Tag: war

Al Qaida’s air force

Karl Denninger correctly sums up the upcoming Syrian misadventure in his customarily reserved manner:

Obama is spouting off from the ass once again in Sweden. Every
time this buttclown, McStain, Graham or the others open their mouths (or
McStain plays poker during the Senate hearing yesterday) they continue to obfuscate and ignore the bottom line:
A military strike at Assad’s government IS ACTING AS AL QAIDA’S AIR FORCE.

The rest of this debate is arm-waving.

A military strike at Assad’s government IS ACTING AS AL QAIDA’S AIR FORCE.

Al Qaida is a sworn enemy of the United States.  The United States has ratified their statement of being our enemy through more than 10 years of continual declaration of a “state of emergency” citing the so-called “war on terror.” It is an act of Treason according to our Constitution to provide material aid and comfort to a sworn enemy of our nation.

A military strike at Assad’s government IS ACTING AS AL QAIDA’S AIR FORCE.

To be honest, it’s hard to argue with either his argument or his conclusions.  Meanwhile, the leading House Republicans are busy demonstrating that while attacking Syria is clearly not in either the national interest or the party’s interest, the decisive factor appears to be that they see it as being in Israel’s interest.  Consider Eric Cantor’s statement that he’ll vote to authorize the use of military force against Syria no matter what the authorizing language happens to be.


“I intend to vote to provide the President of the United States the option to use military force in Syria. While the authorizing language will likely change, the underlying reality will not. America has a compelling national security interest to prevent and respond to the use of weapons of mass destruction, especially by a terrorist state such as Syria, and to prevent further instability in a region of vital interest to the United States.”

That is a total lie.  America has no “compelling national security interest” in Syria, especially since there are reports that the weapons came from Saudi Arabia and were set off accidentally by the Al Qaida rebels.  And seriously, what are the chances that launching missiles, or worse, invading, is going to reduce, let alone prevent, further instability in the Middle East?

It’s probably a good thing this didn’t happen in the late 1970s. I can’t even imagine how many Hal Lindsay readers would be convinced that the end of the world was approaching.

Obama: Syria is on

Or maybe not.  I have to wonder if Obama is hoping Congress will bail him out by refusing to provide the authorization sought:

President Obama announced Saturday that he has concluded the United
States should take military action against Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad and his regime for using chemical weapons on civilians, but
will first seek authorization from Congress.

My suspicions regarding this are mostly aroused by the fact that historically, most military actions haven’t waited on Congressional summer vacations.

UPDATE: Oops.  It turns out the rebels are even admitting that they were responsible for the chemical weapons attack:

“In a report that is sure to be considered blockbuster news, the
rebels told Dale Gavlak, a reporter who has written for the Associated
Press, NPR and BBC, they are responsible for the chemical attack last week.


“Gavlak is a Middle Eastern journalist who filed the report about the
rebels claiming responsibility on the Mint Press News website, which is
affiliated with AP. In that report allegedly the rebels told him the chemical attack was a result of mishandling chemical weapons….

“Gavlak reports he was told by rebels that the gas “attack” was the
result of rebels mishandling the chemical weapons they acquired from the
Saudis. He says in the Mint Press report the following:


“”They didn’t tell us what these arms were or how to use them,”
complained a female fighter named ‘K.’ “We didn’t know they were
chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.””

This tends to raise an obvious question: from whom did the Saudis obtain the chemical weapons?

Britain refuses to follow

The British Parliament refuses to buy a second manufactured excuse for an invasion in the Middle East:

The Grand Old Duke of York marched his men to the top of the hill, then marched them down again. Britain’s Prime Minister last week promised cruise missile strikes on Syria and recalled Parliament early from its summer break to authorise our participation. He now discovers that he has charged up his own hill while the majority of the British people and indeed a majority of their MPs remain stubbornly at the bottom.

David Cameron’s attempt to play statesman on the world stage has created a political shambles which culminated in a humiliating defeat in the House of Commons late last night.

Last night’s defeat will also have repercussions for Britain’s relationship with America, which can no longer rely on the incumbent of No 10 Downing Street to do its bidding almost without question when it comes to military matters.  Heaven knows whether President Obama will launch a punitive strike against Syria in the days ahead. Some political fudge may yet enable Cameron to involve Britain anyway.

But in my view there’s no doubt the Prime Minister has made a colossal fool of himself, on a matter of the utmost gravity – that of war and peace. Almost the worst part of the fiasco is that one day we shall need to deploy our shrunken armed forces against a real threat from a real foreign enemy.

And because our leaders have so often deceived us in the past, crying wolf amid their own hubristic  delusions and pretensions, the British people will not believe them.

The theatrics out of the usual warmongers like John McCain and some even weirder ones from less customary ones like Joe Biden notwithstanding, I don’t see much, if any evidence that the American people are buying the “Assad is winning the civil war so he did the one thing that Obama said was needed to trigger US involvement”.

Considering that his father nearly flattened Hama in 1982 and had up to 40,000 Syrians killed in a 27-day massacre, the idea that Assad had any need to use chemical weapons is simply absurd.  It is a pity that the American Congress has neither a backbone nor the ability to stop responding to the war drums like Pavlov’s dogs to the dinner bell.

An amazing coincidence

In an amazing and unsettling coincidence, it seems the recent massacre in Syria, which we are supposed to believe was committed by the Assad regime just as it had taken control of the civil war, was anticipated by the need for one more than 18 months in advance. Zerohedge posts a StratFor email from December 2011 via Wikileaks:

I spent most of the afternoon at the Pentagon with the USAF strategic studies group – guys who spend their time trying to understand and explain to the USAF chief the big picture in areas where they’re operating in. It was just myself and four other guys at the Lieutenant Colonel level, including one French and one British representative who are liaising with the US currently out of DC.

They wanted to grill me on the strategic picture on Syria, so after that I got to grill them on the military picture. There is still a very low level of understanding of what is actually at stake in Syria, what’s the strategic interest there, the Turkish role, the Iranian role, etc. After a couple hours of talking, they said without saying that SOF teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce [ZH: “recce” means reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces. One Air Force intel guy (US) said very carefully that there isn’t much of a Free Syrian Army to train right now anyway, but all the operations being done now are being done out of ‘prudence.’ The way it was put to me was, ‘look at this way – the level of information known on Syrian OrBat this month is the best it’s been since 2001.’ They have been told to prepare contingencies and be ready to act within 2-3 months, but they still stress that this is all being done as contingency planning, not as a move toward escalation.

I kept pressing on the question of what these SOF teams would be working toward, and whether this would lead to an eventual air camapign to give a Syrian rebel group cover. They pretty quickly distanced themselves from that idea, saying that the idea ‘hypothetically’ is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within. There wouldn’t be a need for air cover, and they wouldn’t expect these Syrian rebels to be marching in columns anyway.

They emphasized how the air campaign in Syria makes Libya look like a piece of cake. Syrian air defenses are a lot more robust and are much denser, esp around Damascus and on the borders with Israel, Turkey. THey are most worried about mobile air defenses, particularly the SA-17s that they’ve been getting recently. It’s still a doable mission, it’s just not an easy one.

The main base they would use is Cyprus, hands down. Brits and FRench would fly out of there. They kept stressing how much is stored at Cyprus and how much recce comes out of there. The group was split on whether Turkey would be involved, but said Turkey would be pretty critical to the mission to base stuff out of there. EVen if Turkey had a poltiical problem with Cyprus, they said there is no way the Brits and the FRench wouldn’t use Cyprus as their main air force base. Air Force Intel guy seems  pretty convinced that the Turks won’t participate (he seemed pretty pissed at them.)

There still seems to be a lot of confusion over what a military intervention involving an air campaign would be designed to achieve. It isn’t clear cut for them geographically like in Libya, and you can’t just create an NFZ over Homs, Hama region. This would entail a countrywide SEAD campaign lasting the duration of the war. They dont believe air intervention would happen unless there was enough media attention on a massacre, like the Ghadafi move against Benghazi. They think the US would have a high tolerance for killings as long as it doesn’t reach that very public stage. Theyre also questiioning the skills of the Syrian forces that are operating the country’s air defenses currently and how signfiicant the Iranian presence is there. Air Force Intel guy is most obsessed with the challenge of taking out Syria’s ballistic missile capabilities and chem weapons. With Israel rgiht there and the regime facing an existential crisis, he sees that as a major complication to any military intervention.

I imagine Mr. Putin knew this already when he expressed his doubts concerning the Syrian regime’s responsibility for the attack.  At this point, I wouldn’t blame those who are beginning to wonder if the Boston Massacre was a false flag.  We should have known George W. Bush wasn’t serious about war with Iran despite all the neocons beating the drum for one, given that the media was never full of atrocities committed by the Iranian government.

So, it looks like Syria is happening and my strategic antenna back in November 2011 were not quite as off-base as I’d concluded they were.

Women and military discipline

As bad as this sounds, the reality is even worse:

I once asked a friend who is a retired Army command sergeant major how
they disciplined the women. He replied, “You can’t. If you try, they
charge you with sexual harassment.” I said, “Then how do you get them to
do what you need them to do?” He said, “We don’t. We just let them do
whatever they want.”

I have a friend who was forced out of the service only a few years before his scheduled retirement due to false sexual harassment charges.  The reason his female subordinate made up the charges had nothing to do with his relationship with her, she was just angry that he had disciplined one of her male friends for committing a crime.

Women in the military destroy more than unit cohesion, they destroy all military discipline across the board, from the top to the bottom.  It’s exactly the same as the difference between raising a generation of children in the traditional manner, and raising a generation using only single mothers. We already have a feral black underclass and an increasingly feral white one; in another two decades we will likely have an equally feral military.

This is precisely why I support an all-female U.S. military populated by a draft.  Anything less would be sexist and fail to account for more than 200 years of unmitigated male privilege.

Ruthless compliance

The Marine Corps appears to be going about complying with the Defense Department’s decision earlier this year to repeal the Direct Combat Exclusion Rule in a correct and effective manner.

The Marine Corps will allow enlisted women to participate in basic infantry training beginning this fall as part of ongoing research to determine what additional ground combat jobs may open to female personnel.

New female enlisted Marines will volunteer for spots in the service’s Infantry Training Battalion, mirroring a related effort allowing new female lieutenants to enroll in the Corps’ Infantry Officer Course, according to an official planning document obtained by Marine Corps Times. Titled “Assignment of Women in Combat Units,” the document is dated Aug. 16.

“Female Marines will have the opportunity to go through the same infantry training course as their male counterparts,” the document states. However, as with the research involving female officers, “female enlisted Marines who successfully complete infantry training as part of this research process will not be assigned infantry as a military occupational specialty and will not be assigned to infantry units.”

The correct way to address female claims to equality is always to insist upon completely objective standards.  Women tend to be highly skilled at manipulating subjective standards, which is why so many of them shriek with indignation whenever they discover that their tears, emotional appeals, prostitution, rhetorical sallies, and negotiating tactics will avail them nothing.

Take the oft-cited “women make 77 cents of the male dollar for doing the same job”, for example.  There is a very easy solution to that “problem”. Eliminate salaries and put everyone with the same job on equal hourly wages. Women will still be making less money on average, but their complaints won’t be credible because it is objectively clear why they are earning less: they work fewer hours.  As Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.”

Now, it can be expected that the Marine Corps will eventually come under considerable pressure to reduce the difficulty of its basic infantry training. But with a growing number of Obama Wars to fight, the Corps has very good reason to resist the political pressure to produce inferior Marines, and in the unlikely event a woman proves capable of successfully completing the course, (note that none of the 10 women who have tried have passed the Infantry Officer Course and only one of those ten made it through the course’s very first test), she is likely to be an extraordinary individual who will not be disposed to creating the sort of problems that most women in the military do.

A too-timely change in the calculus

It’s pretty well understood that the Assad regime has the Syrian civil war well in hand.  So, are we supposed to believe that the regime is not only dumb enough to resort to chemical weapons it didn’t use when it was in far more dire straits, but just happened to pick the one weapon that could be expected to trigger US involvement?  That makes no sense.

“A year ago President Obama promised that the use of chemical weapons against Syrian rebels would bring a game-changing shift in U.S. posture toward Assad’s often brutal regime.

“‘We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground,’ Obama said on August 20, 2012, ‘that a red line for us is [if] we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.'”

I think it is considerably more likely that the Syrian rebels staged the chemical attack in order to try to force the West’s hand.  Foreign Affairs even stated: “months of fighting have underlined the harsh reality that the opposition is outmatched”. To be honest, if I thought the Obama administration wanted yet another war on its hands – and I most certainly do not – I would find Obama to be a far more credible suspect than Assad.

Combat Barbie wear

They still won’t be able to outfight a Boy Scout troop armed with jackknives, but the important thing is wearing the right clothes will help them feel more like real soldiers.

A new combat uniform with special consideration to the female body is
now available at Fort Gordon, almost a month after the Army announced
plans to open all units and military jobs to women by 2016. The March debut of the Combat Uniform-Alternate is the first in a
series of moves the Army hopes to make in the next three years to help
female soldiers feel like more professional members, officials said.

With narrower shoulders, a slightly tapered waist and a more spacious
seat, the unisex clothing line has been in the works since 2009 and is
being issued to all installations – except Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga.
– for men and women with a smaller or more slender body.

Enough of all the talk talk.  Let’s see some war war out of our brave amazons.  Let’s see the US Army form a combat division of its most formidable Combat Barbies and send it to Afghanistan.  Perhaps they can make a reality TV show of it called “Rape, Rout, or RIP?”

Behind the scenes

Unusual changes in the Corps:

The commander of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit was removed from
his position on Wednesday, less than a week after the force’s
subordinate units were first brought together to deploy in 2014, Marine
officials said. Col. James Christmas was relieved of command by
Maj. Gen. Raymond Fox, the commander of II Marine Expeditionary Force,
out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., after the general lost confidence in
Christmas’ ability to continue commanding the Marines and sailors of the
22nd MEU,” said Capt. Binford Strickland, a Marine spokesman. No
additional explanation was given for the decision….

At least six other Marine officers have been
removed from command since mid-March. In each case, Marine officials
have provided little explanation for why the decisions were made, saying
a general officer had lost confidence in that commander’s ability to
lead his personnel.

I don’t even have a crazy conspiracy theory here, I just know that seven reliefs of command in four months appears to be out of the ordinary.

UPDATE: Talk of “purges” is considerably overblown, in my opinion.  Now, this is a purge: “Of 90 generals arrested, only six survived the purges, as did only 36 of
180 divisional commanders, and just seven out of 57 army corps
commanders. In total, some 30,000 Red Army personnel were executed.”

It occurs to me, however, that there is one time when it would make very good sense to replace MEU commanders, and that is when new military action is at hand.  When one considers how the Syrian rebels appear to have failed in their bid to overthrow Assad and the recent army coup in Egypt, I find myself wondering if this might be an early sign of expanded American military intervention in the Middle East.

Courage as cowardice

If you’re going to redefine cowardice as a willingness to engage in conflict, and portray a refusal to engage in it as manhood, you might as well start wearing a pink Gamma Rabbit shirt.  A commenter at Dr. Helen’s objects to my post yesterday at Alpha Game:

Your post highlights a big problem with the “manosphere”: It’s quite
misogynistic and not very manly. A man does what is right regardless of
the consequences, and he does it as a function of his own sense of self.
The “manosphere”, in contrast, is all about men shaping themselves in
their profoundly negative view of women. Vox Day is characteristically
defining manhood downwards by his approval of men using physical
violence against women, even if it is in self-defense.

A warrior
would never define himself by the number of children and old ladies he
had defeated in combat, any more than a real man would pride himself on
the number of women he’s beaten. An alpha takes the blows and walks away
with his self-respect intact. But for Vox Day and his sleazy ilk, men
exist only as responses to women. If women are horrible, then men must
be as well. What an awful world that makes for.

First of all, there is nothing more intrinsically wrong about using physical violence against women than against men. This white-knighting gamma knows nothing about the genuine warrior ethic; by his reckoning, the greatest warriors of history were not warriors at all because they slaughtered men, women, and children with equal abandon.  Warrior’s codes teach respect for all, which in martial terms means taking even the most seemingly overmatched opponent seriously and dispatching her without needless humiliation.

The outmoded code of the gentleman to which Funktacular is implicitly referring is European and is based on a post-martial chivalric ideal that primarily relates to the transition of the medieval aristocracy from a warrior elite to a post-warrior social elite.  As such, it is the exact opposite of a warrior ethic.  Joseph Schumpeter addresses this in some detail in Imperialism and Social Classes. The warrior ethic is focused on the defeat of the enemy, and the defeat of the enemy requires the destruction of his women from whom the future enemy combatants will come in as the destruction of the current generation of combatants.

Were the Romans less than manly because they destroyed Carthage?  Was Genghis Khan a coward because he spared neither women nor children, neither dog or rat, when he stacked skulls outside the shattered walls of the city where one of his sons died?  Was Shalmeneser III defining manhood downwards when, on his annual summer vacation, he crossed the Euphrates, threw down the walls of one city or another, and burned it with fire?

As for misogyny, one need not hate women to refuse to subject oneself to physical assaults by women.  Shall we similarly conclude that the man who defends himself against attacks by men is a misanthrope? The logic is wholly specious.

Funktacular’s comment isn’t merely anti-equality, it is also anti-male, because he attempts to deny men one of their most basic and fundamental rights, the right to self-defense.  He attempts to create a virtue out of cowardice, and in doing so, lends support to the environment where sniping and running away is considered brave, while standing one’s ground is falsely accused of defining manhood downward.  And in doing so, he provides a useful example of how the gamma delusion bubble distorts a man’s view of reality.

Finally, I note that one cannot “turn the other cheek” unless one is first willing to assert the right to strike back.  He who claims there is no right to strike back cannot also claim to be purposefully declining to exert his nonexistent right.