Who Stole the Radio Money?

How can we account for the lack of oomph, the dysfunction, shown by the Russian military?

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of what appears to be incompetence or demoralization. Often the anecdotes have Russian soldiers doing (apparently) senseless things–like abandoning vehicles or burning weapons–which must be symptomatic of larger problems. Why abandon a vehicle? Either there is no fuel, or the vehicle has broken down due to poor maintenance, or the danger of a road ambush is too great, forcing the troops to travel on foot cross-country.

And of course there is the Russian air force, or rather, there isn’t. The world’s third largest air force has scarcely put in an appearance. Is this due to a lack of pilot training or aircraft maintenance? Is there no fuel?

The sinking of the Moskva is a particularly focused example of this problem. The ship was sunk 65 nautical miles offshore, far enough that its defenses had several minutes to respond and destroy the incoming missiles. Why didn’t this happen? The Ukrainian missiles themselves were based on an old Soviet design; these were not cutting-edge Western weapons.

But once struck, why did the ship sink? The watertight bulkhead doors should have kept the ship afloat—-if they were really watertight and correctly sealed. And maintenance is required—the gaskets must be inspected regularly and replaced as needed.

Russian reports have mentioned a fire, and if that is true, why wasn’t the fire extinguished? Were the fuel tanks ruptured? But a modern ship can fill a room with inert gas, displacing the oxygen. And that’s not to mention the presence of a crew of 500, all of which should have been well-trained in fighting fires.

To account for all this, we should note that armies and navies do not exist in a social and political vacuum; they grow out of a particular society and reflect it in many ways. The medieval Hapsburgs could have adopted the tactics of the Swiss and perhaps by doing so have triumphed over them. But heavily armored knights were an integral part of society; the upper class was the military caste, and their efficacy in war justified their privileged position—-and by extension, the monarchy which organized and led the armies, and the church whose leaders were also drawn from the upper class.

The Hapsburg military system couldn’t be rejected or altered without destabilizing the class structure. Eventually monarchs did adopt Swiss tactics, but this was only after armies had been professionalized and the social position of the landed gentry and aristocrats had changed so that not all landowners were soldiers.

Russia is the most fully realized Billionaire State, and Billionaire Capitalism exists to concentrate wealth. The Russian army and navy may be inefficient at combat but are they inefficient….at concentrating wealth? No. Every year the Duma passes a detailed military budget totaling about $65 billion, and most of that ends up in the hands of plutocrats, by one method or another. In some cases, the billionaires control factories that make weapons and uniforms, but in other cases the money is simply “stolen.” I use quotation marks because in a Billionaire State, almost everything worth owning is owned by billionaires, and so “stealing” from the defense budget is a bit like Trump ordering a burger and fries from one of his hotel restaurants. Of course he doesn’t pay, and it’s not theft, either.

So in the Duma’s budget there is money for encrypted field radios, but the Russian troops show up on the battlefield with cellphones, which the Ukrainians hack into at will. Where did the money go? The beauty of Billionaire Capitalism is that everyone knows where it went, but no one can do anything about it. What does “property” mean under Billionaire Capitalism? It means anything a billionaire possesses, by whatever means. Ordinary people don’t own anything; they may possess something temporarily, but if a billionaire seizes it, there is no recourse.

To find out who “stole” the radio money and put them in prison would require a different definition of property, and that would of course be profoundly destabilizing. And in this case it might well have been Putin himself or his generals who appropriated the funds. The troops will just have to make due with cellphones.

This difference in the definition of property is an important distinguishing characteristic between industrial capitalism (as it developed in the West) and Billionaire Capitalism. Under industrial capitalism, even modest holdings of property were—and are—ordinarily secure. Even a blacksmith owned his own tools, just as surely as a Duke owned his estates.

Correlated with Billionaire Capitalism’s expansive concept of property is its concept of efficiency, which again is quite different from that of industrial capitalism. Under industrial capitalism, efficiency means efficacy at creating wealth. It means the production of useful goods and services at a cost less than the sales price. There is value-added, in other words.

But efficiency in Billionaire Capitalism means the ease and speed with which already-existing wealth can be concentrated in the hands of the few.

Industrial capitalism’s efficiency requires engineering, planning, invention, and skilled workers. Billionaire capitalism’s efficiency requires political power and secret bank accounts.

Western armies and navies are mostly patterned after factories. Everyone has a job to do, and wasting time or money is discouraged. But the armies and navies of Billionaire States are patterned after ruthless political parties and crooked banks.

So of course the Moskva sank. Someone had skimmed off the money for bulkhead gaskets and put it in a Cyprian bank account. Someone else sold the inert gas to a foreign shipping company and put the money in a Panamanian bank. And so on: with the firefighting equipment, the anti-missile defense system, etc.

You could sail the Moskva into port and it looked impressive; you could order it to fire missiles at defenseless targets and as long as it had missiles that would work too. Parts of the Moskva were just like a real warship—particularly its appearance.

But it was a product of its society and political system, and so it sank.