Tag: war

Reinventing the tank

There isn’t going to be any ground war in Russia. There had better not be, anyway:

Russian experiences in Ukraine—where both sides are using upgraded Soviet-built tanks and anti-tank weapons—have shown that despite the best active, reactive and passive armor available, a tank will eventually be penetrated. “We discovered that no matter how skillful the crew, the tank would get up to ten hits,” Pukhov said during a luncheon at the Center for the National Interest in Washington, D.C.—which is the foreign policy think-tank that publishes The National Interest—on July 26. “Even if you have perfect armor—active, passive. In one case it will save you from one hit, in another case from two hits, but you’ll still get five hits and you’re done. That’s why now you’re supposed to have some kind of Tank 2.0.”

The Tank 2.0, as Pukhov describes it, is not the T-14 Armata—which despite its advanced unmanned turret and active protection systems—is still a more or less a conventional tank design. “I know Russians are thinking about this new tank and this tank is not Armata,” Pukhov said. “It’s what we call among us Boyevaya Mashina Podderzhki Tankov [Tank Support Fighting Machine]—but in fact it’s not a Podderzhki Tankov, but which can protect itself. So there is a serious debate about it.”

Later, during a one-on-one interview at the Center the same day, I asked Pukhov to elaborate on the Tank 2.0 concept. Pukhov said that traditionally, infantry has protected tanks—particularly in built up urban areas—but given the speed of modern armored vehicles, that is no longer possible in many cases. But while during previous eras tanks were more or less protected against weapons like rocket propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles, the latest generation of those weapons can punch through even the toughest armor.

What should alarm Western planners is that the Russians are rapidly transforming their military into a much more effective one than its larger, cumbersome Soviet predecessor. In both Ukraine and Syria, both air and ground arms have proven to be very effective; the swamp-them-with-numbers approach is clearly a thing of the past.

This wouldn’t be a problem, of course, if the Bush-Obama administrations hadn’t sought to make them an enemy rather than an ally in the Third Wave of Islamic Expansion.

An NCO leaves the US Army

And none too soon, by the looks of things:

I leave the Army for good in September of this year.  My chain of command has been shell shocked that I am going through with it.  Two years ago when I first came to grips with what was happening and resolved to no longer be a part of it, there was derision and even an officer telling me that voicing my opinions about the state of the US economy and its moral failings could be considered a violation of the UCMJ for conduct “prejudicial to good order and discipline.”

When I gave my Operations NCO a copy of the book “A Distant Mirror” by Barbara Tuchman he came to me a month later stating that if there is a civil war, he and his fellow Hispanics will “have to choose sides.”

When I told my first sergeant why I would not be re-enlisting, she said “Don’t you want to re-enlist to get your 20?”

I said that I wanted to re-enlist, but I couldn’t, that my pension was nothing compared to being prepared to sacrifice my life. Then she and I went on to discuss my (your) ideas on why there was a possible collapse of the US government in the future, she went from denying the possibility to stating “Well, it all depends on what level of collapse you’re talking about,”  needless to say I was stunned.

The re-enlistment NCO refuses to talk to me, and several other mid to senior level NCOs who previously thought I was kidding have left the Active reserves for the Individual Ready Reserves.

One stated that he too was disgusted with both candidates for president and then asked me if I thought things would be so bad, why wouldn’t I stay in and try to fix things “from the inside”?  I cited the example of the Yugoslav army and how there were fire fights within units and stated that I would refuse to follow unconstitutional orders.  I then asked, “Don’t you think if one of the two candidates gets in power that either might order the power of the state to be used against their political enemies?  That’s what would be likely to START those kinds of firefights, right?”

If you’re not familiar with military culture, NCOs are the mortar that hold the whole thing together. Young officers are eminently replaceable, as new ones can be trained up in a matter of months, but the veteran NCOs that provide them guidance are not.

The fact that the NCOs are leaving is an even more damning indictment of the current US military than women being permitted to serve in combat units or homosexuals and transvestites being allowed to serve at all.

I don’t find this chilling, though. I find it a somewhat positive sign. Because I suspect the American people are at least as likely to be designated the enemy by the US government one day as the Russian or Chinese militaries. And the prospects for We the People’s will be considerably better if most of those veteran NCOs are on the side of the nation, rather than serving the government against them.

We’ll make it up on volume

Steve Sailer observes that Muslims serving in the US military have been a net negative since 2000:

As far as I can tell, 14 Muslim-American U.S. soldiers have died in this century versus 15 American soldiers murdered in a couple of terrorist attacks by Muslim-American U.S. soldiers.

Okay, so we’re losing soldiers on each one. (Never mind 3,000 dead civilians in the U.S.)

But we’ll make up for it on volume!

But that’s not the point. The point is that global empire costs a lot of money, which lines a lot of pockets around the Beltway, so we need to keep the Invade / Invite perpetual motion money machine going.

The Khizr Khan story was pretty good rhetoric for the Democrats. But it was hampered by the fundamental weakness of rhetoric that is used to sell falsehoods rather than the truth. Of course, one can’t effectively counter rhetoric with dialectic, although Trump could have been even colder than he was in pointing to the silence of Khan’s headscarf-wearing mother.

The more effective rhetoric would have been to point out that Khan’s death likely saved American lives, as he was killed before he experienced an attack of Sudden Jihad Syndrome and turned his guns on his fellow soldiers. The outrage would have been epic and would have served to underline the fact that even some who wear the uniform and are sworn to defend the US Constitution are not, and never will be, Americans.

Criminality and the culture of victimhood

Brings the Lightning author and former prison chaplain Peter Grant draws a connection between the various dyscivilizational organizations active in America today and the criminal mindset:

Each of the organizations we’ve discussed above is trying to exploit the concept and culture of victimhood.  They claim to identify (and identify with) various classes of victims, and seek to mobilize them (and their sympathizers) to agitate against the system that has allegedly made them victims.  If there were no culture of victimhood – if, instead, the focus was on individual responsibility – these organizations would collapse.  Only by denying individual responsibility, focusing instead on groups and the social contract that has until now governed their interaction, can they establish their own reason for being.

This is startlingly reminiscent of the criminal mindset.  I wrote about this in my memoir of prison chaplaincy.  In it, I pointed out a number of characteristics of the criminal’s outlook on life, including the following:

    3.  Refusal to accept responsibility. The criminal avoids or evades any acceptance or admission of guilt or responsibility. Even when he displays contrition about his actions, it’s usually an outward show. In reality his only genuine regret is that he was discovered. He’ll blame anything and everything, anyone and everyone except himself for the negative consequences of his crimes. Of course, this means that he’ll eagerly agree with those blaming factors in his background for his crimes — it allows him to slide out of accepting any personal responsibility for his actions. It’s always someone else’s fault.

    . . .

    6.  A need for excitement. The criminal ‘gets a kick’ out of what he does. Even getting caught has its own thrill. Dealing with the arresting officers (perhaps including an exciting car chase that gets him on TV), establishing his place in the hierarchy in the jail, dealing with the courts, trying to ‘beat the rap’: all have their own emotional intensity. The same applies to life in prison. A really hardened convict may spend more time in the Hole than in general population, aggravate and infuriate staff, annoy other inmates… but he doesn’t care. He’s getting a kick out of his ‘power’ to make others react to him.

    . . .

    10.  A refusal to accept reality. Reality is defined by the criminal on his terms, not by the victim of his crime or by society. A criminal convicted of check fraud will adamantly deny that he’s a thief — he ‘never took anything’. One who stole from a bank didn’t steal from an individual, only an institution, and that’s not theft by his lights. A rapist didn’t do any harm to his victim — ‘she enjoyed it’. A child abuser wasn’t abusing the child at all: he was ‘showing his love’ for his victim. An armed robber who killed his victim when he resisted wasn’t guilty of murder. If his victim had complied with his demands he wouldn’t have died. He ‘asked for it’ by resisting, therefore his death wasn’t the robber’s fault. Most criminals will argue that they weren’t convicted because of what they did, but rather because ‘the system’ or ‘the judge’ or ‘the prosecutor’ was against them. It was personal bias that put them behind bars, not the weight of evidence. I could go on forever in this vein, but I’m sure you get the picture.

Do you see any common ground between these characteristics, and the attitude and conduct of so many progressive pressure groups such as Black Lives Matter, Moveon.org, Common Dreams, Color of Change, and so many others?  I certainly do.  Almost uniformly these groups deny (or don’t even mention) the need for individuals to accept personal responsibility for their lives and actions.  They’ll blame anything and anyone else.  It’s “the system”.  It’s “the police”.  It’s “racism”.  It’s never the individual’s fault, never the fault of the group complaining about oppression.  It’s always someone else.

They also appear to demonstrate a real need for excitement, to make “the Man” respond to what they’re doing.  They’re social gadflies.  They never achieve anything themselves – at least, I’ve never seen anything they’ve managed to build.  They merely cause trouble for those they oppose.  They tear down what others have built, but offer nothing concrete with which to replace it.

Finally, they certainly appear to refuse to accept reality.

These organizations are evil, but they continue to grow in power and influence because no one in the West these days is willing to actually fight evil. Fist-shaking and the occasional denouncement is about as far as it goes. But as the Bible says, there is a time for peace and a time for war. We have already entered the latter, although at this point, any Man of the West who dares to take action will receive considerably more criticism from his own side than praise and support.

The West is not yet desperate enough. Neither the Men nor the Women of the West are truly cognizant yet of the existential threat to them. They don’t fully believe the situation is what it is, and are still hoping that the system will, somehow, magically start working again.

But it won’t. As Dr. Pournelle has repeatedly written, there will be war.

The hero of Nice lives

I’m glad to learn that the courageous motorcyclist who attacked the truck in Nice survived; I didn’t realize that he was actually helped stop the truck in the end. It had been assumed that he’d been killed due to the scooter under the truck, but it turns out that the scooter was thrown there intentionally.

A hero motorcyclist has told of his frantic bid to stop ISIS truck terrorist Mohamed Bouhlel by trying to jump from his bike and onto the lorry as it ploughed at high speed into crowds in Nice. In an act of astonishing bravery, Alexander Migues sped his bike alongside the 19-tonne truck as Bouhlel ran over 84 people watching fireworks on Bastille Day.

Speaking for the time, he revealed how he leapt onto the moving death machine and clung on as he tried to wrestle the driver’s-side door open several times as the truck sped along the promenade.

‘I saw the truck rise (over the median strip) and run over a lady, he told Nice Martin. ‘He was on the sidewalk and then he returned to the road and he tried to run me over too. It was instinctive, I cannot even explain how I managed to go chasing a truck. When I saw that he was really determined, I tried something,’ Migues said

Despite his bravery, Migues was forced to abandon his attempt when the terrorist pulled a gun on him. The Frenchman has been credited with saving lives by slowing the truck enough to give another motorcyclist time to throw his scooter under the wheels of the lorry.

‘He arrived in a scooter and threw it under the wheels of the truck to stop. I let go of the door and when the scooter tapped the truck I heard the noise of bullets,’ Migues said.

He said he wished he could have hung onto the truck longer and slowed it more so that victims would have had more time to flee its deadly path. But he can take comfort that the time when the scooter went under the truck to when the police engaged in a firefight there were no more killed.

In one of the non-fiction articles that will either appear in RTRH 2 or TWBW 11, the special forces author recommends that the best way to survive an urban attack is to adopt an attacker’s mentality, to move, and to act without hesitation. Alexander Migues is an exceptional example of a man who did just that.

And if Migues hadn’t forced Mohamed Bouhlel to deal with his attempts to get into the cab, Bouhlel would not have slowed down enough for the scooter to stop the truck.

Refugee axe attack in Germany

The Germans are going to welcome the Nazis with open arms again. And most of Europe isn’t going to blame them.

A 17-year-old Afghan refugee has been shot dead by police after attacking up to 15 people with an axe on a train in Germany. The teenager, who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the onslaught, was gunned down by armed police after fleeing from the scene near the city of Wurzburg in southern Germany.

As many as 15 people were injured while three of them are fighting for their lives after being attacked with ‘cutting and stabbing weapons’. Authorities say the attacker was an unaccompanied Afghan – but the motives for his attack are still unclear.

As I warned them, they should have sunk the damn boats. Apparently the actual number of wounded is 21, not 15.

Here is the thing. If you don’t like Nazis, then don’t encourage an immigrant invasion, or diversity, or globalism. Because every action leads to a reaction and that is exactly what you’re going to get.

Authorities have said the attacker entered Germany as an unaccompanied child refugee.
Bavarian media say the attacker had lived with a German foster family for two weeks. He had previously lived in a refugee camp.

Europe should not only refuse to accept any refugees, children or adult, it should send all of them back to their native lands. What happens to them there is not going to be as bad as what is going to happen to them in Germany and France, two nations not historically known for their gentle treatment of invaders.

Damned neocons never stop

Michael Ledeen is, without question, the biggest liar in the US political commentariat.

Ledeen told Pollock that “It’s not just radical Islam. It’s radical Islam, plus their radical, secular allies North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba. So we’re fighting a global alliance which is coming after us. We should stand up for our own values and waging political war against them as we did against the communism and fascism in the last century.”

I’m only surprised that Mr. “Faster Please” didn’t try to claim Iran was behind the Nice attack. What a fucking globalist liar.

As for his co-author Flynn, the fact that he was “PRESIDENT OBAMA’S DEFENSE INTEL CHIEF from 2012 to 2014” is sufficient evidence to prove he has no idea how to defeat ISIS.

Coup attempt in Turkey underway

Don’t know any more than that, except that the Turkish internet has largely gone dark.

Confirmed: Twitter, Facebook & YouTube blocked in #Turkey at 10:50PM after apparent military uprising in #Turkey 

Sounds like the military has had enough of Erdogan’s Islamist rule. Remember, in Turkey, the secular military tends to be the force for stability, while the elected officials tend to be the more Islamic radicals.

With all due respect to Turkey, it is France that could most benefit from a military coup right now.

UPDATE: TURKEY ARMED FORCES SAY THEY’VE TAKEN CONTROL OF COUNTRY – Zerohedge

UPDATE 2: Sky News reports that the Turkish military coup was successful.

The Turkish military claims to have taken over after Turkey’s PM said a military faction had been involved in an attempted coup.

In a statement read out on Turkey’s NTV television, the army said: “Power in the country has been seized in its entirety.”

According to Sky sources, state TV has been stormed by the military and staff have been asked to hand in their mobile phones. 

I find it interesting that people think Putin is behind this. But this is hardly the first military coup in Turkey; they tend to stage one whenever the elected politicians start getting out of hand again.

UPDATE 3: According to the resident Turk, Erdogan is running and seeking asylum.

Erdogan is running away. He was reported to be fleeing to the airport that was bombed recently. Military is declaring curfews nationally through the state TV.

UPDATE 4: Things aren’t looking so good for the coup leaders. The Navy and the 3rd Army commanders have both come out as loyalists and the Islamists are taking to the streets as per Erdogan’s call. The mosques are calling for jihad in support of Erdogan. It’s usually fatal to strike at the king and miss.

UPDATE 5: No wonder the coup is in the process of failing, assuming it hasn’t already. “Turkish military’s chief legal counsel Muharrem Kose identified as coup plotter.” A lawyer-led military coup? That has to be a first. “We’ve filed all the documents correctly, there’s no way this can fail!” 

War “must now be declared”

The National Front isn’t screwing around:

Marine Le Pen, head of the anti-immigrant National Front, disparaged the government’s efforts against terrorism.

“The war against the scourge of fundamentalism hasn’t started, it must now be declared,” she said in a statement. “That is the deep wish of the French, and I will put all my energy so that they are finally heard and the necessary fight is finally undertaken.”

The war will start against fundamentalism, but it will eventually encompass all non-Western immigrants. War is the most blunt of instruments and the West has absolutely no need for them. Note that the Nice killer was no fundamentalist.

The center-right parties are belatedly starting to at least address the issue, but they have no credibility anymore.