People, ideas, machines X: Freedom's Forge - the story of American business and industrial production in World War II

Lessons that are in the minds of those doing the DOGE/White House regime change, lessons relevant to UK productivity & security crises

What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?

Hitler, 14 June 1941

My business is making things.

William Knudson, 28 May 1940

You find your key men by piling work on them. They say ‘I can’t do any more’ and you say ‘Sure you can’. So you pile it on and they’re doing more and more. Pretty soon you have men you can rely on absolutely.

Henry Kaiser.

Politics is the womb in which war develops… War is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means.

Clausewitz

In early March 2025, SW1 is going through its standard cycle: an emotional spasm in which it herds to new delusions, it polices them with denunciation of dissidents, then the delusions crash into reality and everyone memory-holes what they said. This cycle will turn out like all the others since the regime tipped into slow collapse in 2016. The NPCs will quickly forget the things they predicted as they were carried away by their war fever. But 2025 is the year SW1 delusions in many areas can no longer be maintained. ‘Reality cannot be fooled.’

If interested in how serious people go about war, read this blog instead of the regime media.

This blog is notes on Freedom’s Forge by Herman.

It tells the story of how American industry organised for World War II. And some of the extraordinary characters such as Henry Kaiser, now largely unknown but an extraordinarily able builder of anything, the Elon of the 1920s-30s who then answered FDR’s call to help the country beat the Nazis.

It’s very topical as a subset of Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurial elite are now trying to change DC radically and one of the core goals is to apply lessons from the golden age of American manufacturing and industrial capacity at speed and scale, in civilian and military spheres. Part of the project is a cross between a) the lessons from this period and b) lessons from the Valley, and Andreessen’s BUILD BUILD BUILD, for modern technology and advanced manufacturing. This book is one of those read by many involved in the White House/DOGE project. Another is Now It Can Be Told which I said in 2019 would be relevant in the next pandemic: it was but SW1 fought, almost entirely successfully, to prevent any learning from it.

This is also highly relevant in Britain where productivity, growth and real wages all slumped from 2008.

• Tory MPs 2010-24 lost all interest in productivity, growth and state capacity while presiding over a state making almost everything worse.

• It’s hard to exaggerate the contrast between a) smart entrepreneurial people outside SW1 who have assumed these things are of intense focus inside SW1 but b) inside SW1 attention has been almost entirely elsewhere and they were just not interested in anything other than the odd tweak. Tories and Labour, Brexit and Remain — all focused attention on a tiny number of issues and tiny amounts of money. Their election campaigns yapped about sums of money that were a rounding error of a decimal point on forecasts that are always out by more than that.

• The MPs operated inside a consensus of policy/think tanky types that ‘you can only make tiny changes’, ‘the economy is so big almost nothing has an effect’, ‘the public don’t want dynamism so it’s politically impossible to be radical in the sense Cummings et al want’, ‘Brexit was stupid because those voting for it don’t want dynamism and a more US/Singapore style government’. SW1’s assumptions about what is ‘good politics’ and ‘what can be communicated’ are always empirically false but a) they are ‘a real existing factor’ in the psychology of MPs who want an excuse to ignore hard things so they can happily just scroll from one news cycle to another and b) they totally align with Whitehall’s desire, and HMT’s desire in particular, for ‘no change’. SW1’s cross-party assumptions on the politics of dynamism are absolute nonsense and almost totally believed across factional lines. It’s crucial to understand that across parties, SW1 types hate the thought of dynamism: it is their enemy. They want to believe it’s unpopular so they’ll latch on to memes and pollster snake oil ‘proving’ it.

• We made this a huge focus 2019-20 and started changing most important aspects of policy. As I’ve written before even I was somewhat shocked how little the Tories cared about these things in summer 2020 even after a pandemic and practically unprecedented economic shock. When Boris stopped almost everything, the MPs were happy in 2021. They just wanted ‘to go back to normal’, i.e the Simulacrum of politics they all grew up with in the 1990s. See previous blogs for details.

• But debate is changing in some ways. Tories remain uninterested in these issues. Kemi spends more time playing games on her iPad than thinking about how and why Tories failed so badly on all this. But Labour is now in government and can no longer just parrot ‘once dumb evil Tories are removed the Whitehall Rolls Royce machine will go back to normal and solve everything’. They’re now presiding over Whitehall’s vandalism and some of them are rationally panicking. (See Chris Curtis and other mostly younger Labour MPs who realise backing the status quo is a loser.) And Reform is trying to work out how to replace the Tories. So outside dead Tory world elements are grappling with how to escape the doom loop of stagnation. After Kemi is replaced, there’s some chance her replacement finally realises the Tory Party is dead unless it re-engages with core issues of productivity and state capacity. And the LFG growth campaign is growing and recruiting in the entrepreneurial world. (If you want to help the forces of dynamism, get involved with the LFG campaign, Discord here.)

These issues are also important in the context of SW1’s latest hysteria over Ukraine as Trump has pulled the plug on the doomed cross-party policy of three years.

What were the biggest disasters on Ukraine?

The entire SW1 ecosystem — left/right, leave/remain, Tory/Labour, MP/official/media — told you: Slava Ukraine, as long as it takes, whatever it takes, Putin will fail, sanctions are crippling Russia, China will abandon Russia, the world will unite for democracy, the counteroffensive is a triumph, Russia can’t sustain her losses and is on the brink of collapse etc.

America is facing the reality that the propaganda is fake and China is the big winner, as I said would happen in Q1 2022. As America recalibrates, SW1 and Europe are going crackers because three years of fairy tales are colliding with reality. Roughly 99% of SW1 was disastrously, historically epically wrong. They’ve humiliated themselves and our country globally, helped wreck a country and kill a million people, and given China a historic bonanza of money and intelligence and leverage.

An SW1 regime that cannot cope with Somali machete-wielding teens, with Albanian drug gangs, with Pakistani rape gangs, with Islamic extremists running ‘gas the Jews’ marches every week in London — a regime with cross party and NPC consensus that stopping the dumb dinghies over the Channel is ‘literally impossible’ (Sam Freedman) and it’s ‘fascist’ to try — is dreaming of phantom forces controlling East Ukraine’s borders.

Slava Ukraine is a perfect way for our Idiocracy, its intelligentsia and the regime media, to vent nationalist emotions without having to be patriotic for Britain. It’s ‘impossible’ to control our borders but we must fight over Ukraine’s borders. We must coverup the rape gangs ‘for community cohesion’ and to continue mass immigration but we will rally on TV to fight ‘the new Hitler’ thousands of miles away with forces that do not exist.

What was the context for SW1’s disaster?

I’ll contrast my view with the SW1 consensus from 2000-2016.

NB. I lived in Russia 1994-6 and met people like Putin — middle ranking KGB guys who got involved in organised crime. Like anyone who lived in Moscow in the insane 1990s, I left with a very different perspective to the SW1 conventional wisdom.

My position 2000-2016 was:

A/ The pro-EU Blairites babbling ‘Putin is a reformer’ and ‘Russia could join the EU’ are deluded. Russia is not European — read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy! The Putin government is a mafia-KGB government that may well have blown up tower blocks to justify invading Chechnya. Its structure and ideology is misunderstood in SW1 discussions.

(I was seen as an extremist, ‘anti-Russian’, and the tower block idea back then was seen as a ‘crazy conspiracy theory’ by the same crew who cheered escalation in 2022. NB. I was never anti-Russian, only anti the regime.)

B/ We should stop the flow of mafia money corrupting the City, the bar and SW1. When I lived in Moscow in the 1990s, London was known as ‘the laundry’. This was an accurate nickname.

(Deeply unpopular. SW1 wanted the cash to flow until 2022. In 2021, a few months before the invasion, I publicly attacked the Tories for still taking cash from dodgy Russians and was attacked by Tories for my attack.)

C/ We should be much tougher about mafia /KGB operations, we should smack Putin back with operations to show he can’t behave like this. People were shot on London streets. Some had their heads chopped off (a Chechen speciality).

(Nobody interested.)

D/ We must transform the MoD and defence procurement because fake budgets and disastrous procurement are destroying our forces.

(Strong anti-interest. Nobody interested in procurement. Nobody wanted the fake budgets to end.)

E/ The combination of the above policies with ‘Ukraine should join NATO’ is very dumb. It mixes great weakness with provocation on exactly the wrong thing.

(Nobody cared. No serious discussion.)

In 2016, Jake Sullivan and others manufactured the Russiagate hoax over Brexit and Trump. Suddenly all over SW1 people who had seen me as an extremist now described me as pro-Putin. The Russiagate hoax was thoroughly entangled in the ‘disinformation’ racket. I’ve written a lot about this and won’t repeat it. But it converted much of SW1 to thinking of Putin as ‘evil’ and because Russians are white they were convenient baddies in the period when the Far Left was rampaging. Putin = Hitler = Trump + Brexit. (Notice how Congo and Sudan slaughter isn’t news in the regime media because the baddies are black. Russians and Jews are good baddies because they are white.)

This was the SW1 context for February 2022.

What were the core mistakes that contributed to SW1’s delusional fantasies?

First, delusions over goals, tradeoffs, the asymmetry of interests and nuclear deterrence. The most important thing in a war is definition of political goals and priorities. Cf. blog on Colin Gray and defence planning.

While it is vital to make sound decisions about how to fight, it is of much greater moment to decide whether or not to fight, and with whom…

E.g1 Britain’s blunder of confusing ourselves over the 19th Century Belgium guarantee, confusing Germany into thinking we would not fight for Belgium then suddenly fighting for it after Germany was committed. (If you compare 1870 and 1914 you see how little the post-Northcote-Trevelyan Foreign Office learned from Bismarck turning them over.) This disastrous ‘strategic ambiguity’ got us into a war for which we were disastrously unprepared and a century of wealth built up 1815-1914 was squandered in consequence. ‘Strategic ambiguity’ would be a very very bad approach to Taiwan. I hope Trump does a deal whereby Taiwan is peacefully reunified for the CCP centenary in 2049 and the West focuses on its own industrial production to replace the comic Taiwan bottlenecks — a deal in the spirit of Lee Kuan Yew who consistently advised the West to forget fantasies on Taiwan and accept reunification. Red lines in Asia should be elsewhere, not through a country of Chinese people visible from China.

E.g2 Hitler’s political errors over Russia and America outweighed by far the German army’s advantages at the planning and operational level: political misjudgement outweighed forces’ competence by far.

As I’ve said from Q1 2022, nowhere in the West could anybody write down a clear definition of realistic priorities in Ukraine given political assumptions in Russia and America. The supposed ‘expert’ community — academics like Professor Lawrence Freedman, O’brien, Snyder et al — chose to be emotional cheerleaders and poisoned their own thinking from the start: ‘Putin has already lost… Putin won’t admit he’s lost… 50-50 Russia collapses in weeks’ Freedman kept telling us 2022-3. I said at the time this was delusional and Putin would keep increasing effort because of how important it is to him and his regime. This expert community has never recovered from its emotional commitment in Q1 2022. It’s been even worse than public health on covid. And the failure is politics — they can write interesting things about military operations, drones and tanks etc, but they cannot write anything realistic about the politics and the politics is always more fundamental and is our regime’s spectacular failure.

Ukraine is existential for Russia. It is trivial for America and Britain. If all Ukraine vanished in a sink hole it would have almost no effect on us. In the early 1990s the expert community’s consensus was it would be totally stupid to start discussing Ukraine joining NATO. If you think my views on NATO and Ukraine are odd given the near-universal agreement among NATO regimes now, consider that in the 1990s there was strong disagreement with the first wave of NATO enlargement, never mind talk of Ukraine:

Some principles of strategy are so basic that when stated they sound like platitudes: treat former enemies magnanimously; do not take on unnecessary new ones; keep the big picture in view; balance ends and means; avoid emotion and isolation in making decisions; be willing to acknowledge error. All fairly straightforward, one might think. Who could object to them?

And yet – consider the Clinton administration’s single most important foreign-policy initiative: the decision to expand NATO to include Poland,Hungary and the Czech Republic. NATO enlargement, I believe, manages to violate every one of the strategic principles just mentioned.

Perhaps that is why historians – normally so contentious – are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world. Indeed I can recall no other moment in my own experience as a practising historian at which there was less support, within the community of historians, for an announced policy position. (John Lewis Gaddis, History, Grand Strategy and NATO Enlargement, 1998.)

Also look at the massive lists of people like George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, Kissinger, former heads of CIA and NSA et al — famous Cold Warriors who fought and won the Cold War — who explicitly said in the 1990s that even floating the idea of NATO expanding to Ukraine was extremely stupid. Then in 2007-8, the neocons who gave us Iraq, such as Victoria Nuland, got Bush to start pushing the idea. The moronic idea became official policy. And Putin warned — if you carry on like this the result will not be Ukraine in NATO but Ukraine wrecked. (Even Biden talked openly in the 1990s about how enlargement would provoke a hostile response but of course he was such a dope he laughed about it.)

We (‘the West’) could never articulate realistic goals given a) it’s existential for Russia but not us and b) Russia is one of the two big nuclear powers. Will you really escalate this to a nuclear crisis and risk nuclear war? If no, then you’re snookered. If yes, then you’re mad and dangerous.

Professors Snyder and O’brien, warmongering pundits like Edward Lucas et al, have repeatedly condemned what they call ‘the western habit of self-imposed restraint’ because of nuclear weapons. They argue:

1/ WE should announce that WE will NOT be deterred by Russian nuclear threats.

2/ But Russia WILL be deterred by OUR threats (nuclear and non-nuclear) and actions (including attacks on Russian territory) and RUSSIA must ‘show self-restraint’ — because we say so!

3/ This is ‘rational’ and if Putin doesn’t follow our logic he is ‘irrational’!!

4/ Putin was ‘mad’ to invade Ukraine!!!

This logic is a demand that deterrence only works in one direction because it’s convenient for us this way. It is the logic of the toddler applied to nuclear deterrence.

The asymmetry of interests and consequent credibility over nuclear threats is an insoluble problem. All you can do is assess the balance of risk (global nuclear war) and reward (the West can put missiles etc in Ukraine) and make a judgement. The West’s Idiocracy can’t cope with problems like this so they just pretended they could ignore it.

As Professor Kotkin, biographer of Stalin, said (Nov 2023):

We had no public conversation about the definition of victory in Ukraine except for ceding to the Ukrainians their definition which was [summary]… Those were attainable if you took Moscow. If you don’t take Moscow you need another definition of what victory might be.

Instead of discussing realistic goals, we broadcast to the world our true Idiocracy nature. We kept saying that ‘Ukraine decides what’s victory’!! No serious Power ever hands over to a small peripheral corrupt colony the definition of goals/victory in a conflict with a peer Power, yet that is exactly what Washington, SW1 and the EU did with Ukraine.

NB. While it is true that Russia opposed Ukraine joining NATO, there is a deeper force at work. The Russian elite sees at least a chunk of Ukraine as Russian. This is true regardless of NATO. Even if NATO expansion had never happened, it would be true. They see it as Russian and they see it as an existential threat to Russia to have it occupied by America/NATO and used to base missiles etc. So it is true both that a) the NATO policy was stupid but b) the core issue is US military expansion into Ukraine, whether it’s called NATO expansion or not.

It is not in British interests, nor humanity’s, to increase the number of ways in which nuclear tripwires could spin out of control, which NATO expansion inevitably does. A core goal should be decreasing the number of ways these tripwires could spin out of control.

(NB. Stoltenberg on TV in September 2023 actually admitted that — totally contrary to the official story up until then — in 2021 Putin offered a deal of ‘no NATO enlargement [to Ukraine] … as a precondition for not invading’. This got absolutely zero regime media coverage. Cf. Stoltenberg, 9/23, on NATO website.)

Second, delusions over China. At the start there was widespread briefing that ‘China will support democracy’. I said this was delusional and China had a great opportunity to a) get paid vast amounts to blow our stuff up for free, b) weaken the West, and c) put Special Forces embeds in to watch how western systems work.

This is what happened. China is the big winner. It’s made a load of money, weakened the West and got great intelligence.

Third, delusions over sanctions. The West was deluded over the effect of sanctions generally. Sanctions do not stop countries pursuing existential interests. They just dig deeper. And you cannot isolate Russia when the world’s biggest manufacturer has a big interest in supplying it. The EU couldn’t even enforce their own crummy ideas on sanctions inside the EU, never mind elsewhere (see all the ships sold by Greece to the Russian fleet).

And we were delusional over India and non-China Asia, South America etc. We thought and briefed they’d ‘rally to support democracy’. Wrong. They see us as the vandals. They have helped Russia avoid sanctions. We’ve paid much more for energy and even bought oil from Russia via Indian middlemen at inflated prices, so it costs us more and Putin makes more. Super-stupid.

Sanctions and our economic warfare has had big blowback effects on Europe’s economies and politics without scuppering Russia’s war effort. America has also gained from LNG market effects, Ukraine blowing up Germany’s pipeline etc.

(The No10 story even switched half way through from the Trolley proudly saying ‘WE cut off Putin’s gas’ (2022) to Sunak saying ‘PUTIN cut off the gas supplies and it had a devastating impact’ on our gas prices (2024). As usual on Ukraine, the regime media did not expose the narrative whiplash, it just pivoted to the new Official Line.)

Fourth, delusions over atrocity propaganda.

Evil Putin blew up the pipeline! Then the CIA briefed the NYT that … err, it was Ukraine.

There was a constant string of stories claiming ‘Russia blew up a market today’ followed 1-3 weeks later by a quiet briefing from the CIA that … err, it was a UKR defensive missile that fell with bad luck. Zelensky kept claiming ‘a Russian missile landed in Poland’ or ‘Russia attacked the nuclear facility’ when the missile was Ukrainian and the attacks on the nuclear facilities were Ukrainian — intended by Zelensky to entangle idiot westerners in his conflict.

The UK regime media peddled UKR propaganda much more faithfully than they ever support any British policy — our media won’t even support our Special Forces who risk themselves to whack terrorists. The regime media was so extraordinary — and in my experience unprecedented in 25 years — that even after Putin gave speeches explicitly stating that because of UK actions we had opened ourselves up to the following counter-actions, our regime media literally en masse blanked the story. Zero coverage in any regime media. Not only normal voters but in my experience MPs themselves often had no idea when I told them ‘oh did you see what Putin said yesterday about reprisals against Britain?’ ‘Err no must have missed it.’

The war did not start in February 2022. It started in 2014. Look back at how the regime media covered Ukraine shelling the Donbas then and you’ll be shocked — sometimes the Ukrainians are baddies! https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/1892410776905797983. You now see nothing in regime media about the murders and terrorism of Ukraine in this period, you only hear about Russian violence.

The unprecedented lies from No10 have poisoned trust for a very long time to come. Cf. when a leak happened from a US citizen on a gaming forum, the MoD reported it as ‘Russian disinformation’ — a flat out lie. The Times reported it as fact and after the truth came out never corrected it. This sort of thing has happened hundreds of times. Our media is even more unreliable on Ukraine than on domestic politics.

Nazis. Before 2022 it was widely acknowledged that Ukraine had a serious problem with real Nazis. Real Nazis are not Trump or Farage. They are Ukraine militias who wear actual Nazi badges like the infamous deaths-head and openly say ‘we’re Nazis, we support what Hitler did against Russia, we will use Nazi methods against the Russians’. Congress passed laws to stop funding of these organisations. Regime media did documentaries on them.

After the war started, we funded the Nazis and rebranded them as heroes. Professors who see themselves as ‘anti-fascist’ retweet propaganda from Ukraine accounts with Nazi links. (Obviously individual cases are tricky to be confident about — some don’t know who they are retweeting and don’t check because their standards are bad.)

Sometimes the Nazi branding morphed with ISIS iconography normalised in the regime media — here is the Washington Post printing beheading t-shirts as if it’s all just standard slava ukraine propaganda, nothing unusual.

I don’t have any good sense of how widespread the Nazi problem is in Ukraine now because the main sources of information are our regime media, Ukraine, and Russia all of which lie massively. It would take reliable independent on-the-ground reporting to figure out, which doesn’t exist. But this isn’t my main point.

My point is: our regimes and media rebranded actual Nazis as freedom fighters and systematically suppressed coverage of the fact that Ukraine troops parade around in SS symbols. Once you do this, all bets are off on ‘disinformation’ and what else the regimes are fooling themselves about.

(Yes the Nazi thing is particularly ironic given the regime media has gone all-in on ‘Hitler/fascist’ as a general description of everybody who opposes the old regime.)

Women. As the manpower problem grew, more and more ghouls pushed the meme that Ukrainian power should not be thought of as ‘manpower’ but also ‘womanpower’. One of the very worst examples of this I saw was General McMaster saying that he wanted to see Ukraine’s women conscripted and sent to the front in order to … show China America is serious about TAIWAN!

I was revolted by this and wondered if the warmongers had not gone too far. No! It quickly became an acceptable discussion in the regime media and NPCs waxed lyrical on how it was actually really inspiring to see women fighting on the front line. They would post videos of these heroic encounters which end with women hunted and blown to bits by drones.

These two trends convinced me further that the West was on course for a hideous reckoning.

Fifth, delusions over ourselves. For thirty years the parties and Whitehall have united in hollowing out capabilities:

• Hollowed conventional forces. Put hundreds of billions into duff projects (e.g AJAX, aircraft carriers that have to flee at the start of every wargame to the edge of the game and hide). Failed to invest in future technologies, e.g drones. Killed military R&D.

• They’ve launched lawfare against Special Forces. Cf. use of ECHR to declare operations soldiers won medals for ‘unlawful’, then prosecutions follow. This is now causing operational problems as SF soldiers ask, very reasonably, am I opening myself up to time-unlimited liabilities and their commanding officers cannot reassure them because it’s impossible in principle to predict what new madness our courts will create with the ECHR. This week they stopped the deportation of a Nigerian drug dealer because he ‘believes he is possessed by the devil’. Such courts are plainly capable of declaring any SF operation ‘unlawful’ whenever they are asked by scum activist-lawyers in years to come.

• They’ve let the nuclear enterprise rot as I’ve recounted many times since 2021. It now relies on vast Pentagon subsidies of money, materials and intellectual property. Which also gives DC vast leverage over a British PM. The nukes are already in an over £50B secret black hole. Having to recreate all the infrastructure without US support would be over 100B. The odds of Starmer facing this openly and explaining how taxes will have to rise by vast amounts so we can bounce more Ukraine rubble are close to zero. MPs and regime media do not understand how constrained a UK PM now is and what a disaster one phone call from the Pentagon to the Cabinet Secretary would be.

• They’ve undermined the spirit of aggression necessary for effective intelligence agencies. Both parties supported the lawyers in pursuing intelligence officers (another problem I tackled in No10 which the Cabinet Office handled appallingly). The parts of the deep state we rely on being very punchy have been largely neutralised. Many things you would assume are being done are not done because the agencies assume rightly the ministers will not support.

• Catastrophically bad procurement. Massively expensive platforms that are not at the technological frontier and are unsuitable for mass production. Severe corruption of our civil service as officials go to the companies they negotiated contracts with, a system defended by the NPC class as ‘necessary to stop corruption’: they defend the old system as ‘necessary to stop corruption’ while it is the corruption. General rot of industrial production and opposition to domestic supply chains even after the covid disasters.

• Promotion of mediocrities to critical roles, top people leave — the general Whitehall anti-talent ratchet has applied here too. Brilliant talent leaves to business, the mediocrities with little moral courage get promoted. SNAFU.

• As I discovered in 2019, there is no place in Whitehall where thinking about all dimensions of conflict occurs. The hollow laugh in the MoD as to where this should occur was ‘the Cabinet table Dom, Trolley and Wally, hahahahaha’. Hollow laughter.

I’ve said all this repeatedly. SW1 closed their ears. For three years of war, they let the MoD and procurement and fake budgets get worse and worse. All the work we started in 2020 to fix the nightmare was stopped.

The rest of the world can see this. They laugh at the gap between our rhetoric and pretensions, the ‘Munich’ speeches and 1940 cartoon patter and the reality that we can deploy almost nothing for any length of time. But SW1 is now largely a closed system. Its inputs are largely internal and emotionally based programming. Reality is not allowed to intrude on core delusions. Both parties and Whitehall perceive a combined interest in preserving fairy tales and excluding reality.

In 2025 the Ukraine fairy tales will hit the buffers in ways that even SW1 can’t hide from itself. But the MPs will continue to ignore the reality of our forces. There will be no proper hearings. The Defence Select Committee will not call any of us who got to the bottom of the MoD’s list of failed projects and fake budgets in 2020. They will keep it all covered up and keep printing lying-delusional op-eds from Wallace, who contributed enormously to the MoD disaster 2021-5, always arguing to put more money into broken things, resist change, and lie. The new Review will mean further rounds of cross-party consensus on fake budgets and lies and spending on broken projects. Everyone will stay silent on the nuclear fiasco. And the hollowing of conventional forces, lawfare on Special Forces, and rot of nuclear forces will all continue.

I don’t think anything short of financial collapse of our Ponzi scheme or the humiliation of having a carrier sunk etc can penetrate SW1’s reality distortion forcefield. This is the lesson of covid and Ukraine so far. Look at the Idiocracy double down on delusions in the past week. Why would it change? What force is big enough to make it when self-evidently neither the worst pandemic since 1918 and the worst land war since 1945 have not been big enough?

Remember — the true test of wars isn’t how they start — normally with emotional and delusional speeches — but *how they end*. The West has a record of starting wars with faux Churchill rhetoric, failing dismally, and slinking away to change the subject. This will follow the pattern. Ukraine will NOT get a Star Wars ending. It will get picked over by vultures like Boris Johnson looking to scam millions in ‘reconstruction contracts’.

If UK forces go to Ukraine, they will get droned to a smoking ruin. Russia is itching to do it and can blame it on ‘local terrorists’. It will be a massive humiliation and Trump will not save our bacon. I suspect after a lot of huffing and puffing there’ll be no ‘coalition of the willing’ deployed in Ukraine. If it is deployed, it will be a disaster. And once Starmer has to have meetings on particular scenario planning, he’ll probably bottle it. Fundamentally everyone in Europe wants to operate under America’s nuclear guarantee and I do not think Trump will extend it. He thinks the whole thing has been an avoidable disaster and he wants it to stop. If Europe tries to continue with fantasies it will have to do so alone. Then it’s in an even worse state. I can imagine Europe seizing Russian assets and causing more chaos including for the euro.

PS. Predicting is not the same as preferring. I’ve predicted disaster for the West’s UKR ‘policy’ from the start. Our Idiocracy conflates such predictions with preference. I do not want Putin to prevail but in analysing politics I try to separate what I want from what seems likely. NPCs optimise for social approval.

(Someone who worked in No10 in 2020-21 sketched a possible way out on Ukraine. I don’t agree with some of it — in particular I think trying to get the UK’s Idiocracy to handle ‘security guarantees’ is impossible, it is a ‘regime-complete’ problem, i.e only regime change allows a UK Government that could do it. But it usefully sets out crucial issues and unlike normal SW1 babble it is being examined in DC.)

The NPC pivot to ‘Rejoin!’

One of the things that SW1 will generate in its 2025 crisis over productivity and security is a resurgence in the London Rejoin campaign.

Objectively this is laughable. But this never stops SW1 NPCs. Rejoin fits many psychological needs:

• The Establishment has no economic model.

• Germany has blown up. For thirty years the ‘sensible people’ of Westminster have peddled the idea that Germany is the model we should be following, Germany is ‘a serious country’ etc etc. This was wrong in 1999. It’s blown up on SW1 since 2022 as Germany hits de-industrialisation, energy crisis, rapid revival of extremist politics etc. Westminster hasn’t replaced this meme.

  

• They fear and loathe the Vote Leave perspective and will try almost anything before doing the obvious things. They’ve absorbed the post-70s Whitehall anti-technology culture. It was an awful shock to have Vote Leave in No10 saying science and technology are central to the economy and defence and to the PM’s job. They were much relieved when we left and science and technology returned to being things ‘serious’ people do not prioritise in No10.

• This anti-technology culture has merged with the ‘the Valley tech companies are outright fascist and AI is a scam’. As I’ve said, the ‘AI is a scam’ is guaranteed to make them all look very stupid (but it won’t matter — they’ll all just pretend they said the opposite and move on, like on Iraq etc).

• They can’t face reality on their disastrous Ukraine war.

• They hate and fear MAGA. They rightly fear that if it succeeds in various ways it will seed similar movements in Britain and Europe.

• ~80-90% of SW1 always hated Brexit. They are emotionally on the side of the Monnet-Delors project against America and ‘hyper capitalism’ and they also increasingly love Monnet’s inherent and explicit anti-democratic orientation.

• The EU is now going to blather on yet again about ‘strategic autonomy’, ‘building up its defence to reduce reliance on America’ etc. It will bring out all sorts of (often unlawful under EU law) special purpose vehicles (SPVs), i.e financing tricks, and the ECJ will say ‘all lawful’. The EU has always grown via Leninist ‘beneficial crises’ — this is the established Monnet method. You can already see the Leninists of Brussels — on the back foot for a decade and out of ideas about how to revive the Monnet-Delors march of integration — seeing their chance. So money will flow with rhetoric. This will be intoxicating for SW1’s NPCs. I’ve watched this cycle since working on the euro campaign in 1999. I vividly remember the entire SW1 media swallowing No10’s spin about the Lisbon summit of 2000 which promised to close the gap with America on technology. I predicted failure. I’ve predicted failure in every cycle since. I’ve always been right. I’ll be right again. The EU cannot do what it wants to do because of how it is structured and it cannot accept this lesson because it’s existential: it’s like Whitehall accepting the permanent civil service was a historic error. This new ‘leap forward’ for integration will be an economic and strategic failure, a massive waste of money that adds to their already enormous debt burden and accelerates the EU’s multiple crises including even more pressure on the structurally flawed euro and even more support for extremist politics.

• Rejoin is a simple thing they can emotionally attach to that obviates a need for thought. NPCs don’t want to think about hard things. NPC graduates crave an identity and Rejoin is an identity. (This is of course what Lenin and Hitler understood well about modern graduates and exploited.) Their identity can’t be ‘independent Britain doing our best for ourselves and the world’ — that is ‘fascism’. But ‘Europe is our natural home in a world of Xi, Putin and Hitler-Trump, we must play our part in building a new Europe for this new world’ — this is a very natural identity for the NPCs. Ukraine has shown that NPCs have very strong nationalist emotions but they just cannot attach them to their own nation, they care about borders but not OUR borders. Nationalism for Ukraine and ‘the European project’ allow them to indulge in nationalist emotions without seeing themselves as nationalist. It’s perfect.

• Rejoin brings together anti-America, anti-entrepreneur, anti-tech/AI, anti-democracy, with the quasi-religious Net Zero. Net Zero also legitimises central planning over Anglo-American capitalism. And Net Zero legitimises protectionism in defence of the quasi-religious. And Rejoin allows them to ignore the collapse of Whitehall’s performance and UK institutions generally. ‘Brexit broke them, Rejoin will fix them!’

I don’t think this emotional spasm will grow into an actual serious chance of a government policy shift to Rejoin (mainly because McSweeney probably has a good sense of what a disaster it would be for the 2029 election). But it doesn’t need to. It just needs to provide NPCs with an emotional identity and something they can wave when asked ‘what’s your plan for our productivity and defence crisis?’ The Customs Union and Single Market and European defence and SPVs, Slava Ukraine, down with Hitler! It gives them something to talk about and emote over until the next election takes over their emotions.

Also note that the same NPC-complex that praised Trolley and Sunak when in 2021 they ditched our 2019 guarantee not to put up individual taxes are lobbying for Labour to ditch their promise to pay for their Ukraine fantasies. In 2021 I pointed out that this would be a strategic disaster for the Tories for many reasons. It was. It would be a disaster for Labour too. I suspect they will at least introduce new ‘taxes on the rich’ because they can’t change how Whitehall works and save money, per my previous long blog on the parties…

Finally, you can see the NPCs excitedly claiming that Starmer’s polls will be transformed by his ‘leadership’ on Ukraine. This leadership will soon be a bust. But that isn’t the main point. Foreign policy ‘success’ always has a very short half-life.

• Churchill 1945.

• Bush and the first Iraq War — briefly ~90 approval. Lost to Clinton.

• Obama after killing bin Laden. Briefly 80-90 approval. Soon back to what it was.

No, this SW1 emotional spasm will NOT change the core issues around Starmer. Voters know he’s a dud. His polls will reflect this. The unknown issue is what others do. Does Farage get Reform onto a trajectory of ‘alternative government’? When do the Tories ditch Kemi? See previous blog.

As I’ve said many times, it would be good for our NPCs to watch JFK’s Peace speech after the Cuban crisis. It is good that the new White House is much closer to this outlook than the last White House.

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Previous in this series:

IX: Notes on Britain's 'Organization of Victory' 1793-1815 and B) Siemann’s biography of Metternich. How the British deep state organised to defeat Napoleon.

• Intelligence.

• Procurement.

• Manufacturing capacity.

• Technology.

• Civil service reform.

• Balance of Power.

• Metternich and European community, international law.

This blog is particularly interesting as we are watching, as I said would happen in 2022, the meltdown of the post-1945 international system in parallel to the crisis of domestic regimes across the West. Pitt and Metternich had to struggle with the implosion of the old Europe in revolution and war and create something new. SW1 is trying to pretend to itself that it can maintain the old regime, the dead ‘rules-based international order’ which has been a wonderful alternative to a serious strategy for SW1 for 30 years. It can’t. Soon everyone will have to face the need for something new. I’ve said this repeatedly. SW1 has refused to listen. 2025 is the year they are forced to face it.

NB. Pitt did not have endless written ‘strategy’ papers nor did he have NPC scripted meetings like Cabinet now. He had unscripted meetings and talked directly to real experts, like Groves doing Manhattan who also avoided written reports where possible.

I tried this in No10. It is a superpower in politics to ignore hierarchy and find the person who actually understands X and talk to them, because the whole system is organised to stop this happening (or even let the expert into the room with the senior politicians). Many people I called to No10 for meetings — like tiny agencies responsible for niche technologies in the intelligence world — said ruefully that the last time anybody from their organisation had been invited to No10 by the PM’s office was in the 1980s.

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them. (This is 99% finished, a little tidying up to do.)

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). (Me, 3/2022)

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

If you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut, and one that ~100% of those in politics are too lazy or deluded to grasp! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.