Tag: war

This is an educational account of a genuine gun fight in Texas.

There had been numerous death threats issued about the event.  A competent security plan had been created. Greg says he was put at the back entrance because it was viewed as the “easy job”. He joked the idea was to “give the old guy the easy job”.  He had a list of the people authorized to use the entrance, and codes they were required to know in order to use it.  It was a shortlist.

Pam Geller and Gert Wilder had been passed through. A snafu with a caterer had been cleared up.  Gert Wilder and his security team had left.

Just before 7 p.m. in the evening, Greg went to the restroom. A pair of roving armed security took his place. He took his duty car. He returned to his post. The roving team left.

About five minutes after he returned, a small black car pulls up, and stops, abruptly, facing away from the entrance.

Greg’s hair starts standing up on the back of his neck. His “police sense” starts going off. Something is not “right”. The car has out-of-state plates, from Arizona. Immediately, both doors to the car open at the same time.

As the passenger exits, Greg sees the muzzle of a rifle moving in a sweeping motion. Elton Simpson, the passenger, has an AK-47 semi-automatic clone and brings it into play. As Greg sees the rifle moving, the synapses click, the trained and practiced instincts kick in.

This is real. He needs to engage. Now! The attackers are 35 feet away. There is no cover.

Gregory Stevens draws his Glock 21 .45 from his retention holster. Elton Simpson brings up the AK clone. The shots exchanged are so close as to be simultaneous. Greg cannot determine who shot first. All three combatants are wearing soft body armor.

Simpson misses. One of the 230 grain Gold Dot hollow points Greg is launching from the Glock, probably the first, smashes Simpson’s femur. More rounds follow as Simpson falls.  He goes down, dropping the rifle.

The driver,  Nadir Soofi, is firing at Greg with a semi-automatic rifle. The rifle is equipped with a 100 round magazine. The rifle was either a detachable magazine-fed SKS or an AK clone. (The terrorists had three rifles with them) Greg shifts his aim to Soofi. He fires several rounds from his Glock. Soofi goes down, dropping the rifle.

During the firing, Greg has taken a step or two closer, utilizing a flash sight picture, and advancing on the terrorists.

Greg directs his attention back to Simpson.  Simpson is still moving, still a threat. Greg fires more rounds. Simpson goes down again.  Greg directs his attention back to Soofi, who is attempting to get up. Greg fires the last of the rounds in the Glock. Soofi goes down, hard. Greg does a tactical reload, very fast.

Greg has fired 14 rounds of 230 grain Speer Gold Dot ammunition from his Glock. Simpson and Sufi have fired about 35 rounds of 7.62 x 39.  Those rounds were easily capable of penetrating Greg Stevens’ soft body armor.

The entire action took 10 seconds or less.

However, for the punchline, read the whole thing there. It makes it very clear that virtually nothing is as it seems anymore.

The neoclowns running the Biden Not-Administration appear to be planning to lose a war between Ukraine and Russia in order to sabotage the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. 

The NAF, to be clear, doesn’t stand any chance in a full scale Ukrainian assault. Even in 2014, when the Ukrainian Army was much less organized, Russian artillery and EW intervention proved critical. The Ukrainian military has since had more than half a decade of getting 5{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of Ukraine’s GDP lavished on it. While Ukraine’s GDP is unimpressive, this is still a high numerator and Russian involvement would have to be more overt than in 2014 if the Donbass is to be saved.

Considering that 100,000’s of Donbass residents are now also Russian citizens, not doing so would discredit Putin domestically.

This, then, might be the game plan. By provoking a Russian intervention, it could finally provide the US with the arguments to finally pressure Germany into shutting down Nord Stream 2, just a few months before its projected completion. (Contra popular conceptions, Germany is more invested into NS2 than is Russia, and stands to lose relatively more from a last minute torpedoing of the project). NS2 threatens to deprive Ukraine of $2-3 billion dollars in annual transit fees. These are not insignificant sums for a country with a GDP of $150 billion and are well worth the lives of a few hundred Ukrainian soldiers, who – as Strana‘s sources report – plan to stop the offensive and probably retreat should Russian troops go in….

There’s another piece of the puzzle that slid into place today. Biden told Putin that “he will pay a price” for his “meddling” in the US elections on coming to power in January. Soon after, no other than RT chief editor Margarita Simonyan was in the LDNR, demanding that Russia take it home in a conference dedicated to the “Doctrine of the Russian Donbass.” I would say that this is unlikely to have been a coincidence.

This strategy may appear to be insane from a conventional view of military strategy. But remember, the neoclowns core philosophy is inversive and they have made an art of winning through losing and playing the victim. 

Kurt Schlichter observes that a military incapable of defeating a single talking head is unlikely to fare well against the Chinese military.

Let’s understand something – the military has been running on empty for a long time. Thirty years ago right now, I was in Saudi Arabia in the wake of the Gulf War, the high point of American power. The military was rebuilt by visionaries who embraced high standards and focused on warfighting rebuilt the devastated post-Vietnam military and proved the concept in those sands by annihilating a relatively powerful nation’s entire force in six weeks of air war and 100 hours of ground war. We were not woke. We were not politically correct. We were just unbeatable.

Fast forward to 2021, as our military is are still chasing bandits around the Hindu Kush, as our forces still in Iraq are still getting rocketed and as we are still pouring troops into Syria for some damn reason. The Chinese are eating our lunch in the Western Pacific, but our military leadership pretend it’s 1945 and that the U.S. is still dominant. It thinks we’re unbeatable, but there’s no Chester Nimitz out there, and the Chinese are deadly serious, even as our leadership pretends boys can become girls and that paying for their snip surgery will make us more combat-ready.

When the Chinese choose to do it, they will take Taiwan. They will screen their flanks by wiping out our regional bases and they will sink every U.S. ship within range that hasn’t already been knocked out of action by colliding with a cargo boat. By the way, read the investigation of the utter incompetence and total failure of leadership that led to those two devastating and fatal collisions in recent years. Sickening – a total failure of leadership starting at the top.

The Chinese are a serious military, devoted to one thing: winning the coming war against the United States. Our military leadership is not serious. It has lost its edge and devoted itself to social experimentation while cheerleading itself into thinking everything is A-okay. It’s not.

This comes from the top, but unfortunately the commander-in-chief is busy with a Matlock marathon while the people pulling his puppet strings are interested only in ensuring that the military is fully absorbed into the ranks of the woke institutions. How can you expect a civilian leadership in China’s pocket to prep to fight it?

Even worse, the Trostkyites running the current Not-Administration are desperately trying to launch their revenge war against Russia, which has already withdrawn its ambassador to the United States in response to the neoclowns’ latest diplomatic catastrophe while their puppet government in Afghanistan collapses.

I may or may not be correct about the 2033 collapse of the political union, but regardless, I see zero chance the United States makes it to 2040 intact.

This harrowing account of living through the 1992 LA riots is more a treatise on what not to do than anything else, but it is extremely educational about what may be in the cards in various cities this summer:

I was supposed to meet my wife at Soup Plantation, a well known restaurant down the road. I couldn’t get her on the mobile. When I got there and parked, there was a queasy air amidst all the shopping mall splendour and people had a frightened look in their eyes that I had never, ever seen before. The easy listening music in the restaurant was so mundane it was hard to reconcile with the outside windows, which had fire engines, police cars and people running on foot outside. I had planned to just eat quickly with my wife and go home, because I was having trouble absorbing the idea that this thing was possibly even worse than I might have imagined. I thought South Central was so far off, truth is it was about five minutes down the road.

People in the restaurant were watching the television reports, which were growing increasingly more feverish and seemed to just show one new burning building every thirty seconds. I was trying to keep a calm demeanour and went to explain to my wife what was happening.

All of a sudden, a woman in the restaurant screamed. A guy dropped his tray and soup went everywhere. A man was standing in the doorway of Soup Plantation and wobbling on his feet. Blood was gushing out of his forehead which had a nasty gash running right down to his ear. He yelled “They’re coming! They are next door in the mall!! They’re tearing everything to pieces!”

You could have heard a pin drop. Then the restaurant exploded with activity and EVERYBODY was crawling over the women and children trying to get to their cars in the parking lot outside. I’m talking blind panic here, people smacking into each other like they could not give a fugg less about any human in the world outside of themselves. A guy floored his Subaru and tore the toll gate right off the booth. Everybody else was following him out, the attendant was gone. There was cars hitting each other like bumper buggies at the carnival, nobody seemed to care, everybody wanted to get out to the street.

When we made it out onto the highway, I got my first look at the skyline since I left Rodeo Drive. It looked like the fires of hell were consuming half of the city. My wife was crying, she thought it was the end of the world.

I have to admit, I had absolutely no idea things were that bad. Definitely read the whole thing. And I couldn’t help but laugh at how bitterly the guy regretted listening to his wife about leaving the house unarmed on a literal milk run. It’s epic.

 In THERE WILL BE WAR VOL. X, the late Jerry Pournelle and I published a haunting story called “Seven Kill Tiger” by Charles W. Shao. It even anticipated the use of vaccine programs to administer genetic weaponry. An excerpt.

Philip Thompson was reading a report of a small measles outbreak in Ecuador when a knock on the open door to his office disturbed him. He looked up and saw it was Scott Berens, one of his junior analysts, standing in the doorway.

“You heard about Ecuador, Dr. Thompson?” the younger man asked.

“Reading about it now. Looks as if the government has it under control.”

“They caught it early enough. It’s the Tungurahua province again. That’s been a problem area for the Ministry of Health since 1996. The vaccination program misses too many of the indigenous children.”

“Understandable.” Thompson put the report down on his desk. “What’s on your mind, Scott?”

“Do you remember that unknown outbreak in northern Zambia we started tracking six months ago?”

“I thought that was a false alarm.”

“It was, insofar as we were able to determine that it wasn’t Ebola, which was the initial concern. And there were only 142 cases and 26 deaths before it burned itself out, so we didn’t even bother sending anyone over to investigate.”

Thompson clicked his tongue against his lower lip, wondering where Berens was going with this. The young man was a bright young doctor and had graduated in the top ten percent of his class from Johns Hopkins, so he assumed Berens must have a good reason for bringing such an obscure incident to his attention.

“Are you saying we should have?”

“No, it’s just that I was reading over the statistics, as part of a paper I was thinking about writing on east Africa, when I noticed an anomaly.”

“What’s that?”

“The population of the nearest town. It’s mostly Chinese. I think they have a big mining camp up there.”

Thompson shrugged and spread his hands. “It’s hardly a secret that China has been moving into Africa in a big way for the last two decades. They have hundreds of such towns.”

“True, but that only explains why the Chinese were there. It doesn’t explain why most of the cases, and all of the deaths, were African. Only five Chinese were affected and all five recovered. Beyond the basic statistical odds involved, you would think the native population would be more resistant to whatever virus makes its way out of the jungle, not more susceptible to it.”

Thompson frowned. Berens was right. It was an anomaly. And if there was one thing he had learned after 22 years at the Center for Disease Control, it was to pay particular attention to anomalies.

“Good catch, Scott. Dig into it and see if it’s really just a mining town or if the PLA happens to have any laboratories or science facilities in the area. Not necessarily where the outbreak took place, but anywhere in the surrounding area. They went dark on the bio-war front a few years ago, and it may be that some of their test facilities were moved from Xi’an to Africa. This just might give us some insight as to where they went.”

“Do you think someone got careless and a bio-weapon escaped the lab, Dr. Thompson?” There was an eager glint in the younger man’s eyes that made Thompson smile despite himself. Such a discovery, even if it was never published in any of the public journals, could be the making of Berens’s career, and both of them knew it.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Scott. Go and see what you can find about this mining town, what is it called?”

“Mpolokoso.”

“Right.” He didn’t even bother trying to pronounce it. “Look into what the Chinese are doing there and we’ll see if it could have any connection to this mysterious outbreak. Write it up and email it to me; I’ll call you when I’ve had a chance to read it and think it over.”

“Will do, Dr. Thompson!” Berens made a mock salute with the paper and disappeared from the doorway.

Thompson leaned back in his chair, reflecting on the unwelcome news. Unlike his young subordinate, he already knew they weren’t likely to find any evidence of laboratories, research facilities, an escaped bio-weapon, or even anything that was conventionally considered to be a bio-weapon. Conventional bio-weapons didn’t discriminate between Asian and Sub-Saharan haplogroups. Genetic weapons, on the other hand, were designed to do just that. And he very much doubted that whatever it was had been released accidentally.

After consulting his contact list, he tapped in the number for Fort Detrick. A young enlisted woman answered the phone.

“US-AMRIID. How may I direct your call?”

“This is Dr. Phil Thompson of the CDC. Get me Colonel Hill, please.”

“Right away, sir.” She paused. “The CDC… is this urgent, sir?”

He smiled grimly. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to determine.”

Now consider how that fictional scenario, published in 2015, compares with this recent report published by Gordon Chang, a critic who has historically been skeptical of Chinese capabilities.

In 2017, Chinese media first reported CCP’s intention to construct a national DNA database. But this year, a think tank in Canberra, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) released a report that revealed the key details and the scale of the operation for the first time and noted that for several years China has been collecting DNA from men, as well as school-aged boys across the country. Even though the Chinese government said that the database will help to track down criminals, the report described the operation as part of government efforts to strengthen social control.

As per the recent report, Chang claimed that China has the ability to collect very sensitive information about people from outside the country. They can do that by “buying American companies which have DNA profiles, subsidizing DNA analysis for ancestry companies, and hacking.” He said that internationally accepted QR codes for the travel in and out of China were another way the CCP government was expanding its database throughout the pandemic time.

According to him, China’s access to more than 80 million health profiles gave the authorities the ability to create dangerous bioweapons capable of destroying specific ethnic groups. Dominating the biotechnology industry was very important to China, said Chang and added that the country was probably trying to develop some diseases, which target not just everyone in the world but only certain ethnic or racial groups. “We’ve got to be concerned that the next disease is more transmissible and more deadly than the novel coronavirus,” he added.

I’ve long said that President Trump’s greatest accomplishment was keeping the USA out of war with Russia. I still believe that Putin would have ordered the invasion of Ukraine if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election. But now that Biden is the Official Not-President, the neoclowns are desperately attempting to provoke war with Russia again:

Even the Sad Puppies are beginning to grasp that extrication and separation are becoming necessary, even at the social and familial levels, although they still don’t grasp the root cause of the necessity:

Okay, so here’s the blog post I don’t want to write.

The next American Civil War will be fought in a lot of places, in sudden flare ups and unexpected bursts of rage. But where most casualties will occur is in the home. America’s civil war will be fought many places, but mostly in living rooms: siblings against each other, parents against children, children against parents, husband against wife, wife against husband.

If you live with a convinced leftist, how safe is your life, should the balloon go up?

And before you say “The first civil war was also between brothers!”

Sure, it was. There were mixed families. Mostly upper crust mixed families. But the war was largely a regional war, the country riven on regional lines.

Now? Bah. Now it’s a war of ideology. A war of beliefs.

And a lot of people are sleeping with the enemy, hanging out on weekends with the enemy. Visiting the enemy. Having lunch with the enemy.

At this moment a lot of you are sitting back there and going “My wife/husband/elementary school friend is not an enemy. Sure, he/she/it drank the Marxist koolaid from a hose but in every day life, in our normal interactions, in non-political things, we are very close, the best of friends.”

And maybe you are. Maybe you can trust them with your life…. Are you sure they’ll remain inoffensive if the ballon goes up and the gaslighting switches to “If you know a Trump voter, he/she is dangerous?” How about “Turn them in, so they can be sent somewhere nice for their own protection?”

They’re still not ready to fight, they still don’t recognize the real enemy, but at least they are beginning to fear those whose approval they used to seek. 

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’

—Matthew 10:34-36

Don’t ever hesitate to cut the wicked, the retards, and the crazies out of your life. Jesus literally told his 12 disciples not to waste their breath on people who were determined not to accept the truth, so why should you feel any need to do so?

The USA is going to lose its next war, and in a manner that will not permit apologists to claim “well, we didn’t really try” or “the politicians sold us out” as they have with Vietnam and Korea. The reason is that the cognitive capability of the officer class is collapsing.

On paper, the US still has by far the world’s strongest military. This is the case whether or not you measure it by military spending, by various indices of military power (e.g. MEU, CAP, or the CMP developed on this blog), or as pertains to the narrower if arguably more relevant naval sphere, by naval megatonnage (even if the gap with China rapidly shrinks as the PLAN adds the equivalent of a major European Great Power navy every single year).

However, there are increasing reasons to think that large parts of this superiority could be becoming illusory – a dangerous state of affairs, given the recovery of bipartisan support for US military intervention and American elites’ oft-stated confidence in their military supremacy.

Some of these reasons are well covered in the military/strategy sphere, such as those relating to issues of the technological convergence of Chinese and other potential adversaries’ weapons systems. The most hyped example are Russian/Chinese hypersonic weapons, though there are many more prosaic examples, ranging from progressive improvements in Chinese fighter engines to the unexpected precision of Iranian ballistic missiles. This is accompanied by US procurement failures, with the F-35 program being the most high-profile example. However, what has not been written as much about is the rapid degradation of the human capital component in the US military – a factor that is no less important than military capital or technological prowess.

Fundamentally, you need your military forces to be staffed with high IQ and well trained men with high morale and commitment to its cause. High IQ is especially important in commanding positions and in the more “g loaded” services. According to a 2015 paper by M.F. Cancian and M.W. Klein, it seems to have been going rapidly down even before the diversity drives of the 2010s. The cognitive performance of US Marine officers has seen a 10 IQ point decline between the 1980s and 2010.

A ten-point decline is even worse than my calculations of the decline in average intelligence of the US population since 1960. My suspicion is that feminism has exacerbated the problem, as the most intelligent women from the most intelligent ethnic groups are failing to marry or have children, thereby multiplying the negative effects of non-European immigration.

By multiplying the average measured IQs for the four major ethnic groups in the United States with their changing demographic ratios, we can calculate how the demographic changes have affected the national intelligence over time. In 1960, we calculate the national IQ average to have been 100.3. By 2010, the average national IQ had fallen four points, to 96. By 2030, if the current population estimates are correct, it will fall another point, to 95. Lest you think that average national intelligence is irrelevant, note that just that four-point difference is essentially equal to the difference between countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and countries such as Uruguay and Portugal. There is a strong correlation between societal wealth and average national intelligence as measured in IQ.

Even the left-wing British paper, The Guardian, was recently forced to take note of this phenomenon, as it reported that scientists have determined genes influence academic ability across all subjects, and that as much as 60 percent of the observed differences between various population groups can be explained by genetic factors. So, the mass migration of the last 50 years has been materially dysgenic and has literally made Americans stupider on average. It’s not just you, mass entertainment really has been dumbed down in recent decades in order to appeal to what is an even lower common denominator than before.

Whatever one thinks of these changes, this is one of the fastest demographic transformations of a nation in recorded human history, and it is the direct result of public policy.

The USA is already Portugal with nukes. No wonder Russia and China are increasingly confident of their ability to break free of the post-WWII neoliberal order. A military whose strength is diversity is a military that lacks any actual strengths and will soon be defeated.

It doesn’t appear that the mainstream strategists have figured out an effective approach to attacking antifragile opponents, if this article in Military Strategy Magazine is any guide:

Antifragile adversaries may lose their potential if the strategic performance they face is inappropriate to their capabilities or if they lack the time to adapt. This does not just turn the antifragile adversaries into the resilient ones. The relationships between the specific characters of the adversary forms a triangle rather than a linear hierarchy. Therefore, one-time antifragility does not guarantee a safe landing in the resilient zone. Antifragile adversaries can be rendered fragile without becoming resilient ones. Strategists have several options to make this happen. These include sequential and cumulative strategies, as well as the strategy of annihilation, and the deliberate use of peace.

The first option includes rapidly executed sequential strategies to deny to the adversary the time to get stronger. The theory of victory here relies on a quick sequential campaign, by which the strategist robs the adversary of the time to improve the latter’s military capability. The adversary can counter this by refusing to engage at all, but then he deliberately robs himself of the opportunity to improve his military capabilities through strategic performance. Sequential strategy can, therefore, force the adversary out of his antifragile mode by either denying him the time to adapt or by rendering him unable to engage in the kind of strategic performance that would increase his military capability. The critical requirement for this approach is to have logistics effective enough to support the continual and relentless push into the adversary’s territory. However, this strategy contains a high risk of morphing into attrition. The sequential strategy can be interrupted in any moment by the adversary as well as by friction and chance inherent to strategic practice. Any serious interruption gives the adversary the time to grow stronger and increase the probabilities of turning the strategy into attrition. Still, the rapid sequential strategy may be useful when trying to achieve limited territorial objectives rather than a regime change. This is so because the pursuit of limited objectives contains fewer opportunities for interruption. The suitability of the strategy therefore varies widely with the political objectives of the strategist.

The second option is the strategy of decisive battle which seeks to annihilate the adversary’s force in one engagement. The theory of victory behind this approach resides in the delivery of the overwhelming challenge to the adversary. Such strategic performance destroys the adversary’s military capability and the associated chance to grow stronger. To pull this off, the strategist needs the cooperation of the adversary and sufficient military capabilities of his own. The adversary must accept the time and the place of the decisive battle. The strategist then needs to be able to defeat him. The adversary may decline the battle but by this he again robs himself of the opportunity to become stronger through strategic performance. On the other hand, the failure to annihilate substantial forces of the adversary during the battle may result in the struggle of attrition. The Spartans were often able to force Thebans to accept battle but they failed to annihilate the latter. Consequently, their hopes of annihilation turned into the practice of attrition which benefited the Thebans. Another problem is that contemporary strategic practice seldom allows strategists to annihilate large portion of the adversary’s military capabilities in one engagement. This has to do as much with the size of the armies as with the ways in which these are deployed. Strategists may be able to pull decisive battle off against unskilfully employed smaller-sized armed forces but it is unlikely to happen in wars between superpowers or even mediumly sized armies. The suitability of this strategy therefore varies with the relative size of the adversary’s armed forces and the way in which they are employed.

The third option is to use cumulative strategy of underwhelming attacks to exhaust the adversary. The theory of victory in this case resides in the continual attacks conducted below the level of the adversary’s current capabilities. This approach gives the adversary’s military capability no opportunity to grow, because the latter is already above the level of the attacks. In the ideal case, cumulative strategy of this sort applies violence unilaterally in order to avoid the interaction with the adversary altogether. Terrorist attacks or raids are ideal examples of this approach, but occasional battle may also work. The key difference between this strategy and the search for attrition is that the former purposefully limits the frequency and the intensity of the violent interaction while the latter does the opposite. This strategy is unlikely to destroy the adversary’s military capability. But, by denying the adversary the opportunity to grow stronger, the strategist may be able to exhaust the adversary. The strategy is most likely to succeed if the strategist pursues limited objectives and if the adversary does not value these objectives very much. There are considerable limitations to the effectives of this strategy. The strategist may be unable to do enough damage over time to exhaust the adversary. This may happen because of the intentional weakness of the attacks or because the adversary is able to recover from them. More importantly, even this strategy can turn into detrimental attempts to attrite. The confidence elicited by the successful conduct of repeated attacks may boost the strategist’s confidence as well as increase the effort he is willing to put up with. Once he feels strong enough, he may recklessly escalate his endeavour into the struggle where the search for attrition replaces the more modest aim of exhaustion. The suitability of this strategy then varies with the political objectives of the strategist, with his own capacity to exercise restraint and with the value the adversary ascribes to the objectives.

The last option is to use peace, that is to deliberately abstain from the use of violence. In this scenario, the theory of victory relies on the detrimental consequences of peace on the adversary ‘s military capabilities as well as on the supplemental use of non-violent instruments of power. In general, peace tends to have a negative impact on the cohesion of society as well as on military capabilities in particular. Conflict lines between different segments of society tends to grow and military forces face gradual capability degradation as a consequence of not facing appropriate challenges. Governments seldom prioritize the development of military capabilities to the extent this happens in war. To put it simply, in peace most people care about things other than war. The great demobilisations that followed the Napoleonic wars, the First World War, the Second World War and the 1990s are good examples of this tendency. Furthermore, some non-violent instruments of power tend to be stronger in peace than in the times of war. Propaganda, for example, is more effective in peace than during the war, because it amplifies the already present conflict lines within a society. During war, societies tends to get more homogenous and united when facing a common adversary, leaving little space for the exacerbation of conflict lines.

I will critique these four strategies in my next post on the subject. In the meantime, feel free to discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and guess which of the four I find to be a) so typical and b) amusingly wrong.

It’s always a good idea to keep up on the latest ideas being produced by the system strategists, especially since some of them are likely to be applied to us in due course.

Any useful categorization of adversaries cuts to the essence of strategy, to the utility of violent interaction. Strategy is about the purposeful use made of violent engagements with the adversary. The purpose of strategy is to decrease the adversary’s military capabilities or his will to fight. Strategic performance, in its consequences, determines whether the purpose is achieved. Therefore, the effects produced by strategic performance are what matters the most in strategy. These effects may vary in three directions. They can decrease the adversary’s capability/will to fight, leave these variables unchanged or increase them. A proper categorization of adversaries helps the strategist orient himself in the logic of these three scenarios.

The main goal here is to develop a new typology of adversaries and to zoom in on those who get stronger when engaged in strategic performance. The paper draws upon the concept of antifragility, popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Anti-fragile: The Things That Gain from Disorder. I argue that depending on their reaction to strategic performance, adversaries can be put on a spectrum from fragile to resilient, to antifragile ones. To keep the scope of the investigation reasonably limited, the paper focuses on the effects of strategic performance on the adversary’s military capabilities rather on his will to fight. The first category describes the adversaries whose military capabilities shrink as a consequence of engaging in strategic performance. The second category is reserved for those adversaries who are able to replenish their military capabilities to the original position after engaging in strategic performance. The last category describes those adversaries whose military capabilities increase as a consequence of taking part in strategic performance. These are, of course, ideal types and their manifestations in strategic practice are less clear-cut.

Antifragile adversaries pose a particular, but not unsolvable, challenge. The challenge resides in the fact that attrition, the most common effect in strategic practice, strengthens these adversaries instead of weakening them. Nonetheless, there are four distinct ways to defeat antifragile adversaries. These include rapid sequential strategies, strategies of decisive battle, cumulative strategies of underwhelming attacks, and the deliberate uses of peace. The secondary argument of this paper is that antifragility in the context of strategy is as much a function of the adversary’s capacity to adapt as of strategist’s own conduct of strategy. Strategist is responsible for the character of the adversary, he shapes it by his own choices and performance. Antifragility is therefore not an inherent nor a stable characteristic but rather a quality which the adversary acquires temporarily and in an interactive relationship.

The things that gain from disorder

Taleb coined the term antifragile in order to describe phenomena that are at the opposite spectrum of the fragile ones. When facing challenges, fragile objects get damaged or collapse completely. A typical example is anything made of regular glass. When thrown against the wall it breaks and is of no use for anyone. Then there are resilient objects, which can sustain challenges with no permanent damage taken. An inflatable ball thrown against the wall may slightly change its shape for a second only to return to the original form in the next moment, with no impact on its utility for the future.

Antifragile objects benefit from facing challenges. Bones have to be challenged regularly in order to get stronger and muscles only grow when repeatedly damaged. In fact, both bones and muscles get weak if unchallenged for longer periods of time. Two key requirements need to be present for the manifestation of the anti-fragile potential. First, the challenges have to be proportionate to the capacities of the object. Jumping from places that are too high may be an overwhelming challenge for bones and lifting stuff that is too heavy may irreversibly damage muscles. At the same time, challenges far below the capacity of the object may result in having no effect at all. A professional bodybuilder lifting weights of one kilogram every-day does not benefit from this exercise. Second, enough time has to pass between individual challenges to grant the object the space for improvement.[v] With no time to grow stronger, both bones and muscles deteriorate under constant pressure. Antifragility is therefore as much a function of the inherent predispositions of the object as it is of the character of the challenges the object faces.

The third ideal type is the antifragile adversary. For this one, strategic performance serves as a stimulus for the growth in his military capabilities. This happens when the adversary with antifragile predispositions faces regular challenges appropriate to his current capabilities. Of course, what is “regular” and “appropriate” is context dependent. Antifragile adversaries are less common in strategic history. This is so because they manifest themselves only in instances when their predispositions match with the favourable character of the strategist’s attacks. One historical example that comes close to the ideal type were the Thebans in their wars against the Spartans (395-362 B.C.). The two polities fought each other regularly during the first half of the fourth century. The continual engagement in strategic performance made Theban forces stronger from one major battle to another. Though first suffering a defeat at Nemea (394 B.C.), Thebans fought Spartans to a standstill at Coronea (394 B.C.), routed them at Tegyra (375 B.C.), and slaughtered them at Leuctra (371 B.C.) and Mantinea (362 B.C.).[vi] Over the course of the wars, Thebans enjoyed gradually increasing morale, explored innovative echelon tactics and developed new kinds of military units. Therefore, by their own efforts as well by the repeated violent interaction with the Spartans, the Thebans fulfilled their anti-fragile potential. Seeing this development in practice, one Spartan sarcastically congratulated his own king that by the repeated attacks against Thebes, he had taught his adversary how to fight. Antifragile adversaries are not an artefact of a distant past. In fact, as David Betz and Hugo Stanford-Tuck argue in their recent piece, even the contemporary West has often pursued a way of war “which through one’s own efforts leaves the enemy stronger at the end than at the beginning.” Antifragile adversaries are universal and so is the unique challenge they pose.

The main challenge in facing antifragile adversaries is that what does not kill them makes them stronger. This is a bit of exaggeration, but in general it does apply. To start with, most strategies seeking to attrite that adversary do not work. Worse, these strategies work for the antifragile adversaries. Actively seeking out the antifragile adversary and trying to attrite his military capabilities by frequent engagements is a reliable receipt for making him stronger. This may not seem like a big deal when the other strategies are available. The problem is, most of the other strategies eventually turn into some sort of attrition contest as well. Strategists too often envision quick and decisive wars of annihilation and get prolonged wars of attrition instead. Others, who start out with terrorist attacks and guerrilla raids, turn to attrition once they develop sufficient military capabilities to have a reasonable chance of success. Not all the strategic options lead to attrition but too many of them do. It follows that most options for dealing with the antifragile adversaries convey high risks of failure. 

The battle of the 72 Bears with Patreon is a classic example of an antifragile adversary vs a resilient adversary. The Bears have antifragility on their side; the LLOE is getting stronger as more lawyers take up the cause and they become better versed in the arbitratry vagaries of arbitration and the California court system. As Sparta did with Thebes, Patreon’s lawyers are literally teaching the LLOE how to defeat them. Patreon, on the other hand, has significant, but finite resources that are being continuously drained at an increasing rate. The eventual outcome is obvious to any strategic observer, since the Bears haven’t even needed to tap into the massive human resources that are available to them while Patreon is conservatively estimated to have already spent more than one-half of its annual revenue on the dispute.

Physicists know the harsh truth: math always wins in the end.

But it is interesting to note that antifragility has become a serious concern to the system strategists. I’ll analyse the proposed strategy for defeating antifragility in a future post.