Tag: war

The Iron Law in the USAF

Jerry Pournelle posts an informative and timely explanation of the US Air Force’s self-assisted decline into military irrelevance:

The heart of the USAF’s institutional culture was Strategic Air Command (SAC). It was where the pilots that learned how to do teamwork, logistics and (nuclear) strategy. That was where officers were groomed for senior flag rank command slots.

When SAC was stood down, Tactical Air Command (TAC) took over in the form of the renamed Air Combat Command (ACC). We are talking fighter jocks, the prima donna’s, the cowboys. The anti-intellectuals who are scared to death of people smarter than they are. Look what happened after the Gulf War when ACC was in charge.

Col. John A. Warden, the architect of the Gulf War air campaign was black balled by Gen. Horner. He retired a thrice passed over Col. at the Air Command and Staff School.

Gen. Corder — the man who put together the 1980’s USAF SEAD doctrine used so well in the Gulf War — was effectively sacked by the USAF chief of Staff (CoS) for disobeying a “strong suggestion” to lie to Congress about the need to retain the F-4G Wild Weasels. (The then CoS was trying to retain more F-15C’s in the force structure.) His efforts to deploy a missile warning system** to protect USAF planes was cancelled partially in retaliation.

When Corder’s allies in Congress started making noise in 1993 about the draw down of F-4G Wild Weasel and EF-111’s, the USAF put the recently retired Corder on a special six month SEAD study to satisfy them. Then the Air Staff sat on the results for close to three years. Corder, under the legal restrictions of the Reagan era secrecy laws, was thus effectively silenced while the deed was done. The downing of Capt. O’ Grady in Bosnia was a direct result of the purging of F-4G Wild Weasel and EF-111 Spark ‘Vark’s from the USAF force structure and senior ACC staff’s willing EW incompetence.

USAF CoS Fogleman, for all his faults, recognized the lack of institutional professionalism. His support of the Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Alb. and attempts to create a USAF doctrine codifying entity like the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) were what was needed.
Unfortunately, Fogleman could not delegate and his reforms died with his military career. The inability to delegate is a defining fault of USAF fighter pilot culture. Fogleman’s successors haven’t tried to address these core institutional issues since then. The F-22 budget wars and the real wars since 1997 have left the USAF CoS no time for anything else, assuming they were interested.

Jerry adds: The Iron Law even in the military, dammit. The purpose of warriors is to
win wars.  It takes one force to gain and keep air supremacy, another
to support the ground army.  The army can win without ground support if
the other guy also has none, and we used to plan Cold War battles in
which neither side had supremacy.  That was tough and the obvious
conclusion is that air supremacy is vital; but that does not mean that
support of the ground forces is not important. If the Air Force won’t
give it, take the mission away; and if USAF blocks that, abolish USAF
and bring back USAAF.

There is real evidence surfacing that the Iron Law has taken over to such a degree that the bureaucrats in the USAF are literally more loyal to their bureaucracy than to the country they are sworn to serve:

The Air Force is investigating allegations that the No. 2 commander
at its prestigious Air Combat Command told lower-ranking officers that
talking to members of Congress about the capabilities of the A-10 attack
aircraft is tantamount to treason.

The alleged comment by Maj.
Gen. James Post has stirred concern in Congress about the Air Force
muzzling officers in violation of their legal rights. “This is
very serious, to accuse people of treason for communicating with
Congress,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-New Hampshire, told Gen. Mark Welsh, the
Air Force chief of staff, who testified Wednesday before the Senate
Armed Services Committee.

Post is reported to have told Air Force
officers attending a recent weapons and tactics conference in Nevada
that it is their duty to support the service’s budget priorities by
refraining from offering opinions inconsistent with those priorities.
Air Force leaders have proposed retiring the A-10 fleet but Congress has
refused, and some inside the Air Force have sided with Congress.

I see no point in a separate air force anymore. It has an insulated and myopic perspective on war that is entirely backwards, it is on the verge of being technologically irrelevant, and it simply cannot deliver the results it promises. Give ground support to the Army and Marines, give air and space supremacy to the Navy, and be done with it.

Abolishing the Air Force

Jerry Pournelle wants to get rid of the Air Force:

I also intend to do an essay on why we should abolish the Air Force
and return to an Army Air Force which is not a separate service. The
purpose of military forces is to win wars. The purpose of the Air Force
is—well, they no longer know. When we had SAC we knew – “Our profession
is peace” was not just a slogan – but that too is neglected in the
Modern Air Force. Deterrence and maintenance of nuclear weapons, being
ready to use weapons when your fondest wish is that they will never be
used – that does require a different kind of military. We once had that
in SAC but the end of the Cold War was the end of SAC, and the nuclear
deterrence force is, well not what it once was. It is subject to the
Iron Law now.

As to the rest of the Air Force, it is more interested in the Air
Force than winning wars, and considers supporting the field army as
beneath contempt. A slow old Warthog does a much better job, but there
is no glory in that. Best to use fast jets… which of course are
imprecise and cause a lot of collateral damage. Everyone knows that a
force of propeller driven P-47 fighters of WWII would be more effective
for supporting the field army than what we use. And the Army must be
crippled, not allowed to have effective air power in taking territory.
You must use modern jets at high speed.

Now the Air Force has a mission that the Army at present does not
have: Air Supremacy. And that is a different mission from supporting the
field army. It involves engagements with Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs)
as well as strikes against the enemy base of operations. The glory is
in air to air combat, but that is not the effective way to air
supremacy.

That is the main argument for an “Independent Air Force” and the
bitter fights that ended with creation of USAF. It is true, ground army
commanders tend to select the wrong targets to sortie against, and
endanger air supremacy; thus the argument for independence, which USAAF
eventually won (before SAC existed or any but a few knew would be
needed.) Hiroshima ended the debate. But now the Cold War ended and USAF
killed SAC as not glamorous – not career building any longer. As to the
Warthogs, give them to the National Guard! Real pilots don’t need them!

Sure, I exaggerate but not much: the Air Force keeps trying to get
rid of the Warthogs, but never by giving them (and the ground support
mission) to the War Department. Better that GI’s die than USAF give up a
mission even though it does not want it.

Drones will change all this, but why wait?

Actually, as Eric S. Raymond demonstrated in both “Sucker Punch” and “Battlefield Lasers”, the Air Force is very close to obsolete anyhow. My expectation is that they’ll try to survive by moving their mission upward, to space, in order to compensate for the vanishing ability of their planes to survive in the atmosphere.

Today Yemen, tomorrow the West

I have no doubt that the governments of Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen didn’t think it was likely that jihadists would manage to topple them either:

Shiite insurgents tightened their grip on Yemen’s capital Wednesday, seizing control of a missile base and keeping the president as a virtual hostage in a showdown threatening a key American ally in the fight against al-Qaeda.

Days of fast-moving advances by the Houthi rebel faction — believed to be backed by Iran — has left the Western-backed government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi backed into a corner with rapidly diminishing options.

Just hours after storming the presidential palace on Tuesday, the Houthi leader gave what amounted to an ultimatum: Hadi can either move ahead with reforms that include giving rebels more power or risk intensified attacks that could topple his government.

The brinksmanship and uncertainly has pushed Yemen closer to a full-scale political breakdown that could resonate deeply in Washington and among its key regional allies, including neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Fortunately, we’ve been assured that Islam is a religion of peace and jihad is a personal, spiritual struggle, so there is no chance that a second Islamic State will aggressively seek to foment jihad in its neighbors. And even if it did seek to so, what could be more stable than a neighboring monarchy ruled by a 91 year-old man?

It’s an Arab Spring in the making, it’s just not a secular Arab Spring.

War is coming

Whether the West is ready or not. As with the National Socialists, the frightened appeasers of the West are unwilling to listen to what their self-proclaimed enemies are saying:

Jurgen Todenhofer, the first Western reporter to embed with Islamic State fighters and not be killed in the process, spoke to Al Jazeera about his time with the terror group. Todenhofer lived side by side with the jihadist fighters for ten days in the Islamic State-stronghold city of Mosul, Iraq. He was accompanied only by his son, who served as his cameraman.

“I always asked them about the value of mercy in Islam,” but “I didn’t see any mercy in their behavior,” explained Todenhofer. He added, “Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers… They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.”

The German reporter then elaborated on how shocked he was about how “willing to kill” the ISIS fighters are. He said that they were ready to commit genocide. “They were talking about [killing] hundreds of millions. They were enthusiastic about it, and I just cannot understand that,” said Todenhofer.

At this point, the Western governments are more interested in suppressing the only forces that will save them, the Christians and the nationalists. But they will go, one way or another. Either they’ll be thrown out democratically by the pro-survival Western elements, or they’ll eventually find themselves in the position of the Yemeni Prime Minister.


Armed Houthi militia have encircled the Prime Minister’s residence in
Yemen just hours after gunmen opened fire on his convoy, according to a
government spokesman.

Underlining their case

We don’t appear to be dealing with strategic masterminds here:

Foreign intelligence agencies have intercepted discussions by Islamist militants about possible attacks on weekly marches organised by Germany’s new anti-Islamic movement, a news weekly reported on Friday, without citing its sources.

Der Spiegel magazine said that foreign intelligence services had picked up the content of communications by some “known international jihadists”, without giving specific details.

The intelligence, which was passed to German authorities, indicated they had discussed possible attacks on the rallies organised by the so-called group, “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident” (Pegida), the magazine said in a pre-released story to appear in this weekend’s edition.

I can’t think of a better way for Muslims to transform the anti-Islamic marchers into anti-Islamic soldiers. Then again, I wouldn’t put it past the European authorities to try to scare the growing pro-Pegida forces into staying home.

And nothing fails like past success. Since intimidation has succeeded so brilliantly for so long in Europe, it may be that this is a case of jihadists with a hammer seeing a nail. Meanwhile the French authorities are already demonstrating that they, at least, are not Charlie:

Justice Minister Christiane Taubira said yesterday the French government was going to tighten laws against racism and anti-Semitism.

It astonishes me how abysmally stupid these people are. Do they really believe placing the cause of free speech in ideological alignment with the most virulent racists and Jew-haters is going to change the way anyone thinks or feels? Especially in light of assertions such as these:

“To laugh at the Prophet… is something very different from “free speech”
as usually understood. It is a violent act.” – Abdal Hakim Murad, the Telegraph

Lind > Mitchell + Douhet

William S. Lind was right. Again.

ISIS has almost doubled the land it controls in Syria since the US-led coalition began airstrikes against the extremist group in the summer, a new map has revealed. The extremist group has continued to expand its ‘caliphate’, despite more than 800 airstrikes hitting targets in ISIS-controlled areas since last summer.

The map, created by the Coalition for a Democratic Syria (CDS), shows just how much land has fallen to ISIS – which now has a third of the country under its control. Before the summer, the militants controlled just half that.

Airpower is nothing more than a supporting arm. Sans nukes, it has never succeeded in accomplishing anything on its own. It’s interesting to see that even in combination with non-US ground forces in Iraq, all it has been able to do is prevent ISIS from expanding further.

Even those with zero interest in things military should keep this in mind, because what it means is that any politician threatening air strikes is essentially promising to do nothing. Note that immigrants, who are a form of boots on the ground, are far more dangerous than air strikes.

Rules of war, and the violations therein

Bill Whittle writes a poignant explanation of the challenge facing a 2GW military that finds itself in a 4GW war:

War is hell, and soldiers have to live there. It is an unbearable burden; unbearable in the sense that not a single man and woman who has been fully exposed to war has ever come back home. Someone else comes back home. Sometimes, it is a better person. Sometimes a worse one. But they are different, all changed in the horror and crucible of war.

And so from the beginning of war, there exists between soldiers a bond that cannot be described. There is the obvious connection of a soldier to his comrades, but there is too a strong sense of respect and kinship with the soldier on the other side of No Man’s Land, shivering in cold wet places just the same, under orders and doing his job, too — just wanting to get the thing over with and go home.

Surrender is a mercy in such a place. The idea that certain death may be avoided, that one might be willing to simply give up fighting and still survive, is mercy of the deepest blue. Surrendering enemy soldiers are often greeted with a warmth and understanding that friendly civilians do not receive, for they have shared in the misery and hardship of war in ways that we comfortable and safe civilians can never know.

Surrender, in war, is perhaps the ultimate of Sanctuaries. It is a way out when hope and rescue have fled the field. Honorable surrender has never been treated with shame by any American unit I have ever heard of.

And so, when groups of un-uniformed enemy soldiers waving white flags suddenly drop and open fire on unsuspecting, generous and honorable Americans, then the masters of these men have made a terrible bargain. They have destroyed the Sanctuary of Surrender, and eliminated for their own men a deep and abiding refuge in the nightmare of the battlefield.

They have done this to their own men. Not us. We have known of the brutality of the Iraqi army regarding prisoners from at least as far back as those taken and beaten during the first Gulf War, and as far as improvements over the intervening years, we might perhaps call Jessica Lynch to tell us of any newfound magnanimity on the part of the Ba’athists.

False surrender as a weapon of ambush is an abomination. When it is repeated, it is obvious that is not an aberration; it is policy. It is, like the abandonment of the uniform, a tactic to gain a short-term advantage that leads to long-term hardship and misery for their own troops. It is a Devil’s bargain, and they have had the Devil to pay for it — as have we.

They violate the Sanctuary of the Uniform. They violate the Sanctuary of Surrender. And the most reprehensible of all is the violation of the Sanctuary of Mercy.

What Whittle fails to understand is that the Eastern enemy the Western militaries are engaging have NEVER respected the rules of Westphalian war. As William S. Lind notes, uniforms are an aspect of 1GW order.

As long as Western armies insist on attempting to fight a 4GW war with 2GW tactics, they are going to be at a significant disadvantage, and one that likely outweights their various advantages. When the rules change, the players have to change with the rules.

Note that few, if any, Western armies have ever succeeded in causing an Eastern foe to modify its non-Westphalian tactics in imitation of the Western army.

However, Whittle needs to be corrected about this historically erroneous statement: “Honorable surrender has never been treated with shame by any American unit I have ever heard of.”

One incident of which I am aware is when the 45th Division of the US Army killed between 30 and 50 prisoners of war after the liberation of Dachau. It appears they mistook Hungarian Waffen-SS troops who had retreated to the camp with the SS-Totenkopf guards, not that killing the camp guards would have been acceptable under the principle of Sanctuary anyway.

The incident was buried by Gen. George Patton.

It takes two to tango

But only one party to wage war. This is honest, but remarkably stupid commentary on the current European situation from the Mayor of London:

About 10 years ago, the whole Danish cartoon controversy blew up – and I remember distinctly concluding that I would never have published them in The Spectator, which I edited, not just because they were gratuitously inflammatory, but because I didn’t see how I could justify my decision to the widows and orphans of my staff, in the event of an attack on our offices (and I note that one of the German publications to use the Charlie Hebdo cartoons has just been fire-bombed).

It is essential to admit this element of fear (and several editors have been candid enough to do so), because fear is a very bad and corrosive thing. Fear leads to anger. Fear leads to mistrust. Fear can make you irrational, and in the case of Islamist terrorism, the resulting fear can obviously encourage prejudice and division. Fear leads to hatred – and that is exactly what those terrorists hope to provoke. They want to see anti-Muslim marches of the kind that are now appearing in Germany; they want an anti-Muslim backlash; they want war; and it would be absolutely fatal if we were to allow ourselves to fall for it.

Imagine if, instead of his famous call to “fight them on the beaches”, Winston Churchill had said something like this back in 1940. “Fear leads to hatred and that is exactly what the Nazis hope to provoke. They want to see us sending out warships to guard the Channel. They want an anti-German backlash; they want war and it would be absolutely fatal if we were to allow ourselves to fall for it.”

The astonishing thing is that Boris Johnson knows his history. He and other self-admitted cowards know that Chamberlain was wrong to attempt to appease Hitler, just as FDR was wrong to attempt to appease Stalin, and yet they are making precisely the same mistake by trying to pretend that Islam can be won over if they are sufficiently accommodating.

Everything about the multicultural status quo is a lie. The headline in the Telegraph says: “Paris march of unity: after a minute’s silence the crowd roared ‘We are not afraid!'”

They lie. They are most certainly afraid. They are afraid of the Muslims in their midst, and they are afraid of the nationalist forces that are rising. They are right to be afraid, because it is primarily their fault that the Reconquista 2.0 is now both necessary and inevitable.

Multiculturalism’s last gasp

The march in Paris today is a pathetic and pointless globalist fart in the wind of the resurgent nationalism that will scour Europe in the next decade:

One million people were today preparing to march through the streets of Paris in tribute to the 17 victims of massacre in the city. British Prime Minister David Cameron was one of approximately 40 world leaders scheduled to take part in the solidarity march in the French capital. In a show of support for the French people, Mr Cameron was to stand alongside French President Francois Hollande in sympathy for the victims executed by terrorists….

Security services across the world have reportedly received intelligence that more terror attacks are ‘highly likely’, as a ring of steel was placed around the French capital for today’s march. There are fears that Al Qaeda and Islamic State-linked terror cells will be activated as the city prepares to host the rally this afternoon.

By mid-morning, approximately 2,000 police officers and 1,400 soldiers were deployed across Paris in an atmosphere described by one officer on the scene as ‘extremely tense’. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said ‘exceptional measures’ were being taken to try and prevent further attacks, including deploying snipers on roofs.

This is nothing more than a futile demonstration meant to prop up the failing status quo, which is so fragile that a single jihadist could render it all moot in seconds today. None of this will end until the genie is again returned to the bottle, which is to say, until Islam has been forcibly expelled from the continent for the third time.

The multiculturalist position consists of lies stacked upon more lies. When Angela Merkel claims there is no place for anti-Muslim intolerance, she is attacking more than TWO-THIRDS of the German electorate that is not Muslim. In a November poll by the Bertelsmann Foundation, 61 percent of the German people said: “Islam has no place in the West”.

61 percent is not an outlier. That is the mainstream position. That is the will of the people. That was before PEGIDA, before the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and before the Jewish deli murders. It is probably over 70 percent by now. What there is no place for is traitorous, anti-democratic “leaders” like Merkel, Hollande, Cameron, and the other anti-nationalists who are marching in Paris today.

Islam is not compatible with the West. Islam is literally at war with the West, which is part of the Dar al-Harb, “the House of War”. As Mizanur Rahman has declared, Britain is the enemy of Islam. So is France. So is Germany. So is Italy. So is the United States of America. Samuel Huntington warned of this coming great clash of civilizations back in 1993. Enoch Powell warned of the rivers of blood that would flow if mass immigration from non-European countries was permitted back in 1968.

That long-predicted day has finally arrived. If the situation is not adequately addressed in the next decade, then the Rotherhams and Parises will eventually become Peshawars and Bagas. Now the victims of Islam in the West are numbered in double-digits, eventually they will be numbered in the hundreds and the thousands, if the Reconquista 2.0 does not begin sooner rather than later.

Sooner or later, it will begin. All of this could have been easily prevented, but the Left preached its lies of open borders and immigration and tolerance and diversity, and the people of the West stupidly believed them. Some fools still believe them, although most who claim to do so primarily cling to them out of fear and desperate hope against hope. But prevention is no longer an option. The choice is now between Charlie Hebdo and Charlie Martel.

As for those who claim that we cannot hold all Muslims responsible for the actions of their military wing, I will remind them that the free people of the West had absolutely no problem holding all Germans responsible for the actions of a few National Socialists. I note that the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has already declared that France is at war with “radical Islam”, even though the vast majority of radical Muslims did not kill anyone in Paris this week.

The fact is that Islam is already at war with the West, regardless of what its “moderate” Fifth Columnists falsely claim. It has always been at war with the West, it simply hasn’t always had the ability to effectively wage that war. But the West gave it that ability and now the people of the West are paying the price through fear, crime, taxes, the loss of liberty, and blood.

“This bloodbath proves that those who laughed at or ignored the fears of so many people about a looming danger of Islamism were wrong,” said Alexander Gauland, a regional leader of AfD, which has its roots in the euro crisis and is currently riding at 25% in nationwide polls, on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. “This gives new weight to Pegida demands.”

In France the leader of the far-right Front National, Marine Le Pen, went further. “We must be in a position to respond to the war that has been declared by Islamist fundamentalism,” she said after a meeting on Friday of party leaders called at the Élysée Palace by the president, François Hollande.

“I regret that word has not been uttered by [Hollande] nor other politicians. The first thing when one is fighting a war is to be able to know what we’re fighting. We’re fighting an ideology, Islamist fundamentalism. Not to say it is a proof of weakness.”

Hultgreen-Curie waits

The RAF foolishly decides to defy Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome:

First woman to command an RAF fast jet squadron named as Wing Commander Nikki Thomas. Wg Cdr Thomas is expected to lead bombing missions over Iraq this summer.  A woman who has become the first to command an RAF fast jet squadron is expected to lead bombing missions over Iraq this summer.

​Wing Commander Nikki Thomas​, who took charge of the newly reformed No 12 Squadron at RAF Marham in Norfolk​ ​on Friday​, flew a daring low mission to help foil a deadly rocket attack on a UK base in Afghanistan. The 36-year-old is a weapons system operator with extensive experience of combat operations, clocking up more than 35 missions in Afghanistan within three months alone. 

One wishes the Wing Commander the best of luck, but let’s face it, the odds are not on her side. It’s a daring move, especially after the first female Royal Navy captain lasted all of three months.

In not entirely unrelated news, the Marines are finding it hard to find a single woman who can pass the officer course:

Two female Marine officers who volunteered to attempt the Corps’ challenging Infantry Officer Course did not proceed beyond the first day of the course, a Marine Corps spokesperson confirms to the Free Beacon. The two were the only female officers attempting the course in the current cycle, which began Thursday in Quantico, Virginia.

With the two most recent drops, there have been 29 attempts by female officers to pass the course since women have been allowed to volunteer, with none making it to graduation. (At least one woman has attempted the course more than once.) Only three female officers have made it beyond the initial day of training, a grueling evaluation known as the Combat Endurance Test, or CET. Male officers also regularly fail to pass the CET, and the overall course has a substantial attrition rate for males.

The Marine Corps spokesperson, Captain Maureen Krebs, told the Free Beacon that the two officers, “did not meet the standards required of them on day one in order to continue on with the course.” Fifteen male officers also did not meet the standards. Of the 118 officers who began the course, 101 proceeded to the second day. 

It’s mildly amusing to see that the reporter feels the need to point out that men have been known to fail the course as well, although at least he’s honest enough to provide the statistics that demonstrate show 13 percent of the male candidates failed CET, compared to 100 percent of the female candidates.

The Marines are under tremendous pressure to water down their standards. One hopes, for the sake of future Marines, they will stand firm nevertheless. And we can be all but certain that if a woman ever does pass the course, she’ll be a strong candidate for Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome.