MilPub

The Greatest Show on Earth

2012-01-27T16:42:00.000-08:00

I could say that my name was Bonaparte,
and show you Napoleon's tomb;
that wouldn't make him my grandfather would it?
--Showboat (1951)

Makes me feel quite dirty,
Though we all do sometimes
--I Wanna Be a Cowboy,
Boys Don't Cry

Oh. Um, l-- look, i-- i--
if we built this large wooden badger ...
--Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974)
_________________

Ranger often quips that he was Special Forces before SF was cool, before it earned its "O".

In his day, joining SF was a career kiss of death for an Infantry Officer, as it was often viewed as abandoning ship. The Infantry's main focus was, "Clank clank, I'm a tank" and the Fulda Gap. The war in Vietnam was just a live fire exercise which Ranger called the field Army in the ambush; the events in SE Asia were mostly seen as a distraction from the Cold War (anyone remember that one?)

Fast-forward 2012 and everyone is GAGA over Special Operations Forces. Poster child Seal Team 6's exploits are touted as the best thing since sliced bread (and since Wonder Bread's going bankrupt, it's nice that we can have a replacement.) The new Bill of Goods says Special Ops are the wave of the future, but this is hype based on showboat moments.

Recent vaunted ST6 actions are not military in nature. For instance, the death/murder/killing/neutralization of Osama bin Laden was a simple assassination, gussied up for American consumption as a heroic military operation. However, wars are not won (or lost) via assassinating individuals; if they are, Ranger would suggest that this is a war he would rather not fight.

How about the recent ST6 rescue of two hostages in Somalia? Portrayed by the administration as a military operation, again this was simply the killing of eight pirates hoping to negotiate for somewhere between their requested $10 million in ransom and the $1 million offered. The WaPo reported, "U.S. officials said there was no evidence that the hostage-takers had any connection to the [al-Shabab militant group which is said to be allied with al-Qaeda]". Shabby brigands who understand Westerners are flush and so want to steal a little; you'd think they'd studied the banker's handbook.

So they rescued a couple of hostages -- a Jessica Lynch moment for sure, replete with blonde captive Jessica Buchanan, reminiscent of other constructed American Teutonic heroes like "Lucky" Penny, the would-be downer of ill-fated Flight 93 (Sorry, Shoshanna, we have not forgotten you). But how does this translate out to war fighting?

This is not exactly Guns of Navarone or the Son Tay Raid, or Desert One. This was simply a feel-good raid against a small band of bandits -- anything but prime troopers. This action was not Anzio or Pointe du Hoc or the Great Raid featured in Ghost Soldiers. This was not a Studies and Observations Group mission against superior enemy forces; not the Hammelburg Raid, alas.

So why do we get our peckers hard about a chicken shit live-fire practice raid?

For SOF assets to contribute anything of value the assets must be part of a Theatre Commander's strategic plans and must work as a force multiplier to synergistically enhance the overall mission objectives. Crummy little raids like these need not apply.

In the 1980's the SOCEUR had raids and target folders that identified and delineated targets 450 kilometers to the rear of the forward line of troops (FLOT). This meant that troops had to insert by fixed or rotary-wing flying over enemy-controlled terrain and then conducting the operation, followed by an attempt to return to friendly lines -- a far piece from fighting drug-dazed bandits.

How does a raid against OBL or a rag-tag bunch of pirates contribute anything beyond enhanced recruitment for the SEALS? It is all movement with no progress. One more dead guy (even OBL) or 20 more bandits is hardly a strategic event.

We are so desperate to call the Phony War on Terror (PWOT©) a real war that we stretch the reality of ancillary actions to the breaking point. Why not just dress the teams as United Parcel Service deliverymen and hide them in the back of the truck? Why not use a Trojan Horse or a Trojan Rabbit?

Our operations mimic those of a bi-polar amoeba. One wonders if the good folks at DARPA have studied that application yet.

The Inflection Point

2012-01-22T06:06:00.000-08:00

FDChief's last thread introduced the latest Obama national strategy document to this blog, that being Sustaining US Global Leadership. The first paragraph of the introduction sets the tone for what is to follow:

The United States has played a leading role in transforming the international system over the past sixty-five years. Working with like-minded nations, the United States has created a safer, more stable, and more prosperous world for the American people, our allies, and our partners around the globe than existed prior to World War II. Over the last decade, we have undertaken extended operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to bring stability to those countries and secure our interests. As we responsibly draw down from these two operations, take steps to protect our nation’’s economic vitality, and protect our interests in a world of accelerating change, we face an inflection point. This merited an assessment of the U.S. defense strategy in light of the changing geopolitical environment and our changing fiscal circumstances. This assessment reflects the President’’s strategic direction to the Department and was deeply informed by the Department’’s civilian and military leadership, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretaries of the Military Departments, and the Combatant Commanders. Out of the assessment we developed a defense strategy that transitions our Defense enterprise from an emphasis on today’’s wars to preparing for future challenges, protects the broad range of U.S. national security interests, advances the Department’’s efforts to rebalance and reform, and supports the national security imperative of deficit reduction through a lower level of defense spending.

Emphasis is mine.

The first sentence is true, but incomplete. Actually we have again transformed the international system since 2001, advocating pre-emptive war as a coherent strategy (as long as the US is the only country that practices it). Also the financial/economic system established by the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 has been replaced by what we could refer to as our own made in the USA version of crony capitalism/global market as rigged casino that had been coming together since the mid 1990s, but has become glaringly obvious after the economic crash of 2008.

The "like-minded nations" at this point in time comes down to Israel, although they have their own goals which are not necessarily in the US interest of being achieved. One could argue that France may be a "like-minded nation", but given US "confusion" during the Libyan campaign I think that unlikely. The extended operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were the results of two strategically incoherent wars and both amounting to US defeats. In fact there is much the propaganda feel to the whole document and the disjunct with our recent history is so blatant at times it is difficult to take this document seriously, at least in terms of strategic coherence based on an accurate assessment of our recent history. Still I think it worthy of study in not so much what it says, but in the assumptions behind it, what it avoids and its intended audience.

Let's start with the assumptions. The first is what I bolded in the first paragraph and is the title of this post. Inflection point can be defined as:

An event that results in a significant change in the progress of a company, industry, sector, economy or geopolitical situation. An inflection point can be considered a turning point after which a dramatic change, with either positive or negative results, is expected to result. . . .

. . . Politically, an inflection point can be illustrated by the fall of the Berlin Wall or the fall of Communism in Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries.

Difficult to see what exactly the "inflection point" is today, although I would agree that 1992 was indeed one and that our strategic coherence has been going south, along with the effectiveness of our military actions, ever since that point in time. In other words there was a turning or inflection point after 1989-1992 and the result has been negative. Nothing I have read in this document shows either awareness of that basic fact, awareness of the self-defeating quality of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, nor any inclination to correct the situation to reflect the actual interests of the people of the United States. Instead what it shows is a lock-step determinism to continue with the failed policies/attitude of the past.

The second assumption is that the Al Qaida boogyman remains the main national security threat and counter-terrorism remains the first primary mission of the US Armed Forces:

The demise of Osama bin Laden and the capturing or killing of many other senior al-Qa’’ida leaders have rendered the group far less capable. However, al-Qa’’ida and its affiliates remain active in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. More broadly, violent extremists will continue to threaten U.S. interests, allies, partners, and the homeland. The primary loci of these threats are South Asia and the Middle East. With the diffusion of destructive technology, these extremists have the potential to pose catastrophic threats that could directly affect our security and prosperity. For the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to take an active approach to countering these threats by monitoring the activities of non-state threats worldwide, working with allies and partners to establish control over ungoverned territories, and directly striking the most dangerous groups and individuals when necessary.

Interesting mix of messages associated with this assumption. First, there is the not so subtle reminder of OBL "being brought to justice". Then the extensive nature of this nebulous threat which is portrayed as being essentially existential (violent extremists . . . pose catastrophic threats that could directly affect our security and prosperity), what in strategic theory is known as an "absolute enemy". Absolute enemies are not recognized as such in Clausewitzian thought and it is rather a Leninist concept. That is the concept that the administration is using here is a totalitarian concept which has been used in the past to justify war crimes and mass murder. The last sentence refers to the use of drones or RPAs, which I have addressed in the past. The existential and absolute nature of the threat justifying not only the use of this destabilizing weapon system, but the extensive and unending dedication of resources to combat this type of threat. In fact even questioning this policy can be see as treason, since "the absolute enemy" requires by definition an "absolute" response.

There is no mention of any state connection to Al Qaida, which is interesting given what we now know about OBL's last years. This would add necessary ambiguity to understanding the actual nature of Al Qaida and the situation as a whole, and that is clearly not the intention of the present administration any more than it was that of the last.

The third assumption has to do with what we actually achieve with our current force structure/level:

U.S. economic and security interests are inextricably linked to developments in the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia, creating a mix of evolving challenges and opportunities. Accordingly, while the U.S. military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region. Our relationships with Asian allies and key partners are critical to the future stability and growth of the region. . .

The maintenance of peace, stability, the free flow of commerce, and of U.S. influence in this dynamic region will depend in part on an underlying balance of military capability and presence.

Is it true that our presence keeps the peace, or would we have an acceptable level of stability if the US Navy only had three carrier battle groups? Is it the US that keeps the free flow of commerce going, or would it be operating pretty much the same without us? Who exactly would be the source of all this disorder if we weren't there to police this huge area? What would be their possible motivation to disrupt things? Do they even possess the resources to achieve this disruption?

A clue to the answer to these questions imo is the title of this document, which is "Sustaining US Global Leadership", but it isn't really "Leadership" that we are interested in sustaining, but "Dominance". "Defense" is a reaction to a threat or actual aggression, whereas "Dominance" is a state or condition of existence. Almost all acts of aggression committed by states since 1992 have been either committed by us, like-minded Israel, or by states that we supported. We're not in the peace and stability business, we're in the coercion and war-making business and our current goal is to maintain the state of dominance which allows for that, no matter what.

The fourth assumption has to do with the Arab Spring:

n the Middle East, the Arab Awakening presents both strategic opportunities and challenges. Regime changes, as well as tensions within and among states under pressure to reform, introduce uncertainty for the future. But they also may result in governments that, over the long term, are more responsive to the legitimate aspirations of their people, and are more stable and reliable partners of the United States.

Emphasis mine. I don't see how being more responsive to the legitimate aspirations of their people can be equated with being more stable and reliable partners of the United States, but then if we get to decide what their legitimate aspirations are (wink,wink, nod, nod), then I guess it works. This of course brings us back to the same situation we had prior to the Arab Spring itself . . .

The fifth and last assumption I'll list has to do with NATO, but is not limited to that since the quote brings up other interesting points as well:

The United States has enduring interests in supporting peace and prosperity in Europe as well as bolstering the strength and vitality of NATO, which is critical to the security of Europe and beyond. Most European countries are now producers of security rather than consumers of it. Combined with the drawdown in Iraq and Afghanistan, this has created a strategic opportunity to rebalance the U.S. military investment in Europe, moving from a focus on current conflicts toward a focus on future capabilities.

The first sentence contains an array of conflicting statements adding together to a very dubious assumption. By bolstering the strength and vitality of NATOpeace and prosperity in Europe? One could argue the opposite, that by not only maintaining and expanding NATO, not to mention a US missile shield for Europe, we are needlessly antagonizing Russia.

Europe doesn't need NATO, the US does, since without it what would be our rationale or legal basis for stationing troops, nuclear weapons and equipment in Europe? Without those bases (and Lajes as well in the Azores) we would be very hard pressed to sustain our dominance, in fact the whole war on terror would have been probably impossible, which would have been a good thing not only for Europe (would there have been the London and Madrid attacks without GWB's wars?), but for the US as well, or rather for the people of the United States.

Europe has gained nothing from NATO post 1992. The commitment of non-US NATO countries to both Iraq and Afghanistan argues for the immediate discontinuation of NATO in fact.

The final point I would like to make associated with this assumption, but actually a separate one, is that security is seen by the US government today as a commodity. The document speaks of our "Defense enterprise" and mentions European countries are now producers of security rather than consumers of it.

On the individual level, we purchase "security" as a commodity all the time: a new/improved lock for the front door, a can of pepper spray, a guard dog, an H&K automatic for your "personal protection" . . . Insurance also provides a form of "security". At the individual level though, "security" is a mindset buttressed by commodities, but not necessarily so. A person who trusts his or her neighbors does not feel insecure and probably will see little need for security in terms of commodities.

But we are not talking about that at the level of states. At this level, "security" is more a collective result of a whole series of material, institutional and moral/value decisions. Security = internal social stability/a durable external balance of power. Dominance could be seen as providing security, but that requires the consensus of the international community. Should the power in a state of dominance start acting erratically, or against the interests of powerful states or coalitions, then the presence of the dominance itself becomes source of instability. Also should the hegemon define its "security" has having its own way by coercing others and perceiving their ability/intention to resist as "undermining" its own security, then the hegemony is approaching delusional behavior or even systemic collapse.

By discussing these assumptions, I think both the mindset of the Nation's leadership and what they are leaving out of the equation becomes clear. My final statement on this post will be in regards to the intended audience . . .

To answer that question, let's first start with a quote:

Here we come face-to-face with the essential dilemma with which the United States has unsuccessfully wrestled since the Soviets deprived us of a stabilizing adversary - a dilemma that the events of 9/11 only served to intensify. The political elite that ought to bear the chief responsibility for crafting grand strategy instead nurses fantasies of either achieving permanent global hegemony or remaking the world in America's image. Meanwhile, the military elite that could puncture those fantasies and help restore a modicum of realism to US policy fixates on campaigns and battles, with generalship largely a business of organizing and coordinating material . . .

Reasserting a professional monopoly over the conduct of warfare requires drawing the brightest possible line between politics and war, thereby preventing civilian and military considerations from becoming entangled. Hence, the senior commander who experiences combat vicariously in the comfort of an air-conditioned headquarters nonetheless insists on styling himself a "warfighter". He does so for more than merely symbolic reasons. Assuming that identity permits him to assert prerogatives to which the officer corps now adamantly lays absolute claim.

As if by default, getting to Baghdad (or Kabul) becomes war's primary - almost its sole - purpose. The result is war undertaken in an atmosphere of astonishing strategic naiveté, leading soldiers like Franks and civilians like Feith to assume that, with a couple of quick battlefield victories, everything else will simply fall into place.

Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power, pp 187-8.

I think this quote makes it clear who the intended audience of this document is. It's our own military elite. This assures them that the political side will retain the same old goal of dominance, which we have pursued since 1992. The military will be left alone to organizing and coordinating the various operations, but there will be no actual connection between policy and military means/aim. Policy will continue as before to exist behind a curtain of propaganda and window dressing, while the military plans campaigns of destruction, but with the new promise of no actual US boots on the ground (However, US forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale, prolonged stability operations), outside of special operations forces I assume. This is what Obama's "inflection point" comes down to. As others have mentioned we experienced this same sort of drawdown in the 1990s after the "Defense Panning Guidance" of 1992 had been put into effect.

Eating Something With a Sieve

2012-01-19T03:23:00.000-08:00

Robert Farley has a new article up at World Politics Review about his thoughts on the coming Department of Defense budget circus:

"Perhaps the most important takeaway from the white paper is the official recognition that the size of the defense budget itself represents a threat to U.S. national security."

says Farley,

"In theory, this should not be such a remarkable insight; one common narrative explaining the end of the Cold War is that the United States drove the Soviet Union to economic ruin by forcing it to maintain an unsustainable military budget. As Bernard Finel suggests, the United States has now committed itself to a degree of dominance over potential rivals that may be unsustainable in the long run, and that in and of itself poses risks."

Well enough. But I don't know if he has thought this through far enough.

Specifically:

First, I think he's giving the flacks too much credit - simply saying this will happen is far from a guarantee that it WILL happen. Military overstretch is nearly universal in the decline phase of imperia; almost the first symptom of post-vitality in a large or imperial polity is an excessive amount of revenue devoted into military forces and a decreasing return from that "investment".

That is; as empires first grow they often find that war "pays for itself". Imperial troops extend the borders, bringing home slaves and tribute, incorporating rich lands and peoples into the empire. This wealth then translates into more, better-equipped forces, which are more effective against the barbarians, bringing more people and more wealth into the empire. Wash, rinse, repeat.

But over time the combination of imperial social and political arteriosclerosis, bloated elites devoted to their own interests at the expense of the common good, and the vicious effects - on both imperials and colonials - of ruling the subject populations reduces the gains and expands the costs. Subsequent rulers desperately try and find ways to reduce these costs, only to find that in armies, in in every organization, what begins as a relatively lean, cost-effective organization over time becomes overstuffed with useless dunnage that contributes little, if anything, to the actual business of warfighting.

But, second, it is difficult or even impossible to reverse this without immense outlays of political prestige and will. I cannot think of a historical example of an empire that voluntarily restructured its armed forces, in a short time, as the result of a deliberate serious analysis of its geopolitical interests. The Marian Reforms? Except they were more-or-less purely organizational. The conversion of the U.S. to a global superpower in 1945? Helped that just at the moment we had the world's largest army, navy, air force, and a nuke or three lying around.

I'm not sating it can't be done - just that it's damn deadly difficult and the successful examples are so few I can't think of any, And throw in the toxic political environment of the 201s United States? It seems beyond unlikely; it is likely to be absolutely impossible.

Overall I tend to agree wholeheartedly with his conclusion:

"Defense budget politics has increasingly become a field of narrow contestation between experts, elites and interested actors, rather than a field in which different visions of the political good engage with one another. This has resulted in a prioritization of bureaucratic interest and parochial concern, both of which are enemies of real grand strategy."

...but tend to see this not as a bug but as a feature. In my opinion throughout MOST of U.S. history our military budgets have been decided this way.

For most of U.S. history that's been fine. We didn't need much in the way of geopolitical strategy to lick the natives of North America; some smallpox and a railroad or two would work just swell. Ad-hoc assemblies of forces would do to swat the Mexicans, Spanish, and Filipinos. You can sum up our geopolitical plans during the period 1918-1940 as "have a big Navy and don't fight anyone worth shit".

WW2? I'll give you that - well done, FDR, George Marshall. and Congresscritters all.

The Cold War was sort of a no-brainer, too. The Soviets were big so we had to be big, and we were already big. They had a blue-water navy and so did we. They had ICBMs and intercontinental bombers and so did we, or we developed them. It wasn't as big a no-brainer as giving smallpox-blankets to the Sioux, but, still...

So we're down to this particular time in history; post-Cold-War, 1991-2012.

And here's where our historical traditions; lack-of-planning, empire-in-a-fit-of-absence-of-mind, foreign-policy-as-an-outgrowth-of-domestic-policy are biting us on the ass. We are suddenly faced with a non-binary choice and an undefined future, a cloud of potential problems rather than a simple "threat". Teasing sense out of the chaotic multipolar world of the 21st Century and translating that sense into some sort of intelligent military policy is the sort of things that asks for a Talleyrand, or a George Marshall.

And instead we're awash with Rick Santorums.

So it occurs to me is that if reducing the U.S. defense budget growth in a sensible, strategically-planned, geopolitically coherent way relies on the sorts of gentlefolk of the sort much found in the U.S. Congress or in charge of the various executive agencies today making some sort of rational choices based on national interests and the cold calculation of economic and political realities we would be better off hoping for a pink magical pony to appear in a cloud of pixie dust, soar overhead and crap out lemon-verbena-scented golden nuggets of budgetary savings.

Vote Herman Cain in South Carolina

2012-01-18T05:26:00.000-08:00

Borthers and Sisters, in times like these, when sin and corruption surround us like the Immigration Fence around the SouthWest Rump of America, God has raised up before our eyes two young heroes to counter the Forces of Evil that beset us day and night!

God may have shut the door in our faces when He forbade Stephen Colbert's name to be placed upon the ballot of the God-Fearing State of South Carolina, but He opened a window in the back porch for Colbert to climb in to steal Evil's Cookies!

Vote Cain!

Raise Cain, South Carolina, raise Cain!

Update: For a "million cool points", who said this?

"Andrew Jackson had a pretty good idea about what do with America's enemies: Kill them."

Update #2: Chief is the proud recipient of "Million Cool Points" prize. Congratulations, Chief. It constantly amazes what a tiny bit of research can do! :)

Stephen has another video out, narrated by Samuel Jackson.

Lots of Jacksons here today. Stonewall, Andrew & Samuel.

Piss Hard

2012-01-16T13:23:00.000-08:00

The Marines I have seen around the world
have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds,
the highest morale, and the lowest morals
of any group of animals I have ever seen.
Thank God for the United States Marine Corps
--Eleanor Roosevelt

The Marines have landed
and have the situation well in hand!
--Richard Harding Davis

Marines know how to use their bayonets.
Army bayonets may as well be paperweights
--Navy Times (1994)
_____________________

The news is abuzz with the story of the four Marines filmed pissing on the bodies of dead suspected Taliban fighters.

Begin with the premise that these are corpses are "suspected Taliban" -- dead, necro, stiff, checked out, finis, kaput . . . suspected. When did being Taliban become a death sentence? Don't Taliban sit in the Afghanistan parliament?

These Marines are warriors; it is extremely doubtful that a soldier would piss on a dead enemy fighter, but clearly the warrior culture permits the behavior. Presidential candidate Perry says the action was that of "kids" making a stupid mistake. Now Marines wielding deadly weapons are relegated to kid status. That statement seems as egregious as calling a black man a "boy", and yet it has passed nicely under the scrutiny of the porous Republican radar.

The pissing Marines are emblematic of a warrior culture run amok. Killing is no longer sufficient, so humiliation must be heaped upon the dead. However, this impulse to desecration runs up against the Geneva Conventions which were passed into law to provide minimal standards of conduct between combatants. Pissing on dead bodies is not in keeping with the intent of the conventions.

How do things like this happen? What is the command climate that permits such disregard of civilized human conduct? Does our training or our never-ending wars contribute to this mindset?

Some say, "What matter?" -- this is one small episode in a larger SNAFU. While that may be true, that fact does not diminish the import or significance of the act. The abject disdain and revilement shown in the act and its filming may be seen as the embodiment of the culture of elective wars, writ small. Peeing on dead opposition soldiers is a microcosm of a destitute military policy. The videotape of actions like this one will serve as future naufrages of a time and place.

The fact that fighting men would photograph this disgusting behavior is indicative of a bankruptcy of spirit which results from adopting warrior values. Warriors must be brave, but what matter if they are morally bankrupt? If the warriors are bankrupt, our social fabric is rent.

Psychologically, this is a sado-masochistic act in which the Marines are sexually humiliating a fallen enemy. The behavior is aberrant, but moreso when death and killing are involved. It is also (possibly) homoerotic.

You would not applaud the behavior in a snuff film, and yet a trash-talking female "news commentator" proudly declares she would "drop trou" and join in the Marine's pissing game. Most who oppose the situation only find fault with the filming of it. But would you want your daughter dating such men?

What sort of society are we when we execute and defend such behavior? Ranger believes the Marine's action signify a personality disorder, and he would recommend psychological evaluation and discharge on that basis.

This is a real pisher. The values of warriors are not the values of a liberal democratic philosophy.

--Jim and Lisa

Former Guantanamo Prisoner Speaks Out

2012-01-14T14:24:00.000-08:00

Chris Hayes on his news show "Up", Saturday and Sunday mornings on MSNBC, really stepped into it earlier today. He interviewed a former prisoner of the US prison at Guantanamo.

Apparently, something has changed here at blogger so that I cannot bring you the video here at this site.

You must see this, and spread it around as much as you can. My hope is that it will go viral.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/45996572#45996572

Americans are one of the most propagandized of any people in the world. We have a major newspaper asking its readers how much truth they need to reveal to its readers, let alone making any attempt to actually do that.

We have a comedian running in South Carolina ( Where the heck is Publius on this? Your country, your readers need you more than ever! ) exposing the fraud and lies of our Democracy.

It takes a foreign court to do the job that the US legal system, with notable exceptions, has failed to do.

http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-13/news/30624630_1_guantanamo-bay-spanish-judge-probe

It's that time of the our lives again...

2012-01-14T08:51:00.000-08:00

As the title says it all, it is that time of year again.

That time when Political speeches are made, many words are spoken, and truly, little of substance is said.

If, however, one is to actually pay attention to what is said by these Armani’s suited warriors of the belt-way carefully parse their words, one will hear what the each individual is saying...

for example...

Newt "not Romney" Gingrich: "Repeal Obamacare and pass a replacement that saves lives and money by empowering patients and doctors, not bureaucrats and politicians."

Now, does our dear Newt tell us what he will replace it with? Nope, he doesn't, but I bet if we look at his contributors we'd get a better idea of what type of "replacement" dear Newt baby is going to bring about...bon appetit!

Rick "Not Romney" Perry: "...get government out of the way so we can get America working again. By cutting taxes, repealing regulations, balancing our budget and expanding domestic energy production America can create millions of new jobs. Perry not only espouses conservative economic ideas – he has put them to work in his home state, where nearly 40% of America’s net new jobs have been created since June 2009."

Now, I'm pretty sure we've been down this road before, but the way this other "not Romney" Republican Candidate talks makes me wonder if Texas isn't the next Shangri-la...however, like Shangri la, alas, Texas isn't all that and buttered toast...in fact, it seems Mr. Perry has the same speech problem that the other former Governor of Texas had...a problem with facts...er, sorry, misspeaking.

"Democratic House member Lloyd Doggett said Perry's job claims don't tell the whole story. "Twenty-five states have lower unemployment than Texas," Doggett said, adding that Texas is "tied with Mississippi for more minimum-wage jobs than anywhere in the United States." We checked the numbers and found Doggett was right; we rated his statement True."

A pity that Ms. Bachmann bailed before I could assemble this list as she would have provided a comedic relief, alas, we press on.

Rick "Not Romney" San...oh, god, really, I can complete his last name...the imagery associated with it...come on sheer, man up...okay, here it goes...Santorum (Oh, god, I think threw up in my mouth): Okay, so, here is his site of issues, and as you peruse this I think you'll see that he is the poster boy with the unfortunate association with what is coined as "A loving act between two people" which is a polite way of saying that, like this man, it is a good idea not to go any further as you may discover things that later you will say to friends and families, "I miss my innocence."

However, since I'm jerk, I'll dive headlong into this mess and "translate" for you, my friends, what exactly he is saying...

"Defending the Dignity of Every Human Life" which is the buzzword for "I'm against everyone else having an abortion except for the privileged few like myself."

"Appointing Constitutionalist Justices and Judges Who Refuse to Legislate from the Bench" which is his way of saying, "I'm liking that Executive Privilege that W. and Obama are setting themselves up with, and I would like to expand on."

"Restoring America's Greatness Through Educational Freedom And Opportunity" is a not so clever way of saying, "I hate public edumication because it teaches our young people how to think for themselves, and we all know that American Greatness doesn't come through thinking for yourself, it comes through obeying those who are telling you what to do."

"Blah, blah" followed by, "Blah, blah, blaaaah, blah blah."

"Herpy derpity derp" which then is explained with, "Derp, burka, derp derp."

"Made In America" is a shorthand version of "Our workers here in the US are making way to much money, and in order to be competitive we need to lower those wages down to something below what their making in those washed out villages along Mumbai."

"Iran" translated is, "Oh how I really, really want to bomb Iran into the stone-age...oh...oh...oh...oh yeah...I need a towel."

"Executive Branch Actions" is another way of saying, "did I mention I totally dig Executive Privilege?"

Ad nauseum.

Anyway, I would go on, but with the loss of Michele Bachmann I've seem to have just laugh my last laugh...now, I just cry because here it is in a nutshell.

Ron Paul, back in the 80's, and 90's was a crack-pot Right Wing looney toon who no one in their right mind took seriously except for a few groups in Idaho, and maybe down south.
Now, that Ron Paul is an actual contender, and that he is actually main stream, EVEN THOUGH HE HAS NOT CHANGED HIS POLITICAL POSITION IN THE PAST THIRTY YEARS!!! tells me how far down the hole of insanity the Republican Party has crawled too...and that the other Republican Candidates actually make him look like the only sane one in the group is, in my opinion, not only disturbing, down right frightening.

And that is the take home message I think we're all stuck with here...the Republican line up has gone full on, batshit insane, and Obama with his "Who you gonna vote for, that, or me?" leaves us with the old adage of "Do we stick with the devil we know, or the devil we don't know?"

Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea...if I only we had that choice as an option.

My predictions for 2012 . . . an open thread

2012-01-10T15:04:00.000-08:00

Why doesn't some one else go first . . . ?

It would be nice to hear from all the barkeeps and regulars, as well as any guest wishing to comment . . .

I'll chime in at an appropriate time. I'm cautiously optimistic for the longer run, fear the immediate could turn somehow possibly desperate. Difficult to say where the fear comes from.

Difficult to say how the locals would react.

How far does theory actually lag behind praxis . . . ? I'd hope for a quiet year, a time of mending, but I somehow don't think it's going to work out that way.

Guten Rutsch! Happy New Year! Boas Entradas!

2011-12-31T12:12:00.000-08:00

Wish all the best for 2012! Let it be a boring, uneventful year . . . and for a bit of mood music, why not Max Raabe?

--

So far so good, and as Al's mentioned we'll be the recon element for the flow of events . . . being as we are a few hours ahead. Watched the New Years concert from Vienna on TV which has been a family tradition since we lived in Berlin, back in the bad ole days. It always ends with the Radetsky March . . .

Dead Time

2011-12-27T07:58:00.000-08:00

There's something about watching a soil sample rebound from consolidation that encourages reflection.

Boredom, perhaps?

This week between Christmas and the New Year has always seemed like an odd sort of interval of no-time to me ever since my Army Days. Back in the Eighties, at any rate, this week was usually a period of massive "ghosting"; we'd fall in for a ridiculously abbreviated morning PT - often distinguished by pure fun-PT like basketball, dodgeball, or the usual exercises but led by the junior privates for the entertainment and mirth of all involved - and then go hang around the aid station for the morning, clean already-clean weapons, dick off doing small PM chores in the motor hole, or find reasons to go "inventory our TA-50" which always seemed to entail fiddling with the field gear in our racks with our boots off while watching He-Man cartoons.

After midday chow even this pretense of military activity ceased, and we would spend the rest of the afternoon just goofing off; hanging out in the chow hall, or at the gym, visit our married pals at their quarters, watch bowl games in the dayroom or just chill in the barracks with our friends.

I remember one particular mid-week afternoon that turned into a "Faces of Death" marathon from noon until well into the following morning.

Remember those videos?

In the pre-cable era I recall that the "Faces of Death" videos were considered shocking evidence of the decline of Western Civilization; amateur (or professional outtake) films of people getting waxed in various either horrible, or comical (or both) ways. Hangings, electrocutions, falls, plus all the usual gawdawful atrocities humans have always managed to figure out how to perpetrate on each other...packaged in a tidy ninety-minute VHS tape perfect for bored-GI entertainment. But the usual finger-waggers and professional morals nannies considered them the nadir of human morality and signs that Western civilization was headed for the depravity of Rome and Babylon.

How innocent were we..?

Anyway, this week was also the time when young troops would get involved in all sorts of insane horseplay; it was this time in 1986 when Private Black pioneered "drainsurfing" during an unexpectedly-intense dry season downpour and ended up in the swamps behind Venado Beach. Given Blackie's penchant for bizarre nonsense I'd have to say that this was fairly subdued for him; nothing was set afire, nobody but him ended up naked, and there were no arrests. This week was for "Jackass"-grade stunts before there was a "Jackass".

Today I'm a sedate middle-aged, middle-class father and husband and the notion of jumping in a raging drainage ditch with a foam sleeping pad wouldn't occur to me any more than running for mayor of Portland. But this week, this dead-week between the two holidays, still retains an odd sort of surreality for me.

It has always seemed to me that the old year really dies with the solstice and the Jesus-come-lately graft of religio-commercial holiday glitter we've pasted to it. The silly alcohol-fueled celebration of the New Year a week later marks the beginning of another year's journey around the sun.

But for now we wait, idly diverting ourselves with desultory work and the bright nonsense of our new toys, through the short, dark week as the earth spins through the no-time that spans the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.

And, perhaps, take some time to reflect on where we've been. And wonder where we're going.

All the Troubles in the World

2011-12-26T19:26:00.001-08:00

...are listed here - the source of the graphic below:I find it interesting to note that some of what we think as truly appalling human conditions - chattel slavery, for example - last for years, decades, even centuries...and yet take a relatively small toll in human lives compared to, say, World War 2, which many of us still consider a Good War and one of the United States' "great adventures".

Which, I think, points up the caution needed in placing a price on horror in death alone. Slavery has always been considered one of the truly heinous human acts because of the wealth of misery it contains. There are, indeed, "fates worse than death" and few of them are remitted the slave.

What I do find interesting to note is the apparent increase in horror over the past hundred years or so. But then you stop for a moment and think of the centuries of human atrocity that have simply disappeared into the memory hole. Rome alone fought nearly constantly during her Republican and Imperial periods - Plutarch says

"[Janus] also has a temple at Rome with double doors, which they call the gates of war; for the temple always stands open in time of war, but is closed when peace has come. The latter was a difficult matter, and it rarely happened, since the realm was always engaged in some war, as its increasing size brought it into collision with the barbarous nations which encompassed it round about. But in the time of Augustus it was closed, after he had overthrown Mark Antony; and before that, when Marcus Atilius and Titus Manlius were consuls, it was closed a short time..."

I wonder; what will some future Plutarch write about our own country in our own time?

2011-12-24T11:02:00.000-08:00

Best to all

Battles Long Ago: First Stronghold 1873

2011-12-23T00:08:00.000-08:00

Over at GFT: the first major engagement of the Modoc War, 1873.The red-hot rampage of War in the Lava Beds - now for your holiday reading pleasure!

Iraq and I Roll - Open Thread

2011-12-16T03:00:00.000-08:00

I normally hate these "open threads", but, frankly, I wanted to hear from the other drunks in this joint; so now that the Third Gulf War is "officially" over (it's not, let's not kid ourselves, but the U.S. has declared victory, so let's make a note to file...) what was the takeaway of the group.

I did think that it was...ironic? Intriguing? ...that this week also featured two other events that seem to carom off the entire Iraq circus;

1. The official recognition by the U.S. Congress of what seems to have been the functional reality inside the Beltway for some time; that "We Are At War", and that war - where it is, who is "fighting" it, how it is "fought" - is whatever the U.S. Executive branch defines it to be, and

2. The passing of one of the most vocal, and certainly the most acerbic, of those who loved the Gulf War; Christopher Hitchens.

I sorta wish we had ol' Hitch this side of the dirt for this one; his opinion would be sure to jump-start the conversation.

Anyway, rack 'em up, as Clint Black would say.

Worth the time to read

2011-12-15T04:53:00.000-08:00

This is far afield from our regular programming, but there had been a couple of requests for the bride's insights on the Chap 11 of AMR, so here is some very good info.

The bride just received this link from former colleagues at AMR Corp. She has a lot of respect for Michael Boyd, head of the Boyd Group. In her opinion (first hand experience) Boyd and Bob Crandall, who retired as AMR CEO a few years ago, represent two of the three sharpest minds in contemporary commercial aviation, the third being Herb Kelleher of Southwest (also a first hand opinion). In fact, the wife would love to see a presidential ticket of any combination of the three. But then, people that brilliant, courageous and honest just don't run for president any more.

What is most interesting is Boyd's scathing comments about the pundits. Yes, we not only live in a land of instant experts, but people actually make serious decisions based on these uninformed fools' bleating. One of the reasons WASF.

Read and enjoy. I'm sure it runs counter to anything you have read elsewhere.

Another interesting article about the Chap 11 is this one. It gives a good insight into why AA was the last "legacy airline" to use Chap 11, as Arpey was of the same school of moral thought as his predecessors Don Carty and Bob Crandall.

Infamy

2011-12-11T09:32:00.000-08:00

Apropos of this Pearl Harbor Day post at GFT, here's a nice article in Naval History Magazine about how the events leading up to 7 DEC 1941 point up the problem that governments and militaries have, not just in assessing threat capabilities, but in assessing their own.

As Parshall and Wenger (2011) points out;

"In the case of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Navy had no real inkling of Japanese carrier warfare capabilities and therefore could not accurately assess likely operational targets. Not only that, but Japan’s carrier force—known as Kido Butai—was evolving so quickly on the eve of the Pacific war that almost no naval intelligence organ would have been able to track, internalize, and gauge those capabilities."

Even the Japanese Navy wasn't really able to understand their own strength.The article correctly notes that

"Indeed, the Japanese themselves did not seem to understand clearly the nature of the weapon they had created, or how best to wield it. Within six months of the opening of the war, poor strategy on the Imperial Japanese Navy’s part would end up committing Kido Butai’s component carrier divisions piecemeal, first at the Battle of Coral Sea and then at the Battle of Midway. During the latter, Kido Butai was decisively defeated—with four of its carriers sunk. Japan’s overwhelming early war numerical advantage was thus erased. Shortly thereafter, America’s superiority in production began asserting itself."

My friend seydlitz likes to talk about how the lack of strategic vision in the 2011 U.S. has contributed decisively to our frittering away our blood and treasure pursuing impossibilities in Central Asia. But I think one of the important lessons of Pearl Harbor, as well-discussed in Parshall and Wenger (2011), is how extraordinarily difficult trying to understand even one's own military and geopolitical strengths and weaknesses is.

How much more so trying to integrate all that into an overall assessment of potential threat capabilities, friendly political and military capacity, national interests, and geopolitical variables.Especially in a domestic U.S. political climate of increasing polarization and magical thinking.

Not saying that this shouldn't happen, or can't happen. But just pointing out that all our historical examples show how extraordinarily difficult it is.

2011-12-09T08:41:00.000-08:00

"By employing a plethora of tax-dodging techniques, 30 multi-million dollar American corporations expended more money lobbying Congress than they paid in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010, ultimately spending approximately $400,000 every day -- including weekends -- during that three-year period to lobby lawmakers and influence political elections....."

Meanwhile:

During a meeting of the Republican Governors Association in Orlando this week, Frank Luntz, one of the most well known political communications strategist in the country, talked to GOPers about how they could do a better job talking about the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

It ain't gonna be pretty.

The Death of COIN, or the Death of Strategic ("C") Thought?

2011-12-09T01:51:00.000-08:00

Recently Col. Gian Gentile USA (h/t to ZP) came out with yet another well-written short article on the dilemma facing the US military today. Which other US officer would one put in the same category as Gian Gentile? Good question . . .

In Coin is Dead: US Army Must Put Strategy Over Tactics, Gentile takes issue with the Counter-Insurgency (COIN) response to the Global War on Terror. He's done this in the past and I posted an analysis of a 2009 article he wrote. In that earlier post I dealt with Gentile's critique of COIN and expanded on that. In this one I rather leave COIN to Gentile but expand into the larger issues I see as at stake.

I organize this post the same way I did the earlier one, providing a list of Gentile's main points, but with fewer this time since this essay is much shorter. I then provide a following list of my own.

The first of Gentile's main points is that "tactical objectives have been used to define victory". This linked with the simple fact that both Afghanistan and Iraq have been "characterized by an all-emcompassing obsession with the methods and tactics of counterinsurgency".

Second, American strategic thought has lost the ability "to link cost-effective operational campaigns to core policy objectives, while taking into consideration American political and popular will".

Third, having learned nothing from the strategic defeats in both wars, "the American military has embraced the idea that better tactics can overcome serious shortcomings in strategy and policy".

The Fourth, following the third, is that the "US military is in dire need for a conversation on strategy, one that looks critically at the past 10 years of war and asks hard questions about the operational methods employed".

Fifth and finally, the future will not necessarily be like the past, unless the national political and military leaderships stumble into another incoherent war and the failure to even attempt to learn from the past will condemn "the US Army and Marines to strategic irrelevance in the years and decades to come".

Gentile is repeating an argument here he as made before, that concentrating on COIN while at the same time ignoring the political dimension in which war operates only condemns the US military to making the same mistakes they made in the past. It could be that the actual threats the country faces in the future are more of a conventional nature and thus requiring quite a different military than one well-versed in COIN, but at the same time having lost the knack for early 21st Century conventional warfare.

While I applaude Gentile's forthrightness in speaking out as a serving US Army field grade officer, I don't think he goes quite far enough in his critique. Mine is very much the opinion of a US civilian strategic theorist rather than a serving US military officer and should be taken as such. I agree with Col. Gentile's views as expressed in the article, but I make no assumption that he would in turn agree with what follows.

So from my own Clausewitzian perspective, let me add my own points which I hope will expand on and in some cases provide some possible political context to Gentile's points.

First, tactics has become the sole focus for the simple fact that the government has been loath to define what the actual political purposes/policy goals of the wars conducted were/are. This was particularly true for Iraq. The military was essentially given a list of propaganda themes (WMDs, overthrow a terrible dictator, inflict punishment for 9/11, ensure our security) and told that they were the political goals, when in reality the actual goals were the overthrow of the Iraqi government and the establishment of a US client state, bases for US force projection throughout the area, domination of Iraq's national resources and economy. That US economic interests/corporate players botched the last two goals should come as no surprise. They were too busy chasing the no-risk war $$$ . . .

So the disconnect between political purpose and military aim was intentional and reflected the rank dishonesty of the US government guided by our political/economic elite. Had the goals been more modest in nature, this might have not been a crippling problem, but given the radical nature of our policy goals (essentially the remaking of the Middle East and of various Muslim political identities) and the massive material and moral resources necessary, these military adventures were doomed to failure from the start. This was/is the fundamental reality of the situation: pre-ordained failure, if for no other reason then simply that these radical goals were not achievable through military means. Essentially instead of simply the confusion of COIN, for us the very concept of strategy (as in military means attaining a military aim to support a coherent political purpose) itself has been lost.

Second and very much related to this was/is the assumption by US policy makers that force and violence were/are the preferred means of attaining their strategic (political) goals, and with the level of force and violence the US was/is able to wield, there was/is no question of failure. I include the present tense here to indicate that this dubious assumption is still very strong in spite of the obvious reality to the contrary. It is in fact driving our current policy in regards to Iran. The assumption among a large swath of the US political elite is that violence is not only a means, but an end. Simply massive destruction is what war is about and when you have destroyed all the enemy target sets you have identified, victory follows. Warfare is simply deploying and manipulating, usually high tech and very expensive, weapons systems to maximum effect. There is no consciousness of war being a social interaction, where the enemy reacts, there is no understanding of a necessary connection between the military aim and the political purpose. "Strategy" is simply causing large explosions in the enemy's backyard while the "warriors" back home watch on TV and feel ever so proud and secure.

Back in 2003 the attitude was, hit the Iraqis hard enough, so the neocon thought went, and the US would be able to achieve anything, even the remaking of the Iraqi political identity. Would anyone argue today that that had any possibility at all of success? Yet we see essentially the same thing in regards to Iran.

There is a decidedly "Marxist" as in exclusively materialist view in all this. Political values stand for nothing in comparison to either unrestrained violence or potential economic prosperity. Make it worth their while, allow the magic of the market do its work, and the conquered peoples would become happy consumers in no time. What could possibly be their reason to resist the corporate bounty offered them? Violence as the unstoppable force, followed by simplistic notions of economics with both displacing politics.

Third, COIN provided an answer to two quite different problems. First, it was the basis of domestic propaganda/information operations whereby the war was repackaged as something quite different then it had been initially. General David Petreaus, "the father of COIN" became the "man with a plan", so the focus shifted from a lack of resources committed to "giving the plan a chance to succeed". Also the Iraqi "surge" provided the basis of the "we won" meme which has been more of less dominate among many Americans since 2007. I would argue that domestic information operations by the US military has become one of the legacies of these wars and will only become more important in the future since it in effect constitutes the military's only success story. This brings up another characteristic of the US as being "too big to fail" notion mentioned above. As long as the public supports the, that is any war, then that war continues, the US only having to worry about "us defeating ourselves as happened in Vietnam". The curious mix of a high level of material/financial resources versus a low level of moral and physical resources necessary to fight these wars particularly stands out; war as endless domestic financial shakedown.

COIN also provided for an unending operational commitment to both wars, since as long as the US was operating in the field, the reality of the strategic failures we had actually suffered could be ignored, actually discounted. COIN allowed for the "can" - and the political decision to withdraw from a couple of lost wars - "to be kicked down the road" indefinitely. In fact President Obama's decision to withdraw from Iraq leaves him open to being tarred with having "lost the war" since he ends military operations there and thus must now deal with the strategic reality (which has been there all along, as in Iran being the prime benefactor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq). This long ignored strategic reality also drives the current lurch to war with Iran, since a new war allows for another throw of the geo-strategic dice: Deep in the hole, is our political elite simply "throwing with their fingers crossed"?

Fourth and finally, while I agree with Gentile in his view of COIN, the actual strategic discussion we should be having involves not how the military should be structured, but rather how the political dysfunctions of our political system should be addressed and radically dealt with. The focus on what's wrong with the military is a symptom of a much larger and serious problem. I fear that all the discussion in regards to COIN or no COIN is a distraction from what we should be dealing with, especially regarding the 2012 election . . .

How to conclude?

Allow me to make three comments:

First, this whole time that we live in could be seen as simply the latest link in a long line of social history, that of attaining "human self-awareness" which I would define as the ability to govern and regulate ourselves without any type of ideology. Long ago our species came to the conclusion that the only way to unite large numbers of people was through a "Weltanschauung" or spiritual worldview, something that made sense of the whole in terms of existence. We've in the West essentially burned through religion, and politics and are now at economic system, which is the threadbare rag that we attempt to hide naked self interest. Consider that we do possess the capacity to negotiate, administer and salvage this planet to the adequate betterment of all. Whether we will or not is another question.

Second, be clear that this is basically a despicable betrayal. This is NOT what was sold to the citizenry as OUR country. The usurpers attempt to blind us with our own values, but they themselves are at heart hopelessly corrupt. Ad hoc structured cynical opportunism built on flimsy stands, essentially broken shards of glass pieced together collapsing before your eyes. Besides fear of not believing, what's left? 2008 came and went with no change. Still the old elite continue, but they are not anything near capable of pulling off what they are now attempting . . .

Finally, language itself has escaped us. We no longer enjoy the rather common place ability of describing our own political relations and conditions. Intricate concepts involving complex social systems/relations are reduced to one simple cause, usually dealt with by means of violence. That this stupid and self-defeating approach to strategy - or even basic existence - that this has led to consistent institutional failure does not matter in the least. Instead, we use language drained of all useful meaning. Clear communication is basic to survival of a group which makes me wonder if what we see today is predominately dead language used by essentially a dying political community blubbering its last shrieking gasps . . . Sad.

More than sad, tragic. Tragedy is something our grandparents would have understood.

On the most personal level, I, my generation and myself, imo, stand disgraced before our grandparents. They are the ones that I, for one, actually answer to, in this very specific case, since they did more to define my values than my parents did, however hard my parents may have tried.

We've lost it big time as a political collectivity somewhere along the line. "C" stands for communal. That's the very simple message of this post. If I were still a Christian, I would tell you all to pray, but since I am now an agnostic, I simply would recommend to hang on tight and hope for the best. That, and perhaps consider immigration.

Gary Francis Powers Redux

2011-12-08T02:51:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Game of Drones

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

For those who need some brushing up on history, Powers was the pilot of the notorious and doomed high-flying U2 spy plane whose siblings are still used for not only spying, but also I'm happy to report, for Astronomy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident

I was out to the movies last night ( "The Immortals" if you want to know, decent enough and surprisingly literate, with the amount of Mythology packed into it ). I bring this bit of info up because the Air Force has been running a series of ads before the flick starts about "this isn't Science Fiction, it's what we do everyday", or some such. I only half listen to them. One in particular shows these huge swivel engine transport planes landing on ruined bridges to save lives, which makes me laugh, because, well, it's silly. Maybe you've seen them and know what I'm on about.

Here's a different one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiB3vrhPDNs

There is buried somewhere in my head a quote from the Original Star Trek series attributed to Nimoy's Mr. Spock, also paraphrased.

"Military secrets are the least secure of all secrets".

So we lose one of our Flying Technological Terrors, as Darth Vader put it in disparaging the Death Star in the face of one of its commanders, to our hated enemy and cause of all trouble in the Middle East, Iran. As Stewart notes above, first comes the lie, then eventually, to our credit, comes the truth.

Our government spends billions to develop these technologies to keep us safe from the Terrors Outside the Walls, spends billions more flying them around the world to spy and gather intelligence and kill where we may, but we cannot rebuild our people's lives, keep them healthy, adequately fund our education system or find a policy that works, rebuild our decaying infrastructure and frayed economy.

We gut our own sacred enshrined and much ballyhooed freedoms, while those brave and long-suffering US citizens and others in our military around the globe fight to preserve them.

There are still vital and healthy signs in the Old Sod left, enough that I'll still go out to plead my case to vote, participate, and to Hope for Some Change. But Lordy, it's a long so very long row to hoe.

He is Us

2011-12-04T06:32:00.000-08:00

Thursday the U.S. Senate made an interesting choice.

It departed from the post-9/11 world, where we were "at war" with the people who planned and performed an act of political violence, and entered the post-post-9/11 world, where we are "at war" with those people who support, in various ways and to various degrees, the people we went "to war" with after 9/11.

Now I'm not going to pursue this further; those of you who have read my previous writing here know how I feel about that. And I don't think that this was a dramatic step beyond - it really just formalized what my country has been doing for most of the past decade or so. It's a tad depressing to realize that the notion that the entire world is now a "battlefield" is so unexceptional that it passes without general comment. But not surprising.

But I'd just like to observe that, to me, the fascinating part of all this is how much it reflects the convergence of our "warriors" and the "warriors" we officially fear, hate, and despise.

Here's Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson on the entire notion of presumption-of-innocence in a nation "at war" - "U.S. citizens do not have immunity when they are at war with the United States. Johnson said only the executive branch, not the courts, is equipped to make military battlefield targeting decisions about who qualifies as an enemy."

And here's shoe bomber Richard Reid on why he wanted to blow up a planeload of civilians: "I am at war with your country. I’m at war with them not for personal reasons but because they have murdered more than, so many children and they have oppressed my religion and they have oppressed people for no reason except that they say we believe in Allah."

Got it?

So my question is - how and when does it end?

Does it EVER end?

How CAN it ever end?

If the "enemy" is everyone you hate...and the "war" consists of when, where, and who you want it to be, whether you're an individual with a grudge, or a government official pondering a potential for some present - or even future - "danger"...how can you ever say that the "war" is over?

Because I cannot see any serious political figure or faction on the U.S. scene that disagrees with this broad formulation that "We Are At War!". Democrats, Republicans...everyone I see and hear, everyone who is in a position to actually effect U.S. policy...all appear to agree in one form or another that We Are At War and that our national foreign, military, and economic policy MUST be shaped by that.

And the people we are "at war" with are in large measure fantasists, goofballs that truly believe in bin Ladin's Caliphate opium-dream, or just angry and vengeful because we have killed someone they care about, or are in it for some other sort of personal revenge. That's not a war that's fought for policy that ends with a peace treaty; that's the sort of "war" that only ends with a grave.

So...does this mean that the United States will be "at war" for the rest of my life?

The Devil is in the Numbers

2011-11-26T03:14:00.000-08:00

Sheer's link to the Atlantic Magazine contained this interesting tidbit:

The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.

It reminds me of an old WWII joke:

A General at the Imperial Military Staff HQ in Tokyo would go to a Chinese barber every Wednesday for a shave and a haircut. Once the General was seated in the chair, the Chinese barber would ask, "How goes the war, Honorable General?" The General would respond with statistics from the China Front, for which he was responsible. Something like, "The War goes well. Last week - 15,000 Chinese soldiers killed, 1,000 Japanese killed." or "30,000 Chinese soldiers killed, only 700 Japanese killed." The barber would answer, "Very good. Very Good." (OK, back before PC, it was said as "Velly Good".)

This went on week after week. The Japanese General was rather surprised that a Chinese person would find such tilted odds "Very Good". So the next time the General gets his hair cut, he answers, "200,000 Chinese soldiers killed, only 200 Japanese killed", to see how the barber would react to his false, but staggering odds. As always, the barber answers, "Very good. Very good."

So the General asks, "Chung How, you are Chinese. Every week I report 15 to 1 or higher losses for the Chinese. Today, I reported 1,000 to 1 losses for the Chinese. Yet, you always answer, 'Very good. Very good.' How can such lopsided odds be very good to a Chinese person?"

The barber smiled and simply said, "Yes, Honorable General, the odds are tilted, but soon there will be no more Japanese soldiers!"

If one American middle class worker is sacrificed by American profit maximizing businesses to raise 4 Chinese and Asian workers out of proverty, pretty soon there will be no more American middle class workers!

November in History: Battle of the Wabash 1791

2011-11-24T23:56:00.001-08:00

Over at GFT.Happy Thanksgiving, too, from all of us here; may you have a better day than St. Clair and the boys had on the banks of the Wabash 220 years ago!

The Quiet of Thanksgiving Morning

2011-11-24T07:46:00.000-08:00

I've been silent for some time because I felt I haven't had much to say...in fact, what I've been feeling most of late with regards to our society et al is a desire to say, "Fuck this, I'm done. Later bitches!"

However, that isn't very helpful, and so I watch the news feeling the gloom of watching a nation spasm in either it's death throes of a dying Republic, or the squalling of new birth of our Plutocracy. The question of which has long been settled by the Department of Homeland Security actively coordinating the suppression of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. If ever there is evidence of the government actively engaged in activity that goes against the wishes of the public at large, this is it.

The Republic is dead. Long live the Republic.

So, now, here I am, early in the morning, standing guard on two smoking turkeys that I put on the smoker at 6:45am, pondering the "what next?" for us as a nation.

President Obama has clearly chosen sides.

I think we're in for a very long winter, and I suspect, and this suspicion needs more research, that by next summer we're going to be looking at a very different world...and I think, again based on this suspicion, that we're going to be none-to-pleased.

Anyway, back to the turkeys, and my best wishes to all of you on this...:::sigh:::...wet day of Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving Pub Mates

2011-11-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

Regardless of how world affairs may be screwed up at present, the bride and I have much to be thankful for, primarily our health and that of our offspring and family. Tomorrow, we will have a traditional Thanksgiving with a long time friend from the US to remember that we have been more than generally fortunate in this life.

We wish a grand Thanksgiving to our comrades in arms (and comrades in keyboards). We hope that your fortunes are as good as ours, if not better.

And to those in need, our thoughts are with you for a better tomorrow.

Valse Triste

2011-11-18T10:52:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've posted something like this, something away from the woes and tribulations that trouble us daily.

The post below inspired this.

And do go to 62angelo's youtube user page to see more great stuff like this piece.

Anybody else a fan of J. Sibelius?

What music refurbishes your spirit?

bb

Langemarck Day, The Other Event Associated with 11 November

2011-11-18T02:55:00.001-08:00

Nonne Boschen, 11 November 1914

Say the 11th of November and you automatically think of Armistice Day, or Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day. There is another event associated with that particular day and in fact that particular war (the First World War of 1914-1918) which I would like to introduce should you not be aware of it.

Langemarck Day commemorates the "Battle of Langemarck" or the more extensive First Battle of Ypres or the battle of Bixchote, all which took place during October and November of 1914. This was part of the so-called "race to the sea" when both the German and Allied armies attempted to outflank each other after the German defeat at the Marne.

This First World War battle or series of battles developed a mythic quality for both the British and Germans during that war. For the British it was the death of the "old Contemptibles", the end of Britain's post-Boer War Army and the Army of the Haldane reforms.

C.S. Forester is his great war novel, The General, describes the battle in this way:

And as he stooped, he heard all the rifles in the line redouble their fire. Borthwick's two machine-guns began to stammer away on his left. The Germans were renewing their advance; once more there were solid masses of grey-clad figures pouring over the fields towards them. But one man with a rifle can stop two hundred advancing in a crowd - more still if he is helped by machine-guns. Curzon saw the columns reel under the fire, and marveled at their bravery as they strove to struggle on. They bore terrible losses before they fell back again over the crest.
page 41

The British Expeditionary Force landed in France with 85,000 infantry and by the end of the campaign had suffered 86,000 casualties, most of them from the infantry. From who had not fallen in Flanders or Mons, along with the British Army of India, and the mass of volunteers who came forward during 1914-15, Britain built a new army which in turn would be bled white at the Somme and Passendaele.

The German myth, however, was to be much more eventful.

First, let's consider General Erich Falkenhayn's comments written after the war. He wrote in his memoirs:

The enemy's offensive was completely broken. He was thrown back almost everywhere either to, or across, the Yser, and a firm connection was established between the coast at Nieuport and the previous German right wing near Lille, thus forming a front from the Swiss border to the sea. That which had to be attained under any circumstances, if the war was to be carried on with any hopeful prospects, was attained. Several times it seemed as though it only needed perseverance in the offensive to obtain a complete success - how near we actually were to it has since been made sufficiently plain. At the time, however, our movement came to a standstill.

Inundations, skillfully managed by the Belgians, put an end to the attack of the German right wing, which was making good progress and bore the main pressure. The young army corps further south fought with incomparable enthusiasm and unexcelled heroism. The disadvantages of their urgent and hasty formation and training, and the fact that they were led by older and for the most part retired officers, as others were not to be had, naturally made themselves felt. In particular there were deficiencies in the new field artillery formation, a fact that was emphasized all the more strongly by the shortage of ammunition. Nor was the leadership entirely satisfactory. At the beginning of November, GHQ could not conceal from itself that a further thorough going success was no longer to be obtained here, particularly in the inundated area, in the face of an opponent who was continually growing stronger.

General Headquarters 1914-16, pp 33-34

The last German attack was on 11 November and was repulsed by the British and French with heavy losses on both sides.

Perhaps there had been a chance to turn the Allied flank and seize the French ports, the British had no reserves left . . . But the French did, and the Germans were exhausted. Getting the infantry through was not the same as keeping them supplied, and artillery and shells were short. The Germans were far from their railheads and the British and French falling back towards theirs.

However, The German High Command (OHL) issued the following press release on 11 November 1914:

We made good progress yesterday in the Yser sector. West of Langemarck, young regiments charged forward singing "Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles" against the front line of enemy positions and took them. Approximately 2000 men of the French infantry and six machine guns were captured.

We now know this report was entirely fictitious. Most of the German troops engaged from mid October on were not student volunteers, there had been no mass singing (running across a sodden field with full equipment circa 1914 did not allow for one to sing), and the attacks in question had been poorly planned and coordinated. There were reports of the German infantry being shelled by their own artillery as they advanced. In all it was not so much a lost battle as a debacle and massacre, but the mental image of those young German students singing to their deaths had great resonance at the time, they came to symbolize all the losses of those first bloody months of war. And as time went on and the losses piled up, the heroes of Langemarck came to symbolize all those who had sacrificed themselves for Germany during the war.

Taping into this sentiment, a member of the Bavarian List regiment wrote:

. . . And then followed a damp, cold night in Flanders. We marched in silence throughout the night and as the morning sun came through the mist an iron greeting suddenly burst above our heads. Shrapnel exploded in our midst and spluttered in the damp ground. But before the smoke of the explosion disappeared a wild ‘Hurrah’ was shouted from two hundred throats, in response to this first greeting of Death. Then began the whistling of bullets and the booming of cannons, the shouting and singing of the combatants. With eyes straining feverishly, we pressed forward, quicker and quicker, until we finally came to close-quarter fighting, there beyond the beet-fields and the meadows. Soon the strains of a song reached us from afar. Nearer and nearer, from company to company, it came. And while Death began to make havoc in our ranks we passed the song on to those beside us: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, über Alles in der Welt.

After four days in the trenches we came back. Even our step was no longer what it had been. Boys of seventeen looked now like grown men. The rank and file of the List Regiment had not been properly trained in the art of warfare, but they knew how to die like old soldiers.

The author was Adolf Hitler and the book was Mein Kampf. He obviously understood the importance of myth, since this is the closest thing to a description of battle he provides in this chapter, which is mainly about attacking "politicians", "Social Democrats" and "Jews".

The legend of Langemarck brought together various German ideals: youth, nation and sacrifice, but also the notion that the old order had wasted the sacrifice of their own youth, had been even unworthy of it and that the next time this situation presented itself the national leadership would/could not falter, as the Kaiser, Falkenhayn and the OHL had done. Thus the dead lived on in the aspirations of the German nationalists to reverse the verdict of Versailles.

Already on the first anniversary of the OHL press release, November 11, 1915, there were numerous calls in the German press for a "Langemarck Day" to commemorate the students' sacrifice. Although no official recognition of the day was ever granted by the Kaiser, it became something of a nationalist day of patriotic celebration even before 1918. With the end of the war, the collapse of the monarchy and the founding of the first German Republic on 9 November 1918, Langemarck Day took on ever more importance. It became the counter-national holiday to the Republic's 9 November.

As Hitler's quote above indicates, the National Socialist movement was quick to recognize and adopt all the ideals and symbols associated with Langemarck to their own ends, this contrary to the actual fact that the German student volunteers had probably included a significant number of German Jewish volunteers. As with the original OHL press release, the intent was not to remember or honor the dead, but to cynically exploit them and/or cover up unwanted facts.

I remember seeing a high quality film of a speech Hitler gave before coming to power. He was in a suit and in a round room flanked by raised rows of wooden benches, as in university lecture hall. He was almost crying by the end, addressing the women especially, the mothers of those dead children most likely, essentially "here I am, I've returned to lead . . . "

If one looks a bit closer at all the various ideals and propaganda themes associated with what Langemarck had become by 1939, we see the original ideals of youth, nationalism and sacrifice combined with revengeful bloodlust, political/ideological fanaticism (which had never existed under the Kaiser) and a belief in modernity as a technological means to achieve extensive power political goals. It is interesting in this context to recall that the stated Nazi goal for the new Germany was to return to a mostly agrarian community, discarding the urban society which had risen in Germany after the 1870s. The conquest of the Soviet Union was to provide this land for the new generations of German farmers in the east . . .

The German war cemetery at Langemarck has an interesting history of its own. It is interesting to compare it to the near-by British war cemetery in terms of layout and architecture.

What does Langemarck tells us today? I think there are several lasting lessons we can learn from its history.

First, no matter how noble national ideals are they can be subverted and transformed into something unrecognizable by politics especially politics associated with wars and violence.

Second, it is always appealing for a military high command, or even the political leadership to dress up a military disaster in patriotic/heroic garb and try to pass off it off as something else.

Third, Langemarck is an example of thoughtless waste. If a country or political community is faced with a long war, then resources, including especially human resources have to be used to their most efficient purpose. Was it in the best interests of either Germany or Britain to man their volunteer formations with the cream of their youth, instead of using those educated and dedicated young men to serve as officers in the new armies? What happens when most of the next generation of leaders are killed or maimed in war, allowing the Hitlers to rise to the top?

Finally there is a great distinction between sacrifice and waste, and it is the people for whom the sacrifice is offered or the waste suffered to decide based on an unemotional weighing of the facts what indeed has taken place. With the resort to war comes naturally sacrifice, but also responsibility to endeavor that the sacrifices called upon are both necessary for the achievement of the shared rational goal and that any waste is exposed as what it is. Power, responsibility and accountability should all go together.

The victims deserve at least that.

Postscript:

I've enjoyed reading the comments on this thread. I think a reevaluation, beyond the propaganda versions generated during the war, is finally possible. It could do much to make for a better Europe and perhaps, with some luck and a lot of effort, also for a better world.

I'll leave the last word to C. S. Forester, from The General:

(His main character Curzon has just found out that he is in command of the cavalry brigade, the Brigadier having been killed by a direct hit on his HQ. This conversion of thought process takes about "ten seconds" since Curzon is well versed in the characteristics of his institution. This takes place during 1st Ypres.)

"Any report from the Dragoons?" he demanded.
That was the beginning of eleven days of anxiety and danger and responsibility and desperate hard work. Even if Curzon had the necessary literary ability, he could never write an account of the First Battle of Ypres in which he took so prominent a part, for his later recollections of it could never be sorted out from the tangle into which they lapsed. He could never remember which day it was that the commander of the First Corps, beautifully groomed, superbly mounted, came riding up the lane to see for himself what were the chances of the Cavalry Brigade maintaining its precarious hold upon its seemingly untenable position, nor which day it was that he had spent in the trenches of the Surreys, leading the counter-attack which caused the Germans to give back at the moment when here were only a hundred or two exhausted Englishmen to oppose the advance of an army corps. pp 49-50

Douglaus Haig was the commander of 1st Corps in 1914 and the battle mentioned was Nonne Boschen.

Die erste achtundvierzig Stunden...

2011-11-13T19:40:00.000-08:00

Occupy Portland is over.An ad-hoc force of police from several places including Portland Bureau today cleared the two downtown parks that Occupy had occupied. The protesters have regathered in several other downtown sites to "discuss" their next move, but in my opinion this is the end for Occupy.

For more than a week the local pols, newspapers, and television outlets have been voicing increasing impatience with Occupy and, truthfully, it seems hard to imagine how the "protests" would have done anything more than they have which beyond generating a sort of unfocused unease amongst the chattering classes has been no more than an irritant under the silken drawers of the rich and powerful.

It's been more than forty years since the mild insurrections of the U.S. Civil Rights era, half a century since the "nonviolent" protests of the Indian National Congress forced Britain's release of her Indian colony, a full century since the end of the violent strikes and near-rebellions that empowered the American labor unions.In the interim we have forgotten that "peaceful" protest is exactly as effective as "peacefully" resisting a savage beating unless you have your "peaceful" beating carefully planned to maximize your PR value - and it helps if your opponents are frigging morons, or politically and financially exhausted.

The civil rights marchers won because the Southern bigots were stupid enough to physically attack well-dressed men and women on national TV and newspapers. The Indian factions won partially because BG Dyer was a fucking bloodyminded idiot and partially because the Empire exhausted itself fighting two world wars. You could argue that the labor unions didn't actually win, but rather reached a sort of armed truce that lasted until the plutocrats shat the bed in 1929 and helped elect a labor-friendly administration.

Occupy had none of these to help it. Instead, it faced a massively corrupted and paid-for military-industrial-congressional-financial complex that is doing quite well under the present system. Any hopes of an FDR moment disappeared early in 2009 when it became obvious at least to me that the current Democratic administration had no interest in even trying cocking a snook at the banksters. The New New Deal this wasn't.

And the Occupiers forgot the other lesson of those earlier protest movements; that the public could give a shit about your politeness. The relative discipline of the Occupiers ended up looking like meekness, and regardless of what the Good Book says the meek won't inherit jack shit without a pair of brass balls, friendly press, and a sackful of bricks and cobblestones hidden away in case all the politeness doesn't work. And Occupy Portland had none of those things.

And ask the Paris Communards how even WITH those things, if the government is willing to ignore you when you're weak - and kill or arrest when you're strong - you will lose.So the banksters have proved that a camel can leap laughingly through the eye of a needle. They have bought all the government they need, they or their lickspittle brownnosers own the media conglomerates, and the U.S. public is about evenly divided into thirds, and while one third is ignorant and indifferent one of the other two-thirds is actively hostile, either hoping to curry favor with the plutocracy or, tragically, mistaking the random helium in their guts for wings; by the time they fart away their good luck they will be plummeting too rapidly to have the time for regrets.

Occupy might have had more hope if the public was more intelligent and their enemies less powerful. In the first couple of days, or weeks...

But no matter. That hope is gone forever.

In March, 1935 the tiny German Army marched into the Rhineland, the first of Hitler's Thirties gambles. And it was more than a gamble; Hitler and his commanders knew how tiny their little force was. As hapless as the French Army of the Thirties was, and it was a fairly ginormous clusterfuck, a whiff of grapeshot in the old Napoleonic style would have seen the Heer packing across the Rhine and, probably, the end of the Hitler Era two years after it began.

But the French were too meek to make that move, and Hitler's success propelled him all the way to the wreck of the European world ten years later.

And here again, the first couple of days - "Die erste achtundvierzig Stunden" is how Hitler phrased it - were key.Once the larger public failed to rise in the first couple of days the Occupiers proved to have no strategy to force the issue or force their enemies to submit and their attempt to tame the bulls and bears is done.

Update 11/14: Upon further review, I had a couple of thoughts.

The antiwar protests of the Sixties have something a answer for in what they've done to the U.S. left. The protests were far less effective at "ending" the war than they seemed at the time (and have been mythologized since) - Nixon's concerns for the economy and the public's indifference to the Vietnamese were more crucial. But the result is that somehow the notion that merely marching around and sitting-in would be enough to effect political change and the record of those actions since then have proved this to be the nonsense it is.

The civil rights protestors, the INC activists, the labor movement radicals all had a collection of things that the post-'72 U.S. protests haven't:

1. An actual strategy that involved an entire range of acts, from pure theatre to violent protest, and some notion of how and where these would be applied. If OWS had anything other than "be there" I haven't seen it (mind you, the combination of vast public indifference and active media ignorance/hostility made it difficult to see how they could have done anything else effectively). And to orchestrate this these groups also had

2. An actual structured leadership - often fractious, even infighting, but the leaders were there actively planning the attacks on their opponents. The OWS seems to suffer from the goofy fuzzy-logic cloud-leadership that is to my mind the very WORST hangover of the Sixties protests. People like Lewis and Nehru and MLK were in many ways very unlikeable, manipulative, cunning sons-of-bitches. The OWS people seem to have absorbed the wrong lesson, which is that to get to a beneficent end you need to be a beneficent person. Couldn't be wronger. Many, perhaps most, of the people who have done "good" things for the mass of humanity have themselves been real bastards. You have to break a lot of eggs sometimes to make a good omlette...

Sorry that I'm such a little ray of sunshine today. But, as Matt Taibbi points out, the things that OWS is pointing fingers at aren't minor issues - they go to the very heart of the corruption of the crony-capitalist scam that has been driving the U.S. (and much of the Euro nations) back towards the Gilded Age. I'd have liked to see the U.S. and other western publics "get" that. But this doesn't seem to have happened, and at this point I have to conclude that it ISN'T going to happen. And for someone like me, who is and whose kids will be, part of the 99%, that looks like a bad thing for the future.

Memorial Tablet

2011-11-11T09:23:00.000-08:00

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby's scheme). I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;
"In proud and glorious memory" ... that's my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west ...
What greater glory could a man desire?~S. Sassoon

Happy Birthday Marines!

2011-11-10T12:54:00.000-08:00

Proud to have worn the Eagle, Globe and Anchor and always will be. Been celebrating this day since 1960, and hope to do so many, many times more.

Semper Fi!

With Their Shields or On Them

2011-11-05T10:13:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in front of the computer whilst the kiddos indulge in some truly reprehensible Saturday morning TV - a ritual as old as MY childhood, at least - and came across this Krugman column that ends with a comment that I thought went right to the heart of the discussions we had over at GFT about what I considered the unfortunate narrowing of the social arc of military service in the U.S. circa 2011:

"If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost."

The Krugman essay is in reference to the apparent difference between "conservatives" - who seem willing to shove any sort of public-figure misbehavior down the memory hole so long as the offending politician continues to vote for their regressive policies - and liberals, who immediately defenestrate their own "leaders" if the personal lives of those leaders vary from the public positions.But in the course of his post Krugman brings up someone I had forgotten; Ed Luttwak, who wrote back in 1995 that any hope the U.S. (and other Western societies) had of returning to a widespread national service was doomed by the replacement-level birth rates of their peoples. Luttwak's "post-heroic" societies had developed such an attachment to their children "...(b)ecause most couples have only one or two children, the loss of any in warfare becomes intolerable, and conscription becomes unthinkable..."(and)"...child-centered Americans (and Europeans and Japanese) will be forced to rely in the future on allies, mercenaries, and maybe robots to fight on their behalf."So; here I am, looking at my own precious offspring (one inert on the couch, the other somewhere in the back of the house - I can hear her chatting to herself there, anyway...) and wondering - would I give them up if my country demanded it not for existential defense, but for some abtruse foreign policy objective? Would I be "convincible" that burying my son or daughter for some transient geopolitical advantage in part of my country's imperial corona was worth the end of my own personal immortality?And I honestly don't know the answer.

But it certainly raises some difficult questions for me.

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T10:05:00.000-07:00

So, I'll admit it. As a kid this was my favorite holiday. Even better than Christmas since I usually knew what I was going to get anyway. But Halloween? You just never knew how it was going to turn out. What would you experience? How much booty would end up raking in? What would everyone dress up as? Would something really weird happen? What if it rained! What a horrible thought! That would have ruined everything! Still, as a kid I can't remember a single rained-out Halloween, they were all dark, relatively dry and moon-lit, or that is how I remember them.

I also remember the old Halloweens when you'd come back home with a sack bulging with great home-made sweets, before the great scare of the late 1960s after which all parents were instructed to sort through their children's bags and throw away (THROW AWAY!) all the stuff that wasn't individually packaged, that is all the great home-made stuff went in the trash and you got to keep all the not-so-great store-bought stuff. In retrospect can we possibly argue that it was the beginning of the end of community and the ramping up of corporate control . . . ?

I never understood what all the parental fear was about. Halloween was suppose to be scary, right? So why throw out all the best stuff we had amassed trick or treating (which was hard work for a kid btw) . . . ?

By the beginning of the 1970s it had all changed and had some how become common wisdom that sickos (could be anyone) were just waiting for 31 October to roll around so they could poison or seriously injure some unsuspecting kid. If you weren't scared to death you weren't a serious parent, or so people thought. I was above trick or treating age by then (which was 13 in our family) but I was still expected to take my sisters out ("only to people we know well, and check what they get!"). This I usually accomplished by talking one or two friends to go with me on my supervisory duties, which usually included trying to scare the bajesus out of the kids we were responsible for, ya know older brother stuff.

So, still kinda fun, but in a different way and nothing like it had been before. Some purists of course say that you have to go all the way back to the 1950s to get the real "old Halloween", but my experiences in the 1960s in the small town South (and once in the Midwest when visiting my mother's family in Iowa) seem to be essentially the same as what my older friends and family experienced. In all I consider myself lucky.

So what was the whole scare about?

An article from 1987 introduced us all to the sociological concept:

The cause of our exaggerated fears about children are not well understood. Social scientists might explain them by pointing to the radical transformation of the American family that has taken place during the last 15 years.

The two-career family has given rise to "latchkey children", that is children who return home from school to empty houses. As we spend less and less time with our children we have become more and more fearful for their safety.

The easy psychiatric explanation is that we are merely projecting our fears of an uncertain world on to our children. While the actual causes still remain an intriguing social mystery, there can be little doubt that there is a growing sense in America that our children are no longer safe.

One of the surprising things about the myth of the Halloween sadist is how few copycat crimes it has inspired.

The most harmful effect of the myth seems to be the emotional difficulties it has caused both adults and children. The social production of unrealistic fears concerning child safety has approached the point where it now threatens to produce an entire nation of anxiety-ridden parents, and, more importantly, a generation of paranoid kids.

What about our kids? Did seydlitz pass on this very important element of American culture to his children? I tried to, but with the kids growing up in Berlin and later in Portugal it was difficult to get the old feel, but then we also had some advantages. My wife, who had no connection with Halloween was a great help and got into the whole spirit of the thing. Also once in Portugal we joined the local American club and then had a Halloween party for the kids every October 31st. So, yes ours have hopefully happy memories connected with this "holiday".

So, what about you, fellow barkeeps and loyal readers? Would you care to exchange your Halloween experiences with us? I'm very interested to know your memories of the event and what you do today to celebrate this great American tradition . . .

T Minus One

2011-10-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

click any tab to vote!

Ranger’s in two runoffs!

Takes under a minute!

Thanks!

The Audactity of Hope, Muslim-style

2011-10-26T09:02:00.001-07:00

--Moammer Qaddafi being sodomized upon capture
by Muslim man (Global Post)

Strategic Stupidity and Unequal Treaties

2011-10-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

Our man seydlitz has a post up asking questions about the U.S. geopolitical strategy in the Middle East and the impact of the continuing drone strikes on that strategy.

While an interesting question, I would opine that as a matter of strategic veterinary dentistry, it's looking at the wrong end of the horse to figure out what's the matter with the teeth.

Instead, I offer this, the supposed final note of the Looney Tune melody we've been playing on the Iraqi barrel organ:

"But what about the extensive negotiations the administration has been engaged in for months, regarding U.S. offers to leave thousands of uniformed soldiers in Iraq past the deadline? It has been well reported that those negotiations, led by U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and White House official Brett McGurk, had been stalled over the U.S. demand that the remaining troops receive immunity from Iraqi courts."

So. I'll be the first one to say - I wouldn't want to be tried in an Iraqi court. I suspect that things are a little less...predictable...shall we say? than ending up in the Multnomah County justice system.

But the bottom line for any Western power in the Third World is that you're always going to be working in the shadow of colonialism.You don't like that? Don't commit your maneuver units to fucking Third World countries.

Despite what 99.7% of the U.S. public - including its leadership, apparently - believes, most of the rest of the world remembers that for about 200 or 300 years being a white guy meant never having to say you were sorry...to a brown, black, or yellow guy. Most of the rest of the world has some ugly memories - still - of being booted around by people who were uniformed and armed like our GIs. The Iraqis were beat up pretty thoroughly in the Twenties by the Brits, who placed great faith in this sort of "unequal treaty", where you got to pimpslap the wogs...but they couldn't do the same to you.

And you don't quickly forget stuff like that.

One of the things that helped make the Bushie Mess-o-potamia such a mess was the reinvention of this sort of horseshit.

I've said for years that we would have saved hundreds of U.S.troops if the FIRST time some GI had shot an Iraqi by accident he'd have had a speedy trial and been handed ten years in the USDB. And the first time some GI shot an Iraqi for fun, or to hide a rape, or some other truly heinous thing, that he would have been handed over to whatever had replaced Saddam's secret police and hanged in Firdos Square. I don't think that would have been just or fair...but it would have been smart. Cunning. We would have gone a long way to distancing ourselves from the Bad Old Days of extraterritoriality, colonial immunity, and the sort of collective anger that a hell of a lot of the world still has for their former imperial masters.

But we didn't.

Instead we made it crystal clear that the Unequal Treaties were still in force and still unequal. Throw a grenade at a U.S. patrol? End up in Abu Ghraib. Shoot a pregnant Iraqi at a checkpoint? Get a downcheck on your "failure to follow proper checkpoint procedures" block in your NCOER.

That's strategic stupidity.

It doesn't take a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of drones, missiles, satellites, and computers.

All it takes is some high level negotiators who don't get that granting your troops "extraterritoriality" (regardless of whether you call it that, or "immunity"...) doesn't fly in the Third World and assumes that because we're just speshul snowflakes the wogs will be happy to give in on this massive collective grudge they carry about that because...well, because we WANT them to soooooo bad.

THAT's strategic stupidity.

Sheesh.

Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?

Strategic Stupidity Incarnate?

2011-10-23T05:39:00.000-07:00

Reaper Drone (aka Predator B)

On 8 October this month, FB Ali posted a thought provoking essay on the US use of drones and how that constituted "a new kind of war" . . . Please take the time to read FB Ali's essay which sets the initial stage for this discussion.

Coming from a Clausewitzian perspective of course I take a different view and don't see where war has changed at all . . . whereas warfare on the other hand goes through a constant process of change/innovation/reaction, the interplay of technology and technique. If it looks like war is changing, then it is the political glass we are attempting to gaze through that is distorting our vision, making it seem that the process of organized violence as a contest of wills has changed when in fact it is the politics/political relations which is/are simply confusing events, making us focus on the smoke, shadows, noise and flashes which distract us from realizing what is actually going on.

Military means used to achieve a military aim supporting a political purpose. Strategy - both in terms of decisions made and process experienced - can simply be defined as linking the military aim with the political purpose. Once the military aim has been achieved, or as Clausewitz tells us, military victory is the means to achieving the strategic end, we enter into the task of achieving peace, making it in the former enemy's interest to conclude peace through coercion/incentive and other non-military means available. War is the most serious undertaking a political community can take on and achieving the political purpose through the use of the military instrument is perhaps the most difficult undertaking in social relations, that is achieving a lasting peace with the political purpose attained.

I responded to FB Ali's post with this:

FB Ali-

Very much a thought-provoking post.

Just a few questions: First, are we not talking about "warfare" and not "war"? You use the terms interchangeably in your post but are they different concepts? War is the political instrument of organized violence of one political community at odds with another. Warfare is the utilization of the means of war for a particular epoch which is in turn influenced by the political conditions/characteristics of the entities involved.

Naval warfare is "without boundaries" and submarine warfare as practiced first in the First World War, expanded the dimensions possible even further. Could we see a parallel between the submarine of 1914-18 and the drones of today in that the machine/instrument achieves a level of autonomy which could endanger/run counter to the very political interests it is meant to serve?

Submarines at the time were considered "terror weapons", are drones by their very characteristics also "weapons of terror"?

Finally does not the employment of drones attack the legitimacy of the state the US is supposedly wishing to support? The basis of state legitimacy being its monopoly on the use of legitimate violence within its borders? By condoning the use of drones over its territory targeting its own citizens, does not the host state become by definition a "failed state"?

To which FB Ali was kind enough to respond:

Seydlitz89,

I think I used the two terms (war and warfare) discriminatingly. Space constraints prevented me from dealing with each separately.

The development of military robots will, in the future, create a new type of warfare, in which machines do the fighting and killing (and ‘dying’) instead of humans. To that limited extent, the development of this kind of warfare could be welcomed.

What I expressed concern about was the new type of war that these machines would make possible. Hitherto, the achievement of any significant results through military power required the exercise of considerable force across national borders, which also could not be concealed. The availability of highly capable, potent machines would tempt powerful countries to apply significant force against others without overtly violating borders, even secretly. This would invite a response in kind, if not degree, from states and even non-state entities.

If such a type of war were to become prevalent, it would tear up the present international order, and force even powerful countries to become ‘security states’.

To tie this all together allow me to make a series of statements which hopefully will indicate a coherent view:

First, drones are simply the latest and most advanced example of what technology has been able to achieve since around 1840. The development of steamships carrying cannon - the classic gunboat - and operating contrary to the elements and this type of weapon system since has provided political communities, specifically states, with this means of coercion for some time. These weapons systems allow the side with the technology to inflict pain and damage, but not to occupy or hold. There also exists a basic tension between this capacity and the achievement of the political purpose, since these systems can coerce and destroy, but only that. The British gunboat in China, the German Uboat in the mid Atlantic and the Reaper Drone over Yemen all share a basic autonomy which may or may not support the overriding political purpose. Thus there is a tendency for the capability to become the focus, not what this instrument is expected/suppose to achieve in terms of military aim/political purpose.

Second, due to this autonomy there is a tendency for this type of weapon to be seen as an instrument of terror. The simple fact that they apparently operate outside the norm reinforces this tendency. The negative propaganda associated with their presence has to be taken into consideration.

Third, the capability and character of these weapons invite inordinate responses from the side under attack from them.

For these reasons weapons of this type need to be deployed carefully with a clear intent in terms of strategy. There also exists the possibility that their employment actually creates more problems than are dealt with.

These above statements refer to these weapons as a class.

Specifically in regards to the drone wars currently being conducted by the present US administration, I have a series of specific questions:

First, specifically what military aim/political purpose are these weapons expected to achieve? How exactly?

Second, if the goal is simply national security, how does undermining the legitimacy of the host government where they are deployed, making them appear to be unable or unwilling to protect their own people, support US interests?

Third and finally in terms of evaluating effectiveness, it seems impossible to separate wishful thinking/endless claims of precision from operational security/legitimate secrecy, that is the line between foreign and domestic propaganda and/or actual reporting has been compromised. In other words, the spin is universal.

Fourth, drones are different from the other weapons of this type I mentioned above in that the future capacity for actual autonomy exists, that is there would be no human element at all. How exactly is this progress? Or is it rather hubris of a rather dangerous sort reflecting our political dysfunctions more than anything else? Given the possible flaws . . .

There is more I could add, but I'm interested first to know what ya'll think . . .

Postscript:

Seems that some US officials at least are worried about the unintended consequences of this weapon system . . .

As It Was and Ever Shall Be

2011-10-22T05:43:00.000-07:00

Basil's posts on Occupy Wall Street got me thinking "Hmmm...didn't I write something about that..?" and eventually I went rummaging around in the back of the packrat portion of my mind and, sure enough, here it is from August, 2008.

"The Public Be Damned"

Every so often I run across something that reminds me so forcibly, so violently, of the present desuetude of our republic that I lose my wind just for a moment.

Here's Glenn Greenwald describing the scene at the current Democratic National Convention, where the telecom giant AT&T throws an intimate little shindig for the very people - imagine that - who helped them evade lawsuits for their lickspittle subservience to the criminals in the Bush White House and the NSA who believe that the laws of the land are, in the immortal words of Leona Helmsley, "for the little people".

I challenge you to read it and not throw up a little in the back of your mouth. It's sickening. It's the real face of "American politics".

It's not like this is something new in American politics. The rich are always with us, and the only difference between the New Gilded Age and the Old was that back then, a man like Mark Hanna could openly say; "Come on, you've been in politics long enough to know that no man in public life owes the public anything."

Today we have to pretend to "care" about the Great Unwashed, but the reality of America is that unless we're in the top 1% of all American incomes many of us have much of the freedom of a polled Hereford being prodded up the chute towards that dark building where we await our political and economic fate. Are we better off than some Ukrainian peasant or Zimbabwean prole? Sure. Will that mean much when our job is offshored, or we get sick and run through our insurance, or the highway to our parents' falls apart and we have to drive a 40-mile detour to visit?

No.

Here's Andrew Bacevich talking some hard, cold sense that most of us will close our ears to:

"The military-industrial complex will inhibit efforts to curb the Pentagon's penchant for waste. Detroit and Big Oil will conspire to prolong the age of gas guzzling. And the Israel lobby will oppose attempts to chart a new course in the Middle East. The next commander in chief will inherit an intractable troop shortage. The United States today finds itself with too much war and too few warriors. That alone will constrain a president conducting two ongoing conflicts. A looming crisis of debt and dependency will similarly tie the president's hands. Bluntly, the United States has for too long lived beyond its means. With Americans importing more than 60% of the oil they consume, the negative trade balance now about $800 billion annually, the federal deficit at record levels and the national debt approaching $10 trillion, the United States faces an urgent requirement to curb its profligate tendencies. Spending less (and saving more) implies settling for less. Yet among the campaign themes promoted by McCain and Obama alike, calls for national belt-tightening are muted.

Will we listen? Will we act? No.

Because, in the end, short of violent revolution, with the monetary grip on the levers of power, what CAN we do?

And because, in the end, we'd rather pretend that the future holds "freedom" and green pastures and sunny skies and try not to hear the cries of the other steers and the whisper of the killing knife.

Update 10/23: I was listening to the kiddos play LEGOS and eat seaweed for breakfast (the Little Girl, anyway - anyone else have a child that likes dried nori for breakfast?) and blogreading when I came across this, from David Atkins at Hullabaloo, which is so good that I have to quote it at length. To wit:

Simply put, in the 1970s America was hit with an inflation crisis that quickly became a stagflation crisis. There were also oil shocks involved. Simulataneously, the world was becoming increasingly globalized, which made it more difficult for American corporations to compete using American labor. Finally, as Hacker and Pierson have persuasively argued, big business banded together to begin more aggressive and cohesive lobbying efforts. These four trends were devastating politically for the middle class.

American public policy on both sides of the aisle reoriented itself away from a focus on wages and toward a focus on assets. Specifically, the idea was that wage growth was dangerous because it led to core inflation in a way that asset growth did not. American foreign policy became obsessed even more than it had been with maintaining access to oil, both to prevent future oil shocks and to prevent inflationary oil spirals. Wage growth was also dangerous because it would drive increasing numbers of American corporations to employ cheaper overseas labor.

But that left the question of how to sustain a middle class and functional economy while slashing wages. The answer was to make more Americans "true Capitalists" in Reagan's terms. Pensions were converted to 401K plans, thus investing about half of Americans into the stock market and creating a national obsession with the health of market indices. Regular Americans were given credit cards, allowing them to take on the sorts of debt that had previously only been available to businesses. Most crucially, American policymakers did everything possible to incentivize homeownership, from programs designed to help people afford homes to major tax breaks for homeownership and much besides.

Low prices on foreign-made goods were also a policy priority. This had a dual benefit for policymakers: lower prices offset stagnant wages, while keeping core inflation low. Free trade deals were also a major centerpiece of public policy in this context. Few politicians actually believed that these deals would help increase wages and jobs in America. But what they were designed to do is keep low-cost goods coming into America, while increasing the stock value of American companies exporting goods overseas, thus raising asset values.

Low interest rates were also important. Renters and savers suffer in a low-interest rate environment, but borrowers and asset owners do very well. Tax cuts, of course, are also helpful in offsetting the impact of wage stagnation.

Houses and stocks, then, are assets that rise independently of wages. Low-cost overseas goods and the easy availability of loans and credit provide offsets to low wages. Low interest rates and tax cuts help as well keep assets afloat as well. The bipartisan idea from a public policy standpoint was not simply to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. The idea was to make the American middle class dependent on assets rather than wages. I was at a conference many years back, the purpose of which was to bring corporate bigwigs together in defense of free trade against what they feared might be a protectionist backlash. One executive told me point blank that if only enough Americans were invested in the stock market, they wouldn't gripe about Halliburton and other similar companies because they would say, "Hey, I own part of that company!" When I objected that that only half of Americans were invested in the market at all, and of that figure far fewer had significant assets invested, he retorted that more Americans were invested in the market than I thought, and that policy needed to be designed to push more Americans to invest.

I've often looked at our public policy and tried to figure out "What sane polity would enact policies seemingly designed to return itself to what may have been the least-stable political conditions (the openly-oligarchic period between about 1870-1930) since before the Civil War?" And here's the answer. And Atkins has a simple and exceptionally sane solution:

"The recklessness and stupidity of this sort of approach to public policy should have been proven by the 2008 financial crisis that saw the rapid destruction of asset values in stocks, bonds, and housing. Predicating economic health on asset growth is a pipe dream: most people will never have enough assets to make it work, and asset growth is far too unstable to serve as the basis for a functional economy.

Whether they can articulate it or not, what has most progressives most incensed about the Obama Administration's domestic policy is that it has ultimately hewed to the same asset-based economic model. When the Administration could be progressive on cutting costs or ensuring equality without negatively impacting assets, it did so. That's what the ACA, the Ledbetter Act, the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell and numerous other left-leaning Administration moves were designed to do. But the Administration has been very reticent to take any actions that would negatively impact the value of assets.

America will only return to real economic health when the asset-crazed insanity of the last 30 years is brought to heel, and America returns to a public policy that is far more interested in wage growth and economic stability than it is in asset inflation. Until then, we can expect continued political and economic shocks from an angry electorate and an economy that has run off the rails due to 30 years of deeply misguided anti-inflation, pro-asset-growth ideology."

But sane or not, my skepticism remains. The wealthy have their hands around the neck of the government; they will not be pried loose. And they are no more prescient that their counterparts were in St. Petersburg in 1917 or Paris in 1789. They will destroy the village in order to save their privileges. And the extraordinary coalition that pulled our nation away from the totalitarian abyss that awaited it in 1932 - Soviet communism on the one hand, Italian (and, later, German) fascism on the other - shows no signs of being there to ride to the rescue.

In other words?

WASF.

Now, the hard part

2011-10-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

So today is the first day of post-Gaddafi Libya.Good on them.

Now for the really hard part.

As the columnist for Al Jazeera reminds us:

"...the NTC has been unable to secure a country awash with armed men. Libya is also a country shot through with rivalries, jealousies and blood debts, among individuals and groups. Some of these divisions are of historic vintage, many arise from Gaddafi's rule, and the war will have added a new crop. Like Iraq, Libya was assembled through histories of empire and its aftermath. It has been torn apart by war. Now it has lost the one thing that united much of the country: hatred of Colonel Gaddafi and his regime. Libyans are left to face the legacy of his mastery of the art of divide and rule. The involvement of Western air forces meant that the rebels never had to form a unified force. Only to a limited extent did they learn the habits of cooperation under fire.

That is why they now lack an army with which to bring the country under control."

The thing that drove and still drives me crazy is the calm assumption that has dominated much of U.S. foreign policy "debate" that the bomb-y, kill-y part is the "hard part". I have no idea where this springs from - watching war films, I suspect - but it's in complete opposition to the actual conduct of damn near every war the U.S. has ever fought, where the worst fuckups always seem to spring from political gaffes made either in hope of winning the war or in post-war inattention to detail.

Thus with Libya. I honestly have very little hope for anything good. The "country" has never been well-ruled, its people have little or no experience in or proven skill at self-government, and its economy and polity are not far above the tribal level. Post-colonial experience suggests that whatever emerges will not be pretty.

But...and this is my point; I cannot see how U.S. fiddling will be helpful. It is up to the Libyans to do what they can for themselves. A "solution" imposed from outside is no real solution at all, and for all that there appear to be significant portions of the U.S. "leadership" congratulating themselves on how much we had to do with the current outcome I hope that we all recall that.

Update on the OWS ( Class Warriors ) thread

2011-10-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

One Marine showed up to defend his fellow Americans.

Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas confronted a small group of NYPD and decided to speak up after watching some protesters get knocked around.

bb

If it ain't broke.....

2011-10-19T00:28:00.000-07:00

We are all familiar with the old saw, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

As we watch our foreign and domestic polices flounder, I have begin to wonder about the definition of the word "broke", primarily with both sides of the aisle claiming virtually everything is indeed broken! If such is the case, I'm still waiting for someone to define exactly what "unbroke" looks like.

So, sitting on the front veranda this AM, enjoying a cup of steaming joe, a cigar and the sun rising over the blue Aegean, my mind wandered back to grad school, and two of my premier public policy profs, Floyd Durham (Economics) and Barry Epstein (Program Evalustion). Both of them had their act together.

Of the many approaches to social program evaluation, two are ever so intuitively attractive, yet really bankrupt. They are called "The Charity Model" and "The Pork Barrel Model" of program evaluation.

The "Charity Model" is pretty straight forward. It simply looks to see if a "need" exists, if the program in some way addresses the "need", if the actors in the program are sincere and diligent in addressing the need and if no one is seriously and involuntarily inconvenienced by the program. If those four criteria receive a "Yes", then that's all that is needed. Sort of like Ron Paul's idea of the community rising up to voluntarily see to the health care needs of the needy, rather than any "government program".

The "Pork Barrel Model" is equally straight forward. If the constituency receiving the benefits is satisfied, and no one is seriously and involuntarily inconvenienced by the program, that is also a sign of a successful program. Take, for example, "progressives" turning a blind eye to sub-prime mortgage abuses because it was getting more Americans into homes and millions of borrowers and lenders seemed to be happy - for a while.

Of course, neither model looks at inputs versus outcomes or "cost/benefit ratios" as it is commonly called. Further, neither model addresses whether or not all of the potential "needy" population is being served, if the number of "needy" is reduced or even if the "need" is valid as defined. Nor is there any evaluation of long term consequences. It's just a subjective, close cropped snapshot.

Both of these approaches fuel what I would call the "Fat, Dumb and Happy" model of society. In doing some searches on the web to brush up on program eval methodology, I found a paper from 1984 with the ever so apt title "Evaluating Programs the Whole World Already Calls Wonderful". While the content of the paper goes far beyond what I offer here, the title does parallel my "Fat, Dumb and Happy" issue. In short, just because no one is calling for something to be fixed, that doesn't mean it isn't, in many ways broken.

Back to the two examples given above. Ron Paul's "Charity Model" does indeed show that communities and institutions have, on occasion, risen to the task of caring for the some of needy in health care, and that can seem to meet the "Whole World Already Calls Wonderful" test, and can make selected people feel good about themselves. What it fails to address is the question of whether the general population of needy receives health care every time it is needed, no less routine or preventative care. All he is demonstrating is that some sincere people, without seriously inconveniencing others, provide some care to some needy. Of course, this approach has come crashing down on some 50 million or more uninsured Americans who now are effectively outside the "system" and cannot make life decisions based on an unpredictable and random "charity model".

As to the sub-prime fiasco, well, a lot of people were made happy in the short run. Both borrowers and investors. From a "Pork Barrel" view, all was well, for a while. Of course, since it met, for a time, the "Whole World Already Calls Wonderful" principle, no further thought was needed. However, once "reality" set in, probably more Americans lost their homes than new owners were created.

In foreign policy, there is the Bush invasion of Iraq, which was carefully crafted to avoid serious inconvenience for most Americans, and bolstered by "sincerity" in the justifications ("Charity Model"). And, of course, lots of "Pork Barrel" for the defense industry. Best of both worlds. And, a total fiasco, domestically and for Iraq.

How can we, as a society attempt to operate in the long run when our policies and programs are subjected to "evaluation" techniques so short sighted, deficient and totally debunked decades ago? Or, are we not only "Fat, Dumb and Happy", but intellectually lazy as well? In fact, wasn't one of the alleged handicaps of GWB identified as being "intellectually incurious"? And a fresh supply of darlings of the Far Right (Palin, Bachman, Perry, Cain) exhibit this same intellectual laziness, and Progressives have counterparts as well. They simply mirror society.

Think about these two models of "evaluation, and I'm sure you can add dozens of other policy decisions that are made using these simplistic measurements.

WASF

MilPub Book Club: Q4 2011 Selection" "The Accidental Guerrilla" (Kilcullen)

2011-10-15T12:57:00.000-07:00

So.

We talked a little earlier about discussing some written work of geopolical or military import. Jim at "Ranger Against War" has volunteered to be our Master of Ceremonies for the first outing and has selected the David Kilcullen work "The Accidental Guerilla".Fareed Zakaria, who for all his wide-ranging geopolitical views seems to know about guerrilla war what a cow knows about the Council of Trent, says of this work: "This book should be required reading for every American soldier, as well as anyone involved in the war on terror. Kilcullen's central concept of the 'accidental guerrilla' is brilliant and the policy prescriptions that flow from it important. And that's not all; the book has many more insights drawn from various battlefields." But nevermind.

Kilcullen was a fairly critical player in the Bush Administration formulation of our current "strategy" - if that is the correct term for the congeries of tactics and politics that the United States is employing in central and southwest Asia - and has had the ear of the "COIN" faction at the Pentagon for some time. Regardless of one's views on his ideas it is difficult to deny that they have been influential.So here's the plan. If you want to participate hit your library, or your Kindle, or bookstore, or whatever (I have a copy reserved at Portland Public Library already) and start reading.

In mid-November jim will post his thoughts here and open the dance.

Sound good?

365 Bottles of Beer

2011-10-11T15:30:00.000-07:00

--A license to do something

--I help people with problems
--Problem solver?
--More of a problem eliminator
--License to Kill (1989)

How can you mend this broken man?
How can a loser ever win?
Please help me mend my broken heart
and let me live again
--How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,
The Bee Gees

We are here to help the Vietnamese,
because inside every gook
there is an American trying to get out
--Full Metal Jacket (1987)

And the day came when the risk to remain
tight in a bud was more painful than the risk
it took to blossom
--Anais Nin
________________________

Below is an excerpt from "365 Bottles of Beer", the story of a young troop's drop into the COIN zone (published @ RAW in its entirety. Links are HERE and HERE.)

Any personal observations are appreciated:

"Like every other soldier, whether draftee or enlisted, [I] was fully prepared to do whatever my Army required to win the war. Every last one of us were willing to kill or be killed in the process of doing what our country required of us, but therein lies the crux of the biscuit: What was required?

When I stepped off that airplane wearing jump boots, crossed rifles, junior jump wings and a Ranger tab with a Green Beret on my high and tight head, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing on the ramp of that airplane, stepping into a war that almost everyone knew was lost (it was 1970). What I did possess was every infantry skill required to kill people, be it on an organizational or personal level.

After I stepped off that plane, 18,000 soldiers died for a policy that was as dead as an old man's dick, but we soldiered on because that is what soldiers do. We are not quitters."

Hmmm. This could end badly

2011-10-11T15:17:00.000-07:00

This may possibly be the stupidest piece of foreign policy business I've heard of since Dubya the Conqueror decided to go all macedonian in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.I'm the last person to say that the United States needs to load up to cockpunch yet ANOTHER Middle Eastern country. But...if a military arm of a foreign country caught actually planning to assassinate allied diplomats and attack allied embassies on your soil isn't a casus belli...what the hell is?

"The men accused of plotting the attacks were Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri, both originally from Iran, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan. Mr. Holder said the men were connected to the secretive Quds Force, a division of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that has carried out operations in other countries. He said that money in support of the plot was transferred through a bank in New York, but that the men had not yet obtained explosives."

It's a sad commentary on the degree to which I believe my own government has utterly fucked up its conflict with Islamic groups including the government of Iran along with its credibility with regards to "terrorist plots" that I am inclined to be skeptical that these mooks were really under orders from Tehran.And the downsides of an open war with Iran make it nearly impossible to believe that the bombs are about to start falling.But...assuming that the DoJ is correct and someone in Tehran sent these guys out to commit mayhem in Washington, D.C., I'd say that this says something pretty disturbing about the levels of either stupidity, or aggression, or both, in the IRGC, the Quds Force, or some other faction in the Iranian government.We know the levels of stupidity and aggression on our own side.The last thing we need is to find ourselves playing chicken with another outfit with a chicken-like brain for international relations.End badly? Y'think?

Sheesh.

Will Work for Votes

2011-10-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

--Vote early and often, Thomas Nast

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans --
unless they have too much education and vote Democratic,
which proves there can be too much of a good thing
--Karl Rove

An election is coming.
Universal peace is declared,
and the foxes have a sincere interest
in prolonging the lives of the poultry
--Felix Holt, George Eliot

You and me
we're in this together now
none of them can stop us now
--We're in This Together,
Nine Inch Nails
_____________________

Hello pub denizens. We saw the "No Solicitation or Sailors" sign out front, so figured we're half in the good. We wouldn't crash an otherwise peaceful Monday afternoon at the bar, but we're canvassing for votes for our brother site, y'see?

It's that time of year again. The time we ask you to show RangerAgainstWar some love and take a moment out of your busy schedules to VOTE RANGER BEST PROGRESSIVE FLORIDA BLOGGER in the 2011 Florida Netroots Awards!

It is almost an oxymoron: Florida + Progressive. But there are a few -- very few --of us out there on the frontiers showing that not all Floridians suffer the sclerotic brains that follow wallows in Sunday fish fries and hog roasts and pound rashers of bacon and Velveeta cheese grits. A few. (Hey -- do you eat pork? It's OK, we do too -- it's the NEW white meat. Cheese grits? Not so much, thanks.)

Here's the skinny on how to cast your ballot (because this is Florida, and The Rules are Different Here.) Please go to the Florida Progressive Coalition (FPC) Blog awards slate HERE.

Ranger is running in FOUR (4) categories: Best Blog on National Issues, Best Writer, Best Post and Best Series (on terror). So tick RAW for questions #1, 10, 19 and 20.

Easy Peasy . . . but wait, there's MORE! You must also vote for the asterisked categories -- #2, 11 and 14. We are not shilling for anyone else, so we can't give you any tips. Just vote and someone will appreciate your largesse.

To recap: Go the FPC online ballot. VOTE FOR RANGER in categories 1, 10, 19 and 20. Vote for someone else in #2, 11, 14. Type in your email and mash the "FINISHED" button.

Only one vote per email, but you could lobby others! We will be trolling our email lists, you betcha!

The election looks to be fair this year so RAW has a real chance of winning. Unlike previous elections, there are no politicos stuffing the ballot in any of the categories for which we are competing -- so YOUR VOTE MATTERS! The FPC awards are often won or lost by only a few votes (when a whole congregation's not voting), so we ask you to do your patriotic duty online.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my mother thanks you, my father thanks you, Ranger thanks you and I thank you. Really, we do. We approve this message.

[cross-posted @ RangerAgainstWar]

Class Warriors

2011-10-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

Sitting and percolating about in my head for the past few days was a post about "Culture Warriors", the "DFH"s who've been giving Wall Street and Mayor Bloomberg some inconvenience over the past fortnight.

And there are CopyCat OWS in other cities, even down south of me an hour in Wichita Ks.

Our military gets all the honor and glory for their very visible struggles for the country and they deserve that and more, but there are other fighters, too. We all can do our small part in the great struggle for the USA.

Show these protesters some love, at least send a pizza their way.

Some Marines are coming to the aid of their countrymen & countrywomen.

“I’m heading up there tonight in my dress blues. So far, 15 of my fellow marine buddies are meeting me there, also in Uniform. I want to send the following message to Wall St and Congress:I didn’t fight for Wall St. I fought for America. Now it’s Congress’ turn.

My true hope, though, is that we Veterans can act as first line of defense between the police and the protester. If they want to get to some protesters so they can mace them, they will have to get through the ( *** ) Marine Corps first. Let’s see a cop mace a bunch of decorated war vets.I apologize now for typos and errors.

Typing this on iPhone whilst heading to NYC. We can organize once we’re there. That’s what we do best.If you see someone in uniform, gather together.

A formation will be held tonight at 10PM.

We all took an oath to uphold, protect and defend the constitution of this country. That’s what we will be doing."

bb

Nation Bulding II: The Never-Victorious Army

2011-10-02T09:36:00.000-07:00

My friend seydlitz recently posted an excerpt from an article in which a U.S. officer lauds the performance of the Afghan troops he has worked with."I watched them run toward the sound of gunfire..." he writes, ""...despite often having only a Vietnam-era flak vest or less to protect them. These men are Uzbeks, Hazaras, Tajiks and, increasingly, Pashtuns — former rivals now working together. They are the beginnings of a nation."And yet MAJ Lujan worries that his nation is going to abandon these hungry young soldiers; "Rather than resignation, America should show resolve...to empower those Afghans willing to lead and serve."

I don't want to use this post to take one side or another about whether the Afghan soldiers should or shouldn't get more or less support from the U.S. First, nothing I will say will have any affect one way of the other, and, second, I don't have anything near enough information about the Afghan troops involved or the tactical situation on the ground to be able to make an informed judgement about whether such U.S. investment will produce a commensurate return.

But one thing that DOES give me heartburn - and I do want to offer a comment about - is the question of how long it should and can take to create an army.One constant meme we U.S. citizens are fed is how long it takes for the training and equipping the U.S./NATO has been doing to take effect. Overall foreign forces have been in Afghanistan for a decade. Even discarding the first eight years - which, we are reminded, were the Afghan National Army's "lost decade-minus-two" - the intensified effort to create a viable fighting force has been going on for two years.

And at this point we are informed that a thundering two out of 180 maneuver battalions in the ANA are capable of combat without direct ISAF direction.

Only...they're sort of not. "Those two “independent” battalions still require U.S. support for their maintenance, logistics and medical systems,” LTG Caldwell (commander of the ISAF training command) admitted when Pentagon reporters pressed him on Monday morning. “Today, we haven’t developed their systems to enable them to do that yet,” Caldwell said.

Now that's fine. The ANA is having a tough time getting their shit together. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you, and sometimes the bear pulls your shirt over your hear, pulls your pants down and bloops you up the bunghole until the eyes pop out of your head. There are just days like that.

But can we fucking stop saying "Building up foreign armies isn’t easy."

It's not "easy". But it's not fucking rocket science, either. And because the Western publics now have very little experience with going through military training - and have NEVER had a decent grasp of history - they are inclined to believe this statement about how hard it is to build an Afghan Army and are nodding their heads rather than asking hard questions about what the hell is going on.

In fact, Western officers have relatively quickly built foreign levies into effective armies since Hernan Cortez drafted a bunch of Tlascalans to help him skin the Aztec Empire.

To take just one example. Back in 1860 the European powers were in a tight space in China. The Qing government was a shambles, and what may well have been the most terrible insurrection in history, the Taiping Rebellion, was rampaging all over the part of China that the Westerners were living in.

So a character named Frederick Townsend Ward - American sailor, filibusterer, mercenary, and general adventurer - doped up a bunch of ex-Taiping rebels and assorted random coolies into a European-style force that was eventually tagged with the awesome title "Ever-Victorious Army" by the Qings. Formed in 1861, three years later the little Army had a force of some 5,000 including infantry, artillery and even its own little brown-water Navy. Ward and his successor Charles "Chinese" Gordon, a British officer led the EVA into a series of beatings of the Taiping rebels, who were at that time the most formidable force in Qing China. The Qings rallied, the Rebellion fell apart, and the European powers continued their bitch-slapping of the Chinese "government" on their way to colonial sexy-time.

The thing is, the raw material for the EVA was no better, and probably worse, than the raw material for the ANA. And the resources Ward and Gordon had to make this rabble into a fighting force was certainly slimmer than that available to ISAF. And yet, in roughly a year - the EVA was beating the Taipings by 1862 - and certainly by two years this shake-and-bake Army was equal to or better than the toughest insurgent force in China.The ANA doesn't need to meet Manstein on the plains of the Ukraine, for cryin' out loud. They need to be able to execute the simplest Infantry 101 missions; security, cordon-and-search, movement to contact, combat and reconnaissance patrols. The Afghan peoples are among the fightingest on Earth, and the U.S. has organizations like the Special Forces that are supposed to be some of the finest trainers of foreign soldiers in the world.

So can we stop repeating how haaaaard it is to make an Army and, instead, start asking why is has taken so long to take a bunch of fierce fighters into...units that can fight fiercely?

Because every time we say it Fred Townsend and Charlie Gordon and the ghosts of the ex-coolies and peasants of the EVA flip us the bird in Hell.

Nation Building! Major Lujan's View

2011-09-29T16:02:00.000-07:00

. . . There are still corrupt, lazy, incompetent senior officers in the ranks, clinging to positions they’ve bought or traded for. Yet for every one of them, I met five young, hungry soldiers eager to take up the fight. Men like Jawad, a brilliant 23-year-old intelligence officer, or Jamaluddin, a sergeant major who had revolutionized his entire battalion from within.

I watched them wake up early every morning to drive unarmored Ford Rangers down some of the most dangerous roads in the world. They unfurl huge Afghan flags and fly them from every truck. I watched them run toward the sound of gunfire, despite often having only a Vietnam-era flak vest or less to protect them. These men are Uzbeks, Hazaras, Tajiks and, increasingly, Pashtuns — former rivals now working together. They are the beginnings of a nation.

“Winning” is a meaningless word in this type of war, but something is happening in the Afghan south that gives me hope. Rather than resignation, America should show resolve — not to maintain a large troop presence or extend timelines, but to be smarter about the way we use our tapering resources to empower those Afghans willing to lead and serve.

For all our technology and firepower, we will succeed or fail based on what happens after we bring our troops home. . .

Hat tip to Colonel Lang for presenting Major Lujan's view favorably. I can respect the Major's conviction, and he comes across as a real Mensch, but Lang's right as to our inability to deal in the long term . . .

Also, for me from a strategic theory perspective, this is a non-starter.

We simply lack the cohesion to pull something like this off, so maybe we should consider some nation-building at home, although that would require us to come to terms with our own problems.

The ability to perform strategic operations, to achieve extensive political goals requires a high level of both national/social cohesion, as in the means/values mix needed to carry out such ambitions, but also the material resources/international conditions available to see them through.

What would be the historical analogy to the US situation in AFghanistan in 2011? The US in the Philippines in 1925? Or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1988? Or . . . ?

What If They Gave A War And No Enemies Showed Up?

2011-09-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

Vary much apropos of the discussion we were having here about "whither the defense budget?", Robert Farley zeros in on the U.S. Army, asking "So with no Soviet Union, no clear role in war against China and a skeptical public, what is the Army to do?"He doesn't have any more answers than we had, but just interesting that another observer noting that for all the money we're spending and propose to spend on our military capabilities, there just doesn't seem to be any way to really focus that spending.

Right now it seems like there's just no there there...

The Battle of Kiev - September 1941

2011-09-26T06:10:00.000-07:00

13th Panzer Division, 1st Panzer Group, Army Group South, Summer 1941

Seventy years ago today the massive encirclement operation known as the battle of Kiev was declared over by the German High Command. The success was deemed the greatest defeat of its kind in history with the Wehrmacht taking 665,000 Red Army prisoners, although Soviet sources give a smaller number. The Deutschewochenschau number 577 of 24 September 1941 opened with a dedication to Generaloberst Ritter von Schobert - commander of the 11th Army - who had died a "hero's death" (den Heldentod fand) when his reconnaissance plane landed in a Soviet minefield earlier that same month. The music playing in the background to the report provides an example of the attitude the Nazis had towards sacrifice at this point in the war. It was assumed that there would be significant losses given the stakes involved and the willingness to self-sacrifice (Opferbereitschaft) of the soldiers from the highest to the lowest ranks was expected since the decisions made and the successes achieved would mark the next phase/epoch of not only the history of Germany, but the entire world. Through this unprecedented level of destruction, the participants in this crusade were in effect making a new world.

The Kiev operation is interesting for several reasons in addition to its very scale. For maps look here for detailed maps and here for a general map.

Stalin had thought an offensive at this late date in the season would not come in the south, but towards Moscow, which he knew from his spies in Berlin and elsewhere was the prime German goal. General Zhukov was in fact sacked for suggesting that Kiev would have to be surrendered. At the end of July with the German Army Group Center stalled to the front of Smolensk, Zhukov saw the threat to the south and recommended a retreat across the Dnepr. Stalin took this as a challenge to his strategic leadership and had Zhukov replaced with Marshall B.M. Shaposhnikov whom Stalin considered politically reliable and unlikely to disagree with his views. Zhukov was given command of the Reserve Front facing the German bridgehead at Yelnia to the front of Moscow, where his successes there were to pay later dividends.

So, first we have the unwillingness of the Soviets to retreat, but if the main goal was Moscow, why turn half the Panzer strength of Army Group Center south into the Ukraine instead of northeast towards Moscow? Why was there this diversion of strength which allowed for the massive encirclement of the Kiev pocket?

To answer that question we need to go back to the planning stages for the campaign which had started at the end of 1940. A series of competing plans were drawn up, and while there was general agreement as to the main emphasis on Moscow, there were those who felt that either Leningrad in the north, or the Ukraine should be secured first. Hitler's own variant envisioned a flank strategy focused on Leningrad. In December 1940, a General Staff Kriegsspiel or war-game was conducted by General von Paulus (who would later go into captivity with the remnants of his 6th Army at Stalingrad). The results were quite interesting and contrary to the very optimistic projections coming from the Army High Command (OKH), the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) and the Luftwaffe (OKL).

Based on his war-game, Paulus concluded that: First, the resources at German disposal were barely enough to advance to Moscow and reaching the Archangel-Volga River line were beyond their capabilities. Second the spaces and time involved did not allow for the Blitzkrieg approach which had been used effectively against both Poland and France. The Panzers could advance, but at such a speed that the following infantry would be left far behind. Also the Luftwaffe would not be able to displace forward as quickly as in the past leaving the Panzers with limited air support the further they advanced. Third and finally, supply would be difficult once the advance got beyond the Dnepr-Dvina line. Constructing new supply areas, relaying European gauge rail lines not to mention repairing what had been destroyed would take months. It should be noted that the war-games included certain optimistic assumptions some of which later proved unfounded. The Germans assumed superiority in tanks, artillery, signals equipment and aircraft, and assumed that their infantry divisions enjoyed a 1/3 superiority in terms of heavy weapons over Soviet infantry division equivalents.

In spite of the war-game's conclusions, General Halder of the OKH believed the fighting quality of the Red Army to be so low, that he assumed that the campaign would be over by the onset of winter. At the same time Halder was focused on Moscow as the main aim of the campaign and thought it possible to capture the capitol during the 1941 campaign.

The OKW under General Jodl were convinced of the importance of Moscow, but thought that the northern flank, the area between Leningrad and Moscow would have to be cleared before an advance on Moscow could commence. Halder was able to convince Jodl of the soundness of his views, but given the influence of Hermann Göring and the Luftwaffe who were pressuring Hitler to capture the Ukraine and the Crimea as well, Halder was having difficulties. Success it seemed had made far too much possible, that is assuming that the Red Army was on the edge of collapse . . .

Reichsmarschall Göring is seen today as simply a drug-addicted buffoon, but in 1941 he enjoyed a relatively high level of prestige in the Nazi hierarchy. It is interesting to note that in the Wochenschau edition linked above, he receives a prominent place in the presentation. In the summer of 1941 Göring was seen as an expert in Blitzkrieg warfare, due to the Luftwaffe component of the system, and considered by many to have a better grasp of the subject than the reactionary generals like Halder of the General Staff.

Thus we see Göring, not Halder or even Jodl, playing a key role in strategic direction in the summer of 1941. It was also at this time that he promised Hitler that the Luftwaffe would be able to "destroy Leningrad from the air". So it became policy with a memo issued by Hitler on 22 August. This is important to note: As the Panzers were moving south towards Kiev, the Luftwaffe was moving north to support Army Group North's attack on Leningrad.

The final indignity for Halder was performed by General Guderian, who in a private discussion with Hitler on 23 August confirmed that Moscow should be the main goal, but that also he be allowed to retain control of his entire 2nd Panzer Group for the Kiev operation. Guderian advanced due south to close the pocket with the 1st Panzer Group advancing north. Thus Guderian retained control of his formation, but this allowed Zhukov to grind up a German Army Corps at Yelnia, which would have could have been better used on the later advance on Moscow.

Kiev was a great victory, which opened the door to the Ukraine, but it also saved Moscow since the Germans would be unable to shift the 2nd Panzer Group north in time, not to mention the losses/wear and tear which could not be replaced. Instead of smashing the forces to the immediate front of Army Group Center with a fall offensive and then digging in for the winter, the Germans risked it all to take Moscow as the weather turned cold, with an army that had been equipped to win before the snows fell . . .

A Drinking Club with a Book Problem

2011-09-25T23:02:00.000-07:00

Jim and I have been kicking around the idea of starting up a monthly discussion of some printed work.

In other words - a MilPub Book Club.

We thought we'd throw this out and see if there are any other takers. Our thought is that it'd work like this;

Every month one of us would throw out a suggestion for something for us to read. We thought that it wouldn't have to be restricted to military affairs and politics, but since that's what we talk about most we thought that they'd probably turn out that way. Jim says no fiction or historical fiction, and I would suggest trying to keep it to items published within, say, 20 years, to keep from circling back to the Classics. Journal articles are OK, but I'd suggest we try and keep it a little more strenuous than the typical Atlantic magazine piece. Yes?

We'd then take three or four weeks to read the thing, and then the original poster would open the dance with a "open discussion" post, giving his synopsis of the work and perhaps some commentary, whereupon we'd all get to chime in/pile on/discuss.How's that sound? Anyone else like the idea?

"Fat, Dumb, and Homophobic is no way to go through life, son"

2011-09-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

I got a big laugh from this, the latest on the proposed re-institution of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (aka "Youse Homos Can Serve Until We SAY Youse Can't Serve") from Former Senator "Man-on-Dog" Rick Santorum:

"What we are doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now. That's tragic. I would just say that going forward we would reinstitute that policy if rick santorum was president. That policy would be reinstituted as far as people in I would not throw them out that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration. But we would move forward in conformity with what was happening in the past. Which was sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself whether you are heterosexual or homosexual."

because if you needed to know anything about what the man doesn't know about military service circa 2011, this pretty much tells you.And that's...pretty much everything.

I never served in anything but an all-male unit until after I got off active duty. But since then I've been assigned to everything between a headquarters company and a laundry-and-bath platoon with stops along the way with every sort of military critter.

And one thing I can tell you with stone-cold certainty.

Sex is ALWAYS an issue.

Doesn't matter if it's the boys on the girls, the girls on the boys, the boys on the boys or the girls on the girls. We're human, so until we're about 68 years old roughly a third of our brain is occupied in thinking about sex. I'm not sure what the other 66 percent does; sudoku, maybe.

Obviously the most complicated this gets for military discipline is in mixed-gender units. I've worked in several, and I can tell you that you can walk and talk military discipline and the UCMJ all you want to, but you get a young man and a young woman together and you automatically have the potential for something not covered in the rest positions at the halt section of FM 22-5.

Mind you, the Army has a long history of being stupid about Sex. I saw it first all the way back in 1981, when in its infinite wisdom the Army had set up a mixed-gender BT company. 1st Platoon of A/4/3, Fort Dix N.J. was female. "First Fox" fireguards shared a stairwell with my Second Platoon, and I was later told (though I was unaware at the time, being first a squad leader and then platoon guide and thus exempt from fireguard) that the young women on guard ranged from adorable to fugly and the young men from studly to dorky. But they were there, they were horny, they were bored, so almost none of them left Fort Dix unscrewed.

It's lucky we never did have a fire; the horndogs were too busy having it off in the empty cadre rooms to have sounded an alarm.And in my experience it almost always has nothing to do with homosexuality, which makes Santorum's connection between the Big Gay Scary even less sensible. The disciplinary problems and/or personnel complications were 99.9% heterosexual and 85% consensual (the other 15% were a supervisor/supervised deal, which IMO pretty much can't really be counted as such any more than any other "sexual harassment" type scenerio can).

And gay?

Ask anyone who served in Panama back in '86 and '87; the women's barracks over at 210 Aviation was like a big OG-107-covered episode of "The L-Word". Damn near every one of those gals liked her girls like she liked her corn-on-the-cob; hot and covered in butter.

But y'know what? They worked their asses off and kept those aircraft where they belonged, in the air, and as a result nobody really brought up the whole "hot-girl-on-girl-GI-action" thing.So excuse me if I continue to laugh at young Mister Santorum, who seems to think that U.S. troops have to put their genitalia in the company safe before leaving Reception Station. Sex not an issue?

Maybe on your planet, spaceman...

Defiance

2011-09-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

The Bielski family and partisans

The people can be oppressed
by violent measures,
but they cannot be governed by them
--Leo Tolstoy, letter to Czar Nicholas II

Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it
--George Santayana

Shall I tell you what the real evil is?
To cringe to the things that are called evils,
to surrender to them our freedom,
in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering
--Lucius Annaeus Seneca
________________

Defiance is a book (1993) and a movie (2008) based upon the lives of the Bielski partisans of World War II. The group was named after the organizers, a family of Polish Jews who rescued Jews from extermination and fought against the Nazi German occupiers and their collaborators in Poland. They saved approximately 1,200 Jewish lives.

The Bielski's story is but one of many amazing wartime stories of average people who endure against overwhelming odds, many of which are probably lost to history. Of the Bielski group, 70% were women, children, and the elderly; about 150 were shooters. The movie delivers a highly romanticized version of a dire existence, replete with the Hollywood sensitive Nazi.

Ranger found the Bielski's behavior links with classic unconventional and guerrilla warfare, though their primary function was to ensure the survival of its Jewish members. His personal SF training was the result of the U.S. adopting UW/GW experience which evolved from the OSS in WW II, reflective of partisan and resistance warfare of WW II. This type of warfare was fought in all theatres in that war, and were aimed if not at destroying, then hamstringing the armies of occupation of the Axis forces.

Partisan units existed to harass, destroy and generally force the occupiers to dilute the combat power of their maneuver units by diverting them to fight the partisans. The titular use of the term in this case is not exactly correct since partisans existed to fight, where the Bielski unit existed primarily to save Jews; they fought only when forced to engage enemy forces.

The regular armies of the Allies provided trainers and support for partisans which enabled the UW/GW forces to exist behind enemy lines. The Bielski unit received limited aid from the organized Soviet partisan units. Though minor, it is doubtful the Bielskis could have endured without it.

Another key point relevant to today's UW/GW scenarios is that the unit would not have survived without the active and passive support -- regardless of how meagre -- of the local population.

WW II is now 66 years old. Can such units still exist in future wars? Will Special Forces maintain their classic OSS/UW/GW orientation in future conflicts? Has Special Forces performed as UW/GW assets in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), or has their performance been a weak approximation of the OSS template?

The OSS types were originally organized to infiltrate enemy-occupied territory to link up with and train UW forces, then task-organizing them for actual combat operations. All UW/GW operations of significance in WW II complemented the Allied Armies' tactical plans.

Partisans were used to target specific objectives and were discouraged and disallowed from random and unfocused attacks upon the Axis forces. Although the UW/GW units were not strictly military organizations, they were compelled to operate in a military manner.

After WW II, the USSF was organized to operate with partisans and dissident groups in areas occupied by the Warsaw Pact forces. In the Republic of Vietnam, the Special Forces supported the government of Vietnam, while in Europe they opposed the governments of the Iron Curtain countries. This shows the SF -- like the sword in our unit patch -- is a double-edged weapon which will cut in both directions.

The question is, will SF retain its original function as an UW/GW force multiplier if the U.S. were to engage in a conventional ground war? Can organizations like the Bielski Partisans survive today's battlefield scenarios? Are partisan units a concept that is still within the realm of military logic?

A good story should provoke such thoughts on the relevance of its topic to the present day.

Join the Debate

2011-09-15T08:53:00.000-07:00

One of the outcomes of the recent deficit reduction legislations will be cuts in Defense Spending. AOL Defense has some thought provoking articles. What's your take on:

Coming Cuts May Put Services At Each Others Throats

Defense Industry Comes Out Swinging: Don't Cut Us!

That's just two articles addressing the looming cuts. More can be found at this link.

Are our military services ill structured and inappropriately expensive for the future? What roles and missions do you think are valid, and what services fill those roles?

The Smoking Lamp is lit!

Quo Vadis?

2011-09-14T23:33:00.000-07:00

In the "December 12th" Thread, Andy made this thought provoking comment:

Somehow we've always seemed to muddle through. Not sure if that's because of luck or some unseen force in the system or what. Can it continue? Probably not.

My concern is whether or not we have retained the ability to "muddle" in a productive direction. I wonder if our long standing, stable and productive form of government and governance is still what the masses, and more importantly, the power brokers, really want.

It is unsettling to see how our perceptions have been altered by the Bush experience. Chris Matthews of MSNBC recently asked a former Bachman campaign manager:

"Would you like to see her commander in chief of the United States?"

While there is no such position or title identified nor authorized in our Constitution, the title is gaining more and more common usage. Do the people really want to have a "Commander in Chief" of the country itself? If the United States is effectively "We, The People", then does that mean "CINCUS" (Interestingly pronounced "Sink Us") exercises command authority over each and every person in the country?

Should we return to calling the CINCUS "His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties", as was the title originally used by Washington until James Madison and the House of Reps demanded something a bit less lofty?

Nearly 200 years after the outrage over "His High Mightiness" had simplified the President's Title to "Mr President", Richard Nixon made a short foray into adding a touch of imperial majesty to his surroundings by putting the White House Police into garish uniforms he helped design, making the Marine Guards' Dress Blues look like leisure suits. The outrage was almost universal. Time magazine editorially wondered at the time whether the White House would soon revert to its old name, which, for a while during the 19th century, was the "President's Palace". Perhaps contemporary folks will begin calling the White House the CINCUS' Command Post?

Is it not just a bit perplexing that so many of those who wish to "return to the Constitution of the Founding Fathers" lean towards semantics, perceptions and practices that are quite alien to what was put in place all those years ago?

The late Rodney Smith, PhD, who brilliantly taught 9th Grade US History and Government in my high school, impressed upon us "the beauty" of how the framers of the Constitution strove to insure the continuity of our sovereign existence and provide for a "peaceful transition of Power" from one administration and Congress to the next. How he must be rolling in his grave as we now see that the objective of partisan politics has become the "overthrow" of an administration. Just listen to the many, many voices, both in and out of elective office, that clamor for same. Consider the ridiculous, never ending "investigations" of President Clinton and his friends, and the attempt at impeaching him over a BJ, when nothing more substantive could be found. Overthrow by any means available! All too many of us want to live in a "Banana Republic", as long as we are the ones in power.

More than the trends towards a militaristic police state, the disregard for "peaceful transition of power" leaves me unsettled. The recent debt ceiling extortion shows that many no longer care to recognize the legitimacy and lawful obligations of previous elected governments of our country. Where Nixon's Police uniforms gave the visual impression of a Banana Republic, actual recent legislative actions is the behavior of one!

But it not just an undercurrent of militant political "violence" to topple a government. Couple this with the recent voices of "yes" at the question of whether an uninsured person in a coma should be left to die, and one has to wonder. Once upon a time, the basic conventions of civility would have led people to keep such thoughts to themselves. And these cries to let the uninsured die came from an audience of people who's political platform is supposedly "Pro-Life".

So, I guess my worry for the future is that we may see many more significant shocks to our "system", and I'm not sure they will be the kind that can be muddled out from under. There is a limit to how much trauma an organism can withstand.

WASF

September 12th

2011-09-13T22:38:00.000-07:00

So.

My last post was a straight-up rant, and one that those who know me have learned to dread. By late August they are avoiding meeting with me, or attending any sort of event where politics or recent history may be discussed, but as early as the First of September they are even dodging my phone calls and deleting my text messages before reading them, knowing that my vitriolic bile will be reaching explosively toxic levels.

The actual detonation is usually reserved for the collision of some innoffensively idiotic television 9/11 retrospective and my forebrain which leaves me flecking the innocent phosphor screen with spittle shouting about 1948, Lebanon, Charlie Wilson's War, Rummy/McFarlane, the cake and the Bible, and the House of Saud.

After that things return rather quickly to normal, and by 13 SEPT I can even hold normal conversations with friends without more than an occasional mutter about "the fucking moron-grade American public..."

All very entertaining, but...now that the ranting is done, what now?

Andy brought up a post on the blog "Zenpundit" that he considered the best observation of 9/11 he had read that day. I went over and read it and found a generic "The Day History Changed" (because, of course, the Soviet Union never fell in 1989...) sort of thing, with the usual mild "perhaps we should re-examine some of the choices we made that day" caveat at the end.

And that got me thinking. Okay, so, first; what things DID change that day?

Well, remember on 11 SEPT 2001 the U.S. was snakebit by one of the snakes we'd been handling since 1948, and not in a good way (our snake made the other snakes play mean, and we had done some snake-slapping ourselves) so while it shouldn't have been a surprise the sheer effectiveness of it was a nasty shock. We'd gotten used to the idea that those Allah-pesterers were pretty much hopeless fuckups, so the notion that they could kill large groups of Americans (that is, large groups of Americans not dispatched on pointless show-the-flag-missions in the Levant by Saint Ronald of Hollywood) using boxcutters and lead pipes was a novel one.

So overseas we did what we do; we went and fucked us up some wogs. First in Afghanistan (where, in justice, the tricksy bastards who smote us were lurking and, besides, it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, anyway) but then in Iraq (which had nothing the fuck to do with 9/11 but, hell, Saddam was a right git and his sons had stupid names (Uday? Who the fuck is named "Uday"?) and we'd been itching to pimpslap him since back in '92) and then pretty much all over the Arab world, with drone aircraft, anyway. Busy, busy little Yankees!

But at home we were even busier! We did some things we hadn't done - much - before; we set up secret ways to spy on people (who were supposed to be Evul Terrists but, hey - it was SECRET. So who the fuck knows?), we started files on everyone who was different and scary; Muslim clerics, peace activists, chicks with hairy pits, Mormons (oh, wait, no...Mormons were only scary to teabaggers. Oh, wait - most of the people we spied on were scary to teabaggers. Carry on).

We passed something called the "USA PATRIOT Act" which let cops and spies do all sorts of cool stuff they'd been forbidden to do for years because, well, the last time they did it they railroaded a bunch of people for stuff they didn't do and spied on domestic political "enemies"...and that was just the part we KNOW about - supposedly there's this "Secret" PATRIOT Act that lets the door-kickers and snoopers do a lot MORE stuff, except, y'know, it's fucking SECRET, so we have no fucking idea what it involves.

We jammed a bunch of different agencies - the Coast Guard, the DEA, the guys who inspect poultry - into this monster superagency, called in the "Department of Homeland Security", tossed an assload of money at it and told it to go and...do stuff to scary brown people. Or something. We opened secret prisons and put secret prisoners in them because...well, it's SECRET, dummy, so we didn't know exactly why they were there except our Leaders told us they were bad, scary people, the "worst of the worst".

Except the ones we let go because, well, they turned out to be goatherders, or innocent Canadians, or carpet beaters ratted out by the guy who was sleeping with their wives.

Yeah, that.

But, anyway, I think we've pretty much pegged the stuff that Zenpundit's guy said we should "re-examine"; a bunch of wars abroad and a bunch of domestic snooping and spying at home.

So let's "re-examine" them. Let's. Let's put on our Yankee Thinking Caps and try to figure out whether there was anything different we could have done about all that crap.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Believe it or not, I don't actually think that the original, 2002, 114th Afghan War (surely they must be up in at least the low three figures by now, right?) was all that bad a move. Probably could have been done a little slicker with some cunning diplomacy, an assassination and a bribe or three, but, really - they're Afghans; feud, revenge, making an affray, putting in fear...that's cake and ice cream to them. Even the Taliban probably expected the hiding they got. It's the Afghan Way, the central Asian version of a chicken in every pot; a cluster bomb in every Islamic Center.

Now, having done the traditional punitive expedition, the notion of hanging around trying to kill enough Pashtuns to turn the place into Waterbury with more goats was simply stupid. But that was eclipsed by the Really Big Stupid; Iraq.

And, frankly, there is only one way to "re-examine" Iraq. Aggressive war is a crime under the Nuremburg verdicts.

We hung people like Jodl and Ribbentrop and Tojo for it.

Until Dubya and Dick and Wolfie and the rest are hanging alongside them we will never be able to "re-examine" Iraq in any sane fashion. Admitting that we - that members of our elected government, with our tacit approval - committed a war crime (that lead to the useless, meaningless deaths of thousands) and many subsequent crimes is the only possible first step to "re-examining" that lunacy and preventing its repetition.

And that, we will never do.

And the other thing we will never do is "re-examine" the two main pillars of our treatment of the Middle East; the Israel First, and the Your Gas Is Really Our Gas policies.

We made a conscious decision to put Israel's welfare before our own selfish interests back in 1948. All the old State Department hands - the guys who had made their bones in the Middle East, the guys who (mostly) were defenestrated by the Red witch-hunters after State "lost China" in the late Forties and early Fifties - warned Truman about that. But we made our bed, and we choose to continue to lie in it.

You know how I feel about Israel our "ally". But I am a very small minority, and I accept that so long as we have Israel's back - with all that entails, such as supporting pro-Israeli/anti-Islamist dictators like the Mubaraks and the Sauds - we put ourselves at odds with the bulk of the Middle Eastern Arab and Muslim populations.

So, too, our incessant need for petroleum, which means our need for pliant bobos or buyable clowns on the gaddis of the petroleum states. So we prop up the Shah in Iran, or the Gaddafi's in Libya, or the Malikis in Iraq, regardless of the enmity...and until the wrath...of their own peoples becomes too great.

But in the process we ensure ourselves of a constant, running, low-grade warfare with certain elements in the Islamic world. There is no element of the foolish "Islamofascism" or "hating our freedoms" so beloved of the GOP's wingnut brigade. Rather, they hate our Israel, or they hate our porn, or our bare-legged women, or our greed for their petroleum, or their disregard for their lives.

This makes them no better (and no worse) that we. They are acting selfishly, their selfish interests will always collide with ours if we persist in the policies we have pursued - and we show little or no interest in or willingness to change them - and so we are fated to encounter these Islamic characters until either we change or they do. There is no real other option.

We simply cannot have Israel, cheap Arab petroleum, and peace with the hard-core Islamists and Arab nationalists.

So that "re-examination" leads to the grim conclusions that we are in for a long, long century.

The Laughing Policeman

On the Home Front, however, what holds us back is not inevitable collision but moral and political cowardice.

We have erected, brick by brick, a monstrous edifice of surveillance and secret machination. Little in U.S. history since the Alien and Sedition Acts, or perhaps some of the most extreme lawlessness enacted in actual wars (such as Lincoln's violation of habeas corpus or Roosevelt's Japanese internment) can equal the sheer grandiosity of this vast and secretive erection. We have granted, out of our fear and anger, immense powers to our most uncontrolled servants and trusted them to remain servile.

Why, I do not know.

And, by and large, these powers have gone unneeded and unused for the demolition of actual "terrorist" plots and plans. Most of the domestic acts of "terror" have been foiled by simple citizens, or random customs agents, or street cops snitched on to someone. Several of the most "nefarious" plots appear to have been largely the work of government agents, who have tracked down various disgruntled and unhinged individuals, coaxed them, coached them, made their weapons for them, even driven them to the "terror" site before arresting them.

And many of these powers are even less comprehensible than that, like the 21st Century equivalent of the lettre de cachet, the "national security letter", that cannot even be mentioned under pain of imprisonment. We cannot know if the lettre de...excuse me, the "national security letter" has been misused...because those against whom it has been used cannot speak of their misuse, and if they attempt to do so they will find themselves in another modernization of Bourbon justice, the Chateau d'If of the "secret prison".

Can you imagine a United States with "secret prisons"? With nameless prisoners, latter-day Monte Cristos but in their orange jumpsuits and hoods? With secret letters demanding secret interrogations, carried on in secret and then buried below further layers of secrecy, lowered into a well a midnight, never to be known?

Is this the United States we pledged to as children? And if not, why not?

Because of some raggedy Islamic fantasists plotting in some dumpy motel in Lahore?

Or because of...us?

In a sane world we would shake our heads like a dog shaking off water, and immediately eighty-six about 99 percent of the ridiculous security rigamarole we've invented since 9/11, starting with the "PATRIOT" Act, the AUMF, and continuing from there. We'd relegate "terrorism" to the nuisance status it deserves and making in the province of our State Department and our spy agencies, who could make the appropriate recommendations to Congress and the President when they spotted another bin Laden lurking behind the arras.

Because, as I said, he will come. When you fight an old enemy long enough he will throw out the occasional Mosby, or bin Ladin, or Francis Marion.

But sending out troops to beat the hustings where he may be born...or sending in police to snoop and sneak on Americans guilty of nothing more than disliking WalMart or protesting foreign policy...is worse than a crime. It is a mistake, and one that we have been paying for this long decade.

But...

Again, to undo all of this harm would be to admit that we were sniveling, mewling cowards to begin with. To admit that we fucked up dozens of people's lives for no better reason than our own bed-wetting fears. And to accept the calumny due us for being frightened little weasels too small to deserve the freedoms we so boldly lay claim to, and yet so quickly piss away rather than face any potential for harm.

And we would rather give up ALL those freedoms than accept that.

So, in brief; abroad we cannot have peace with a segment of Islam - unless we radically change our goals and interests in the Middle East, which we have and continue to show no interest in doing - while at home we will not have liberty - unless we radically accept responsibility for our own panicked fuckups as well as the risk inherent in living in an open society.

So in that sense the dead of 9/11 really DID die in vain, or worse - their deaths have made their nation a smaller, meaner, more secretive, less dynamic place.

By their deaths we were given a chance of greatness and instead we went shopping - on credit - whilst fools and knaves led us into dark places.

"It is by our own feathers, and not by others' shafts, are we now stricken"

Decimation

2011-09-11T00:35:00.001-07:00

I thought after last year that our long national indulgence in the compounded delusions of self-pity and self-righteous anger were starting to fade.But for the tenth anniversary of the events of 11 SEP 2001 has brought out all the usual idiots parroting all the usual tropes; It's was all about US! OMFG it was Pure Evil! It was Such a Shock 'Cause We were just Minding Our Own Business when We were viciously mugged!Well, okay, so we've had ten years and we're STILL thinking about this.

(Anybody want to make a bet as to whether Pearl Harbor was still front page news on 7 DEC 1951? No? Didn't think so. It was a very different war in a very different time, and in many ways were were a cruder, harder, simpler...but more sensible people fifty years ago.)

So let's get a couple of things out of the way first.

That an Islamic attack of some sort was successfully completed on U.S. soil was an entirely rational and expected result of the Middle East policies we had been pursuing for decades; since 1948, at the very least. This doesn't make OBL or AQ any more loveable or "justified". But you bankroll, arm, and act as consigliere for one of the local mobs in a bad part of town, don't be surprised to wake up with a horse's head in your bed some morning. It ain't an "if", it's a when, goombah, capisce?That it succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its Saudi maker is unquestionable. If 9/11 was a battle and you looked at it trying to define "Who won 9/11?" the world's tallest dead Saudi would have to be the winner, hands down. For the cost of a relatively small number of expendable fanatics (and the bombing and occupation of a stone-age tribal wasteland back into the stone age) he sent his target rampaging through the Middle East, bombing, shooting, and - worst of all - acting like the least competent imperial power in history. Too meek to conquer, too clueless and viciously self-protective to woo, too stupid to realize the difference...Osama must look back at the past ten years and the present position of his target, exchange incredulous looks at the demons tormenting him, and all three of them must collapse in helpless laughter. Satan in all his genius couldn't conceive of a richer foul joke.That the most significant, durable, and successful effect it has had has been the erection of a monstrous internal and external surveillance and propaganda contraption that extends across multiple agencies and continents, absorbs billions of dollars and tens of thousands of careers and lives...and all in pursuit of this chimera. Al posted the link to a Naval War College journal article in the preceding post. In it the author bemoans the costly, inept behemoth we know as the Department of Homeland Security.Because it is a massive boondoggle ginned up by the world's last superpower to oppose the efforts of a handful of raggedy-assed clerics and Muslim fabulists dreaming of Caliphate in dumpy rooms in Third World shitholes that, even if successful, would be unlikely to do better than 9/11 - that is, kill a relative handful of Americans compared to the number who drive into utility poles while texting every year?

No.

Because "...we need a longer term strategy for dealing with terrorism overall. Perhaps the most disappointing non-event of the past ten years has been the complete failure of America's intellectual infrastructure, including its colleges and universities, to create a reserve of expertise similar to that funded by the U.S. government in the wake of the Soviet challenge in the 1950s."

Got it?

The threat from a tiny band of poorly-funded, tactically-incompetent, Islamic boneheadsis and should be considered the modern equivalent of the challenge posed by the world's only other global superpowermassively armed with blue-water fleets, intercontinental bombers, an trained army of spies and assassins, and, oh, yeah, fucking nuclear ICBMs.

So one would think that this tenth anniversary of the moment we started the geopolitical equivalent of slamming eleven vodka and Red Bull shooters, stripping down to our skivvies, and leaping into the beer tub down at the local lesbian softball victory party swinging a length of tire chain and shouting "I can whip any bitch in the park!" we'd be looking around sheepishly at all the angry bull daggers, picking our saggy wet Jockeys out of the crack of our stinging ass and wondering what the fuck we had been thinking.

(Stops. Sighs. Shakes his head.)

Instead of indulging in an orgy of self-pity, maudlin sentimentality, and self-righteous victimhood.

But we won't.

Worth Sharing

2011-09-10T03:56:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, a snippet from an article is so precise, so succinct, that it bears sharing. In an article about the Dept of Homeland Security, Joan Johnson-Freese, of the Naval War College faculty wrote:

DHS was a panic reaction, a precipitous act by a Bush administration determined to show it was "doing something" about terrorism. The horses had already escaped, but the Bush administration went ahead anyway and bought more land, constructed extra barns, equipped them with state-of-the-art doors, and then hired thousands of conscientious civil servants to slam them shut over and over again, for the rest of eternity.

Almost as elegant as "Broke out in assholes and shit themselves to death".

I've always considered myself fortunate to have attended the Naval War College. Professor Johnson-Freese has reinforced that for me. BRAVO ZULU!

The full article is worth reading, as well as the several links in it.

Why I Write

2011-09-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

But it wasn't because I didn't know enough
I just knew too much
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly
--Crazy, Gnarls Barkley
_____________________

[Motivated by Sgt. Rabb's post]:

I was a soldier once and now not-so-young, a fact which allows me to connect the dots from present to past. The logic of soldiering has been left deeply ingrained in my thoughts and actions.

Last night was suffused with memories of past screw-ups and negative events that I still cannot justify or accept as being correct. Today's events resurface them, and I am discomfited down to my Ranger lizard brain.

When I was a platoon leader, my assigned strength equaled the 37 men killed in the recent shoot-down of the Chinook in Afghanistan. My platoon was line infantry, not elite in any manner. We did, however, stress one military precept: Dispersion.

We never put all our eggs in one basket. We would never allow one military round to kill or wound more than was militarily acceptable. We maintained dispersion while eating and even in the chow line when we were operational. My tracks (M 106) were never bunched up to allow enemy counter battery to knock out more than one of our guns. Not being bunched up is Rule One of ground combat.

On or about 21/22 Jan 71 there was an action at B53 in the Republic of Vietnam in which another entire helicopter of highly-trained Special Forces and Special Operations Assets men were blown out of the sky. To this day it is my contention that these men were sacrificed because there was not a proper and judicious recon. Helo gunship fire suppression of the area was not employed and the men did not know what enemy they were facing nor their capabilities.

U.S. SOF assets are still making the same senseless mistakes that get good men killed for no measurable reason. What is the benefit of the cost?

Thirty soldiers died at the hands (we are told) of a lucky RPG gunner. But in Special Forces, we are taught there is no such thing as "luck" -- there is only the presence or absence of solid planning and execution. No unit should lose 37 people associated gear from one lucky RPG shot.

Such a loss is criminal negligence on the part of the operational planners and team leaders. No sensible soldier would put all his assets in one bunch, hoping luck would not turn ill; it does not work that way either in gang warfare or combat.

Ranger does not believe the shoot down of the Chinook was an RPG loss. Why does the media not posit the employment of a ground-to-air Redeye or Strella-type missile? If the U.S. uses technology, then why not the Afghanis? Why the fiction that their successes are due to sheer, dumb-ass luck? The Gods of War need not be Christian or Western.

What would it mean if they were as tactical as we?

[cross-posted @ RangerAgainstWar]

Gift Box; Books, Fruits, and Nuts...

2011-09-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

DragonCon ??? A sci-fi fanatic acquaintance stumbled across this and emailed the link. This parade was held in Atlanta? I wonder what they do in the convention hall – fire-breathing workshops? - lady troll mudwrestling? And what is served in their foodcourts? I hereby declare that the Left Coast is no longer the land of fruits and nuts, that distinction is now bestowed on Georgia. I use to think that the Civil War re-enactors were a little ‘dinky dau’. Maybe they are the same people expanding their horizons. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgp2PQAV3pg

Fall Reading List – One new book on order titled: ‘How the Helicopter Changed Modern Warfare’ by Walter Boyne. It has some good reviews. This I understand is a history of the development of military rotary wing aviation and of the evolution of their use and tactics and not a technical discussion on aerodynamics. Coming in the mail soon I hope. I am not an aviator myself but have had a love and hate relationship with helos since I took my first ride 50 years ago over the pine savannahs and sawgrass swamps of Camp Lejeune in the passenger seat of an HOK-1 (later renamed OH-43), the one with the side-by-side intermeshed twin rotors. I would hope it covers Brute Krulak pushing the vertical envelopment concept in the 1940s when everyone else considered helos as only good for observation and search-and-rescue. The author Boyne is one of the founders of ‘Air and Space’ magazine and a pre-eminent aviation historian so I am expecting a good read. This should be on your list Al, but then you probably already have a copy. http://pacificamilitary.com/wordpress/?p=34

Plus some used books I picked up from the annual book sale at our local library listed below:

I already started on Asprey’s bio of ‘Frederick the Great’, but am only through the first chapter about his youth. What a strange relationship with his father. I thought the English royals had toxic family relationships but they were nothing compared to this household.

Also a bio of Cervantes the author of Don Quixote – how could a jarhead like me resist the life story of a Spanish Naval Infantryman who was reportedly at the Battle of Lepanto.

A bio of Graham Greene the novelist, occasional spy, friend of Kim Philby and Charlie Chaplin, and critic of American imperialism.

The memoirs of Vincent Sheean, foreign correspondent who interviewed Abd el Krim in the Rif War of 1920s Morrocco, Sun Yat Sen and Borodin in China, and who covered the Spanish Civil War, Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the occupation of Sudetenland.

Barbara Tuchman’s ‘The March of Folly’ – I think she needs to update with a new chapter on Junior Bush.

And I have to confess some spy thrillers, I cannot stay away from LeCarre and Alan Furst, plus a few of Stuart Kaminsky’s Moscow detective mysteries. I am addicted, I use them as in-betweens of more serious reads.

Battles Long Ago: First Manila 1898

2011-08-28T00:38:00.000-07:00

...over at GFT:Dusky Spanish damsels, plucky Yankee adventurers, sly foreigners (twirling their mustaches, no doubt...) and a rousing tale of planting the Grand Old Flag!Civilize 'em with a Krag!

"Why I Fight" - Sgt Raab's Post

2011-08-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

Since I don't wish to color his declaration in any way, I'll not provide a selected quote, rather read the whole thing for yourselves . . .

There's also this . . .

As to my perspective, consider that I volunteered at 18 for the USMCR in April 1975 the same month that Saigon fell. I served into the mid 1990s in various capacities - reserve, active duty, civilian US Army. I'm a small town Southern conservative who left the GOP in disgust due to Iran-Contra in the mid 1980s. I think the country would have been far better off had George W. Bush remained an obnoxious drunk and not found religion or a political "calling".

Never fired a shot in anger, never really, physically risked my life, or maybe, but hard to tell. Still, if you consider I was in Berlin in the late 1980s . . . with my family. And we wouldn't have given up. Whatever the Cold War's worth in the pecking order of US wars . . .

World War II's definitely on top, but there are not too many of those vets left anymore. Korea? Nobody asks. Cold War's not even on the list.

Vietnam looks a lot better than it did 40 years ago . . . What exactly that's due to I'd ask Publius to go into . . .

Iraq, Afghanistan, the whole Global War on Terror? I just wish they would all end. That maybe some politician might say, "It's time to come home America and fix the country!" Don't hear anybody saying that!

Still, given the right point in time, maybe, a soldier might say . . . something different and unlike all the times in the past, it might make a difference . . .

Finally, simply, I don't really recognized what this gentleman - Jonathan Raab - is talking about.

What is Empire?

2011-08-21T04:39:00.000-07:00

Emperor Napoleon I

EMPIRE is a term which is often used today to describe US policies, or rather specifically reactive US domestic and foreign policies since September 11, 2001.

To analyze this properly we need a clear ideal type as to what "Empire" is, what makes it distinct from say "the State", which is the usual apparatus of control for political communities. In 2005, Dr. Herfried Münkler published a book entitled Imperien, which was published two years later in English as Empires. I will refer to the English translation in order to present Münkler's ideal type of Empire. Münkler's a professor of political theory which is a broad discipline which would include not only Clausewitzian strategic theory but the political theories providing context to it. He has been described as a "one man thinktank" and deserves a wide dissemination of his ideas.

Once we have an ideal type as a yardstick, we can then compare it to what we see in reality and present those views for discussion. My goal here is to create a dialectic whereby through presentation, question and response we all attain a higher appreciation and understanding of this current political phenomenon which affects the entire world. Since we have had whatever varying success with this type of discussion numerous times here on MilPub in the past, I have every reason to assume that we will do so again this time around.

Everyone reading is welcome to comment, in fact I would specifically encourage some of the great number of silent readers we have to express their views . . . Such comments/questions could be about the strengths or weaknesses of Münkler's ideal type, or how effectively it describes specific political entities today . . .

Now to Münkler's ideal type. The elements should be clear and well-defined, expressing extremes of various sorts. Ideal types are not found in reality, but contain exaggerated characteristics found in reality. There is also no morality associated with the "ideal" in ideal type, one could describe an ideal type whorehouse or political machine. I refer here to pages 5-8 in Empires:

Quotes from the book are within "--".

--

First, an empire must be distinguished from a state, or more precisely, from an institutional territorial state, which operates according to completely different imperatives and a completely different action logic. This begins with the way the population is internally integrated and extends to how boundaries are conceived. the boundary line typical of states is sharp and clearly demarcated; it indicates the transition from one state to another. Such precise dividing lines are exceptional in the case of empires. To be sure, the boundaries of an empire are no longer lost in those wide expanses in which tribes and nomadic peoples sometimes obeyed imperial requirement and sometimes resisted them, but even since the disappearance of those unruled spaces into which the classical empires were able to expand, imperial boundaries have remained different from state borders. Imperial boundaries do not divide political units possessing equal rights; instead they involve gradations of power and influence. Moreover, in contrast to state boundaries, they are not equally permeable in both directions; those who wish to enter an imperial space must satisfy different conditions from those who leave it. This is connected to the economic as well as the cultural attraction of imperial powers; more want to enter than to leave, and this has consequences for the border regime. --

Or in a nutshell -- Empires have no neighbors which they recognize as equals, that is as possessing equal rights; with states, by contrast, this is the rule. In other words, states are always in the plural, empires mostly in the singular.--

Second, but related -- States integrate their populations equally, above all, grant them equal rights whether they live at the core of the state or in its border regions - this is not the case with empires: there is almost always a scale of integration descending from center to periphery, which usually corresponds to decreasing right and an increasingly limited capacity to determine the politics of the center.

Third, empires must be delineated in contrast to hegemonic structures of dominance. The line between hegemonic supremacy and imperial dominance may be fluid, but it is still meaningful to distinguish the two. Hegemony is supremacy within a group of formally equal political players; imperiality, by contrast, dissolves this - at least formal - equality and reduces subordinates to the status of client states or satellites. They stand in a more or less recognized dependence in relation to the center.

Fourth, empires may be delineated in contrast to what has since the 19th Century been called imperialism. A distinction between theories of empire and theories of imperialism makes it possible to disregard the normative perspective of nearly all theories of imperialism and to sharpen our descriptive-analytic focus on the imperatives of empire. The concept of imperialism also includes theories of empire-formation as a unilateral process running from center to periphery; which proves to be rather a hindrance in the observation of real empires. Imperialism means that there is a will to empire. Whether from political or economic motives, this is seen as decisive, if not the only, cause of world empire-building. . . [However] most empires have owed their existence to a mixture of chance and contingency, often taken up by individuals who were in no way legitimately authorized to do so. In that sense, almost all empires have been created 'in a fit of absence of mind'. A focus on the center, characteristic of imperialism theory, must be supplemented with a focus on the periphery - on power vacuums and economic dynamics, requests for intervention by losers in regional conflicts and decisions made by local authorities. --

I'm adding a fifth characteristic, which Münkler does not place here, but describes later (page 84 & 96). Fifth, -- All empires that have lasted any length of time have chosen as their self-justifying objective a world-historical task or mission that confers cosmological or redemptive meaning on their activity. Hegemonic powers do not need a mission, but empires cannot do without one. . . The persausiveness of an imperial mission depends to a large extent on the discursive construction of what it is directed against, or which forces it is meant to keep from becoming politically dominant. This will here be considered under the generic term of the barbarian of the barbaric . . . Imperial frontiers are thus also frontiers between cosmos and chaos.

--

So, that's my initial ideal type based on Münkler's Empires.

Let's dance!

Postscript:

We really seem to be at something of a crossroads. There is in general a resistance to taking on board the significant, even fundamental changes that have take place in the country since 2000. It's always easier to simply tell ourselves that this has "all happened before", but does that really stand up to any serious scrutiny? I find it more the need to find some commonality, some sense of bearings that could indicate where the country will go from here.

It's scary to think, as I do, that we are in essentially "uncharted waters". More to follow.

How I Lost the War

2011-08-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

I'm a loser

I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be
--I'm a Loser, The Beatles

Some day, yeah
We'll put it together and we'll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
--Ooh, Child, Nina Simone

Maybe I, I tried too hard
to find someone to blame
And maybe it's me who changed
And now I'm left with nothing again
--Failure, Unloco
_________________

[*This is a true story. No sh*t.]

There are some things to which a man cannot admit. We cannot countenance the thought that our peckers are small and short-fused, nor admit that we have reluctant bladders, or that we really were not heroes.

The following admission goes way beyond these foolish psychosexual fripparies. It has been Ranger's secret cross to bear for decades. You see, he is the reason the U.S. lost the Vietnam War.

Forget all of the armchair quarterbacking you've heard over the years, blaming everything from hippies to the U.S. running like scalded dog. I am here to tell you the real deal: The weight of the nation rested upon the fitness of U.S. Army personnel, and Ranger let the sacred honor of the nation down on this front

He knows because CPT Willoughby told him so. It was OH Dark Thirty and the universe was clipping through the month of September in the year 1968. Tet '68 had just delivered a humbling, and Ranger was a young shave-tail wearing infantry brass on collar if not in his heart.

The revelation occurred during Physical Training, specifically, the jumping jacks portion. Ranger was dogging it because he was tired, hungover and just did not give a flip about the exercise regimen of the Army at that moment. His mien was dour; Richard Simmons he was not (nor is he.) He needed some serious tightening up.

My bad attitude was infecting the Army, or so said Captain Frank "Fucking" Willoughby, our class training monitor. Frank called me all sorts of sorry motherfucker and said in no uncertain terms that it was guys like me that were losing the war. Incidentally, it was Ranger's first exposure to motherfucker as non-hyphenated noun versus verb. Motherfucker as an entity in and of itself, and not the description of an unsavory action.

That encounter started my thinking about alternate recompense for being a soldier. If the Army paid a quarter for every time someone called me a motherfucker, I would be a rich mother-fucker. Sadly, this initiative was never adopted. (I'd like to kick the ass of the motherfucker who nixed my proposition.)

In retrospect it is clear the National Liberation Front and VC had a rarefied intel apparatus to be able to divine my dogging it during PT and learn that all they need do is wait for me and my ilk to make our way forward.

After a lifetime of forced denial, I bare my soul and individual culpability in this colossal failure. This is why I shun most fraternal military gatherings: I know we lost before I even got on station, and that the loss was my doing. My crossed rifles may as well be scarlet.

This is my most important confession.

'Cause the Bible Tells Me So

2011-08-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

One thing my rock-ribbed agnosticism has always helped me with is soldiering.

Knowing that I don't have to agonize over how an omniscient, omnipotent, loving Father God can sit on his holy ass in the sky whilst humans inflict all sorts of horrors on each other has made doing whatever fucked-up military thing I was told to turn my hand to so much simpler.

But I did get a certain amount of unholy (as it were) amusement out of watching my Christian comrades try and work through the notion that the Christ that called them to love one another as he had loved them - and died for them - could also ask them to rip apart tiny children and helpless civilians as part of their mission.And - just my opinion, mind you - "nuclear war" has always seemed like the LEAST defensible of the "just war" notions. There's not really any sort of "defense" argument there, is there? Seeing as how you're either cold-bloodedly first-striking a helpless population, or, with missiles already inbound and your own civilization doomed, merely scourging that helpless population in a vengeful reflex, a reptile tail-whip of dying fury.

So I got a cynical chuckle our of Chaplain (Capt) Soh's little Powerpoint for missile officers that lead (naturally) to the conclusion that a good Chrstian CAN, indeed, incinerate millions of innocents and still go to church - whatever's left of it - the next day with the stainless heart of a child.

How about this?

How about just accepting that warfare in ALL its aspects is the Devil's Work and, like most things we do in our lives, there are times when the Devil sings loud and sweet, and we gleefully jump up and dance antic hay on the ruins of others' lives......and always will?

Backside to the Future

2011-08-16T19:45:00.000-07:00

(Being A Mere Diversion, And a Personal Rumination on The State of the Nation and the Upcoming Election Year)

With the ludicrous Ames Iowa "straw poll" it appears that the 2012 campaign season has officially begin...15 months before the actual election.I can't begin to express how this irritates me.

Glenn Greenwald explains better than I can how the combination of endless "election" coverage combined with the rapacious cable news 24/7/365 cycle hammered down into the simpleminded "tell the masses what they want not what they need" paradigm of the corporate news (and, of course, sprinkled with some commercial gottasellsomeads! pixie dust) goes in one end and emerges a Möbius band of idiocy that ties misinformation into disinformation with plain, good old fatuousness for a sort of fractal stupidity; refracted infinitely to where any hope of extracting simple, sane understanding of the people and their ideas has vanished.

But at least on one hand the tale told by one of the idiots - while set about with sound and fury signifying nothing (that is, the usual folderol involving gays, guns, and God - fodder for the gossip columns and the prayer breakfasts but nothing more than a magnetic sticker on the bumper of the People Who Matter in our electoral "process") - is simple enough.

No new taxes. In fact, no taxes at all, or as close as possible.

Small government. Teeny, tiny, eensy-weensy leetle government (except the part that blows up Scary Brown People, but that's the cool part, anyway).

Freedom for the Job Creators! Deregulate everything regulatable!

Free Markets! (meaning; deregulate even MORE stuff!)

Plus some other truly crazy shit; abolishing the Fed, returning to the gold standard, protection for precious rapist-babies...but you know the drill - that's just to give the loonies a shiny pretty to play with.

Here's the thing; this is nothing new. Nothing. We've already been there, done that, and got the crinoline and the Arrow t-shirt.

Low taxes? Freedom for the magnates? Utter deregulation and a complete lack of federal anything?The Gilded Age.

Seriously.

And, if I have to be scrupulously honest, if I was in Forbes 400, if I was one of the rich and the powerful...why not?Hell, the pre-Depression United States was a paradise for a rich man (woman? enh...not quite so much). Mansions? Servants? Senators appointed at your whim? Entire federal administrations in your pocket? Ask the Doles how that Hawaii thing worked out for them, the Rockefellers how the Standard Oil gig payed off before those meddlesome Progressive trustbusters elbowed in.

And let me be honest about this, too; the United States works perfectly well as an open oligarchy. It did from about 1870 to 1930, and don't kid yourself; some pigs are still more equal than others and always have been. Tell me that you get the same meal ticket emerging from the Oregon Episcopal School versus Jefferson High School here in Portland.

Henh. Right.

But I'm not here to argue equality of outcomes.

I'm here to talk about next year.

It's becoming painfully clear that the GOP is going to nominate someone whose positions on things like federal regulations and spending are closer to those of John D. Rockefeller than his grandson. And if they win - and the continuing Great Recession makes such a win highly plausible - they will do their very best to return this country to the Gilded Age they by their words and deeds so seem to yearn for.

I consider this a very Bad Thing, largely because me and mine are unlikely to be among those included in the Four Hundred. We will not be robber barons; more likely we will be among the robbed. Mojo and I had a lovely saunter about our graceful Pittock Mansion this sunny Sunday, and I observed that had we been alive then our only glimpse of the beautiful appointments and spectacular vistas would have been as we carried the dirty linen down the stairs or brought master his cigars.But I have to accept that it would not necessarily be a Bad Thing for the nation. More nations have thrived and grown in wealth and power as oligarchies than as democracies, simply because of the late arrival of popular democracy on the historical scene. The nation as a nation might do quite well.

And it is unlikely that even the most teabaggiest Republican government would be able to go full public-be-damned on us. The welfare state is deeply ingrained in U.S. society, and there would come a point where even the most Galtian overlord would draw back from reintroducing a world of match girls and breaker boys even if it helped bring back the Gibson Girl and the Arrow Shirt guy.Make no mistake; "reforming" the entitlement systems now in place mean simply throwing people out of them. Some of those people will find ways to live without their dole money; the American people had all sorts of ways of coping with poor, sick, old parents and injured relatives before 1933 and they can reinvent those ways again. Families will return to the multigenerational homes of the past, where retired grandma cares for the grandkids while mom and dad work, in return for food and a bed. There are ways, there are ways.But.

And this is a big "but"...

Two things have changed enormously since the last time we tried to live this way, assuming that the GOP experiment goes forward. And I'm not sure whether they've really thought this out.

First, in 1911 the U.S. was a burgeoning industrial power; work was there - not always good work, often dirty, hard, low-paying, dangerous work - but it was there. And it was work that needed people; vastly manual, even when skilled. The factories of the Gilded Age needed lots of poor people to work them.Second, there was still a hell of a lot of "open" land, and "open" places, for people to go to try and start again. The frontier only officially closed in 1890, and even in the Fifties there were lots of places that were still booming and enjoyed a boomtown's need for people.And both of of those "safety valves" are gone.

If the Great Recession and the thirty years of deregulation, outsourcing, offshoring, downsizing, and deunionization have proved anything to the people Who Matter in business and politics, it's that Henry Ford's old paradigm - pay the workers better so they will buy more stuff - has been broken. The "old economy" here in the U.S. - the economy that depended on American working people working to make stuff that other American working people bought - is tanking, HAS tanked, and I don't think anyone knows how to put all those people back to work in any sort of work that pays a living wage.And there's nowhere to "go". The frontier really IS closed, and there's no hope for people to take up forty acres and try and make a go of it. Oh, sure, you can try an start-up a little company, make cute glass cups or design webpages or invent a new application for a cell phone...but working for yourself is a backbreaking task, and especially in the corporatist U.S. of 2011 there are so many ways that a bigger, more powerful competitor can dry-gulch you. My wife is a "contractor" and I've seen the sausage-making up close. They're right - it's not pretty. And it's not going to get you into the parlor at Pittock Mansion, either.

So assuming that the Gilded Age Project largely succeeds, we can assume that it will result in a fairly large group - larger than we have dealt with in living history - of relatively permanently unemployed or under-employed people, people who not only don't have work but for whom the IS no work, no work that can't and won't be done by someone in Bangladesh or Uruguay for a fraction of what that American would need to make to live even at poverty levels in this country. That among this group will be many old, sick, and old sick people. And that if there IS a way out of that throwback to the future it is something that not only is unapparent to us now, but even potential precursors are not apparent.

The old economy is failing. The new economy - whatever that may be - has not yet emerged, if it ever will emerge in any form that will help those knocked down by the fall of the old economy to their feet again.

And one major political group in U.S. politics believes that the best response to this is to return as closely to the conditions of 1889 as possible.

So.

I'm not sure what is in store for me, for my family, for you and yours. But I suspect that even if we don't end up turning back down the road towards the past we're in for some hard years ahead.

And if we do...well...

If the U.S. Army taught me one thing, I learned how to mop a fucking floor.Hopefully when I get laid off I won't be too old to get a job cleaning up at the Big House.

A Couple of Things in August

2011-08-14T04:08:00.000-07:00

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 1961

On vacation, at home, trying to achieve that balance between relaxation/necessary work/creative endeavor. A couple of things have come to mind in the last few days.

First off, we have the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, which took the Western Allies in Berlin by surprise at the time, although it shouldn't have. The situation was very tense 50 years ago in Berlin and this tension lasted, if in a lesser degree, to the time 28 years later when the people brought that wall down. So, what was initiated by a state with with limited popular support (based mostly on a grotesque view of the "other") lasted only as long as the people it was meant to control submitted themselves to that control (that is Weberian social action theory). It took 28 years, but it happened which is the point to remember.

There are also those who argue that the whole thing was overblown, that the Soviet Army would never have attacked, that "all they wanted was peace", or "their economy was going down the tubes" ,or amazingly, that it was our military budgets (spending) which drove the USSR over the edge. It's amazing how so many people see these arguments as believable and at the same time today believe in a Global Jihadist Threat. That is the full spectrum of views in regards to the USSR unite in one simplistic view regarding the Global War on Terror.

So to make it even clearer, the USSR as a qualified threat (actually a potentially existential threat) which required certain changes in our government structure (the establishment of the National Security State after 1947) but virtually none in our Constitutional or legal systems, whereas Al Qaida's actions since 2001 have initiated a whole series of drastic (and sometimes illegal) changes in virtually every aspect of our society? Yet in what way is Al Qaida any sort of threat in the way the USSR was?

Recently a documentary was aired in Germany which addressed the Warsaw Pact plans for the conquest of West Berlin which was in turn the subject of a large East German Army field exercise in 1988, that is a year before the wall came down. It's actually a common element in corrupt elites which are on the verge of collapse, that is the consideration of the use of military power to some how remedy the situation, turn things around, remove the pressure to "reform", that is respond to public pressure. Obviously the government of the German Democratic Republic felt secure enough in 1988 to have this as an option, the people were "manageable" enough in terms of propaganda, fear, incentives and what ever other elements of power/inducement the state could muster.

What made a difference at the end of the Cold War, was of course the top man on their side, M. Gorbachev, who was a great human being, but a lousy Communist. "Communist" defined in terms of perpetuating the interests and power of the Communist elite, much as we would define our own leadership/elite today.

Consider how Eastern Europe with a worn out and discredited social/economic system in 1989 compares to the West - and especially the US - today?

So that's one thing.

The other is a response I got on one of FDChief's threads. I commented this to Andy:

"I think most serving in the armed forces today would disagree with your characterization that they are "imperials." "

Agree, but what is the actual effect of what these American "warriors" are doing? Some would argue this is all about empire, or would you argue that there actually exists a "global threat" which requires our military actions on such a scale as a response?

Are we on the defensive or the offensive? Is the enemy a threat to our "freedom" or simply responding to our depredations? A very basic question from a strategic theory perspective; I suppose it comes down to that . . .

Andy was kind enough to respond:

That's a good point, but these wars aren't "imperial" simply because they are strategically incoherent. If we were installing Viceroy's in Iraq and/or Afghanistan and granting US corporations exclusive rights to territorial resources, then I'd think these would be "imperial" wars. We would have a clear purpose that would, theoretically at least, provide us a clear and material benefit.

What have we gained? What is the purpose? IMO, as I've said before, I think these are now wars of national honor and the reason we are still there is that our politicians think they can't leave without a clear "win" and the American people don't want to suffer the perceived psychological consequences of a Vietnam-like "failure." The sunk-cost fallacy is also at work.

After a bit more thinking, I'll add this to my earlier thoughts: Maybe it's an artifact of the AVF, but for me and most people I know, service is in large part about "serving the nation" and the deal is that if you want to serve the nation, you don't get to pick and choose your wars. Almost everyone today, including me, continue to serve by choice despite misgivings about our current conflicts (obviously, my misgivings are not everyone's). Each individual, therefore, has to balance whether service is worth the downsides, whatever those downsides may be. For most people, continued service is not worth the cost and they either choose not to join at all or serve one or two hitches.

So I guess it strikes me as - not sure how to put this - "unfair" to suggest that the sacrifice these men made is somehow diminished because the campaign they fought and died in didn't rise to someone else's arbitrary level of righteousness. I have a hard time entertaining the notion that the sacrifice of a soldier in WWII who was accidentally killed by by his own troops is somehow greater or more honorable than those guys in the 47, or the soldier in Iraq who dies to save his men. Everyone has their own opinion and I'm not claiming any moral high ground here, but for me personally I feel completely unqualified to make such judgments.

I think Andy's comment very articulate and informative, but communicating something else then what he intended, possibly. I assume no agendas/political views beyond the content of this single comment, rather simply separate and develop the points made.

First, my questions were addressed to a citizen/the citizenry of the political community called the USA, not to the troops who go where they are sent. If these military members serve the nation, then it is the responsibility of the citizenry that the political leadership (in theory our elected representatives) ensure that they are actually operating in the interests of the US. An elite that arbitrarily uses the powers of the state for their own narrow interests is by definition a tyranny.

Second, while the US political purpose is "incoherent" it is not blatantly so - no "Viceroys" ruling in our name - and the series of wars seemingly provide no benefit to the nation at all. That is where this consideration ends, though without considering that the wars in question might actually support the interests of the elite, while providing the nation with no benefit, are in fact contrary to our political community's interests. This of course within a context of constant government deception and propaganda, in effect selling this necessarily ambiguous threat as "existential". This in turn would indicate a very serious state of affairs, the collapse of the concept of citizenship, accountability of elected officials, consideration of the long-term effects of what is carried out in our name, how our policies might actually bring about the "war of civilizations" hornets nest we insist on beating . . . the questions only become more serious as you follow this line of thought . . .

Third, it seems that this view argues that as long as the military assumes the war passes whatever their own subjective smell test is, it will continue, since by continuing the military "serves the nation" and upholds its own "honor". For those military members unable to deal with this, they get out after "one or two tours". That is it is only those career military who actually count.

Finally, arguing against these wars is simply exercising an "arbitrary level of righteousness" against, not the political leadership, they enter into this discussion not at all, but against the military: that is "attacking the troops".

In all I would label his view, "21st Century US militarism" which indicates for me a collapse of all our traditional ideals of the citizen, the political leadership, the military and even the use of state force itself.

Postscript (from one of my comments below):

--We're talking a lot about symptoms, but not much about causes. If we go to the actual root causes then I think we get an idea of the extent of the crisis facing not only the US, but also the West (but to a lesser degree).

Systemic failure due to elites who simply cannot divorce themselves from the Weltanschauung which educated, formed and conditioned them and has been shown to be dysfunctional, incapable of reform or even acknowledging the extent of the crisis.

Obama is a product of the same elite system of education and indoctrination. He vacations on Martha's Vineyard since that is where the East Coast elite go and he wishes very much to signal that he is one with that elite. It's not based on race or ethnic background, but on class and sharing the same background which is the glue that holds the whole thing together.

The same Ivy League idiots who ran the economy off a cliff are retained and rewarded since there are no others to replace them with. This crop would be replaced with the same systems managers who caused the last big crack up.

Ditto with every major institution we have - the military included - the same thinking but from the service academies.

Our elite cannot deal with systemic failure because simply they are NOT even aware they are dealing with a failed system, rather for them this is the one and only "reality" and scary brown people who "hate our freedom" are definitely part of it.

Consider the group reading these words. How many of us are autodidacts, who have been fundamental to our own individual educations? How many of us are by nature critical thinkers? How many of us see the world, not in binary black/white, but in infinite shades of gray? How many of us see that in America today there are no actual conservative or progressive political alternatives?

And there's something else . . .

I think those who see this disaster more clearly also have a coherent system of values. I know that word has been debased for decades, but consider what I'm talking about is not "right" and "wrong" but a coherent structure. This was common in the past, btw, in all healthy societies. Values are not what make us "feel good about ourselves", but give meaning to our world. Many times we have found ourselves not living up to our own values, which is the opposite of the sanctimonious buffoonery (actually narrow self-centered interest) common today. These values reflect in turn our belonging to a larger community, and it is in many cases this poor reflection which discourages us perhaps the most.

The country has changed or rather has been changed, but we have not, nor will we. Imo the growing conflict in the US today is not between "Left" and "Right", or "Liberal" and "Conservative", but between the elite and their stooges (both Obamaites and Right Wing Nihilists), and the anti-elite, which is a diffuse and reactionary movement. Given the disparity of power, the best strategy - as we have spoken about before - is one similar to that taken by the peoples of Eastern Europe prior to 1989 . . .

Essentially we are the anti-elite . . .

--

We need to start with simple definitions. First "Empire" . . .

Ratigan Rant

2011-08-11T16:14:00.000-07:00

Dylan Ratigan Rants. Is this our "Network" moment? Will anyone listen, take heed?
Found at Americablog.com

This bit follows the famous scene.

Of course, George Carlin's been telling us this stuff for years.

The Lament of the Frontier Guard

2011-08-10T23:46:00.000-07:00

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:

My friend jim recently posted an extended rumination about the combat loss of a CH-47 and the embarked team of Navy SEALs. In this post he uses President Obama's term "sacrifice" to compare the way these men died to the offerings presented to the gods; in this case, the twin gods of War and Hubris that have ruled lately in the East. He asks "How can a nation sacrifice the best that we have to offer in such a blithe manner?" and suggests that these dead men were sacrifices for our national sins of arrogance and foolishness.Now I have no end of respect for jim's opinions on things military. He's been there and done that and got the O.D. T-shirt. He's probably forgotten more about soldiering than I'll ever know.

But in this case, I think he's looking at this as an American and a citizen-soldier, and that's the wrong way to look at this.

Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.

For most of these guys the Saturday in Wardak Province was just another day at work. They are long-service professionals - imperial troops in all but name - and they are doing what imperial troops have done since Augustus' day; carrying our imperial policy in the far reaches of the imperial frontiers.

This was no army of liberation storming ashore on the beaches of Normandy or Italy, no army of vengeance pouring gasoline into the caves of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. This wasn't even "Lafayette, we are here" or "Remember the Maine". While I'm sure that one or two of the guys who augered in somewhere in the Tangi Valley comforted themselves with the fiction that they were avenging 9/11 I'll bet most of them thought about their mission as imperials have always thought about the mission of civilizing the savages with a rifle.Long, tiring work, typically boring, occasionally terrifying, often fruitless. Pitied and ignored by the civilians safe at home, feared or swindled by the natives nearby, tasked by the uninformed higher-ups to perform everything from the pointless to the dangerous, taking successes wherever and however possible, accepting failures as part of the game.

A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars - men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.

And I believe we do them a disservice when we use the language of popular mass wars for what they do and how they die. The President, of course, well, it's his job to drape the charred bits of meat and bone - all that remain after JP-4 and airframe aluminum combine to combust human bodies - in patriotic bunting. He is, after all, both our national mourner and national cheerleader, saying the correct and solemn words over the caskets filled with sand, fanning the fire in the faint hearts to continue the fight that will bring more dead men home to more bereft hearts.

But we should be big enough to overlook these public platitudes and see these men for what they are; imperial legionaries of a most unimperial empire, manning the milecastles we build for them with our taxes, our reflexive rage, our incurious sloth, and our ignorance of the world and the people in it.

Those dead men, could they reassemble themselves, could they pull the poncho-liner of whole flesh back on so as not to frighten us with the gibbering horror of their deaths in a rage of fire and metal, might tell us of the people in those far places who killed them and whom they killed, the broken places and the broken tribes within them, whose ferocities and griefs they and we will never understand. They might tell us about the meaningless strobing of parachute flares in the night sky, of little villages with yesterday's bulletholes in walls that Alexander's troops passed by, of walking over the same ground they walked yesterday and finding new death buried by the roadside.

But, then again, they might not.

Because there is no way we in the soft lands and the quiet places could understand what it means to try and defeat the 14th Century with the weapons of the 20th.

Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku's name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

Because they are atop the milecastles, peering out to the barbarous lands, and we are peacefully asleep in the fat lands within the walls. Because they know war and we do not. Because they are not our sacrifices; they are our proxies. Because, although we have never seen a tiger or know what it does...

...we feed them to the tigers.And then go home to our dinners.

Queen's Peace

2011-08-08T22:21:00.000-07:00

I used this picture to close the preceding post.Because it's rather a powerful image and let me explain why I think so.

The police officer has all the accoutrements of First World riot control circa 2011; helmet, facemask, radio, riot shield, baton, all in police blue, all very modern and urban down to her mascara.

But look at her.

Take the club out of her hand and shove a sword in it and she's 1211, not 2011, facing down Welsh rebels for King John. Or 711, fighting the Moors at Tours. Or 511BC, chasing helots out of Sparta. All our complex learning hasn't changed the simple understanding of one human standing ready to deal out brutal force against another.

For all our inventiveness, and gadgets, and indoor plumbing, for all our "civilization" and "wisdom" and "learning"...Constable Nameless with her club and shield reminds us that we haven't come all THAT far from when we were some damn pithecanthropus scratching our ass wondering whether that thing under that bush is something to eat or something that's going to eat us.

The Red Flag

2011-08-08T18:05:00.000-07:00

The recent failure of the U.S. governing class to understand that the immediate (i.e. next decade's) problems are not those of debts and deficits but of jobs and joblessness make the recent news from London something of a nasty reminder of what happens when a substantial portion of your working-age population ends up jobless for long periods of time.I think we need to remember that we are not Japan. Young American men (and women) without a job are not going to behave well for long. Why bother? What is there to lose? In the U.S. you ARE your job. And if you have no job, how much do you have? Freedom? You have the freedom to lay about, eat junk food, and do squat. As much as that might have appealed to me at age 14 for about three weeks, spending the bulk of my twenties or thirties...or fifties...doing that?

I'd probably go out and loot a 7-11, too.No question that we will have to grapple with the question of how much the U.S. governments need to take in and how much they need to spend. But before we do that we need to get through the next stage of the Great Recession (can we start calling it a Depression yet?) without finding a sizeable chunk of our population out of work and on the dole. Because that's not a good thing for them, it's not a good thing for us, and it's not a good thing for the country.There's a reason that that crafty old patrician FDR and his New Deal pals didn't just push through stuff like Social Security and unemployment insurance but created a bunch of make-work agencies; things like the CCC and WPA and the big government construction projects were a smart reaction from people who were watching what the Soviets and Italian Fascists were doing with their young people - stuffing them into armies and "labor corps" and other make-work jobs. Things like the Bonneville Dam and the CCC kept idle hands from becoming devils' playgrounds...and idle brains from getting stuffed with fascist or communist ideas. Those New Deal guys knew that having a bunch of working - i.e. military - age guys just hanging around with nothing to do was a hell of a good way to start trouble.

I'm not sure if we need a new CCC. But I'm hella sure that we don't need a bunch of stuffed hairbags in DC gassing on about the Terror of Deficits when 10% and probably more of the U.S. public is out of work and stands to be for a long, long time, at this rate.

Because despite what they tell you on TV; were not that much smarter, or better behaved, than we were in 1932. And now, as then, as the London Council is finding out...if we don't figure out how to get those guys back to work or find something for them to do, they'll find it themselves, and the rest of us might not like it."I'm out of work and on the dole,
You can stuff the red flag up your hole."

Exciting Times in Wisconsin

2011-08-08T16:48:00.001-07:00

The previous 2 posts below this have produced comments about the capability of our fellow citizens to govern themselves, their intelligence and quality of character. As I wrote in my last post about propaganda down below in the basement, our citizens do not have consistently honest media and there is no strong consistent push to investigate and set the record straight.

I was particularly struck by Ranger's story of his encounter with a gun-owner recently. He attempted to set the record straight about the history of gun control to a fellow he met by chance in a shop, who revealed his weapon and growled "I don't speak to liberals!"

The answer to the obvious question here, how did this fine patriotic fellow get to the point where he feels he needs at least one weapon to carry around in public and where he has closed his ears to clear-as-crystal historical, factual truth, is without a doubt the constant drumbeat from the NRA and Fox that the government wants to take weapons from Americans, to deprive us of our rights.

It is curious, that this one amendment to the Constitution, about citizens and weapons, seems supreme above all in some circles.

The people of Wisconsin have found out the true nature of the people they elected to state office last November, they have learned how the people they voted for, or didn't vote for, for all intents and purposes, flat-out lied about their plans for the state and its people.

Wisdom comes to us from 2 sources: Actual Experience and Communicated Experience.

I hope this election tomorrow shows the rest of us how to take back our society from elements among us who do not have the best interests of our country at heart.

Go Wisconsin!