An article in Foreign Affairs by Dara Massicot, a former RAND and Pentagon analyst, warns that Russia’s rapid military-industrial modernization—its emerging “Learning Industrial Complex”—is outpacing NATO’s capabilities. Massicot describes NATO and U.S. military dysfunction, recognizing with alarm that Russia’s rapid modernization of their military and matching industrial and scientific capabilities will defeat NATO’s support of their proxy warfare geopolitical toy and battering ram, Ukraine.
Russia is unifying the efforts of its defense sector, civilian industry, research institutions, and startups, she says, to drive innovation in drones, AI, electronic warfare, and battlefield tactics. This adaptability, including empowering junior officers and learning directly from combat contrasts with what she calls the West’s “uneven and siloed” approach. Because of these rapid changes, “Ukraine is likely to face even greater destruction in the months ahead,” she insists.
Massicot frets that Russia has “learned from its failures and adapted its strategy and approach to war, in Ukraine and beyond,” and is rapidly surpassing its early equipment, technology and logistics blocks. By early 2023, Russia had begun creating a “Learning Industrial Complex” unifying the defense industrial base (and civilian industrial base, which “Western” analysts like Massicot hysterically refuse to address), research organizations, and universities, and is now pairing small “tech” startups with state resources. She decries new Russian battlefield tactics, revolutionized rates of production and sophistication of drones, AI and electronic warfare, dissemination of new battlefield tactics to troops on the front lines, rotating research military personnel into the front to observe operations, and creation of “better missiles and more rugged … armored systems.” Russia is giving junior officers more freedom to plan operations, an aspect of what the Prussian reformers called “Auftragstaktik.”
There are valid observations of Russian shortcomings in field medicine, and bottlenecks in implementing the recommendations from the “vibrant learning” of Russian headquarters staff, researchers and defense firms. These are limitations that Lyndon LaRouche and EIR identified years ago in various publications.
However, much of the article’s criticisms of Russia’s military learning and procurement strangely echoes well-known problems in the U.S. and NATO forces, which the theatrical Hegseth “reforms,” or recent U.S. “defense industrial base improvements” have not addressed. Her criticism of Moscow’s poor track record on “postwar learning” sounds eerily like U.S. refusal to learn the strategic lessons of the stunning failures of Vietnam and subsequent undeclared “counter-terror” warfare. She notes that Russia will continue to expand production of existing and new forms of autonomous drone swarms in all areas of combat and is deploying AI to speed analytic tasks and automated commands, akin to the Western “hyperwarfare” doctrine. Implicitly, Massicot views the war in Ukraine as unwinnable under current U.S. and NATO policy assumptions.
The solution to the challenge she identifies cannot be solved by the current methods of the “West.” Only by disgorging the “continuous geopolitical warfare” social disease of the British and Wall Street establishments, and embarking on the new economic paradigm of LaRouche’s Four Laws in national banking, enormous infrastructure project cooperation—as, for example, the Bering Strait Bridge Tunnel to link the vast lands and mineral resources of Siberia and Alaska for joint development—and crash programs for fusion energy deployment and the in-depth development of the near solar system and beyond, will a Western Götterdämmerung be averted. Such a policy revolution would eliminate the drivers of Anglo-America perpetual war, enabling real collaboration among nations to address the “common aims of mankind.”
