Tag: war

They’re likely to make more intelligent opposition than the average suburban guy with a rifle is anticipating. This is definitely 4GW in action, being utilized to disrupt the US state. Notice how the “peaceful protesters” are not only being used as a shield, but are actively attempting to protect the violent extremists and conceal their activities:

We call the battles of the second and third days at the Precinct a siege because the police were defeated by attrition. The pattern of the battle was characterized by steady intensification punctuated by qualitative leaps due to the violence of the police and the spread of the conflict into looting and attacks on corporate-owned buildings. The combination of the roles listed above helped to create a situation that was unpoliceable, yet which the police were stubbornly determined to contain. The repression required for every containment effort intensified the revolt and pushed it further out into the surrounding area. By Day Three, all of the corporate infrastructure surrounding the Third Precinct had been destroyed and the police had nothing but a “kingdom of ashes” to show for their efforts. Only their Precinct remained, a lonely target with depleted supplies. The rebels who showed up on Day Three found an enemy teetering on the brink. All it needed was a final push.

Day Two of the uprising began with a rally: attendees were on the streets, while the police were stationed on top of their building with an arsenal of crowd control weaponry. The pattern of struggle began during the rally, when the crowd tried to climb over the fences that protected the Precinct in order to vandalize it. The police fired rubber bullets in response as rally speakers called for calm. After some time passed and more speeches were made, people tried again. When the volley of rubber bullets came, the crowd responded with rocks and water bottles. This set off a dynamic of escalation that accelerated quickly once the rally ended. Some called for non-violence and sought to interfere with those who were throwing things, but most people didn’t bother arguing with them. They were largely ignored or else the reply was always the same: “That non-violence shit don’t work!” In fact, neither side of this argument was exactly correct: as the course of the battle was to demonstrate, both sides needed each other to accomplish the historic feat of reducing the Third Precinct to ashes.

It’s important to note that the dynamic we saw on Day Two did not involve using non-violence and waiting for repression to escalate the situation. Instead, a number of individuals stuck their necks out very far to invite police violence and escalation. Once the crowd and the police were locked into an escalating pattern of conflict, the objective of the police was to expand their territorial control radiating outward from the Precinct. When the police decided to advance, they began by throwing concussion grenades at the crowd as a whole and firing rubber bullets at those throwing projectiles, setting up barricades, and firing tear gas.

The intelligence of the crowd proved itself as participants quickly learned five lessons in the course of this struggle.

First, it is important to remain calm in the face of concussion grenades, as they are not physically harmful if you are more than five feet away from them. This lesson extends to a more general insight about crisis governance: don’t panic, as the police will always use panic against us. One must react quickly while staying as calm as possible.

Second, the practice of flushing tear-gassed eyes spread rapidly from street medics throughout the rest of the crowd. Employing stores of looted bottled water, many people in the crowd were able to learn and quickly execute eye-flushing. People throwing rocks one minute could be seen treating the eyes of others in the next. This basic medic knowledge helped to build the crowd’s confidence, allowing them to resist the temptation to panic and stampede, so that they could return to the space of engagement.

Third, perhaps the crowd’s most important tactical discovery was that when one is forced to retreat from tear gas, one must refill the space one has abandoned as quickly as possible. Each time the crowd at the Third Precinct returned, it came back angrier and more determined either to stop the police advance or to make them pay as dearly as possible for every step they took.

Fourth, borrowing from the language of Hong Kong, we saw the crowd practice the maxim “Be water.” Not only did the crowd quickly flow back into spaces from which they had to retreat, but when forced outward, the crowd didn’t behave the way that the cops did by fixating on territorial control. When they could, the crowd flowed back into the spaces from which they had been forced to retreat due to tear gas. But when necessary, the crowd flowed away from police advances like a torrential destructive force. Each police advance resulted in more businesses being smashed, looted, and burned. This meant that the police were losers regardless of whether they chose to remain besieged or push back the crowd.

Finally, the fall of the Third Precinct demonstrates the power of ungovernability as a strategic aim and means of crowd activity. The more that a crowd can do, the harder it will be to police. Crowds can maximize their agency by increasing the number of roles that people can play and by maximizing the complementary relationships between them.

Non-violence practitioners can use their legitimacy to temporarily conceal or shield ballistics squads. Ballistics squads can draw police fire away from those practicing non-violence. Looters can help feed and heal the crowd while simultaneously disorienting the police. In turn, those going head to head with the police can generate opportunities for looting. Light mages can provide ballistics crews with temporary opacity by blinding the police and disabling surveillance drones and cameras. Non-violence practitioners can buy time for barricaders, whose works can later alleviate the need for non-violence to secure the front line.

Here we see that an internally diverse and complex crowd is more powerful than a crowd that is homogenous. We use the term composition to name this phenomenon of maximizing complementary practical diversity. It is distinct from organization because the roles are elective, individuals can shift between them as needed or desired, and there are no leaders to assign or coordinate them. Crowds that form and fight through composition are more effective against the police not only because they tend to be more difficult to control, but also because the intelligence that animates them responds to and evolves alongside the really existing situation on the ground, rather than according to preexisting conceptions of what a battle “ought” to look like. Not only are “compositional” crowds more likely to engage the police in battles of attrition, but they are more likely to have the fluidity that is necessary to win.

Of course, the only reason they won is that the local and state authorities were on their side and preventing the police from taking the sort of actions that allowed the National Guard to easily control and disperse them.

It is becoming obvious to everyone who has witnessed the so-called Color Revolutions performed by the Deep State that the Black Lives Matter / Antifa “protests” are simply the same weapon now aimed at the American people and the U.S. government:

Why has the media failed to show the vast destruction of businesses and private property? Why have they minimized the effects of vandalism, looting and arson? Why have they fanned the flames of social unrest from the very beginning, shrugging off the ruin and devastation while cheerleading the demonstrations as a heroic struggle for racial justice? Is this is the same media that supported every bloody war, every foreign intervention, and every color-revolution for the last 5 decades? Are we really expected to believe that they’ve changed their stripes and become an energized proponent of social justice?

Nonsense. The media’s role in concealing the damage should only convince skeptics that the protests are just one part of a much larger operation. What we’re seeing play out in over 400 cities across the US, has more to do with toppling Trump and sowing racial division than it does with the killing of George Floyd. The scale and coordination alone suggests that elements in the deep state are probably involved. We know from evidence uncovered during the Russiagate probe, that the media works hand-in-glove with the Intel agencies and FBI while–at the same time– serving as a mouthpiece for elites. That hasn’t changed, in fact, it’s gotten even worse. The uniformity of the coverage suggests that that same perception management strategy is being employed here as well. Even at this late date, the determination to remove Trump from office is as strong as ever even though, in the present case, it has been combined with the broader political strategy of inciting fratricidal violence, obliterating urban areas, and spreading anarchy across the country. This isn’t about racial justice or police brutality, it’s about regime change, internal destabilization, and martial law….

The United States has never experienced two weeks of sustained protests in hundreds of its cities at the same time. It’s beyond suspicious, it points to extensive coordination with groups across the country, a comprehensive media strategy (that probably preceded the killing of George Floyd), a sizable presence on social media (to put people on the street), and agents provocateur whose task is to incite violence, loot and create mayhem.

What this means is that martial law is coming to the USA, and probably sooner than you might imagine. Moreover, its institution will be absolutely justified by the level of treason involved. The events of the hot summer to come may turn out to be the ultimate Q proof, and also explain the God-Emperor’s uncharacteristic equanimity and relative taciturnity concerning the ongoing riots; he knew what was coming, he knows it is going to get worse, and he is waiting for the correct moment to strike at those who are behind it.

The average white American is rapidly getting to the point of seeing the actions of the Deep State provocateurs as treason. But he isn’t quite there yet. And I doubt the God-Emperor will launch The Storm until he is, because the actions that he absolutely has to take in order to deal with this attack on America will be very upsetting to the average Fox News viewer.

FDR had to wait for Pearl Harbor and a German declaration of war before he was able to declare war on Germany. The neocons had to wait until 9/11 to get their long-sought war with Iraq. Trump has to wait until the Deep State crosses a similar line before acting, which is precisely why the “protesters” and their allies in state and local government have been seeking to bait him into premature anti-revolutionary action.

Mattis was our Country’s most overrated General. He talked a lot, but never “brought home the bacon.” He was terrible! Someday I will tell the real story on him and others – both good and bad!
– Donald J. Trump

I suspect the real story will have something to do with the serious violation by Gen. Mattis of the USMC’s erstwhile Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. That famous story of him prowling around alone on Christmas Eve in order to relieve young Marines on duty tends to take on a darker tone once you realize that there may well have been an alternative meaning to the description of a confirmed bachelor being “married to the Corps”.

It was once said of another general, Julius Caesar, that he was “every man’s woman and every woman’s man.” And it occurs to me that another way of describing a man who is “married to the Corps” is “every Marine’s wife.”

The Atlantic is literally spelling it out for those who are too slow to recognize the obvious pattern of a color revolution playing out:

What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milošević, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali.

And although Trump’s time in office will end with an election and not an ouster, it is only possible to grasp the magnitude of what we’re seeing and to map what comes next by looking to these antecedents from abroad.

As in the case of many such revolutions, two battles are being waged in America. One is a long struggle against a brutal and repressive ideology. The other is a narrower fight over the fate of a particular leader. The president rose to power by inflaming racial tensions. He now finds his own fate enmeshed in the struggle against police brutality and racism.

The most important theorist of nonviolent revolutions is the late political scientist Gene Sharp. A conscientious objector during the Korean War who spent nine months in prison, Sharp became a close student of Mahatma Gandhi’s struggles. His work set out to extract the lessons of the Indian revolt against the British. He wanted to understand the weaknesses of authoritarian regimes—and how nonviolent movements could exploit them. Sharp distilled what he learned into a 93-page handbook, From Dictatorship to Democracy, a how-to guide for toppling autocracy.

Sharp’s foundational insight is embedded in an aphorism: “Obedience is at the heart of political power.” A dictator doesn’t maintain power on his own; he relies on individuals and institutions to carry out his orders. A successful democratic revolution prods these enablers to stop obeying. It makes them ashamed of their complicity and fearful of the social and economic costs of continued collaboration.

Sharp posited that revolutionaries should focus first on the regime’s softest underbelly: the media, the business elites, and the police. The allegiance of individuals in the outer circle of power is thin and rooted in fear. By standing strong in the face of armed suppression, protesters can supply examples of courage that inspire functionaries to stop carrying out orders, or as Sharp put it, to “withhold cooperation.” Each instance of resistance provides the model for further resistance. As the isolation of the dictators grows—as the inner circles of power join the outer circle in withholding cooperation—the regime crumbles.

This is essentially what transpired in Ukraine in 2014. When the country’s president backed away from plans to join the European Union, a crowd amassed in Kyiv’s central square, the Maidan. The throngs initially had no avowed intention or realistic hope of overthrowing the kleptocratic president, Viktor Yanukovych. But instead of letting the demonstrators shout themselves hoarse in the thick of subfreezing winter, Yanukovych set about violently confronting them. This tactic backfired horribly. A movement with limited aims became a full-blown revolution.

Essentially… there is the key tell that assures us the writer knows he is misleading his readers. The Maidan protesters were not “violently confronted” by the Yanukovych regime, they were murdered by mercenaries in the employ of the people who were pulling their strings, the very same people who are now pulling the strings of BLM and Antifa in the USA’s own would-be color revolution.

That’s why there are now anti-sniper snipers in position around the White House and other protest locations. They are not there to shoot the protesters, they are there to prevent the puppets from being publicly sacrificed by the puppetmasters.

Neon Revolt observes that the USA is now experiencing its own attempted Color Revolution and reaches a genuinely startling conclusion:

We’re now in the midst of a full-blown Soros-backed Color Revolution in America.

What do I mean by that?

Well, for those unfamiliar, Soros has been in the business of disrupting governments and nations for some time now. There have been a number of color revolutions around the world, and many of them have been both directly and indirectly funded by George Soros – which means, they’ve been funded by taxpayer dollars.

How does this work? Well, Soros, through his NGO, the Open Society Foundation, will take funds in, and then donate those funds to other radical leftist/neo-Marxist funds and activist groups.

So the Open Society will take in millions and then say, “Hey, we don’t like the frontrunner in that Moldovan election. What can we do about that?”

And some sniveling intern from the bowels of hell rubs his palms together and responds, “Well, there’s a humanitarian group comprised of local artisans in the area called Masonry United For Justice, and they share our values, so why don’t we donate to them?”

And so they donate millions to Masonry United but it turns out that, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, they were actually brick-chucking Communists this whole time, and the only redistribution they want to do, is redistribute pallets of bricks through the windshields and windows and faces of everyone who disagrees with them.

And then Masonry United may turn around and give part of the funds they received to the Frozen Urine Bag Bros (who hold weekly secret meetings on Wednesdays). and the Frozen Urine Bag Bros will donate to the Molotov Cocktail Crew. And so on, down the line.

That’s a vast, vast oversimplification of course, but the important effects to note are: Soros gets to keep his money machine “clean” because he’s not responsible with what the groups “down the line” do with the donations. In fact, they get to keep publishing high-minded articles, interviews, and pieces of media to maintain their outward image, and at the same time, these groups that would otherwise languish if left to their own devices like the societal detritus they are get sudden funding.

So now Harmony with the dreadlocks in her arm pits and Flynn with the infected earplugs get to have enough money to buy Cheerios and matching sets of Portland chic so they can have enough energy to drive to your town and throw M-80s at the cops while screeching about the evils of the Free Market.

It’s trickle-down economics for the Bolshevik set.

Read the whole thing and don’t worry about the boring bit in the middle, it will be worth it.

It’s a bit ironic that David Goldman, who was once at the forefront of the planned Leap to China, has now turned in alarm to talking up a nonexistent “American” unity between Americans, Paper Americans, Fake Americans, and Not Americans, now that the US empire has squandered its brief period of global dominance on the invasion and occupation of a few of Israel’s enemies.

There is a line of American commentary on China, argued most clearly and persistently by David Goldman at Asia Times (now apparently with Gordon Chang also on board) telling us that we Americans should consider ourselves to be in a Sputnik Moment: a moment in history where, if we don’t stop the fruitless squabbling and begin engaging in some serious, co-ordinated national effort, the ChiComs will eat our lunch, breezing past us in key technologies like artificial intelligence, big data, microchip fabrication, and quantum computing.

The problem with that prescription is that the original Sputnik Moment, to which America reacted with such spectacular success, occurred in 1957, a whole decade B.S.—”Before Sontag.”

White ethnomasochism was not entirely unknown in 1957, but it was restricted to tiny cliques of urban intellectuals.

We could make a united national response to Sputnik sixty years ago because we were a sufficiently united nation. You need that qualifying word “sufficiently” there because there was what people of the time called “the Negro Problem.”

White Americans didn’t think about black Americans any more than they absolutely had to, though, and the race issue didn’t split whites down the middle as clearly and angrily as in what I call today’s Cold Civil War.

Sputnik-wise, we were a sufficiently united nation—sufficiently to co-operate in a colossal national effort with a minimum of bickering.

The US empire is now about as well-equipped to withstand the Chinese challenge as the Austro-Hungarian military was ready to face the Russian army in 1914. No amount of talking up the value of words and ideology and paper identity is going to substitute for genuine nationalism.

Now the professional wargamers are figuring out that the US military is an overextended, technologically backwards paper tiger:

“In our games, when we fight Russia and China … blue gets its ass handed to it,” RAND senior researcher David Ochmanek said during a panel discussion at the Center for a New American Security think tank last week. “We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary,” he added.

Ochmanek said the scenarios often end with the “red” – Russia and China – destroying U.S. fighter jets while still on the runway, sinking U.S. warships, and destroying U.S. military bases and other vital military systems.

“In every case I know of, the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense and an expert war game analyst. “But it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”

U.S. aircraft carriers are also considered more vulnerable to enemy attacks. “Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time,” Ochmanek said.

The Chinese would “attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly, and they practice it all the time,” Work said. “On our side, whenever we have an exercise, when the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the exercise and say, ‘Let’s restart.’”

There is a widespread assumption that paints America as a leading military power who wins handily in any wartime scenario, Ochmanek pointed out.

However, he noted that this isn’t the case, and people are shocked to learn the truth – that all five warfare domains are contested.

“We do not have air superiority over the ballast space at the outset of these wars. We do not have maritime superiority. Our space assets are under attack with kinetic and non-kinetic means. Our command-and-control is under attack by electromagnetic attacks and cyber,” he continued.

The “brain and the nervous system that connects all of these pieces is suppressed, if not shattered,” Ochmanek said.

He also explained that the forward bases U.S. forces operate from are eliminated in war scenarios, taking away critical points of operation; researchers are unsure of what that means for America’s fate.

U.S. bases in Europe also pose a vulnerability due to their scattered proximity and insufficient defense capabilities.

“If we went to war in Europe, there would be one Patriot battery moving, and it would go to Ramstein [in Germany]. And that’s it,” Work noted. “We have 58 Brigade Combat Teams, but we don’t have anything to protect our bases. So what difference does it make?”

The researchers stressed that a military defeat is imminent unless the U.S. employs a major change in strategy.

Even these gloomy predictions are optimistic. The truth is that the F-35 does not rule the skies, as the 5th-Gen Russian fighters are proving to be superior in practice to the USAF’s ill-designed superplane. The US empire is failing and will collapse within 13 years, most likely within 10, although the core polity should survive until 2033.

That may still sound shocking now, but it probably won’t even strike most intelligent observers as much of a surprise by the time it happens.

It’s not a good sign that every argument in support of the USA’s continued global ascendancy is based on pure theory:

In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China’s ruling elites as “extractive”—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America’s “inclusive” governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.

First, there is no ruling elite as extractive and parasitic, and few as observably corrupt, as the current US ruling elite.. Second, these theoretical strengths are mostly imaginary and based on the historical American posterity rather than actual US demographics. Consider the reality:

Over the last few years one of the most ambitious Chinese projects has been a plan to create the world’s largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail transport, an effort that absorbed a remarkable $200 billion of government investment. The result was the construction of over 6,000 miles of track, a total probably now greater than that of all the world’s other nations combined.

Meanwhile, America has no high-speed rail whatsoever, despite decades of debate and vast amounts of time and money spent on lobbying, hearings, political campaigns, planning efforts, and environmental-impact reports. China’s high-speed rail system may be far from perfect, but it actually exists, while America’s does not. Annual Chinese ridership now totals over 25 million trips per year.

Of course, the most significant development of the last decade is one that has gone almost entirely unnoticed by everyone, which is of course, the Chinese rejection of one faction of the US ruling elite’s gracious offer to transfer the benefits of their wise and impartial guidance from the USA to China. It would appear the Chinese elite is content with their extant extractive abilities.

It increasingly appears that Ron Unz had it right back in 2012 when he cast his vote with Richard Lynn:

Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, hope that other dark meat tastes a lot better than it looks.

But, as Ron Unz has observed, in matters of international import, the Chinese government and media have repeatedly been proven to be more honest than the US government and media:

Few Americans remember our 1999 attack upon the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and if not for the annual waving of a bloody June 4th flag by our ignorant and disingenuous media, the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” would also have long since faded from memory. Neither of these events has much direct importance today, at least for our own citizens. But the broader media implications of these examples do seem quite significant.

These incidents represented two of the most serious flashpoints between the Chinese and American governments during the last thirty-odd years. In both cases the claims of the Chinese government were entirely correct, although they were denied by our own top political leaders and dismissed or ridiculed by virtually our entire mainstream media. Moreover, within a few months or a year the true facts became known to many journalists, even being reported in fully respectable venues. But that reality was still completely ignored and suppressed for decades, so that today almost no American whose information comes from our regular media would even be aware of it. Indeed, since many younger journalists draw their knowledge of the world from these same elite media sources, I suspect that many of them have never learned what their predecessors knew but dared not mention.

Most leading Chinese media outlets are owned or controlled by the Chinese government, and they tend to broadly follow the government line. Leading American media outlets have a corporate ownership structure and often boast of their fierce independence; but on many crucial matters, I think the actual reality is not so very different from that in China.

I tend to doubt that Chinese leaders have any overwhelming commitment to the truth, and the reasons for their greater veracity are probably practical ones. American news and entertainment completely dominate the global media landscape and they face no significant domestic rival. So China recognizes that it is vastly outmatched in any propaganda conflict, and as the far weaker party must necessarily try to stick closer to the truth, lest its lies be immediately exposed. Meanwhile, America’s overwhelming control over global information may inspire considerable hubris, with the government sometimes promoting the most outrageous and ridiculous falsehoods in the confident belief that a supportive American media will cover for any mistakes.

These considerations should be kept in mind as we attempt to sift the accounts of our often unreliable and dishonest media in hopes of extracting the true circumstances of the current coronavirus epidemic. Unlike careful historical studies, we are working in real-time and our analysis is greatly hindered by the ongoing fog of war, so that any conclusions are necessarily very preliminary ones. But given the high stakes, such an attempt seems warranted.

Read the whole thing, as it is a very good analysis of the present situation regarding the coronavirus and some of the vagaries concerning what is believed to be the original outbreak in Wuhan. The big difference today, an important factor that Unz did not include in his analysis, is that the US government and media are no longer in alignment as before, since the Deep State + US media is in direct conflict with both the Trump administration and the Chinese government + Chinese media.

Unz’s conclusion is that the virus was a nominally US biological attack on China and Iran that hit the US as an unintended backlash. He notes, significantly:

One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often anonymously authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active information war. The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred, but I do think it tends to support such a theory.

But we cannot and should not rule out evil intent and the possibility that the “unintended backlash” was actually an intended bonus. Because another element that needs to be explained is the bizarre “incompetence” of the CDC, which has repeatedly acted in a manner guaranteed to enhance rather than restrict the spread of the virus, as well as the strange attempts by Democratic governors in New York and Michigan to criminalize medical treatments and reject medical equipment. And it is this purported incompetence, in combination with the strange tangential transmission to the Iranian leadership, that tends to indicate the coronavirus as a coordinated Deep State attack on China, Iran, the Trump administration, and the American people.

It would appear the Chinese have inadvertently discovered how to break the chains of global US hegemony, as both Pat Buchanan and The Saker are both contemplating the same potential consequences of Corona-chan:

Seeing what happened on the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, the coronavirus could have a major impact on U.S. global commitments.

Americans were already coming home from the Middle East, drawing down our 12,000 troops in Afghanistan after a deal with the Taliban, and moving our 5,000 troops in Iraq into fewer bases.

We have disengaged from the Saudi war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen and are drawing down our forces in Syria.

In Libya’s civil war, it is Russians, Turks, Egyptians and Gulf Arabs, not Americans, who are the supporting actors.

American soft power is also in retreat from the world.

Some 10,000 Peace Corps volunteers have been brought home. Scores of thousands of U.S. citizens have been repatriated by the State Department. We have shut the door to Europe, China, the world.

What now becomes of the U.S. geostrategic “pivot,” the shift of planes, troops, ships and bases from the Middle and Near East to the Indo-Pacific theater to contain a rising China?

And contain China with what?

The Roosevelt has been ravaged by the coronavirus. As of Tuesday, 589 cases of COVID-19 were reported from a crew of 4,800. Four thousand sailors in Guam are in various stages of a 14-day isolation period in hotels and spare rooms across the island.

But it is not just the Roosevelt. Every U.S. warship — carriers, cruisers, frigates, destroyers, subs — has cramped quarters conducive to the spread of the coronavirus.

How many of these vessels will soon be doubling as hospital ships?

The same question might also be asked of the U.S. Army and Marine barracks in South Korea, Japan, Australia and Okinawa.

There are allegations that the coronavirus did not originate in the Wuhan “wet market” where bats are sold for food but instead escaped through a horrible blunder in a Chinese bioweapons laboratory a few miles away.

Whatever the truth, the Wuhan virus appears to have become the most effective means of disabling U.S. hard and soft power that we have encountered in many a decade.

The Saker observes that carrier diplomacy is no longer an option when an entire carrier group can be disabled by arranging to infect a single sailor on shore leave.

First, the obvious: USN carriers cannot operate effectively under a bio-attack (a truly weaponized virus would both be much more transmissible than SARS-COV-2 and it would be far more deadly). This also indicates that they would probably do no better under a real chemical warfare attack either.

Considering that in reality USN carriers are a instrument of colonial repression and not ships to be engaged against the USSR (which had real biowarfare capabilities), this makes sense (while most university labs & the like could produce some kind of virus and use it as a weapon, truly weaponized viruses, the kind effectively used in special delivery systems, can only be produced by a limited list of countries). However, in theory, all the formations/units/subunits/ships/aircraft/armor/etc of a military superpower should be trained to operate in case of a nuclear, chemical and biological attack. Clearly, this is not the case with US carriers, most likely because nobody in the USA really expected such an attack, at least not during the Cold War.

For the current situation, however, I think that the lesson is clear: the USN simply does not have an effective capability to operate under NBC attack conditions.