to happen and that, in the hypothetical case that it did, it would be the same old guy as before who would come to save the day, as happened a few years ago with the anti-missile shield to defend us from nuclear-tipped missiles from Russia or Iran, which was and still is mainly in the hands of American forces and resources. 

The prolongation of the aforementioned war in Ukraine, without any great results having been achieved, even after several hundred thousand human casualties and an enormous expenditure on offensive and defensive material by both sides, is not a serious indicator that Russia is certainly in a position and capable of launching attacks of this type against coastal countries or even beyond its shared borders.

However, the aforementioned threats of abandonment of NATO by American forces and resources have exposed the poor or pathetic state of defense in which we Europeans find ourselves. While it is true that some of us are more vulnerable than others, this is mainly due to the incompetence of their leaders, the lack of foresight and sincere vision of their strategists in charge of national security, or the internal pressures on or within their coalition governments. 

All of this is more than enough to suggest that, being so poorly trained and so short of material, something important must be accomplished, but without once again getting carried away by individual and collective hysteria.

We are back to the red books, the shelters and even the survival quids; to doing everything in a hurry, without foundation, organization, plan or adequate budget for it. 

I fear that several governments will strive to put all kinds of expenses into the defense fund, even though they have nothing to do with it; but I firmly believe that the time for tricksters is coming to an end. 

Finally, and only for the moment, it is clear that we have made the serious mistake that I have warned about on several occasions; it seems obvious that each country will try to improve and launch its arms industry without adequate planning with its allies or neighbors because there are many European companies in the sector that are dedicated to the same type of products and, nevertheless, there are other great needs for material and ammunition that are hardly covered by anyone.

The wolves of all kinds are lurking again, but many of us think that with so much beating about the bush and the profusion of useless and unproductive meetings as up to now, we are not going to solve it. 

From what I can see, we are incapable of discerning and not even clearly foreseeing the true path that lies ahead. At the moment, there is no plan in sight and nobody is capable of assuring us that the planned economic resources and the time frame that we initially set ourselves will be sufficient.