The Real Goal of World War III

World War III has begun as an undeclared world war, which has much in common with the Seven Years War. The Seven Years War had major theaters of war in Europe, which incited proxy wars in North America, small wars in the Caribbean, and trade and factional wars in India—creating a grand mosaic of war throughout the world. Today, we are already amidst another such war. Although the presidents or statesmen from the present, modern nation-states, who are the central actors in this world war, are loath to admit why such a war has gone beyond a regional friction of economic and political interests, the actual world conflict was subtly ignited by the friction in Syria. 

When the Obama regime, in conjunction with the CIA, began arming the so-called moderate urban forces in the later days of August 2013 (thinking naively that they were punishing the Bashar al-Assad democratically elected government for using chemical weapons in Damascus against the rebels), this became part of the beginning of World War III.  A number of circumstances and combination of events have layered this world war; one being the downing of the Russian Sukhoi Su-24 bomber by a Turkish jet fighter on November 24th, 2015, without provocation by the Russian pilots, which lead to diplomatic and economic sanctions by the Russian Government against the Turkish regime. Then the United States and its coalition of fighter jets initiated a lethal and deadly killing of over sixty Syrian Arab soldiers who were fighting ISIL terrorist fighters in the eastern city of Deir el-Zour on September 17th, 2016. 

As a military historian, I argue that it was not “the fog of war” (as coined by Clausewitz) that killed the Syrian soldiers, but it was premeditated murder. This incident on the war front in Syria cemented Syria as the major theater of World War III.    

As this is a theoretical work on the world war we are now engaged in from one moment to next, I would like to quote Clausewitz, the German military thinker. We should not fantasize about future wars, but instead concentrate on the wars at hand: “Theory serves to throw a clear light on the mass of objects, that the mind may the more easily find its bearings; theory serves to pull up the weeds which error has sown everywhere.” The “weeds” are the war we can only imagine, which does not exist, and will have its own surprises in the future, while our study of the war at hand can be based on observation of the battle fortunes before us, thereby creating certain fundamental principles on war, which in turn creates a singular, clear idea of a feeling of what the course of action or actions will be in any given war. Let us observe the battlefield scenario that is taking place in Syria and how it is unfolding into a regional war that will eventually expand into a major confrontation between Russia and the United States and include the Eurasia powers.

The various factions or the different compatible allies who are engaging in the first stage of the Third World War are of diverse economic social and culture features, and therefore, the mutation of how they are working together on the battlefield and in diplomatic circles is conflictory.

They are discharging their political anger on the battlefield in small- to medium-size engagements, which I predict will eventually lead up to profoundly large-scale engagements such as the world has never seen before in the art of warfare. At the present time in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, we have battle frictions that have included not only the traditional combat, infantry forces, but also the classical jet fighter and bomber strikers. However, air battles between Russian, American, Syrian, Israeli, Turkish, and Iraqi and Iranian aircraft have not yet begun. Eventually, there will be a complete violent discharge of aerial warfare between these opposing nations when they tire of their lack of military cohesion on the battlefield and in the air. When either Russia or the United States, for instance, realize that the so-called humanitarian truces and no-fly zones will not stop their perceived enemies from shoring up their tactical or strategic positions in the Syrian city of Aleppo (which can be regarded as Syria’s Stalingrad, as an example), then non-strategic nuclear weapons will be used to destroy the enemy. Because of the direct and immediate threat to the Syrian Arab Army by different outside forces such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United States (with its lethal air power), Russia (as a nation-state and as Syria’s nominal ally), it will have no choice but to use such tactical nuclear weapons to send a harsh signal concerning its desire not to be subservient to United States hegemonic foreign policy.  

The Obama regime, for all its feigning at being opposed towards engaging Russia in a nuclear war, would actually welcome such a scenario should they be able to provoke Putin to defend the Russian military front in Syria at all costs. The extremist right-wing generals within the bureaucracy of the Pentagon and the Obama regime (or the next Presidential regime to follow after him, if such a case occurs), would gladly test the Russian armed forces and their political elites to see if in fact they are only pursuing their conflict against Al Nusra and Al Qaeda in what Clausewitz would call “a half-hearted affair, a thing without inner cohesion.” My view on the intentions of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Valery Gerasimov, and the Minister of Defense for Russia, Sergey Shoygu, is that they will carry forth total war against the West in their final assessment for the survival of Russia. If there is a weakness in the Russian armed forces, it may have to do with its navy, particularly the Black Sea Fleet operating in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, because its warships, freights and submarines are undergoing modernization, which means that they are vulnerable to the sophisticated American Air Force and American nuclear submarine attacks.  Because the more aggressive and imperialistic-minded generals in the Pentagon are strategically thinking of war against Russia, it would not be surprising, if not ironic, that they would mount a surprise attack on the Black Sea Fleet once the world war continues to spread beyond the frontiers of the Middle East.                                                                                  

In this sense, the American military command is similar to the high military command of the Japanese army and navy in the very early days of World War II, who conducted a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. If the United States nation-state uses the “first strike” or “first use” paradigm with nuclear missiles against an adversary that is opposed to the military concept of “no first use” (which Obama has reportedly not been enthused about), then it will be the country’s gravest mistake of all. As Clausewitz reminds us of such adventurous actions, “Would Prussia in 1806 have made war upon France with 100,000 men if she had considered that the first pistol shot would be a spark to fire the mine which was to blow her into the air?”

I would not be surprised if the Pentagon generals and colonels resort to such a naïve strategy in attacking Russia because they are desperate men with broken fingernails clawing the brittle rocks on the edge of a cliff as they attempt to escape their fall into the abyss of total war.

I have theorized that after ground, battlefield warfare, the second major stage in the war will be the usage of tactical nuclear warfare in this beginning of World War III that we are living and dying in now. The third stage I foresee —unless there is a profound social revolution in the United States brought about by the repressed African American people, segments of the American working class and the great indigenous peoples of the United States (meaning the Native American tribes)— there will be a war of continental nuclear weapons, or what is also known as strategic nuclear weapons. Although the United States will decimate cities within mainland China, which has chosen to side with Syria in its quest for self-determination and complete freedom form American hegemony, the Chinese Air Force, along with its nuclear submarines, will counterattack and lay waste to Pacific American cities, perhaps even to cities near the Gulf of Mexico. Russia will strike with strategic ballistic missiles from home bases within Russia proper as well as with nuclear bomb loads from nuclear submarines and long-range Russian Tupolev Tu-22 M bombers against specific American cities and deep echelon American, military bases. This will be the general climax of World War III. We are living through the first stage now, and the fortunate or unfortunate ones will live through the horror in the end. What is important in my humble scenario of how I see the present world war unfolding is this: we need to understand that war is a dialectical process in which one side can be seemingly winning before there is a sudden reversal of fortune or chance. As Napoleon Bonaparte wrote about the issue regarding the act of war, “The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.”   America will not control the chaos of World War III. America and her allies will perish in the chaos as if blown into the air.