Tag: war

Dark portents of things to come

I had a very interesting conversation with a retired general today. (No, not the former USMC general of whom you’re probably thinking.) We were discussing how William Lind and his 4GW seminar had seen ISIS, or some reasonable facsimile therein, coming more than ten years ago. I thought it was interesting that the general, too, had picked up on this.

As I was editing Lind’s collection of columns that we will be publishing this fall, a few passages leaped out at me. Consider:

The current phase of the war in Iraq is driven by three different elements: chaos, a war of national liberation (which is inflicting most of the casualties) and 4th Generation War. In time, the 4th Generation elements will come to predominate, as they fill the vacuum created by the destruction of the Iraqi state.

That was written back in 2003. And that is exactly what has happened, as the non-state elements have replaced the Ba’athist national elements. Here is one that indicated, very early on, the likelihood that the resistance was not an amateur operation.

More significant than the destruction of two American tanks is the fact that Iraqi guerrillas are attacking tanks. This is an indicator that the guerilla war is developing significantly more rapidly than reports in Washington suggest. With the second stage of the Iraq war just six months old, one would expect the guerillas to be attacking only weak, vulnerable targets, such as supply columns. The fact that they are going after the most difficult of all ground targets, heavy tanks, is surprising. It means they lack neither confidence nor skill.

And finally, an early observation of the transnational nature of the developing 4GW forces.

One other indicator. A friend recently noted to me that the rapidly improving techniques we see from the Iraqi guerrillas bear a striking resemblance to those used by the Chechen guerrillas against the Russians. Might it be that we are not the only ones to have a coalition in Iraq?

ON WAR is going to be a monster of around 750 pages. Spanning six years of war, it is a treasure trove of military theory being formulated and refined in real time. If you have any interest in mil-SF, military history, or understanding the shape of the 21st century, it is a book you’ll almost surely want to read.

Women in combat

One aspect of the Eric Frein manhunt that has mostly escaped readers is the way that this episode, featuring a strong, independent female police officer under fire, doesn’t bode well for the champions of women in combat:

Late on the night of Sept. 12, Cpl. Bryon Dickson, 38 years old and the father of two young sons, was ending his shift. As he walked out of the Blooming Grove barracks, a neat, tan-brick building nearly surrounded by woods, he suddenly dropped to the ground.

A colleague who was just beginning her shift heard a sound like a firecracker, saw Corporal Dickson on the ground — a few yards from flagpoles flying the American and Pennsylvania flags — and went out to help, only to hear another shot that kicked up a cloud on the lobby floor.

She retreated into the building and tried, unsuccessfully, to call 911. Her wounded colleague asked her to bring him inside, but she could not reach him. She called out for assistance.

Trooper Alex Douglass, also just beginning his shift, walked up from the parking lot toward Corporal Dickson. He, too, fell to the ground, shot, but crawled to safety into the lobby. Using bravery and the shield of a marked S.U.V., other troopers managed to carry their brother into the barracks.

In other words, she heard a shot, ran away, didn’t shoot back, couldn’t manage to call for help, and wouldn’t take the risk of going back out to drag the wounded into shelter. Then, when other male officers arrived, she didn’t help them go out to get him.

Also, since when are police officers “assassinated” rather than “shot” or even “murdered”? They are armed civilians and petty agents of the state, not heads of state. Are they really to be considered “politically prominent” now?

The USAF doesn’t need God anymore

And the long slow decline into military irrelevance continues:

Members of the U.S. Air Force will no longer be required to say “so help me God” during their enlistment oath. A legal review of rules that required the phrase occurred after the American Humanist Association threatened to sue on behalf of an atheist airman. The unnamed airman at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada was denied re-enlistment Aug. 25 after crossing the phrase out of the oath.

It would be interesting to see the USA try to defend itself if Christians simply refuse to serve it any longer. Of course, allegiance to the state is rapidly disappearing as the connection between nation and government becomes increasingly tenuous.

A German knows what Germany is. The Scots, for all their fear of independence, know what Scotland is. What does “America” mean any longer? It’s certainly not “One Nation Under God” anymore.

But the USAF is on the verge of technological irrelevance anyhow. It won’t prioritize the one mission for which it is actually needed, infantry air support, and the combination of anti-aircraft lasers and unmanned drones will supplant its other missions.

Isn’t it amazing how many traditions that have been around for decades, if not centuries, are being belatedly discovered to have been unlawful all along?

Into the blast furnace

The UK’s demographics are illustrating the truth of GK Chesterton’s observations concerning the human disinclination to believe in nothing:

In England’s second city of Birmingham, of 278,623 youngsters, 97,099 were registered as Muslim compared with 93,828 as Christian. The rest were of other faiths such as Hindu or Jewish, or none.

A similar trend has emerged in the cities of Bradford and Leicester, the towns of Luton, in Bedfordshire, and Slough in Berkshire, as well as the London boroughs Newham, Redbridge and Tower Hamlets, where nearly two-thirds of children are Islamic.

Last night experts said more must be done to ensure that society does not become polarised along religious lines.

I think it is fairly obvious that when people are being beheaded, it is a little late for that. To quote Jerry Pournell’s apt observation, there will be war.

Professor Ted Cantle, of the ICoCo Foundation, which promotes community cohesion, said: ‘What we are seeing are several trends running together. There is a long-term decline in support for the established religions, notably Christianity; continuing immigration from the Asian sub-continent; and higher fertility among the Muslim population, which has a considerably lower age profile.

‘There is also deepening segregation exacerbated by the loss of white population from cities and more intensive concentration of black and minority ethnic groups as a result of replacement.

‘This is the real problem, as residential segregation is generally compounded by school and social segregation.

If he thinks segregation is a problem, just try desegregating those communities. Because communities that can’t peacefully segregate will always eventually find another, less palatable means of doing so.

Well done, secular Britain. Out of its desire to weaken Christianity’s societal dominance, it imported Islam. That’s like leaping out of the frying pan and into the blast furnace.

Fourth time’s the charm

Obama is merely the latest U.S. president to attempt to make a pointless gesture that will resolve absolutely nothing by bombing Iraq:

Did last night’s primetime presidential speech announcing expanding authorization for airstrikes in Iraq and Syria feel kind of familiar? Like you’ve heard it before?

That’s probably because you have. You’ve been hearing for more than two decades, from presidents on both sides of political aisle. At this point, bombing Iraq is practically a American presidential tradition.

And, via the magic of YouTube and The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, you can watch every president back to the first George Bush announce a new plan to launch military strikes in Iraq.

Presidents and the public love airstrikes because it feels like war without actually risking any American lives. Never mind that they are an act of war and a direct provocation that legitimates any amount of “terrorism” directed at the American public.

The Great War 100 years later

esr reviews Collision of Empires, a history of WWI:

Collision of Empires (Prit Buttar; Osprey Publishing) is a clear and accessible history that attempts to address a common lack in accounts of the Great War that began a century ago this year: they tend to be centered on the Western Front and the staggering meat-grinder that static trench warfare became as outmoded tactics collided with the reality of machine guns and indirect-fire artillery.

Concentration on the Western Front is understandable in the U.S. and England; the successor states of the Western Front’s victors have maintained good records, and nationals of the English-speaking countries were directly involved there. But in many ways the Eastern Front story is more interesting, especially in the first year that Buttar chooses to cover – less static, and with a sometimes bewilderingly varied cast. And, arguably, larger consequences. The war in the east eventually destroyed three empires and put Lenin’s Communists in power in Russia.

Prit Buttar does a really admirable job of illuminating the thinking of the German, Austrian, and Russian leadership in the run-up to the war – not just at the diplomatic level but in the ways that their militaries were struggling to come to grips with the implications of new technology. The extensive discussion of internecine disputes over military doctrine in the three officer corps involved is better than anything similar I’ve seen elsewhere.

There is more at his site. However, as a corrective to this obviously
deficient history of the Great War, allow me to recommend the book I just
finished reading, namely, CATASTROPHE 1914 by Max Hastings, which can be
summarized as follows.

  1. The Great War was the inevitable consequence of dastardly German militarism. Since the
    Kaiser didn’t forcibly stop Austria from invading Serbia, the Germans
    are entirely to blame for making British lads volunteer to travel to the continent
    and die in the mud.
  2. Moltke was a psychological train wreck wholly unsuitable for command.
  3. French was a psychological train wreck wholly unsuitable for command.
  4. Churchill was an excitable loon wholly unsuitable for command of any unit larger than a company.
  5. If it were not for the brave and heroic British Expeditionary Force
    defending freedom, justice, and democracy, the Germans would have broken
    through the French lines and conquered the continent.
  6. The French did a little fighting too. So did the Russians. The Serbs
    killed lots of Austrians. None of this had any serious effect on the
    war, which was won by British courage and pluck.
  7. The death of millions was worth it in the end, because Germany is bad and if the Central Powers had won, Europe would not have the European Union today.

Obama betrays the Constitution

What’s remarkable isn’t that Barack Hussein Obama is ignoring the U.S. Constitution and its limits on the powers of his office. What is remarkable is that the New York Times is calling him out on it:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.

Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written….

But
for now the president seems grimly determined to practice what Mr.
Bush’s lawyers only preached. He is acting on the proposition that the
president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has unilateral
authority to declare war. In
taking this step, Mr. Obama is not only betraying the electoral
majorities who twice voted him into office on his promise to end
Bush-era abuses of executive authority. He is also betraying the
Constitution he swore to uphold.

ISIS in Iraq and Syria is not a problem. Immigrants in the USA are a problem. The complete lack of a southern border is a problem. The expanding credit demand gap and the outstanding debt to GDP ratio is a problem. The decline of Christendom is a problem. The rise of the new Caliphate will likely pose a serious problem for future generations, but there will be no future generation capable of fighting it if the West in general and the USA in particular refuses to provide it with a coherent opposition that is not riven by its sympathizers.

We are waiting for Martel.

It is an appallingly bad idea for Obama to attempt to drag a war-weary, divided nation into a war that has nothing to do with the national interest. It is such a bad idea that even the New York Times is capable of recognizing it.

Fisking George Will

In case you haven’t noticed, Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler. Because fascist. And threat-crisis. Also, Hitlerian:

Vladimir Putin’s Hitlerian Mind. The Russian president’s fascist revival in Eastern Europe poses a unique threat to the West. Vladimir Putin’s fascist revival is a crisis that tests the West’s capacity to decide. 

When Will speaks of ‘fascism’, he means it in the mythological sense of the word, not the historic. You know; big bad Hitler plotting to conquer Planet Earth and exterminate or enslave all non-Aryans blah….blah…blah.  Notice how Will cleverly embeds the allegations of a “fascist revival” and a “crisis” as a given, and then quickly redirects the subject to how the West should handle it.

Salesmen refer to this cunning rhetorical tactic as ‘assumptive selling’. Sorry George. We will not allow you get away with slipping such poisonous assumptive ‘mickeys’ into our journalistic drinks. Either prove your underlying premise of a “facist revival’ (in the sense you mean it), or cut the crap about some dangerous “crisis” caused by Putin.

At a certain point, one loses one’s innocence about the strangely repetitive coincidences concerning which first Britain, and then the USA, continually find themselves engaged in fighting wars on other people’s territory for reasons that are never, ever their fault.

I thought it was interesting that there was barely even a handwave in the less-than-halfhearted attempt to declare Assad the new Hitler.

The EU prepares for a winter cold war

The EU strategy is obvious: stock up enough natural gas to try to outlast the need Russia’s gas exporters have for European cash. Zerohedge points out three possible problems with that strategy:

1) What if the weather is considerably colder than normal this winter? (i.e. they need more supply)

2) Russia has already committed to supporting the sanctioned firms.

3) German industrials will need energy in the spring.

This also ignores one fundamental flaw in the concept. If the EU is stocking up on its gas supplies, then it is already paying the Russian firms for the gas they would have otherwise expected to buy during the winter. Now they’re buying it early, which means this tactic won’t put any more financial pressure on the Russian firms than it would have if they took delivery later, and accordingly, paid later as well.

Perhaps they’re expecting that the Russians will take all their newly received cash and put it in the NYSE, which will then crash violently, thereby depriving them of it. A stroke of pure genius!

Things I’ve noticed while reading military history

  1. Civilian leadership usually appoints the wrong commanders.
  2. The main thing lacking in military leaders, from the highest level to the lowest, is a willingness to accept the risk of defeat. Nothing assures failure like indecisiveness.
  3. Advances in communications technology increases the amount of civilian interference into war operations.
  4. Civilian leadership seldom has a clear objective in mind.
  5. Military commanders regard “the book” as an intrinsic excuse and therefore have a tendency to cling to it.
  6. A historian’s take on a given war is strongly influenced by his nationalist sympathies.
  7. The temptation to interfere with a strategic plan once it is put into action appears to be almost overwhelming.

My favorite quote from Max Hastings history of World War I thus far: Falkenhayn noted laconically on taking over command:  “Schlieffen’s notes are at an end and therewith also Moltke’s wits.”

It’s really remarkable to observe how overwhelmed, inept, and generally detached from reality the generals on both sides were. Between the commander of the British Expeditionary Force constantly attempting to retreat and the high commander of the German forces not bothering to even give orders to his generals for literally days at a time, it’s just astonishing.  And they were the relatively competent ones in comparison with the Austrian and Russian commanders.

It’s somewhat sobering to read the historical blunders in light of the lunatic decisions presently being made by the US and European military leaders.