Life in a once-great nation

Post-mort

Posted on August 19, 2021August 19, 2021 by Mike

Another real no-shitter, this one quite comprehensive and in-depth.

I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer and what I have to say is highly critical of our current military leadership. But it must be said.

I don’t blame President Biden for the catastrophe in Afghanistan. It was the right decision to leave, the proof of which is how quickly the country collapsed without US support. Twenty years of training and equipping the Afghan army and all that they were capable of was a few hours of delay in a country the size of Texas. As for his predecessor, the only blame I place on President Trump was that he didn’t withdraw sooner.

We should blame President Bush, not for the decision to attack into Afghanistan following 9-11, but for his decision to “shift the goalposts” and attempt to reform Afghanistan society. That was a fool’s errand any student of history would have recognized. And yes, we should place blame on President Obama for his decision to double down on failure when he “surged” in Afghanistan, rather than to withdraw.

However, most of the blame belongs to the leadership of the US military, and the Army in particular. The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” detailed years of US officials failing to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” That report was two years ago, and the stories within it began more than a decade before that. Afghanistan was, and always will be, “unwinnable”.

Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders. They stonewalled President Trump rather than beginning deliberate preparations to exit the country when he told them to. They thought that they could outlast him and then talk sense to his successor. Then after the inauguration, they pressed the new president to reverse course. He wisely chose withdrawal. Then and only then did the generals begin their preparations in earnest. But it was too late to do it well.

The war in Afghanistan lasted more than twice as long as the Vietnam War. Although the cost in terms of American blood was thankfully far smaller, the mistakes are the same: America got involved in a long land war in Asia, in a peripheral region, in order to prop up a floundering and unreliable government, and at a time when there was a much bigger looming threat. In fact, Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in that at least the Vietnam War was tangentially related to the effort to stop the global spread of communism during the Cold War. Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in another respect: the military’s leaders of the Vietnam era had no precedent to dissuade them from a disastrous path. Today’s military leadership has the precedent of not just Vietnam, but also Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. That much obtuseness must be punished and removed from the system.

It SHOULD be, sure. It won’t.

General Milley must resign. Not only is he the Chairman of the Joint Staff, prior to that he was the Chief of Staff of the Army. While all services share the blame, the Army is the land domain proponent. The 20 years of failure in Afghanistan is an Army failure. Scores of other generals also deserve a thorough evaluation; many of them are complicit in the lies to protect a decades-long failed strategy.

Won’t happen, and we all know it won’t. I suspect the only people who seriously think it might are the self-same purblind Pollyannas who blibber on and on about the vitally vital importance of “taking back Congress in 2022.”

Secretary of Defense Austin also must be fired. The recently retired Army general and former CENTCOM commander was, and still is, part of the culture that is impervious to the fact that 20 years of trying it their way did not work.

Won’t happen.

Just as it did after Vietnam, the military, and especially the Army, must conduct a comprehensive review of why it exists.

Won’t happen.

The purpose of the Army is to visit profound violence on our nation’s enemies; it is not to rebuild failed states. We have decades of experience: counter-insurgencies and nation-building does not work for America. We do not have the stomach for long wars of occupation—and that is a good thing. We are a nation of commerce, not conflict. A constellation of retired stars will tell you that the two can coexist. They are wrong. Retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane said only two months ago that because Afghanistan consumes just a small portion of the force, America “can afford the cost of fighting” there. What he does not see is that for 20 years, that “small portion” was the most important portion of the military. Everything else necessarily is subservient to the portion of the force in conflict. It has altered who the Army is and how it thinks. There exists only a handful of officers below the general officer ranks who served during the Cold War and who have lived through an era of great power conflict. From private through brigade commander, virtually every Army Soldier serving today has experienced little other than counterinsurgencies or nation-building while operating out of secure FOBs.

Hey, what better way to exhaust said military; demoralize the warriors at the pointy end; erode the support for said military among its natural base of same; reinforce the paramount urgency of the fundamentally anti-American idea that participation in multinational forces (as no more than “one among equals,” even though the contribution demanded of the US will always and forever exceed that of all other “coalition partners” combined, by orders of magnitude) and submission to the authority of globalist organizations—in short, to invalidate and demolish the very concept of national sovereignty and independence, thereby achieving the eternal Leftist dream of One World Government: omnipotent, unchallengeable, eternal. Why, one might almost imagine the whole thing had been planned in advance or something.

Large scale combat operations and insurgencies require different cultures and mindsets. In a resource constrained environment, the same service cannot do both well. The Army today could not win a major war.

Clearly, it couldn’t even win a minor one.

Yet, winning a major war, is the number one reason why an Army exists. It will take a generation to break bad habits, to think in terms of closing with and destroying the enemy versus winning hearts and minds.

More importantly, it will take a clear-eyed, stout-hearted populace whose will to victory hasn’t been broken by seeing the lives of friends, family members, and neighbors who are in the military squandered for no discernible purpose or gain by an entirely loathsome and corrupt political/military complex, in pointless conflicts half-heartedly fought in farflung shitholes all over the world—places in which there there is no national interest to be found.

Keane sees raw numbers (and ignores the stark evidence that there was no progress over 20 years) and thinks that America’s Army can sustain that level of commitment. It cannot, and the opportunity cost to the culture of the force is much too great. Ignore him. Ignore Petraeus, McMaster, Stavridis, and the rest of their ilk.

Done.

Let us not forget the intelligence agencies. They reported that Kabul was at risk of falling in as little as 90 days. That report was from last Thursday! The capital fell in less than 90 hours. Failure must be punished. And punishment in a bureaucracy means mass firings and a smaller budget—not more money so that they might be better the next time. Congress must consolidate and collapse our intelligence agencies. And when its reorganization is done, if the overall size of the nation’s intelligence apparatus is a quarter of what it is now, that still is too large.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. Won’t happen.

And while we are on the topic of “too large,” DoD must be halved. There are too many flag officers, too many agencies, departments, and directorates. It is the only secretariat with independent but supposedly subordinate secretaries. There are too many Geographic Component Commands—each led by a 4-star virtual proconsul whose budget dwarfs what the Department of State spends in their regions. The result is a foreign policy that is overly military and underly diplomatic, informational, and economic. Congress must revisit the 1947 National Security Act and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Both were good for their times, but after decades of experience, there clearly are new reforms necessary.

Unreformed, DoD is an inscrutable labyrinth which invites fraud, waste, and abuse. The excess attracts unscrupulous camp followers. Amazon did not choose Crystal City to locate its new headquarters because of low rents and ease of transportation access for its 25,000 employees. It chose the Arlington, Virginia neighborhood because it is two blocks from the Pentagon. That building controls the distribution of three-quarters of a trillion dollars every year. Most of it is wasted. The excess is apparent in the scores of class-A high rises housing defense contractors just blocks from the Pentagon. To end that waste, nothing so concentrates the senses as austerity.

Okay, I’m gonna just lay off the “won’t happen” schtick—do I really even need to say it again? No, I do not—so we can get to the last crucial bit.

Let me conclude with one last thought: the generals, the intelligence analysts, the defense contractors, and the pundits all leveraged America’s rarest resource: the American serviceman and woman. They are the ones who fought, and sweat, and bled, and died for what is now clearly a failed strategy and a doomed mission. Even after its failure was apparent to their leaders, they continued to enlist and reenlist, largely because their superiors—the experts—assured them that success was possible. It was not. It never was. Absent American support, Afghanistan collapsed over the length of a long weekend. That is proof enough that the last 20 years were in vain, and proof enough that the system is broken from within.

Actually, we’ll never know for sure whether “success was possible” or not…because it was never actively, vigorously pursued. In reality, it was barely ever even discussed—certainly, it was never defined, after the original goal of “find and kill bin Laden” shifted to “remove the Taliban, destroy their ability to provide a base for the projection of jihadi power a la 9/11,” morphing from there into “Make Afghanistan Georgetown Again.”

Once again, The Power and its Grand Scheme has been undone by its own arrogance, incompetence, and witless disregard for the harsher realities. If it weren’t for the way the horrific consequences of their folly always crash down onto the heads of the hapless wretches so uncaringly used and manipulated by them, watching the serial pratfalls of our grotesquely-misnomered “Elite” would be funny as all hell to watch.

A real no-shitter of an AAR

Posted on August 18, 2021August 18, 2021 by Mike

STRONG message follows.

Some of you Afghan Veterans out there are hurting, trying to make sense of what this all means. Including some of my peers, who are not immune to the feel bads coming out of this clusterfuck. So allow me to give you a different perspective, one that will perhaps sooth the pain a bit. I shoot straight, and this isn’t all sunshine and roses. There is going to be some Grim Dark up front. But it does have a silver lining, hear me out.

Was this a foolish mission to start with? Yes. The only way to decisively win in Afghanistan was full scale genocide, which we knew from about 2003 forward. We don’t have the stomach for that, and that is probably a good thing.

Nah, not so much. All’s we ever had to do—ever SHOULD have done—is hew closely to LeMay’s Maxim, a man who very much knew whereof he spoke when it came to waging war: If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.

Did we lose? Yeah, goddamn right we lost. Let’s just get that out of the way now, like ripping off a band aid. Do not get out the “ We were winning when I left” hats and slap a Ghan flag on them. Face the facts, and then act. If the goal 20 years ago was to remove the Taliban, and now the Taliban is back 100% in control without even requiring a name change, then the objective was not met.

Is it your fault? No. The failure here, while stunning, rests on the political class and the Generals. So like I said, the political class. Who, exactly, do you think lost this war? You, out slogging the mountains, and mowing down Taliban fighters with a machine gun, and surviving on fish sticks and MRE crackers at the firebase, and winning EVERY tactical level engagement for 20 years? Or the spineless General who didn’t hear a gun shot despite 9 tours, who was the architect of the grand strategy, and spent his time quite literally getting his dick sucked by his biographer in his office at Bagram instead of trying to win?

We can safely say at this point that the real goal in Afghanistan was a transfer of wealth from the tax payers to the MIC ( Military Industrial Complex) and the politicians they bought with the profits. $88 billion dollars ( for the ANA alone) is a staggering figure. For that much money, you could have paid half of Afghanistan to kill the other half. You could have paid China or India or even Pakistan to do it for you. That money was wasted, and we all knew that well over a decade ago.

Afghanistan should never have been anything except a punitive expedition. We should have left in 2004, 2006, 2007, or ten minutes after Osama Bin Laden died. Any one of those would have been a leave with honor type situation. Instead, we opted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and look like incompetent boobs to the entire planet. I should say, our Generals and Politicians opted for that. Almost like that was the goal………

The idea of spending 2.2 trillion dollars to “export our way of life” to cavemen is retarded, and anyone with an ounce of sense knows that. I often said that giving the Ghans a Jeffersonian Democracy was a fool’s errand, since we could barely keep one functioning ourselves. Post Nov 4th, 2020, we know that “barely functioning” wasn’t true either. The idea of the US Government fighting corruption is laughable in our own country. So no shit we laundered 2.2 trillion into bribes and fake projects, what did you think was going to happen?

How many Company Grade Officers were relieved of command or run up on charges over 20 years? A lot. Hundreds, if not thousands. How many Generals faced the same fate, or resigned in disgrace over their incompetence? None. Stan McCrystal resigned for saying not nice things about Obumer to a Rolling Stone reporter, but that doesn’t count. In fact, perhaps it is telling that General JSOC himself was played in such a manner. If ole Stanley is too much of a fucking idiot not to effectively give his enemy kryptonite and ask him nice not to use it, what does that say about the rest of the Officer Caste? For that matter, how many children did the CEO of Ratheyon or Boeing or Lockheed Martin lose to the meat grinder?

Yeah, it hurts. I feel you. We all lost friends. Had our brothers return home mangled and broken. Was it worth it? No. But those are sunk costs, so we might as well look at what we gained from the experience.

He goes on to list a few of those silver-lining items before laying down some 24-karat-gold, capital-t Truth:

We lost this war the minute Code Pink was taken seriously. The minute Bradly Manning and Bo Berghdale weren’t hung. The first time we charged one of our warfighters with murder or using excessive force. The first time we denied a element in contact air support. Our people, 49% of them at least, are weak and stupid. The great sifting has just begun, and it will get worse. That is the price you pay for allowing weakness to take root in your society.

All of us, I promise, will be needed once again. And soon. And not in some Bureaucrat, Blue Blood , Skull and Bones created debacle on the edge of the Empire. I mean needed as in needed like the Spartans at Thermopylae. The weakness on display right now by the Government of the United States will not go unnoticed by the world at large. We can expect now to be poked in the chest, because we have shown that we will take it.

Seems to me it ain’t really the rest of the world that we need to be concerning ourselves with now. As I keep saying, the war has been brought home to us, right to our very doorsteps. The primary threat to American liberty, American prosperity and security, and Americans themselves, no longer comes from enemies abroad. As in the classic old horror-movie line: The calls are coming from inside the house.

(Via WRSA)

“We are led by buffoons”

Posted on August 18, 2021August 18, 2021 by Mike

Well, there’s no arguing with THAT.

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: Joe Biden went on television today, this afternoon, and talked to the country about Afghanistan. He said, among other things, that we had no choice but to leave, and on that question, he is right. The United States should have left Afghanistan 19 years ago when it became obvious that Osama bin Laden wasn’t there and had fled to Pakistan. There was no reason to stay in the country.

And the longer we remained, the worse it was always going to be. The question is, and the relevant question today, is how exactly do you get out? Just because something is necessary doesn’t mean you get to ignore the details of it. If you learned you needed an emergency appendectomy, would it matter to you who performed the operation? A surgeon with a scalpel or a drunk guy with a pocket knife? Yes, it would matter to you.

But it didn’t matter to Joe Biden, apparently. He barely mentioned the withdrawal today. Biden did the necessary thing in the ugliest possible way. If you’ve been watching television during the day, you’ve probably seen this footage. It’s terrified men in sandals clinging to the side of a C-17 as it attempts to leave Afghanistan.

This is the iconic photo of the moment. It’s the final humiliating scene of the American occupation of Afghanistan. That means that after 20 years and trillions of dollars, our leaders couldn’t manage to pull off an orderly retreat. They couldn’t even secure a single runway, and that’s the main lesson of the fall of Kabul. We are led by buffoons. They have no idea what they’re doing. We know that now. They are imposters.

Everything they touch turns to chaos, not just there but here. These are the people who run the Amtrak station in Midtown Manhattan, the one that’s filled with drug addicts. They are the people in charge of the power grid in the State of California, they have no useful skills, and yet somehow, these same people assured us they were going to turn Stone Age Afghanistan into Modern Belgium. Remembering it now is bitter and hilarious.

At this point, our leaders are so discredited, they are running out of ways to criticize the Taliban. Is the Biden administration really going to attack the new government of Afghanistan for forcing women to cover their faces? Are American diplomats actually going to lecture Taliban leaders about toppling statues? Probably not going to happen. That’s how much credibility our leaders have lost, how much moral authority they have squandered in the past 20 years.

But most of what they’ve lost is their self-awareness. They have none.

Okay then, ONE thing I’ll argue with: as nothing but walking, talking skin-bags of pure conceit, they’re ALL self-awareness, ALL the time. The trouble is that their perception has been so radically skewed by their monstrously bloated egos, that’s all. They aren’t what they think they are: not nearly the capable, intelligent, admired, and influential leaders they believe themselves to be. None of which fazes them in the least, natch. Obama said a mouthful when he told author Richard Wolfe, “You know, I actually believe my own bullshit.” They all do, and demand that everybody else must as well.

“America’s Elites are trash”

Posted on August 18, 2021August 18, 2021 by Mike

NAILED. IT.

Former US intelligence colleagues are angry and deeply worried at what has happened in Afghanistan. Here’s what I’m hearing, and why there’s nearly universal belief that America and the world are in for one of the most dangerous, unpredictable times in modern history.

Afghanistan has shown the world — enemies & allies alike — that our military & intel assets are largely irrelevant because we can’t deploy them successfully. The blame lays at the feet of multiple Presidents. The Generals. The Spies. The Congress.

America’s Elites are trash. China knows it. They will become emboldened, covertly & overtly. War over Taiwan and contested islands in the S. China Sea and E. China Sea is now more likely. Russia will consider similar covert & overt moves, focused on Crimea, & former Soviet satellites. The fear is that China & Russia will act in concert.

Why? America was whipped by a tiny rebel force and couldn’t even retreat properly. Meanwhile, the American people are angry, COVID weary, & divided. If there were ever a time to push American hegemony aside, this is it. If Cold War III grows hot, America will need to quickly build up & work with foreign counterparts. But who will trust America after Afghanistan? Who believes we have the leadership to use our military might well? Who will trust us when we say “We Will Stand With You”?

Nobody with half a lick of sense, on every one of those questions. Including me.

Beyond China/Russia, others will take gambles too. Terror orgs like al-Qa’ida & ISIS are degraded but not dead. Their ideology is very much alive. Iran’s Hizballah — with terror cells throughout the US — may see an opening to create chaos too.

Meanwhile, the disaster inside Afghanistan is only just beginning. The Taliban will launch a terror campaign against American collaborators. The pictures will shock the conscience of the world, further degrading American moral authority. Biden & Co will struggle to respond.

There’s also the nightmare of tactical weaponry now awash in Afghanistan, in the hands of the Taliban and — soon — on the global black market. These arms will fuel chaos around the world for decades. The Pentagon has no idea where this stuff is and no plans to destroy it.

Finally, if Afghani refugees pour into the US, there are profound implications for security, culture, the economy, & politics. Are they properly vetted? Do they hold Western/tolerant values re: women, gays? Do they bring skills/education? Which party will they support?

More questions for which sentient beings already have the answers: no, RUFKM, HELL no, and three guesses, DUH. Expect to see much more splodeydopery, head-choppery, and sidewalk-murder-trucks driven into crowds up close and personal-like all across the too-feckless-to-bother-saving-itself Woke West, as the victorious Taliban expands its power and reach to put all those new war-toys abandoned by the fleeing Uncle Sam to best use.

The existential problem is that America needs good leadership to right its ship but there is none. Our federal bench is weak. Biden is a corrupt old man. Impeachment is a long shot; VP Harris is an unpopular paperweight. The Legislature is a feckless cabal of empty suits. Leadership could come from a state Governor, it’s true, but not soon enough. The above threats by China, Russia, & Co will metastasize well before the 2024 elections, and even a heroic new President will need years to clean things up.

Hate to be the one to hip ya, buddy, but the problem is even more existential than you may realize. NO President—however heroic, over whatever span of time he’s given—can or will clean this up. The mess is simply too big, the rot too deep, the national fabric too tattered and torn. This Augean stable is beyond hope of restoration; even the mighty Hercules himself would only throw up his hands in despair and just walk away from the job, shaking his head and muttering under his breath about what a total dick that damned King Eurystheus was for assigning it to him in the first place. Which, as it turned out in the end, he really was a dick. Anyhoo.

Again, our enemies and allies know this. Upshot: There is fear and outrage streaming through former intel officers over the Afghanistan debacle. America is rudderless. And the world now knows it. Grave dangers lie ahead, some predictable, others unimaginable.

‘Fraid so. The closing plea to “vote for change” is risible and pathetic, of course, in enforced accord with Beck’s First Law of TINVOWOOT™. But the rest is pretty much spot on, I’d say. Makes one wonder, since Wright is identified as a “former CIA ops officer,” whether there might not actually be a few white hats in the US spook community after all. Or might have been in the past, shall we say.

The weakness of Wokeness

Posted on August 17, 2021August 17, 2021 by Mike

He’s dead, Jim, and doesn’t even seem to realize it.

The War on Terror began with men plunging to their deaths from the highest floors of skyscrapers hit by airplanes; it ended with men plunging to their deaths from the undercarriage of a US airplane taking off from what’s left of “Hamid Karzai International Airport” (the signs will be coming down even as you read this).

America is a global laughingstock right now, but that’s no reason not to give Chairman Xi and Putin and every up-country village headman in Helmand a few more yuks. Step forward, State Department spokeswanker Ned Price:

State Department calls for Taliban to include women in its government

The United States is dead as a global power because of this kind of indestructible stupidity. You’ve lost, you blew it, it’s over: The goatherds just decapitated you; could you at least have the self-respect not to run around like a headless chicken too stupid to know it’s nogginless? Or like a broken doll lying on its back with its mechanism jammed on the same simpleton phrases: “Diversity is our strength… diversity is our strength…”

Contrast the Washington presser with that in Kabul:

Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid says ‘We have defeated a great power.’

Wrong, asshole. If Amerika v2.0 was a “great power,” you goat-humping, dress-clad lower primates would never have defeated it. America That Was, on the other hand, would have exterminated every last Muzzrat in the Hindu Kush and reduced the flatter areas of your cesspool “nation” to so much steaming glass in the first fucking month. Then Our Boys would have loaded up the gear and headed on home with, as Billy Beck once put it, the last US soldier pausing his trot up the troop-transport ramp to nail up a sign warning DON’T MAKE US COME BACK HERE AGAIN.

And know what? I bet you wouldn’t have, either. You mouthbreathers would have been very, very careful to make sure it didn’t happen, your bowels instantly going gooey at the mere thought of giving us a reason to, what with the unpleasant memory of your asses having been kicked up between your shoulder blades fresh in mind and all. No, don’t y’all be breaking any arms patting yourselves on the back for “defeating America.” You weren’t fighting America; America no longer exists, not as anything other than a fond memory. It hasn’t for many years.

Hmm. Ned Price vs Zabiullah Mujahid: tough call. The mountain of non-existent dollar bills that the bloated husk of federal government blows through every minute surely should buy sufficient self-awareness to know that, whatever else it may be, this is not a day for wankery as usual. Even CNN has a more proximate relationship to reality.

Wokeness is weakness, and diversity is where nations go to die. Contrast our spokesmen with theirs: in the White House, Jen Psaki picked the weekend to take a vacation, possibly to film her scenes in another hilariously viral Mr Non-Binary Goes To Washington video; at Foggy Bottom, Buffoon McStriped Pants III issued a stern warning on the need for the firebreathing mullahs to include more female deputy-assistant-undersecretaries; and, at the Potemtagon, Kabul Kirby stood there doing his usual anguished-eyebrows Saddy Sadcakes routine.

All these images project global impotence: none of these people would be a serious and prudent power’s projection of itself to the world.

Meanwhile, back at the palace in Kabul, the Taliban commander giving a victory speech is Gholam Ruhani, released from Gitmo (under Bush) because he said his “only wish” was to return to Afghanistan to (per the Department of Defense documents published, natch, in a London newspaper) “assist his father, who is sick, in operating the family appliance store in Kabul”.

I don’t know what appliances they sell at Ruhani & Son over at 237b Sword of the Infidel Slayer Street, but evidently they’re enough to take out the global superpower. On social media, the wags are having great sport with Joe Biden’s recent taunt that no American needs an AR-15, because, if you want to defeat the mighty US government, you’re gonna need fighter jets and nukes.

Well, the Taliban just took out Joe as Leader of the Free World with no nukes, no F-15s, just a big bunch of AR-15s.

That could actually be taken as an encouraging thing, were it not for the sure and certain knowledge that The Power in Mordor on the Potomac would be FAR less hesitant about waging full-on, no-holds-barred warfare against Real Americans than against anybody else. Balancing that, though, is the equally sorry truth that America’s military might has atrophied so badly by now that really, the only army in the world that the FUSA stands any chance at all of defeating would have to be the “largely disintegrated” Afghan National Army that just downed weapons and surrendered to the Taliban. So we got that going for us, at least.

Steyn uncorks a painful-but-funny at the close:

If you saw my long-form interview by Tucker Carlson yesterday, you’ll know he asked me about writing obituaries. And I replied that it was very difficult to do obits for people for whom you had total contempt; you had to have some basic human sympathy even for the most unlovely types. And yet, as the world dances on the grave of Washington’s “elites”, I cannot muster a jot or tittle of human connection with the likes of Milley and Austin, Kirby and Psaki and Biden: They will all die richer than you, and with half the citizenry convinced of their virtue.

Steyn Clubber Eric Dale from Iowa appended this somewhat mordant comment to my Sunday column:

Do you think there’s any chance of getting Taliban commanders to teach at West Point? It might be a nice change of pace for cadets to learn from someone who actually won a war.

We all laugh…but it’s actually a very fair point: Would you rather hear first-hand from a mullah about how they took out the hyperpower in a week? Or from a corrupt toad like Milley who can only express bewilderment at how showering billions on other corrupt toads from Herat to Jalalabad didn’t pan out?

Myself, I wonder how many more shiny additions to his chestful of fruit-salad Milley will award himself for Heroic Leadership Above And Beyond The Call etc in the Afghanistan fiasco. Oh, and in case you aren’t angry enough to explode a ventricle quite yet:

Taliban Leader Obama/Biden Released from GITMO in Swap for Deserter Bergdahl Just Resurfaced
It was one of the worst trades in history, even worse than Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi or Kobe Bryant for Vlade Divac: Back in 2014, Barack Obama traded five Taliban commanders for one American who, we were led to believe, had been captured by the Taliban. Obama did all he could to make the swap seem noble: He said at the time that the recovery of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was “a reminder of America’s unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield,” and the five Taliban jihadis were sent to Qatar, where they would ostensibly be kept out of trouble. Seven years later, Bergdahl is known as a deserter, not a hero: In 2017, he pleaded guilty to desertion and was given a dishonorable discharge. And now Khairullah Khairkhwa, one of the jihadis Obama traded for Bergdahl, is among the Taliban leadership that just took Kabul.

Obama’s deal was fishy from the start. Bergdahl was known as a deserter even at the time the deal was made. Former infantry officer Nathan Bradley Bethea, who served with Bergdahl in Afghanistan, wrote in the Daily Beast that Bergdahl was “a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.” Refuting reports that Bergdahl got separated from his unit while on patrol, Bethea declared: “Make no mistake: Bergdahl did not ‘lag behind on a patrol,’ as was cited in news reports at the time. There was no patrol that night. Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.”

Three days before he deserted, Bergdahl wrote to his parents: “I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.”

The Obama/Biden administration ignored all this, made the lopsided deal, and treated Bergdahl as a returning hero at a Rose Garden ceremony featuring the deserter’s parents.

Meanwhile, Obama’s own intelligence team warned him that four of the five jihadis he traded for Bergdahl were almost certain to return to the jihad. He ignored this. And so Khairullah Khairkhwa was free to join other Taliban representatives in Qatar in 2019, negotiating the terms of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. During those protracted, fruitless, and foredoomed negotiations, Khairkhwa declared in March 2021: “I started jihad to remove foreign forces from my country and establish an Islamic government, and jihad will continue until we reach that goal through a political agreement.” Or, as things turned out, until Old Joe Biden leaves Afghanistan without bothering to have his military, which was too preoccupied with making sure to enforce woke orthodoxy anyway, prepare a coherent exit strategy that would protect our personnel and get them and our weaponry out of the country safely.

“The horror that is America is disgusting.” I must confess that I’m finding it awfully tough to disagree with Berghdahl’s assessment at the moment.

Screwed, blued, tattooed

Posted on August 17, 2021August 17, 2021 by Mike

The always-wise and eloquent Claire Wolfe is wondering about a few important things.

We hardly need Arnold Schwartzenegger to tell us our freedom is screwed.

As determined as we freedomistas may be to uphold our mental and philosophical freedoms, our political freedoms and economic freedoms are gone-gone-gone. They’ve been going for decades of course. But we now live under a regime that in eight months has ruled via a combination of ever-shifting whim, diktat, incompetence, and a complete disregard for reason, principle, or constitutional law.

When you’re ruled by capricious madmen, your external freedoms are moot. Here today, gone tomorrow, partially restored for a few moments the day after that, made illegal and punishable by heaven knows what the following day.

Knowing we’re headed for some sort of revolution, I’ve surrounded myself with history books. Seeking parallels. Seeking key differences. Seeking advice from the past. Seeking useful blog fodder.

What can we learn not to do from the French? How are we like, and different from, the Americans of 1774? Must we expect the Russian revolution or might we be smart, luck out and get the kind they had more recently in Estonia or East Germany or Hungary? What can the fall of the Roman empire and its long aftermath tell us? How about the Irish, with their centuries of failure followed finally by a “success” that tears them apart to this day?

I’m telling you, though, I read and read and read and got nada.

While history does at times conveniently rhyme — or echo; we can hear the echoes of several civilizations now — our circumstances are so different they’re like discordant, meterless, meaningless nonsense verse, conveying nothing coherent.

I called up a friend with whom I often brainstorm.

“Give me some insights, preferably with a dose of optimism,” I requested.

For half an hour he ranted about…how screwed we are.

Yes, we’re like the French in 1789 or the American colonists in 1774 or the Irish in 1916. But we’re much more like Germany in 1933.

I have no hope for us; we are such a nation of cowards. We have no backbone.

Even after decades of being lied to, we’re watching Americans not only bow down to every bit of nonsense uttered by the establishment, but seeing those of us who question the nonsense demonized as vermin, to be exterminated.

It’s the kind of self-righteousness that goes along with absolute spinelessness.

Well. That was cheery.

Oddly ironic, ain’t it, how we’ve suddenly found ourselves tossed about on the stormy seas of all-too-familiar history, and yet are in completely uncharted territory simultaneously. But since Claire brought up the French and all, Dave Renegade reviews a little French history that might well contain a useful lesson or three for us.

History once again repeats itself as Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban in a matter of days. Or should we acknowledge this as a surrender since the American puppet army did not give any resistance to their conquerors. I doubt the Afghanistan government installed by the United States was popular except with the opium traders. I also doubt that this was an intelligence failure: the CIA knew what was going to happen. They found greener pastures to rape under the illegal Biden administration.

The analogy of Napoleon’s return to power from Elba should also be considered. Napoleon landed back in France on March 1, 1815. He regained power in Paris on March 20, 1815 without any resistance.

Napoleon was recognized by the military and the people as their rightful leader:

[Napoleon] landed at Cannes on March 1st, intending to travel to the city of Grasse, however the road he wanted to travel did not exist for the Bourbons had given up on expensive works in order to have money. It was known that Grasse was in favour of Royalist cause at the time, yet Napoleon’s sudden appearance led to submission towards the Emperor. After this display of loyalty to the Emperor, Napoleon began to march confidently to Paris as the population were in favour of his cause. There was zero opposition until they reached a battalion on the road the fifth day after landing at Cannes. The commanding officer of said battalion refused to talk to Napoleon. Hearing this, The Emperor took matters into his own hands and walked straight at the battalion with his 100 soldiers treading behind slowly, ripped open his jacket, exposed his chest to the entire battalion and shouted “Let him that has the heart kill the Emperor”. Upon seeing this, the soldiers threw down their arms, tears in their eyes, and shouted “Vive l’Empereur!”

How about another repeat to replace an illegal and unpopular government?

Dave goes on to roll out a scenario involving a reclamation of power by the rightful POTUS (Trump) which parallels Napoleon’s. It has its appeal, I guess, but is unlikely in the extreme to happen. He includes several useful suggestions for what should happen after that, all of which are good.

Honestly, though, I’m pretty much all done with Trump, and I’m by no means alone in that. He had his contribution to make; if nothing else, Trump pulled off the lid to expose what a great big box of pure, undiluted nasty the US government has become. But now—love him or hate him, for better or for worse—his time has passed. From what I’m seeing, he’s lost a significant chunk of his core support at this point—so much of it, in fact, that I have to wonder if he’d even be re-elected in an honest election today. I seriously doubt he would, frankly.

Kabul falls, hilarity ensues, Trump blamed

Posted on August 16, 2021August 17, 2021 by Mike

Parseltongue from the mouth of the lamest, most ineffectual Voldemort ever.

Biden Says He Stands By Decision to Leave Afghanistan, Doesn’t Discuss Botched Exit Plan, Takes No Questions
In prepared remarks delivered from the White House, Monday Afternoon, Joe Biden focused on explaining why pulling out of Afghanistan was the right thing to do, rather than addressing why the administration’s plan was so poorly executed.

“I stand squarely behind my decision,” he said, referring to President Trump’s decision to exit Afghanistan. “The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.”

Biden cast blame on his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, arguing that his administration’s hands were tied by the plan Trump set in motion last year.

He also repeatedly excoriated Afghanistan’s elected leaders and military for not putting up more of a fight against the Taliban. He said that they in essence squandered the time and money America spent to build up its security forces.

“We gave them every tool they could need,” he said. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. [What] we could not provide them, was the will to fight for that future.”

Biden even said that it was “wrong” to put Americans in harm’s way to do a job that Afghanistan wouldn’t do itself, and positioned himself as being a leader who was willing to make the difficult call to leave Afghanistan that a generation of Washington officials were incapable of doing. He added that the United States will continue to provide humanitarian assistance and try to exert soft-power influence to improve the conditions on the ground.

Biden also blamed our Afghan allies for their dire predicament, claiming they didn’t want to leave earlier because they still had hope for their country.

“I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner,” he said. “Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it is because the Afghan government, and its supporters, discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.”

The “***president***” then hurriedly scuttled back to his secret lair, contemptuously showing his back to the adoring press gaggle without taking the slightest notice of them.

And that’s a wrap, more or less. No real need to discuss the bumbling, blibbering dolt’s spluttering dumpster-fire of a statement much further, I don’t think. It’s not as if the doped-up zombie has any real idea of what he’s saying anyway, if he ever did.

Heart of stone update! Question asked, question answered.

He walked out without responding to questions from the press. The transcript records one and only one of the questions shouted at him: “Mr. President, what do you make of the Afghans clinging to the aircraft?”

Oh, a throw rug, a unique and intimidating doormat, some extremely unappetizing pancakes…

Just another humiliating defeat

Posted on August 16, 2021August 16, 2021 by Mike

Everything old is new again.

pic.twitter.com/skQjngLckd

— Dr. Nickarama (@nickaramaOG) August 15, 2021

Know what’s really gonna hurt, though? When some enterprising soul out there does some digging and establishes that the Kabul Chinook is the exact same damned one from the Saigon ’75 photo. Seeing as how the only hardware the “world’s strongest military” has that actually works as it’s supposed to is all fifty to seventy years old, that wouldn’t be any big surprise.

Ultimately, Antipresident Biden owns this embarrassing debacle lock, stock, and barrel—or his handlers do, rather. But let’s not be too quick to lay it ALL at his feet; as always, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Doug Lute, a retired Army general who directed Afghan strategy at the NSC for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told The New York Times that the puzzle for him “is the absence of contingency planning: If everyone knew we were headed for the exits, why did we not have a plan over the past two years for making this work?” 

Big brass ones on this blame-shifting rumpswab, you gotta give him that much. Which would have to be Requirement One for the guy who directed Afghan strategy for No Such Agency, under not one but TWO (2) US presidents, to blandly declare himself mystified over the absence of contingency planning for a more dignified exit from the Graveyard of Empires. Now I’m certainly no expert, but it seems obvious enough that, as not only a high NSA mucky-muck and superspook but also a former US Army general, Lute might rightly be thought of as one of the folks officially responsible for the development of things like, ohhh, contingency plans, no? As in, that’s a critical part of your job description?

Additionally, it’s widely known that the US military has long made having a plan in place for EVERY imaginable contingency—including some pretty fanciful ones, at that—among its top priorities. Yet somehow—for a twenty-year quagmire which even not-particularly-attentive Americans could readily discern we were losing, the current “president” and his predecessor both having implicitly conceded defeat by announcing an imminent US disengagement and withdrawal—there was no planning done to prevent the anarchic, bloody rush for the exits we just witnessed.

As I said about Faux Jaux, though, so it is with this Lute loser: plenty of blame here to go around.

The US Embassy in Afghanistan spent more time planning for Pride Month than it did for the withdrawal. One unforced error after another. https://t.co/hgqN8PKIrR

— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) August 15, 2021

Steyn spreads the blame around even further, to some candidates richly deserving of their portion.

One of the depressing aspects of the Swamp is that everything becomes a racket – including even your armed forces. Look at that buffoon at top right, the guy who heads the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Thoroughly Modern Milley: that’s an awful lot of chest ribbonry for a nation that hasn’t won a war in three-quarters of a century. During his recent wokier-than-thou Congressional testimony on “white rage”, I wish someone would have asked Thoroughly Modern what they were all for:

Well, this is for Korea…Vietnam…This small ribbon’s for the Jimmy Carter helicopters-in-the-desert fiasco, because that went tits up far quicker than it usually takes…Here’s the Pentagon Female Empowerment Award I got for introducing Take Your Child Bride To Work Day to Jalalabad…This one’s from the Association of Non-Binary Staff Colleges for Most Transitions in a Single Battalion…Oh, and this most recent one is for getting into a Twitter spat over Tucker Carlson…

If you don’t have total contempt for Milley and the rest of the brass right now, you’re part of the problem.

I’m in favor of razing the Pentagon and salting the earth – or, at the very least, firing Milley and the massed ranks of “parade generals” (a useful Commonwealth term) and moving the few guys left to a new HQ in a strip-mall on the edge of Cleveland. The bigger your armed forces get, the more they become a racket – as the US-created “Afghan National Army” “300,000-strong” (and now down to, oh, twenty-seven maybe) has just conveniently demonstrated. As for where all the money wound up, the Taliban’s tour of American “ally” and former Afghan vice-president “Marshal” Dostum’s palatial spread provides a clue.

I’ve said for years, into the void of silence from Bill Kristol, Max Boot and the rest of the shock’n’awe crowd on the laughably misnamed “national-security right”, that the entire American way of war needs rethinking.

As for the enemy, the good news is that if your regime is attacked by America you’ll likely wind up with even more territory than you started with:

The Taliban now controls more of Afghanistan than it did before the US invaded in 2001.

That happens to be true: the only change effected over two decades of Nato occupation is that the Taliban now controls northern Afghanistan, which it didn’t do on October 7th 2001. But don’t worry; here’s how US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spent his Saturday night:

Very productive conversation with Canadian Foreign Minister @MarcGarneau about our efforts to reach a diplomatic solution in Afghanistan.

In the course of that “very productive” telephone call, the Taliban took three more cities.

America is not “too big to fail”: It’s failing by almost every metric right now. The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we’re Weimar with smartphones.

Clearly, Chairman Xi and his allies occasionally muse on the best moment to yank the dollar out from under. If you were in Beijing watching telly today, would you perhaps be considering advancing those plans?

At this point, if they aren’t, then what the hell are they waiting for?

A fragile peace

Posted on August 5, 2021August 5, 2021 by Mike

Looking on as, all around us, the collapse accelerates.

In the distant future, as Gibbon did, some historian will stick his wrinkled finger on a calendar date and pronounce “and on this date, the United States of America fell.” If by some miracle I were to witness the event, I would not be surprised if that date was already in our past. Historians have the benefit of hindsight, but also of not living in the aquarium they spend their lives researching. Some say Rome fell in 476, as a puppet emperor was deposed and sent into retirement. Did Roman citizens know this was an ending of things? No. To them the real emperor resided in Constantinople. Since they had first drawn breath, all power resided there, in New Rome. Old Rome had been a shadow for generations, and even in Italy, rule had long been pronounced from Ravenna, itself far less important than the economically powerful East.

Justinian the Great thought himself the Emperor of the Romans and ruled over the Mediterranean shores as tightly as many of his predecessors, more than half a century after the fall. What changed, then, on that day historians marked? Symbols changed; I suppose. We see discontinuity, but there was none. We see change, but such change was gradual, the product of generations.

The point is essentially arbitrary. A finger found its way to a date on a calendar, one small event in a sequence of centuries, and thus was it pronounced: Rome has fallen.

Look out of your window and see urban gentrification, perhaps. Or peaceful suburbia. Perhaps you see farm fields, forests, or the unbroken concrete towers of the projects – those never particularly peaceful, but no worse, perhaps, than you recall in your youth. America outwardly looks like America.

On the Internet, however, it is every cyberpunk dystopian hellhole ever conceived. And worse, perhaps. The things that lie beneath on Twitter should scare anybody.

A video was posted the other day of two thieves conducting an armed robbery. One of the victims pulled out a handgun and shot one of the thieves. You could tell the affiliation of every commenter. Their cultural and moral values were so diametrically opposed that nothing could unite them. To the Leftist, this was a great tragedy, and the victim was evil for killing some presumably poor person for the crime of attempting to feed themselves and resist systemic oppression. To the Rightist, the armed robber had forfeited his life the moment he drew that weapon and attempted to steal someone else’s possessions. The shooter was to be commended for eliminating such a clearly deficient specimen.

In a way, it does not even matter which one was right, though I suspect my readers would have a strong opinion. What matters is the diametrically opposed viewpoints, the hatred and vitriol thrown back and forth between people who are theoretically of the same nation, the same cultural stew. Of course, they are not of the same milieu, not truly. We know that now. Was it always this way, and the Internet just exposed it? I do not know. Maybe.

Regardless, there is no peace beyond the wifi.

Yet the fragile peace – with its occasional flare-ups – that holds in the real world cannot hold forever. What will happen if that dam ever bursts? If all the animus, hatred, and vitriol of social media crosses into reality?

Driving down the street, look at the signs. MAGA signs never taken down. Declarations that this house or that house believes in the core tenets of Progressive Faith. Screaming matches over mask and vaccination policies. The peace in the real world stands on the edge of a knife. Everyone fears to cross the line, to admit openly what they know privately: these are not my countrymen. These are not my people. I do not like them, and they never liked me. They do not share my values, and I do not share theirs. We have nothing in common.

What happens when all pretenses are stripped away?

Someday, the historians will look back on our history, and they will find a moment – perhaps one as seemingly-insignificant as the deposition of a minor puppet ruler in Italy was to the story of Rome – and they will say “this is the day America was cleaved in two.”

Perhaps those same historians will say of the Cold War that both the USSR and the USA fell, the former due to economics and the latter due to cultural infighting. Perhaps like the ancient fall of Sassanid Persia and the diminishing of Byzantium. Or perhaps it will be seen as something entirely different. We live in the aquarium they will someday comment on. None of us will live to know.

Regardless, there is no singular America, not anymore. Only the outward appearance still exists – and only so long as the waning pretenses of peace last in the real world. Not forever, I imagine. Perhaps not even very long.

Those “waning pretenses of peace” hold solely because Real Americans, some unknown percentage of them at any rate, still want it to. It will last not one minute past the moment when the last thread of their patience has snapped, the last tatterdemalion remnant of their natural optimism and restraint has been ripped to pieces. And then, it’s Katy bar the door: open season on shitlibs, no bag limit, no ammo restrictions. Weapons free, and happy hunting!

The really remarkable thing to me is how the Collectivists, whether from arrogance or blind stupidity, insist so mulishly on keeping the pedal firmly to the metal in spite of absolutely everything. It’s as if they’re completely unaware of Dead Man’s Curve looming closer and closer just down the road, and that they’re already going much too fast to negotiate it safely and avoid a horrific crash. Human civilization has traveled this same road many times before; its hazards are known, the roadmap accurate, specific, and crystal clear. They KNOW what comes next, what has always come next. Yet still, they persist. It’s mind-blowing, is what it is.

Sick burn

Posted on July 28, 2021July 28, 2021 by Mike

This is what it sounds like/When ~~doves~~ generals cry.

The Conservative Case for Cyberbullying America’s Generals

Oh goodie, I like it already.

On July 22, Major General Patrick Donahoe, the Commanding General of Fort Benning, reported from his official Twitter account that he was seeing a “surge” in ICU visits among young soldiers due to Covid. He reported that he would mandate the vaccine if he had the power to do so.

I replied, pointing out that the DOD has lost a total of 26 out of over 2 million personnel in the last year and a half to the virus. In the fourth quarter of 2020, there was a 25 percent surge in suicides across all services. In those three months alone, 26 additional servicemembers took their lives compared to the prior year.

The military’s response to the Coronavirus is almost certainly to blame for the rise. I exited the service in May of 2020, having had plenty of time to witness these policies firsthand. Deployed troops returning home were forced to quarantine for weeks at a time. Masks were required in all public spaces on base. Gyms were shut down. Commanding officers dramatically reduced liberty limits to within only a few miles of base. Those, like me, who were stationed in Camp Pendleton, were prohibited from traveling just 30 minutes south to San Diego during our off hours.

In light of these draconian policies, it is no wonder that troops experienced a surge in psychological illness and suicidal ideation. Turning barracks into prisons is a recipe for problems. Nor did the catastrophic “outbreaks” of Covid materialize. Virtually all servicemembers known to be infected with the virus recover. The handful of Covid related deaths are sad, but they never rose to the level of a crisis. On average, nearly a thousand military personnel die because of training accidents, suicide, and illness every year.

General Donahoe accused me of engaging in “false equivalency” and of downplaying the vaccine, arguing that it was the path to “normalcy.” As the return of mask mandates for both the vaccinated and unvaccinated in cities like Los Angeles attest, this is clearly not true. The real path to normalcy is for military leadership to adjust their risk tolerance. Treating healthy people like biohazards over an illness that has killed two dozen personnel in a force of millions is insane. Those preventative policies have consequences, too; the surge in depression and suicide among the young is real.

Preventative measures make matters worse. One need only look at the case of Michigan and Sweden. Both territories have an equal population. Yet, Michigan suffered 50 percent more deaths from Covid despite implementing lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates while Sweden did not. General Donahoe simply brushed these facts aside, deciding instead to call me a member of the “disinformation tinfoil hat team” for pointing them out.

He also tweeted at the university where I am a student, Hillsdale College, and told them to “come get your boy” for questioning the military’s quarantine and lockdown policies. General Donahoe, apparently, thinks the private sector is just like the military, where criticism can be stopped, and careers ended, with a mere snap of the fingers. As the thread attracted more attention, one commenter asked the General “how many wars he’d won.” The General responded by accusing the questioner of “shilling for Putin.” When I asked if Putin was the reason America had lost in Afghanistan, the General blocked me.

Heh. Whiny-ass little bitch.

My interaction with the General serves as a microcosm of the American military’s cultural rot. Here we have a two-star General who spends his days on social media hyping a vaccine for an illness that poses minimal risk to his troops. When pressed on why America can’t win wars and why he embraces policies that treat healthy people like biohazards, his first response is to accuse his critics of treachery and then block them from view.

This is what $693 billion a year buys you: unbridled arrogance from the leaders of a military that can’t win against third world tribesmen armed with small arms and homemade explosives. A significant portion of our military leaders, like General Donahoe, are totally detached from reality. They face no consequences for losing wars or losing troops to preventable suicides. Many of them don’t really command anything at all. They are so ensconced in layers of bureaucrats, staff, operations and logistics shops, briefs, intelligence reports, public affairs officials, and aides that there is usually no danger of the public uncovering their true character, lack of leadership, or empty careers.

The American people need to demand more from their leaders. They need these heroic defenders of freedom to account for their lost wars, failed policies, and ideological radicalism. Twitter gives the people the perfect avenue to do so.

Americans are beginning to realize that their military leaders are failing them. Even if politicians fail to demand better of them, we can and should still make our opinion known. Our generals are, far too often, soft, coddled elites and unthinking ideologues. It is time for the American people to start cyberbullying their generals.

At the very least. And they should by no means limit themselves to just the generals, either. Oh, and we seem to have ourselves an answer on that “won any wars lately?” question, and guess what? Though I’m surprised beyond belief at this, it turns out that—contra Gen Deskwarrior and alllll his Pretty Perfumed Pentagon Princes, diversity might NOT in fact be “our greatest strength” after all.

The Pentagon’s wokester generals, such as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, have touted Critical Race Theory as the military’s focus and a great success story.

The guy under him, though, didn’t have such good news.

According to DefenseOne:

A brutal loss in a wargaming exercise last October convinced the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Hyten to scrap the joint warfighting concept that had guided U.S. military operations for decades.

“Without overstating the issue, it failed miserably. An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us. They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it,” Hyten told an audience Monday at the launch of the Emerging Technologies Institute, an effort by the National Defense Industrial Association industry group to speed military modernization.

The Pentagon would not provide the name of the wargame, which was classified, but a defense official said one of the scenarios revolved around a battle for Taiwan. One key lesson: gathering ships, aircraft, and other forces to concentrate and reinforce each other’s combat power also made them sitting ducks.

“We always aggregate to fight, and aggregate to survive. But in today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if you’re aggregated and everybody knows where you are, you’re vulnerable,” Hyten said.

Even more critically, the blue team lost access to its networks almost immediately.

This is ugly stuff. The military’s top strategic and tactical maneuvers — such as the massing of force (remember “shock and awe”?) and information dominance from Big Tech, fell into enemy hands like a captured weapon. Long-range missiles made amassed force a liability, as such targets are easy to spot in a big group, while cyber-hacks (notice how those are stepping up?) took care of the rest, leaving the ships virtually useless with no information to go on.

Both things have served the U.S. well in the last wars, from the Persian Gulf War of 1991 to the Iraq and Afghanistan endless wars that followed. Apparently, the long endless wars that never ended until apparently now on Joe Biden’s watch served as a study point for our enemies to observe our strategies and tactics. Leaving the show on for a long time permitted authentic enemies with big firepower, such as Russia and China, all the study time they needed to get a sense of how our military operates.

A big mistake on their part, I’m thinking. After all, the only thing America’s increasingly ineffectual, poorly-led, and PC military might possibly have to teach anybody nowadays is how to lose very, very slowly.

“An Open Letter to Joseph Robinette Biden”

Posted on July 26, 2021July 26, 2021 by Mike

Michael Smith’s title graciously refers to The Not-So-Great Pretender as President of the United States of America, without the asterisks and sneer quotes I always include. Nonetheless, what follows is a most thorough and comprehensive scorching of Grampy Gropey Rapefingers’ worthless ass, a righteous blast of hellfire and brimstone the Drooltard In Thief has worked diligently to earn. Gropey deserves every oozing blister it raises. To wit:

President Biden:

It gives me no pleasure to write to you today and publish this in a public forum, but circumstances dictate this will be the necessary vehicle for what I know will be the redress of grievances for many Americans like me.

I must inform you that you, sir, your Vice President, and your entire administration are unfit to govern this country.

The reasons why are legion, and I offer but a summary below, but each is clearly evident from your words and actions to date.

Your lies are brazen, and while Americans have come to expect both lying and brazenness from politicians, seldom have we seen a President who lies with the specific goal of producing harm.  You, sir, are that president.

You began your campaign in 2019 by shamelessly repeating the vile and debunked “Charlottesville Good People” lie about President Trump, and your prevarication has grown since then. That this is the tack you have taken after lying about being a “moderate”, should come as a surprise to no one. Your career in politics is measured by lies about your college experience, your speeches, and your positions.

You have lied about the greatest threat being white supremacy while you, sir, are the greatest threat to America. You casually make the intellectually lazy libelous and slanderous claim that white people are racist based solely on opposition to your regime.

You have employed lies, as well as Soviet style propaganda and agitprop, to create a rift knowingly and purposefully between Americans of a magnitude not seen since the American Civil war.

You have imposed regulations and requirements through the unelected bureaucracy in your agencies even though they lack the constitutional powers to promulgate and enforce said regulations and requirements.

You and your administration have engaged in unequal application of the law, enforcing it in arbitrary and capricious ways to advantage your supporters and disadvantage your opponents.

You and your administration have also engaged in the most egregious acts where the Bill of Rights are concerned – violating nine out of the first ten amendments – the only one spared (so far) is the Third Amendment. Sad to say, not a single person I know would find it surprising in the least if you ordered quartering of federal troops in private homes. It is that dire.

Our Declaration of Independence says:  “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Well, sir, we have rapidly come to a point where we find we are no longer disposed to suffer insufferable evils. We believe we have made the case that you, sir, your administration, and your party have no moral authority to govern the right and righteous people of this nation.

Regrettably, we the people find we must withdraw our consent to be governed by you, your Vice President, and your entire administration and in the true spirit of the founding of this great nation, we do so assert it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for our future security and to assure the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Respectfully submitted on this 20th Day of July in the Year of our Lord, 2021.

Michael Smith
Citizen of the United States of America

There’s much more included in Smith’s recounting of the “long train of abuses and usurpations,” because of course there is. WRSA’s CA urges that this truly momentous j’accuse be disseminated as broadly as possible, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s as brilliant a document as it is timely, a throaty roar of defiance which may very well become a historical milemarker for future generations (if any) to reflect on and, hopefully, to cherish as a turning point. The CF Chapeau is hereby humbly doffed to Mr Smith for producing this stirring work. CA seems to have run across it via a likewise brilliant if much bleaker post from Kevin at TSM, which I’ll attend to quick as I can.

Breaking down the breakdown

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Mike

As I’ve said in a different but very much related context: a process, not an event.

How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse
Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.

The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.

Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.

The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy’s connections run. Put another way, the economy’s as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.

One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It’s such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.

The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.

Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources. We see this everywhere in the global economy: a handful of plants and companies (sometimes a single source of essential components) process or manufacture essential components in much larger systems.

This is how you end up with thousands of newly manufactured vehicles parked in lots awaiting one critical part that is in short supply.

We’ve seen this movie before; we already know how it ends, or we should. Yet somehow, a great many of us seem unable—or unwilling, perhaps—to learn.

“Who’s in denial” Part the Second

Posted on July 20, 2021July 20, 2021 by Mike

Been waiting with bated breath for the second installment of Claire Wolf’s characteristically brilliant magnum opus to drop, and finally it has.

Who’s in denial about our current cultural and political state of collapse?

Most everybody. Millions of ordinary people who think bad times are always temporary are in denial. Oligarchs and plutocrats who believe we ordinary people are eternally tractable and malleable are in denial. Intellectuals who believe increasing quantities of fashionable nonsense are in denial. Politicians and their handlers who believe they can rule by fiat without consequences are in denial. Fools who imagine “the science” is a religion and that dissent from any statement by a ~~high priest~~ government-approved scientist is heresy are in denial.

I’ve been in denial about the true depth of our circumstances and about how truly evil (and insane) our new totalitarians are. I venture to say every one of us is in denial about something pertinent to freedom’s future. Even the best of us have blind spots, no matter how much we pride ourselves on having clear heads and open eyes.

Anyone who doesn’t see that we’re in deep, deep trouble must be very carefully NOT looking. Yet even the most clear-headed can’t see the future.

And by “future” I don’t mean a year or 10 years or a century from now (though that, too). I mean what might happen tomorrow. Or what’s happening today that we just haven’t found out about yet.

But who can blame those who yawn and go on with life? Yesterday no doubt brought some equally shocking, horrifying, or scandalous news. Tomorrow will bring more word of the ridiculous, the invasive, the totalitarian, the impossible. Some days we might get hit with two or three or four such outrages. Which one do you adopt as your cause when by tomorrow morning five more equally outrage-worthy acts will have fallen to your attention?

This is not apathy. This is not even the famous “outrage fatigue.” This is a sign of fatal decline. People know either that they can’t do a damn thing against the onrushing absurdities and evils or that they’ll try to accomplish something and be trapped forever in a game of Whack-A-Mole.

It’s chilling, as well, when you remember Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
I’ll update Voltaire for our times: “Those who believe absurdities and force silence upon doubters, ensure atrocities.”

Good people are famously slow to perceive real evil. Famously slow to react radically (in the original meaning of striking at the root of a problem) once they realize conventional solutions no longer avail them. Once pushed to the wall good people can be famously more dangerous than their would-be masters acknowledge. Still, we’re slow — often tragically slow. We act only after the thing we love is already lost or crumbling.

That’s particularly true when we understand that virtually everything we read or hear is a lie, a distortion, a manipulation, or a sheer display of moonbattery. We realize we’ve been disenfranchised. Self-appointed (or dubiously elected) political and cultural leaders can get away with any damn thing they please. And they’re all rushing to do their dirty deeds as fast as they can, before we can catch on to what they’re doing, let alone react. So far, this tactic seems to be working in their favor.

But then, sometimes rapid shifts toward evil or insanity work to the advantage of We the Deplorables, as well.

Okay, enough with the excerptin’. As with Part the First, Claire takes a deep dive into American history to help shape her argument, but this time out she throws some of the less-well-known and seldom-discussed aspects of that era into the mix. It’s all solid stuff, a genuine, all-caps MUST READ. Hie thee thither.

No, we won’t be getting those flying cars either

Posted on July 18, 2021July 18, 2021 by Mike

The future ain’t nearly as bright as it used to be.

When I was born in 1971, we were just two years removed from the first manned moon landing. There would be a total of six manned landings, all by Americans, from July of 1969 to a a few weeks before my first birthday. I was born at the peak of the age of space exploration. As a kid I remember watching the shuttle launches and I recall pretty vividly the Challenger disaster in 1986 while I was at school. Growing up we watched Star Trek on TV and saw Star Wars, E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the theater. It seemed to us that we were on the cusp of exploring space, a new age of discovery where humankind would escape the bonds of earth, conquer the stars and perhaps even make contact with aliens! The future was bright.

As a child in the 1970s and 80s, 2020 seemed like a long way into the distant future and while we couldn’t predict what that would bring, it was assumed it would bring a progressively better society and that space exploration and great technological achievement would make life immeasurably better. Colonies on the moon and even Mars were just assumed to be the natural near-future next steps.

Instead we get billionaire vanity projects.

Space is no longer the final frontier, at least not for the bulk of humanity. It will become the playground for the ultra-wealthy. According to Space.com, seats on Branson’s Virgin Galactic will run around $250,000 each. There are lots of people who can afford that but the vast majority of humanity will not. As chaos descends on the world, can we be far from seeing space colonies where the wealthy can flee from the devastation? The proles will be ordered to drive tiny electric cars to “save the environment” while the ultra-rich blast off on huge rockets to take selfies in space, just like we will be told to eat the bugs to reduce our climate footprint while the rich eat steak.

That starry eyed kid I used to be in the 1970s is facing the ugly reality of life in the 2020s. It isn’t a bright future for humanity but a slow war of attrition that a small cabal of elites are winning.

I don’t dream about space travel anymore, I just dream of a future where my family will be left alone. Even something that simple seems as fantastical as exploring the stars.

The Once-Great Nation status inflicted on us by the revanchist Left is not all it’s cracked up to be, not by a long yard. The ironic thing is that once we’re all fully and firmly settled in and resigned to a third-world lifestyle, they’re the ones who are going to be most miserable living it. Pretty much everything that makes Proggie’s preferred big-city, citizen-of-the-world living arrangement so appealing to him—high-tech personal electronic gadgetry; reliable and affordable household electricity, powering advanced appliances and conveniences; ubiquitous Internet access points, most of them free of charge; ethnic restaurants; a fulsome glut of entertainment/nightlife choices; trucked-in fresh fruit and vegetables, &c—will assuredly NOT be available in the dismal Neolithic-era civilization they so shrilly advocate.

As always, Leftist useful idiots blithely assume that they’ll be exempt from the privation and disaster created by their ideological and political preferences—that their delusional self-definition as the Good, Smart, and Moral Ones forever immunizes them against the consequences of their own unworkable stupidity. Our only consolation is that, as they find themselves blindfolded and marched over to be put against the wall and shot down like dogs—UNEXPECTEDLY!!!™—the looks of shock and disbelief on their once-hopeful faces are always priceless. Happens every time.

Love Desire wins!

Posted on July 16, 2021July 16, 2021 by Mike

The mopping-up phase of the Culture Wars is upon us, when the victors walk the field shooting enemy wounded.

Some still have hope the war can be won, as seen in this headline: “Christopher Rufo says he’s outmaneuvering ‘hostile media’ on [Caucasians Require Termination]: Most people ‘on our side’”.

Rufo is right the majority of people are against teaching Caucasians Require Termination (CRT), but that counts for little, because in wars the side with the more powerful weapons win. Teachers unions, for instance, have already vowed to continue promoting the evilness of whites in spite of any rules against it. True, the baizuo pushing this might come to grief when it is realized they are white, too, but for now, they are triumphant.

All rulers and Experts say “Diversity is our strength”. There is no state more conducive to turmoil than Diversity. And maximal Diversity is CRT.

Think on it. There isn’t any major entity, from religion to education to business to government, that is not now in the hands of the Enemies of Reality. Their victory would now be complete were it not that the victors are a minority of persons. And because Reality must continuously be fought. You will have to repeat forever, and with great force, that men can be women or it will soon be disbelieved.

The 2020 election functioned as a tearing down of the Berlin Wall, a visible symbol of the futility of continuing the war. Regular readers will recall how we tried to fight the Fortifying, as they victors called it. But we lost. The truism that history is written by the victors will apply here, and has been applying to our memories for some time. The statues of great men like Lee fall to the cheers of Desirists, to be replaced by those celebrating the wastes of society.

Some, like Ed West, are painting the end of the war as not much more than a regime switch. When Reality ruled, busybody aunts, the Karens of their day, kept public morality in line. Now, with Desire the soon-to-be-victor, busybody aunts, the Karens of our day, will perform the same duty. This is nothing more than the commonplace observation that women in societies do most of the morals policing.

He says, “The revolutionaries were always going to create new rituals, new speech codes and new forms of censorship. England has changed a huge deal since our great victory in 1966, but in many ways it has barely changed at all.”

Of course it is true that public morals will be monitored and maintained. That is a constant. Somebody’s beliefs must be imposed and others’ shunned, canceled, or even censored. It’s that the wrong side’s views are now imposed.

West is right, however, when he explains how moral relativism was one of the weapons of war wielded with great success by the Desirists. “Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win.” It is more than clear that it has been abandoned in their victory. The woke are all vehement moralists.

We know that we have lost because their morality has become official. Yet we also know that we cannot accept it.

So how to fight? First, save yourself and your family. Then think about your neighbor. Then think about your neighborhood and village. Then think about your county, then your state or region. Worry last about the country as a whole. As they move towards nationalizing everything and then toward supra-state governance, there will be less and less you can do about the state anyway.

Do you really think they’ll let you vote your way out of this at the national level?

Those still foolish or blind enough to believe that the systemic corruption of our “elections” only began in 2020 (CLUE: it did not) notwithstanding, it’s plain to more sentient types among us that free, fair, and honest US elections have long since been no more than a myth—a comforting fantasy naifs cling to as a toddler does his passie, his teddy bear, and his blankie. Of all the aphorisms, folks sayings, and old saws in existence, there’s probably none more apposite to Amerika v2.0 than this one: If voting could really change anything, it would be illegal.

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