Guardians Of Freedom

Cooper on violence, and other things

Posted on September 26, 2021September 26, 2021 by Mike

After running across a great LTC Jeff Cooper quote on the topic of violence over at GFZ, to wit…

One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that ‘violence begets violence.’ I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure – and in some cases I have – that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy.

…I decided to dig around the Innarnuts for more of the same good stuff, and found—well, not a ton, but somewhat more of it than I really expected. Enjoy.

Fight back! Whenever you are offered violence, fight back! The aggressor does not fear the law, so he must be taught to fear you. Whatever the risk, and at whatever the cost, fight back!

The only acceptable response to the threat of lethal violence is immediate and savage counterattack. If you resist, you just may get killed. If you don’t resist you almost certainly will get killed. It is a tough choice, but there is only one right answer.

Any man who is a man may not, in honor, submit to threats or violence. But many men who are not cowards are simply unprepared for the fact of human savagery.

Weapons compound man’s power to achieve; they amplify the capabilities of both the good man and the bad, and to exactly the same degree, having no will of their own. Thus we must regard them as servants, not masters – and good servants to good men. Without them, man is diminished, and his opportunities to fulfill his destiny are lessened. An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.

If you find yourself under lethal attack don’t be kind. Be harsh. Be tough. Be ruthless.

The police cannot protect the citizen at this stage of our development, and they cannot even protect themselves in many cases. It is up to the private citizen to protect himself and his family, and this is not only acceptable, but mandatory.

If you don’t understand weapons you don’t understand fighting. If you don’t understand fighting you don’t understand war. If you don’t understand war you don’t understand history. And if you don’t understand history you might as well live with your head in a sack.

The will to survive is not as important as the will to prevail…the answer to criminal aggression is retaliation.

According to Herodotus, the ancient Persians felt that what was necessary in the background of a young man entering adulthood was his ability to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth. Perhaps we should now grant our college degrees to young men who measure up to that standard.

Dead accurate. For anybody here who might be unfamiliar with Col Cooper—which I can neither comprehend nor forgive—he was nothing less than a bona fide American icon, a giant among men whose passing in 2006 diminished us all. Some biographical info:

John Dean “Jeff” Cooper (May 10, 1920 – September 25, 2006) was a United States Marine, the creator of the “modern technique” of handgun shooting, and an expert on the use and history of small arms.

Cooper was born in Los Angeles where he enrolled in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Los Angeles High School. He graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He received a regular commission in the United States Marine Corps (USMC) in September 1941. During World War II he served in the Pacific theatre with the Marine Detachment aboard USS Pennsylvania. By the end of the war he had been promoted to major. He resigned his commission in 1949, but returned to active duty during the Korean War, where he claimed to be involved in irregular warfare, and was promoted to lieutenant colonel. After the Korean War, the Marine Corps declined his application to remain on active duty. In the mid-1960s, he received a master’s degree in history from the University of California, Riverside. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, he was a part-time high school and community college history teacher.

In 1976, Cooper founded the American Pistol Institute (API) in Paulden, Arizona (later the Gunsite Academy). Cooper began teaching shotgun and rifle classes to both law enforcement and military personnel, as well as civilians, and did on-site training for individuals and groups from around the world. He sold the firm in 1992, but continued living on the Paulden ranch. He was known for his advocacy of large caliber handguns, especially the Colt 1911 and the .45 ACP cartridge.

Exemplars like Jeff Cooper are never in abundant supply at any time, in any place. In present-day America we have not only lost all capacity to birth and nurture them, but to appreciate their inestimable worth. Actually, it’s even worse than that: many if not most of us seem to actively hold such men in contempt, to perceive them not as representations of national glory but as shameful throwbacks, people whose excision is the only hope for real progress.

Organization Men

Posted on September 25, 2021September 25, 2021 by Mike

Brandon Smith offers some ideas on how one might go about this thing.

There is a simple fact that must be understood when it comes to the fight for liberty: Such a fight cannot be won by lone individuals. Freedom requires organized resistance and it does not matter how many millions of people stand against an authoritarian regime, if they are completely isolated from each other they WILL lose. It’s a guarantee.

Actually, I’m kinda conflicted on that. Admittedly, humans seem to be genetically predisposed to create organizations and hierarchical leadership structures to run them. In this context, though, organizing at anything above squad- or cell-level numbers will also create infiltration and surveillance/intel-gathering opportunities, among other highly undesirable failure points.

Many of us are already clamoring about the need to organizate, and expressing great frustration that no inspiring Great Man has yet appeared to lead Patriots into battle, then on to ultimate victory. I don’t hold with any of that myself. When the time is right and the need for him is apparent, Team LIberty will find the leader it needs readily enough. Until then, such a person will only make himself a target, a resource whose usefulness the Enemy will identify and exploit posthaste. Unsurprisingly Brandon is smart and experienced enough to know it.

It is important to understand the difference between a Lexington Bridge moment and a Fort Sumter moment – During Lexington Bridge, the revolutionaries took action to stop a British detachment from arresting colonial leaders and confiscating rifles and powder stores. The British were in the midst of an undeniable attempt to disarm and snuff out the resistance. At Fort Sumter, the Confederate attack was in response to an attempted resupply of the fort itself; which made sense strategically but looked like an act of pure aggression to the wider public. The concept of states rights (more prominent in the minds of the confederates than the issue of slavery) fell by the wayside.

Eventually tyranny has to put boots on the ground. A totalitarian system can function for a time on color of law and implied threats, but it will crumble unless it is able to establish a physical presence of force. Once those jackboots touch soil in a visible way and the agents of the state try to expand oppressive measures, rebels then have a free hand to disrupt them or bring them down. But this only works if there are objectives and enough decentralization to prevent misdirection of the movement.

Some organization is essential. It cannot be avoided. All the “Gray Men” and secret squirrel preppers out there that think they are going to simply weather the storm in isolation and pop out of their bug-out locations to rebuild are suffering from serious delusions. I can’t help but think of that moment in ‘Lord Of The Rings’ when the Ents refuse to organize to fight against the invading orcs. Pippen suggests to Merry that the problem is too big for them and that they should go back to the Shire to wait out the war. Merry laments:

“The fires of Isengard will spread. And the woods of Tuckborough and Buckland will burn. And all that was once green and good in this world will be gone. There won’t be a Shire, Pippin.”

If this fight is not pursued now, there will be no world worth coming back to, even if one was able to successfully hide from it. There will be a “new world order” as the globalists like to call it. There will be nothing left of freedom.

So, organization must be accomplished, and it should be built at the local level. This is far more important than any dreams of a national organization, at least for now. There is no one we can trust to lead such a nationwide revolt, and that includes political leaders like Donald Trump.

And on that last, I feel no conflict or uncertainty whatever—Brandon is one hundred percent correct, right down the line. The dilemna we face at present is a thorny one indeed, of which the “who do ya trust, who do ya trust” issue is one of the largest and sharpest. Yes, you’ll want to read all of it. Delve into the comments too; as is his wont, Brandon pops up there throughout, and the insights he provides there are every bit as not-to-be-missed as the article itself.

Since Brandon was clever enough to bring up Lord Of The Rings as a metaphor, and since I already recommended his comments section, one of the posters therein suggests this next as a sort of companion piece, one whose aptness regarding the current contretemps will have any Tolkien fan nodding his head in quiet satisfaction.* The opening sets the stage:

“Do you not yet understand? My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights, nor to help folk to do so. And as for you, my dear friends, you will need no help. You are grown up now. Grown indeed very high; among the great you are, and I have no longer any fear at all for any of you.”
The Lord of the Rings, Loc. 996

“‘Good, good!’ cried Farmer Cotton. ‘So it’s begun at last! I’ve been itching for trouble all this year, but folks wouldn’t help.”
The Lord of the Rings, Loc. 1008

Introduction
There are many things to be learned in Middle Earth, and this would include things that we all once knew, but have since forgotten. And the things we have forgotten fall into two categories. We have forgotten some of the things we have already completely lost, and we have also forgotten the foundation of some of the remaining things we (for some reason) still have. We have forgotten what is long gone, and we have forgotten what might still preserve our remaining good.

In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits of the Shire, protected as they were by the Rangers, took all their peace and security for granted. All that peace and security was somehow their birthright. It was just how things were, of necessity. It would just continue, right? All by itself, isn’t that correct? Well, no.

In other words, they forgot the basis of their security and safety long before they actually lost their security and safety. And this meant that once they were in trouble, and knew they were in trouble, they were leaderless and didn’t know the way out. When despotic and irrational rule takes over any people, the corruption is centralized and organized, while the unhappiness with the corruption is decentralized and not organized at all. The corrupt ones are organized and have a plan, and those who suffer under their ministrations haven’t even thought about a plan.

But once the hobbits had that necessary leadership—which came in the form of Merry and Pippin, and Frodo and Sam—they found they had hidden reserves. These hobbits of the Shire found they had hidden reserves because they were rallied by those four adventurous hobbits who had found out earlier about their hidden reserves.

I recently finished reading The Lord of the Rings (yet again), and the penultimate chapter is The Scouring of the Shire—which to my mind is the most satisfying episode in the whole trilogy, and as you well know, that is saying something.

But this time through, it was different. It struck me, reading through that chapter, that there were numerous things that Americans of our generation really need to learn from this. And so I have assembled some of those lessons in a reasonable order, and have made some observations about what the hobbits learned. I was astonished at how much their situation was parallel to ours.

He’s perfectly right to be, I couldn’t agree more: the parallels are in fact nothing short of astonishing. Once you’ve seen them, it’s hard to imagine how you ever missed them in the first place. Then again, a certain timeless relevance is characteristic of all truly great literature—one of the traits that defines great literature, actually. The above excerpt ought to be enough to whet your appetite for more, I believe. It’s a long ‘un, but well worth your time and attention, whether you’re a devotee of Tolkien’s books (I definitely am, since the age of about, oh, thirteen or thereabouts) or not.

*NOTE: That would be the books, I mean, not the movies. Peter Jackson’s magisterial film adaption left the Scouring of the Shire chapters that close ROTK out of the third movie altogether, an omission that baffled some and angered others. Personally, I wasn’t bothered by it, since he had already made such a bang-up job of cramming in everything else. If Jackson had included it, he would have needed FOUR movies to do it, not three. Just thought I’d mention it, since that last article uses the Scouring as its springboard and central focus.

So long, SEALs

Posted on September 23, 2021September 23, 2021 by Mike

And thanks for all the, uhh, fish.

Hundreds of U.S. Navy SEALs are on the verge of being undeployable because they are refusing a Pentagon order to take a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a lawyer representing some of them.

R. Davis Younts, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force reserve who is a military lawyer and is representing several of the special operators as a private attorney, indicated that the number of SEALs involved represents about one-quarter of the nearly 2,500 members of the elite fighting force.

The loss of so many of the special operators, who are on the verge of being placed in a non-deployable status, would severely cripple military readiness because special forces troops in all branches “play an outsized role in modern military operations,” Just the News reported.

Some of the SEALs were told they had until this week to get the COVID jab, leading them to claim a religious exemption since they were out of time to try and find another workaround, Younts said.

“My clients include several Navy SEALs who are a small part of a large group of SEALs and other military members who are being asked to choose between their faith and their ability to serve our nation,” he told Carlson. “They have been told that if they seek a religious accommodation, they likely will no longer be able to serve our country as Navy SEALs and been given an arbitrary deadline to comply with the vaccine mandate.

Well hey, it’s not as if a third-rate power like Amerika v2.0 is ever gonna need ’em for anything again anyhow.

The attorney said that the Defense Department has put its ultimatum in writing that SEALs who are not vaccinated, including any who received a religious exemption or have natural immunity from having contracted the virus already, will not be able to deploy with their assigned teams, which will essentially end their careers as special operators.

Tim Parlatore, an attorney who helped secure the acquittal of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher after he was charged with the murder of an ISIS prisoner, told the outlet he has confirmed that large numbers of SEALS are refusing the vaccine at this time.

“It’s in the hundreds. And it’s not the senior leadership. It’s all the shooters and it is going to have a huge impact,” Parlatore said. “If they continue with this asinine policy you are going to have the complete decimation of the SEAL teams,” he said.

Oh, there’s gonna be a “complete decimation” of a whole hell of a lot more than just that, bub. Compared to what’s just down the road for us all, the woes of a few hundred cornholed SEAL operators are gonna come to seem like some very small beer indeed. But does the Biden junta have yet another, harder slap in the face in store for America’s taken-for-granted Warrior Class, you ask? Three guesses, sez I.

The White House said it “strongly opposes” a provision in the 2022 defense spending bill that would block the Pentagon from dishonorably discharging a service member who refuses to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

A section in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act would limit military commanders’ options for disciplining those who fail to comply with the vaccination mandate, the White House Office of Management and Budget said in a statement of administration policy Wednesday.

The Pentagon has described the vaccine mandate as a “lawful order” that must be obeyed.

“To enable a uniformed force to fight with discipline, commanders must have the ability to give orders and take appropriate disciplinary measures,” the White House said in a statement.

A DD, of course, deals a crippling, life-wrecking blow to the man hit with one. To wit:

A fucking D.D.? Oh man, now that is a line that they don’t seem to understand what that means. A D.D. means like zero post-military bennies, in fact it’s like getting a felony on the record. In fact it’s worse than a felony. They fucking lose all veterans’ benefits, and are forbidden from owning a firearm, working for the government and taking out bank loans. Often, they also lose the right to vote and accept federal assistance as a civilian.

Perhaps worse still—as if all that wasn’t bad enough—having a DD on your record makes it damned near impossible to get a decent job—ever again, for the rest of your life. It’s an even blacker mark than being an ex-con is when it comes to that sort of thing. More from CBD:

Bowie Bergdahl received a dishonorable discharge for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.

Typical reasons for dishonorable discharges include murder, rape, treason, etc. These are not trivial crimes, and dishonorable discharges are usually given only after a general court martial. And the consequences don’t stop after separation from the military, since it typically prevents the use of any military benefits, and is considered a felony in civilian life…that means no 2nd Amendment rights! Oh…good luck getting a job!

How very typical of the Biden junta. Strong-arm its opponents, use judicial contortions to punish them for daring to disagree with its edicts, and try to destroy their lives with the power of the federal government.

So servicemen who have done their duty, have served honorably in all other respects, but have a philosophical or religious objection to being forced to accept the CCP flu vaccination will be treated the same way as murderers and rapists and deserters?

Biden and the whores who pull his strings are without honor, have no concept of what honor is, cannot comprehend honorable actions, and simply assume that all Americans who act contrary to the junta’s desires are enemies of the state and should be crushed under the weight of its authority.

That’s the thing, though: we’re ALL “enemies of the State” now—the State as it currently exists, the illegitimate one that insidiously supplanted America That Was in the dead of night, by every manner of sneakthievery and skullduggery. I consider it to be a badge of honor myself, and so should the SEALs and all other soon-to-be-separated military personnel, SOF or otherwise. And with that in mind, there IS a potential silver lining here.

This has to be the stupidest fucking plan EVER implemented by ANY and ALL DotGov and DotMil in history. I mean Holy. Fucking. Shit. Not only are they going to purely gut the Special Operations Community, but then after busting their asses loyally, doing the dirtiest of deed for them, to not only cashier them all, but also essentially fuck them in the ass (with ground glass and sand, sans lube) on the way out the door in the form of “criminalizing them”.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeah. That’ll work. I’m sure that they’ll take that news with a calm, measured response. Well, actually, the few SEALs I’ve interacted with? On a good day they tend to be the sleepy-eyed bored looking dude at the back of the room, who’s usually calculating how much effort it’ll take to kill every one in the aforementioned room. So, yeah, it’ll be calm and measured. But NOT in the way I think these idiots think it’ll happen. Just short of locking the SEALs up, we’re talking for real no-shit trained unmerciful killers.

And by literally criminalizing “freedom of choice” and “my body, my choice” in DIRECT violation of the Nurnberg codes, whelp, In my fictional world, three SEAL Teams in concert could wreak absolute havoc in an incredibly short period of time. Hell, a Direct Assault of the Capitol by one Team, killing as they go, and the Senate and congress hit simultaneously by another Team? Or even a simple “decapitation strike” on the White House? I mean these guys? The “regular fuzz” to include even the Secret Service are not prepared to do anything other than to become “good Feds” i.e. dead as doornails IF the SEALs decide to turn them into “good Feds”. Literally there ain’t no “quit” in them. I could realistically see it.

If anything, IF the SEALs went “full retard” I could literally visualize the cops, standing on the stairs of the Capitol Building listening to the gunshots, screams, grunts, explosions, and not doing a fucking thing. Like standing there, waiting. Watching torrents of blood run in rivers down the marble stairs and saying to each other “I ain’t paid near the fuck enough to go in there for anything.” and waiting for the noise to die down. Then, as the noise tapers and stops, a platoon sized element of blood soaked warriors walk out the door, covered in gore, gobbets of flesh, weapons shouldered and smoking, and look at the cops and the leader says something: “Don’t make us come back…” and walks off, unmolested.

Know what’s keeping me awake nights of late? Wondering whether all this fuck-uppery should be thought of as a real-life demonstration of “they know not what they do” in action—just the core, marrow-deep stupidity endemic throughout Mordor on the Potomac in full effect—or not. The hotter the dumpster fire burns, the more it all—ALL of it, I mean, from the Biden Bugout to the border boobery to the fifty-megaton backfire of (Not)Vaxx fascism, the whole damned goatfuck ENTIRE—begins to look to me as if it simply COULDN’T be happenstance, bad luck, or mere incompetence.

No, this HAS to be some sort of a plan, an op they’re running on us. Doesn’t it? I suppose it might barely be possible that these Deep State/Biden junta klowns are indeed this mind-blowingly, hamfistedly D-M-U-B, yes. BARELY. But really now, how LIKELY can that be? Because if they ARE that stupid, they’d have to be unable to tie their own shoes, feed themselves, or come in out of the rain—much less scheme, claw, and back-stab their way up to the highest-level positions in the most powerful, amoral, and blackhearted tyranny the world has ever known.

But if it IS some kind of plan or op, then what on earth do our would-be Masters intend to achieve by it? What is the desired outcome of all this, how do they define success? Is instigating flailing, mindless, widespread and ongoing chaos the whole point?

Whatever the behind-the-scenes truth of the matter may be—whether this is an ingenious plan worthy of The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu himself, or the kind of clumsy anarchy only a rubber-room-wardful of board-certified, one hundred and ninety proof retards could possibly contrive—things are obviously NOT going well for them. For one thing, it’s apparent they’ve been caught on the weak foot by the sudden almighty blast of real resistance to them, which is only going to grow and worsen from here. By tightening their grip on our throats, they create the very conditions that will bring them down. It’s one of history’s most fulsome ironies: that the bane of all tyrants, sooner or later, is tyranny itself.

And that brings us right ’round to the funniest bit of all, the shiniest of silver linings: Behold ye the clown of clowns, in the timeless routine these people bring to my mind first, last, and always.

Yes, I’m laughing at you assholes, you two-bit schoolyard bullies, you clueless fucking imbeciles. Your petty edicts will neither touch me, nor break me, nor induce me to submit. I DEFY YOU, I SCORN YOU, I DESPISE YOU. Today, tomorrow, and forever. Let Melville’s indomitable Captain Ahab say it for me:

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Groundswell

Posted on September 15, 2021September 15, 2021 by Mike

Another LTC decides that honoring his oath outweighs sullying his personal integrity by staying in long enough to collect his pension.

Army Officer LTC Paul Hague Resigns in Protest – ‘Marxist Takeover of the US Military’
Army officer LTC Paul Hague has turned in his resignation after 18-19 years of active duty service. Though part of it had to do with the mandatory vaccines, it was also due to what he described as the ”Marxist takeover” of the US Military. He is the 2nd officer to walk away from retirement, i.e. USMC Lt Col Scheller, who was removed from his position and may be court martialed for his views. LTC Hague left voluntarily.

This comes as the Democrat chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Menendez threatened to subpoena SecDef Austin for refusing to testify on the disastrous Afghanistan pullout. Gen Milley has been using every tactic he can to place blame for the debacle on others. Both of them have pushed forward talking points that are a death knell to war fighting and military cohesion.

First, and foremost, I am incapable of subjecting myself to the unlawful, unethical, immoral and tyrannical order to sit still and allow a serum to be injected into my flesh against my will and better judgment. It is impossible for this so-called ‘vaccine’ to have been studied adequately to determine the long-term effects…

I would like nothing more than to continue in the Army to reach my 20 years of active federal service and retire with my pension. However, I instead will join those who have served before me in pledging my Life, my Fortune, and my Sacred Honor to continue resisting the eternal and ever-mutable forms of oppression and tyranny – both from enemies outside our nation‘s borders, and those within.

These words are a strongly worded statement against the US Military under the Biden administration. LTC Paul Hague’s wife told reporters that her husband drafted the letter on August 23, but after revising it several times, did not submit it until August 30 and failed to change the date. He was focused on the use of the Covid vaccine as a political tool when she was asked about all the normal vaccines required for the military.

It is not easy for any officer to walk away from a 20 year retirement. That his wife is supportive is a huge plus to taking a stand against what has been happening in the military.

”We may be personally defeated, but our principles, never.” William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879

LTC Hague’s statement can, and definitely should, be read in full at the link. A respectful doffing of the CF Chapeau to the good Colonel who, like his Marine colleague LTC Stuart Scheller, has not only taken a morally-righteous stand based on his beliefs and values, but has also bravely put himself at considerable risk of Deep State retaliation in the doing.

May God forever bless and protect you and yours, sir. Let the fine example you’ve set of what real patriotism, honor, and selflessness look like serve as inspiration to your fellow soldiers, and to every true American as well.

Update! NC Scout puts it bluntly.

On 19 June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenburg met their deserved fate.

Having been convicted of giving the Soviets critical information on the US’ technological developments in the decade just past the conclusion of WWII, they were very correctly blamed for the technological parity the Soviets quickly gained costing American lives in the wars that would follow.

We didn’t kill enough of them.

The Left has reveled in certain claims over the years, always running contrary to the interests of this once-great nation in every attempt at stymieing its progress whilst rotting away its very core. Very cleverly they understood that the 1950s era represented the pinnacle of capitalist achievement, juxtaposed to the rampant poverty of a broken post-war USSR. There were jobs, a roaring economy, great advancements in technology, and a properly run education that – gasp – met standards and produced giants.

The Rosenburgs acted against a nation and people they hated. Why else could one betray his nation, very knowingly culpable for the killing of his own countrymen? And yet, the Rosenburgs knew not directly the staggering cost of war. When it was discovered by the War Department that Rosenburg, an engineer for the Army’s Signal Corps, was a member for the Communist Party, he was fired, but he didn’t stop there. For the communist, Revolution is duty.

While the Soviets were adept at spy recruitment in that era, after all, many in the US infrastructure had well known communist leanings prior to WWII, they understood well that the source of a nation’s pride is its ability to levy war. Until the US military could be broken, there would be no hope of communist revolution in the United States. Having a Flag Officer handing secrets, or even so much as consorting with an enemy nation, would be unthinkable. The solution then is communist revolution within the ranks.

This leads us to the case of General Mark Milley, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared Maoist under oath, academic adherent of communist revolution, and now the subject of accusations of contacting his Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army counterpart ahead of a possible President Donald Trump asserting his Constitutional duty to the nation and declaring a fraudulent election what it in fact was.

A very easy case can be made here condemning this man to death. Nothing further should need stating; collusion with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is rather blatant should these allegations be factual. That said, the book, by longtime leftist journalist Bob Woodward, should be taken as valid on its face by the very hubris that the Left continues to exhibit. Why should they hide? Who will prosecute them? By their own actions they have exposed themselves as thus. Milley deserves a firing squad.

But we should not stop there.

Damned skippy. Indeed, if we hope to excise the Leftist tumor from the body politic in any effective fashion, we MUST not stop there. Executing Thoroughly Modern Millicent for treason, while satisfying, would barely even amount to a good start on that daunting but vital project.

He lives!

Posted on September 1, 2021September 1, 2021 by Mike

Some good news. Click to embiggen if you’re a blind old geezer like me and have trouble reading ’em.

Keep checking six, brother. Head on a swivel, as the fighter jocks always say.

Of mice and/or men

Posted on August 31, 2021August 31, 2021 by Mike

Well, this is…shall we say…troubling.

This is how Stalin did it. If you dissent from the regime, “scientists” declare you insane and incarcerate you “for your own protection.” https://t.co/2Wuy33fm4L

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 30, 2021

It’s always, always, ALWAYS the same with these assholes, innit? As if they only have just the one playbook for all of them to work from, and aren’t bright or original enough to come up with anything different. Via my NC homeslice Wes Renegade, who elsewhere puts it plain and simple.

How do we BEGIN?

It’s a question I have asked many times. It’s a question many commenters here have asked.

I am just as frustrated as all of you that keep saying “the time for talk is over.” Believe me I know. I have been saying that for an extremely long time now.

I am tired of hearing the statement made that we must wait and not act first. Are we going to wait until it’s too late? I believe we are already at the point where it may be too late and our chances of success will be minimal. However it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees as a slave.

Our country has been overthrown/stolen from us. It’s time to quit talking about it and it’s time to start fighting for our freedom. While I’m not skilled in how to begin a Revolution, neither were our Founding Fathers. They fought for what they believed in and did what was right, regardless the certain death they faced. Are we lesser men?

Indubitably so; no disgrace in that, necessarily, since they were genuine titans among men, whose mettle very few before or since could hope to meet, or even approach. The real question is: are we man enough? We’ll very soon find out.

As for Scheller, you regime pusbags just go ‘head on and make a martyr of the man, whydon’tcha. Let’s all see how that works out for ya in the end.

An honorable man

Posted on August 30, 2021August 30, 2021 by Mike

LTC Scheller makes the only move that makes sense.

A Lt. Colonel in the United States Marine Corp announced on LinkedIn today that he is resigning his commission after losing his command over a public video he had posted criticizing top military brass for their actions in Afghanistan.

Lt. Colonel Stuart Scheller’s video attacking everyone from the Joint Chiefs of Staff down for their role in creating the Afghanistan crisis went viral last week. Shortly after the video was released, he was relieved of his command but still remained a Marine. Today, he announced he is resigning.

“Part of me feels like everything in the last 25-years of my life may have happened to bring me to this point right now,” he said.

Reactions from patriots since the video went viral have been mostly positive. Many tribute and GoFundMe pages have been set up to support him, but he made it clear that he has not set up a GoFundMe himself. He called for donations to go to the families of lost service members from the attacks in Afghanistan.

One comment in particular seemed to truly affect Stuart. A former commanding officer, “Lt. Col. Hobbs,” posted something on social media that prompted the latest video as well as his resignation.

“If Stuart Scheller was honorable, he would resign his commission,” Hobbs posted in a reply on LinkedIn, according to Stuart’s video.

Stuart became emotional and proceeded to announce his resignation.

“I want to make the announcement today,” he said. “After 17 years, I’m currently not pending legal action and I can stay in the Marine Corp for another three years, but I don’t think that’s the path I’m on. I’m resigning my commission as a United States Marine, effective now. I’m sure there’s more admin on how I’m supposed to do that, and I’ll work through that. But I am forfeiting my retirement on entitlements. I don’t want a single dollar.”

Obviously, Col Schiller, the USMC you loved and served in for so long exists now only as a fond memory. The current Corps, sadly, is no longer worthy of men of your caliber and qualities, and there is no place for you or them in it. I can but sit back in awe of your courage and integrity for taking the stand you have, and shouldering the burden of sacrifice you just did with your resignation. All good Marines will rue your absence; each should now do some soul-searching themselves to ponder where all this is headed, and what part they want to play in the days ahead.

Update! A thoroughly honorable man.

The maverick Marine fired after he released a now-viral video slamming the US military for botching the exit from Kabul, issued a clear threat to his aging superiors Saturday.

“The baby boomer’s turn is over,” Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller told The Post. “I demand accountability, at all levels. If we don’t get it, I’m bringing it.”

He also quoted Thomas Jefferson, saying “every generation needs a revolution.”

Scheller’s family and former troops say they’re not surprised the officer sacrificed his career in order to tell his truth.

“It takes real courage to do what he did and that was Stu all the way,” Juan Chavez, 33, of Valparaiso, Ind., who served under Scheller from 2011 to 2014, told The Post Saturday. “He was a magnificent leader, a breath of fresh air, who was always going to do what’s right, even if it goes against the grain.”

Scheller’s father, Stuart Sr., told The Post his son was “the real deal, a Marine’s Marine. People will follow him to the ends of the earth. He has put his life on the line for fellow Marines so putting his career on the line like this does not surprise us.”

Stuart Scheller Sr. said his son idolized his grandfather, a World War II vet who landed on the beach at Normandy, and always wanted to go into the military.

“He’s still on the battlefield protecting his men and women,” Scheller Sr. said. “It’s interesting that no one (in the military) has answered his call for accountability. Their answer was to fire him I guess. It’s a sad day for America.”

Yes, it is. But maybe a little less so than might otherwise be the case, thanks to your son’s courageous stand against the corruption, fecklessness, and ass-covering endemic in our increasingly-dysfunctional military establishment. Obviously, your boy was brought up right, and you should be damned proud of him.

A married father of three boys who lives in Jacksonville, NC, Scheller seemed to have had a brilliant military career before he did the unthinkable and broke rank with the Marine Corps. He received a Combat V for Valor and a Bronze Star.

But now he’s a hero to many in the military and among civilians for, as one person commented, “coming out with what everyone was thinking but was afraid to say.”

Scheller said some of his fellow officers, while supportive, urged him to take down the video.

“Obviously I didn’t take it down,” Scheller wrote in a later Facebook post. “I’ll offer this…we can’t ALL be wrong. If you all agree…then step up. They only have the power because we allow it. What if we all demanded accountability?”

More than 30,000 people, some of whom served under Scheller, have liked and commented on his video.

“Proud to have served under your command sir, we’ll follow you to the pits of hell and back,” wrote Zach Olbrys of Worcester, Mass.
Ryan Holland of Lexington, Ky. wrote: “I see a seat in Washington in your near future!! It was always an honor serving with you sir! Semper Fi!”

“It took big brass balls to do what you did…[knowing] it came at a huge risk to your career personally,” wrote Paul Zedalis. “An Officer with integrity…hard to find at the senior levels these days. My hat is off to you Sir!”

Mine too.

Spanked!

Posted on August 29, 2021August 29, 2021 by Mike

Also: PWNED. And a few other choice things, too. Remember Nazimerican Cindy Bronson, a staff sergeant in the late, lamented US Army? Well, Aesop certainly does, and he has a few things he’d like to say to her. Strong message follows:

Dear disloyal fascist peawit: You are a No-Go at the stations marked Oath Of Service, ROE, and Basic Common Fucking Sense, and are Too Fucking Stoopid to wear any stripes, except the prison variety. Your recruiter should be crotch-kicked for about 3 days straight, by a conga line of prior service former drill sergeants, just to make the point. How you ever got past basic training highlights the sad lack of any standards for military service in this country, and getting all the way to staff NCO rank shows that the Army gives out promotions to fucktards like they couldn’t find such unredeemed shitheads fast enough. You are the poster child for abolishing a standing army, and throwing the lot of you into prison until your initial enlistments are up, or for a term commensurate with your time in-service for people like you. If they drummed you out afterwards, and marched you at bayonet-point across the Bridge Of No Return at Panmunjon into North Korea at the DMZ, and tore up your American citizenship papers behind you, it would be too good for you, and far too light a sentence.

But be advised, if martial law is ever declared in America, Motor Transport Operators (that would truck drivers) like you should be informed that under such likely unconstitutional eventuality, the range will (be) hot in both directions, and you won’t get your weapon out of its holster before you get popped right between the running lights. They won’t name any bridges after you, but you can bet your body parts will be used to decorate one. And what’ll go on any grave of yours, if anyone bothers to shoo away the pigs feeding on whatever’s left, won’t pass for flowers.

But after recent events, you’ll understand why precisely no one in the entire nation is quaking in its collective boots at the fear of what you, or even the entire Army, think you’ll do. You won’t get what you like, and you won’t like what you’ll get. (cf. Lord Cornwallis) {Yet another strike against Common Core grads like SSGT Bulldyke, is that she probably couldn’t come up with the significance of the reference, even with a cellphone, three lifelines, and a shout-out.}

So put away your finger gun, and stick your thumb back into your cockholster, you would-be-Nazi stormtrooper cunt, before you beclown the entire U.S. Army more thoroughly than the events of the last two weeks have already done.

Dude, I mean, just…OUCH. Plenty more raucous bitch-slappery where that come from, all of it equally well-said. I also would like to commend Aesop, a former Marine his own bad self, for a most righteous response to the other night’s post wherein I lauded LTC Stuart Scheller, USMC—a Dogface’s Dogface and bona fide American hero of the old-school variety. Which we don’t seem to making too many of anymore, to our national shame and great loss.

LtCol Scheller, relieved of command of his battalion of Marines, and soon to be court-martialed, and dismissed from the service, started out as a grass-green 2dLt in 2004. He’s thus been fighting this war his entire adult life.

He is now olive green, and hard as crocodile dicks.

And he’s the only active duty Marine officer from 2d Lt to 4-star Commandant Hamhead Berger who can ever walk around with his head held high and his honor clean, no matter what aspersions are cast at him, nor what shenanigans are pulled on him by the chain of command.

He just embarrassed the living hell out of every officer in the Marine Corps, and for that matter, every other service, from full colonel on up, for them ALL being too chickenshit to do what he just did: call out the rent-seeking, ass-licking bullshit they’ve all participated in for any amount of time you’d care to name.

The Marines haven’t seen heroism like this since Capt. Jordan climbed onto an Israeli tank in Lebanon in 1983, and suggested to the colonel commanding that tank that trying to pass his Marine checkpoint without authorization would be career-ending, in a brains-all-over-the-turret sort of way. The tank commander rethought his plan, and departed intact.

LtCol Scheller just did the same thing to Commandant Berger and the entire Marine Corps and DoD chain of command, all the way to Gropey Dopey, and they unhesitatingly chose the path of dishonor. They might as well go full retard, and kill themselves. they can never get the yellow stains out of their pants, and they’ll never get the yellow stripe off their backs.

And for icing on the cake: the bomb that killed a dozen Marines was made with explosives left behind without being blown in place, by the Air Force etc. @$$holes who chickenshitted out of Bagram Airbase in the dead of night.

That right there is Dereliction Of Duty, and 12 counts of Manslaughter under the UCMJ.
UCMJ Article 92: Failure to Obey Order or Regulation (thebalancecareers.com) UCMJ Article 119 Manslaughter – Court Martial Defense Attorney (ucmjlaw.com)

Call me when the worthless sons of bitches responsible for that colossal homicidal fuckup, from multi-star generals on down, are rightfully prosecuted and justly imprisoned in Leavenworth for the blood of heroic Marines now on their hands.

I ain’t holding my breath.

And no matter what happens to him henceforth for speaking the inconvenient truth, Scheller has a backbone of pure titanium, and balls the size of church bells.

Anyone asked ought to be honored to follow him, even through the gates of hell.

Semper Fi, Leatherneck!

Well said again, and seconded heartily—for whatever that might be worth, coming as it does from a cake-eating civilian like myself.

Hidin’ Biden: “I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world”

Posted on August 21, 2021August 21, 2021 by Mike

I’m sure that’s perfectly true, actually. He sees only what his handlers allow him to, understands very little of it, and immediately forgets the whole thing the moment somebody hands him another ice cream cone.

Biden says he’s seen no ‘questioning’ of Afghan policy by allies – despite angry scenes in UK parliament
But despite Mr Biden’s words, plenty of European politicians have objected.

In the UK, former prime minister Theresa May was among dozens who criticised Mr Biden’s decision to follow through with former president Donald Trump’s exit plan from Afghanistan.

Similarly, Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, himself a veteran of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, told The Independent earlier this week: “Blame shifting in the face of the predicted disaster that is Afghanistan today is extraordinary.”

Following Mr Biden’s speech on the situation in Afghanistan on Monday, British Conservative MP Simon Clarke posted on social media: “The more you reflect, the more you realise the speech POTUS gave last night was grotesque.

“An utter repudiation of the America so many of us have admired so deeply all our lives – the champion of liberty and democracy and the guardian of what’s right in the world.”

Not quite. In truth, it’s the repudiation of Amerika v2.0—the misbegotten, dysfunctional obscenity that replaced the America you’re talking about. And that phony “America” is deserving of all the repudiation that can be heaped upon it, and of a lot of other things besides.

And with that, the time has come for me to write something I never, ever expected to.

I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations. I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.

Emphasis mine, and nothing short of stunning, at least to me. With all the fissures, fractures, and structural weakness now being laid bare by the stresses this past week has subjected Amerika v2.0’s jerry-rigged foundation to, British soldiers are displaying some of the good old Limey mettle that saw them through the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz so long ago—the grit and balls-out courage that made Britain truly Great, that inspired the awe and admiration of the once-free world, but that afterwards appeared to have been forever lost. Good on ya, chaps, and may God bless you all.

The headline of that last piece says something very different about our own military “leadership,” alas:

US general tells British special forces: Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you’re making us look bad

Umm, no sir (spelled with a “c” and a “u,” mind), not exactly. From what I can tell, you accomplished that mission quite thoroughly on your own, with no assistance necessary from those stout SAS and 2nd Para squaddies. Further deets:

According to some reports, conflict is developing between US forces, who seem to be content to let potential evacuees make their own way through Taliban checkpoints to the airport (we are literally referring them to a web form Up to 10,000 Americans Remain Trapped in Afghanistan as We Face a Second Iran Hostage Crisis) and the British forces who are going out to bring in evacuees. This is from a freelancer inside Kabul Airport.

There are also unconfirmed reports that 2 Para has exchanged shots with the Taliban on some patrols.

Some thoughts on all of this.

The tweets from the freelancer mesh with the frustration expressed by the British commander on the scene. I don’t know anything about the journalist’s background, but bashing the American Army and puffing the British Army up as superheroes is an accepted journalism genre in Britain; keep that in mind. [I have some personal experience with 2 Para; they were the partnership battalion with my battalion in Berlin. The troops are tough…I might even say sort of thuggish. One of my friends was chatting up a German girl outside the Irish Harp in Charlottenburg. The last thing he heard before getting his ass kicked was, “F***, it’s a Yank!” He knew it was 2 Para because the people stomping him wore jump boots with their civvies.] There is no doubt that they are aggressive, and if their vision of evacuation is pulling people in while ours is waiting for them to walk through Taliban checkpoints, I have no doubt that there have been several frank and open exchanges of views. The cascading tragedy at Kabul probably hasn’t helped the working relationship, either. As with any terrific story, there are caveats. The actual veracity of the report of conflict between British paras and American airborne is being challenged.

I’ve seen and heard reports that, far from being “content to let potential evacuees make their own way…to the airport,” there is widespread and increasing anger in the US rank-and-file over having been told to sit on their hands whilst the Brits—even the French, for chrissakes—are going out and getting the job done.

Another interesting item I saw the other day said that British troops at Karzai airport charged with checking the IDs of British and Irish civvies before allowing them inside their perimeter were summarily denying entry to all Afghan nationals, regardless of any claimed status as employees, translators, and etc. In fact, the story said that the Brits were turning them down flat without even bothering to check any paperwork the Afghanis had with them at all, grounds for that being that UK subjects had first claim on the limited airlift capacity available to evacuate them.

Which seems to me to be the correct way to handle this mess. If these stories are accurate, which I hope they are, then the British military has its priorities squarely in order here, in a way that Americans can only envy. Then again, if our military and political “leadership” had their priorities similarly aligned—putting the interests of their country and its people first and foremost, as they should be—it’s doubtful any of this would be happening in the first damned place.

In any event, if the Brits are angry about all this, well, they’re right to be. ALL of us ought to be, and ought to keep that anger well-stoked, too. For my part, I intend to go right on hammering away at this story indefinitely; right now, my big fear is that the Biden Bugout will be encouraged to slink quietly out of the national Zeitgest and then fade away, just as the Benghazi blunder has done. Don’t kid yourself that it couldn’t happen, either. It most certainly could, and a lot faster than you might believe. It cannot, MUST not, be allowed to happen this time. The blaze of anger and disgust sparked in so broad and varied a portion of the population must instead be not just maintained, but intensified.

“The Afghanistan Exit Debacle: Incompetence, Distraction Or Something More Sinister?”

Posted on August 20, 2021August 20, 2021 by Mike

At this point, after seeing all we’ve seen, I gotta go with “sinister.”

My first instinct has been to ignore the circus surrounding Biden’s apparent bungle of the troop exit from Afghanistan, primarily because I think it distracts from the much bigger danger of despotic covid mandates and vaccine passports that Biden and his handlers are trying to push forward right now on our home soil. That said, I have received numerous requests from readers to discuss the situation and I’ve found certain aspects of the pull-out rather suspicious. The basic assumption here is that Biden is senile and his handling of the exit is tainted by his stupidity, but maybe there is more to this than meets the eye…

First, I think it’s important to dispel a propaganda narrative being circulated by the media that conservatives are somehow calling for troops to stay in Afghanistan by criticizing Biden’s exit strategy. This is typical leftist gaslighting. One can be in favor of a troop draw-down and still be critical of Biden’s handling of it. Frankly, the US should have been out of Afghanistan several years ago; I don’t think that it’s too much to ask that there be a concrete plan in place to mitigate damage to those people who relied on our presence to protect them from the Taliban.

It was Barack Obama who first promised an exit from Afghanistan by 2014 while claiming that the “combat mission was over.” This of course never happened and the political left ignored Obama’s deception in favor of the progressive savior narrative.

To be fair, the Trump Administration did the same exact thing, platforming the idea of a major draw-down or a full exit and then instituting troop surges instead, but at least conservatives were far more critical of his backpedaling. Trump finally committed to troop reductions in 2020, with most of the assets relocated AFTER the November election, leaving 2500 military personnel in Afghanistan along with 17,000 private contractors.

The real shock has been the speed of Biden’s exit agenda after Trump had already removed the bulk of US troops. This rapid draw-down has included cutting almost all US troops and cutting private contractor numbers by at least 60%, and all of this has been undertaken in the span of a few months. This has allowed the Taliban to overrun the last secure provinces surrounding the capital of Kabul and then overrun Kabul itself. A panic has ensued among Afghan citizens with anti-Taliban sentiments, and it’s hitting a fever pitch with hundreds of thousands looking for any way to escape.

It has been the common practice of multiple US administrations to pay lip service to public concerns over the endless war in Afghanistan, telling people an exit is imminent, then shrugging their shoulders when they are caught lying. It has become so formulaic that I think Americans have been conditioned to expect we would never actually leave the country; that the false promises would go on perpetually. Perhaps that’s why Biden’s rushed and haphazard removal of troops from the region over the span of mere months feels so bizarre.

Biden apologists would make the argument that the gibbering commander-in-chief has given us exactly what we wanted, so we should be applauding him. However, the chaotic manner in which Biden is executing the troop draw-down is increasingly suspect. It feels more like a desperate retreat in the face of an overwhelming attack, rather than a controlled exit with a defensive plan in the face of a limited insurgency. Or, even more disturbing, it feels like Biden needs those troops and resources elsewhere and in a hurry – but where are the troops needed and why?

Three guesses, first two etc.

It needs to be understood that the US was NEVER going to “win” the war in Afghanistan. An orthodox military strategy is rarely going to succeed against a long term insurgency using asymmetric tactics. It does not matter how technologically advanced that military might be; it does not matter how many planes, tanks, and drones they might have. Eventually over time they WILL lose by pure attrition in the face of a guerrilla resistance.

It needs to be remembered, too. It will be on the test later. So to speak.

I’m not buying the “Biden is incompetent” story because it is too simplistic and it doesn’t take the bigger picture into account. Biden is a muppet, a mascot, a front-man for the public to love or hate, and that’s all he is. Yes, he can barely read from a teleprompter, but it’s his puppeteers that make the big decisions, not Biden. They are evil people, but not incompetent.

So we have to ask some important questions: Why now? And, who benefits? After decades of presidents lying to us about “mission accomplished” and impending troop exits, why is Biden suddenly committing to an exit strategy in the most hysterical way possible?

Why did the Biden Admin choose September 11th as the end date for the troop exit? It’s certainly symbolic of further US failure and defeat, but is it also symbolic of a new phase in the establishment’s plans for the US as a whole? Is there another major event like 9/11 or larger on the way, and is the sudden exit from Afghanistan in preparation for that event?

As I mentioned, there are scenes here that remind me of Vietnam, but I am also reminded of Benghazi – There is a rotten smell to this event, as if the goal is to deliberately spark an inferno to hide another motive in smoke.

To be sure, the insanity in Afghanistan is quite a distraction away from the implementation of vaccine passports and other illegal mandates in the US, with an increasing number of corporations and city and state governments trying to enforce them. The DHS has just released a statement indicating that anyone who refuses to submit to restrictions and the experimental mRNA vaccines “might” be a potential terrorist. They are even entertaining the idea of interstate restrictions on travel for unvaccinated people, which is something I have been predicting for the past year and it is an action that’s on the top of my list of items that will trigger civil war.

Everything those of us in the alternative media have warned about over the past 18 months in terms of medical tyranny is coming true. It’s not “conspiracy theory”, it’s conspiracy reality.

The Biden Admin will certainly try to announce vaccine passport requirements at the federal level in the near future. Is the plan to bring US troops and maybe even private contractors home to the US to help enforce illegal directives through martial law? There is a high probability of a soft secession of red states and counties if the mandate farce continues. With US troops being majority conservative there is the hope that they will not comply and that they have no interest in fighting yet another insurgency made up of their own people. We will have to wait and see.

The nice thing about that is, what with however many grim-faced warfighters may still be left in our New LGBTQZRXPIALIDOCIOUS Army now driven to purple-faced rage by the Biden Betrayal, the idea of those troops coming over to the side of American Righteousness en masse in such a conflict is nowhere near as far-fetched as it might have been only a couple-three weeks ago. As I’ve always maintained, Leftism always carries the seeds of its own destruction within itself, awaiting the chance to take root and blossom. By so stupidly alienating the very force they must rely on to suppress Team Liberty, the Moron Left could very well end up providing the real-world proof of concept for that idea.

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)

Departures

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

I’m gonna have to postpone my examination of the TSM piece mentioned below, having unexpectedly run across another one at WRSA that led me to…well, first, we have this obit and remembrance for a legendary Naval aviator:

We wake to the sad news that Snort (Capt Dale Snodgrass, USN-RET, callsign “Snort”—M) died in a crash yesterday. I was honored to interview him in 2000, but it wasn’t our first encounter.

In 1985, I was there in the crowd as a teenager when he awed us all in the Tomcat at the Pratt & Whitney airshow in East Hartford. I have chills this morning thinking of the chills I had then, watching the Tomcat in formation with the other Grumman cats, and I do believe it was a missing man formation.

RIP, Snort. Thank you for taking the phone call from a young writer with no credentials, but who was thrilled beyond words to interview the legend.

I imagine so. Follows, a repost of his 2010 interview with CAPT Snodgrass, which runs below one of the most famed photos of Tomcat derring-do ever captured, which I cannot possibly resist running here.

You can practically hear those jet-jock sized Big Brass Ones all a-clank just looking at that pic. On to the interview.

If you’ve researched information on the F-14, it is pretty likely that the name Dale Snodgrass has appeared somewhere in what you’ve read. “Snort” is virtual legend in the Tomcat community, and with more than 4,800 hours in the F-14, he is the most experienced Tomcat pilot in the world. Over a 26-year career in Naval Aviation, he had moved from being the first student pilot to trap an F-14 on a carrier to commanding the US Navy’s entire fleet of Tomcats as the Commander of Fighter Wing Atlantic. Now retired, Snort is on the airshow circuit, flying a wide range of aircraft, from the F4U and P-51 to the F-86, MiG-15, and MiG-17.

The accolades for Snort’s flying are long and distinguished…twelve operational Fighter Squadron/Wing tours, including command of Fighter Squadron 33 during Desert Storm, the Navy’s “Fighter Pilot of the Year” in 1985, Grumman Aerospace’s “Topcat of the Year” for 1986, a US Navy Tomcat Flight Demonstration Pilot from 1985-1997, and numerous decorations for combat and peacetime flight.

This is all good stuff, well worth reading in full if you’re any kind of military-aviation guy at all. But then we get to the part that stopped me COLD and made my eyes bug out comically.

What was your most tense moment in the 26 years?

From a combat perspective, it was when I had a flameout over Iraq while executing a last ditch surface-to-air missile defense. I was leading a night Fighter Sweep in support of an A-6 strike on a power plant on the north side of Baghdad.

As I said, the story of Snodgrass’ close encounter with an Iraqi SAM, which caused a flameout that in turn brought on a 15k-foot altitude drop, leading to an attempted air-start of the dead engine whilst flying through the middle of a thick triple-A barrage, is all good, gripping stuff for sure. But what slammed me betwixt the orbs was the part I bolded in the last line. Because see, I happen to know a little something myself about that A-6 strike he mentioned. In order to explain it, though, we’re going to need to make a little side-trip here, to another obit from 2015.

Reggie Parks Carpenter, 51, Captain, United States Navy, died from sudden cardiac arrest in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on February 3, 2015. Captain Carpenter, from Cherryville, North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Communications. He was commissioned an officer in the Navy via the Aviation Officer Candidate School, and received his aviator “Wings of Gold” in 1987. Captain Carpenter, also known as “Regbo” to fellow aviators, bravely served in the defense of the United States for 29 years.

He flew tactical missions in three jet aircraft, in four operational squadrons, and over six aircraft carrier-based deployments, including one as an exchange pilot with the French Navy.

A graduate of the U.S. Naval War College with a Masters in National Security and Strategic Studies, the personal highlight of Captain Carpenter’s career was his tour as commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron EIGHTY THREE (VFA-83), an F/A-18C Hornet squadron at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, VA. His final tours of duty, which he also enjoyed immensely, were in military diplomacy. He served as Naval Attaché to France, from 2007 to 2011, and to Argentina, from 2012 to 2015.

Captain Carpenter was a highly decorated naval aviator who earned many awards and medals during his career, including the Distinguished Flying Cross. A devoted, loving husband and father, he was also a kind, passionate man with quick wit and boundless zest for life. Captain Carpenter is survived by his wife, Suzanne, and daughters, Avery and Caroline; mother, Barbara Cannon; sister, Kelly Stewart; brother-in-law, Bob Stewart; and many loving friends and colleagues from all over the world.

A funeral service will be held at 2 p.m. on Thursday, April 23, 2015, at Vienna Presbyterian Church, 124 Park St. NE, Vienna, VA. Interment with full military honors will take place at 3 p.m. on Friday, April 24, 2015, at Arlington National Cemetery.

You CF Lifers might begin to see where all this is going, I bet. For the shavetails, nuggets, and noobs, this oughta help clear things up.

The CF community suffered a serious loss yesterday, although most of you might not know about it. My “cousin”, Captain Reggie Carpenter, USN, died suddenly in Buenos Aires, where he was serving as naval attache, capping off a distinguished three-decade career as a naval aviator and diplomat.

He wasn’t really my cousin; he was actually my first cousin’s cousin, but his family and mine had been tightly intertwined for our whole lives; our fathers, uncles, and other kinfolk were all close friends from childhood, and the subsequent generations have all retained a sort of extended-family relationship ever since.

Those of you who have been around these parts a good while may remember him as “Regbo,” his flyboy call sign, or simply as “Cuz.” He did a fair bit of writing for the site back in its early years under those handles; he preferred the anonymity of them, for obvious reasons.

Y’all also might remember a post I did years ago from NAS Oceana, where the band had gone to play Reggie’s change of command party at the O-club there. He was taking over Rampager squadron, VFA 83, after having served as XO of the Sunliners. We didn’t get paid for the gig, or at least not in money; we got paid with twenty minutes apiece in the F/A-18 simulators instead. Which just made it one of the most richly remunerative shows I ever did. Hell, just hanging out at the O-club, meeting and hearing the sea stories of these “casual American heroes” as Reg called them, was payment aplenty.

He was a damned fine pilot, flying the A6 Intruder in the first sorties of the first Gulf War, then F14s, then Super Etendards off the Foch for a year as part of the officer-exchange program with the French. He graduated to the Hornet after that, and stayed in ’em for the remainder of his career. He was invited to join the Blue Angels and even toured with them awhile while he considered the offer; he eventually decided against it, and went to the War College instead. Back in his college days he got one of the highest scores ever on the Navy’s Pilot Aptitude test, and just moved on ever upwards from there.

Reg had a heart attack either on his way to or shortly after arriving at work yesterday morning in Buenos Aires (the family is still waiting for details on that); he’d just returned from an African safari with his beloved family. He was due to retire next spring; in fact, the last conversation I had with him was shortly before he left for the Africa trip. He asked if I wanted to attend his retirement party, and I assured him I did. We were talking about maybe having the band play for the festivities, in fact, and I was looking forward to seeing him again. He was 52, which is way too damned young to lose a guy like him. Hard to believe he’s gone so quick. He’ll be missed by all who knew him.

Rest easy, Reg, until we meet on the other side to pick some guitar and talk fighters and politics again. Your whole family was extremely proud of you, as well they might be, and your friends were glad and grateful to know you. Much love to you and your family, brother.

That, of course, is part of the obit I wrote for Reg right here at CF, which includes a photo of him leaning nonchalantly against his own personal F/A-18 that I took at NAS-JAX during a post-gig visit we paid him there once.

So here’s the payoff: that aforementioned A-6 strike over Baghdad on opening night of Desert Storm? Well, guess who else was out there along with Snort Snodgrass? Yep, you got it: none other than one Reggie “Regbo” Carpenter, that’s who.

Reg later sent a somewhat illicit cockpit video home to his (also my) Uncle Gene from that eventful night, along with a letter detailing a harrowing misadventure when his Intruder was struck by lightning (!!!) on the way back to the carrier, knocking out every electronic gee-gaw and instrument save for the gyrocompass. After being asked by the Midway’s comm shack if he wanted to attempt a trap on the carrier deck—sans all instruments and lights, at night, in a storm, no less—Reg opted for what’s known as “the better part of valor” and diverted to the airbase at Riyadh instead, where he landed his damaged aircraft without further trouble.

And that concludes tonight’s amazing tale of serendipitous coinkydink. You really just never know what you’re going to run across out there on the Innarnuts, do ya?

Men like Reg and Snodgrass are a breed apart for sure—capable men, courageous men, dauntless men, men without an ounce of give-up in ’em. Men whose vocabulary assuredly does NOT include discouraging words like “can’t” or “impossible.” As I so often say around here, we need all of such men we can get, and will never have enough of them. RIP, CAPT Snodgrass, and farewell. You too, Reggie.

Sink, sank, sunk

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

Tell me the one about “the most powerful military in the WORLD” again, Daddy. That one’s my favorite.

The other day, WRSA linked to a recent great read by Cdr Salamander, who’s probably known to Pentagon brassholes as Cdr. Cassandra, on just exactly how f**ked up the US Navy has gotten.

Before you head over to RTWT (which you should do), hydrate.

Because you’re either going to cry a river, or be vinegar-pissing mad, either of which is going to take a full tank.

He ain’t just whistling Dixie about that, either; the post opens with a jawdropping pic featuring what looks to me like a rusted-all-to-fuck-and-gone superstructure/bridge from a USN destroyer or perhaps heavy cruiser, just before the breakers turn the poor neglected thing into razor blades…and a CIWS* mount with its gun-muzzles rusted also! I swear to you, I can think of five or six former sailors and Marines in my personal circle of family and close friends who would jump at the chance to come out of retirement and deal out some old-school NCO justice to everyone responsible for such a shameful dereliction of duty.

TL;DR:

The Navy sucks ass right now, because going back to 2009 (perspicacious readers may note a specific change of administration that correlates with that timespan), all flag- and general-rank promotions were run through a filter of pre-woke communist civilian and military zampolits. Only ass-kissing toadies need apply. The current can’t-sail-can’t-shoot-can’t fly-can’t-fight genderfluid diversity Navy is how that plan worked out.

GIGO.

In short, when the only admirals the Squids promote are ass-kissing back-stabbing four-star fuck-ups, the entire Navy takes it in the neck. And. It. HAS.

You can’t even blame this on the blue-haired transgender enlisted, because the fault was letting them up the gangplank in the first place; everything else is just gravity working, plus time, and salt water. Both literal, and metaphorical.

There’s a simple cure, in about three parts. Sadly, Cdr Salmander’s once-wonderful comments seem to have gone away (we can guess why), so we offer our cure here.

Follows, Aesop’s simple three-step solution for unfucking the Navy—all of which identify and address the underlying issues correctly, would almost certainly work a treat, and which therefore have absolutely zero chance of being implemented. In sum:

Do that, and you’ll have the ass-kicking world-beating US Navy last seen about 1990, if not 1945, by Christmas.

Re-enlistment will hit 100%, and we’ll have the fleet we paid for. And certain countries thinking they’re the New Big Dog will be in for a rude awakening.

Do it not, and we may as well de-fund the Navy, and to save further time and effort, just send everyone in the U.S. free copies of Rosetta Stone Mandarin and Cantonese.

Some may think I’m too harsh on the sister service. On the contrary, a functional Navy is vital for US interests. Speaking as a former Marine, for naval gunfire support and amphibious transport, just for openers. Let alone the basic missions of carrier force projection, maintaining freedom of the seas by the surface fleet, and control of the shipping lanes and nuclear deterrence by the Silent Service.

We currently – and going back a decade and more – have a Navy full of Squids and Shitbirds. Starting at the E-ring in the Pentagon. Those at the bottom of the totem pole are that way precisely because of those at the top, whether by active sabotage, foolish encouragement, spineless apathy, or malign neglect and dereliction of duty. Period. Complicity should become a hanging-from-the-yardarm offense.

We need, and deserve, a Navy of sailors. History teaches harsh lessons to nations who fail to provide for their own defense, and we’re dangerously close to the shoals of learning that lesson, in a Pearl Harbor sort of way. Hoping it doesn’t happen is not a good plan.

Rather more drastic measures, just shy of actual guillotines, are needed. In haste.

Oh, I dunno now, let’s not be too hasty about ruling things out here. Myself, I’m very interested in your guillotine idea, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Like I said, good, practical ideas all, with less than the proverbial snowballs chance of ever seeing the light of day in the Navy as currently constituted. What we have here is an endless Swamp circle-jerk: the necessary reform and rejuvenation of the Navy will require that its misbegotten, politicized, and self-serving higher-officer class be reformed first. That, in turn, can’t happen unless and until the civilian “leadership” is also reformed, top to bottom. And that means removing and replacing the sleazy, corrupt DC ProPol class which is ultimately responsible for the decline and decrepitude of not only the US military but the whole damned country…which reform, thanks to their accumulation of near-limitless power, can now be accomplished in but a single, radical, and distasteful way.

Link to CDR Salamander’s post, which you should also read, here, and to the report itself here.

*Close-In Weapons System, an either missile- or gun-based perimeter defense system in use on just about all of the larger USN ship classes to defend against enemy missile and/or aircraft attack. The one in Aesop’s pic looks to be the Phalanx, which is built around the venerable, trusty old Vulcan B61 20mm autocannon—a tried-and-true workhorse of a Gatling gun that was originally developed for the USAF in 1959, mounted in a multiplicity of aircraft ranging from the F4 Phantom, to the F111 Aardvark, to the F16 and -18, to the stupidly-abandoned F22 Raptor

With rust in the fucking barrels. Lord help us all.

See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya

Posted on July 14, 2021July 14, 2021 by Mike

Unexpectedly, inadvertently, and for the first and only time in his entire useless existence, senile alleged “President” Grampy Fingerbang has done the right thing.

Good Riddance, Afghanistan
merican forces are finally departing Afghanistan. While Donald Trump had promised to end the inconclusive war there, he eventually gave in to the pleas of the defense and intelligence community and continued the war. Other than a few dozen more dead Americans, and a few more hundreds of billions of dollars up in smoke, it’s not clear what these additional years of effort achieved. Now Joe Biden has finally acknowledged the political and military reality: if we haven’t lost, we certainly are not winning or making any progress.

One of the most remarkable things about the last few weeks is how utterly brittle the Afghan security forces and government have turned out to be. After billions of dollars spent on training, equipment, and support, the Afghan National Army is abandoning large bases, along with state-of-the-art guns, optics, and military equipment. These are now in the hands of the Taliban. For all the talk of our Afghan partners and their heroic national commitment to democracy, none of it turned out to be worth much when the training wheels were taken away.

It is not even clear if the American-supported Afghan government will last as long as the Soviet supported regime, which held on for three years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

While it is clearly time to leave, it is worth thinking for a moment about why the entire Afghanistan mission, particularly after 2002, was a fool’s errand.

The mission became distorted over time. After 9/11, Americans wanted revenge. That mission was a simple one: punish the Taliban, destroy al-Qaeda, and capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Within a month of the attacks, our troops were in the field.

The campaign featured a novel operational approach. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to show the military that it needed to learn to do more with less. His concept of “transformation” limited troop numbers, a feature of what was called the “Revolution in Military Affairs.” This theory proposed that the combined effects of high-speed communications, sophisticated sensors, and precision air power, would succeed where the traditional military’s risk-averse, heavy footprint would fail.

At first it seemed Rumsfeld and the revolutionaries were right. Very quickly, the Taliban melted away under pressure from American special forces, the Afghan Northern Alliance, and a fusillade of precision guided bombs in the months after 9/11.

But the first hint of trouble appeared soon thereafter. In the Battle of Tora Bora and later in Operation Anaconda, the Army’s lack of artillery (on Rusmfeld’s order) and the lack of sufficient blocking troops allowed the lion’s share of al-Qaeda, including Bin Laden, to slip away and obtain refuge in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. He wouldn’t be killed for another decade.

Unable to use our forces in our nominal ally’s territory, the United States and NATO emphasized the secondary aspects of the mission. They got to work on “nation building.” Political and military leaders defended this approach as enlightened realism, because al-Qaeda flourished at the extremes, in either weak states or politically repressive ones. Developing governing institutions and security forces, while expanding human rights to women and minorities, would create enduring stability and reverse the conditions in which al-Qaeda previously thrived.

This was an ambitious strategy, made twice as hard by the artificially low levels of troops. It became even more challenging after the start of the Iraq venture, which put Afghanistan on the backburner until the 2009 surge. Afghanistan is a famously violent and tribal place, where disparate tribes only unite under the banner of Islam to expel foreign invaders. The American concepts of democracy and liberalism were a message that worked at cross purposes to our efforts to obtain legitimacy and security. After all, these changes slowed down the decision-making of the Afghan government, while also alienating many Afghans, Taliban or not.

The biggest mistake we made in Afghanistan was presuming we had to turn the Middle East into an American-style democracy in order to have peace. We presumed we had to rectify the root causes in order to maintain national security. The same scenario played out in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In all of these cases, our efforts did not increase our security or enhance stability, and sometimes made things worse.

More limited and realistic options were available, including the old fashioned punitive raid. Wrecking a place sends a message too, a message of deterrence. Because we viewed it as our duty to lift up the Afghans—strange people with whom we have no historical or other connections—and because no one wanted to admit the flawed foundations of the war, we ended up there for 20 years, long after most of al-Qaeda had decamped for Pakistan.

Even accepting the strategic premise, it’s not clear that anything we did enhanced stability or reduced international terrorism. Afghanistan has been in a state of civil war since our arrival. ISIS also materialized in the meantime. Al-Qaeda is still around. And attacks within the United States by immigrants and home-grown Islamic terrorists have continued the entire time.

By trying to do too much, we accomplished too little. The U.S. military is perfectly capable of bombing, killing, and capturing people. But, even with the help of its second army of contractors and do-gooder NGOs, the United States is not particularly good at nation building. We are no longer the America of the Marshall Plan, and the people of Afghanistan are not the same as Germans, Japanese, or even Iraqis for that matter.

To turn disorder into order is a difficult thing. Democracy is probably not the best tool for doing it. Historically, liberal democracy is normally an end stage form of government, not a foundational one. Moreover, our entire approach does little to account for the strict Islam of the Afghan people and their pre-Islamic tribalism. This comprehensive religion, coupled with this cultural inheritance, is not fertile soil for a democracy, let alone a liberal one.

Leaving Afghanistan does not diminish the bravery of our soldiers, the magnitude of the 9/11 attacks, or the need to avenge those deaths and remain vigilant against terror threats.

But we are neither avenging nor remaining vigilant in Afghanistan today. Since 2002 or so, we have been going in circles against a local resistance to our presence. Any temporary gains soon evaporate, as we lack sufficient troops to hold what we have cleared, and the Afghan security forces are woefully inadequate to consolidate the gains. The overall connection of any of this activity to U.S. security is minimal.

Our feckless, thoroughly politicized general-officer corps turned the Graveyard of Empires into the Playground of the Ruling Class, their own private test-bed for weapons systems, surveillance technology, and tactical doctrine. The experiments and aimless fiddle-fucking around cost too many good soldiers their lives, shattering morale and unit cohesion without producing anything of notable use. American troops trained to kick ass and take names were forced to bleed and die under preposterous ROEs that put them at severe hazard while granting every advantage to a savage and deadly foe.

From early on, it became all too clear that Afghanistan was to be an open-ended campaign in which victory would remain undefined, unpursued, and beyond reach, the ultimate outcome a foregone conclusion. The Playground should have been shut down years ago. The hapless Biden deserves no credit for it whatsoever, but I’m glad to see this unholy mess finally grinding to a halt, however ignoble and humiliating a one it might be. The FUSA—its “leaders,” its subjects, and its military—bears a moral obligation to not even dream of launching another war of any kind or magnitude until the multifarious issues raised by its Afghanistan dumpster fire have been properly addressed.

Dawn of the Jet Age

Posted on July 5, 2021July 5, 2021 by Mike

Col Bunny gives us a steer to something truly great, for anybody who is as fervent a pursuit/fighter/intercepter aircraft junkie as I am.

A Fighter Pilot’s Airplane

Ooooh, I like where this is going.

On December 18, 1950, an F-86 Sabrejet in its first combat over Korea shot clown a Russian-built MiG-15. The North American jet which, at the time, held the official world speed record of 670.951 miles an hour, was the best air-superiority fighter possessed by the free world during that period.

We can certainly be thankful that we had this machine in our inventory, for we would have fared rather badly trying to fight MiG-15s with F-51s, F-80s, and F-84s.

However, by way of contrast, today’s F-104 Starfighter (this piece is from 1960; more on the Starfighter anon—M) is the only airplane in history that has simultaneously held all three official world’s records—speed, altitude, and rate of climb. We have, in other words, come some distance since the day of the Sabre. I will here attempt to analyze the aircraft concerned from a fighter pilot’s viewpoint.

Much has been written and said in comparing the performance capabilities of the F-86 and the MiG-15. Certainly most fighter pilots felt that the MiG was a higher-performance airplane above 30,000 feet. Only in the latter stages of the Korean War, when we received the F-86F, could we raise this altitude factor to 35,000 feet.

However, this increase in ceiling was offset by the fact that when we did receive the F model, most of our initial contacts with the MiG were above 40,000 feet. To say the least, it was both highly impressive and yet extremely depressing to see a MiG pilot loop his aircraft at 51,000 when we could barely stay in the air at that altitude. I am certainly not trying to downgrade the fighting qualities of the F-86; it had many advantages over the MiG—in fire control, range, diving ability, and ruggedness—all of them vitally important in the business of shooting down airplanes.

It must have; by the admittedly disputed numbers, Saber pilots shot down 200 of them, possibly quite a lot more.

The Sabre was certainly a credit to its designers and manufacturers, but the fact remains, the MiG could outperform the F-86 at any altitude, except in a dive, and was a better fighting machine at the higher altitudes. The answer, of course, to our huge success over the MiG lay in the aggressiveness, discipline, training, and leadership of the USAF fighter pilot. We’ve all heard the phrase “guts will take the place of skill” in fighter combat. This is true. Nevertheless, superior aircraft performance can take the place of both. If you can fly higher and faster than your opponent and want to get the job done badly enough, then you’re going to win.

The original fire-control system of the F-86 was one of our greatest deficiencies. We had a World War II gunsight and World War II guns. Hitting a MiG at angles off of more than fifteen degrees and range of 1,300 feet was nearly impossible with the short firing time available in high-speed jet combat. Our primary advantage was the high rate of fire of the .50-caliber gun, even though the destructive power of our ammunition could not compare, projectile for projectile, with the 37-mm and 23-mm cannon shell of the enemy.

The later acquisition of the radar gunsight in the F-86 was probably the greatest single improvement of the airplane during the Korean War. Expert gunners such as Lt. Col. Vermont Garrison and Maj. Manuel J. Fernandez could hit a MiG at 3,000 feet and high angles off with the radar gunsight, and the shooting problem was also considerably lessened for the more inexperienced pilot.

If I remember correctly, and I may not, the F86-D variant was the first with the big, honking radome in the nose that said gunsight worked in concert with. More on that anon, too.

As in the ease of Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, F86s were fighting against heavy odds in Korea. Approximately 800 MiGs were based in Manchuria and China. The Soviet Union had supplied China with more sweptwing fighters than the United States had even produced. It was common to encounter 150 or more MiG-15s twice a day against no more than thirty-two Sabres. The 4th Fighter Wing, with a World War II record of 1,016½ enemy aircraft destroyed, had fought steadily rising odds, eventually reaching as high as ten to one. When the 51st Fighter Wing converted to the F-86, these odds dropped to seven to one.

I’ve always considered the Saber to be one of the most gorgeous fighters ever made…right up to the D variant, which was butt-ugly because of that radome. No surprise, since both were designed and built by the same company responsible for my eternal favorite, the P51 Mustang: North American. And since this is where the purty pitchers come in and I don’t want to drag down page-load times for those of you who, incomprehensibly and inexcusably, have no interest in these matters, I’ll do y’all the courtesy of tucking the rest below the fold.

Continue reading “Dawn of the Jet Age” →

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