Tag: war

Maurice Montaigne argues that it is:

“War is not the answer!” the bumper sticker proudly proclaims. It’s a ridiculous assertion. Sometimes war is the answer. It depends on the question.

If the question is “do you need to impose your will on an enemy who will otherwise not stop hurting you?” then war is the only answer.

Don’t let the limited wars that America has fought in recent memory fool you.

War, real war, total war, the sort of war that the West created and mastered, is decisive. It shatters nations. It destroys cultures. It obliterates the will to fight and leaves a civilization reduced to pacifism…or rubble.

Until 1945, Imperial Japan was defended by a fighting force that had a worldwide reputation for brutality and fanaticism. The Rape of Nanking is the most notorious of the Imperial Japanese Army’s many war crimes. The soldiers themselves believed in gyokusai (“glorious death”), preferring to make suicidal attacks rather than surrender to the enemy. Only 921 out of 31,000 soldiers surrendered in the Battle of Saipan. The suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese culminated in the kamikaze, pilots flying planes filled with explosives who deliberately crashed their aircraft into enemy warships. In all, 3,860 kamikaze pilots died to destroy between 30 and 50 warships and kill around 4,000 sailors. The fighting spirit of the Japanese was so terrifying that our war planners expected that the Japanese would kill one million Americans if we invaded.

Today, we primarily know the Japanese for their fuel-efficient cars and game consoles. There are no Japanese suicide bombers. American visitors to Tokyo need not fear being blown up by an adherent of gyokusai seeking to avenge the Divine Emperor.

Read the rest there.

Instead of reviewing 4th Generation Warfare Handbook, CQW has chosen to apply what he learned from it to the current war with the Islamic State:

The 4GW War in the West

However western governments choose to handle migration, the governments need to look like they are in control of the situation. This certainly hasn’t been the case in Europe.

Flat out refusal, and the repatriation and dispersal of potential enemy elements already in country is the simplest and most likely method to succeed, but the political viability of this remains uncertain for now.

Whatever number of refugees Western governments choose to accept, it needs to be in a distributed, non permanent way. Any migrants need to be spread thin throughout the country. And there has to be a plan for sending them home as the conflict ends.

Preventing and breaking up enclaves is key. If you expect any sort of assimilation, it will only happen outside of ethnic and religious conclaves.

In lieu of trying to integrate refugees into the country or to turn them away, they could simply be sent to a third party. Paying countries to take in and support the refugees is one way to handle things and still look good. You reduce the potential for Paris-style attacks in your own country. You also don’t look like a horrible villain to the bleeding hearts. It works on a tactical and moral level. This of course takes lots of money, but as Lind states, money is one of the state’s most powerful 4th generation assets.

Fighting ISIS in the Middle East

While Lind touches on fighting 4th Generation war in western countries, the main focus of the book is on fighting wars in the Middle East, or wherever non-state actors are likely to come into play.

The first question that has to be asked are what are our goals in fighting ISIS in the Middle East. These are the ones I identify:

• Elimination of ISIS control over state functions over large parts of the Middle East.
• Establishment of peace across Syria and Iraq
• Establishment of stability across Syria and Iraq through state power.

Currently, ISIS wants to operate like a state that uses traditional warfare to accomplish its military goals. When ISIS tries to take an area, it rolls in with force and asserts control. In many ways they function like a 3rd Generation force, because they are highly mobile but lack the communications to have the overarching control of Western army commanders. Of course they lack training and skills to exercise precision and tactical excellence like well-trained Western armies. Their advantage is their adaptability.

Also, make no mistake, ISIS’s plan is likely to fall back into a 4th Generation insurgency model should the West come to occupy the areas now held by ISIS.

Unlike the resort to airstrikes, his plan has the benefit of not being guaranteed to fail. However, given the increasing number of U.S. state governors who are rejecting the Obama administration’s demand that they take in more refugees, to say nothing of the total rejection of the Hungarian and Polish governments, I think the refusal-and-repatriation option is much more politically viable than most Western governments want to admit.

It is, in fact, so politically viable that every government that claims it is not is going to be removed from power within the next five years. Even the mainstream media is beginning to understand that.

Isil and its death cult stablemates will never be defeated until we get to grips with the concept that this has nothing to do with anything except the fact that we exist. It is that, and that alone, which offends them and which they seek to destroy.

So, unless we are all happy to sign up to radical Islam right now, with every heretic and infidel executed on sight, every man forced to take up arms, every woman enslaved, every homosexual stoned to death and every nine-year-old girl at risk of rape, in a terrifying return to the Dark Ages, we have a choice to make.

That choice is stark: kill or be killed. So which one is it going to be? 

The single most important thing to understand is that ISIS can’t be defeated over there before it is defeated over here. Until the Reconquista 2.0 begins, the Western politicians are doing little more than trying to buy time until retirement.

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.

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.