Tag: war

Star Wars worked

The good news is that the Strategic Defense Initiative appears to have worked well enough to deter potential enemies from planning to launch orbital missiles. The bad news is, there is a developing alternative to space-based attacks that even the U.S. Navy’s superiority at sea can’t do much about.

The Kremlin has confirmed “some secret data” was accidentally leaked when Russian TV stations broadcast material apparently showing blueprints from a nuclear torpedo, designed to be used against enemy coastal installations.

During President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with military officials in Sochi, where the development of Russia’s military capabilities were being discussed, a number of TV crews were able to capture footage of a paper that was certainly not meant for public viewing.

The presentation slide titled “Ocean Multipurpose System: Status-6” showed some drawings of a new nuclear submarine weapons system. It is apparently designed to bypass NATO radars and any existing missile defense systems, while also causing heavy damage to “important economic facilities” along the enemy’s coastal regions.

The footnote to the slide stated that Status-6 is intended to cause “assured unacceptable damage” to an adversary force. Its detonation “in the area of the enemy coast” would result in “extensive zones of radioactive contamination” that would ensure that the region would not be used for “military, economic, business or other activity” for a “long time.”

According to the blurred information provided in the slide, the system represents a massive torpedo, designated as “self-propelled underwater vehicle,” with a range of up to 10 thousand kilometers and capable of operating at a depth of up to 1,000 meters.

“Accidentally leaked.” Right. Anyhow, this is particularly interesting because we had a submission for Riding the Red Horse vol. 2 that had to be withdrawn due to the fact that it was still under some sort of embargo by the naval service concerned. The torpedoes it described were not so massive, but they were fast and land-launched, and my impression was that they were designed to be used to deny control of the sea in places like the Persian Gulf, particularly around the Strait of Hormuz.

4GW isn’t the only challenge facing the U.S. Armed Forces. The naval dominance enjoyed by the U.S. Navy since the dawn of the aircraft carrier is on the verge of ending, as the combination of aircraft-killing lasers and long-distance, land-launched torpedoes looks likely to render them as vulnerable, and therefore outdated, as battleships in WWII.

And since the United States is a maritime power, the loss of naval superiority necessarily means the loss of its superpower status.

Second time farce

I used to think David Goldman’s “Spengler” columns were pretty good. But as time goes on, he seems to be getting almost deranged:

Kissinger’s latest offering has the distinct virtue of reducing the foreign policy Establishment’s thinking to absurdity. Kissinger saw the major powers as fixed entities to be moved around on a geopolitical game board, in a Parker Brothers’ version of the Congress of Vienna or the Treaty of Berlin. He missed the internal decay of the Soviet economy and its strategic consequences–the Russians’ realization in the mid-1980s that they could not compete with the American economy and its capacity to invent new military technologies. It wasn’t quite Stratego, to be sure: Kissinger drew on non-trivial mathematics, for example Thomas Schelling’s game theory. Variables in an equation and tokens on a game-board, though, both remain fixed entities to be arrayed according to given rules. Sometimes the long-term sometimes overtakes the short-term and mugs it.

The internal decay of present and former nation-states from Libya to Afghanistan is even more obvious, and even more germane to the politics of the region. Kissinger’s current recommendations for the Middle East, outlined in an Oct. 16 essay in the Wall Street Journal, treat the region’s players as if they were fixed entities that can be manipulated into a stable balance of power. It is obvious, though, that nothing is fixed about these entities, and this leads Kissinger to torture logic until it expires on the rack. Here for example is a characterization of Iran: “On one level, Iran acts as a legitimate Westphalian state conducting traditional diplomacy, even invoking the safeguards of the international system. At the same time, it organizes and guides nonstate actors seeking regional hegemony based on jihadist principles….The U.S. should be prepared for a dialogue with an Iran returning to its role as a Westphalian state within its established borders.”

One can imagine Iran’s supreme leader attempting to parse Kissinger’s logic: “Westphalian? What is ‘Westphalian?’ I have Googled it, and behold!, it is a kind of ham! The infidel Kissinger likens us to pork!” Iran perhaps the least Westphalian political entity on the planet. It is not a nation-state in any sense of the term but the rump of a collapsed empire, in which Persians comprise barely half of the population, with “Azerbaijanis (16–25+%), Kurds (7–10%), Lurs (c. 7%), Mazandaranis and Gilakis (c. 7%), Arabs (2–3%), Balochi (c. 2%) Turkmens (c. 2%)” making up the rest, according to Wikipedia. Shi’ite messianism and attendant imperial ambitions are its raison d’etre. It is like saying, “Excuse me, Mr. Hyde, but is Dr. Jeykll at home?”

And about what should the United States engage Iran in its “Westphalian” incarnation? “It is preferable for ISIS-held territory to be reconquered either by moderate Sunni forces or outside powers than by Iranian jihadist or imperial forces.” If we had some Westphalian ham, we could have ham-and-eggs, if we had some eggs: if we had “moderate Sunni forces” we could persuade the “Westphalian” Iran to withdraw the “jihadist or imperial” Iran to acquiesce in the reconquest of ISIS-held territories by Sunnis. Then “The reconquered territories should be restored to the local Sunni rule that existed there before the disintegration of both Iraqi and Syrian sovereignty.” Someone should break the news to Dr. Kissinger that Saddam Hussein is dead and that the previous Sunni regime is not available.

Is Iran any less a nation-state than the USA? If diversity is our strength, is it not also the strength of “the rump of a collapsed empire” in which there is still an ethnic majority more solid than a mere “proposition nation”?

And Spengler misses, or more likely, intentionally ignores Kissinger’s observations about the breakdown of the Westphalian state. Indeed, some of Man’s foremost thinkers about Man’s oldest art have been thinking very hard indeed about the implications of what they call “the crisis of the State”.

The fact that Kissinger could be – and in my view, observably is – wrong about the dangerous geopolitical situation in which the world finds itself does not mean that either the man or his ideas should be belittled, especially by someone who is so shortsighted that he genuinely believes his people can simply jump to China when their welcome in America finally wears out.

The original Spengler was tragic. This pale imitation smacks of farce.

Can’t say we weren’t warned

The Chateau digs up an early warning about the inevitable effects of immigration on America:

We find that our democratic theories and forms of government were fashioned by but one of the many races and peoples which have come within their practical operation, and that that race, the so-called Anglo-Saxon, developed them out of its own insular experience unhampered by inroads of alien stock. When once thus established in England and further developed in America we find that other races and peoples, accustomed to despotism and even savagery, and wholly unused to self-government, have been thrust into the delicate fabric. Like a practical people as we pride ourselves, we have begun actually to despotize our institutions in order to control these dissident elements, though still optimistically holding that we retain the original democracy.

Of course, economist John R. Commons was far from the first to observe the obvious:

“Another cause of revolution is difference of races which do not at once acquire a common spirit; for a state is not the growth of a day, any more than it grows out of a multitude brought together by accident. Hence the reception of strangers in colonies, either at the time of their foundation or afterwards, has generally produced revolution; for example, the Achaeans who joined the Troezenians in the foundation of Sybaris, becoming later the more numerous, expelled them; hence the curse fell upon Sybaris. At Thurii the Sybarites quarrelled with their fellow-colonists; thinking that the land belonged to them, they wanted too much of it and were driven out. At Byzantium the new colonists were detected in a conspiracy, and were expelled by force of arms; the people of Antissa, who had received the Chian exiles, fought with them, and drove them out; and the Zancleans, after having received the Samians, were driven by them out of their own city. The citizens of Apollonia on the Euxine, after the introduction of a fresh body of colonists, had a revolution; the Syracusans, after the expulsion of their tyrants, having admitted strangers and mercenaries to the rights of citizenship, quarrelled and came to blows; the people of Amphipolis, having received Chalcidian colonists, were nearly all expelled by them.”

And yes, that would be Aristotle, from the Politics

4th Generation Warfare Handbook

Written by the author of the landmark Maneuver Warfare Handbook and an
active-duty USMC officer with experience in Iraq, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook is the doctrine for a new generation of war. Over the last 40
years, the world has gradually entered into a post-Clausewitzian state
where the wars are undeclared, the battlefields can be anywhere, the
uniforms are optional, and the combatants as well as the targets are
often “civilian”. Conventional militaries have repeatedly attempted to
utilize technology to meet the new challenges posed, but even the most
advanced technology has provided little more than meaningless short-term
victories rendered futile in months, if not weeks.

This inability of Western governments and militaries to come to
terms with the changing nature of modern warfare has led to failed
interventions, failed occupations, and now even failed states everywhere
from Eastern Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And with the
recent mass movement of peoples around the world, 4th Generation Warfare
can be safely expected to appear in Western Europe and the United
States before long.

Drawing on their decades of experience with military history and
military action, the authors have distilled 4GW theory into a short,
concise, easily accessible handbook that provides the soldier, the
military analyst, and the civilian observer with a guide to
understanding and responding to the changing realities of this
challenging new form of war.

4th Generation Warfare Handbook is now available on Amazon for $6.99. If you preordered, you are eligible for a special Brainstorm event featuring the authors. Please send me an email with PREORDER in the subject if you wish to attend; the event has not yet been scheduled.

In an interesting juxtaposition, last night I finished putting the accepted submissions to There Will Be War Vol X in order. What was interesting was that the other non-fiction submissions tended to underline the importance of this handbook, as they both a) appealed to the use of new technology or a combination of 2nd and 3rd Generation tactics, and, b) indicated the need for the very sort of 4GW counterforce that Lind and LtCol Thiele describe in detail in 4th Generation Warfare Handbook. If you’re interested in reading more about 4GW theory, you’ll definitely want to read On War, which is now available on Kindle Unlimited, in which you can see how Lind gradually refined his thinking on the subject.

It will be interesting to see if this handbook eventually becomes officially adopted in the way its predecessor did in the 1980s. In any event, a belated Happy Birthday, Marines. Hope you like your new doctrine!

US military defeat expected

And as they debate the best way to prepare to fight the Russians, they’re not even looking at the more serious problem presently facing the U.S. military forces in Europe:

Ironically, this Washington war of ideas has pitted against each other two brainy career Army officers who fought together in one of the most famous battles of modern times.

On one side is Macgregor, an outspoken and controversial advocate for reform of the Army — whose weapons he describes as “obsolescent,” its senior leaders as “self-interested,” and its spending as “wasteful.” Viewed by many of his colleagues as one of the most innovative Army officers of his generation, Macgregor, a West Point graduate with a Ph.D. in international relations (“he can be pretty gruff,” a fellow West Point graduate says, “but he’s brilliant”), led the 2nd Cav’s “Cougar Squadron” in the best-known battle of Operation Desert Storm in February 1991. In 23 minutes, Macgregor’s force destroyed an entire Iraqi Armored Brigade (including nearly 70 Iraqi armored vehicles), while suffering a single American casualty. Speaking at a military “lessons learned” conference one year later, Air Force General Jack Welsh described the Battle of 73 Easting (named for a map coordinate) as “a stunning, overwhelming victory.”

In the wake of the battle, however, Macgregor calculated that if his unit had fought a highly trained and better armed enemy, like the Russians, the outcome would have been different. So, four years later, he published a book called Breaking The Phalanx, recommending that his service “restructure itself into modularly organized, highly mobile, self-contained combined arms teams.” The advice received the endorsement of then-Army Chief of Staff Dennis Reimer, who ordered that copies of Macgregor’s book be provided to every Army general.

But Macgregor is still fighting that battle. In early September he circulated a PowerPoint presentation showing that in a head-to-head confrontation pitting the equivalent of a U.S. armored division against a likely Russian adversary, the U.S. division would be defeated. “Defeated isn’t the right word,” Macgregor told me last week. “The right word is annihilated.” The 21-slide presentation features four battle scenarios, all of them against a Russian adversary in the Baltics — what one currently serving war planner on the Joint Chiefs staff calls “the most likely warfighting scenario we will face outside of the Middle East.”

In two of the scenarios, where the U.S. deploys its current basic formation, called brigade combat teams (BCTs), the U.S. is defeated. In two other scenarios, where Macgregor deploys what he calls Reconnaissance Strike Groups, the U.S. wins. And that’s the crux of Macgregor’s argument: Today the U.S. Army is comprised of BCTs rather than Reconnaissance Strike Groups, or RSGs, which is Macgregor’s innovation. Macgregor’s RSG shears away what he describes as “the top-heavy Army command structure” that would come with any deployment in favor of units that generate more combat power. “Every time we deploy a division we deploy a division headquarters of 1,000 soldiers and officers,” Macgregor explains. “What a waste; those guys will be dead within 72 hours.” Macgregor’s RSG, what he calls “an alternative force design,” does away with this Army command echelon, reporting to a joint force commander — who might or might not be an Army officer. An RSG, Macgregor says, does not need the long supply tail that is required of Brigade Combat Teams — it can be sustained with what it carries from ten days to two weeks without having to be resupplied.

Though it may sound to outsiders like a disagreement over crossed t’s
and dotted i’s, the dispute is fundamental–focusing on whether, in a
future conflict, the U.S. military can actually win. Even inside the
Pentagon, that is very much in doubt. A recent article by defense writer
Julia Ioffe reported the “dispiriting” results of a Pentagon “thought
exercise” between a red team (Russia) and a blue team, NATO. The “table
top” exercise stipulated a Russian invasion of the Baltics, the same
scenario proposed by Macgregor. “After eight hours of gaming out various
scenarios,” Ioffe wrote, a blue team member concluded that NATO “would
lose.”

What I find more worrisome is the possibility that the U.S. government will decide to throw its weight against the nationalists who have overthrown, either electorally or by other means, a European government, as they did in the case of Serbia. I can envision a situation where U.S. forces step in to create a Ukraine-style puppet government in defense of the poor Muslim refugees, in which case they’ll be faced with European 4GW opponents far more lethal than anything they have seen in the Middle East or in Asia.

It may seem unthinkable, but there are already serious tensions inside the German government, where the Interior Minister is accused of having mounted a semi-coup against the Chancellor, and his new stricter policy was overruled, not by the Prime Minister, but by her Chief of Staff. It would be surprising, but not entirely unexpected, for Merkel’s government to collapse before the end of the year. And there are tens of thousands of American troops still stationed in Germany; the temptation to use them to dictate German government policy on the migration crisis will be difficult for any U.S. president to resist.

Whatever happens, there can be little doubt that the rising European nationalist forces will have the backing of Russia, and probably China as well, as both of those countries clearly recognize the threat the globalist U.S. now poses to world order.

Mass migration is war

The mainstream media is finally beginning to recognize that perhaps they don’t actually want to live under Sharia or in a third world hellhole after all.

Mass immigration is on the verge of DESTROYING Europe.

SEVERAL millennia were required to build European civilisation but its impending destruction has been the work of just a few years, carried out by a cadre of irresponsible, unpatriotic and deluded politicians led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Dressing up their vandalism as
compassion and their cowardice as moral superiority, these leaders have
created an immigration crisis so profound that the very existence of our
European culture and heritage is under mortal threat.

The tragic
paradox of the obsession with free movement and the abolition of
national identities is that Europe in any meaningful sense will probably
cease to exist this century.

As the social revolution
accelerates traditional values of democracy, freedom and solidarity will
be replaced by conflict, sectarianism, oppression and intolerance.

Increasingly
Islamified, barbaric and poverty-stricken, Europe will become
indistinguishable from large swathes of North Africa and the Middle
East.
Even the stupendously high levels of mass immigration over the past
two decades are now dwarfed by the colossal flood of new arrivals that
has occurred since the early summer when Merkel made her woefully
illconceived pledge that ­Germany would welcome anyone claiming to be a
refugee.

She may have thought that the open-door policy would
provide a counter to Germany’s appalling record of aggression since the
1860s but in reality by wrecking Europe’s social fabric she has added to
the long catalogue of Teutonic crimes.

Mass migration is war. And enabling mass migration is anti-civilization, societal treason and a war crime.

Ranger School coverup

The Army is attempting to bury the evidence that it relaxed standards in order to permit women to graduate from Ranger School:

Congressman Russell contacted the Secretary of the Army on September 15, 2015, and requested the Ranger School records for Captain Kristen Griest and First Lieutenant Shaye Haver.

The Secretary of the Army stalled Russell for nine days and then asked for an extension to obtain documents readily available.

The Army waited another two weeks to tell Russell the documents had been shredded.

The Army refuses to tell anyone what the school’s policy is for the storage and destruction of Ranger School records.

The Army refuses to tell the media why they shredded Griest’s and Haver’s records.

The Army refuses to tell the media what they are doing with the third female graduate, Major Lisa Jaster’s records.

The Army wants us to doubt that journalist Susan Keating’s Ranger School sources are real because they are anonymous.

The Army wants us to believe that if Susan Keating’s sources were real they would come forward, when in fact, they are frightened of retribution. Considering the Obama administration’s treatment of whistleblowers, these fears are more than justified.

I very much doubt anyone is even remotely surprised by this. But consider the silver lining: given the way in which recent administrations appear to regard American citizens as the enemy, there are worse things than social justice convergence debilitating the U.S. military.

Destroying the evidence won’t do the Army any good. Everyone knows that the standards were dumbed-down and that the women who “passed” the course are frauds and an insult to all real Rangers, past and present. Want to argue otherwise? Fine, show the records.

#1 in Strategy

The level of interest in 4TH GENERATION WARFARE HANDBOOK has truly been encouraging. I have to admit, I did not expect this:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #904 Paid in Kindle Store
    #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Military > Strategy  

That’s pretty incredible for the first day of preorders. We probably should have figured out this preorder thing sooner, it would appear. Although I like to think there is a certain inept charm to our “well, it’s done, so let’s whang it up there and do a blog post” approach. The least-organized book launch in the entire history of publishing doesn’t seem to have hurt SJWAL much, anyhow. And one of these days, we are going to actually get around to doing our first press release.

But since there is so much more interest in 4GW than anticipated, I thought it might be a good idea to make ON WAR: The Collected Columns of William S. Lind 2003-2009 more readily accessible to those who aren’t familiar with William S. Lind or the four generations of post-Westphalian warfare. So, we have made ON WAR available on Kindle Unlimited; if you’re on Prime or KU, you can check it out at no charge to you. And if it piques your interest, well, there is a bestseller-to-be that you may want to preorder.

And for those of you who are curious why we’re so suddenly enamored of KU, well, it works very badly for short, expensive works of the sort that independent scam artists and scam artists who are published by certain SF publishing houses who shall remain nameless were publishing, and that Amazon wished to deter. And it happens to work rather well for long, inexpensive works of the sort we publish. And by “rather well”, I mean that we actually do better with a KU copy that is read than a copy that is sold either on Amazon or Castalia. So if you really want to help us out, read one of our books on KU first, then buy it.

The First Amendment isn’t merely dead

It is outdated, irrelevant, and at this point, civilizationally destructive. John Wright explains:

The First Amendment was never anything but a cease-fire and peace treaty of a Christian v Christian civil war, which was extended, out of Christian charity and and English sense of fairplay and goodsportsmanship, to Jews and other religions.

It was never a suicide pact, never an invitation for socialists at home and soviets or Islamists abroad to overturn our system of protecting our God-given liberties.

The challenge is how to protect some semblance of free speech while strictly limiting, if not banning outright, the exercise of all non-Christian religions in Christendom. This is theoretically possible, as history demonstrates. But as events are rapidly demonstrating, in the current circumstances the latter is going to take precedence over the former.

The age of fairplay and goodsportsmanship is over. You don’t have to like it; I certainly don’t. Unfortunately, we have no choice but to accept it. And if you can’t bring yourself to do so now, don’t worry, you will soon enough.

The necessity of reprisal

Some interesting and intelligent commentary on John Wright’s post concerning A Time for Peace, A Time for War:

HMSLion: All the codes of chivalry, of diplomacy, and Laws of War work on an assumption that all participants will adhere to them. They represent the Golden Rule in it’s most practical form.

But those codes also recognized the legitimacy of reprisals against violators. A foe who showed no mercy could expect none.

The Enemies of Civilization have realized that there are some people who are so accustomed to acting in a civilized manner that they have forgotten that reprisals are perfectly legitimate. More than legitimate, necessary. It must NEVER be possible to secure an advantage by violating the norms of civilized conduct.

And people are starting to realize it.

I’ll add something else…part of the problem of the West is that the World Wars were fought with a level of savagery that shocked us. They were the modern equivalent of the Thirty Years War three centuries earlier – a conflict fought with a ferocity unprecedented among Christian nations.

The Thirty Years War led to significant changes in international politics with the Treaty of Westphalia, and the formalization of Laws of Warfare. A system that held for nearly three centuries, even in the teeth of the Napoleonic Wars.

The World Wars? There’s been no formal New Laws of Land Warfare, but there’s been no willingness to use nuclear weapons since then. Nor to engage in area bombing of cities. But the lack of a formal document has, I think, hindered the self-confidence of the West. Too many people are obsessively wringing their hands over the past, instead of resolving not to do that sort of thing again.

dgarsys adds: It must NEVER be possible to secure an advantage by violating the norms of civilized conduct. In other words, to keep turning the other cheek in order to “be nice” and “not use their tactics” is to play the iterated prisoners dilemma in “nice only” mode, instead of hammering the violator for betraying you.

As William S. Lind has observed, 4GW is in many ways 0GW, albeit with a technological twist that is primarily based on communications. Both of Mr. Wright’s commentators are correct; the chaos is being stoked by the international community’s legal overreach combined with a practical refusal to permit bad actors to be held to account if it finds them useful to its interests.