Tag: war

This guy is GOOD

It’s not hard to understand why the God-Emperor Ascendant was so impressed by Gen. Mattis. Speaking as a game designer, which involves thinking through things in a way few people ever have to do, I can say this is an indication of man who takes the time to be certain he really, really knows his stuff. The mind behind this level of detailed preparation and coaching can only be described in the vernacular as Belichickian:

First Marine Division was holding their first ROC Drill, the rehearsal of concept of what we were about to do. I had never seen a walk-through like this before. Marines had spent days building an enormous reproduction of southern Iraq in a bowl formed by a huge, semicircular sand dune. Each road, each river, each canal, each oil field was built to scale and even in proper color (water was blue dye poured into a sand ditch, and so on.)

Each Marine unit wore football jerseys in different colors, and with proper numbers. First Battalion, Fifth Marines, known as one-fifth, wore blue jerseys with “15” on the back, and other units were similarly identified. Principal staff from those units stood on the “border” drawn in the sand. About 300 officers stood and sat on the dune above. It was the perfect way to visualize what was about to happen.

General Mattis stood up and took a handheld microphone. Without referencing a single piece of paper, he discussed what each unit would do and in what sequence, and outlined his end state for each phase of the early war. He spoke for nearly 30 minutes, and his complete mastery of every nuance of the battle forthcoming was truly impressive.

A narrator then took over and picked up the narrative, the rest of the first week of the early war in sequence. As he described each movement, the officers from that unit walked to the proper place on their terrain model, and by the end of an hour the colored jerseys were spread over nearly a football field’s worth of sand. What a show.

At the end of the drill, questions were answered and then Mattis dismissed everyone. No messing around with this guy. Mike Murdoch, one of the British company commanders, leaned over to me, his eyes wide. “Mate, are all your generals that good?”

I looked at him.

“No. He is the best we have.”

As I’ve repeatedly observed about the God-Emperor Ascendant, when he says he is going to get the best people, he isn’t blowing smoke or pontificating. He’s simply expressing his intentions. And if those he hires subsequently demonstrate they can’t get it done, he doesn’t hesitate to eject them and replace them with someone who can.

Making war great again

The God-Emperor Ascendant chooses Mad Dog Mattis for Defense:

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis to be secretary of defense, nominating a former senior military officer who led operations across the Middle East to run the Pentagon less than four years after he hung up his uniform, according to people familiar with the decision.

To take the job, Mattis will need Congress to pass new legislation to bypass a federal law that states secretaries of defense must not have been on active duty in the previous seven years. Congress has granted a similar exception just once, when Gen. George C. Marshall was appointed to the job in 1950.

An announcement is likely by early next week, according to the people familiar with the decision. Mattis declined to comment. Spokespersons for Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Mattis, 66, retired as the chief of U.S. Central Command in spring 2013 after serving more than four decades in the Marine Corps. He is known as one of the most influential military leaders of his generation, serving as a strategic thinker while occasionally drawing rebukes for his aggressive talk. Since retiring, he has served as a consultant and as a visiting fellow with the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University.

Once more, Donald Trump exceeds expectations. It will be good to see a genuine strategist who understands war and is capable of riding herd on the neocons and their insane, ignorant fantasies in a position of overseeing the military.

One hopes this will bring an end to the lunacy that has pervaded the Pentagon since 2001.

The best thing about Trump’s selections is that he clearly has a penchant for self-confident men who are not inclined to be influenced by the vagaries and narratives of the media.

To gain some insight into Mattis’s thinking, it’s worth reading A New American Grand Strategy, a piece he wrote for the Hoover Institute:

The world is awash in change. The international order, so painstakingly put together by the greatest generation coming home from mankind’s bloodiest conflict, is under increasing stress. It was created with elements we take for granted: the United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods and more. The constructed order reflected the wisdom of those who recognized no nation lived as an island and we needed new ways to deal with challenges that for better or worse impacted all nations. Like it or not, today we are part of this larger world and must carry out our part. We cannot wait for problems to arrive here or it will be too late; rather we must remain strongly engaged in this complex world.

The international order built on the state system is not self-sustaining. It demands tending by an America that leads wisely, standing unapologetically for the freedoms each of us in this room have enjoyed. The hearing today addresses the need for America to adapt to changing circumstances, to come out now from its reactive crouch and to take a firm strategic stance in defense of our values.

While we recognize that we owe future generations the same freedoms we enjoy, the challenge lies in how to carry out our responsibility. We have lived too long now in a strategy-free mode.

To do so America needs a refreshed national strategy.

Sure, some of the language he uses is enough to make one reflexively reach for one’s pistol and scan for neocons. But the salient point is that what the USA has been doing since the end of the Cold War IS NOT VIABLE. And the fact that we “must remain strongly engaged in this complex world” is not a prescription, it is an accurate observation.

He doesn’t say what the nature of that engagement is. And, more reassuringly, there are these comments:

  • We know that the “foreseeable future” is not foreseeable; our review must incorporate unpredictability, recognizing risk while avoiding gambling with our nation’s security.Incorporating the broadest issues in its assessments, Congress should consider what we must do if the national debt is assessed to be the biggest national security threat we face.
  • Strategy connects ends, ways and means. With less military available, we must reduce our appetite for using it. Absent growing our military, there must come a time when moral outrage, serious humanitarian plight, or lesser threats cannot be militarily addressed.  Prioritization is needed if we are to remain capable of the most critical mission for which we have a military: to fight on short notice and defend the country.

If nothing else, at least he’s asking some of the right questions.

Incoming: Round Two

The Left is beginning to hyperventilate about the possibility of another American civil war:

Since 1972, the General Social Survey has collected data on how many Americans think “most people can be trusted.” A guy named Josh Morgan graphed it, and while the south has always taken a more “we don’t like your kind ’round here” position, most of America started the 70s in a pretty good place:

Now fast-forward to 2012:

“Trust” isn’t just an intangible concept when we’re talking about the potential for civil warfare. Sinisa Malesevic is a professor who studies the sociology of civil wars and a survivor of the Yugoslavian civil war. He’s someone Marvel really should’ve reached out to for script advice, and he noted the breakdown of trust was one of the first traumatizing steps to war, “… in a very short period of time, there is a complete sense of fear, you do not know who is who, who is supporting which side … that fear spreads.”

Sinisa also pointed out that most civil wars start after a loss of trust in the government, particularly law enforcement: “One of the defining features of any state is a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence.” In other words, if we trust the police to handle bad guys better than armed groups of vigilantes, we’ll probably trust the government more than armed groups of insurgents.

“And if police are not seen as doing their job … I think that certainly has an impact.”

Now, what could possibly have changed since 1972? What could possibly have reduced the sense of community, and trust, and unity to the point that the average percentage of people who believe “most people can be trusted” has fallen from 46.2 percent to 32.4 percent.

Could it, perhaps, be the alteration of the country’s population demographic by the largest invasion in human history?

It might make Cracked feel better to know that their reasons for a possible civil war are largely irrelevant. It probably won’t make them feel better to be informed that there are much better reasons for a civil war to be almost inevitable at this point.

As I noted previously, Peter Turchin and his team have calcuated that the Population Stress Index is already at 1856 levels. While there is no definite trigger point, the USA is already well within the range that civil wars happen. And since the USA is not even a reasonable approximation of a genuine nation anymore, Round Two promises to be considerably less civil than its predecessor.

Donald Trump and the Alt-Right are very likely the last hope for avoiding the balkanization and break-up of the USA. Regardless of what you think of either, you would be wise to support both if you wish there to be domestic peace on the North American continent.

Expect candlelight vigils

If I was a Filippino living in the United States, I would immediately self-deport. Not due to the rising tide of nationalism and the ascendancy of the God-Emperor to the Cherry Blossom Throne, but simply to bask in the sheer awesomeness of President Duterte:

At least seven members of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s security team and two soldiers were injured in a roadside bombing ambush by suspected Muslim militants. The attack took place ahead of the president’s planned visit to the south of the country, AFP reported citing the president and the Armed Forces.

An explosive device planted along the road detonated when the presidential convoy headed to Marawi, the capital of Lanao del Sur province on the island of Mindanao, the second-largest island of the Philippines. “The truck carrying the president’s advance security detail was hit by an improvised explosive device,” Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said, as cited by Reuters. “There was no firefight.”

Lorenzana said that he advised Duterte to cancel his visit to Marawi, scheduled for Wednesday, as the situation is “still not under control.” The president chose to ignore the advice. Never one to take the easy way out, the combative Duterte said that “The advice was to postpone. I said no, I will go there. And if possible, take the same route,” the president was cited by Reuters, and added that “Maybe we can have a little gunfight here, gunfight there.”

I am confident that President Duterte’s response to the attack will be temperate, restrained, and proportional. Between Putin, Trump, and Duterte, it appears that the nations are beginning to produce strong leaders worthy of the challenge of the times.

NATO cannot stop Russia

A RAND Corporation wargame reveals that NATO is in absolutely no shape to even slow down Russia in its near-abroad:

Assuming NATO has a week to detect a coming invasion, the alliance could deploy an equivalent of 12 maneuver battalions in the Baltic states. This includes the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team rushed from Vicenza, Italy, but no main battle tanks. Poland — which has the largest tank force in Europe west of the Bug River — would be “assumed to be committed to defend the [Polish] national territory” and blocking Russian forces from moving south from Kaliningrad.

However, Russia could mass the equivalent of 22 maneuver battalions, including four tank battalions and large amounts of artillery from its Western Military District. Russia would also have an advantage in the air, with 27 squadrons of fighters and bombers compared to 18.5 NATO squadrons. While able to challenge Russian aircraft, the NATO planes could not quickly establish air superiority. Russian combat planes would then create “bubbles” of undefended airspace to launch “massed waves of air attacks.”

There’s an important lesson here — though Russia cannot challenge the United States or NATO globally, it can do so locally … and win.

To be sure, NATO has additional forces including at least two-dozen M-1 Abrams tanks and 30 M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles stored in Grafenwoehr, Germany. But RAND estimates those tanks need at least 10 days to organize and travel. Not enough time before a Russian victory.

This is why Trump’s election was so important. All of the neocons, Republicans, and Democrats pounding the drum for direct conflict with Russia over Syria or Ukraine are completely ignoring the grim reality of the situation for their so-called allies. Russia has not taken Georgia, Ukraine, or the Baltics because Putin does not want the increased expense and trouble of occupying them.

But if he has to in order to keep NATO from establishing bases and missiles on Russia’s doorstep, I very much doubt he will hesitate.

The USA still possesses the most powerful military on Earth, but it is no longer a true superpower. And it won’t be too long, perhaps 20 years, before a joint Russian-Chinese alliance will be more militarily powerful than NATO even if the USA does not politically disintegrate before then.

Western civilization is European

And European-only, the ahistorical fever dreams of cucks and neocons notwithstanding. Immigration is more than merely dyscivic, it is observably dyscivilizational.

Violent attacks on personnel, robberies, and fraud have forced DHL Express to halt all deliveries in the invader-overrun region of Wedding, north-west Berlin, a statement from the company has announced.

Wedding has a “German-origin” population of only 50 percent, with the rest being made up of Africans, Turks, Arabs, Asians, and Eastern European gypsies.

According to a statement issued to Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) by Anke Blenn, the reason for the halt in delivery services is because of the increasing number of “attacks on drivers” and rampant fraud and robberies to which they are being subjected. As a result, parcel recipients will from now on have to collect their items from a DHL office, where the identity of the recipient can then be checked, she added.

Forget home delivery. A minority-European population in a Western country isn’t even going to have flush toilets or functioning dishwashers for very long. If white workers can’t even drop off a package safely, they sure as Hell aren’t going to enter a stranger’s home and stay there for hours.

The thing that is so ludicrously stupid about the equalitarian position shared by American liberals and conservatives alike is that it assumes because reasonably digestible numbers of European immigrants were semi-successfully assimilated with only one massive civil war followed by 60 years of virtually no immigration, an unlimited number of non-European immigrants can be permitted to enter the country indefinitely.

This is not merely bad logic. This is insane. There is no way – none – to rationally defend or justify the position, which is why its defenders immediately retreat to abstract ideals and pure rhetoric.

The invasion of 60 million immigrants in 50 years, the largest invasion in human history, will lead to war in the United States. There is ZERO question of this, as it is only a matter of time. We can’t know when it will happen, we can’t know exactly why it will happen, but given the fact that the USA is already at a stress level that was last seen in 1856, the odds are against the USA even making it to the 2033 date I had predicted for financial collapse and some form of political dissolution. Keep in mind that I neither created nor calculated the Popular Wellbeing Index or the Political Stress Index, I have merely independently observed some of the factors that go into those cliodynamic metrics.

There will also be continuing conflict in Europe, but given the rapid rise of the nationalist parties, something more akin to Operation Wetback and the Chinese Exclusion Act are more likely.

So, cry Racism, Constitution, Declaration, and Proposition Nation all you like. Virtue-signal your color-blindness all you like. Adopt one child of every color if you want. None of that frantic appeal to totem magic will save you from what is to come any more than it would have in 1861, in 1914, or 1939. None of that is going to excuse your complicity in the nightmares to come. And regardless of what you think of it, understand that the Alt-Right program is the only one that even has the possibility of averting the coming conflict.

San Antonio shooting

Another policeman is murdered:

A detective was shot and killed while writing a traffic ticket outside of police headquarters late Sunday morning. San Antonio Police Chief William McManus identified the slain officer as 20-year veteran Detective Benjamin Marconi, 50. He said the suspect has not yet been apprehended, and a motive is not known.

McManus said Marconi had pulled over a car for a traffic violation outside Public Safety Headquarters in downtown. While Marconi was inside his squad car writing a ticket, a black vehicle pulled up behind him and the driver got out, walked up to the detective’s window and shot him in the head, McManus said. Then the suspect reached into the window and shot Marconi a second time, he said.

It’s tragic. It’s horrifying. But the grim reality is that this will not be the last such murder. Until the following steps are taken, expect more of the same:

  • Restore the pre-1965 American population demographics
  • Demilitarize the police
  • End the Drug War.

If you’re not going to work towards, or support, any of those things, then Blue Lives really don’t Matter to you. Sure, you can talk tough if you like, but no one has ever won a 4GW conflict that way.

Aleppo

Putin and Assad are such monsters that it really defies all imagination. They have both ISIS and the various rebel groups on the verge of defeat through their ruthless strategy of carpet-bombing children’s hospitals, kitten sanctuaries, nunneries, and humanitarian food distribution centers.

How the God-Emperor ALREADY saved the world

I have spoken to several Europeans in the aftermath of the US presidential election, and they’ve all been very curious about what happened, and how it was possible for Donald Trump to win when everything they had heard from their medias indicated that he was a) very, very bad, and, b) certain to lose by a huge margin.

Of course, they were even more deluded than the US electorate, as the European media took the already misleading US narrative and exaggerated it, just as the US media does the same thing in reverse.

What is interesting is their reaction to finding out that Hillary Clinton supported NATO membership for both Ukraine and Georgia. It can be best described as “aghast”. Learning about Hillary’s foreign policy on Russia also suffices to convince them that Donald Trump was, in fact, the vastly preferable candidate. One man even said, “well, no wonder he won, given that he was clearly running against a madwoman.”

Unlike Americans, Europeans take the idea of war with Russia very, very seriously and understand it is something to be absolutely avoided at almost all costs. There are still millions of people who remember the brutal swath that the Red Army cut across Eastern Europe on its way to Berlin. They also understand that a considerable quantity of the natural gas that heats their homes comes from Russia, and that the first consequence of any military action will be for that pipeline to be shut off.

Very, very few Americans or Europeans understood just how serious the danger that Hillary Clinton posed to the world was. First, she supported NATO membership for Ukraine:

The former U.S Secretary of State is a far more vocal critic of Vladimir Putin than her party rival Bernie Sanders. She has argued that Ukraine deserves more military equipment and training and financial aid (the latter dependent on the government’s ability to carry out the necessary reforms). The U.S. Democrat’s frontrunner for the White House has also urged other E.U. states to be more committed to sanctions and has supported the strengthening of ties between NATO and Ukraine (unlike Bernie Sanders who sees NATO expansion as a provocation against Russia).

Second, she supported NATO membership for Georgia, who had already started and lost a brief war with Russia after being encouraged to join NATO in 2008.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington will continue assistance to Georgia in the field of security and defense and supports country’s NATO membership. The Secretary spoke at the opening of the U.S.-Georgia Strategic Partnership Commission plenary session in Batumi, Georgia. Georgia is strategic partner of U.S. as regards the issues of regional and world security. She stressed that increase in combat readiness of Georgia and matching it with NATO standards continues within the framework of agreement reached by both countries’ presidents, Gruziya Online reports.

Third, the woman who would likely have been Secretary of Defense under Hillary favored direct military intervention in Syria and called for spending $3 billion on military assistance for Ukraine.

The woman expected to run the Pentagon under Hillary Clinton said she would direct U.S. troops to push President Bashar al-Assad’s forces out of southern Syria and would send more American boots to fight the Islamic State in the region. Michele Flournoy, formerly the third-ranking civilian in the Pentagon under President Barack Obama, called for “limited military coercion” to help remove Assad from power in Syria, including a “no bombing” zone over parts of Syria held by U.S.-backed rebels. Flournoy, and several of her colleagues at the Center for New American Security, or CNAS, have been making the case for sending more American troops into combat against ISIS and the Assad regime than the Obama administration has been willing to commit.

Meanwhile, Russia has consistently warned, since 2008 when Ukraine submitted a Membership Action Plan and Georgia indicated its desire to do so, that it would respond to any such actions by invading and conquering both countries. This is just one of the many implicit warnings delivered.

Admission of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO will place Europe on the verge of a large-scale crisis, Russia’s Permanent Representative to NATO added. “One can’t imagine the situation when those countries [Ukraine and Georgia] keep cherishing the hope to join NATO and the alliance really plans to admit them, as this would explode the situation and put Europe on the brink of a crisis, whose size and scale can’t be imagined today,” Grushko said.

The warnings are not, as some foolish neocons insist, mere bluff. Russia has already invaded both countries for much smaller provocations than NATO membership. I strongly suspect that the troop movements that were taking place on both sides, which combined consisted of nearly one million troops, indicate that if Hillary Clinton had been elected President, Putin would have ordered the invasion and occupation of Ukraine before January.

I think the idea was for Crimea to become a NATO base as part of this ongoing campaign to surround Russia which has clearly been in the works now for the last 25 years despite the fact that when the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and even before that, the end of the Warsaw Pact, there were assurances that were given to Russia that NATO would not move eastward. Twelve new countries have been added to NATO since that time and Ukraine would have been number 13 and would have been actually I believe the most dangerous from Russian point of view…. I think that it is clear that the United States is pursuing what it views as its interests as it always does, the United States government. In Syria, in the Middle East and in regard to Russia and we, I believe, are very likely to see an even more aggressive policy in Europe against Russia if Hillary Clinton and her entourage come into power with the November 8 election.

For 25 years, the US has been knowingly playing a dangerous game, trying to see how far they can push Russia without provoking it to war. As her record in Georgia, Libya and Syria clearly shows, Hillary has no strategic vision, no understanding of war, and would have almost certainly erred on the side of excess provocation.

Many congressional members say that Putin has not been deterred, but he has, to some degree, because if he wanted to he could order the full-scale invasion of the entirety of Ukrainian territory. That he has kept Russian direct personnel support for the separatists’ brutal aggression relatively small (1,000 military and intelligence personnel by recent NATO estimates) demonstrates that his decisions are rational (to him) and done with some awareness of the likely consequences.

And that is why Donald Trump has been one of the most effective Presidents in U.S. history, even before he has taken office.

Migrant nightmares in Sweden, Germany

Back in September, Breitbard reported that 80 percent of Swedish police were considering quitting. Two months later, Sweden is hemorrhaging police and now has more than 55 no-go zones where the Muslims rule:

SWEDEN is on the brink of becoming a lawless state as the police force is losing the battle against unprecedented levels of crime and violence amid a growing migrant crisis.

The Scandinavian country is facing an existential crisis with on average three police officers handing in their resignations a day. If the alarming trend continues, and police officers continue to resign more than 1,000 officers will have quit the service by New Years.

Since the migrant crisis began last summer, Sweden has been hit by a series of brutal crimes and violent incidents. In 2015 alone Sweden, with a population of 9.5million, received over 160,000 asylum applications and the country is expected to take as many as 190,000 refugees, or two per cent of the population, by the end of 2016….

Currently there are more than 6,000 suspected crimes that are unsolved in the area and 400 of these cases are suspected to be rapes, murder or attempted murder.

Mr Stjernfeldt said the figures are alarming and police officers are constantly forced to work overtime  in an attempt to solve the reported crimes. The Police Association admitted it fears the public will lose faith in the force and their ability to protect citizens if the situation is not resolved.

The Swedish public shouldn’t lose faith in the police force, but in the politicians. Electing the Sweden Democrats followed by the 100 percent repatriation of every migrant and Muslim in the country is the only answer that will avoid massive violence.

Things are little better in Germany, which has also descended into lawlessness, as the police now say “We are losing control of the streets”:

Germany took in more than 1.1million migrants in the past year and parts of the country are crippled with a lack of infrastructure. Now the true reality is hitting home ahead of next year’s elections as the far right surges in the polls threatening to topple the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader Mrs Merkel.

According to a report by the international policy council the Gatestone Institute, local police in many parts of the country admit that they are stretched to the limit.

The report states: “The rape of a ten-year-old girl in Leipzig, the largest city in Saxony, has drawn renewed attention to the spiralling levels of violent crime perpetrated by migrants in cities and towns across Germany.

“During the first six months of 2016, migrants committed 142,500 crimes, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office. This is equivalent to 780 crimes committed by migrants every day, an increase of nearly 40 per cent over 2015. The data includes only those crimes in which a suspect has been caught.

“Thousands of migrants who entered the country as ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘refugees’ have gone missing. They are, presumably, economic migrants who entered Germany on false pretences. Many are thought to be engaging in robbery and criminal violence.”

According to Freddi Lohse of the German Police Union in Hamburg, many migrant offenders view the leniency of the German justice system as a green light to continue delinquent behaviour, says the report.

He said: “They are used to tougher consequences in their home countries. They have no respect for us.”

Meanwhile a female police officer has admitted that officers are under attack and that the courts are a “joke.”

Americans should not be smug about this. The challenge is posed to the entire West, as in addition to being invaded from the south, tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants have been permitted entry to the USA in 2016.

The Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower levels of immigration, estimated in a report released Tuesday that more than 3 million foreigners moved to the United States in 2014 and 2015. The total foreign-born population in the United States in 2015, 43.3 million, was an all-time high. At 13.5 percent, immigrants now make up the largest share of the population in 105 years.

Forget the Global War on Terrorism and fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here. The orcs have invaded the Shire.