Tag: war

The Saker interviews a Russian military expert who is rightly concerned about the way in which U.S. military planners are increasingly failing both aspects of Sun Tzu 101:

Martyanov does an absolutely superb job explaining some (not all, of course!) features of modern warfare to a reader which is assumed to be only a curious amateur whose intellect can be persuaded by fact-based and logical arguments (as opposed to delusional, imperial hubris and feel-good flagwaving and self-worship). As a matter of fact, Martyanov’s book could be an ideal “introduction to military analysis” or a “planning military forces 101” course.

Martyanov is clearly deeply frustrated with the willful ignorance shown by a lot of US academics, politicians and other talking heads and he places the blame on the US educational system which, according to Martyanov, teaches nonsensical theories which are not just useless, but actually self-deceiving and outright dangerous. In all fairness to US colleges and academies, I think that Martyanov is just a little unfair: while it is true that most “political science” and other “conflict and peace studies” schools mostly teach nonsense, there are other US colleges and academies – both civilian and military – which, at least in the 80s and 90s – did teach real military analysis and force planning. Those courses were typically taught by adjunct teachers taken from military personnel who taught evening classes while still working in their regular DoD positions. Furthermore, many students had a military rank (typically First Lieutenant and Captains). I don’t know how good these schools are now, but in the 1980s-1990s some of these schools had superb curricula, “heavy” on technical analysis and computer modeling. I can also say that most of the US officers I studied with were very competent specialists and honorable men who were all acutely aware that being an officer in a superpower’s military, places upon you a double burden: that to protect your country by deterrence, but also to avoid a conflict at almost any cost because this is the only way to really protect your country!

By the way, at that time a senior officer of the DoD’s Office of Net Assessment openly told us “no US President will ever sacrifice Boston or Chicago for the sake of Berlin or Paris; but we will never admit that publicly“. In my experience, US Cold War officers were very competent, cautious and acutely aware of the immense responsibility placed upon their shoulders. Furthermore, I will say this: during the Cold War both the USSR and the US acted responsibly, even during major crises. Finally, in spite of Reagan’s (stillborn) idea of “Star Wars” aka “SDI” – I never met a single US officer who believed, even for a second, that the US could ever stop a Soviet retaliatory second strike (never mind a first one!).

During the Cold War – deterrence worked and both sides played by the same rulebook. This is not the case anymore, and that is very frightening.

This is very typical behavior of an empire in decline. The imperial forces tend to overestimate their own capabilities and underestimate the capabilities of their potential adversaries. This is what leads to imperial overstretch and empire-shattering disasters like the Syracuse Expedition and the Peninsular War.

The three primary anti-globalist powers are sending a very clear message to the prometheans of GloboSatan Inc: the planetary balance of power is shifting:

Iran, China, and Russia will hold in the coming weeks their first-ever joint war drills, which leaders say are meant to send a “message to the world” about increased military cooperation between the rogue countries.

The commander of Iran’s navy, Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi, said Wednesday that the Islamic Republic will team up with Moscow and Beijing within the next month to hold the mass war drills…. The joint war drills will be aimed at sending a message to the world, particularly Western nations, like the United States, that have sought to constrain Iran’s expanding military ambitions.

This gathering of resisting forces very likely accounts for the desperate sense of urgency that Dr. Charlton has observed among what he describes as the Ahrimanic evil of the global establishment:

The interesting aspect is the sheer urgency. There is a very obvious attempt to create a worldwide sense of emergency, of imminent cataclysm, of terrible things that are Just About To Happen… unless, we hand over complete power to the Establishment (preferably the-day-after-tomorrow, or quicker). And this handover – this Power Grab by the Global Establishment – is being aimed-at Very Soon; on a timescale of months, not years.

Like it or not, the reality is that the U.S. military has been the primary tool for global evil for the last 75 years, due to the invasion of the USA and the abandonment of the American principles of isolation, non-intervention, and the avoidance of entangling alliances. And now, having been converged and repurposed, the U.S. military is observably no longer able to perform its primary purpose, which is to defend the American people from enemies foreign and domestic.

It’s going to be amusing to see the media waxing dramatic about the importance of military control of the civilian government. Jack Posobiec breaks the news:

BREAKING: President Trump has fired the Secretary of the Navy after publicly defying a direct order from the commander in chief

Good on the God-Emperor. Any cabinet member who is going to publicly disrespect the President and play semantic games about what an “order” is has to go, and go immediately.

UPDATE: Agent Posobiec confirmed.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper asked and received the resignation of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer on Sunday over his handling of the case of a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes in Iraq that angered President Donald Trump.

A military genius warns of what will happen if the Deep State gets its way:

As I have said many times, Fourth Generation war is at root a contest for legitimacy.  On one side is the state. On the other is a vast array of alternate primary loyalties: religion, race, tribe, gang, and locality, among others.  Around the world, the contest is going poorly for the state as a growing number of people shift their primary loyalty to one of the many alternatives, for which they are willing to fight.

Washington does not perceive it, absorbed as it is in its own struggles for power and money, but the same contest is going on in this country.  So far, to our great benefit, it has remained on the peripheries. Urban police know they are confronting it in the form of ethnically-based gangs, which are illegal business enterprises that fight.  But the mass of the American people appear still loyal to the state.

The appearance is, I think, deceptive.  On both the Left and the Right, doubts about the legitimacy of the federal government are growing.  Mostly, the doubts are about the legitimacy of the current President, although polls show public perception of Congress is also strongly negative.  There is no question many on the Left regard President Trump as illegitimate. Should a hard-Left figure such as Warren win in 2020, the Right will doubt her legitimacy.  But considering the current President illegitimate is different from thinking the state itself has lost its legitimacy.

Impeachment could change that.  President Trump’s supporters regard his election as proof their voices can be heard, that their interests will be considered in Washington.  They know that to virtually all Democrats and some Republicans, they are “unpersons”. Why? Because they are White, male, or non-feminist female, straight, and mostly Christian.  They are also struggling economically, which means they are not contributors to politicians’ campaigns. The coastal elites dismiss them as rubes and hicks inhabiting “flyover land”.  The Democratic Party, which has embraced the ideology of cultural Marxism, considers them all inherently evil “oppressors” fit only to kiss the feet of blacks, immigrants, gays, feminists, etc., PC’s sainted “victims” groups.

Again, should a Warren win in 2020, President Trump’s supporters will not consider her (or him) a legitimate President.  But if the unholy alliance between Democrats and the Deep State succeeds in driving President Trump from office through impeachment or some other means, that will be a very different story.  At that point, the message to President Trump’s supporters will be, “Your votes don’t matter, because even if you elect a President, we will drive him from office and reduce you to a silent serfdom.  You and your views are entitled to no representation. You are and will remain ‘unpersons.’”

At that point, in the vast electoral sea that is red America, the legitimacy of the system itself, i.e., the state, will be brought into serious question.  And when that happens, the chance of Fourth Generation war here on a large scale will rise dramatically. When you tell people they cannot achieve representation through ballots, they start to think about doing it with bullets.

The Deep State is playing an incredibly dangerous game here and has been for some time. The thing is, no matter how it turns out, they are not going to win. Messrs. Van Creveld and Lind seldom see eye to eye politically, so when they are both seeing the same danger on the horizon, it behooves one to pay very close attention.

There are so many New Canadians that they have their own veteran’s associations now.

Dressed in the uniform of China’s People’s Liberation Army, the 40 or so singers stood proudly in neat rows and belted out an old favourite.

I am a Soldier talks of defeating the Japanese, vanquishing Nationalist leader Chiang Kai Shek in the Communist revolution and being tested by the revolutionary war. The performance “brought forth a whirlwind of Chinese military spirit in a foreign land,” said a report on the concert.

The recital earlier this month at the Centre for the Performing Arts in Richmond Hill, Ont., was not offered by a visiting martial choir from Beijing.

It was the work of a surprising new Canadian association, dedicated to retired troops of the China’s People’s Liberation Army or PLA — China’s armed forces — who are now settled in this country.

Interesting that we don’t often hear how “Canada is fallen” even though it is a tossup between Canada and Australia concerning which will be the first to follow South Africa into the “formerly First World” category.

Sanctions and U.S. military assistance are threatening to change the balance of power in the Middle East. Just not in the way they were intended to do so:

Despite decades of sanctions, Iran has succeeded in developing its missile arsenal, which is larger than that of any other Middle Eastern country including Israel, a Pentagon study said Tuesday.

“Iran has an extensive missile development program, and the size and sophistication of its missile force continues to grow despite decades of counterproliferation efforts aimed at curbing its advancement,” the Defense Intelligence Agency said.

“Lacking a modern air force, Iran has embraced ballistic missiles as a long-range strike capability to dissuade its adversaries in the region — particularly the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia — from attacking Iran,” the report said.

Iran has “the largest missile force in the Middle East,” the report said. A US intelligence official said on condition of anonymity that the assessment included Israel.

Not unlike the German development of the U-boat and the Japanese development of the aircraft carrier due to overwhelming British and American battleship strength, the Iranian bypassing of the aircraft-based air superiority doctrine is likely to have helped it strategically in the end.

And due to its inability to purchase weapons from the US or the European countries, it now has a base of missile technology that cannot be cut off at will by those countries.

At least 38.6 percent of the U.S. military is literally unfit for service.

In a new report, the Center for Military Readiness says that 84{7920286a66e4f1f0530b37c9dd80de53efff9c5d61ddedf8a26aff588199c419} of women fail the New Army Combat Fitness Test and that “all military officials should drop the ‘gender diversity’ agenda and put mission readiness and ‘combat lethality’ first.”

“It makes no sense for recruiters to devote more time and money recruiting ‘gender diverse’ trainees who are more likely to be injured, less likely to want infantry assignments, and less likely to remain through basic training or physically-demanding combat arms assignments for twenty years or more,” states the  CMR report….

According to the Department of Defense, 16{7920286a66e4f1f0530b37c9dd80de53efff9c5d61ddedf8a26aff588199c419} of the overall active duty force is comprised of females, with 170,000 women enlisted and over 40,000 women officers.

30 percent of male soldiers failed the fitness test. Now imagine what percentage would fail the old fitness test. I’d bet nearly two-thirds.

This is a continuation of the email that was first posted on October 20 from a US Army officer observing the current state of the US Army:

Low Quality Training
If we even get it all. While at OCS 75{70c7b7f7aab8b67ba35de4bcae63b8a0d68f374a6be07ec7eab7f6e1cd2f43c9} of the material I have either had to self-teach or rely on help from prior/in-service candidates. Notably, I only got trained on the machine guns by prior-service Marines. This is partly due to manpower shortage in the trainer cadre, as we only have about 1/3 of the regulation amount. This is a good time to mention that the Army has a manpower crisis at the moment. It is also due, however, to mentality. You’re supposed to be a “leader,” which includes knowing things that you don’t know, like how land nav works. Except real life doesn’t work like that, and invariably for military-related tests the prior and in-service candidates come out ahead of the others by 1-2 standard deviations in scores.

An ABUNDANCE of Foreigners of Dubious Loyalty
I would be a rich man if I had a dollar for every time in the military I have heard a peer say “my country” in reference to not-America, and usually not even a country in the West. The foreigners that have been recruited with reckless abandon do not see the empire as being their peoples, and when the chips are really down I don’t trust their fealty at all. Of course, saying as much aloud would be grounds for disciplinary action. These foreigners aren’t evil. It has been many a time that a black peer has helped me when no one else would, or I have helped them. Yet the fact remains that they do not, and never will, view the US as really theirs. None of them do. The separation of blood is just too much.

Appalling Historical Ignorance Among Officer Candidates
They give us a crash course history class and test which is considered extremely difficult. Naturally, the NuBoomers and foreigners had trouble finding space in brains cluttered with porn, trash media, and schemes to get foreign relatives American money and citizenship for such information. The complaints during the whole course were extremely loud. “We don’t need to know about the past,” was a common one I heard. As for the knowledge they had before the course, one remark I overheard a foreign female candidate make tells it all. “I learned something today, haha” I heard her say the week after the test to another female with a Hispanic name, “I thought Abe Lincoln led the Confederacy. That was actually Jefferson Davis.”

Top-Brass Fantasies of Beating Up Russia AND China Simultaneously in Conventional War
There’s a publication called the Army Times that they sell on racks in the PX. Two covers have caught my eye, leading me to purchase the issues: One discussed new army plans to use tactical nukes to win conventional battles. The other went into detail about the Army’s initiative to revive its capacity to conduct “big unit” (read: conventional, pitched-battle) operations. This flushes with other peeks at the higher-ups of the imperial military, as when the Army Infantry School commandant told us in a lecture that it had been a mistake to implement the Brigade Combat Team (a replacement for the divisions designed to be rapidly deployable and fight vastly inferior insurgent forces with only minimal losses being tolerable) and that the Army was rushing to get rid of it in favor something bigger. I interpret this to be downstream of the imperial elites realizing that they are on track for another world war with a Sino-Russian Alliance and are now scrambling to transform their peasant-terrorizing, Christian-betraying, Israel-serving mercenary force into a serious military capable of fighting the up and coming superpower and its friend the Russian phoenix.

In such a war the US in such a war would not be fighting a country exhausted by a more serious war on another front (WWII Germany) or one which possesses vastly inferior technology and resources (WWII Japan), but one which wields full-spectrum superiority once the new Alliance overcomes the barely-relevant technology gap. For your readers, in case this shows up on the blog, I say the tech is barely relevant, because how many wars since WWII has technology helped America win? Oh sure, it helps tactical victories. Yet America has by now a chronic, damning track record of an inability to translate tactical victories into strategic ones. The empire, including its vaunted military, has simply ceded too much ground to degeneration and demoralization to have any hope of fighting as, say, Rome did against Carthage.

At best, I think it will perform more akin to Austria in WWI. At worst it will just come into contact with the Sino-Russian Alliance, lose a major battle, and then the whole shebang will come unglued as the mask comes off concerning loyalty and competence within the ranks. God help us all.

The Turks, Russians, and Syrians have reached an agreement to keep both ISIS and the Kurds under control now that the USA is no longer getting in the way.

Russian military police and Syrian servicemen will be deployed to northeastern Syria, while Turkey’s operation ‘Peace Spring’ will continue in a limited area, presidents Putin and Erdogan have agreed after lengthy talks.

Moscow understands the reasons behind the ongoing Turkish military incursion into Syria, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said, though he stressed it must not play into the hands of terrorists and that the territorial integrity of Syria must be preserved. Ultimately, the country must be freed from all “illegal foreign military presence,” the president added, reiterating Moscow’s long-time position.

The almost-seven-hour-long talks in Sochi, Russia between Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan were focused on the situation in Syria, particularly the ongoing offensive in its northeastern region.

Kurdish forces to withdraw

The agreement says the Kurdish-led militias – the prime target of the Turkish operation – must withdraw into Syrian territory beyond 30km from the Turkish border. Erdogan’s operation, meanwhile, will continue in a limited area – between towns of Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ayn – up to 32km inside Syrian territory.

Syrian army to be deployed to the border

Other parts of the Syrian border – from Kobani to Tell Abyad and from Ras al-Ayn to the Iraqi border – are set to be controlled by the Syrian military and border guards, supported by Russian military police.

Joint Russia-Turkey patrols along the border

At the same time, areas not affected by the Turkish military operation, will be jointly patrolled by the Turkish military and Russian military police up to 10km deep into Syrian territory.

Well, that’s one way to get out of NATO, I suppose.

I’m trying to think of a less useful, more intrinsically irrelevant concept than utilizing science fiction as a lens with which to consider the ethics of war….

Generally, three families of theories about the ethics of war have some credibility or prestige within modern liberal democracies. We can question whether the third is technically an ethical theory, but it plays the same role, and I think it does contain at least a residual ethical element:

• Pacifist theories, which, with limited exceptions and variations, rule out acts of violence.
• Just war theories.
• International relations realist (or simply “realist”) theories of war. These are basically theories of enlightened self-interest.

Before going further, it’s important to note that there are other approaches that now lack credibility among thoughtful people in liberal democracies. These approaches emphasize such things as empire, personal and national glory, spreading religion or ideology, the idea of war as a kind of adventure or grand game, or as character building, and so on. A whole range of such approaches were once popular, but are now commonly viewed with disdain.

Historically, that is a recent development. These approaches to war lost credibility as a result of the horror of trench warfare in World War I, the immense destructiveness of the atomic bombs used in World War II, and the hydrogen bombs developed soon after, and doubtless other historical developments. But at least until World War I, these older ideas had great currency.

Prior to that time, few narratives of future wars included warnings against the horrors of war as such, or against the horrors of a future form of war. Where they expressed warnings, as they often did, it was usually against geopolitical and military vulnerability, as with “The Battle of Dorking”, a novella by G.T. Chesney (1871), and, in the Australian context, The Yellow Wave by Kenneth Mackay (1895). The great exception here is The War in the Air by H.G. Wells (1908), which I’ll return to in more detail.

The article is not entirely uninteresting for anyone who is interested in military history or strategy. But the idea that science fiction offers anything – anything at all – to say on the subject is objectively risible. And this intrinsic irrelevance is underlined by the way that the opinions of “thoughtful people in liberal democracies” are meaningful, let alone definitive.