Tag: war

Speed bumps

Apparently the USA learned nothing from the Cold War:

The new Army commander in Europe plans to bolster the U.S. armored presence in Poland and the Baltic states and keep rotations of U.S. troops there through next year and possibly beyond to counter Russia. Lt. Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, who replaced Lt. Gen. Donald M. Campbell  earlier this month as commander of U.S. Army Europe, said the Army was looking to add about 100 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles to the forces in Eastern Europe.

Since taking command, Hodges has made clear his concerns about
Russia, which annexed Crimea last March and has supported the
separatists in eastern Ukraine. U.S. Army Europe, which had 280,000
troops at the height of the Cold War, now has 31,000.

The rotations of U.S. troops on training missions in Eastern Europe
would provide “deterrence against Russian aggression,” Hodges said. “I don’t think that Russia has any intention of some sort of a
conventional attack into NATO territory because they know that would
generate an Article 5 response.”

Translation: We know from the old Fulda Gap that 100 tanks won’t actually do anything militarily except provide a speed bump, but having ground troops there would provide the US with an excuse to get further involved if the Russians elect to follow the US lead in Ukraine and arrange for a “regime change” in Poland or the Baltic states.

One thing many Americans don’t understand is that they are the bad guys in Ukraine. The USA is the evil aggressor that overthrew a flawed but democratically elected government and installed a puppet leadership against which a portion of the country is literally up in arms. This, in addition to the failed US-supported “Arab Spring”, is another reason why anti-Americanism is on the rise in Europe and Asia.

To put it in perspective, imagine if Russia orchestrated the overthrow of the Mexican government (which is every bit as corrupt and shady as the former Ukrainian government was) and installed a pro-Russian puppet who promptly sent all of Mexico’s gold reserves to Moscow and placed Russians on the corporate boards of its oil companies? Do you think the USA would respond in as limited a fashion as Russia has?

Remember, Putin does not have to be a good guy in order for Obama to be the bad guy. The recent warning about ISIS targeting US soldiers in America is apt, as the increase in the amount and extent of US interventions abroad is infuriating more and more people around the world. If the USA won’t leave other sovereign countries alone, it seems likely that sooner or later, someone is going to return the favor.

Operation Arab Sea Lion

Surge in Arabic names this year with Omar, Ali and Ibrahim all in top 100.  For girls, Maryam has shot to number 35, while Nur is new entry. And Muhammad rose astonishing 27 places to claim the number-one spot.

In England.

“Fourth Generation war is also marked by a return to a world of cultures, not merely states, in conflict. We now find ourselves facing the Christian West’s oldest and most steadfast opponent, Islam. After about three centuries on the strategic defensive, following the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, Islam has resumed the strategic offensive expanding outward in every direction. In Fourth Generation war, invasion by immigration can be at least as dangerous as invasion by a state army.”
– William S. Lind, “Understanding 4th Generation War”, 1989

The Ministry of Lies

With its recent public statement on Syria, the U.S. government has gone full 1984:

The US has seized on Syrian air force strikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) stronghold of Raqqa to denounce Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and push for his government’s removal. For the past three years, the Obama administration has backed anti-Assad militias in Syria. The main aim of its new Middle Eastern war remains regime-change in Damascus.

US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Wednesday said the US was “horrified” by reports that Syrian air strikes the previous day killed scores of civilians. She condemned the Syrian regime’s “continued slaughter of Syria civilians” and “callous disregard for human life,” declaring that “Assad long ago lost all legitimacy to govern.”

According to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 95 people were killed in the air strikes on Tuesday, including 52 civilians. A Raqqa activist with the Syrian opposition network—the Local Co-ordination Committees—told the BBC that further deaths were likely because only one hospital was operating normally in the city and “a lot of people [are] dying from their wounds.” Both organisations are aligned with the pro-Western opposition in Syria that is hostile to both Assad and ISIS.

 Meanwhile:

Although the US-led coalition has conducted about 300 air strikes in Syria since September, it has evidently failed to weaken the Islamic State, stated Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem. “All the indications say that (Islamic State) today, after two months of coalition air strikes, is not weaker,” Walid al-Moualem emphasized in an interview with the Beirut-based Al Mayadeen TV broadcast, as quoted by Reuters.

It’s like a very bad, very dark joke. Washington is denouncing Syrian air strikes on the Islamic State while simultaneously launching 300 of its own air strikes on the Islamic State in Syrian territory.

Do you still seriously question the obvious fact that the US government are the bad guys here? Do good guys ever behave in a manner indistinguishable from Orwell’s fictional monsters? Do you still wonder why fewer and fewer people believe a single word coming out of the U.S. federal government? Perhaps the biggest irony is that Washington is decrying Syrian air strikes that caused LESS collateral damage, in percentage terms, than the AVERAGE U.S. air strike.

If Assad’s government is said to have lost its legitimacy to govern on the basis of a single day’s air strikes, has not the U.S. government also lost its legitimacy on the basis of the hundreds of air strikes it launched over the course of three months?  I also note that this further supports William S. Lind’s statement about the effectiveness of air power:

“Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who
weren’t your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow
tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as
useful as 420mm siege mortars.”
 –  from “Incapable of Learning”, ON WAR

Temperatures rising in the East

Taiwan hasn’t declared independence yet. But they are clearly moving in that direction, apparently in response to the Chinese crackdowns in Hong Kong. From Generational Dynamics:

Taiwan’s ruling nationalist party KMT (Kuomintang) suffered disastrous losses in local elections across Taiwan on Saturday, giving victories to the opposing DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), and forcing the resignation of the prime minister. Thousands of municipalities, including the capital city Taipei, that had been ruled for years by KMT mayors and politicians will not be ruled by DPP mayors and politicians.

The Kuomintang (KMT) is the modern day incarnation of Chiang Kai-shek’s original nationalist party of soldiers that fought against Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolution and lost, and fled to Hong Kong, then a British colony, and from there to Formosa (Taiwan) in 1949, at the conclusion of the civil war. The KMT position has always been that Taiwan would reunite with China.

KMT held an iron grip on power in Taiwan after the war, and that only began to fade in the 1980s with the founding of the DPP. However, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, which people in Taiwan viewed with horror, proved to be a catalyst in turning Taiwanese people against Beijing, and by 2000 the DPP won a national election. A DPP corruption scandal in 2006 put KMT back into power, and KMT officials have been working closely with Beijing officials to woo Taiwan’s public to voluntarily want reunite with China.

The policy hasn’t really been effective. There are two groups of people who don’t want to reunite. One group is the indigenous Taiwanese people who lived there before 1949, and who have suffered at the hands of the KMT. Young people generally form the second group, and they distrust China and they distrust the KMT for selling out to China.

The problem isn’t that the Red Navy is capable of defeating the US Navy. It isn’t. But it increasingly looks capable of giving the US Navy a seriously bloody nose if it intervenes in cross-strait hostilities between China and Taiwan, and never forget, the Chinese always play a long game. And there is no way, none, that the American people have any stomach whatsoever for war with China after thirteen years of pointless and desultory war in Afghanistan.

I suspect the Chinese may be aware of that, which may explain why so many of their wealthy are stashing their children and buying up properties in the USA. I doubt there will be any open war, but there will likely be growing pressure being exerted on Taiwan with the threat of force behind it.

More collateral than damage

Like it or not, the US is clearly guilty of large-scale terrorism:

The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur.

Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.

However many Americans know who Zawahiri is, far fewer are familiar with Qari Hussain. Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Qaida that trained the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before his unsuccessful 2010 attack. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010.

Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.

A new analysis of the data available to the public about drone strikes, conducted by the human-rights group Reprieve, indicates that even when operators target specific individuals – the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls “targeted killing” – they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November.

I’m not entirely sure such indifference to collateral damage is correctly described as not meaning to harm anyone except the targeted individual. Regardless, it’s become abundantly clear there is no such thing as “targeted killing” that doesn’t involve soldiers on the ground pulling the trigger. And I suspect in less than ten years, cheap DIY drone technology will drive US politicians almost entirely underground as they become the targets of those they have so ineffectively targeted.

Unless, of course, cheap, but powerful ground-to-air laser technology renders drone technology completely useless.

Casualty in the Cabinet

Obama fires his Secretary of Defense:

Chuck Hagel has been fired as defense secretary. We were critical of his appointment, and opposed his confirmation by the Senate. But let’s be clear: Hagel has done what he was asked and what was expected of him at the Pentagon. To the degree he has deviated from the Obama White House line, he’s been more right than wrong (e.g., on the threat the Islamic State poses).

So why has he been fired? Because the Obama White House needs a scapegoat. President George W, Bush fired Don Rumsfeld in connection with a change in strategy (the surge) and to bring in someone of independent stature. That’s not the case today. President Obama continues to want a Pentagon with weak leadership and little independence. There’s therefore no reason to expect the next two years of Obama foreign and defense policy to be any better than the past two.

He’s fired an awful lot of generals too, come to think of it. I don’t know if there have any bigger purges among the brass since pre-WWII Stalin.

ISIS drops the gold bomb

The Islamic State has barely been around for a year and already it has a stronger, more stable currency than either the USA or the European Union:

Islamic State is set to become the only ‘state’ to back its currency with gold (silver and copper) as it unveils the new coins that will be used in an attempt to solidify its makeshift caliphate. ISIS says the new currency will take the group  out of “the oppressors’ money system.” As Zaid Benjamin notes, ISIS releases details of its new currancy with golden 1 & 5 dinar, silver 1, 5, 10 dirham and copper 10 & 20 fils

They don’t permit usury and they back their currency with gold. In the long term, Osama bin Laden may have been right about who was the strong horse and who was not. The fact that an ideologically weakened, demographically dying West, which is no longer Christian nor ethnically homogenous, nor nationalistic, still has a technological edge, is not likely to make the difference in the long run.

To paraphrase Tom Kratman: always bring a gun to a gunfight and always bring a religion to a religious war.

This move by ISIS may be particularly effective now that the USA has all but destroyed the international banking system with FATCA and the SWIFT sanctions. Look for Russia and China to follow suit before too long.

3GW at sea?

The US military may be beginning to learn the hard way that high-tech warfare is powerful, but fragile:

On 10 April 2014, the USS Donald Cook entered the waters of the Black Sea and on 12 April a Russian Su-24 tactical bomber flew over the vessel triggering an incident that,
according to several media reports, completely demoralized its crew, so
much so that the Pentagon issued a protest.

The USS Donald Cook (DDG-75) is a 4th generation guided missile destroyer whose key weapons are Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of up to 2,500 kilometers, and capable of carrying nuclear explosives. This ship carries 56 Tomahawk missiles in standard mode, and 96 missiles in attack mode.

The US destroyer is equipped with the most recent Aegis Combat System.
It is an integrated naval weapons systems which can link together the
missile defense systems of all vessels embedded within the same network,
so as to ensure the detection, tracking and destruction of hundreds of
targets at the same time. In addition, the USS Donald Cook is
equipped with 4 large radars, whose power is comparable to that of
several stations. For protection, it carries more than fifty
anti-aircraft missiles of various types.

Meanwhile, the Russian Su-24 that buzzed the USS Donald Cook carried neither bombs nor missiles but only a basket mounted under the fuselage, which, according to the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, contained a Russian electronic warfare device called Khibiny.

As the Russian jet approached the US vessel, the electronic device
disabled all radars, control circuits, systems, information
transmission, etc. on board the US destroyer. In other words, the
all-powerful Aegis system, now hooked up – or about to be – with
the defense systems installed on NATO’s most modern ships was shut down,
as turning off the TV set with the remote control.

The Russian Su-24 then simulated a missile attack against the USS Donald Cook,
which was left literally deaf and blind. As if carrying out a training
exercise, the Russian aircraft – unarmed – repeated the same maneuver 12
times before flying away.

After that, the 4th generation destroyer immediately set sail towards a port in Romania. Since that incident, which the Atlanticist media have carefully
covered up despite the widespread reactions sparked among defense
industry experts, no US ship has ever approached Russian territorial
waters again.  According to some specialized media, 27 sailors from the USS Donald Cook requested to be relieved from active service.

This has been going around, but while the SU-24 is confirmed to have successfully buzzed the destroyer, some of the details are being disputed.

In truth the Russian fighter did fly 12 times provocatively close to the US destroyer, and Col. Warren did report the incident to Reuters. However, this is where the truth ends.

In reality Warren told the following to the agency: “This provocative and unprofessional Russian action is inconsistent with international protocols and previous agreements on the professional interaction between our militaries.”

The plane appeared to be unarmed, according to Warren. The pilot did not respond to multiple queries from the Cook. Warren also added that another Russian fighter was also flying in the area, but not as close to the ship as the other one.

Warren said the vessel was not in any serious danger. The Pentagon website cited the Colonel’s words: “The Donald Cook is more than capable of defending herself against two SU-24s.

I think that the only way we can know the truth is by observing if US Navy ships continue to enter the Black Sea or not. One thing American readers may not know is that Russian warplanes have tested NATO air defenses more than 40 times in the last nine months. So it’s far from implausible that they are sending a similar “back off” message to the US naval forces as well in light of the Obama administration’s foolish, if not downright insane, decision to interfere in Ukraine.

However, the specific details appear to be closer to a Tom Clancy novel than anything that happened in 2014. It’s much more likely that 27 pregnant sailors were quietly relieved from active duty than 27 sailors quit from sheer terror of Russian ECW capabilities.

Two failed wars

A lieutenant general regrets the wasted lives of his soldiers, thrown away for nothing in Iraq and Afghanistan:

As a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, I lost 80 soldiers.
Despite their sacrifices, and those of thousands more, all we have to
show for it are two failed wars. This fact eats at me every day, and Veterans Day is tougher than most…. We can convince ourselves that we did our part, and a few more diplomats or civilian leaders should have done theirs. Similar myths no doubt comforted Americans who fought under the command of Robert E. Lee in the Civil War or William C. Westmoreland in Vietnam. But as a three-star general who spent four years trying to win this thing — and failing — I now know better.

We did not understand the enemy, a guerrilla network embedded in a quarrelsome, suspicious civilian population. We didn’t understand our own forces, which are built for rapid, decisive conventional operations, not lingering, ill-defined counterinsurgencies. We’re made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam. As a general, I got it wrong. Like my peers, I argued to stay the course, to persist and persist, to “clear/hold/build” even as the “hold” stage stretched for months, and then years, with decades beckoning. We backed ourselves season by season into a long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq, then compounded it by doing likewise in Afghanistan.

What went wrong in Iraq and in Afghanistan isn’t the stuff of legend. It won’t bring people into the recruiting office, or make for good speeches on Veterans Day. Reserve those honors for the brave men and women who bear the burdens of combat.

That said, those who served deserve an accounting from the generals. What happened? How? And, especially, why? It has to be a public assessment, nonpartisan and not left to the military. (We tend to grade ourselves on the curve.) Something along the lines of the 9/11 Commission is in order. We owe that to our veterans and our fellow citizens.

Such an accounting couldn’t be more timely. Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren’t enough, we’re told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we’re there.

As a veteran, and a general who learned hard lessons in two lost campaigns, I’d like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It’s not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat.

Clearly the general should have read ON WAR. William S. Lind could have told him – in fact, did tell him – that the US military could not defeat the Pashtun in Afghanistan or rebuild the state it shattered in Iraq.

SJWs are Gramscian culture warriors

In which esr points out that SJW tactics are the same as those utilized by the Nazis and the Communists before them:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists….

I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover
from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and
waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize
Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern
leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our
politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t
hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with
attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later
get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t
want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do,
either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our
children, we’d better get to work.

Esr is addressing the danger posed by Islam here, not SJWs, and he’s talking about the entire West rather than the assault on the game industry but he’s describing the same tactics derived from the same playbook as part of the same anti-Western cultural war.

I have little doubt that he is right. Many, if not most, #GamerGaters would rather drink the blood of every single SJW than submit to them. In the same vein, many Americans would rather see a ruthless pro-white, pro-Western government led by the hard-eyed likes of Vladimir Putin than watch their nation continue to vanish in a swarm of third world immigration. The Left, for all their drama queen antics, doesn’t realize how many Men of the West are never, ever going to submit to them.

And if the sweet reason of the esr’s prove impotent, the Breiviks will rise. Esr thought, back in 2006, that there was an excellent chance the West can recover from the intellectual disease without violence. Eight years later, in 2014, I am considerably less sanguine about those odds.