Tag: war

“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.

Yes. Next question

Conde Nast asks a Troubling Question to which the answer is obvious:

The Troubling Question in the French Jewish Community: Is It Time to Leave?

How can anyone be allowed to paint a swastika on the statue of Marianne, the goddess of French liberty, in the very center of the Place de la République?”

That was what the chairman of one of France’s most celebrated luxury brands was thinking last July, when a tall man in a black shirt and a kaffiyeh leapt to the ledge of Marianne’s pedestal and scrawled a black swastika. All around him, thousands of angry demonstrators were swarming the square with fake rockets, Palestinian and Hamas flags, even the black-and-white banners of ISIS. Here, barely a mile and a half from the Galeries Lafayette, the heart of bourgeois Paris, the chants: “MORT AUX JUIFS! MORT AUX JUIFS!” Death to the Jews. It was Saturday, July 26, 2014, and a pro-Palestinian demonstration turned into a day of terror in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods of the city.

“Do something! Do you see what is happening here?” the chairman said to a line of police officers watching the demonstration build to a frenzy. “What do you expect us to do?” one officer said, then looked away. For years, the chairman, a longtime anti-racism activist, has turned up at rallies like this one to see which politicians and which radical groups were present. (For reasons of personal safety, the chairman asked not to be identified for this story.) France’s endless demonstrations are a mainstay of the republic, a sacred right rooted in the legacy of Voltaire. But hate speech is a criminal offense—people may express their opinions, but not to the extent of insulting others based on their race, religion, or sex. The protest—against Israel’s Gaza policies—had been banned by the government, fearful of violence, following flare-ups in the preceding weeks. But if the police were to move in too quickly, the riots might continue all summer long—suburbs in flames, mobs in central Paris.

Photographs and videos of the swastika and its perpetrator, of protesters chanting “Kill the Jews,” and of the Palestinian, Hamas, and ISIS flags were sent in a rush to various groups in the Jewish community who assess threats. By early afternoon, some of these reached Sammy Ghozlan, a 72-year-old retired police commissioner who has spent his career working the banlieues, the belt of working-class, racially mixed suburbs that surround Paris. Ghozlan is a folk hero of the banlieues and has a nickname that is impossible to forget: le poulet cacher—“the kosher chicken.” (Poulet is slang for cop.) For 15 years, he has overseen France’s National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism—known by its French abbreviation, B.N.V.C.A.—a community hotline he founded that is funded by his police pension and whatever small donations he can come by. Its purpose is nothing less than to protect the Jews of France….

Two days before the Charlie Hebdo
attack, Sammy announced what, to many, including me, was unthinkable:
Sammy Ghozlan, proud Frenchman and the dean of Paris’s anti-Semitic
crime-fighters, had joined the thousands of French Jews moving to
Israel.

The Jews in Europe are doomed because they spent the last 70 years undermining European nationalism and supporting the transformation of European population demographics. That strategy was understandable, given their mid-century experience with German nationalism, but short-sighted, and its long-term failure was absolutely inevitable. That is relatively obvious now; everyone from Benjamin Netanyahu to Sammy Ghozlan has concluded that it is time for continental Jews to go home to Israel. And while the Jews in the UK aren’t quite at that point yet, I expect they will be soon enough. The English have long looked with mild disapproval upon the Jews in their midst, but
they simply don’t hate them the way their millions of recent Polish and Muslim immigrants do.

What is much less obvious at this point is that the Jews in America appear to be similarly doomed because their elite has spent the last 50 years undermining American nationalism and supporting the transformation of America’s population demographics under the mistaken impression that it would be “good for the Jews”. Feeling threatened by European nationalism as a result of their experience with Germanic nationalism, a small number of elite Jews worked very hard to remove the barriers to entry that protected their people from those who hate them considerably more than Frenchmen or Americans do. In fact, some of them are still at it; consider this piece published in the National Journal:

Nearly 70 percent of Jews support comprehensive immigration reform, according to a survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution in March 2013…. Jews have always been immigrants. We’re always searching for a safe place to call home. That is one reason we are so invested in making sure that today’s immigrants have the opportunity to build their lives in America like we did.

Obviously very few Jews have made what might be called the French connection between immigration and anti-semitism yet. Due to the larger Jewish population in America and the USA’s bigger geography, the USA is probably 30 years behind France in this regard, but one nevertheless can observe the same process at work. The outcome is so predictable that one would almost suspect those responsible of being ruthless Zionists with the long term goal of driving all of their compatriots to Israel whether they will or no.

Even in the case of immigrants who don’t have anything against Jews, groups such as the Mexicans and Chinese, the demographic tradeoff has been a negative one for the Jews because unlike the various European nations, the newcomers are totally immune to the Holocaustianity to which misbehaving Jews have tried to hide behind for decades. Forget Greenspan, Bernanke, and Yellen, even critics of Bernie Madoff, the Jewish con artist who materially harmed more Jews than any anti-semite since Adolf Hitler, were declared to be “anti-semites” by Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League.

But notice that for all the wealth and power possessed by “the chairman of one of France’s most celebrated luxury brands”, such things are impotent in the face of the Muslim numbers, which dwarf France’s Jewish population, 5 million to 500,000. (Note to American readers who think France is being swamped by Islam: the USA has proportionately more Hispanic residents than France has Muslim residents, 52 million and 18 percent vs five million and 8 percent.)

Now nationalism is resurgent throughout Europe, everywhere from Greece and Italy to Norway and Sweden. But while those European nationalists are primarily opposed to the Jew-hating invaders, they will not lift a finger to aid or defend the Jews who have been actively attempting to suppress them for decades. Indeed, most Jews in America are still more concerned about the nationalists than they are about those who are actually calling openly for their death. The European Jews have learned better.

It is said that generals always fight the previous war. In this case, it seems apparent that the diaspora Jews were determined to fight their previous enemy rather than their current one. But it should have been obvious that any nation that is unwilling or unable to defend itself is a nation that will be equally unable to defend its guests.

That is why I expect the French policeman’s response will serve as a predictive microcosm of the European and American responses to the war that the New Europeans and the New Americans are waging on their resident Jews.

“What do you expect us to do?” one officer said, then looked away.  

If the Jews in America do not wish to see America follow Europe’s lead in this regard, they are going to have to do a complete 180 on immigration, do it fast, and do it hard. Regardless, I suspect an investment in Israeli real estate may be something to seriously consider as the demand for housing there is only going to grow.

Accountability is abuse

A female officer learns the hard way that holding women accountable is “hostile, unprofessional and abusive”:

A Marine officer who led the service’s only all-female recruit battalion was fired amid complaints of a toxic leadership environment — but her supporters say she was only trying to make the unit better by holding women to tougher standards.

Lt. Col. Kate Germano, the former commanding officer of 4th Recruit Training Battalion at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, was found to be “hostile, unprofessional and abusive,” according to a command investigation obtained by Marine Corps Times. She was relieved for cause on June 30 by Brig. Gen. Terry Williams, Parris Island’s commanding general.

But officers who served with her say she was a blunt reformer who spearheaded efforts to improve recruit training regardless of gender, and that a vocal minority in the battalion undercut her achievements. Germano’s tactics, for example, dramatically improved range qualification rates for female recruits.

The ensuing controversy, some say, provides a glimpse into an ongoing struggle to establish equal standards for male and female Marines at the Corps’ East Coast recruit depot. Now Germano is petitioning lawmakers for redress, saying she was treated unjustly by base leadership. Germano declined to provide additional details about those efforts, due to concerns about protected communications to Congress.

Williams cited a poor command climate and the loss of trust and confidence in Germano’s ability to serve in command, according to a statement that was provided to Marine Corps Times. The command investigation, completed June 25 and obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, states that Germano displayed “toxic leadership” by publicly berating and showing contempt for subordinates, bullying Marines and singling them out for under-performance.

On one occasion, the investigation found, she made comments during a sexual assault prevention brief that female Marines interpreted as victim-blaming, leading some to testify that it would make them feel less comfortable reporting a sexual assault within the command.

Germano also “reinforced gender bias and stereotypes” in the minds of her Marines by telling them on several occasions that male Marines would not take orders from them and would see them as inferior if they could not meet men’s physical standards, the investigation found.

Women seem to be very, very uncomfortable with the idea that if you are inferior, you will be regarded as inferior. Apparently the idea is that as long as no one actually refers to someone’s objective inferiority at something, as long as everyone pretends not to notice the inferiority, that magically makes the inferiority disappear.

It’s ridiculous. They’re fucking cargo cultists.

There shouldn’t be female Marines in the first place. But as long as there are, it sounds like Germano is the kind they should want. Unfortunately, it sounds like her expectations of accountability are too masculine for today’s emasculated Corps.

Prediction, the USA is going to be in for some serious military shocks in the relatively near future. Forget the logistical, equipment, and technological advantages, this is not how a first-class military force is maintained.

Free expression and cultural war

This seemed relevant in the present circumstances:

A lesson is learned most firmly when the application of what has been learned turns failure into success. The failure, in Clausewitz’s estimation, was the humiliating defeat suffered by Prussia in 1806. He attributes this failure to Prussia’s adherence to eighteenth-century methods of warfare against an opponent emancipated from the limitations of those methods. The success, as Clausewitz saw it, was the resurgence of Prussia as a military power and the victory over Napoleon in 1813-15. Clausewitz attributes this resurgence to the replacement of the small professional (eighteenth-century model) army by a mass (citizen) army; that is, by recourse to the weapon with which France dominated Europe for almost two decades. In other words, Prussia achieved full nationhood by accepting the principle of national war.
– The Clausewitzian Century, Anatol Rapoport

In like manner, the SJWs have dominated the public discourse for almost two decades by assiduously targeting, attacking, and disqualifying those public figures they deem dangerous to their Narrative. In their foolish confusion of method with objective, conservatives, libertarians, and liberals have, like Prussia, insisted on adhering to outdated methods and gone from defeat to defeat as a result.

This is why the SJWs are so ferociously fighting against Irene Gallo’s well-deserved and overdue dismissal for cause by TOR Books. They know that the successful adoption and utilization of their own methods will lead to the freedom-loving right learning a very important lesson that will help bring about its resurgence at SJW expense.

We can beat them. We will beat them. The only way that we will fail is if we fail to emancipate ourselves from the limitations of outdated methods to which those who have been attacking us for over a decade do not subscribe.

Delusion and deterrence

Mr. Smith has a rather unusual theory about the Charleston church shootings:

Adam F. Smith ‏@Adampdx Jun 18
Haters like @castaliahouse  Theodore “Vox Day” Beale are the cause of massacre at SC AME church #SadPuppies #hugoawards

I look forward to the SJWs at File 770 being as horrified and outraged by this ludicrous accusation as they pretended to be by Mike Z. Williamson’s “too soon” joke. It’s particularly bizarre since I am not Castalia House and @castaliahouse has never taken any position on any American racial or religious affairs.

It’s rather amusing to see the many attacks by their own side the SJWs resolutely ignore as they go about their daily posturing and strike their latest outrage poses. Tor employees attack Tor’s authors and customers alike, Castalia House has undergone six straight months of cracking attempts, Vox Popoli is now into its third straight day of a DDOS attack, hundreds of people emailing Tor Books have been accused of being bots by Tor employees even as as Tor supporters create fake tweets to feign public support for Tor, and yet science fiction’s SJWs still preen and posture as if they’re the good guys because a few hundred science fiction readers followed the rules and violated an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement to which we were not privy and to which we never agreed.

And yet, some of those on our side still want to pretend this decades-long cultural conflict is some sort of white-glove affair. There is a fundamental disagreement between the noble defeatists and those who are less willing to continue to submit to the SJWs attempt to claim cultural dominance at Sarah Hoyt’s post on The Marquess of Queensbury’s rules:

thewriterinblack  
Another observation I have made in the past is that our enemies often not only know that we don’t play by the same “rulebook” as they do, they count on it. Those among the Jihadis who have even a ghost of a clue know that if we were really as bad as they make out, well, it would be easier to pray toward Mecca–just face the blue glow.

Apropos of nothing, I am reminded of a scene in an old Fantastic Four comment. Sue Storm as the Invisible Girl (I think this was before she started calling herself the Invisible Woman) facing Dr. Doom. “Doom, do you have any idea how dangerous my force fields would be if I decided to play by your rules?”

That’s us all over.

Dorothy Grant
And this would be why they hate and fear Vox Day above all others: because he does play by their rules.

RES
If we played by their rules the earth would be scorched. But playing by the Devil’s rules would be to concede defeat — what we fight for is ordered liberty, constrained government, rational argument over insanity.

Batman does not become the Joker, Superman does not accept the values of Luthor, Spiderman does not become Doc Octopus.

RES is completely wrong for the obvious reason that SJWs are not the Devil, they are merely his unhappy, not-very-bright children. And the vital point that RES completely misses is that you do not defend ordered liberty, constrained government, and rational argument over insanity with unconstrained liberty, government inaction, and talk. You defend it with force, and you defend it successfully with force that exceeds that of your opponent at the point of conflict.

The Romans did not become the Britons by defeating them with superior force. The USA did not become Nazi Germany by invading Normandy (although it may as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act). The Soviets did not become the Afghans and the Coalition of the Willing has not become the global jihad. Batman would not become the Joker even if he snapped the Joker’s neck, but he would certainly save the lives of all of those who would have been killed by the Joker in the future.

What frustrates me about the noble defeatists is that they are like a football team who refuses to accept the newfangled rules that permit the forward pass. They insist on playing the game in the outmoded way they believe to be the correct way, run the ball every down against a defense with 11 men stacked in the box, and inevitably lose when the other team passes for ten touchdowns and wins 70-0.

The problem is a conceptual one at heart. Even those whose devotion to free expression is unquestioned, such as Ken and Clarke of PopeHat, fail to understand that their efforts are doomed to failure so long as they confuse the objective with the methods used to defend it. This is not a “by any means” argument, it is a straightforward argument for Chicago Rules deterrence.

The best defense for free expression is not to permit the other side to freely libel and slander and calumniate and defame and lie while responding with few feeble protests that what they’re saying just ain’t so. The reason poison gas has made very few appearances on the battlefield since WWI is not because the French, English, and Americans set the Germans a good example, but because they promptly responded by manufacturing and using even more gas than the Germans did. The only reason the USA has not dropped an atomic bomb since 1945 is because the Soviet Union obtained their own in 1949.

Has the assault on free speech waxed or waned since Belgium introduced hate speech laws in 1981? The high-minded non-deterrent approach has failed, continuously failed, for the last three decades. The SJWs find speech-policing to be a useful weapon for marginalizing, disqualifying, and destroying their enemies and they are not going to give it up until they find themselves suffering from it to a greater extent than the free speech advocates do.

If you seek to defend free expression, you can do no better than to follow the lead of Lieutenant General Sir Charles Ferguson, who said of poison gas, which he deplored as a “cowardly” and un-English form of warfare:

“We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.”

This does not mean we must blindly imitate the other side, particularly not in their instinctual resort to stupid and petty lies, transparent psychological projection, and a foolish insistence on defending the indefensible. Nor should we seek to be as blindly ignorant of them as they are of us. What it means is that we should adopt their more effective tactics, and, as the Allies did with gas in WWI, make even more effective and extensive use of those tactics until they agree to abandon them.

It would be more efficient

It’s a sad day when the parodies are more sensible than the actual policies:

Recognizing the need for a new strategy to fight ISIS, the Pentagon announced today that it would no longer supply the Iraqi Army with American vehicles, artillery and rifles, and instead would supply materiel directly to ISIS.

CENTCOM spokesman Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder says the idea “would be a game changer.”

The plan has its roots in Army Capt. Noel Abelove’s PowerPoint briefing, which was hailed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sources said. Abelove, a supply officer on the Joint Logistics Staff (J-4), realized that cutting out the Iraqi Army middlemen had numerous advantages.

“They taught me at West Point that ‘amateurs talk strategy but professionals talk logistics,’” Abelove told reporters. “The most important advantage is, we only supply about 40 percent of each ISIS requisition.”

Abelove continued: “Before, when we gave the [Iraqi] Army 100 percent, then we had to fly strike missions to destroy a lot of it a week or two later. This way we immediately degrade ISIS by over 60 percent, without having to use our increasingly scarce missiles and JDAMs, and more importantly, without having to put any airmen into harm’s way.”

Other sources indicate that supplying ISIS also reduces the risk of sensitive equipment being passed to Iran by Shiite commanders in the Iraqi Army, or being sold on Craigslist.

“A lot of these guys were piling a lot of cash into banks in Qatar and the Caymans,” according to an analyst who requested anonymity. “Well, screw that. ISIS will literally burn anyone selling our gear.”

Counterinsurgency is difficult enough in the best of circumstances. But it’s even harder when you’re stupid. And that’s the best case scenario. Worst case, “my Muslim faith” wasn’t the inadvertent slip of the tongue everyone, including the interviewer who had to catch and correct him, assumed it to have been.