Tag: war

Why doesn’t Putin fear the US military?

This is an example of one of the likely reasons:

On Saturday, six gay and straight service members applied some of their finest makeup and lip synced to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” in what is believed to be first drag queen and king show on an American military base. The show was thrown in support for the base’s recently formed OutServe-SLDN chapter, a nonprofit advocacy group for the army’s LGBT community.

Navy Lt. Marissa Greene told Stars and Stripes she only expected to sell 75 tickets for the variety show, but ended up selling more than 400 in ten days. The event went through the same approval process as other on-base fundraisers go through, with the only caveat being that it was not allowed to be labeled a “drag show” in its publicity materials. The show was warmly received by spectators, who rocked out to performances by the likes of Manny Nuff and Chocolate Sunrise (“a crowd favorite,” the website notes.)

Just a few years ago, performances like these would have been grounds for a possible discharge. The repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has made it possible for events like this to occur.

This is the Club Play Dance Edition of the US Armed Forces, right up to the closeted Commander-in-Chief. Why on Earth would Putin take seriously a military that has decided to put gays and women on the front lines and gutted its capabilities in favor of foolish imperial adventures and social progress?

Putin may have seized the Crimea, but he had better watch himself carefully now or Obama will pose at him a second time. Oh, SNAP!

And for the Christian conservatives who cling to the belief that America is particularly favored by God, the fact that the military has been literally Sodomized should suffice to indicate otherwise.

Blowback in Ukraine

Apparently the whole CIA Spring strategy isn’t so effective when someone is prepared for it:

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Sunday that his country was “on the brink of disaster” and personally blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for bringing the two nations to the verge of war. Speaking to reporters at the Ukrainian parliament, Mr. Yatsenyuk called on the international community to rein in Mr. Putin and pressure him to remove troops from the Crimean peninsula, where a majority of residents are ethnic Russians but have Ukrainian passports.

“If President Putin wants to be the president who starts the war between two friendly and neighboring countries, he has [almost] reached this target,” Mr. Yatsenyuk said. “We are on the brink of disaster. There was no reason for the Russian Federation to invade Ukraine.”

Western diplomats doubt that the Ukrainian armed forces would be able to match up to the Russian forces already in control of the critical infrastructure and border points in the Crimea. Ukrainian leaders say that Russia has already sent an additional 6,000 troops to Crimea since tensions arose in the peninsula last week. The two countries have a military agreement that allows Moscow to base forces in the region, but Ukrainian officials accuse Moscow of violating that treaty by not informing Kiev of additional troops, and by moving forces without prior notice. Moscow says that it is in compliance of the accord.

Earlier Sunday, Ukraine’s interior minister said Russian officials had approached Ukrainian officers remaining in Crimea and offered them immediate Russian citizenship. “Across the entire territory of Crimea, Russian emissaries and military officers have invited the remaining Ukrainian interior ministry troops to take Russian citizenship and immediately receive Russian passports,” Arsen Avakov wrote on his Facebook page. “This appeal has been aimed at upper and middle officer corps troops.”

So, instead of Ukraine being independent and leaning towards Russia, the US-sponsored anti-democratic coup looks as if it will hand at least part of the nation right back to Russia. The thing is, there is no one who buys the whole “sovereign Ukraine” thing; everyone knows this is just the neocons latest project.

And meanwhile, China is sitting silently on the other side of the world, taking notes.

Not so stupid after all

Tina Fey’s comments about the visibility of Russia notwithstanding, it appears Sarah Palin’s foreign policy perspective was, in some ways, more perspicacious than Barack Obama’s:

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned that if Senator Barack Obama were elected president, his “indecision” and “moral equivalence” may encourage Russia’s Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.

Palin said then: After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine.  In light of recent events in Ukraine and concerns that Russia is getting its troops ready to cross the border into the neighboring nation, nobody seems to be laughing at or dismissing those comments now.

Hounshell wrote then that Palin’s comments were “strange” and “this is an extremely far-fetched scenario.”

“And given how Russia has been able to unsettle Ukraine’s pro-Western government without firing a shot, I don’t see why violence would be necessary to bring Kiev to heel,” Hounshell dismissively wrote.

That being said, the problem wasn’t Obama’s indecision, but rather the decision of the USA to support and encourage the anti-democratic revolutionaries who forced Ukraine’s democratically elected president to flee, thus handing Putin the international moral high ground and permitting him to send in Russian troops “to restore democracy” to Ukraine.

The real cost of the Obama foreign policy is that he has simply thrown away America’s second-greatest foreign policy asset; the credible claim that the USA held the moral high ground vis-a-vis its enemies. The Obama administration has never understood that even when one has overwhelming might on one’s side, the failure to establish at least a credible claim to the moral high ground means that those who might otherwise stay neutral will be forced into at least nominal opposition.

This is why Rome, in several centuries of world-spanning conquest, never fought a war that wasn’t “defensive”, and why Hitler went to the trouble of dressing dead bodies in Polish uniforms to excuse the Nazi invasion of Poland. The USA has gone from a global crusade for democracy to overthrowing multiple duly elected governments in a few short years, and this has not escaped the world’s attention.

Of course, President McCain would have been even worse, in foreign policy terms, than President Obama. Obama may have handed Putin an excuse to invade Ukraine, but at least he hasn’t started an open war with Russia… yet.

Dead Horse: the conclusive beating

Longtime Ilk will recall that once upon a time, in 2004, a lengthy debate was inspired by a book written by Me-So-Michelle that insisted the WWII-era internment of Japanese-Americans was justified on the basis of legitimate military fears of an invasion of America’s West Coast in early 1942. I took extreme exception to that ludicrous attempt to justify internment, knowing that the argument was complete nonsense, and demonstrated that Malkin hadn’t done even a modicum of military research given her incorrect count of US carriers and inability to correctly interpret the significance of US carrier movements in early 1942.

This did not prevent a number of Malkin fans from attempting to defend the woman, mostly on the sophisticated grounds of “yeah, but, how can you REALLY know, for, like, you know, sure?”

As it happens, the recently released gray book of Admiral Chester Nimitz, published by the American Naval Records Society, not only makes for fascinating reading, but conclusively settles the matter of the US military’s historical concerns regarding a potential invasion of the American West Coast in 1942. These are the verbatim words of the US Navy’s assessment of the situation in January 1942, quoted from Volume 1 of the briefings for the USN Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Fleet (CINCPACFLT). There is considerably more information than this available, but I have only transcribed that which is directly relevant to the subject at hand.

January 8, 1942
EMPLOYMENT OF CARRIER TASK FORCES IN JANUARY

ENEMY SITUATION
From the best intelligence we have, it appears that:

  1. The Far East offensives are occupying practically all of the amphibious forces of the enemy plus 3 or 4 carriers, 2 BB’s, about 13 cruisers, about one-third of his destroyers, some submarines and many auxiliary types. How long these forces will be needed in the Far East is problematical but it is believed that the end of January will see them there.
  2. Since the raid on the 7th, all First Fleet units and carriers have apparently remained west of the Eastern Marshalls.
  3. Carrier groups are being refitted or exchanged.

ENEMY INTENTION

In other estimates the enemy’s intentions in general order of priority have been deduced as follows:

a) The prosecution of the offensives in the Far East until all of Malaya, Philippines and NEI have been captured. In this will probably be included Rangoon.
b) Consolidation of this territory.
c) Advance upon Australia.

    While these are going on:

d) Continued submarine raids on our forces and communications, minor attacks against outlying islands and Alaska.
e) Cruiser raids against the routes to Australia, and possibly to the Mainland.
f) Capture Samoa.
g) Capture Canton. [Canton Island (Kiribati)]
i) Capture Java.
J) Attack with strong forces, including carriers, for demolition Johnston, Palmyra, Midway.
k) Sweeps in force along our communications to outlying islands; along our route to Mainland.
l) Carrier raids on West Coast.
m) Attacks for capture of Midway, Palmyra; main Hawaiian Islands; Oahu.

One of the basic questions facing us is: Is the close cover of Oahu necessary at this time? Taking in combination the present state of its defenses and our deductions as to enemy intentions, the answer is “no”.

In other words, the admiral commanding all the US military forces in the Pacific had absolutely no fear of a West Coast invasion, knew perfectly well that the limited Japanese transport capacity was committed elsewhere, and even went so far to conclude that the risk of a Hawaiian invasion was so low that it was not necessary to closely defend Hawaii, let alone California. Not only were Japanese naval forces fully engaged in the Far East, but their anticipated next move was in precisely the opposite direction from the West Coast!

As for the prospective carrier raids, I addressed the logistical aspects of them back in 2004 and showed that no amount of carrier raids could have even slowed down the American production of war materials, much less “cripple the war effort”, as evidenced by the INCREASE in German manufacture under heavier and more regular bombing than the sort permitted by carrier raids.

The lesson, as before, is this: Michelle Malkin is an ignorant media whore with risible intellectual pretensions. To the best of my knowledge, she has never come out and admitted that she was wrong, nor has she publicly disavowed the ridiculous argument she presented in her book In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror.

Cracks in the Pax

Contra the myth of shining happy progress, China and Japan appear to be heading directly into military conflict again:

Chan Kai Yee of China Daily Mail, a blog with no connection to Beijing, Feb. 22, 2014, provides the following summary translation of an article in Qianzhan.com,
a Chinese-language news site headquartered in the city of Shenzhen in
China’s southeastern Guangdong province, with offices in Beijing and
Hong Kong:

Quite a few people have said that the conflict over the Diaoyus (known as Senkakus in Japan) has passed the stage of oral confrontation and what follows may very probably be direct military conflict.

It is especially so as, relying on US support, Japan is obviously declaring war against China already. Sources say that China’s Central Military Commission has directly given Chinese military the instruction: “Fight if it is appropriate to fight.

Sources pointed out that they had received information that Xi Jinping, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, gave a relevant warning to a Japanese economic and trade delegation that recently visited China. Xi specially pointed out to the delegation when he met them, if Japan kept provoking China and thus gave rise to an unstable situation, it alone has to be responsible for all the consequences.

What we are seeing here is the pre-positioning for the collapse of the global Pax Americana. The US is intervening in the internal affairs of foreign governments ever more actively than any time since the 1950s, but it is doing so now without the benefit of a credible military threat. While the weaponry is still significantly advanced and there is still a core of excellent soldiers, it is no secret that the population has zero will-to-fight and the military has been all but broken by constant misuse and overuse as well as the incessant social meddling by its civilian overseers. Vladimir Putin recognizes this, as do the Communist oligarchs of China. So, too, do the Eurofascists of the EU.

The world’s second-rate powers can’t stand directly against the USA yet, but they know the time is rapidly approaching when they will be able to do so. Remember, it only took 22 years for Germany to go from laying prostrate and defeated before the Western Allies to defeating France. Already, the US finds itself unable to impose its will upon China. In another generation, the USA will be unable to impose its will in Asia.  It’s not unthinkable that a generation after that, its European influence will be gone and US hegemony will be largely limited to the area of the historical Monroe Doctrine.

And clearly it isn’t only the foreign governments who anticipate this:

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel plans to shrink the United States Army to its smallest force since before the World War II buildup and eliminate an entire class of Air Force attack jets in a new spending proposal that officials describe as the first Pentagon budget to aggressively push the military off the war footing adopted after the terror attacks of 2001.

The proposal, described by several Pentagon officials on the condition of anonymity in advance of its release on Monday, takes into account the fiscal reality of government austerity and the political reality of a president who pledged to end two costly and exhausting land wars. A result, the officials argue, will be a military capable of defeating any adversary, but too small for protracted foreign occupations.

The size of the military and the expenditure upon it can rapidly change, but the population from which it draws won’t. Between Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Younger, and Obama, is there a single individual one could honestly recommend anyone accepting on oath as a commander-in-chief? And as for the time-hallowed notion of  “serving one’s country”, what country would one serve now? North Mexico? Israel? Melting Pottomia? Democracy?

The only people in whose interests the US government appears completely unwilling to intervene is the Revolutionary American people.

Regime change comes to Eastern Europe

I have to admit, I haven’t been paying attention and I have no idea who is even supposed to be “the good guys” in Ukraine:

  • Ukrainian Health Ministry said 88 police, six journalists and four foreigners were among those hospitalised
  • Ukraine’s Interior ministry says 67 police troops have been captured by protesters in Kiev
  • At least 50 people have died in clashes in Kiev that came just days after the crisis in the Ukraine seemed to be over
  • Government snipers were reported to be shooting at some of the protesters in Kiev
  • Protest leaders and president called truce after two days of violent clashes between activists and police
  • President Barack Obama condemned violence, warning ‘there will be consequences’ for Ukraine if it continues
  • President Viktor Yanukovych declared Thursday a day of mourning for the dead
  • Several thousand protesters remained on Independence Square in Kiev and clashed with police on Thursday

It seems bizarre that one side is (allegedly) taking prisoners while the other one is (reportedly) shooting unarmed protesters. But those protesters don’t look particularly unarmed, what with the shotguns and all. And the fact that the Obama administration is pushing the Bush Doctrine of regime change in Europe makes me very suspicious of any attempt to turn the protesters into the good guys after their attempt to whitewash the psychopaths in Syria.

Women in combat: a prelude

The Sochi Winter Olympics are providing a useful service in demonstrating the complete absurdity of the woman warrior meme:

Sarka Pancochova, a Czech snowboarder, led the slopestyle event after the first run. On her second trip down the course of obstacles and jumps, she flew through the air, performed a high-arcing, spinning trick and smacked her head upon landing. Her limp body spun like a propeller into the gully between jumps and slid to a stop.

Pancochova was soon on her feet, and the uneasy crowd cheered. Her helmet was cracked nearly in half, back to front. She was one of the lucky ones, seemingly O.K., but her crash last week was indicative of a bigger issue: a messy collage of violent wipeouts at these Olympics. Most of the accidents have occurred at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, the site of the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events like halfpipe, slopestyle and moguls.

And most of the injuries have been sustained by women….

The Winter Games have always had dangerous events. But the Extreme Park,
as the name suggests, is built on the ageless allure of danger. All of
the events there have been added to the Olympic docket since 1992, each a
tantalizing cocktail of grace and peril.But
unlike some of the time-honored sports of risk, including Alpine
skiing, luge and ski jumping, there are few concessions made for women.

For both sexes, the walls of the halfpipe are 22 feet tall. The
slopestyle course has the same tricky rails and the same huge jumps. The
course for ski cross and snowboard cross, a six-person race to the
finish over jumps and around icy banked curves, is the same for men and
women. The jumps for aerials are the same height. The bumps in moguls
play no gender favorites.

“Most
of the courses are built for the big show, for the men,” said Kim
Lamarre of Canada, the bronze medalist in slopestyle skiing, where the
competition was delayed a few times by spectacular falls. “I think they
could do more to make it safer for women.”

Compare
the sports with downhill skiing, in which women have their own course,
one that is shorter and less difficult to navigate. Or luge, in which
female sliders start lower on the track than the men. Or ski jump, in
which women were finally allowed to participate this year, but only on
the smaller of the two hills. The Olympics have a history — sexist,
perhaps — of trying to protect women from the perils of some sports.

But equality reigns at the Extreme Park, even to the possible detriment of the female participants.

Actually, equality doesn’t reign. Because the inferior and uncompetitive female athletes don’t compete against the superior men. But the young women are such stupid herd animals that they will literally kill themselves in their incoherent denial.

“I see it every contest,” Cusson said. “Unless they are forced to hit
the smaller side, the best ones will always go for the bigger jumps.
They want to prove to everybody that they are capable. And then all the
other girls will follow.”

As usual, the end result of feminism is more dead and injured women. If one simply judges by the consequences, it should be obvious that feminists hate women far more passionately than even the most virulent misogynist.

They can’t even compete in competitive leisure pastimes without half-killing themselves and requiring surgery, but they’re going to hold their own in combat, where the enemy is actually trying to harm them?

Women not in combat

One aspect of the Amazonian warrior woman that is never considered by its SF/F proponents is the female ability to override any combat assignment at will:

Nearly 100 female British soldiers have been sent home from Afghanistan after finding out they were pregnant. Between January 2006 and December last year, 99 servicewomen on operations have been flown back to the UK under strict military rules that ban mothers-to-be from serving in a war zone.The women were flown back on flights usually reserved for injured troops, meaning the true figure could be higher if other female soldiers came home via routine flights.

That is 1.2 percent of all the women serving in the British Army.  The percentage of women serving in Afghanistan is even higher, though unknown. And keep in mind that only three women have been killed in Afghanistan. This should suffice to demonstrate the complete absurdity of women in combat.  Even if one assumes a 10:1 kill ratio in Afghanistan, it means an Amazonian warrior woman is more than three times likely to get pregnant than to kill a single enemy troop.

In battles between reasonably equivalent forces, such as the Eastern Front in WWII, the kill ratio is 2:1. So, for every enemy soldier killed by a female soldier, the superior army can assume that it will lose 16.5 of its troops to pregnancy.

Imaginary women in the military

It’s not the article at Tor that is of interest here, but rather the discussion between Tom Kratman and a small collection of Pink SF enthusiasts who do not permit their complete ignorance of all things military affect their ability to express some strong opinions on future war: 

“Sexual attraction may be innate, but it’s not universal. See asexual, people who identify as.”

Do you really think the occasional fluke has a whole lot to say about mass armies? If so, why?

How people act on sexual attraction is learned behaviour.

Only in minor details. The love, lust, favoritism, demoralization, and de facto prostitution are fairly universal within any armed force that sees integrated sexes or integrated sexually compatible people unless extraordinary structural provisions are made. Those structural provision include segregation. Here’s an interesting quote from very liberal, very politically correct Canada’s PPCLI battle school: “Male/female attraction will not go away because we tell it to; and soldiers will court considerable risk to pursue the obvious.”

What you really seem to be saying is we can control it. Forget it; we can’t.

What you should not forget is the ability of an army, any army, to make a terrible idea look good through sheer weight of effort and duplicity practiced on an heroic scale. Think Vietnam…or Project 100,000.

“can’t be controlled.” Tom, man. What’re you saying, dude? That people use sex to game the system? (Some people use anything to game systems.) And somehow that’s what, especially unfair? Or you’re saying, what, the act of sex is so inherently super-special it has in itself some peculiarly distorting effect on hierarchies? (Or maybe you’re saying something about sexual coercion, but I’m not going there.) I say to this: grow some imagination. I’m tired of hearing “the future can’t be different because [argument which boils down to “I don’t want to think about what would have to change”].” Like I said, these may not be stories you want to read or tell? But don’t pretend they can’t be told, or that other people may not find your futures as implausible – and even unpleasant – as you might theirs, on good grounds. From where I stand, your futures do live in Opposite World. And unless you bring a more SFnal imagination to our present interaction, my opinion of your wrongheadedness isn’t likely to change.

No, you are presupposing that things which cannot be changed can. Worse, you have no obvious basis for believing it except that you want to. Do you have any expertise in the matter of combat? I do. What you’re demanding isn’t SF; it’s fantasy. The mere fact that you can so lightly dismiss the effect of using sex to game the system, and as if that were all of it, indicates that anything that interferes with your particular fantasy has to be rejected.

Yes, the effect of sex has distorting effects in hierarchies. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at any given corporation, but combat units are not corporations. The next time Bill Gates has to worry about a near ambush or artillery strike on his way to the office will be the first.

In this particular, no, the future cannot be different unless you write away what men and women are, how they think and act, what they care about, and what they’ll take risks for.

Tom’s response is brilliant because it highlights the essential inhumanity of Pink SF. If great fiction speaks to the human condition, the great flaw of Pink SF is that it specifically and overtly rejects the human elements of the human condition. While I defer to Tom Kratman on what he insists is the legitimate possibility, given a considerable quantity of extreme and particular training, of women serving in an effective military unit, I remain extremely dubious that even the conventional notions of superstrength and mandatory reversible birth control could begin to permit women to become even mediocre soldiers. (4-3-6), in ASL terms, would be a best case scenario.

While I am not a military veteran, I am both a student of military history and a former martial arts fighter. As the former, I am aware that what settles battles is not who can kill the other side more effectively, but rather, who can cause the other side to run away or otherwise quit fighting first. As the latter, I have observed that women quit fighting as soon as they take a single damaging strike and not infrequently before then.

I have seen many men fight with broken bones; I myself once won a ringfight after having my nose broken in the initial exchange. I have never seen a woman get up off the ground after being flattened or bloodied and continue fighting except when she is in training with someone she trusts not to intentionally hurt her. In fact, when a woman isn’t hurt but simply gets frightened while sparring, she tends to turn her back on the opponent and literally cringe.

So, my conclusion is that women in combat will either surrender or run like rabbits as soon as they get sufficiently frightened or their unit takes a few casualties.

This comment, in particular, amused me:

Then again, on the other hand, we have John Scalzi, against whom I can
levy no such complaint. Scalzi, unlike Ringo, Kratman, or Williamson,
doesn’t have a military background of his own. Yet I find his future
military more convincingly science-fictional than those of the aforementioned authors. Why is that?

I would think the answer is entirely obvious. Because you know nothing about war or the military and you prefer your weird non-science fantasies about old people’s orgies and men exchanging sexual favors to anything that can be reasonably extrapolated from the last 8,000 years of recorded military history.

The militaries in the science fiction world of QUANTUM MORTIS do not utilize female soldiers for the obvious reason that they are actually expected to engage in combat. The science fiction elements there involve physical augmentation, targeting-assisted weaponry, artificial intelligence, and interstellar mercenary corporations. They do not involve silly fantasies about strong, independent warrior women, which by rights should be classified as women’s erotic fiction rather than science fiction because it is quite literally anti-science.

A sacrifice for nothing

The fall of Fallujah, met with complete indifference in the very neocon circles that endlessly proclaimed the supreme importance of the Iraqi Adventure, sickens the Marines who fought there:

“I don’t think anyone had the grand illusion that Falluja or Ramadi was going to turn into Disneyland, but none of us thought it was going to fall back to a jihadist insurgency,” he said. “It made me sick to my stomach to have that thrown in our face, everything we fought for so blatantly taken away.”

The bloody mission to wrest Falluja from insurgents in November 2004 meant more to the Marines than almost any other battle in the 12 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many consider it the corps’ biggest and most iconic fight since Vietnam, with nearly 100 Marines and soldiers killed in action and hundreds more wounded.

“Lives were wasted, and now everyone back home sees that,” said James Cathcart. He fought as a private first class in the Marines in Falluja in 2004, and was discharged with post-traumatic stress disorder. For many veterans of that battle — most now working in jobs long removed from combat — watching insurgents running roughshod through the streets they once fought to secure, often in brutal close-quarters combat, has shaken their faith in what their mission achieved.

It shouldn’t shake their faith in what their mission achieved, because one can’t have faith in nothing. It should shake their faith in the US political system and the commanders-in-chief who are abusing the trust of the American military.

Let’s hope they remember this the next time the usual suspects are beating the war drums for attacking Serbia Iraq Afghanistan Syria Iran.