Tag: war

They will never give credit where credit is due. But it truly doesn’t matter. The viral ideas spread. Even into enemy territory like the New York Times. And we know from whence they came:

It’s easy to think that ISIS is some sort of evil, medieval cancer that somehow has resurfaced in the modern world. The rest of us are pursuing happiness, and here comes this fundamentalist anachronism, spreading death.

But in his book “Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence,” the brilliant Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that ISIS is in fact typical of what we will see in the decades ahead.

The 21st century will not be a century of secularism, he writes. It will be an age of desecularization and religious conflicts….

Sacks emphasizes that it is not religion itself that causes violence. In
their book Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod
surveyed 1,800 conflicts and found that less than 10 percent had any
religious component at all.

Actually, the correct numbers are 1,763 wars and 6.98 percent, half of which involved Islam. And, of course, Phillips and Axelrod didn’t actually do any such calculation….

Like many guys, I found myself wondering what I would have done if I was so unfortunate as to find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time if people who belong to no particular religion and totally aren’t refugees or immigrants happen to decide to express their grievances in one lethal manner or another.

Now, it should be understood that sometimes there is simply nothing you can do. It doesn’t matter if you are a physical specimen with black belts in five different disciplines, including Ninja and Navy SEAL, who can shoot the testicles off a fly at 100 meters, if a 15-year-old Muslim wearing a vest made of plastic explosive happens to be standing next to you in the elevator when he decides to collect his 72 virgins.

But setting aside pure bad luck, there has to be SOMETHING you can do to improve your odds and avoid being the subject of a pavement garden or candlelight vigil after yet another epic magic dirt fail.

A few basic thoughts:

• Carry a gun if you can. Carry a knife and some legal projectiles if you can’t.
• Always wear a belt that you can slip through your keychain. It can serve as an effective submission noose or a fairly nasty ad hoc flail.
• After you shoot, don’t forget to scoot. Unless you’re Nate, you’re probably going to be outgunned. If you saw the clip of the French police exchanging fire with the Batalan attackers, you can see why it’s a bad idea to go pistol against combat rifle directly.
• Face to the door. Always sit facing the door and maintain situational awareness.
• Don’t just hit the deck. Hit the deck and move immediately to the side.
• There are weapons everywhere. Be aware of where they are in case you need them. Someone once asked me what I would do if attacked RIGHT NOW. I picked up a stone and threw it at him, then scooped up another handful. He was already cringing and loudly expressing his opinion that he understood my point by the time I raised my hand again.
• The police are not going to come in fast and hard. Their first concern is protecting themselves. Their second concern is preventing the bad guys from getting away. Don’t think about waiting for the police, think about how you’re going to win. Focus on attack and neutralization, not on simply running away, assuming you can’t simply walk out another door and be safe.
• Movement and distraction are key. Think triangles. Flank and then hit from both sides, ideally with someone serving as a distraction in the middle.
• Think predator, not helpless prey.

The essential problem is one of game theory. The safest thing for the group to do is mass rush the gunman/gunmen. But the immediately safest thing for each individual to do is to remain motionless and hope someone else gets shot.

Reading the account of the concert hall shooting, the striking thing was the way in which everyone just lay there doing nothing while the gunmen were reloading. Now, it sounds like they were trained well enough to have one cover while the other was reloading, but there were well over 300 people in there; an AK-47 magazine holds 30 rounds. It reminded me a little of the scene in Band of Brothers when Easy Company is attacking Foy and Lt. Dike loses his nerve.

Despite the major and the other officers repeatedly bellowing “keep moving, keep moving”, he can’t find the courage to do it with the Germans shooting at them, and the rest of the troops are pinned down as well. Not until Lt. Speirs relieved Dike and took command of Easy Company were they able to get moving again.

So, the assumption has to be that most people won’t do anything unless they think it is reasonably safe for them to act.

I did wonder about the balcony, though. Had the men on the balcony started hurling chairs down at the gunmen below, that would have presumably served as a sufficient distraction for the people pinned down on the floor to act. Of course, they had no reason to be thinking in such terms at the time, but now that we know what can reasonably be expected, we should think about how one might be able to do better and save some lives in the event we find ourselves put to the test.

I’m very interested in publishing an article in Riding the Red Horse V2 on this subject, so if you’ve got SWAT or urban combat experience in Iraq and you’re interested in putting together a piece on the subject, let me know. If you’re just an interested civilian, however, please do NOT contact me. I’m looking for someone with actual experience of these things.

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.