Unavailable Options

As I’ve said before and will probably say again, I support President Trump’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and President Biden in carrying that decision through.  Our withdrawal should have taken place 60 to 90 days after we first entered, but better late than never.  We could stay one hundred years and Afghanistan would remain what it is.

On the other hand, the conduct of our withdrawal has been a mortifying mess.  Yesterday we lost thirteen American servicemen dead and more wounded, doing what the U.S. military does so well: occupy fixed positions, follow predictable routines and get surprised when an enemy walks through the door we leave wide open.  The military responds, “What other options did we have?  All we hold is the airport, we have to defend that and try to get Americans and Afghan allies out through it.  We have no option other than being sitting ducks.”

In fact, there were options and there should have been more.  The first and most important was at the strategic level.  As soon as the Biden administration decided to follow through with President Trump’s decision to leave, it should have sent a loud, clear message to the Taliban that we will leave only on our own terms.  Those terms should have been, first, a “decent interval” of perhaps a few months before the Taliban took Kabul.  I’m well aware we did not expect the Afghan government and army to collapse as quickly as they did, but that possibility should have been recognized early in our planning.  Quisling regimes seldom last very long after the occupying Power that created them leaves, and Afghans are well practiced at going over to the winning side as soon as one is clear.

Second, we should have told the Taliban our timetable will be determined by us, not by them.  We have the power to do that, and it made little sense for the Taliban to fight us when we were leaving. 

Third, -- and this remains an option even after our debacle -- we should have offered the Taliban an alliance against ISIS-K.  Unofficially, U.S. forces have already acted in support of Taliban troops fighting ISIS, primarily with intel and air strikes.  ISIS-K is the most dangerous enemy the Taliban faces because the Islam it promotes is more “pure,” which is to say brutal and, in terms of governing a country, unworkable.  An alliance with the Taliban against ISIS-K would serve the interests of both parties, would have given us an orderly and even “friendly” withdrawal and probably would not have left us with thirteen dead and more, I fear, to come.

This strategic option was not recognized by the Biden Administration because the Washington foreign policy elite cannot think in these terms.  Nothing ends the career of one of those tuft-hunters and yes-men faster than being accused of “realism.”  Now our troops and our country pay the price.

If the striped-pants set blew it at the strategic level, the military failed to see much less grab an option at the tactical and possibly operational levels.  Imagine, for a moment, that our six thousand troops in Kabul were not American but rather belonged to the Wehrmacht or the pre-1967 IDF.  Would they have simply sat on an airfield waiting for it to hatch while the Taliban dictated what we could and could not do?  Either one would have taken Kabul from the Taliban in a matter of hours, and, this time bottom-up rather than top down, dictated to them how and when we would leave.

That tactical option, once exercised, would have opened up the possibilities of operational maneuver.  All over urban Afghanistan, young Afghan males are appalled at the prospect of being governed by a bunch of illiterate hicks with bushy beards and AKs.  The Taliban’s victory is shallow: they beat the Afghan army, which had not been paid in months, so most did not fight, but they did not conquer Afghanistan.  Ethnic rivalries are already surfacing, which, added to urban insurrections, could roll the Taliban back.  Suppose our Wehrmacht or IDF forces took Kabul, passed out rifles and RPGs to all the young men who now see their freedom gone and then moved on to retake other Afghan cities the same way and create anti-Taliban militias?  They would still withdraw from Afghanistan, but they would have left behind what we should have left in a post-60 or 90- day withdrawal: a new government in Kabul and an Afghan civil war that would keep the Taliban busy for a long, long time.

Unfortunately, while the Wehrmacht and the IDF had the ability to adapt quickly and sometimes radically to new situations, the U.S. armed forces do not.  They remain stuck in the Second Generation of modern war, which means nothing can be done but through elaborate, time-consuming processes.  They could no more turn our humiliating withdrawal at Taliban sufferance into a victory that they could win the Fourth Generation war in Afghanistan we fought for twenty years.  Until someone with authority figures out that Second Generation armed forces are useful only for parades and air shows, and demands real military reform, we will continue to get our butts kicked.  And, as in this case, both the civilian and the military leadership, if we can call it that, will be to blame.

Nominalism and the Defeat of Afghanistan

Republicans are trying to blame President Biden for the defeat in Afghanistan while Democrats are pointing to President Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban as the cause.  In fact, a Taliban victory became inevitable when, early in the war, the U.S. expanded its objectives from driving out or killing al Qaeda to turning Afghanistan into a modern, secular democracy.  That objective was unattainable no matter what we did.  If we want to blame Presidents, the culprits are the idiot George W. Bush and the empty suit Barack Obama.  The first allowed the mission creep and the second presided over its continuation, content to kick the can down the road.  It is to the credit of both Biden and Trump that, after nineteen years of failure, they made and stuck with the decision to pull the plug.

But how could the whole Washington defense and foreign policy establishment get it so wrong?  One answer is that, if you want to become and remain a member of the establishment, you must never make waves.  Since almost all the people in question want to be something, not do something, they follow that rule regardless of where it leads.  A defeat in war is but a small matter when compared to a risk to their careers.

Another answer is that members of the establishment are almost all nominalists.  That is to say, if they give something a name, it takes on real existence in their minds.  The Afghan National Army offers a perfect example.  Because we called it an army, gave it lots of American money, equipment and training, and knew its order of battle, it was an army.  But it wasn’t.  Apart from a few commando units, it was a ragtag collection of men who needed jobs and had little or no interest in fighting.  Those men seldom saw their pay, because it was stolen before it reached them.  Rations and ammunition often suffered the same fate.  That army collapsed overnight because it never really existed outside the minds of establishment nominalists. 

That same nominalism applied to the entire Afghan government.  Washington nominalists thought it was real; Afghans knew it was not.  A Marine battalion commander just back from Afghanistan put it best.  He said, “Talking to a 14th century Afghan villager about the government in Kabul is like talking to your cat about the dark side of the moon.  You don’t know what it’s like and he doesn’t care.”

We see nominalism running all through American policy-making.  Washington nominalists think Iraq is a state.  It isn’t, because real power is in the hands of ethnic and religious militias.  The state is merely a facade, but since it has a parliament, elections, cabinet ministers, etc. it is real to nominalists.  Not surprisingly, our policy there has been a series of disasters ever since the initial disaster of invading the place.

The Washington elite’s nominalism is not restricted to foreign policy.  It looks at the U.S. military the same way.  If you call something an army, it must be able to fight, even though you have filled its ranks with women, made promotion depend on Political Correctness rather than military ability and given it bureaucrats for generals.  When it loses a war, as it just did in Afghanistan, it must be a matter of bad luck.  The fact that it ceased to be a real army decades ago is not recognized.

The Washington establishment’s civilians have been soaking in nominalism ever since they began their “education” at various elite institutions.  Woe to any who pointed out that the U.N. has proven worthless in one crisis after another, that our “democratic” allies are all really oligarchies or that “human rights” vary enormously in their definition from one culture and people to another.  To call an entity a state or an army or a democracy means it magically becomes one.  And the magical thinking that dominates the establishment’s picture of the world leads to repeated debacles from which it learns nothing.

A return to reality from nominalism can only occur when the whole establishment is replaced.  We just watched that happen in Afghanistan with stunning speed.  I suspect that the American establishment’s collapse will be equally fast once it starts.

Mars Ascendant

By “Mars Ascendant,” I do not mean the little green men who pole their gondolas along the planet’s peaceful canals are about to invade and conquer earth.  I refer to a different Mars, Mars the god of war.  I think he is about to take a prominent place in the history of this country.

In most segments of the American right, I find a sense that a reckoning is coming.  The enemy is cultural Marxism, the ideology that is driving hard to put an end to Americans’ freedom of thought and expression.  Anyone accused of “racism, sexism, or homophobia” is to become an “unperson,” fired from their job, unemployable in their profession, thrown out of their school, unpublished, unmentionable.  Their number includes everyone who voted for Donald Trump, anyone who does not prostrate himself before cultural Marxism’s “victim” groups, anybody who does not hate Western Culture, the Christian Religion, the white race, males, and straights.  Last time I counted, that’s quite a number of people.  Most of them know how to shoot.

The cause of our coming civil war will be cultural Marxism.  But, as in many wars, the trigger may be something else.  I have expected a financial collapse to be the trigger, a financial collapse proceeding from the Fed’s mad money creation.  That still may be the case.  But something new is showing on the political horizon, something likely to make many people on the right wonder if they have enough ammunition: a national mandate that everyone get a COVID-19 vaccine shot.

I am not an anti-vaxxer.  I got my two shots (Moderna) as soon as I could.  I urge everyone who has not been vaccinated to get their shots soon.  We’ll all have large green horns growing out of our foreheads by Christmas, and they’ll be festive.

But the vaccine is not what’s at stake here.  What’s at stake is whether the elites who are trying to force cultural Marxism down our throats will succeed in doing so with the COVID vaccine.  Because if they can do it with the one, they can do it with the other.  AND IT’S THE SAME PEOPLE PUSHING BOTH!  That’s the issue, and that’s what the elites don’t get but ordinary Americans do.

The establishment is moving towards a vaccine mandate in its usual way, by having its pimps puff the idea in the usual places.  According to a thoughtful article opposing mandates in the Sunday, August 8 Cleveland Plain Dealer, by Taylor Dotson and Nicholas Tampio, the Washington Post’s Max Boot, previously best known as a neo-clown howler for the Iraq war, is now pushing a vaccine mandate, writing “Stop pleading with anti-vaxxers and start mandating vaccinations.”  The Pentagon has just announced a vaccine mandate for all U.S. military personnel.  Many states and cities will mandate vaccination for their First Responders, if not for all employees. 

But as Dotson and Tampio write,

If this rhetoric and these efforts lead to a de facto national vaccine mandate, it will backfire: Americans from all walks of life resist being told what to put into their bodies, and many will resent any politician of institution that makes them get vaccinated, creating a crisis of legitimacy. . .

As I have written many times, Fourth Generation war is above all else a contest for legitimacy.  A state which has already brought its legitimacy into question by attempting to force an alien and destructive ideology on its citizens has little ground left to give before it finds itself standing on thin ice.  Millions of Americans who have already been told they are “unpersons” will not only resent the people and institutions behind a vaccine mandate, they will resist them.

Dotson and Tampio hit on the central issue when they write,

Researchers have found that in some cases, vaccine resistance can be an expression of what the New York Times described as an ingrained “moral preference for liberty and individual rights.”

It is precisely that “moral preference for liberty” that America was founded on.  It runs deep in the blood and soil of the Heartland, that vast geographic portion of the map painted red in both 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections.  Americans have the right to reject the vaccine just as they have the right to believe, say and write that races are different, the two sexes are different, sex outside marriage is sinful and Christianity is the only wholly true religion.  They have the right to do and say these things without being “canceled,” fired, arrested for “hate speech” or blackballed in their chosen field by a left-wing McCarthyism that makes the original version seem like small potatoes.

Heartland Americans believe these rights are worth fighting for.  And so a vaccine for a not terribly dangerous disease may trigger a vast revolt, the revolt against cultural Marxism and all those institutions and people who seek to make it the replacement for liberty.  The revolt is coming; the only question is the trigger.  If a vaccine mandate does not trigger it, something else will.  Mars is in the ascendant.

The View From Olympus: Afghanistan

The United States has lost another Fourth Generation war.  To his credit, President Biden has stuck with President Trump’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan.  Will that mean the fall of the current Afghan government, a return to Kabul for the Taliban, and renewed civil war?  Of course.  That’s Afghanistan.  We could stay one hundred years in that wretched hellhole and nothing would change.

The astonishing thing is that we went there in the first place.  I was a Senate staffer on Capitol Hill when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.  Everyone was glum, expecting the Red Army to win a quick and easy victory.  I was exultant, because I knew the Soviets had just joined the tar baby in the briar patch.  I found it hard to believe Moscow would do anything so foolish and I was confident it would end badly for them.  And then, with the Soviet example staring us in the face, we made the same obvious blunder!  Why?

The first answer is that the Washington foreign policy establishment is willfully ignorant.  They know the history of places such as Afghanistan and the Balkans, but they don’t think it applies to them.  So they behave like bad children, doing whatever they want and leaving adults, in the form of the U.S. military, to clean up the mess.  Unfortunately, the senior military is also willfully ignorant, in their case of the fact that they lead a Second Generation military that is doomed to defeat in Fourth Generation wars.  So thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, we accept our inevitable defeat and go home with another loss on the board.

Why does it take us so long--twenty years in the case of Afghanistan--to admit defeat and go home?  Because both the civilian and senior military Washington establishment is made up almost exclusively of moral cowards.  Their focus is their personal careers, they got to the senior positions they occupy by avoiding decisions and passing every buck, and they don’t want to be the ones holding the bag for losing another war.  So they kick the can down the road, letting a lost war continue at vast human and financial cost.  Twenty years is a long time to be kicking the can.

We should have gotten out of Afghanistan no more than 90 days after we went in.  By that point, we had done all a foreign invader can do.  We had taken Kabul, thrown out the government we didn’t like, put a puppet government in its place and given it some money and weapons.  After that, if an invader stays he becomes everyone’s target.  Within those first three months we had also botched the chance we had to grab bin Laden, so that mission offered no justification to stay.  Again, the only reason we did so is moral cowardice in high places. 

That military failure points to the third reason we have scored another loss: military incompetence.  Osama was in the caves of Tora Bora when we tried to grab him there.  He escaped because the U.S. military does not know how to fight battles of encirclement.  It draws a line on a map with us on one side and the enemy on the other, then dumps vast quantities of firepower on their side of the line.  Such a reductionist approach to war has little chance of success unless the enemy must move while under fire, which in most cases he does not.

Generally, decisive success in battle requires either ambush or encirclement, not just a firepower dump.  The U.S. military makes few attempts to do either, and, as at Tora Bora, the few times it does attempt it the result is usually failure.

Dealing with these three causes of our repeated defeats in Fourth Generation war requires replacement of the existing Establishments, civilians and military.  They cannot be reformed; they are too far gone for that.  Replacement will come only from a national catastrophe severe enough to grab the public’s attention.  I suspect that lies just over the horizon.

The Last Woman

July 9, 2147: AP reported today that the last female human has died in her enclosure at the Philadelphia Zoo.  Her remains have been sent to a taxidermist, to be subsequently displayed in a glass case in the bar of the Union League Club, a la Jeremy Bentham.

The last woman’s passing marks a sad but inevitable milestone in the progress of mankind.  It is hard to grasp in this day and age, but just a few centuries ago the extinction of women would have been inconceivable.  It would have meant the end of the entire human race.  Men could only create progeny through a woman.  More, women played a multitude of vital roles in men’s lives, from providing sexual pleasure, through housekeeping, cooking, washing, and caring for children, to making certain the family had adequate food to get through the winter.  Men and women were as inseparable as fuel and fire.

What happened to bring such a change in the lives of men?  Two developments, both underway by the late 20th and early 21st centuries, set men on a course for a world without women.  The first was technological: it became possible to create babies outside wombs.  In vitro fertilization was the start.  Then came cloning.  It was no great step to making babies in bottles, just as in Brave New World (as prophetic a book as was ever written).  At the same time, progress in robotics gave men sexbots that delivered sexual pleasure beyond what women could provide while happily spending their days silent, in closets, until their services were desired.  While initially expensive, their life-cycle costs were small compared to those of a wife.

All this made a world without women possible.  But technology seldom determines the course of events alone.  Before the 21st century, women played a vast number of roles in mens’ lives, all complementary to the roles of men.  As the Victorian concept of “separate spheres” laid out, the woman created and ran the “higher sphere” of home and family, while the man had to go out into the world of work to provide the wherewithal to support that family.  When he returned home from the office or the mill, he entered into a delightful world of peace and plenty of beauty and gentleness, with a good dinner waiting for him on the table and a clean, ironed shirt for tomorrow hanging in his closet.  He knew he owed this delightful world to a woman, his wife.

Then, beginning in the 1960s, women in increasing numbers decided they wanted the life of a man.  This was feminism, an absurd notion that men and women were interchangeable.  From being helpmeets, women became men’s competitors.  Men found themselves working for women, taking orders from women (in the military!), and being accused by any woman they displeased of “sexual harassment”.  Worse, as women attempted to become men, women’s duties went undone.  Children were raised (badly) in daycare instead of in a home, meals went uncooked, houses unkept, clothes unwashed.  No-fault divorce turned marriage from a mutual benefit to a scheme for stripping a man of half his assets.  In movies and on television, petite, lovely women were regularly beating up big men. 

It was all flight from reality, and, for women, a journey to extinction.  As sex selection became the norm, people, including many women, selected more and more males.  This should not have been a surprise; it has been true throughout history.  When in the late 20th century China instituted a “one child” policy, the Chinese chose boys over girls two-to-one.  Now, all over the world, men could choose sons over daughters, and they did.

The feminists howled, of course, but they could not stop a train they had set in motion.  Bots replaced them not just for sex but for all the work women would no longer do.  Once again, men came home to clean houses, great meals, ironed shirts, and well-mannered sons.  What men had traditionally regarded as “girls’ stuff” was now “bots’ stuff”, at a lower price and with no headaches.

And so, like the Cheshire Cat, women slowly disappeared, leaving only the grin on the face of a bot.  The last woman’s passing was certain to come (her name seems to have been Mabel, but everyone called her ByEve).  It’s a man’s world now, where the fountains run with beer, endless free pizza is a birthright, and you can pee anywhere.  Do we miss them?  Nah.

Critical Race Theory

Across the country, grass roots resistance to “critical race theory” is growing, and that is a good thing.  But what is critical race theory and where did it come from?

At its core, critical race theory is the argument that all white people have an unjustified negative attitude towards blacks and some (not all) other races, which leads whites to treat blacks et. al. unfairly.  No white is exempt from this bias, and if they are to avoid being “racists”, they must be psychologically conditioned to mouth a set of lies about what evil people they are, grovel in the dirt before blacks, pay “reparations”, etc.  For blacks, it’s a racket, what Tom Wolfe called “mau-mauing the flack catchers.”  For black “leaders”, it’s a highly remunerative shakedown: pay me off or I’ll call you a racist.  It should be ridden out of every town and campus in America on a rail, wearing tar and feathers.

The question of where critical race theory came from points to a larger threat.  In a column in the June 3 Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger wrote,

Critical race theory refers to an idea that emerged some 40 years ago in academia.  The idea’s originators, most famously the late Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell, argues that “race” infuses virtually every aspect of American social reality.

Henninger is not wrong, but this history is incomplete.  Critical Race theory is a subset of Critical Theory, which was invented in the 1930s and ‘40s by the Frankfurt School, the group of Marxist intellectuals who created cultural Marxism, now most commonly known as “wokeness”.  Critical Theory quickly became one of the most important tools in their quest to destroy traditional society, Western culture, and the Christian religion.  The term “Critical Theory” is something of a play on words: the theory is to criticize, to damage and eventually destroy all traditional institutions by unremitting criticism. 

Critical race theory has already destroyed the generally functional relationships whites and blacks had developed in most of America, starting after the Civil War, and replaced them with a witches’ brew of black racial anger and growing white resentment that constitutes a dire threat to blacks, who are only a small minority (about 13%) of America’s population.  When a small minority of any country’s population becomes a threat to the majority, the minority’s future is uncertain.

To understand critical race theory within the context where it originated, the Frankfurt School’s translation of Marxism from economic into cultural terms, people need to learn more about Critical Theory and cultural Marxism generally.  A good place to start is a short video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, “The History of Political Correctness,” available on Youtube.  Another good introduction is a recent book I co-edited, Political Correctness: A Deceptive and Dangerous Worldview, published by the Nehemiah Institute and available on Amazon.  For those seeking in-depth knowledge of cultural Marxism, the definitive work is Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School.

I must note that the Left has taken to labelling my work on the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”.  They have called it that in a number of places, including in my biography on Wikipedia.  This is a lie.  First of all, it is not a theory, it is history, the history of the Frankfurt School, which is well-documented in an extensive academic literature.  Second, they call it “anti-Semitic” because I point out that the reason the Frankfurt School left Germany in 1933 and moved to New York was that all its members during its German phase were Jews, as Wiggershaus states.  Do you think Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 might have led Jews to leave Germany?  The move was of great significance for this country because had the Institute not moved to the U.S., its influence here today would probably be much smaller.  Third, the Frankfurt School had aspects of a conspiracy from the outset, often concealing its real objective and its Marxism; this was especially true during its New York phase.  Indeed, the Institution was originally to be named the Institution for Marxism, but instead chose the neutral-sounding name Institution for Social Research, again with the purpose of concealing its real nature.  If there is conspiracy here, it is theirs, not mine.  My pointing out that the Left is telling a lie about my work will not stop them, since everything they say is a lie, but it at least corrects the record (and might shame Wikipedia into not publishing the lie?).

Note:  My columns on Traditional Right will be on hiatus for a few weeks as we upgrade our steam plant.  We are installing a new, triple-expansion engine, putting in four high-pressure boilers and, to do our bit for the planet, converting from solar heating to coal.  The work should take about a month.

The View From Olympus: Groundhog Day in the Marine Corps

Over the past year or so, the Marine Corps Gazette has again become an important forum for debating maneuver warfare, a.k.a. Third Generation war.  That is to the good, and I am happy to participate, as I did in the first round of that debate in the 1970s and ‘80s.  The Gazette’s editor at the time, the late Col. John Greenwood, told me I wrote more for his publication over a twenty-year span than any other author. 

But what does it say about the state of intellectual life in the Marine Corps that it is again fighting over old ground, ground it traversed forty years ago?  The debate of those years culminated in the then-Commandant, General Al Grey, making maneuver warfare official Marine Corps doctrine.  So why is maneuver warfare the latest hot topic now?  How did the Marine Corps get caught in its own groundhog day?

Part of the answer is that the Marine Corps adopted maneuver warfare on paper but not in practice.  Beyond its doctrine manuals, it remains a Second Generation, French-model armed service: centralized, preferring obedience to initiative, depending on imposed rather than self-discipline, and inward focused: rules, processes, (highly specific) orders etc. are more important than getting the result the situation requires.  Tactics, to the degree they exist at all, consist of wandering around until Marines bump into an enemy, then calling in remote firepower.  Success is measured in attrition. 

A debate over why the Corps has failed to adapt to its own doctrine and how to fix that would be useful, and part of the discussion in the Gazette is on that subject.  But much of it just repeats what I and others were writing before most of today’s Marines were born.  That points to a second reason for the Corp’s groundhog day problem: most Marine officers now read little or nothing.  During General Gray’s Commandancy, reading and discussing serious books, books such as Martin Van Creveld’s Fighting Power that were and are directly relevant to the changes the Corps needs, were common activities among not only officers but NCOs and Staff NCOs.  Perhaps that is still true to some extent with the latter, but the officer corps seems to have left its brain at the hat check.

That is especially concerning because war has not stood still.  Since General Gray’s time, the Marine Corps has found itself fighting Fourth Generation wars, wars with non-state opponents, in Iraq and Afghanistan.  With the rest of the U. S. armed forces, it has been defeated.  If we do not grasp the significance of President Biden’s choice of September 11 as the date for the end of our efforts in Afghanistan, our victorious Moslem enemies do.  That was the date the Turkish siege of Vienna was raised in 1683.  This time, the shoe is on the other foot.

Nor does the Marine Corps’ intellectual collapse end with its failure to address, much less win, Fourth Generation wars.  It has failed on the strategic level as well, both in terms of its role in our nation’s defense and in its strategy for political survival.  The two are linked: the Marine Corps has survived as an institution because Americans could see a need for it.  They could do so because the Corps had a unique strategic role.

At present, it does not, and its attempts to find such a role border on farce.  In a war with China we ought not fight and almost certainly will not fight, because China has nuclear weapons, the Marine Corps is to take strategically meaningless islands from the Chinese on which Marines will base anti-ship missiles to shoot at Chinese ships that will all be in port.  In pursuit of this “strategy” that needs only music by Sullivan to become a comic opera, the Corps gave up substantial force structure in the naive assumption it would get the money saved thereby.  OSD said “Thank you very much,” and took all of it.

The obvious and necessary strategic role for the Marine Corps is to be the nation’s force for Fourth Generation war.  Both Capitol Hill and the public could grasp that readily.  Unfortunately, doing so requires thought, high-quality thought and lots of it.  No one yet knows how to win such wars.  But figuring that out would have been the Corps’ intellectual Schwerpunkt under General Gray.  Now, it’s not even on the map.

John Boyd stressed that winning wars requires people, ideas, and hardware, in that order.  Without ideas, the Marine Corps is more than a few bricks shy of a load.

The View From Olympus: Did Hamas Win?

In the latest dust-up between Israel and Hamas--a few hundred dead is not a war--Israel once again appears to have triumphed.  Hamas suffered around ten times as many casualties, and property damage ran at about the same ratio, or perhaps better, for Israel.

However, this assessment is open to question.  In my view, the actions of both Hamas and Israel were driven by domestic politics, as is usually the case in foreign policy.  Hamas’s real target was the PLO, which had just for the umpteenth time, canceled elections Hamas was likely to win.  By attacking Israel, Hamas deepened its support on the West Bank and diminished further the almost gone legitimacy of the PLO.  That’s a win.  Israel’s disproportionate response was part of Netanyahu’s drive to remain Israeli Prime Minister, since if he is not in that job there is a good chance he will go to jail for corruption.  So far it’s a win for him.

But if we look at the conflict between Israel and Hamas through the lens of Fourth Generation war, we see, emerging wraith-like from the rubble, what looks like a strategic victory for Hamas.  How so?  In 4GW, the most valuable target is the enemy’s homeland.  Sometimes, as on 9/11, it can be struck physically.  More often, and more potently, the goal is to hit it on the mental or, better still, moral level.  The ideal attack bypasses the enemy’s defenses completely and goes straight for his soft underbelly. 

That Hamas seems to have achieved, and not with its rockets.  For the first time, Israelis fought each other in the streets, Israeli Arabs vs. Jews, in a spillover from the external conflict.  That spillover is Hamas’s chi, while the rockets vs. bombers war was the cheng.  In 4GW, and in 3GW as well, the chi, not the cheng, is often decisive.  Hamas did not win a decisive victory this time, but its success in generating civil conflict in Israel points the way toward a strategy that could win decisively: exacerbating tensions within Israel to the point where it is not just Israeli Arabs fighting Jews, but Jews fighting Jews.

Until I went to Israel, I did not realize how deeply Israeli Jews are divided.  Like most Americans, I thought history and Israel’s fragility combined to create unity.  Once there, I quickly encountered divisions that are shockingly visceral.  The main gulf is that between secular Jews and the ultra-orthodox.  Both sides regard the other with bitter disdain, and outbreaks of physical clashes are not unknown.  Among the non-ultra-orthodox, further divisions create more potentially dangerous fissures. 

Let me add that I enjoyed Israel.  I liked the place and the people.  I have Israeli friends.  I do not want to see Israel destroyed, from within or from without.  But the Israeli military still operates within a state vs. state mental framework and doesn’t get 4GW.  That is dangerous anywhere, and especially so in Israel’s neighborhood.  I write this column to draw their attention to the danger.

To win decisively, Hamas must find ways to ramp these frictions up.  That is a tall order, and so far there is little evidence that Hamas is led by deep strategic thinkers.  For that we should all be thankful.  But any such strategy would focus at the moral level of war, where the Netanyahu government seems almost entirely blind.  To use Martin van Creveld’s analogy, it is an adult giving a small child a prolonged beating in a public place.  Oddly for Jews, it does not seem to realize that in the end, Goliath always loses.

In terms of their primary objectives, both Hamas and Netanyahu won.  Hamas ramped up its legitimacy, as the only people willing to fight Israel, compared to the PLO, and Netanyahu is still Israel’s Prime Minister.  But in the Israel vs. Hamas conflict, Hamas has reason to think it won strategically.  It hit Israel’s unity at home, moving its internal conflict beyond the political system to fighting in the streets.  It is typical in 4GW for states not to have the internal unity they tend to presume in wars, at least short ones.  But few states grasp this or any other aspect of 4GW.  If Israel and the IDF do not come to grips with Fourth Generation war soon, Hamas and its other 4GW enemies may win big.

PS:  The IDF might want to take a look at The Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook, with special attention to “the grid”.  It might help them get off the track of losing by winning.

Barometers of Legitimacy

Readers may wonder why I keep returning to the theme of legitimacy.  The reason is simple: legitimacy is the ground on which Fourth Generation war is fought.  It is, above all, a contest for legitimacy, and winning (or losing) is measured by gains or losses in legitimacy.  Fourth Generation war on our own soil is by far the greatest threat this country faces, and as the legitimacy of the government, and even more of the state itself, wains, Fourth Generation war spreads and intensifies.

From this perspective, barometers of legitimacy--anything that helps us measure the rise or fall of the legitimacy of the current order of things--are earnestly to be sought.  I can identify at least three.  The first is widely recognized: opinion polls that ask Americans how much trust they have in various institutions.  These include the Presidency, Congress, the courts, and, perhaps most important, the integrity of the electoral process.  As I noted in a previous column, the latter is the equivalent of a claimant to a throne having (or lacking) royal blood.  Nothing else in the political system is as important for legitimacy.  For decades, polls have shown a downward trend in Americans’ trust of all these institutions.  Since the 2020 election, distrust of the electoral process has spiked, not surprisingly given the abandonment of long-standing rules designed to prevent vote fraud.

I think a second barometer of legitimacy is Americans’ willingness to be vaccinated against Covid-19.  According to the Wall Street Journal, about 58% of our population has received at least one dose.  (I have received both shots, which probably means I will have a large green horn growing out of my forehead by Christmas, which should look festive; I may add tinsel and lights.)  But as vaccine availability increases, the number of people lining up to get jabbed is shrinking.  As we begin to get some sense for how many people will refuse the vaccine, we also get a measure of the state’s legitimacy, not just the government’s.  Why?  Because the whole establishment, Republicans (or most of them) as well as Democrats , along with the usual “celebrity" riffraff, is urging people to get the shot(s).  Those refusing are rejecting the entire system.

A more interesting, and ominous, measure of the whole system’s legitimacy is the rising number of shootings.  Such an important barometer is moved by more than one thing; the war on cops is a factor, the cultural collapse of the black urban community is another, the 15 minutes of fame the media gives a shooter motivates some.  But I think a broad and spreading sense that the establishment has transformed what used to be America into an insane asylum may be a major and unacknowledged cause.  Down is now up, white is black, day has become night and night is filled with nightmares.  This is Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values,” and it is a core component of the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism, aka “wokeness", “Political Correctness", etc.  In an insane asylum, people do insane things, including shooting their families, friends, co-workers, and anyone else they can.

In all of these barometers we can read the change in political weather most easily if we compare what is happening now to life in America’s last normal decade, the 1950s.  President Eisenhower was widely popular.  Congress did not top anyone’s list of most trusted institutions, but ordinary Americans did not think they had to invade it to make their voices heard.  The Warren court was disliked and distrusted by many conservatives, for good reason, but the problem was Warren, not the court itself.  Everyone knew vote counting in some big cities might be crooked, but elsewhere the process was trusted.  As to vaccines, when the polio vaccine became available virtually every kid in the country took it, because mom and dad told them to.  And gun violence was rare, beyond mobsters killing each other.  The government and the state were accepted as legitimate by the vast majority of Americans.

No more.  The future looks grimmer still, because no one in the establishment will consider for a moment how their actions affect legitimacy.  Add in the coming debt crisis and inflation and it begins to look a lot like Weimar.  As was true then, what replaces the current dysfunctional mess will come from the right, not the left.

Silence of the Lions

Sometimes the most important indicator of what is to come is not noise but silence. I think that may be the case now, not only here but in Europe as well.

Since the events of January 6, the 70+ million Americans who voted to re-elect President Trump have gone silent.  Judging by the mainstream media, it is as if they ceased to exist.  We do not hear their voices.  In politics, the Democrats serve their “victims” groups and the Republicans carry water for Wall Street, as usual.  No one represents or speaks for the 70+ million.

The news is dominated by the travails and demands of just 13% of our population, the blacks.  While President Trump did remarkably well for a Republican among black voters, the large majority of those who voted to re-elect him were white.  The media that regularly headlined “Black Lives Matter” (except, apparently, to blacks, from the rate at which they kill each other) have nothing to say about these white Americans.  Many have been devastated by the coronapanic and the repeated shut-downs of normal life, but they don't count.  They have all become “unpersons.”

The situation is similar in Europe.  But there, some ordinary people are starting to make themselves heard.  Berlin just saw a large and violent demonstration against the latest virus-justified shutdown.  To understand the German situation, you have to know that when Germany’s short summer arrives, most German life moves outdoors.  This is partly a factor of most Germans living in small apartments and partly of Germans’ romantic relationship with nature.  But to tell Germans they may have to stay inside through another summer is a very big deal--especially when everyone knows the reason, namely the EU’s typical bureaucratic incompetence in distributing effective vaccines.

The most explosive situation may be that in France.  For decades, ordinary Frenchmen have found themselves pressured by a large, growling, increasingly fanatical and violent Moslem population that, for the most part, rejects acculturation, i.e., becoming French.  The Thursday, April 29 Wall Street Journal reported a countermove by the new French Resistance:

Marine Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigrant National Rally party, threw her support behind a group of retired generals who published a letter in the far-right magazine Valuers Actuelles, saying the spread of Islamism and other ideologies is pushing France towards a civil war. . .

“There’s no time for procrastination.  Otherwise, a civil war will put an end to the growing chaos,” the letter says.

Anyone familiar with French history will not take this lightly.  Civil war is a long-standing French tradition, as are mass uprisings against situations ordinary Frenchmen view as intolerable.  As an Englishman, writing during the Napoleonic Wars, said of the French, “Individually they are contemptible, but in a mass they are terrible.”

Events in France also have a history of exerting influence throughout the rest of the West.  If the French rise up against Islamic immigrants and the cultural Marxism of the elites that bids the immigrants welcome, what might the spillover effects be in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden, all of which face the same problem?  Germany’s Turks are partially acculturated, especially those born in Germany, but what of Frau Merkel’s disastrous million-plus Arabs?  You see them everywhere, the women in black bags and surrounded by many children, all being raised at German taxpayers’ expense.  The conflict in Syria is almost over; time to go home, folks?

The left forgets that when you finally push the whites, European or of European descent, too far, they remember they come from great warrior peoples.  Compared to some other ethnic groups, they are hard to arouse.  But once you’ve done it, blood flows in great quantities.  They don’t just kill; they kill in highly organized ways, ways that can dispose of millions.

The lions that are Western peoples are currently led by asses.  The asses think the lion's silence, enforced by political correctness, means they have been beaten.  But that is not what it means.  It means that, not allowed to vent, the pressure among those populations is building.  If they blow, it’s not going to be pretty.  Should that happen first in France, don’t be surprised.

The Chauvin Show Trial and the State's Crisis of Legitimacy

On Tuesday, April 20th, a Minneapolis jury found police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of three counts, including second-degree murder, in the death of George Floyd.  The “trial” had the usual characteristics of a political show trial, including an automatic verdict of guilty, even though we still do not know whether Floyd died from officer Chauvin’s actions or because of Floyd’s combination of heart disease, breathing problems, and ingestion of both fentanyl and meth.  In show trials, the facts don’t matter anyway.

The markers of a show trail include:

• The President of the United States, Joe Biden, said publicly before the verdict that he was praying for “the right verdict.”  Could anyone doubt what verdict he meant?
• One defense witness had his former home vandalized, presumably by people who thought he still lived there.  Witness intimidation, anyone?  Hello?
• The Left openly threatened riots unless the jury caved and voted Chauvin guilty.  In a column in the Saturday-Sunday, April 24-25 Wall Street Journal, Joseph Perkins quoted Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who is black, saying in Minneapolis the weekend before the verdict, “I hope we get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty.  And if we don’t. . . we’ve got to stay on the street.  We have to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational.”  Perkins quoted attorney Alan Dershowitz saying Waters’ words were “an attempt to intimidate the jury,” which they certainly were in a city that had already suffered major riots over Floyd’s death.
• In an editorial on April 21, the WSJ noted that, “Even after the verdict, commentators who applauded the jury gave last year’s riots in American cities the credit for inspiring it.  Not the facts.  Not the law.”  If that doesn’t define a political show trial, Lavrentii Beria took in orphans’ washing.

Blatant show trials are a sign of a regime’s lack of legitimacy, not of its strength.  They show a state is afraid of facts.  Some of the facts those now running the executive and legislative branches of government fear are:

• Cops react to blacks, especially black men and most of all young black males, the way they do because they have to.  Floyd had already done time for violent crimes.  The black violent crime rate, almost all of which is committed by young black males, is twelve times the white rate.  If cops cannot use force against blacks, they cannot protect other citizens (including innocent blacks, who make up most of the victims of black crime) or themselves. 
• The Chauvin show trial is part of a broad assault on policing and order by the cultural Marxists.  Cultural Marxism’s goals are purely destructive: they want to bring everything down (“negative dialects,” to use their own term).  Since the state arose to keep order, there is no more effective way to destroy a state than to create massive disorder the state cannot stem.  The cultural Marxists believe a stateless paradise of all play and no work will arise on the ruins, as per Marcuse’s book Eros and Civilization.  What will actually happen is going to be less enjoyable.
• Thanks to the mindless encouragement to “act out” we see “leaders” white and black give to blacks, the 13% of our population who are black have become 90% of our problems.  That is a perilous situation for the 13%, and it is not likely to end well.  What real leaders need to tell Americans, blacks, whites, and whatever, is that freedom is not some impossible “right” to do whatever you feel like at the moment, i.e., embrace a culture of immediate gratification.  Freedom is the right to substitute self-discipline for imposed discipline.  Those who cannot do the former are not fit for freedom and must live under the latter.  Jim Crow may soon find himself a welcome bird.

Most Americans long ago wrote off both the White House and Congress in terms of legitimacy.  The one remaining element of our tripartite system that has retained legitimacy is the courts.  With demands for political show trials rising and court-packing schemes afoot in Washington, soon that element of our system may also shed its legitimacy.  At that point, all that can keep a state afloat is terror.  Terror will be hard to pull off in America, where states retain substantial leverage against Washington, the population is well armed, and cops are usually conservatives.

The war on cops is not moving us toward “racial justice.”  It is moving us towards anarchy, followed quickly by an authoritarian state.

The View From Olympus: Are Neo-libs Even Dumber than Neo-cons?

As expected, the Establishment Biden administration has rounded up the usual suspects to fill its defense and foreign policy slots.  That means the neo-liberals are back, once again dictating to the rest of the world how it should live.  Just as the neocons bamboozled America’s dumbest President, George W. Bush, into invading Iraq to spread “democratic capitalism” to the Middle East, so the neo-libs are pushing the dotty Mr. Biden into confronting Russia and China to promote their brand of patent medicine, more “democracy” (so long as it elects people like them) coupled with such bitter herbs as Feminism and “gay rights.”

But China and Russia are not Iraq.  They are nuclear powers with substantial conventional military capabilities.  How competent the Chinese are militarily remains to be seen--we may find out the hard way--but the Russians do seem to know what they are doing.  They undertook a substantial and effective program of military reform after the Soviet Union fell apart, including learning from Fourth Generation forces around the globe, merging some of their tactics and techniques with those of a conventional army. 

Now it appears the neo-libs are maneuvering poor Mr. Biden into a confrontation with the Russians in Ukraine.  Do these people even look at a map?  Geography says that even with NATO support--no sure thing--we could at most logistically support two or three brigades of American troops in Ukraine.  War in the Russian heartland (which geographically includes Ukraine) requires hundreds of divisions.  Has anyone in Washington heard about Operation Barbarossa?  Probably not, since it wasn’t about expanding “transgender rights”, whatever those are.

The reason Russia is stirring up trouble on Ukraine’s eastern border is that NATO threatens to expand by inviting Ukraine to join.  However, NATO rules say that no country with a border dispute can join NATO.  So, Russia has given Ukraine a border dispute, which will continue so long as NATO plays footsie with Kiev.  Remember, the U.S. promised Gorbachev that if Moscow dissolved the Warsaw Pact, NATO would not expand further east by inviting those countries to join.  And then we promptly tossed that promise in the wastebasket and expanded NATO into former Warsaw Pact lands.  Why should Moscow trust us again when it comes to expanding NATO?

In addition, Washington has been arming and training the Ukraine armed forces.  This is both an offensive act strategically and a foolish policy because it puts American prestige on the line if Ukraine attacks in the east.  The last time we played this game, the country we helped arm and train, Georgia, got its butt kicked swiftly and hard by the Russian Army.  The same thing will happen if Ukraine mounts an offensive in either its eastern regions, now Russian-controlled, or Crimea.

That's the point where I fear the neo-libs, who know nothing of war (like the neo-cons), could push President Biden into sending American troops into a hopeless situation.  When they all end up in a Russian Kessel--Stalingrad, first as tragedy and then as farce--what’s our next move?  Go nuclear?

Against any competent opponent, and the Russian Army should be one, the U.S. Army has a sucking chest wound that a Democratic administration cannot even acknowledge, much less address.  What is it?  Women, lots of them, scattered throughout the force, including now in combat units.  An army full of women is an army that will quickly be in full rout if it finds itself in serious combat.  The key factor in whether men fight or not, unit cohesion, is greatly undermined by the presence of women, because instead of forming a “band of brothers” the men see each other as rivals for the women, because that is human nature.  The same nature says many of the women will panic.  It is a disaster waiting to happen.

Just as the idiot neo-cons gave us a failed war in Iraq, so the neo-libs may trump them (or Trump them, come 2024) by getting us into a militarily impossible situation in Ukraine.  We are putting American prestige on the line, step by step, in a place where our defeat-waiting-to-happen Army cannot support with a competent army.  How much dumber can you get?

White Supremacy

The latest cackle from the Left’s henhouse--all cultural Marxists are chicken, because they are terrified of facts and reason--is “white supremacy”.  We are supposed to grovel in the dust before this charge, endlessly apologizing for being white.  But what do facts and reason say about this?  Are whites in fact superior to other races?

The question cannot at present be investigated by science because where only one conclusion is permitted there can be no science.  Academics who have studied the matter and concluded that whites are, on the whole, smarter than some other races have been subjected to a campaign of terror: shouted down, fired, blackballed, sometimes even physically attacked.  But the evidence from IQ tests seems to indicate that East Asians are on top, whites come in second, and the rest are also-rans.

History appears to confirm that verdict.  Only two cultures have been successful over time, i.e., for thousands of years: Chinese (Han) culture and Western culture.  These are the products of East Asians and whites.  Civilization first arose around five thousand years ago among these two peoples.  Was race the only factor?  Undoubtedly not.  All major historical developments are the product of multiple factors.  Whenever you hear a single-factor explanation of history, you should know you are listening, not to facts and reason, but to an ideology.  Beware!  But was race one factor?  Almost certainly.  Are the differences between, say, Sweden and Italy today in part products of the differences between Swedes and Italians?  Who, other than an ideologue, can deny it?

Other places and peoples have produced splendid civilizations: the Maya, the Khmer, the peoples of India, etc.  But all rose, peaked, declined, and never rose again.  They followed a bell-shaped curve they could not escape.

In contrast, Han civilization and Western civilization have endured.  They took two very different paths in doing so.  Han civilization rose and never fell.  China fell numerous times as a political entity, both to foreign invasion and to civil wars.  But Chinese culture was so superior that her conquerors quickly adopted it.  Over five thousand years, China has maintained a remarkable continuity.  If you look at an artifact from the Shang dynasty, you immediately know it is Chinese.

In contrast, the West has risen, fallen, and risen again repeatedly.  The great example is Rome, but there are others.  The high and successful Medieval culture that eventually replaced Romanitas fell in the 14th century, largely thanks to the plague.  The first blooming of Western culture in the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean oceans collapsed around 1200 BC for reasons we do not fully understand.  But in the former case the fall was followed by the Renaissance and in the latter by the glories of classical Greece.  The Western pattern is very different from that of China, but both have succeeded over time, as has no one else.  Again, is race one factor?  Almost certainly.

When the cultural Marxists throw their boogeyman words at us, our response, after we have stopped laughing, should be to do what I have done here: respond with facts and reason.  Nothing scares them more.  In fact, they denounce facts and reason as “white”.  To that, our answer should be, “Thanks for the compliment.”  Reason and logic are one of whites’ great contributions to civilization, among many others, including classical architecture and classical music, both of which are now found all over the world because of their superiority to all others.

History says that white supremacy means a society that is constantly striving in every field to reach greater heights, to the benefit of everyone, including all other races and peoples.  Just look at how Africa and Asia have profited from modern medicine, overwhelmingly a product of whites.  Thanks to the uniquely white concept of noblesse oblige, supremacy does not mean oppressing others but raising them up, serving them and giving them the blessings of peace, order, and commerce.  After all, most whites worship a God who said, “I came not to be served but to serve.”  Don’t expect to hear that from Quetzalcoatl any time soon.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

Hell's Puritans

With most other conversations, I have been amused watching New York Governor Andrew Cuomo get hoist on his own petard.  Always ready to condemn others for Political Incorrectness, he now finds his political future in mortal danger from the very P.C. harpies he championed.  It couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

But we should not let our Schadenfreude override the fact that Hell’s Puritans are a growing menace to everyone, or at least everyone white, male, and straight.  What is commonly known as political correctness and is actually cultural Marxism is attempting to outlaw broad aspects of reality, including the reality that in humans as in other species, the male initiates most of the sexual encounters.  The fact that the male takes the initiative does not mean the female does not welcome his attentions.  Often, she does, including when, among people, one or both are married or they are in a professional setting.  But now, if the woman does not welcome such attention, or does at the time but has second thoughts later, the male is crucified.  How ironic that Governor Cuomo was one of the many politically correct men to declare, “The woman must always be believed.”  Yes, indeed, women have been known throughout history and literature as creatures who never tell a lie.

That this Puritanism has its roots in Hell is betrayed by the fact that it is nihilist.  It seeks simply to bring everything down: “negative dialectics”, as the originators of cultural Marxism, the members of the Frankfurt School, put it.  It does so by forbidding aspects of human behavior that are hard-wired in human brains, then destroying anyone--“canceling” is the new synonym for “liquidating”--in whom nature triumphs over its commands.  But nature will always triumph, meaning that the level of tension, anger, and finally despair grows in a society to the point where that society turns inward and devours itself.  We see that happening in a broad swath of what used to be called Christendom.

It is not only in relations between the sexes that Hell’s Puritanism makes demands that cannot be met and that rip society apart.  Another field is race, ethnicity, and culture.  The new Puritans demand we pretend that all races and ethnic groups are interchangeable and all cultures are happy, innocent, peaceful cultures except for our own Western culture, which is evil and oppressive.  The fact that it was overwhelmingly white Europeans shaped by Western culture who turned a vast wilderness into the modern United States of America, the best place and time to live through all of history, must never be stated.  Nor dare one say that, for example, the black rate of incarceration is proportional to the black crime rate, which is many times the white rate.  No, “systemic racism” is why all those young black males end up in jail.  And cops regard young black males the way they do because cops are all evil “racists”, not because a young black man is far more likely to commit a violent crime than is an Asian grandmother.  Not how in all the howling about the killings of Asians, only the Wall Street Journal has dared mention the fact that most of those assaults are carried out by young black males.

Again, the goal of penalizing by “canceling” anyone who dares mention more and more aspects of reality is to rip society apart, to create a war of all against all where only mass violence will release the pent-up fury of people who must conform their behavior to rules that contradict human nature.  This is “Critical Theory” at its most powerful, where constant criticism of every aspect of traditional culture crosses over into setting new rules no one can follow, then destroying them when they do not.  That is why Governor Cuomo’s political body twisting slowly in the wind is so entrancing, because he too fell to the impossibility of obeying the very rules he championed.  The secret of Hell’s Puritanism stands revealed: no man can meet its demands except by self-destruction, either internalized or externalized.  Your choice is suicide or execution.

And so, in the hands of the “woke” Left, America has been saddled with a Puritanism without God and without virtue, the worst of all Puritanisms, nihilistic Puritanism.  Hell no doubt rubs its hands in glee.  But as the 17th century English Puritans discovered, Puritanism soon runs its course.  People return to the old ways again with relief and joy, looking back on their former Puritan times and saying, “How did we ever believe all that crap?”

Let us answer Hell’s Puritans with a 17th century ditty I enjoyed playing on my harpsichord, “on the King's Birthday, May 29”, the day when a restored King Charles the II entered London:

Welcome, welcome, royal May, Welcome long desired day!

Many Springs and Mays we’ve seen Have brought forth

What’s gay and green,

But none like this glorious Spring Which brings forth our gracious King;

Then banish care, and let us sing, We have our laws, and we have our King!

Amen.

The Spark

Great historic currents are often set in motion by small events.  The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand did not cause World War I--the cause was enmity between Austria and Russia that went back to the Crimean War, coupled with military plans that put a premium on mobilizing faster than your opponent--but provided the spark in the powder magazine.  Similarly, the cause of a collapse of the republic will lie in the Washington Establishment’s adoption of the ideology of cultural Marxism, which condemns whites, men, and heterosexuals as inherently evil and thus makes enemies of a majority of Americans.  But a minor event may well be the spark that sets the building ablaze.

Such a spark is in the offing.  Bowing to the demands of cultural Marxism and its “woke” fanatics, the Biden Administration is moving to re-name all military bases whose present names are those of Confederate generals.  This is part of the Left’s hate campaign against the South, its history, and its culture, and more broadly its demand that whites continually abase themselves before blacks (not including the blacks who fought for the Confederacy, a non-trivial number).  Presumably, the bases’ new names will be those of black lesbian women, “transgendered” freaks, slaves who murdered their masters and their families or whatever else the Left can find floating in the gutter.

The people who make up the Washington Establishment know nothing about the military.  Nor, for the most part, do they care about it.  They find it useful when they want to ram “progressive” culture politics down the throats of recalcitrant foreigners, but otherwise they dislike men who fight--and think they can replace them with women, which is replacing guard dogs with guard cats.  Should they get into a war that involves more than bombing mud huts at night from 30,000 feet, they will discover their error.  In the meantime, they look at their organizational charts and say, “Well, those dumb soldiers have to do whatever we tell them to because the chart says so.”

But fighting men tend to have strong identification with things like regiments, service branches, and the historic names of their bases.  The units based at places such as Ft. Bragg, Ft. Hood, and Ft. Benning identify with those names.  In many cases, other family members often serve at those same bases for generations (as always, the Army’s most important recruiting ground is the rural South).  All over the country retired fighting men share strong identification with the current base names.  I do not find it difficult to imagine that when the new, politically correct base names are announced, the troops on those bases mutiny.  If they do, they are likely to get strong support from veterans and from the communities that surround the bases.

What does the Washington Establishment do then?  If it sends other military units against those resisting, they are likely to refuse the orders.  So will the National Guard.  So will the police.  What now, Madam Under-secretary?

The events which will bring down the American Third Republic, our system of government 1865 to the present that has given us an all-powerful federal government, a closed system in Washington and an administered people, need one more cause.  That cause is an economic collapse.  The wild creation of dollars by the Federal Reserve and exploding national debt will bring that collapse about.  Whether the timing will be such that the economy is going down just as the base-renaming hits, I do not know.  I am confident that when the economic disaster hits, coupled with the rapidly intensifying culture war, the volatile mixture will find a spark.  I would enjoy the irony if that spark comes courtesy of the Confederate States of America.

The View From Olympus: Dreikampf or Vielkampf

The February Marine Corps Gazette includes an article in its series “Maneuverist Papers” titled “Introducing the Dreikampf” by Marinus.  Its thesis is that Clausewitz’s concept of Zweikampf, war between two opponents, is outdated:

Warfighting (the Marine Corps’ foundational doctrine statement) steals a page from Clausewitz’s On War by proposing the Zweikampf, or “two-struggle”, as the essential, universal definition of war.  It defines war as a violent clash between two independent and hostile wills. . .

But after witnessing nearly twenty years of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, we cannot help but question if the Zweikampf is a universal construct after all.  It strikes us as something of a stretch to argue that the two-struggle has applied cleanly to those concepts--as well as to many others throughout history.  Perhaps the Zweikampf applies more narrowly to what we now call regular warfare, and there is an entire other category of war that the Zweikampf does not capture. . .

For these other forms of warfare, we propose a construct we will call the Dreikampf, or “three-struggle”, in which the third actor in the struggle is the common population that both belligerents struggle to impose themselves upon. . .

I agree with the Dreikampf concept--as far as it goes.  But it suffers from exactly the same problem it diagnoses in the Zweikampf, namely oversimplification.  Fourth Generation War theory says that what Marinus sees as one entity, the population, is in fact many entities, which fight with each other as well as with one or both of the foreign states which have armies in the unhappy land that is serving as the battlefield.

Marinus sees this plurality but does not draw out its implications:

Finally, populations are not likely to be as monolithic as the two other belligerents, nor as consistent and coordinated in their actions.  The contested population almost always will comprise multiple subgroups, each with different, if potentially overlapping, objectives, means, and methods.  Again, this variability only tends to increase the complexity of the dynamics.

The first implication is that these subgroups not only differ from one another but that some, perhaps many, will fight.  From their perspective, their power balance with other local subgroups is usually more important than their relationships with either outside belligerent, because they know the outsider will eventually go home.  At the moral level of war, these local power balances may depend in part on who does the better job of fighting one or both outsiders.  In other words, both outside powers are likely to find themselves fighting each other and a constantly shifting coalition of local elements.  This is not Dreikampf, a fight among three, but Vielkampf, a fight among many.

Fourth Generation Warfare theory adds that these subgroups fight not only for different objectives but for different kinds of objectives, many of which lie outside what we regard as the political process.  Objectives range from impressing the local girls to attaining everlasting salvation.  The fighters for these causes may range from a group of teenage friends who found guns or explosives through highly trained, paid soldiers belonging to non-state entities such as ISIS.  The resulting dynamics are not only complex, they are often too complex for an outside force even to grasp much less to leverage.  To the outsiders, the game becomes not worth the cost because no political settlement is possible regardless of how long the outsider remains.  Afghanistan is example A.

The third implication is perhaps the most threatening yet also the easiest to overlook.  The various loyalties and causes the local entities represent can bleed over into the outside state forces.  Intelligent Fourth Generation combatants seek to take physically far more powerful opposing state forces from within, attacking at the moral level.  Causes that are religious, racial, or ideological in nature are likely to have sympathizers inside the invading state forces.  Smart 4GW elements will identify those sympathizers, encourage them to act against their own forces and at the same time help them spread their alternate loyalty.  The U.S. military has already experienced this on a small scale, both in so-called “Green on Blue” attacks and in attacks by U.S. servicemen on their colleagues, motivated by Islam.  4GW theory says both could become much more frequent if enemies who represent trans-national loyalties make them their Schwerpunkt. So Dreikampf is bad news for state armed forces, but Vielkampf is worse.  If Dreikampf is a complex problem, Vielkampf is a wicked problem, one that often will have no local solution.  Generally, the only answer will be to stay out of the briar patch in the first place.  That, coupled with effective control of our own borders, should be our strategic answer to Fourth Generation warfare as a whole and to Vielkampf specifically.

Making the World Safe for Autocracy

President Woodrow Wilson took America into World War I in order to, in his words, “Make the world safe for democracy.”  That quest gave us Hitler, Stalin, the Holocaust (an event that could never have happened under the Hohenzollerns) and all the many other disasters that flowed from the Allied victory in 1918 and the Diktat of Versailes.

In contrast, my objective is to make the world safe for autocracy, monarchy to be specific.  The universe, after all, is not a republic.  From that perspective, President Joe Biden’s first foray into foreign policy offers hope.

An article in the February 20 Cleveland Plain Dealer, “Biden warns that the world faces an ‘inflection point’”, reported that President Biden told his first international audience, the annual Munich Security Conference, that:

We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future direction of our world.  Between those who argue that--given all of the challenges we face, from the fourth industrial revolution to a global pandemic--autocracy is the best way forward and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting those challenges. . .

We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of history.

As a monarchist, my reply is that President Biden’s model, "democracy", is both a relic of history and a colossal fraud. 

The first point is attested by the remarkable tone of Mr. Biden’s speech.  He clearly sees “democracy” as now on the defensive, with autocracy rising.  This is a monumental sea change in the rhetoric of American leaders from the odious Wilson onward.  Indeed, it marks an astonishing break from the whole Whig interpretation of history, in which inevitable “progress” is marked by ever-greater “democracy” and its pox-ridden whore, “equality”.  If there is one thing people are not, it is equal.

The “democracy” fraud is revealed by the fact that only one country in the world today is a democracy: Switzerland.  Only in Switzerland do the people have and regularly use the power to overturn decisions by their government through referendums.  Elsewhere, including in the United States, what the Establishment calls “democracy” is really oligarchy, with the Establishment the oligarchs.  That is why the whole Establishment, Republican as much as Democrat, hates President Trump.  He is not a member of the oligarchy, and the absolute worst thing that can happen, from the oligarchs perspective, is that someone outside their club takes the top office.  The fanaticism of their hatred of Mr. Trump reveals the “democracy” fraud more clearly than can any of “democracy’s” critics.

Neither the oligarchs nor their tool Mr. Biden understands why people are turning to autocracy.  Indeed, few outside monarchist circles understand it.  Most people all around the world just want to live normal lives.  Normal lives are not politicized.  They are about family, friends, and neighbors; school, work, and profession; land, crops, and community.  Survey after survey shows Americans are sick of the political divisions that are ripping our country apart.  They want to get back to normal life. 

But democracy will not let them.  Even the fraudulent form practiced by every country other than Switzerland will not let them.  Democracy opens the door to ideologies, and all ideologies want to politicize everything.  The more heated democratic politics become, the more aspects of life get politicized.  Cultural Marxism’s capture of American elites coupled with ordinary people’s rejection of that ideology have shattered organizations, friendships, and families.  To offer just one grotesque but not unusual example, democracy in America has now politicized pillows.  The founder of “My Pillow” is a Trump supporter.  So someone on the Left has started up a new pillow company lest fellow lefties end up sleeping on a Right-wing pillow. 

A good autocracy instead offers a normal life.  Politics are seldom found beyond the court.  The vast majority of people are left alone by politics.  Now, if autocracy is combined with ideology, that can be a very different story.  Then, everything is politics, as in democracies run wild.  But traditional autocracies, which is to say monarchies but also happy dictatorships like Portugal under Salazar, are not ideological.  The monarch’s authority comes from God.  He doesn’t need or want ideology.  Nor do his happy subjects, blessed in their ability to live normal lives.

Traditional monarchs, such as those in medieval Europe, are not absolute.  Their subjects have rights, which monarchs are bound by oath to respect.  Rights vary greatly from one culture and people to another, but all peoples have a concept of rights.  If a monarch violates them, he endangers his legitimacy.  He either backs down or is presented with a Magna Carta by his barons.

So Mr. Biden’s defensive crouch around “democracy” is wise.  Finally, after giving the world a century and more of catastrophes, “democracy’s” time is running out.  Real democracy will endure in Switzerland, but elsewhere “democracy” as a cover for oligarchy is heading for history’s wastebasket.  Autocracy is the wave of the future.  Our task is to make it the right kind of autocracy, the kind established by God Himself.

The 2020 Election and the State's Crisis of Legitimacy

For millions of Americans, perhaps as many as one-third of the population, the results of the popular vote contest in the 2020 election of the President remain in doubt.  Because the Electoral College, not the voters, elects the President, there is no question that Joe Biden now holds that office.  But his legitimacy depends on whether the popular vote count was accurate.  Was it?  No one knows, and no one can know. 

Until recent years, voting and vote counting in America had long followed certain rules.  Votes were cast on paper ballots.  Unless you could demonstrate you had to be out of town on election day, your only opportunity to vote was on that day in your local precinct.  Those who had to be out of town could get an absentee ballot, but the number of people who did so was small.  Votes were counted under observation of representatives of both major political parties, and the paper ballots were retained for a set time after the election so they could be recounted.  The system was not tamper-proof--ballot box stuffing in Cook County, Illinois, turned the 1960 election for Kennedy--but over the years fraud had become increasingly rare.  The vast majority of Americans had faith in the integrity of the electoral process, and they were right to do so.  The process was accepted as legitimate.

In the 2020 election, that legitimacy evaporated.  The reasons were several.  The most important was widespread adoption of electronic voting.  Anyone who knows anything about electronics knows nothing electronic is or can be secure.  Everything can be hacked.  We read constantly about one system or another being hacked, but far more are hacked than we read about because good hacking goes undetected.  Was the 2020 Presidential vote hacked in key states?  We do not know and we cannot know, and that is a problem because our inability to know destroys the electoral process’s legitimacy.

The legitimacy of the process was undermined further by massive use of early-voting, mail-in voting, legalized ballot harvesting in some states (an open invitation to vote buying), court rulings that signatures on ballots did not have to match those on voter registration cards (Pennsylvania), etc.  In some key cities, vote counting was ended for the evening, but when the Republican poll watchers had gone home it was restarted and suddenly produced big majorities for Biden.  Added to the uncertainty that must surround electronic voting, these measures have made the voting process of even more questionable legitimacy.

That, in turn, is a blow to the legitimacy of the state.  In my most recent column in The American Conservative magazine, titled “Legitimacy”, I make a distinction between the legitimacy of a government and the legitimacy of the state itself.  A crisis of the former is serious but manageable because time solves it; at some point, Biden will no longer be President.  A crisis of legitimacy of the state is far more serious, because time deepens it; the longer people see the processes on which the state’s legitimacy depends get undermined, the more they transfer their primary loyalty to other things, to ideologies, races, religions, etc.  That sets the stage for widespread Fourth Generation war, i.e., the scenario in Thomas Hobbes’ novel Victoria.

Both political parties have a common interest in preventing a crisis of legitimacy of the state.  That should mean both have an interest in restoring the credibility of the vote.  It is not hard to do; Retroculture supplies the answer.  We can and should return to the old ways we used to do elections, i.e., you vote in person on election day in your precinct on a paper ballot.  Electronic voting should be prohibited in federal elections, along with electronic vote counting.  That worked for many years, and what worked in the past can work in the future. 

The alternative, in which doubts about real election outcomes grow with each new electoral contest, means any republic becomes an illegitimate state.  Integrity of elections are as central to the legitimacy of a republic as are integrity of royal bloodlines to a monarchy.

Dare we hope for a bi-partisan approach to restore the legitimacy of our elections?  I doubt it, because the Democrats want to make it as easy as possible for their semi-literate and lazy hordes to vote, even if doing so brings the whole temple down on their own heads.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.

The View From Olympus: SOF and the Operational Level of War

I recently enjoyed a three-day visit by two very bright Special Operations Forces (SOF) officers.  One had already read the whole of the canon, and the other was working on it.  That meant they were familiar with the operational level of war, and one of our topics of conversation was the need to employ SOF at the operational, not the tactical, level.  I have touched on that subject in previous columns, but one of the officers said it would be helpful to his unit if I addressed it again, hence this column.

In the German understanding of the operational level (the Russians, who have a long tradition of operational art, understand it somewhat differently), it is not a “thing” like tactics and strategy but a linkage between those two.  In essence, it is how to think about what to do tactically and how to use tactical events, battles, and refusals of battle, victories and sometimes defeats, to strike as directly as possible at the enemy’s strategic hinge, that which, when struck, collapses his strategy.  Operations are designed to achieve a strategic decision as quickly as possible and with as little battle as possible, because battle costs both casualties and time. Operations can be thought of as meta-level economy of force measures.

SOF, by their very name, should be employed at the operational level.  If used (and used up) at the tactical level, they will contribute little to strategic victory; they are simply too small to matter if used in classic attrition warfare fashion, where strategic victory is supposed to come from accumulating tactical victories.  Conversely, when used at the operational level in the context of maneuver warfare, they have a history of decisive success.  Perhaps the best example is the German special operation to take Fort Eben Emael in Belgium in 1940.  An action by a single company that landed on top of the fort, something the Belgians had not imagined, opened the door to Army Group B’s thrust into Belgium.  The 1940 campaign is itself a brilliant example of thinking and acting on the operational level, not just the tactical, especially in XIX Panzer Corps’ thrust north to the Channel after crossing the Meuse at Sedan.  Other examples of strategically important special operations, using the term correctly, are Skorzeny’s rescue of Mussolini and abduction of Admiral Horthy, the regent of Hungary.

Not surprisingly, most American headquarters do not understand the operational level of war; they practice Second Generation, attrition warfare where the operational level is not important if it is even recognized.  This puts an unrecognized burden on American SOF.  Not only must they be highly proficient tactically and technically, they must themselves grasp the operational level and be able to think operationally.  Why?  Because if they do not tell the headquarters employing them how to use them at the operational level, they will be frittered away tactically with little impact on the strategic outcome--impact they could have had if they had been used right.  Few feelings are more bitter than those suffered when, after taking heavy casualties, you know your efforts were wasted.

The two young officers who visited me are both highly intelligent and could be educated to guide their unit’s employment at the operational level.  That does not mean sending them to the Army Command and Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth to be taught some absurd “method”.  It means copying the way the German Army taught its officers at the Kriegsakademie, with case studies, war games, map problems, and the like.

As General Balck said, only a few can do it; most can never learn.  These two guys could, and I am sure there are more.  Unfortunately, at present, there is no effort to identify and educate such people in the SOF community, because the assumption is that higher headquarters will employ them properly.  They won’t, and the fruit of that assumption will be bitter.

Why the Right Should Never Fight or Hurt Cops

I have made the point before that the political Right, which obviously includes me, should never injure police officers.  This should be self-evident--it is the Left that hates cops, while we on the Right like them--but some elements on the Right are now calling for violence against police.  This is a mistake of strategic importance, and the purpose of this column is to explain why.  It is not just a matter of “being nice”; it is central to winning.

To understand why, we need to look at “the grid”.  Found on page 13 of the Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook, the grid has three elements across and three down, creating nine boxes.  The three down represent the three classical levels of war: tactical, operational, and strategic.  The three across are John Boyd’s three new levels: physical, mental, and moral.  To use the grid, you need to know two other things.  First, a higher level of war trumps a lower, e.g., no matter how good you are at the tactical and operational levels, if you are beaten at the strategic level, you lose--Germany’s fate in two world wars.  Second, the weakest box is the tactical/physical and the most powerful is the strategic/moral.  The U.S. armed forces usually lose because, although they dominate the tactical/physical box, they are beaten at the strategic/moral levels.

Interestingly, some police departments are now using the grid.  They have come to realize that by militarizing, they have become dominant at the tactical/physical levels, but at the price of defeating themselves at the operational, strategic, mental, and moral levels.  This is, if I may say so, typically American, and it lies behind much of the bad relationship some departments have with the press, politicians, and public.  Some now get it, and they are finding the grid gets them out of the tactical/physical victory but strategic/moral defeat cycle.  At a Boyd conference, some cops told me their department now uses the grid for almost every operation, thereby anticipating and avoiding undesirable secondary effects.

For the Right, there are at least three reasons why we need to avoid fighting and hurting cops if we want to win, all of them in boxes beyond the tactical/physical.  First, most people line up mentally and morally with the cops.  Every time the Left hurts cops, it loses public support.  This is a gut issue for most people, with good reason: we all depend on the police.  We want to leverage this issue against the Left, but we cannot do so if some people on the Right fight police.  Calls for violence by the Right against the police will lead directly to our defeat in the court of public opinion, that is to say, at the most powerful levels of war, the moral/strategic.

Second, as readers of Thomas Hobbes’ Victoria know, police are natural and potentially very valuable allies of the Right.  Most cops are cultural conservatives.  They loathe the cultural Marxists just as we do.  In Victoria, cops at all levels, federal, state, and local, provide critically important intelligence to the people trying to rescue our country from cultural Marxism.  That intel is important at every traditional level of war, tactical, operational, and strategic.  If some elements on the Right start hurting cops, that scenario from Victoria will be short-circuited, leading to the Right fighting blind.

Third, neither the Left nor the Right has sufficient strength to take on the state and its armed forces.  That route leads straight to defeat.  The way to destroy any regime is to take it from the inside.  The Left has done that by co-opting politicians, professors, entertainers, educators (so-called) etc.  The Right’s path to victory runs through taking the element all those things depend on, the state’s security forces, from within.  A regime is finished when its security forces, police and military, go over to the opposition.  Again, both police officers and the men in our armed forces are mostly cultural conservatives, natural allies.  But they cannot ally with the Right if elements on the Right are fighting and hurting them.  That is potentially decisive at the strategic levels, i.e., game over.

So powerful is the moral level in this kind of war that you win not by inflicting casualties but by suffering them.  This is nowhere more true for the Right than in its relations with police (and National Guard or other U.S. military).  If someone is to suffer casualties (cameras rolling), it needs to be people on the Right, not cops getting hurt by the Right.  Fighting Leftists who attack us first is fine.  Fighting cops will lead directly to disaster.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.