Tag: war

I’m not much bothered about the latest Kashmir flareup. It’s pretty obvious that Pakistan wants to de-escalate the situation and has been retaliating in a very measured fashion:

On February 14 a suicide car bomb hit a police convoy in Pulwama in the Indian controlled part of Kashmir. The suicide bomber was a local man. The Pakistan based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) claimed responsibility and uploaded a video of the attacker.

General elections in India are due in May and the Hindu-fascist Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is under pressure. The incident in Kashmir led to violence of Modi followers against Kashmiri people. Pakistan denied any involvement in the incident and called for a joint investigation.

After the suicide attack Modi immediately threatened to retaliate against Pakistan. He did so yesterday. In an elaborate operation Indian fighter jets released stand-off weapons, purchased from Israel, against an alleged JeM training camp near Balakot. India made explicit that it hit a “non-military” target.

While the Indian jets did not enter Pakistan’s airspace the target was within Pakistan’s undisputed borders. Small scale ground combat between Indian and Pakistani at the line of control in Kashmir is nothing unusual. But the air attack exceed the limits both sides so far held to.

Pakistan saw the incident as a failure of its deterrence. India has about 140 nuclear weapons while Pakistan has about 100. Pakistan’s conventional military is inferior to India’s. It therefore follows a doctrine of asymmetric escalation which allows for nuclear strikes in response to conventional military attacks.

Pakistan could not leave the hit within its own borders without response. Not responding would have set a precedence and invite further Indian attacks. Earlier today two Pakistani J-17a jets flew into the airspace of Indian controlled Kashmir and released bombs against what its military claimed to be a “non military target”:

Two rather antique Indian MIG-21 jets scrambled to chase the Pakistani fighter jets away. They were lured into the Pakistan controlled air space and both were shot down. Pakistan published pictures of one of the downed jets and claimed that the other one fell into an Indian controlled area. An Indian pilot ejected from his plane and was captured by Pakistani troops who had trouble to keep the locals from lynching him. The captured pilot was blindfolded and interrogated. He identified as Wing Commander Abhi Nandan, Service No: 27981, and did not respond to further questions. His father is said to be a retried Air Marshal of the Indian air force. The pilot now seems to be fine. He thanked the Pakistani military for rescuing him from the mob.

The fact that India is lying about having shot down a Pakistani jet is probably a good sign that they don’t wish to genuinely escalate either. The Pakistanis would be well-advised to permit the Indian government to lie to its people about how bravely and fiercely it responded to the loss of its two obsolete MIGs.

But one wonders what sort of political ideology “Hindu-fascism” is supposed to be. Did they bring back the swastika?

The Times of Israel is reporting on an Israeli government minister’s statement about how the US President and the Israeli Prime Minister are going to divide Jerusalem in the latest iteration of a Middle East “Peace Plan”:

Education Minister Naftali Bennett said Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump were planning to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and divide Jerusalem.

Speaking before a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Bennett, who now heads the New Right party, warned the shift in Netanyahu’s declared position would come “a day or two after election day” on April 9.

Shortly after the cabinet meeting, Netanyahu responded to Bennett’s claim with a terse denial.

“It’s natural for him to be anxious, and to get a little confused,” Netanyahu said of Bennett. “It goes without saying that elections can do funny things to small parties.”

In a statement, Netanyahu’s Likud party called Bennett’s warning “utter piffle with no connection to reality. After the elections, Netanyahu will establish a right-wing government under his leadership.”

In his initial comments to the press, Bennett said that the Trump administration had completed its plan for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Netanyahu and President Trump have agreed to come out with the plan to establish a Palestinian state on 90 percent [of the West Bank]. They’ve agreed not to present the plan before election day so that it doesn’t hurt Netanyahu, but a day or two after election day the plan will be presented, and will include the division of Jerusalem.”

In the meanwhile, the US has gone back on the promises it made to the Turkish government in order to prevent Turkey from invading northern Syria.

The so called Manbij Roadmap was signed in June, 2018, a full 6 months before Trump’s withdrawal announcement. The deal requires the US to work with Turkey to remove all terrorist groups from Manbij– which is a Syrian city east of the Euphrates– and to assist with security during the transition period. This was the deal the US made with Erdogan during a period of heightened tensions between the two NATO allies. The agreement was made to placate Erdogan and to forestall the imminent invasion by Turkish troops massed on the Syrian border. Readers need to understand that Turkey is not behaving irrationally or precipitously. The Trump team made the deal, and Turkey expects them to keep that deal, that is the long and short of it.

The media has also mischaracterized Trump’s December 19th announcement to withdraw all 2,000 US troops from Syria bringing an end to the failed 8 year-long military campaign. The announcement was not the decision of an unstable and impulsive autocrat who had no real grasp of the situation. (as the media would like you to believe) What the media failed to report is that Trump had discussed the issue with a frustrated Erdogan just days earlier, and he decided to withdraw to avoid an acrimonious split with a NATO ally who was threatening to invade at any minute. Check out this article at the Guardian dated December 12, 2018, just 7 days before Trump’s announcement.

“The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said that Turkey will launch a military operation against the Kurds in northern Syria within days, in a decision that could signal a shift in Turkish-US relations and have far-reaching consequences for Syria’s future.

Long frustrated by US support for Kurdish militias that Turkey views as terrorists, Erdoğan has threatened to push deeper into north-eastern Syria since sending Turkish forces into the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in February.

The president said during a televised speech in Ankara on Wednesday that the operation was imminent. “We will begin our operation to free the east of the Euphrates [river] from the separatist organisation within a few days,” he told MPs. “Our target is not the American soldiers – it is the terror organisations that are active in the region.”

Erdoğan also expressed disappointment that US-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria had not left the town of Manbij, as agreed in a US-Turkish deal brokered this year. “The Americans are not being honest; they are still not removing terrorists [from Manbij],” he said. “Therefore, we will do it.” (Turkey primed to start offensive against US-backed Kurds in Syria, The Guardian)

There was no mention of Erdogan’s threats in any of the mainstream news publications. The focus was almost entirely on Trump who was blasted as impetuous and ignorant, a foreign policy dilettante. In fact, Trump was merely pursuing the rational option, which was to give ground on Turkey’s legitimate national security needs while concealing his real motives for the policy-change. Naturally, he couldn’t say the US was withdrawing because of Turkey’s sabre rattling, but that, in fact, is what happened. And that’s why Trump announced a ‘complete withdrawal of US troops’; it was a clumsy effort to hide the fact that Washington was backing down on their plan to control the area up to the Turkish border. The Trump team tried to make it look like the president was just keeping a campaign promise, but–as you can see– there’s more to it than meets the eye.

Now, of course, the administration has abandoned its withdrawal plan and decided to keep 400 troops in Syria indefinitely. Unfortunately, the new policy only further exacerbates the tension between the US and Turkey. The reduction in troops does not in any way alleviate Turkey’s security concerns, in fact, it worsens them because it indicates that Washington is more resolved than ever to preserve the status quo. If the US and their multinational allies stay, the YPG will continue to occupy Manbij and other territory along the Turkish border, the de facto independent Kurdish state in East Syria will be preserved, and Turkey will be prevented from resettling the more than 3 million Syrian refugees it has housed for the last 8 years. So, how exactly does Turkey benefit from this troop-reduction plan?

It doesn’t. Turkey doesn’t get anything out of the deal. Nor does the new arrangement fulfill the basic requirements of the Manbij Roadmap. There won’t be any joint Turkish-US patrols because Washington is now committed to keeping Turkey out of Syria altogether in order to “protect the Kurds”, which is a misleading sobriquet that is used to hide the real motive, which is to occupy east Syria and protect Washington’s terrorist-linked militia.

So, will Trump’s modified plan work? Will Erdogan see the withdrawal of some US troops as an honest attempt at peace and security?

No, of course not, because nothing has changed. The only choice Erdogan has is to ratchet up the pressure by delivering more threats to invade. And that is precisely the course that Erdogan has decided to pursue. 

So, not only will Turkey likely invade, but it now knows what the Russians have learned, which is that there is no point in even trying to reach an agreement with the United States, because the USA does not keep its word. And while the US military gets entangled everywhere from Afghanistan to Venezuela, Russia and China continue to bide their time and quietly improve their carrier-killing capabilities.

It’s really rather remarkable how every US president since Nixon seems utterly determined to throw themselves on the sword of their own Mid-East “Peace Plan”. I know literally nothing about the latest one, but I do know this: it won’t work.

The inevitable consequence of the drive to put women in the military is on the verge of arriving:

A federal judge in Texas has declared that the all-male military draft is unconstitutional, ruling that “the time has passed” for a debate on whether women belong in the military.

The decision deals the biggest legal blow to the Selective Service System since the Supreme Court upheld the draft in 1981. In Rostker v. Goldberg, the court ruled that the male-only draft was “fully justified” because women were ineligible for combat roles.

But U.S. District Judge Gray Miller ruled late Friday that while historical restrictions on women serving in combat “may have justified past discrimination,” men and women are now equally able to fight. In 2015, the Pentagon lifted all restrictions for women in military service.

The case was brought by the National Coalition For Men, a men’s rights group, and two men who argued the all-male draft was unfair.

Men who fail to register with the Selective Service System at their 18th birthday can be denied public benefits like federal employment and student loans. Women cannot register for Selective Service.

The ruling comes as an 11-member commission is studying the future of the draft, including whether women should be included or whether there should continue to be draft registration at all.

Regardless of what the needs of the U.S. military may be now, we know there will be military drafts in the future because there will be war in the future. And now, thanks to the feminists, young women who don’t want to serve in the military will be drafted and forced to risk their lives in combat.

Feminism has always been focused on destroying Christian Western civilization. And turning young women who should be wives and mothers into sterile worker bees and amazons is an important part of that goal.

The UK appears to be about eight-to-ten years ahead of the USA, as the imported populations brought in by the political Left are now driving their Neo-Palestinian predecessors out of the very political vehicles that were empowered by bringing them in:

A Jewish Labour MP who was subjected to a ‘Soviet show trial’ by party members was last night at the centre of claims that she will be the next MP to defect from Jeremy Corbyn’s party. Just hours after Mr Corbyn claimed that there was no ‘widespread’ problem of anti-Semitism in the Party, Dame Louise Ellman was barracked by supporters of the Labour leader during a bruising meeting of her Liverpool Riverside constituency party on Friday evening.

The hard-Left activists overwhelmingly passed a motion supporting the activists who targeted fellow Liverpool MP Luciana Berger, leading a friend of Dame Louise to say: ‘Louise will not be in the party for much longer.’

Ms Berger, who is also Jewish and required a bodyguard at last year’s Labour Party Conference after receiving death threats, quit Labour on Monday saying the party was ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ – a day after The Mail on Sunday revealed that she was on the brink of forming a breakaway movement in protest at Mr Corbyn’s failure to tackle the problem.

She was one of the seven Labour MP founders of The Independent Group.

This newspaper reported last year that Mr Corbyn and others on his staff had been heard describing Dame Louise as ‘the Honourable Member for Tel Aviv’, a claim which the Corbyn camp denied.

The so-called Independent Group is a small collection of mostly Jewish former Labour Party and anti-Brexit former Tory Party members. With one or two exceptions, they are totally unelectable in their own boroughs now, which is why the “new party” is almost certainly going to cease to exist after the next election. Peter Hitchens is one of the British observers who is entirely unimpressed by The Independent Group, which can perhaps be best understood as a collection of Never-Corbyn neocons.

When I travel round this country, observing its many problems and troubles, I seldom meet anyone who says: ‘What we need here in Britain is more political correctness.’ Nor do I hear many people saying: ‘The trouble with Britain is that fashionable, liberal views do not get much of a hearing, or have much influence. What this country needs is more foreign rule, more mass immigration, more failing comprehensive schools, more broken marriages, more crime and more drugs; not to mention less Christianity, lighter punishments for criminals and less freedom of speech.’

What we are seeing play out is, I suspect, the consequence of the Jewish nation’s historically nomadic nature, and it appears that instead of slowing the process down as had been widely assumed would be the case, representative democracy is speeding it up. Contra Jordan Peterson, the reason Neo-Palestinians are what he described as “over-represented in positions of authority, competence and influence” is because they are very adept at utilizing identity politics to benefit their immigrant community at the expense of their native hosts.

Historically this was done through their close financial relationship with the native king and aristocracy, which in many cases was little more native than they were. But democracy, even representative democracy, also requires numbers to acquire political influence, and so in the democratic era the Jews of the diaspora have adopted a standard policy of bringing in as many immigrants as possible in order to augment their own electoral influence. However, this is a policy with a time limit, because sooner or later, the immigrant allies are no longer content to follow Neo-Palestinian leadership and seek to wield their influence directly on behalf of their own identity rather than being content with whatever crumbs they are given by the existing leadership.

This development was entirely predictable, and in fact, I described its inevitability three years ago, in 2016, when Ilhan Omar, now a newly-elected Congresswoman, defeated 22-term State Representative Phyllis Khan for her seat in the Minnesota State Legislature.

Now that low-altruism minorities are approaching 50 percent of the US electorate, identity politics are permanently replacing ideological politics, and a Jew like Khan is never going to be elected in any district where Somalis, or Arabs, or Indians, or Chinese are the majority. And they’re also increasingly unlikely to be elected in black-, white-, or Hispanic-dominated districts.

Further complicating matters is the fact that the rise of Donald Trump and American nationalism means the “hello, fellow white people” schtick is not going to work much longer, particularly now that the inordinately Jewish “conservative media” has unmasked itself as globalist rather than pro-American, and viciously opposed to any America First nationalist ideology.

So, setting up Pedro, Peng, Pasha and Prodosh to fight Paul for the benefit of Peter has, over time, put Peter in a no-win situation. If Pedro and company win, Peter is permanently excluded from power and may even be actively persecuted by the rainbow coalition he helped build. And if a newly self-interested Paul wins, he’s no longer likely to listen to Peter or pay any attention to Peter’s interests.

This leaves Peter with three options. Try to shut down democracy, accept the gradual decline of power, wealth, and influence, or leave.

This isn’t a matter for debate, nor will crying Holocaust or engaging in philosemitic virtue-signaling make any difference here here. It’s simple demographic math combined with an observation of historical group voting patterns. US whites are willing to vote outside their identity. US non-whites strongly prefer to do as the Jews do and vote their identity.

The end of the era of Neo-Palestinian influence in the Western democracies threaten to be uncommonly interesting times for everyone. Remember, the Holocaust was an anomaly, and it’s much more common for Europe’s nomads to simply move on to a new territory when the current one becomes less amenable to their traditional practices. The strategic complication, of course, is that the friendliest and most obvious destination will require the nomads of the diaspora to follow the lead of the modern Israelis by giving up their exploitative nomadic ways and transforming themselves into farmers and builders and settlers.

They can do it. But will they do so? That is the question that may well shape the course of more than a few of the 21st century’s wars.

I’ve been reading the third volume of Oman’s excellent A History of the Peninsular War, and a particular passage on the solid reasoning that lay behind Napoleon’s self-obstructive and objectively suboptimal decision to refuse to appoint a proper unitary command to execute the invasion of Portugal and the attack on Wellington’s British army while simultaneously maintaining the Spanish occupation caused me to reflect on the limits imposed on evil by its own nature.

As has been shown above, from his own words, he [Napoleon] was conscious that he was too far from the scene of operation, and that mere ordinary directions to his lieutenants might not be carried out with zeal. ‘Je donne l’ordre. L’exécutera-t-on? De si loin obéit qui veut.’ But if this were so, it was surely necessary either that he should go to Spain in person, or else—the more obvious alternative—that he should appoint a real Commander-in-Chief in the Peninsula, who should have authority to order all the other marshals and generals to obey his directions, without malingering or appeals to Paris. Napoleon had deliberately created a divided authority beyond the Pyrenees when he set up his military governments, and instructed Suchet, Kellermann, and the other governors to report directly to himself, and to pay no attention to commands emanating from Madrid. King Joseph, as a central source of orders, had been reduced to a nullity by this ill-conceived decree. Even over the troops not included in the new viceroyalties he had no practical authority. Not he and his chief of the staff, but Masséna, ought to have been entrusted with a full and autocratic power of command over all the armies of Spain, if a true unity of purpose was to be achieved.

This necessary arrangement the Emperor utterly refused to carry out: he sent rebukes to Drouet for hesitating to obey the orders of the Prince of Essling, and he jested at the absurd conduct of Ney and Junot in conducting themselves like independent generals. But these officers were in command of troops definitely allotted to the Army of Portugal. Over the other generals of Spain he refused to allow Masséna any control, and he continued to send them his own ever-tardy instructions, which had often ceased to be appropriate long before the dispatch had reached its destination. If we seek the reasons of this unwise persistence in his old methods, we find that they were two.

The first was his secret, but only half-disguised, intention to annex all the Spanish provinces north of the Ebro to France, an insane resolve which led him to keep Suchet and Macdonald in Aragon and Catalonia, as well as the governors of Navarre and Biscay, out of the control of any central authority that he might set up in Spain. The second was his jealousy of entrusting the vast army south of the Ebro, far more than 250,000 men at the moment, to any single commander. He remembered Soult’s absurd strivings after royalty in Portugal; he knew that Masséna, though the best of soldiers, was false, selfish, and ambitious; and he refused to hand over to either of them a full control over the whole of the forces in the Peninsula. It was even better, in his estimation, to leave King Joseph a shadow of power, than to take the risk of giving overmuch authority to one of the two able, but not wholly trustworthy, marshals to whom he must otherwise have entrusted it.

Napoleon made a conscious choice to reduce the probabilities of defeating Wellington and conquering Portugal in order to reduce the risk of creating a powerful rival power on the Peninsula. He knew he couldn’t trust Soult or Masséna to remain loyal to him if either of them found themselves victorious and in command of an army capable of rivalling his own forces, so he refused to take the step that was absolutely required in order to win the war.

This is one of the fundamental weaknesses of evil, however strong it appears, however much potential force it has at its disposal. Self-interest imposes an intrinsic limit on evil’s ability to bring its power to bear, because it always has to worry about its forces fragmenting and pursuing their own goals instead of the obediently pursuing the goals set by the leadership. This, of course, is why evil puts so much effort into creating social pressures and false narratives its NPCs will blindly follow, and to ensuring that its NPCs never dare to think independently or in a critical manner.

Not when you’re able to produce the answer “THE US MUST INVADE [Fill-in-the-blank]” on cue whenever called upon by the Fake News. Tucker Carlson shares a compelling selection from his recent book about two neocon mediocrities who keep being called upon for their opinions on military matters despite their collective track record of complete failure:

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.

Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn’t exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict.”

None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one ofthe world’s Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don’t need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that’s required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you’re in.

Meanwhile, brilliant military historians and strategists like Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind are being ignored, to the cost of many thousands of lives.

Jim’s Blog notes that the USA isn’t merely losing its technological advantages vis-a-vis its now-smarter rivals, it is actually losing military capabilities it previously possessed:

As societies enter a dark age, military technologies are apt to be the last to be lost, and in the recovery from a dark age, the first to advance.

In dark ages, art declines, great buildings decline, ordinary people’s living standards decline, people harrow the ground with stones tied to bits of wood instead of iron plows, but weapons technology usually goes right on improving.

Our art is crap, we no longer build Cathedrals, but until recently, weapons were good and improving.

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review has recently appeared, revealing that we have lost all nuclear military technology:

U.S. production of tritium, a critical strategic material for nuclear weapons, is now insufficient to meet the forthcoming U.S. nuclear force sustainment demands, or to hedge against unforeseen developments. Programs are planned, but not yet fully funded, to ease these critical production shortfalls.

This is euphemistic.  Recent attempts to produce tritium were fully funded, but failed, which failure resulted in new plans for new attempts to produce tritium, which have not yet been fully funded.

I have regularly remarked on America’s inability to produce tritium.  All existing nuclear weapons require tritium to juice their detonation, and without tritium, would produce a low yield explosion.  Tritium decays over time, and so fresh tritium continually needs to be added.  The US is out of tritium, has repeatedly attempted to produce more, and repeatedly failed.

The combination of a 10-point loss in the average US IQ with the systematic diversion of its best minds to irrelevant financial scams and other trivial activities means that the USA is now both less-populous and less capable than China and less capable than Russia. That does not mean the USA is devoid of military advantages, after all, it still possesses a legacy military that is larger and better-funded and more technologically advanced than any military in history, but the rot has now gone from being institutional and societal to infrastructural.

I mentioned previously that the US military is almost certainly going to lose its next war. It has neither the officers nor the civilian leadership that is capable of compensating for its infrastructural debilitation. What we are witnessing in Afghanistan and Syria and Venezuela is almost certainly the feeble last gasp of an empire in contraction.

“The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.”
– Robert E. Lee

The level of bureaucratic incompetence plaguing the US Navy is almost astonishing, even without taking into account the way female crewmen have increasingly hindered the ability of the Navy to properly crew its ships. No wonder the Russians were able to defeat US forces in Syria; the Chinese have absolutely no reason to fear a US Navy that literally can’t even steer its own ships.

The Navy called three-star Adm. Phillip Balisle out of retirement to investigate the state of its operations. The fleet was in decline, with two warships so neglected they were unfit for combat. He delivered a sobering assessment.

In 2009, Balisle and a team of investigators had traveled to the Navy’s power centers, in Norfolk, Virginia; Hawaii and San Diego, interviewing senior enlisted sailors, private contractors and officers up and down the chain of command. They toured ships, gathered data and received briefings from senior officials in Washington.

They were alarmed by what they saw. Clark’s “optimal manning” had reduced crew sizes for warships. Destroyer crews had shrunk on average from 317 sailors a decade earlier to 254. Then the Navy shorted the ships even further, exacerbating what was already a critical situation. Ships had roughly 60 percent of the enlisted leaders needed to mentor and train young sailors. And to make up for the short-staffing, the Navy simply extended the crews’ workweeks.

Balisle’s team determined the Navy’s 283 surface ships needed 4,500 more sailors to be staffed to recommended levels.

The condition of those ships was also declining as the Navy reduced time devoted to maintenance. Ships that once docked for 15 weeks for repairs were sent to sea after just nine weeks. The effects were dramatic; destroyers the Navy hoped would last for 40 years were hanging on for just 25. Reports of problems with certain radar systems were up, and sailors were increasingly unable to make fixes on their own.

A legion of poorly trained junior officers aboard the ships were being promoted, Balisle warned, creating a generation of unprepared leaders.

Balisle’s report, dated February 2010, was delivered to Mabus and to Congress.

“It appears the effort to derive efficiencies has overtaken our culture of effectiveness,” Balisle said in the report. He then took aim at the “downward spiral” of the Navy’s culture, in which a commitment to excellence had been badly eroded.

“From the most senior officers to the most junior petty officer, the culture reveals itself in personal attitudes ranging from resignation to frustration to toleration,” he wrote. “While the severity of current culture climate may be debated, its decline cannot.”

The report left Work, then the undersecretary of the Navy and Mabus’ No. 2, shaken. He decided to act.

Work, a widely respected figure at the Pentagon, said he began using his monthly meetings with then Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and his counterparts at the Army, Marines and Air Force to detail the stress on the Navy’s ships. The Navy was being asked to conduct too many operations, Work told them, some of debatable merit. The problems were real, he said, and the risks to readiness considerable.

“We’re using the fleet too much,” Work told the Pentagon. “We have to say ‘no’ more often.”

Work said he brought Carter round after round of data showing the demands on the fleet were degrading its readiness to counter threats.

Specifically, Work recalled raising concerns about a request around 2011 to have two of the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers — and their escort ships — in the Persian Gulf at all times, an unusual demand that would require putting off repairs and training.

The request came from the commander of CENTCOM, the uniformed officer responsible for all operations in the Middle East. In the military, the wishes of what are known as combatant commanders are all but paramount. They are often dealing with issues of utmost national security: the war in Afghanistan, the development of nuclear weapons in North Korea, ISIS fighters in the Middle East, Al Shabab terrorists in the Horn of Africa, the expansionist aims of China and Russia.

Individual combatant commanders, who report to the secretary of defense, are in charge of military operations inside six global regions, no matter which branch of the military is conducting the operation. The leaders of the Navy, Army and Air Force are responsible for delivering trained and equipped troops. They can lobby the Pentagon against an operation they feel is ill-advised, but the final say goes to the defense secretary, and ultimately the president.

Navy officials — from captains helming ships to three-star admirals — told ProPublica that many commanders’ operations seemed unnecessary, such as shows of force requested by allies, joint-training exercises with foreign militaries or so-called presence missions in non-contentious parts of the world. As Aucoin struggled to find ships to patrol off nuclear-armed North Korea, his superiors sent a destroyer to help the small Pacific islands of Tuvalu and Nauru enforce their fisheries laws.

Some extolled such operations as key to maintaining so-called soft power — keeping allies happy, telegraphing might without direct military force. But others saw them as a luxury a strapped Navy could no longer support. When the Navy had 600 ships, about 100 were at sea at any given time. With half as many ships, the Navy still keeps about 100 at sea. In other words, as the Navy shrunk its fleet, it increased the workload on its sailors.

The USA is almost certainly going to lose its next major war. What we are witnessing here is nothing new, it is absolutely normal for an empire that has indulged itself in imperial overstretch for generations to fail to fund its military infrastructure prior to engaging in the conflict that fatally exposes the rot within. And lest you appeal to the inherent strength of the American people, keep in mind, the United States of Diversity is comprised of a very, very different population than the United States of America of 78 years ago.

Ann Coulter makes a compelling case for military action by the Commander-in-Chief:

Who can say with a straight face that the importation of tens of millions of Latin Americans has not changed the character of our country, the safety of our people and the economic prospects of so many of our fellow countrymen?

The conditions on the ground in Vichy France were less altered by war than the conditions on the ground in America today, compared with America circa 1980.

By the way, what, precisely, is the “military purpose” of building schools in Djibouti? How about building walls, schools, bridges, hospitals, roads and water purification systems in places like Vietnam and Iraq?

Our military did that!

The U.S. Navy Seabees and Army Corps of Engineers have built all kinds of non-military infrastructure in, among other places, Djibouti, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Somalia, the Congo, Cambodia and Grenada — even in little Micronesia (population: 100,000).

A couple of years ago, an American sailor who had just helped build a school in Ban Nong Muang, Thailand, was proudly quoted in Seabee Magazine: “My recruiter told me to join the Seabees. He said they build schools in foreign countries for kids.”

The U.S. military does these things in other countries but, we’re told, can’t build a wall in our own.

You promised Americans a big, beautiful border wall, Mr. President. It’s time to deliver on that promise, no matter what the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Federal Judiciary, the State Judiciaries, or the media says. Because if you don’t, nothing else you have done or plan to do is going to matter.

The protests will continue as long as Macron refuses to resign:

Violence erupted in France for the 11th Saturday in a row today as thousands of so-called Yellow Vest protestors demonstrated against President Emmanuel Macron’s government. It came two days after the head of state had accused British politicians of ‘tearing society apart’ by allowing a Brexit referendum in Britain, but today the chants in his own country were for his resignation.

The worst early violence was in Paris, and in northern towns including Evreux and Rouen, in Normandy, where tear gas and baton charges were used by police to restore order…. Today’s ugly scenes came on the 11th Saturday in a row of violence that now routinely reduces cities and towns to battle zones.

Mr Macron has since pledged that any attempt to damage pubic property will be treated with the ‘most severe action possible.’ Despite a range of concessions by President Macron including scrapping green taxes of diesel and petrol, the Vests continue to call for him to step down.

The anti-democratic whores of the EU do not represent the people. The Macron government is illegitimate and against the interests of France.