'Insanity' to Think NATO Can Defeat Putin in Conventional War: Ret. U.S. Army Colonel

U.S. military is not in the position where it can mobilize and take on Russia.

Lawrence Wilkerson, retired US Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said in an interview published Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s selection of Andrei Belousov, an economist, as defense minister is evidence that the Kremlin in preparing for a wider war with NATO, which the alliance would lose.

There is an axis developing with Moscow Beijing, and – to a certain degree – Tehran, which is dangerous because these countries have “an incredible capacity to hook what could be fairly powerful elements of their economy to a military regime” like Hitler in 1937, he told the podcast Dialogue Works.

He said Putin is a very smart strategic thinker and yes getting prepared to take NATO on if he needs to. Wilkerson said there is no way that NATO forces could penetrate or go more than 100 kilometers into the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Russia’s answer to the alliance, for more than a day.

“Sorry, the United States military is, in terms of mobilization capacity and readiness, right now it’s as bad as it's been since the early 1970s – post-Vietnam. That’s how bad it is. So anyone talking in the military leadership or the civilian leadership about America's readiness to mobilize and take on a country that's been at war for 2-plus years it has now hooked up decisively, its economy, which is banging away to its military is just pure insanity.”

He said Europe is in no better position to take on Russia.

TREND FORECAST: As we had long forecast, no amount of weapons or money given to Ukraine would be enough to defeat Russia. And what is essentially absent in the U.S. and EU media is that Russia has taken some 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory and Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year was a total failure.