Publisher’s Note: I have said that a complete elimination of all government funding K-PhD is the only way to eradicate communist ideology being the ascendant creed in the 21st century. Now Project Veritas has found more of the usual ideological thuggery that is the bread and butter of American politics among Comrade Sanders’ campaign staff. Please very carefully consider when you think you want to send your urchins to college; use this data. For most non-STEM majors, they will be morally crippled for life.
The distillate of the woke nonsense, the new communist momentum and the Democrat party is based entirely on the appropriation and transfer of other people’s wealth and labor to politically connected privilege groups from the nomenklatura to the usual suspects whose pigmentation and groin tackle find favor with the new masters.
Some claim we live in a kakocratic society, one whose rulers are the worst people, the shit people; there is no doubt that has been the case since the end of the War Between the States. When you look at the psychotic scum that is the sum of everything in America’s political class, you know what is attracted to it.
Buppert’s Corollary to Acton: “Power attracts the corruptible and absolute power attracts even worse.”
This blog is not a political blog, it realizes that all political action is simply seeking to eliminate cannibals by eating them.
Per the essay below, I highly recommend the interview with Dr. Codevilla by a typical smarmy communist where he rhetorically dismembers the interviewer (David Samuels) in rich and gory detail.
Pay very close attention to the Brexit dialog, it is a smaller operatic analog of secession in America now and in the future.
Here’s a brilliant supposition of the core of tyranny:
“The prime object of totalitarian government thus becomes the incessant destruction of all evidences of spontaneous, autonomous association. For, with this social atomization, must go also a diminution of intensity and a final flickering out of political values that interpose themselves between freedom and despotism.”
Have you been to the range?
355 shopping days until the next master shuffles onto the veranda n the Offal Office. -BB
“A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them that which they possessed, to see those whom they cherished in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms [aka rape with the man often forced to watch the initial violent rape before being killed].”
– Ghengis Khan [not Conan the Barbarian]
“Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat for it is momentary.” (Satyagraha Leaflet No. 13, 3 May 1919)”
―“Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” [News conference, April 21 1961]
―
I have been a reader of Angelo Codevilla for years, he is one of the few sober defense intellectuals like Bacevich. The rest have no strategic depth and tend to think solely in terms of hardware calculus much like the coindinistas that have haunted the Pentagram for most of this century with their failed recipes for military conflict. Codevilla is also one of the voices in the defense community who has lobbied for an active defense of the continental United States for decades.
He just penned a scintillating and for me, knowing him, predictable essay that calls out the latest fads in anticipating near-peer and peer threats emerging on the world stage. Keep in mind that the US has tens of trillions of dollars to create a military that can’t protect the homeland nor Alaska and the various US island protectorates globally, it has never defeated an insurgency outside of CONUS and since, 1980 has fielded weapons systems that simply don’t work. Exhibit is the USS Ford which can nether reliably launch nor retrieve aircraft even the subsonic and chronically broken F35.
The graf:
What forces against what, where, to do what, is the nub of the military matter. The Chinese and Russians, respectively, have good strategic, operational, and tactical answers. The U.S. side does not.
Read the whole thing.
I am surprised the Claremont Institute would publish this, they tend to be the clearinghouse for neoconservative militancy and possess an almost sexual attraction to all things Comrade Abraham Lincoln.
I tend to write solely on irregular warfare but have strayed on occasion to address the perils of modern “unified land operations” which do contain components of littoral and strategic airlift to close on distant theaters of war in a bid to replicate the complete global mobilization of military power like the War to Save Josef Stalin.
Dr. Codevilla remains one of the few global military thinkers popular in the media. Like Andrew Bacevich, he finds himself in a very small coterie of observers willing to claim the American military is a hollowed out and ineffective force. There is a reason the Pentagram has not won a conflict since 1945.
The keenest advantage China and Russia have lies in their abject disinterest in global military conquest or hegemony and a concentration on regionalized hegemony that makes all of their military goals realistic especially since both nations possess the requisite throw weight of nuclear munitions via IRBMs and ICBMs to deter any possible conventional advantage the US and its erstwhile allies may think they have.
While the Chinese may possibly be able to erect a thin phalanx of protective anti-aircraft/ missile defense along their entire Pacific seaboard, the US would be lucky to defend a sliver of San Diego county with all available THAADS and Patriot batteries in the entire US inventory hoping that they could be synchronized to the appropriate detection and cuing radar sets to make the missiles lethal by linking to rational targeting.
The cutting-edge SAM (Surface to Air Missile) batteries in the Russian inventory afford them a like capability in defending threatened border spaces against aerial threats. The obscenely financed Pentagon has chosen to completely ignore passive and active defense of the homeland and American states and territories outside CONUS. Witness the mad rush to find something, anything to protect US ground forces from the emerging air threat. The last time a US ground pounder was killed by enemy air was 15 April 1953 on the Korean Peninsula (by a biplane no less).
The hubris and complacency that has informed the operational decisions to totally ignore aerial threats to American forces and the homeland will be a fundamental mistake that will prove deadly in the next generation.
The US has stomped around the planet so often in so many ill-conceived neo-imperialist shit-pits, the number of enemies groomed and queued up are legion. The bottom line is you can’t defeat mature nuclear-tipped nations with conventional forces. Nor a nuclear geopolitical tennis match, everyone loses.
The future near-peer and peer threats will revolve around three rather singular technologies: unmanned vehicles from mud to space, hyper velocity munitions and autonomous targeting properly aligned to munition sets. America’s perceived threats are ahead in every respect. In the end, technology can be a swansong that seems a panacea for all military problems, asymmetric warfare will prove otherwise. Please take note of the reading I provided in the previous essay to this one. A revolution, argues a German historian, is “a local event with a claim to universal validity”.
In a conventional conflict in this century, the US will have its profound Battle of Tsushima. What was the worst defeat inflicted by the United States? The 400-year genocidal war (1492, when Columbus “discovered” the Americas, to 1890, the “Battle” of Wounded Knee) fought first by Europeans and, after 1783, by the United States against aboriginal American tribes. The was not the agent of defeat in any of history’s greatest routs:
- the Battle of Cannae (216 BC);
- the Battle of Trafalgar (1805);
- the Battle of Waterloo (1815);
- the Battle of Tsushima (1905); and
- the Battle of Stalingrad (1943).
Of course, 35-37 million dead at the hands of Mongol invaders is nothing to sneeze at.
More wrinkles will emerge I can’t even extrapolate on but imagine a world where regardless of past history, all politicians are eminently targetable as combatants in direct correlation to deployed soldiers; imagine the calculus for the most cowardly and corrupt humans in the history of mankind, the violence brokers themselves.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading the “Journal of Military History” published by the Society for Military History (a dying profession) you are missing out. I have every quarterly issue from 1990 to 2017 and use them often for reading and research. Best book reviews on Earth.
Ouch, Bill, I gotta believe in something, so I’m taking the United States for three thousand.
My shoot partner, also retired Col, SF with 26 years active, has told me oooo a thousand times were a paper tiger, as you state. John also tells me often we will see armed conflict with China in our life time. How exciting is that. ” more likely sea battles” I guess CONUS is a possible.
My town is the RAG for worldwide F-15 aircraft training, also a Shuttle alt site, with a long runway.
Many locally see saftey with these 30/40 fighters here. I see a big fat bullseye.
I have no illusions of who exactly will be fighting for our nation on US soil should it come to that. But I see that enemy as not Chinese or Russian, but American socialist/communist. In my minds eye the left is by far the most likely encounter.
Va, was an example. We have talked and postured until we’re blue in the face, what did 22/25 thousand men all gussied up in there killer kit achieve. NADA!. If what I’m reading is accurate, Va pumping out gun bills like the hospital delivery room pumps kids out.
Here in Oregon we will be crossing this bridge in 2021, when our legislature reconvenes. Tic Toc.
Good stuff as usual. Was beginning to wonder if you had gone fishing.
Dirk
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When you look at it from a different perspective, the Bolshevik side, it’s not about saving the USA, but rather how much money can be made from this project, this conflict, and how long can we drag it out and still turn a good profit?
The masses are asleep at the wheel, and in denial of who’s really driving.
Re: “If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading the “Journal of Military History” published by the Society for Military History (a dying profession)…”
Take it from one has been inside the wire, so to speak, of academic history departments: The death of military history has not been a natural one. It was killed by the Cultural Marxists. Too many white-skinned traditional males good at it – so it was purged from curricula and faculty lounge alike. Outside of the military-defense community academic/professional mill, there are few four-year universities or graduate schools that offer the study of military history as a major field. Ohio State University and a few others come to mind. Even if one succeeds in finding a program and gets a Ph.D. in the field, good luck getting a job. Unless you are a diversity hire, and even then prospects are lean.
Which is why many – perhaps even most – of the high-quality scholarship in the various fields of military history is being done by gifted amateurs, and not pros.
It goes without saying that if our institutions of higher education, so called, are not turning out military historians, that there is also a dearth of instructors and classes in it at the K-12 level.
The next war will be decided by how much 1940’s (pre-microchip) tech .can be dragged out of the boneyards of the world and put back into service. “High tech” weapons will have no place on the battle field after the first EMP. The winning side will be the ones with the whit and ability to field P-51’s .155 MM field guns. and M-1 rifles. Everything built after 1960 will be useless billion dollar scrap.
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I found your comments amusing. Considering most of the wars waged in the early 20th century by the US were low intensity type conflicts throughout the war and all concluded successfully I wonder why you said we never won any? Even the late lamented war in Vietnam was won militarily before being tossed away by a bunch of knee walking turkeys. I suspect the wars in the Middle East will have a far worse ending considering this generations turkeys have been genetically modified into monsters.
Our weapons systems while not perfect have consistently outperformed those of Russia and the PRC. So much so that they engage in huge efforts to obtain those secrets. One doubts they do so because these systems are laughable.
The Chinese build up will undoubtedly prove to be much like that of the Soviets in the 70s and 80s when they the touted as being 16 foot tall. Unfortunately they had feet of clay and their systems had unfortunate habits of being inferior in every imaginable way. Of course in the 70s the MIG-25 was cited as proof positive of Soviet technology being superior until one fell into our hands. Today what do we see that demonstrates our enemies have developed superior tactics and methods?
China cannot control its population. Russia’s economy is broken. Our greatest enemy are a political class that is determined to treat illegals better than native Americans while shipping out economy overseas so long as they can collect 10% seller’s fee.
America may have its problems but those of China dwarf America by several magnitudes. And if a conflict does occur I would not want to be the Chinese. As for the Russians, I would not want to be Putin.