Tag: war

Building the next Nazis

When the ultra-nationalists take power in Europe, it is the “open borders” advocates and “save the poor refugees” advocates who will be responsible. And we’ll all be lucky if they settle for mass deportations:

Italy’s simmering anti-immigrant sentiment has been stoked by the murder of an elderly couple in their home in Sicily, allegedly by an African asylum seeker. Mamadou Kamara, an 18-year-old from the Ivory Coast, allegedly slit the throat of Vincenzo Solano, 68, and then attacked his Spanish-born wife, Mercedes Ibanez, 70.

Ms Ibanez fell to her death from a second-floor balcony, during a robbery that turned violent.

Mr Kamara is one of thousands of migrants and refugees living at a vast reception centre at nearby Mineo, in south-eastern Sicily.

They are accommodated there after arriving by boat from Libya, and wait sometimes for months to have their asylum applications assessed.

The migrants are allowed to come and go freely from the facility, a former US military base where prostitution, links with organised crime and the trade in illicit goods is said to be rife.

Mr Kamara, who was rescued in the Mediterranean on June 8 and brought with other migrants to the port of Catania in Sicily, allegedly broke into the pensioners’ flat in the village of Palagonia, six miles away, and slit the throat of Mr Solano….Patience is wearing thin among many Italians, with some of the country’s 20 regions refusing to accommodate any more migrants and centre-Right parties accusing the centre-Left government of Matteo Renzi, the prime minister, of having lost control of the country’s borders.

I think we’re two election cycles away from the end of the pro-EU governments. They may end up shutting down Schengen and taking away the welcome mats, but by then, it will be too little, too late. The anti-immigrant sentiment is rapidly approaching a full boil; mass immigration is invasion. As you will see in an essay that appears in Riding the Red Horse V2, mass immigration is invasion. Mass immigration is occupation. Mass immigration is war.

Russia reinforces Syria

As if the Middle East wasn’t already enough of a powder keg: The Russians are showing up in force:

While military direct intervention by US, Turkish, and Gulf forces over Syrian soil escalates with every passing day, even as Islamic State forces capture increasingly more sovereign territory, in the central part of the country, the Nusra Front dominant in the northwestern region province of Idlib and the official “rebel” forces in close proximity to Damascus, the biggest question on everyone’s lips has been one: would Putin abandon his protege, Syria’s president Assad, to western “liberators” in the process ceding control over Syrian territory which for years had been a Russian national interest as it prevented the passage of regional pipelines from Qatar and Saudi Arabia into Europe, in the process eliminating Gazprom’s – and Russia’s – influence over the continent.

As recently as a month ago, the surprising answer appeared to be an unexpected “yes”, as we described in detail in “The End Draws Near For Syria’s Assad As Putin’s Patience “Wears Thin.” Which would make no sense: why would Putin abdicate a carefully cultivated relationship, one which served both sides (Russia exported weapons, provides military support, and in exchange got a right of first and only refusal on any traversing pipelines through Syria) for years, just to take a gamble on an unknown future when the only aggressor was a jihadist spinoff which had been created as byproduct of US intervention in the region with the specific intention of achieving precisely this outcome: overthrowing Assad (see “Secret Pentagon Report Reveals US “Created” ISIS As A “Tool” To Overthrow Syria’s President Assad”).

As it turns out, it may all have been just a ruse. Because as Ynet reports, not only has Putin not turned his back on Assad, or Syria, but the Russian reinforcements are well on their way. Reinforcements for what? Why to fight the evil Islamic jihadists from ISIS of course, the same artificially created group of bogeyman that the US, Turkey, and Saudis are all all fighting. In fact, this may be the first world war in which everyone is “fighting” an opponent that everyone knows is a proxy for something else.

According to Ynet, Russian fighter pilots are expected to begin arriving in Syria in the coming days, and will fly their Russian air force fighter jets and attack helicopters against ISIS and rebel-aligned targets within the failing state.

And just like the US and Turkish air forces are supposedly in the region to “eradicate the ISIS threat”, there can’t be any possible complaints that Russia has also decided to take its fight to the jihadists – even if it is doing so from the territory of what the real goal of US and Turkish intervention is – Syria. After all, it is a free for all against ISIS, right?

From Ynet:

    According to Western diplomats, a Russian expeditionary force has already arrived in Syria and set up camp in an Assad-controlled airbase. The base is said to be in area surrounding Damascus, and will serve, for all intents and purposes, as a Russian forward operating base.

    In the coming weeks thousands of Russian military personnel are set to touch down in Syria, including advisors, instructors, logistics personnel, technical personnel, members of the aerial protection division, and the pilots who will operate the aircraft.

The Israeli outlet needless adds that while the current makeup of the Russian expeditionary force is still unknown, “there is no doubt that Russian pilots flying combat missions in Syrian skies will definitely change the existing dynamics in the Middle East.”

Why certainly: because in one move Putin, who until this moment had been curiously non-commital over Syria’s various internal and exteranl wars, just made the one move the puts everyone else in check: with Russian forces in Damascus implicitly supporting and guarding Assad, the western plan instantly falls apart.

I think this demonstrates why the US coup in Ukraine was a grand strategic disaster. Putin now knows beyond any shadow of a doubt that the USA isn’t afraid to go after his backyard, which means that sitting tight is riskier for Russia than taking aggressive action. So, he’s not going to shy away from destabilizing actions, and he can do considerably more than interfere with the West’s plan to overthrow Syria under the guise of fighting ISIS.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin started sending serious arms to the Mexican drug cartels and relaunching the Soviet Union’s policy of funding revolutionary movements around the world. Thanks to the EU’s insane immigration policies, he could even turn the USA’s mujahideen strategy on its head and sow chaos throughout Western Europe if he wanted.

The end of air supremacy

ESR called this one in “Battlefield Lasers”, which appeared in Riding the Red Horse.

If history teaches us anything about military technology, it’s that cheap systems scale up faster than expensive ones do. It is already easy to imagine an up-gunned version of Rodriguez’s laser pointer slaved to a radar with a couple of bog-standard servomotors. Off-the-shelf parts, incremental cost less than $3K each, with most of it the development budget going for the targeting firmware. Cost per shot, effectively free.

Call it the PlaneZapper. You could sit it on a roof, power it off wall current, and it would blind every pilot it can see. Including drone pilots; even if there’s a peak-clipping filter between a drone’s sensors and its pilot’s screen, the effect will be like whiteout. Altitude and cloudy skies might save pilots from the early versions of the PlaneZapper, but for anything that has to fly low and slow this could already be a death knell. Close air support and medevac are obvious vulnerabilities.

Apparently someone at Boeing was reading Raymond:

Wednesday morning, the company showed off its Compact Laser Weapon System for media in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s a much smaller, significantly more portable version of the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) Boeing demonstrated last year. This setup looks like an overgrown camera, swiveling around on a tripod.

In the demo, Boeing used the laser to burn holes in a stationary, composite UAV shell, to show how quickly it can compromise an aircraft. Two seconds at full power and the target was aflame. Other than numerous safety warnings to ensure no one was blinded by the two-kilowatt infrared laser, there was no fanfare. No explosions, no visible beam. It’s more like burning ants with a really, really expensive magnifying glass than obliterating Alderaan.

Instead of a massive laser mounted on a dedicated truck, the compact system is small enough to fit in four suitcase-sized boxes and can be set up by a pair of soldiers or technicians in just a few minutes.

This means that the battle for air supremacy is going to have to move higher, which is to say, space.

The end of the invasion

It looks like the end of the Mediterranean Invasion is now in sight:

A Greek coast guard vessel allegedly sank a rubber dinghy full of Syrian refugees, including women and children, according to film footage shot by Turkish fishermen.

The footage, which was reportedly recorded a few days ago and obtained by Turkish media, suggests that the Greeks sank the migrant boat with some sort of “lance”.

The inflatable boat had just left the Turkish coast, just a few miles from the Greek islands of Kos and Lesbos, where thousands of Syrians and other refugees have landed in recent weeks.

As the Greek patrol vessel moved away from the area, one of the fishermen can be heard saying: “The boat is deflating, the boat’s taking on water and there are people on board.”

He then added: “The boat was pierced by what looks like a long lance.”

The footage then showed migrants in the water as the boat gradually sank. The fishermen went to the rescue of the Syrians – said to be around 50 – and then called the Turkish coast guard, who eventually took the refugees back to the Turkish coast.

Armed or not, mass migrants are invaders and it’s about time that the European coast guards started actually guarding their coasts. The only thing that surprises me is that it wasn’t the Italian Navy that started sinking the “refugee” boats.

If the Greek and Italian navies had simply sunk the first ten or twenty boats to try to cross the sea, the entire crisis could have been averted. Now, with African “refugees” beating up and raping the aid workers working in the “refugee” camps, it looks like it’s going to be an long and ugly process of violent repatriation.

The Italian article points out that the cost of housing and providing for the three “delinquent” immigrants is 20,000 euros a year, which happens to be the annual income for one-third of Italian families. Which means the invasion is going to be brought to an end soon, one way or another.

Fighting them there

I respect this British man’s decision to join the Christians fighting ISIS in Iraq. But given that ISIS and other jihadists are already in Britain and America, I don’t think it will be too long before one won’t need to go abroad to do so.

A British granddad has left his family to join militants fighting Isil on the frontline in Iraq claiming he could no longer sit back and do nothing.

Despite having no military experience, Jim Atherton, 53, of Tyne and Wear, has sold his car to buy weapons and has already come under mortar and rocket attacks.

The granddad, who before leaving for Iraq cared for rescued daschunds, said Special Branch had tried to persuade him to come home, but he believed his place was fighting jihadists.

It’s very strange that there has been so little martial activity inside Western countries given how completely they have been infiltrated by jihadists. One wonders what they are waiting for.

“A Reliable Source” in the real world

This link to an FBI activity alert was sent to me by a reader with the comment that it didn’t take long for “A Reliable Source” (which appeared in Riding the Red Horse) to become non-fiction.

Middle-Eastern Males Approaching Family Members of US Military Personnel at their Homes In Colorado and Wyoming, as of June 2015. 

SOURCE: An officer of another law enforcement agency.

In May 2015, the wife of a US military member was approached in front of her home by two Middle-Eastern males. The men stated that she was the wife of a US interrogator. When she denied their claims, the men laughed. The two men left the area in a dark-colored, four-door sedan with two other Middle-Eastern males in the vehicle. The woman had observed the vehicle in the neighborhood on previous occasions.

Similar incidents in Wyoming have been reported to the FBI throughout June 2015. On numerous occasions, family members of military personnel were confronted by Middle-Eastern males in front of their homes. The males have attempted to obtain personal information about the military member and family members through intimidation. The family members have reported feeling scared.

It’s my opinion that large-scale drone warfare could be easily counteracted by targeting the drone operators and their family members. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if countries like Iran, Russia, Israel, and China already have near-complete lists of every US military drone operator and their home addresses. There are only 1,200 of them, after all. In less than 24 hours, the entire US drone fleet could be rendered inoperative, which is the main reason AI-controlled robodrones are inevitable, the various moral and technical concerns about unintended consequences notwithstanding.

I also wonder if their awareness of being the most vulnerable link in the chain is one reason why “drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.”

Blame the Royal Navy

You rescue them, you keep them:

A Sudanese migrant rescued by the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean Sea and dropped off in Italy just five weeks ago has already made it to Britain. Hamad Said, 22, was given free passage on trains across Italy, France and all the way to Calais, where he jumped on a lorry to England. His journey of more than 2,000 miles from Sicily to Birmingham cost him just €76 — around £53 — as the French and Italian authorities simply waved him through.

Mr Said said they helped him by providing free train rides. And he claimed that even when he was eventually stopped by police in Marseille, they told him he had to leave the country. He replied that he was off to England, to which the officers simply said: ‘OK.’ They then gave him a piece of paper that allowed him to travel free on trains across the country.

You have to love the Italians. I expect the British concern for the Africans crossing the Mediterranean is going to disappear pretty quickly now that the Italians, with French complicity, have decided to ship them to Britain.

I don’t know how long it will take before their policy changes, but I expect those Royal Navy warships are going to start sinking the refugee boats sooner or later. If they had done that the first place they would have saved many, many lives in the long run.

Mailvox: “we’re waiting for ISIS”

Shimshon asks about the Middle East:

i think i mentioned before. i heard word from someone who knows. the region north and west of amman, and all along the syrian border is thick with refugees. have you seen some of the pics? there’s around 600k i think. around 10% of the native population. my understanding is that king hussein is pretty terrified of the powderkeg in his midst.

Powderkeg barely begins to describe it. The refugee situation is even worse than that. I had lunch with a Lebanese Christian last week, who was visiting while on vacation. Apparently there are over a million refugees there now. I asked what the Maronites were doing and he said “we are waiting for ISIS.”

That sounded rather fatalistic, so I asked him if they would fight or if they would simply submit like the Assyrians and the Yazidi did. He smiled and said “We have always had to fight to stay alive. The difference is, this time many of those we used to fight against will be fighting with us.” It’s perhaps worth remembering that they were winning the Lebanese civil war when Syria entered and forced a settlement.

What the US and Israel should do is materially support Assad and the Alawites, the Jordanians, and the Lebanese Christians without getting involved in the fighting, and at the same time, clean house at home. Instead, they appear to be playing the same stupid game they did in Afghanistan, where they create a weaponized puppet who rapidly grows beyond their control. Too many parties appear to be too caught up in their historical concerns, such as the Turks with the Kurds, or their grand strategic vision, such as the Israelis with Iran, to focus on the actual danger at hand.

Sure, the Islamic State is no danger to Israel or the USA now, so they think they can use it to settle old scores. But just as the anti-Soviet mujahideen eventually transformed into the Taliban, Daesh is in the process of developing into a more serious and formidable force.

The Iran agreement, and the fact that Turkey, Israel, and the USA are all cooperating to hit Daesh in Syria may indicate that they’re finally beginning to rethink their previous perspectives. The one thing that is certain is that Syria is far less dangerous with Assad in control than Daesh.

Good news for rebels

Considering that the US military is in the process of running exercises to practice fighting against the American people, this announcement is probably good news for the millions of Americans who have been gunning up for the past decade:

The Pentagon announced Monday that it will allow transgender members of the military to serve openly starting next year, marking an end to a long-standing policy that barred them from the armed forces.

In an echo of the Defense Department’s repeal of the ban on gays in uniform four years ago, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said he had directed the armed forces to devise new rules over the next six months that would allow transgender troops to serve, except in situations “where objective, practical impediments are identified.”

“We must ensure that everyone who’s able and willing to serve has the full and equal opportunity to do so, and we must treat all our people with the dignity and respect they deserve,” Carter said in a statement. He called the military’s current regulations “outdated” and said they were “causing uncertainty that distracts commanders from our core missions.”

Carter also issued a directive that would make it more difficult to discharge transgender personnel over the next six months while the new rules are being established, requiring all such cases to be reviewed by a senior Pentagon official. The Pentagon took a similar interim approach to freeze the discharges of gay troops while it was preparing to lift that ban five years ago.

As an added bonus, we should stop hearing about there being too few women in the Navy SEALs and other elite forces. Just put a few of them in dresses, call them ladies, and the problem, such as it is, is solved.

One thing I didn’t realize when reading about the historical collapse of empires is how damned farcical it is. Heinlein’s Crazy Years are upon us, and they are considerably crazier than he’d ever imagined.

Paging Mr. Lind

The Pentagon has no idea what to do about 4GW:

The Pentagon is increasingly concerned about how to combat “hybrid warfare,” the combination of stealth invasion, local proxy forces and international propaganda that Russia used to annex Crimea and destabilize eastern Ukraine, U.S. officials said.

Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday released the 2015 National Military Strategy, in which he cited Russia’s actions in Ukraine and said “hybrid conflicts” will persist well into the future.

This kind of warfare transcends traditional notions of one military confronting another by incorporating conventional and unconventional forces, information warfare such as propaganda, as well as economic measures to undermine an enemy, according to Frank Hoffman, a professor at the National Defense University.

“The critique was, and still is, that America’s view of war is overly simplified,” he said. “We think of things in black-and-white terms.”

I suppose I’ll have to send Gen. Dempsey a copy of The 4GW Handbook when we publish it in September.