

My senescent state of decrepitude condemns me to a lot of 24/7 news. Unable to reach the controller in time I watched in abject horror yesterday as General (Ret.) Jack Keane, Chairman of the Kagan controlled Institute for the Study of War, (ISW) told Fox News that it "is obvious" that Russia will "test" NATO in eastern Europe and that we (NATO) should be ready to meet the test.

This is a revelation (irony)! I thought it had become a truism that nuclear armed powers should not prepare to fight each other because of the general belief that escalation to a nuclear exchange would be a constant danger in such situations. To prepare for war is a different thing from establishment of deterrence against war through presentation of a plausible image of readiness.

The recent musings of the soldiery here (SST) on the paucity of conventional resources in the non-US countries of NATO would seem to point to the impracticality of a conventional war betwixt NATO and Mother Russia.

At some point in such a war the incipient losers are likely to say something like "Ah, to hell with it lets bomb them with the B-2s." After that the game would truly be "on."

But, I suppose Jack Keane is "onto something" now, something new. pl