Publisher’s Note: Welcome aboard the new, improved and more secure ZG. As the years have moved forward, the site has become subject to a variety of mishaps and attacks on occasion. I’ve updated and secured the site on a far more robust server.
Still working on getting the forum linked up and synched. Digital Ocean has been an expensive curse and I highly recommend if you use them, abandon them immediately.
Forum is still down right now.
On 7 July, we celebrated our ninth year and 482 posts after being excommunicated by Lew Rockwell at LRC in that same year. I still wish Lew the best and you should make LRC a daily sojourn.-BB
In July, I briefed a presentation to an academic society annual symposium in Kalifornia. I am a co-chair of the Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Working Group in the organization.
Here’s the abstract:
Sisyphus Rules: The Antifragility of the Insurgency Enterprise *
Operations research needs to acquaint itself with the limits of modeling and the pitfalls of insufficient and misguided asymmetrical evidentiary bars. The West has been combating insurgencies of one stripe or another for hundreds of years and it has occupied center stage in all military efforts in the new century. The insurgency and counterinsurgency (COIN) dialectic provides a scheme t o map the strengths and weaknesses of the intersection of the two methodologies. Historically, the insurgency has been much more adaptive to COIN efforts and overcoming the conflict dynamics to favor strategic compression on the part of the insurgent. The COIN calculations tend to be wildly optimistic unmatched by concomitant success once committed.
This brief will discuss how the adoption of antifragility models to template insurgency dynamics will reveal the high costs and unexpected pitfalls for COIN practitioners more realistically and template a holistic map of insurgency behavior and dynamics.
My brief is dead simple, Western notions of COIN are not only ineffective but tend to have a negative effect on everything the country intends on doing by floating a police state death star above the invaded country. And everything the empire does abroad it will bring home.
I highly recommend Douglas Porch’s magisterial study of COIN. He punctures every illusion and trope that the Western armed forces have trotted out for a hundred years.
Perhaps the most painful truth is that in COIN, “protecting the populace” does not mean what it implies, that is, tending to civilians with the care a shepherd gives his flock. “Protection and isolation of the population from the insurgents usually boiled down to campaigns of counter-terror that included internment without trial, torture, deportation, creating refugee tsunamis, or curfew and concentration camp lockdowns supplemented by calorie control” (328), Porch accurately notes. These uses of force include “assassination, rape, destitution, internment, and intimidation with the goal of depriving the resistors of their support base and indeed of any reason to go on living” (21). It is not meeting popular needs that defeats insurgencies, Porch argues; “Better strategies, leadership, coercion, and contingent circumstances in their variety, not popular support, determined victory in small wars/insurgencies” (303).
Take notes and remember that the US has yet to win a conflict since the end of the War to Save Josef Stalin.
Resist. Rinse. Repeat.
* Here’s the presentation: SR3
Hi Bill,
Why were you booted from LRC? I read it daily but have grown a little disillusioned over the last year or so with it. They seem to be supporting Trump or at the least providing him cover. Nice new site. Hope to read more posts from you.
David
Pingback: Zero Gov 2.0 | Western Rifle Shooters Association
Nice new look, Brother! Miss the cactus, tho!!
Tom762
What is happening with your book, The Cancer Club? The chapters you posted previously were excellent. Will it be completed/published soon?
I second the query…
Bill the only thing that you have neglected is that God is in control and He is getting ready to wrap things up according to His plan. We may have to fight a battle but the outcome is already in the Book. Those accountable To their Creator WIN. Those who will be as the most High lose FOREVER. The solutions guy is just about ready to show up.
God, there is no God here. There are Gods here.
“I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century; 800 years ago the Norwegians were still worshippers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways.”
– Thomas Carlyle
“Against stupidity, even the gods are powerless.”
-Friedrich von Schiller
I agree, the religions of our ancestors before the introduction, of the you’ll get yours after you’re dead, AKA Christianity were much more in line with our culture and our mindset. While I have Christian family and friends I would rather be in Valhalla than their heaven.
“God is in control”
So what do you do with your time? Even more puzzling, why?
Bill, the scroll-wheel function seems to be broken on this site – it’s the opposite of “smooth scrolling”, huge jerks in the text. This is annoying because I normally use the scroll wheel to read longer articles..
I am running Firefox on Ubuntu.
At your suggestion, I’ve purchased the mentioned book. Would you consider commenting on Kil Cullen’s works,
AccidentalGuerrilla.
Out of the Mountains.
Also
War of the Flea.
I’m putting my winters reading projects together, have all of David K’s stuff, looking for more material.
Frankly I’m having problems grasping this 4th gen warfare. Modeling of,,,,,,,Moral, ethical, legal warfare.
“Feel good Warfare, is justified by the winners. I’m trying hard to objectively grasp their theory, frankly I don’t know that I could ever embrace, not fucking the enemy up, any way possible.
Have a good one.
Dirk
Dirk,
Kilcullen has important things to say about conflict ethnography and I pay attention because I consider myself an amateur conflict anthropologist. His Anglophile tendencies in assessing British COIN historiography leave a lot to be desired. The British in all their war-fighting prevail in spite of their best efforts since the end of the 19th century.
War of the Flea: Taber is dull and windy, he is a commie but you can draw lessons from him in reverse. He occasionally has good things to say: Follow the pattern in pp 80- 82. The French in Vietnam followed the “oil-slick pattern” – they held the crossroads and towns, the perceived places of strength, but the Viet Minh had no need for roads or towns: they won the people. Kilcullen would borrow some of these concepts for his oilspot notions.
Bill.
Thank You,
Dirk
@Jay…Non-sequitur sprinkled with Pascal’s Wager
Looks great, but it looks like your Contact button at the top is not in the right frame, it floats outside the black menu bar at the top so it overlays text in the main body. Also, you may want to consider an SSL cert that is issued from a reputable Certificate Authority like DigiCert, GoDaddy, VeriSign, or Amazon if you are hosting there. Thanks for all your hard word, always a good read and I fully agree.
Devin,
I will get after that.
Bill
Hurry up with the forum, Bill. I have many bellies to jiggle and ears to delight.
Cheers bro……..
I would also like to add-
Many respects to ML. Glad to have known you. Sad that you’re gone. Happy that your agony is over.
DD/DL
Still working it, will alert when active again.
Damnit, I hate to hear that. So long ya feisty spirit.
I understand you don’t have the resources they do, but it might put a burr under your saddle to know the government typically strives for five-nines reliability. That means they don’t tolerate their sites/networks being down more than about 5 minutes a year.
I don’t have the resources to ensure that kind of reliability.
Ask, and you just might receive.
I know amigo. I was just letting you know a couple of things: 1) There are fanboyz of your forum eagerly awaiting it’s reopening, and 2) There’s probably a point or two for the AAR I know you’ll do.
I don’t know the circumstances, but had I known you were gonna make the transition, I could have offered some advice. Real-time migrations are tricky. Maybe the old host was crappy enough that they didn’t offer you many options or time to plan properly, in which case this post is moot.
-B
I suspect any COIN actions against patriotic traditional western Christian Liberty orientated FreeFor upon our sovereign soils is by default incapable of the ideal of Hearts & Minds COIN. How can such actions originating from the statist-quo’s intent on retaining raw naked power, especially running military based police actions against American who are defending their primal rights and freedoms, be anything by illegitimate to begin with?
A stupid question?
No. Not if you think about it like this: Essential the only people involved in COIN scenario against sovereign Americans, are going to be anyone not Patriotic in FreeFor heart and mind.
And that’s the thing. Its all about hearts and minds far as an insurgency based in preserving its God given natural liberty. You are either with this movement or against it. There is no middle ground. Even passive middle ground is a non starter, because that is ripe for abuse by COIN, its provides tacit consent. ( remember, totalitarianism depends on making all possible afraid of resisting, hence all who do resist then stick out like a sore thumb, making them easier to be gone after, or wither on the vine).
I can say for myself, and this I rich fertile ground for the heart and mind: I’ll be damned if another man is going to die defending my liberty, my family property and culture, my legacy as a Freeman, if for no other reason, the negative of the above is how we got into this fucking disaster of epic proportions to begin with by failing to think thusly.
Just as TINVOWOOT, because voting was never intended to get us out of anything, it was to avoid and keep us from having to try to vote our way out of this to begin with.
Still, no matter what COIN, on sovereign soil, is the ultimate in oxymoron’s. Its weak link, its soft underbelly, and ripe for exploitation. Again, its hearts and minds. Winning the minds is science, winning the hearts is art. FreeFor has to do 3 things right. Garner populist support. It needs logistics, materiel support, and moral support of a population that wants to win freedom too.
Fight to live to fight another day and so on. It only requires the appearance of not loosing, for by going up against the leviathan it wins support, because it is the indomitable underdog thing, Americans love so much.
And last but not least, FreeFor must hold territory, this is where all the elements above come together, and create a Winning Insurgency, even if it is a Mexican standoff, for FreeFor, it is winning liberty, against tyranny. In this sense COIN starts at a disadvantage. 4th Generation War is as much about actual combat and warfare, as it is about the political part of 4th GW. Its very important to season tactics and strategy, of appearances, for FreeFor to understand culture is upstream of politics, and politics is the art of war by other means than Arms.
Again, its hearts and minds. No matter what, everything in 4th Gen War is about hearts and minds then its about fighting.
This I where COIN is at an extreme disadvantage, because COIN against FreeFor on sovereign dirt peoples soil, is an extreme reaction by the statist-quo to legitimate primal naturally lawful resistance to tyranny.
In simple terms, to run COIN operations, it isn’t FreeFor who will be volunteering as combat and support cadre. It most likely, be populated and overseen by some pretty bad characters, who are willing to go against the basic natural freedoms of everyday Americans. Even depopulating a given area by asking real sweet like, the community to leave hearth and home, and politely set up in well run camps, is a non starter but for the brain dead and resistance is futile crowd. And what about the little totalitarians among us, the useful dupes, will they be carefully selected out for benign or special favored treatment? That’s not “good optics” as the last regime of the swamp would spin it. Everything the COIN operators do involves hearts and minds. How can they possibly keep from creating deep resentments, create even more FreeFor resistors to tyranny?
If this shit drops in the pot, and COIN operations take place, its gonna be a fucking meat grinder. And COIN along with every other police state actor, will be sticking their dicks in that meat grinder. What about protecting their assets, people, organizations, the timely dependable services and materiel required to run a police state that alienates a plurality of very pissed of dirt people coming for them with a bone in its teeth. Talking about tens of millions of superbly equipped small unit infantry civilian fighters, and who knows how many FreeFor saboteurs and agent provocateurs with an axe to grind?
Any COIN or police state operations already are at an extreme disadvantage politically before they begin.
We haven’t even talked about how the statist-quo affords such expensive labor intensive operations. And that statist-quo, they themselves, in 4th Gen War, are most suitable targets also. It I them who sponsor finance and sanction COIN with immunity to come to our back yards and kill everything we love.
Alls fair in Love & War my friends.
And paybacks a fucking Bitch.
BFYTW
Then there’s the idiots called the neo-bolsheviks and their army of diversity. These human extinction movement retards are talking all kinds of smack about after they finish punching all the fascists in the nose in the urban and metro centers of marxian paradise, they are coming for us white Nazi racist trailer trash out in fly over nation.
Now, not for nothing, don’t know about you all, but here in beautiful West by God Virginia, they try that crap with my family friends tribe and community, we will bury them in these mountains, only the trees will know where the bones lie.
See, there ain’t no Fort Sumter’s this time, this ain’t you great Yankee grand dads Civil war of aggression. This is now, the land of the leaderless resistance, because a common dirt people armed and with an ax to grind, a bone in our teeth, in these mountains, we all are on the same page. There will not be a circular history of kill the Kulak in WV and a number of other Southern Rebel states, no Bolshevik revolution, it will be an extermination of a two legged disease.
Cross that Mason Dixon line again, and we are all Capt. John Mosby’s.
As fraught with disaster as these or any scenarios are, all along us freemen dirt people have only wanted to be left alone. Its not rocket science. Live and let live, family, tribe, community, its a beautiful culture, way of life, where you have others, and they your back, politely, with simple grace and providence. And the good Lords blessing.
But nothings ever enough, we, what we are, who we are, our legacy, our traditions long learned, and hard won, it all must be destroyed.
Well, you clowns started it, you can’t leave well enough alone, and now its our deaths you crave, the genocide of everything we love, as you have boasted non stop, you despise us, for what we are.
That makes this a war of extermination. Only one side can exist.
Careful what you wish for.
People as us, our tolerance is not a sign of our weakness, just the opposite.
The question which nobody has an answer for, is what after?
If all this blood and treasure comes to be spilled, what do we do? What Zeitgeist do we fulfill? After such a Paradigm, how do we avoid repeating what we originally tried not to repeat?
Is it as Montesquieu stated about the size of the state determines its character and politics, its system of governance? Is it The Compact of Confederation this time with no sacred parchment of centralism, when all we wanted was Liberty? After all, The Compact theory was functional, and why Philadelphia in the first place, to iron out certain aspects of the Confederation that require fixing, and not this horrid parchment and the conspiracy which foisted it for “ratification”, of every thing which had been fought so desperately against by such an amazing plurality.
If all this ages crap comes to pass in some version, which who knows what transpires, and by some providence, we are given a second opportunity that comes only once in a human millennium if at all, is it truly the spirit of hearts and minds which do the said impossible, as in such things where the impossible, which we seem squeak thru some how, making the impossible only the beginning?
Is it things really could not happen any other way? That its Legacy Bitchez!, and we come out the other side, better, wiser, free as we hope for, that this is a natural stage of The 5000 Year Leap, necessary to us to learn the wisdom required to move on, to further the legacy and history our founders foresaw?
Its impossible for me to see in my minds eye and in my heart, considering all the above and more, that the dissolution of the grand thing called Liberty is only a 250 year flash in the pan.
I think when the Genie of Liberty was let out, there was no outing it back. That The 5000 Year Leap, was in fact the natural progression through history to that point in time, the natural product of the ages preceding it. And, that what we face now, is another stage in that history. Natural order of Liberty and the people of it. In the final equation, nothing grew and good as Liberty and its people is ever was, or not fraught with trial and tribulation. It must be hard won to be properly appreciated and defended.
That all this is the perpetual war between good and evil.
That nothing can take the place of perseverance, of that most important thing prudence, that indomitable will, and withdrawal of Consent are the most powerful weapons ever devised against human evil.
That we are forearmed with knowledge of how evil has attempted to undermine Liberty, and armed by the grace of God, we go, to defend ourselves, our freedoms, as no race of Men of The West before, or possibly, armed as no people, which is the next 5000 Year Leap.
That it all comes down to guns, that guns in our hands will be decisive in the next stage of Liberty.
That we are armed so for no light and frivolous reasons.
That prudence and our tolerance mentioned so profoundly in that amazing document of We Won’t!, The DOI, we have held our temper for good and proper moral reasons.
That once pushed past our tolerance for tyranny, once released from our prudence, we become the most fearsome foe imaginable.
That we stop only when we decide to stop, and nothing else.
That that sounds like us who love Liberty more than ourselves.
That we Win.
It’s unfortunate that the comment policy on the blog here is so much different than the forums. For instance, here I can’t say that this is incoherent blabber, speak of the poster’s questionable heritage and/or mental state, and post some funny pictures to that end.
No, I must entertain this nonsense with polite point-by-point debate, which I started to do, but then thought better of it as I realized the poster has no point. Also, I was enumerating logical fallacy number 4 when I realized I was only 2 sentences into the posters Great Wall of Text.