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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

Understanding the Left's Tactics

The Left is wrong, but it is not stupid.  If we are to defeat it, we must study and understand its tactics.  Three are of special importance.

  • From other totalitarian ideologies the American Left has adopted the tactic of telling a big lie fast, immediately after or during an event, and figuring the truth, which usually comes out more slowly, will never catch up.  We've seen this both in Minneapolis and in Kenosha.  In Minneapolis, the lie is that a cop killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck so he could not breathe.  The Wall Street Journal subsequently reported the facts: Floyd was on drugs, he was deliberately injuring himself while saying “I can’t breathe”--before the cops put him on the ground--and they took him down to stop him from further hurting himself, calling at the same time for an ambulance.  The coroner found Floyd did not die of asphyxiation.  The police were trying to help him, not hurt him.

In Kenosha, we still do not know the details.  But it seems as if, from the cops’ perspective, Jacob Blake was acting irrationally, in a way that could have meant he was on drugs such as PCP.  He ignored the cops’ orders and seemed to be unaffected by two tasings.  According to the August 29 Wall Street Journal, quoting the Kenosha Professional Police Association, Blake “forcefully fought with the officers, including putting one of the officers in a headlock.”  He was either carrying a knife or had one in the car he was trying to enter--a car with three young children in it.  Would it have been reasonable for a police officer to think those children were in mortal danger under those circumstances?  Remember, police are authorized to use deadly force not only to protect themselves, but to protect citizens as well.

And in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, far from being an intended “mass shooter”, he was being attacked by a hostile mob and he thought, with reason, his life was endangered.  We all have a right to defend ourselves.

To counter this tactic, we have to get the facts out fast.  Our OODA Loop must be faster than the Left’s, or at least as fast.  That is difficult because we care about the truth and they don’t.  The mainstream media, which are in the Left’s pocket, quickly report the Left’s version of events but then ignore the facts as they slowly come out.  Someone with more resources than I possess needs to create some sort of bulletin board anyone can access that withholds conclusions until the facts are available, corrects the Left’s lies, and can be relied on for accuracy across the political spectrum.  I suspect it would quickly attain widespread popularity.

  • The Left is embedding vandals, arsonists, and looters in larger “peaceful demonstrations”, then pretending the police and the Right are attacking the latter as the former run wild, smashing, looting, and burning.  The tactic of embedding can work well.  In a Marine Corps war game at Quantico some years ago, where I commanded Blue, I embedded a regiment-sized Operational Maneuver Group in a (division-size) MEF landing.  Once I had beached the whale, I popped the OMG straight for Red’s capital and thereby quickly won the war.  Red’s response was too late because they could not find the OMG among the MEF until it was on its way. 

To counter embedding, we need people on the Right who document on video, just the way the Left does, what the other side is doing and get that video out fast.  We also need to inform the cops, the local press, and the public about the embedding tactic before the game starts.  If they are all looking for it, that tactic will lose its effectiveness.  Pre-emption defeats embedding.

  • Third, the Left plays endless and seemingly purposeless word games.  But those games do have a purpose: over time, they condition the public to allow the Left to dictate everyone’s language and thereby their thoughts.  Worse, ordinary Americans come to accept being conditioned by the Left as the normal and proper state of affairs.  A recent example is the Left’s order that the word “black” begin with a capital B when referring to colored people (which in my view remains the most polite term, as it always was).  Even some media on the Right are bowing before this decree from our self-appointed censors.

Our answer should be, “Sorry, but I speak English, not Newspeak.”  In English, proper names are capitalized, most other nouns are not.  That rule extends to proper adjectives.  Therefore “Hispanics” is capitalized because Hispania is the Latin word for the country of Spain.  “Indians” is capitalized when referring to people from India, but not for American indians.  The word “whites” is not capitalized because there is no country called “Whitey,” nor is “black” because there is no country called “Blackey.”  There is the country of Niger, pronounced with a soft g, and niger is the Latin word for the color black, pronounced in classical Latin with a hard g.  I’m not sure American blacks want us to go there. . .

On the Right, the response to those tactics of the Left should be to present the facts quickly, warn beforehand what the game is and aggressively assert proper English.  Our voice must be as loud as the Left’s, but far more reliable.  Eventually, in the marketplace of ideas, that will give us the victory--assuming we can keep the marketplace open.

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

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

The View From Olympus: A Marine Experiment

By a “Marine experiment”, I do not mean crossing airline stewardesses with manatees in hope of producing a mermaid.  That would result only in fat stewardesses and manatees with an attitude.  My proposed experiment would have as its subject the United States Marine Corps.  Its purpose would be to find a way to make what the Marine Corps says in its doctrine consistent with what it does.

In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when General Al Gray was Commandant, the Marine Corps adopted maneuver warfare as its doctrine.  Also known as Third Generation war, it is the Prussian/German approach to war as it developed from 1807 to 1945, with the key years being 1914-1918.  The Marine Corps remains the only American armed service to have made this important move.  The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force remain Second Generation, which is to say doctrinally obsolete.

However, what the Marine Corps actually does, in terms of its tactics, life in garrison, and institutional culture, is still mostly Second Generation.  Ever since the FMFM-1 Warfighting field manual, which remains one of the best ever written, came out, Marines have told me,"What the Marine Corps says is great, but it’s not what it does.”

Changing that so the Marine Corps’ actions match its doctrine has been the Corps’ greatest challenge for almost thirty years.  Although islands of maneuver warfare appear here and there, the products of individual commanders, those islands vanish again into the Second Generation sea as personalities change--which they do at a dysfunctionally rapid rate due to our surplus of field grade and senior officers, each of whom wants his lick at the ice cream cone of command.  The Corps has failed, and continues to fail, at meeting its main challenge.

So here’s my proposed experiment to make maneuver warfare real.  The people who seem to take maneuver warfare most seriously are the NCOs and Staff NCOs, as the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette show.  The Corps’ failure is not their failure; it is thirty years of failure by Marine Corps officers, especially the field and senior grades (lieutenants and captains, like the enlisted Marines, often make serious efforts to follow maneuver warfare doctrine).  So why don’t we put them in charge with a simple order: "make it happen!”?

All officers from the Commandant on down would take between six and twelve weeks of leave.  They would not be permitted on base during those weeks, nor could they contact the Staff NCOs who would be in charge of everything.  At the end of their prolonged period of leave (paid, of course), the officers could come back, but only as observers for another six to twelve weeks.  They could offer advice if asked, but not otherwise interfere.  At the conclusion of this second “all enlisted” period, the NCOs and Staff NCOs would turn over to the officers a Marine Corps that actually does what Warfighting says.

Could enlisted Marines succeed where Marine officers have failed for 30 years? Since we know the officers can’t do it, it’s worth a try.  If that too fails, well, the Marine Corps will join the Army, Navy, and Air Force on their ballistic courses into history’s wastebasket.  As Mark Twain said of the male teat, they are neither useful nor ornamental.  They also cost what is effectively a bankrupt country a boatload of money.  We should be able to buy defeats for less than a trillion dollars a year.

My bet is the NCOs and Staff NCOs can do it.  They did it on a small scale a year or so ago at 29 Palms, when an officerless unit had each Marine read Warfighting and then just do it.  They took on and handily beat a normal Marine unit of much larger size.  No surprise there: we’ve known the Third Generation beats the Second since May, 1940.

In the end, if Fourth Generation war sweeps over America, as looks more and more likely, it will be the people now serving as NCOs and Staff NCOs who emerge as the leaders, at least on the political Right.  Few officers will be able to adjust as their comfortable upper-middle-class world falls apart.  Enlisted Marines still come from families where people work with their hands.  They are much more in tune with the real world than those who rank above them.  If they are not given a chance to save the Marine Corps now, they will be in charge later of building new Marine Corps--one if we’re lucky, one hundred if we’re not.

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

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

The Core Election Issue: Fear vs. Anger

The way the Presidential election is shaping up, most of the big issues will not be openly stated.  They include race, with the Republicans the White party and the Democrats the black and immigrant party; socialism, with the Democrats in favor and the Republicans against; and freedom of thought and expression, with President Trump not only an advocate but a practitioner as he says things deemed politically incorrect while the Democrats hope people do not notice what the Left is doing on college campuses, where students and professors who dissent from cultural Marxism do so at their peril.  But behind these largely unstated issues lies another: the Democrats are the party of fear while the Republicans, and especially President Trump, are the party of anger.

It is obvious how the media, which are almost wholly in the Democrats’ camp, pump up the fear.  The corona panic is exhibit A: most people have figured out it isn’t very dangerous unless you're lying in a bed in a nursing home, while the media talks as if the Black Death were again upon us.  The Left puts more and more restrictions on daily life, all justified by COVID-19, but they fail to see how they are thereby stoking public anger.  The latest example is widespread cancellation of fall college and high school sports, including football.  That might seem a small matter in the great scheme of things, but it is not to the thousands of players and millions of fans.  Their anger will turn into many votes for President Trump, because he is the angry man’s candidate.  Some of his votes will be black votes, because sports, especially football, are young black men’s road out of the ghetto.

Fear is the Democrats’ underlying theme on almost every issue.  Global warming and climate change, job losses (most of them lost to the over-reaction to COVID-19, which the Democrats continue to push), “black rage” as the Left urges young blacks to riot, loot, and burn, these and many other issues reflect the Dems’ main message: it’s a terribly dangerous world out there, but if you’ll give us all your money and your liberties, we’ll protect you.  They won’t, but so long as they get your money and freedoms they will have won.  Of course, the day after the Democrats win, if they do, the media will turn off the fear machine and become Pollyanna.

On the other side, President Trump benefits from every voter who gets angry.  He is an angry man, and that resonates with other people’s anger.  The ongoing violence in our cities and their rapidly rising crime rates, an inevitable product of the Left’s assault on police, are an example.  The Left thinks people will be afraid of what’s happening.  But instead, they are getting angry.  They want the traditional “whiff of grape” to answer the rioters, not more government programs to keep them happy.  They are angry towards the blacks, they are angry about being flooded by immigrants who do not acculturate, they are angry about the COVID-19 shut-downs that have killed their jobs, their social lives, and their football games.

So what happens in November?  My bet is that anger wins big, which is to say President Trump is re-elected in a landslide and the Republicans take back the House and keep the Senate.  But there is a larger issue here that will play out after the election.  Does a Republican win satisfy angry Americans, or will their anger continue to build until it overflows the political system into the streets?

The answer will depend in part how the Left reacts to defeat.  If it pumps up the fear campaign and the urban violence, the Right will at some point respond.  Hopefully, that response will take the form of supporting the police and National Guard as they move to restore order--which even Democratic mayors will want, to save their own political skins--but it may go further.  If checkpoints manned by armed locals start going up in the countryside, watch out: Fourth Generation war is here.

If the Democrats scare enough voters (mostly women) into giving them a victory, the anger of the angry public will boil over.  Its numbers will include most cops and Guardsmen, so Democratic governments may not have the tools they rely on (while at the same time despising them).  Where do the Democrats turn then?  Power ceases to be power when no one obeys it.  The scenario in Thomas Hobbes’ Victoria plays out, which again means 4GW on our own soil.

In terms of the core issue, fear vs. anger, the 2020 election will be an important one--so important that there may not be another, at least for a long time.

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

A Campaign Theme for the President

Thus far in the 2020 Presidential campaign, neither President Trump nor Mr. Biden has found a campaign theme that resonates with the public.  I don’t know that any single theme would be sufficient to address that lack.  But for President Trump, I think there is one theme with widespread appeal that could make a difference: what is at stake in November is your right to think, say, and write what you want to.  If the Democrats win and you are not a cultural Marxist, you may lose your freedom of thought and expression.

The evidence for this is rich and getting richer, thanks to the cultural Marxists’s premature celebration of victory.  On campuses across the country, professors and students find themselves facing expulsion, firing, harassment, and sometimes physical violence if they challenge any of the cultural Marxists’ ideological claptrap.  They may even be sentenced to “re-education” in the form of “sensitivity training,” which is psychological conditioning to mouth cultural Marxism’s lies.  One does not have to be an historian to see the parallels with what happened in Marxist states like the Soviet Union.

Nor is the aspirational totalitarianism of cultural Marxism only to be found on campuses.  We now see it in the streets of Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and elsewhere, as Marxist youth trash and burn small businesses the owners (sometimes minority members themselves) have put their lives into.

And we see it in rising urban and suburban crime rates as young black males calculate that police are now afraid to arrest them since the cop, rather than the criminal, may get in trouble. “Support your local police” is not just a nice idea; it is essential if order is to be preserved.

It is not hard to see how this theme could translate into powerful television advertising for President Trump’s re-election.  Show scenes of Left-wing youth rioting, destroying property and burning books (yes, they are doing that too) coupled with Democrats defending the rioters.  Interview small business owners, men and women, White and minority, who have lost everything to the arson and looting.  Get black inner-city residents to talk on camera about how crime ruins their lives.

President Trump has talked in several recent speeches about the fact that many of the demonstrators are Marxists.  It might go over some of the audience’s head, but he should consider using the term “cultural Marxism”.  That way the Democrats, especially Mr. Biden, could not defend themselves by pointing to past foreign policy positions that opposed the Soviet Union.  That was Marxism-Leninism, this is cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School, of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse.  They are different, but they are both forms of Marxism. 

As every good propagandist has always known, the most effective propaganda is propaganda that is true.  The truth is that many Americans already feel restrained from saying what they think on a wide variety of topics.  If a social media post or casual remark in the workplace is deemed “politically incorrect”, their job and even their whole career may be on the line.  How did we get to a point where any American is afraid to say what they think?  It’s not a case of “this could happen here;” it already has happened here.  We have already lost a substantial part of our freedom of speech.

If President Trump received the vote of all American citizens who are now afraid to say what they think on any topic, in any place, he would win in a landslide.  Freedom of thought and expression have been fundamental to defining America ever since the Constitution was ratified.  The average American knows it is under threat because he is under threat himself.  One wrong word, one “politically incorrect” post, and his life may be overturned.  He will be told the only way to save himself is to grovel in the dirt before the “woke” youth who are cultural Marxism’s storm troopers.

People are angry about this.  All the President has to do is make the vote in November a referendum on freedom of thought and expression.  The Left has created the situation; Mr. Trump merely has to point it out.  It won’t hurt if people also get the message that a vote for President Trump is the third-finger salute to cultural Marxism and the looting, burning minions it has spawned.

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

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

The Oppressed Majority

The cultural Marxists prate endlessly about “oppressed minorities”. A cynic might reply that it is in the nature of minorities to be oppressed.  In reality, this country’s “oppressed” minorities profit mightily from their “victim” status.  They get preferential treatment in hiring, boatloads of free money, and rules that allow them to behave badly while paying no penalty.  It’s a pretty good racket.

One of the strangest things about early-21st century America is that not minorities, but the White, Christian majority is oppressed--and puts up with it.  “Affirmative action” gives places in high-prestige universities,  as well as cushy jobs, to blacks and women instead of better-qualified White males.  Bakers, florists, and photographers are sued out of business by gays for refusing to violate their religious beliefs and help celebrate gay "weddings”, which are an impossibility.  The entertainment industry portrays White Christians in ways that, were blacks so type-cast, would bring howls of outrage.  Yet the oppressed White majority just sits there and takes it.  Why?

To answer that question, we need a bit of history.  The Frankfurt School created cultural Marxism in part by crossing Marx with Freud.  From psychology they took the idea of psychological conditioning: repeating messages so often in so many different ways that people absorbed them without conscious reflection.  If you presented logical arguments that Whites were somehow to blame for all the problems of blacks, men for all the problems of women, and Europeans for all the problems of North American Indians, those arguments could and would be demolished by facts and reason.  So instead the cultural Marxists repeat these messages endlessly in every available medium, bypassing the reasoning mind and planting their absurdities in the public’s sub-conscious.  Want to normalize homosexuality?  Make every competent, intelligent White male on television gay (and every monster or buffoon straight).  Put out movie after movie in which petite, beautiful women beat up big men, something that rarely happens in real life.  Make muggers White and heroic cops black, despite crime statistics that show blacks have a rate of violent crimes twelve times that of Whites.  It’s as if, through endless repetition, people can be brought to believe Jack Benny really is 39.  Poor Jack missed his era--today, thanks to psychological conditioning, he could be.

The result is that, across our society, the good, the true, and the beautiful are ripped down and the evil, the false, and the ugly are raised up and put in charge.  Cultural Marxism has invented a whole new form of government: cacastocracy, rule by excrement.

What should we do about it?  First, tell the truth.  This country was created by White Christians.  White Christians, not blacks, not Mohammedans, not gays, not women pretending to be men, turned a vast wilderness into what was the greatest country on earth.  Bach, Handel, and Hayden were White Christians, whose music is enjoyed by every race and culture on earth.  Just who was the Mozart of the Masai or the Da Vinci of the Hausa?  Only one culture can compete with White, Christian Western culture, and that is Chinese culture.  There is no Parthenon of sub-Saharan Africa or pre-Columbian North America.  The rest of the world has copied the West and is better off for it--we men of the West are happy to have our culture “appropriated” because it affirms we got it right.

Second, get the conditioning mechanisms out of our lives.  Turn off the TV, home-school the kids, and read good old books, not lying new ones.  White Christian families should secede from the surrounding society shaped by cultural Marxism.  It takes some effort but it can be done.

Third and most important, fight back.  Fly flags and put up signs the cultural Marxists condemn.  Vote out politicians who agree to tear down statues of our ancestors and heroes.  If they call you a “thisist” or “thatist”, reply that they are cultural Marxists and you reject their totalitarian ideology.  Send your kids to colleges that still have freedom of thought and expression, and demand state schools do so or lose their state funding. 

It is absurd for the majority to be oppressed in a country they created.  Our ancestors had the guts to fight to build this place.  Do we lack the courage even to defend it?

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

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

The View From Olympus: Some Prussian Advice for the Commandant

In my last column, I noted that the Commandant’s letter in the June Marine Corps Gazette rightly argued that large-scale amphibious operations are probably a thing of the past, but then offered as a replacement preparing for a highly unlikely conventional war with China and some force structure changes that share no connecting logic.  Since the Commandant, General David H. Berger, seems to need competent staff work he’s not getting, I sent his article off to Berlin by z-mail with a request that Max Hoffman, our best operational brain, take a look at it.  Zeppelin L-70 brought his prompt answer back to me, which I set out below:

Mein lieber Wilhelm!

Our airship brought me your letter and that of your Marine Corps’ Commandant, with your request that I give him our assistance.  I hope you will forgive me for not attending to it personally; I’m somewhat deeply into a challenging planning effort, namely how Prussia might best assist the Baltic states, Finland, and Sweden in case of a Russian attack.  As your problem was a relatively simple one, I took the liberty of sending it to the junior class at the Kriegsakademie as an exercise in strategic planning.  I enclose their proposed solution, which has a twist at the end I did not expect. 

Sehr Geehrter Herr Generalfeldmarschall!

Were we to draft a new letter for the American Marine Corps Commandant, we would begin with his (in our view correct) statement that, as their 37th Commandant said, “the (U.S.) Marine Corps is not organized, trained, equipped, or postured to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving future operating environment.”  We would follow this with his (again, in our view, correct) discussion of why large-scale amphibious landings against strong opposition are not likely in the future.

However, we view the possibility of a large-scale Chinese-American conventional war as equally unlikely, because both countries are nuclear powers.  The risk of escalation by whichever country were losing is simply too great.  The Commandant would do better to turn to an article by three gunnery sergeants and a staff sergeant in the July Gazette and pick up their “Where We’ve Been and Where We Are”, which in our view is on target.  These staff NCOs note that “for the last fifteen years of combat, Marines have not faced a single uniformed or ‘state’ enemy force on the battlefield.”  It is our opinion this will probably continue to be the case.  To prepare for this, as we call it, Fourth Generation war, the Marine Corps’ top challenge is to make maneuver warfare what it does, not just something it talks about.  This was General Berger’s Schwerpunkt in his initial Commandant’s guidance; we did not understand why he has altered it, especially since his direct jump to force structure changes suggests he may not have any Schwerpunkt, a certain guarantee of failure.  This impression is strengthened by the fact that, were the U.S. Marine Corps to focus on war with China, it would certainly want its own tanks and a large artillery park.  This disconnect suggests poor staff work, in our view.

If the American Marines were to prepare for more war with non-state opponents, it would need to address the reasons most state forces, including those of the United States, have been defeated in such conflicts.  In our view, this means reform, not reorganization; the two are not the same, and in fact, the latter is often used to disguise failure to do the former.  Reform in this case means making maneuver warfare real, forming a strategic alliance of all states in defense of the state system and doing serious intellectual work on the problem of Fourth Generation war.

As to force structure, for Fourth Generation war, what Marines need most is true light (Jaeger) infantry.  At present, all their infantry is Stellungsdivisionen, i.e., line infantry with little mobility.  Such forces largely serve as targets for their more mobile opponents.  Converting these line infantry battalions to light infantry should be the Commandant’s top priority.  This begins with assigning the brightest men to the infantry, not the dullest.  We would also eliminate all F-35s, which are useless for supporting troops in action, and instead either take the Air Force’s remaining A-10s or purchase our Stukas and/or Halberstadt CL-IIs.  The resources absorbed by the useless F-35 would buy many squadrons of the latter.  We concur with the Commandant’s plan to eliminate most current tube artillery, but would add new, lightweight 10.5 centimeter howitzers in some number, plus many more mortars, including large ones (up to 16 cm).  These could respond more quickly to the fleeting targets Fourth Generation opponents offer.  We would retain the three tank battalions, which can offer a useful presence in 4GW.

To complete this exercise, we add the following annex, which should remain classified.

STRENG GEHEIM!

As is the case with most other European states, the next real war the Americans face is likely to be fought on their own soil as 4GW rises from within.  This recently broke out in a number of American cities, initially on a small scale.  As the central government continues to lose its legitimacy, it will spread and intensify.  Were we advising the Commandant, we would propose he begin (secretly) planning to mobilize all Marine veterans who are willing to answer the call, forming on whatever active or reserve Marines are present (in many places that may be staff NCOs on recruiting duty).  They would arm themselves with whatever is available, and would place themselves under the orders of their individual state’s National Guard.  Their primary function would not be armed action, but giving legitimacy to their state's government (not necessarily the federal government) by showing Marines support it.  U.S. Marines still have substantial moral credibility in the eyes of most Americans, and that will be the most important quality in the situation as we envision it.

PS:

I thought the class’s secret annex showed the sort of forward thinking the Kriegsakademie attempts to encourage.  I hope you find their exercise useful; perhaps it may encourage your Marine Corps’ Commandant to do some further thinking of his own.  As with the Austrians, Prussia always stands ready to come to the rescue.

Max

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

The View From Olympus: Why Did the Marines Stop Thinking?

Contrary to the stereotype of the “dumb Marine”, from the mid-1970s into the early 1990s the Marine Corps was intellectually the most lively of the U.S. armed services.  The intellectual ferment brought dramatic change to the Marine Corps in its adoption of maneuver warfare (aka 3rd Generation war) as doctrine.  But since that time, the Marine Corps’ intellectual light seems to have flickered out.

The June and July issues of the Marine Corps Gazette show the extent of the Corps’ downward slide.  Both month’s magazines feature a renewed focus on maneuver warfare.  Each contains one important article, in both cases written by Staff NCOs, the theme of which is that the Marine Corps does not actually do maneuver warfare, it just talks about it.  The Staff NCOs are correct; the changes to the personnel system, education, and training maneuver warfare required were never made.  The other articles on maneuver warfare, while generally sound, could all have been written thirty to forty years ago--and in fact were in terms of their content.  It is good the Corps is reviewing this material, but hardly counts as intellectual progress.

One article in the June Gazette does include some new thinking, and surprisingly it is written not by a captain but by the Marine Corps’ Commandant, General David H. Berger.  In it, General Berger acknowledges that the day of large-scale amphibious landings like Tarawa and Iwo Jima is past, at least against serious opposition.  Boldly, the Commandant writes,

The force we have today, with the notable but operationally insufficient expectation of rotary-wing vertical envelopment, is an incrementally-advanced, higher-tech version of that same 1930s solution.  We now must recognize that time has flowed on.  Our problems today, in terms of threat, geography, and technology. . . are not those of the 1930s.

For a Corps that has hung its hat on large-scale amphibious operations for the better part of a century, this is daring.  I would add that the importance of the Marine Corps’ ship-borne strategic mobility remains.

But after this intrepid start, the Commandant’s article dribbles off into strategic irrelevance in the form of pretending we will fight a conventional war with China and a dog’s breakfast of force structure changes with no discernible logic to connect them.  This is not the Commandant’s fault; it reflects the reality that an organization that stopped thinking thirty years ago can’t suddenly do it again.

So why did the Marine Corps stop thinking?  The most important answer is: too much money.  When I began working with the Marine Corps in the 1970s, it prided itself on not spending much.  Marines knew they could not buy a future, they had to think one up for themselves.  This began to change in the mid-1990s, and I watched, sadly, as money and the quest for even more money swamped everything else.  The vaunted “Warfighting Lab” soon focused not on experiments to improve combat performance, but on inventing justifications for more programs and money.  A friend who was involved at the time in setting up the “Commandant’s War Room” said to me, “The only war discussed in it is the budget war.”  Poverty begets thinking, while a flood of money washes it away.  The Marine Corps’ senior leadership forgot that in the end, Midas starves.

A second reason for the Corps’ intellectual retreat is that the personnel system did not and does not reward intellectual achievement.  It makes no effort to identify Marine thinkers early in their careers, develop them carefully and place them in billets where they can use their talent to greatest effect.  On the contrary, it drives them out by misusing them in jobs the average cabbage could do.  A Marine officer’s PFT score is more important than his ability to think.  Perhaps our future enemies will challenge us to a Marathon (with us playing the Persians?).

Third, over the almost-fifty years I have observed the Marine Corps, I have watched bureaucracy grow like kudzu in July.  It now enmeshes everything, to the point where all the Marine Corps can produce is more bureaucracy, more and more elaborate processes and briefings with glitzy graphics and no intellectual content.  Process has been substituted for thinking, and the two are not the same.  Now, when a Commandant needs a new strategic role for the Marine Corps, all he gets is endless process.  No wonder the poor man seems lost. 

In my next column, I will suggest what the Commandant might have said if he had a Prussian general staff advising him.  I’m thinking Max Hoffman is exactly the right man for the job.

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

How to Strike Back

The Left’s seeming triumph is a momentary affair.  In fact, with idiocy such as abolishing the police it is discrediting itself massively.  But conservatives are frustrated.  They want to strike back but aren’t sure how.  Here are a few ideas that might help.

First, before we strike back at anyone we need to know who the enemy is.  It is not black people.  They are just tools being used by the real enemy.  Who are they?  The cultural Marxists, the purveyors of political correctness, multiculturalism, and white guilt.  Just like the economic Marxists who ruled the Soviet Union, they are ideologues who want to establish a totalitarian state based on their ideology.  They couldn't care less about the blacks they use, damage, and then discard.

Second, we must always follow one rule: never initiate violence.  If they start it, then we have both a right and a duty to defend ourselves.  And at that point, we should fight to win.  But every time the Right starts a physical fight, it helps the cultural Marxists even if we do win in the end.  They become “victims” who, in a feminized culture, other Americans will have sympathy for and identify with.  At that point we lose on the moral level, which is the most powerful level of conflict.

So what can we do, beyond making sure in November that President Trump is re-elected in a landslide?  Here are a few possibilities:

  • Show our support for the police.  If the Left holds “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations, we should counter with “Blue Lives Matter” rallies.  The police represent one of conservatives’ highest values: order.  We need them and, especially now, they need us.  We should be there for them, publicly, every way we can.
  • Boycott the moral cowards.  Who are they?  The businessmen, newspaper editors, politicians (not all Democrats), sports team owners, etc. who are tripping over themselves in their rush to kiss the cultural Marxists’ feet.  We can refuse to go to their restaurant chains, buy their companies’ products, order tickets to their games and races, vote for them (including cowardly Republicans), or read their newspapers.  We can make them pay.
  • When the Left pulls down statues to our heroes and our ancestors, either with ropes or through cowardly politicians, we can put up new statues in areas we control.  There are lots of small towns and rural counties in the South where conservatives are in charge.  Offer to take the statues of Confederate generals they have pulled down and put them back up again.  If they refuse, have new ones made.  The same should happen in Italian neighborhoods with statues of Christopher Columbus.  And how about Marshal Balbo too?  He was very popular in America in the 1930s.
  • Rename streets, squares, and other geographic features.  They want to strip out all politically incorrect names, so we should add more.  Every Southern town and county should have a new President Jefferson Davis Avenue.  General Robert E. Lee, Longstreet (the South’s best general after Lee), Stonewall Jackson, all should get new places named for them.  Outside the South, we could adopt other names the cultural Marxists hate.  How about Adam Smith Avenue?  In towns with lots of German-Americans, I’d love to see the town square become Kaiser Wilhelm ll Platz (he’d love it too).  And why not some statues of real heroes on the re-named streets: the black Confederate soldier?  A significant number of Southern blacks fought for the Confederacy.
  • We need our own flag, in addition to our country’s flag.  Down South, the Confederate flag should fly everywhere outside big cities (where it may get torn down).  As the descendant of Sgt. Alfred G. Sturgiss, 177th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, I am reluctant to fly the Southern banner.  But what about a dark blue St. Andrews Cross on a white background?  Or the Pine Tree flag with its “Appeal to Heaven”?  Conservatives need something that says, “We are conservatives.”  Once we have one that works outside Dixie, it should turn up everywhere.

All of these are ways we can strike back at the real enemy, the Left.  I’m sure others can come up with more and better ones.  But the Right needs to launch a (non-violent) counter-offensive one way or another, and do it before election day.  That day should seal, not start, our victory.

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

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The View From Olympus: A Glimpse of Future War Among Great Powers

Several weeks ago, the world got a glimpse of what future war will look like among Great Powers.  The weapons were rocks and clubs.

Indian and Chinese troops battled each other over worthless ground along their undefined border high in the Himalayas.  It was a classic case of two bald men fighting over a comb.  But at least 20 Indian soldiers died, along with an unknown number of Chinese.

What is interesting about this skirmish is the weapons employed.  Both India and China have sizable arsenals of modern weapons.  They employed none of them.  Instead, they fought with rocks and clubs.

I find the deafening silence over this choice of weapons, including from the U.S. military, to be interesting.  It certainly should draw the attention of anyone who studies where war may be going.  Why did such a bizarre scenario unfold?  Because both countries have nuclear weapons.

It is probably true that neither India nor China wants a war at this point.  But what limited both countries' soldiers to the weapons of cavemen was something with general import: so terrifying is the prospect of nuclear war to anyone threatened with it that governments are willing, even eager, to go to seemingly ridiculous lengths to prevent it.

Prevention begins with avoiding the escalatory ladder.  And that is what led to a fight with rocks and clubs.  Both countries rightly feared that if they went to the weapons of, let’s say Sung dynasty China or Moghul India, they would set foot on that ladder.  So rocks and clubs it had to be.  Even a battle with those so alarmed Beijing and New Delhi that they quickly sought to settle the dispute diplomatically.  Many weapons have claimed the title of “the Peacemaker”, but nuclear weapons actually deserve it.

This offers us a look at what war between other nuclear powers, let’s say the U.S. and China, might be like.  The driving consideration for both countries’ leadership would be avoiding escalation.  Since any confrontation would probably be a sea and air war, it might look something like the Cod Wars between Britain and Iceland.  Ships might ram each other (not too hard).  Water cannon might be employed.  Chinese sailors might throw bao at American crews, who would volley back hamburgers in return (the Americans would end up with the better lunch).  Fighter aircraft might engage, at least to the point of seeing who was better at staying on the other guy’s six.  Would they shoot?  If they did, both capitals would be frantic, trying to de-escalate.

Since both countries now have obesity problems among their youth, my proposal for an escalation-safe war would be vast eating and drinking matches between their respective ships’ and aircrafts’ crews.  Just imagine what the Navy PFT might look like!  It would do wonders for qualifying recruits.  Join the Navy and become the world!

The really funny thing here is that both the U.S. and China are spending vast sums buying weapons and generating forces for a conventional war.  That is not going to happen, barring outright insanity in both capitals at the same time.  Unless the inmates are running the asylum, both countries will seek to de-escalate rapidly from any accidental clash that might occur (things can happen; remember the War of Jenkins’ Ear).  Rules of engagement would quickly be established that would take both sides back to rocks and clubs, as India and China had already done.

The fact is, the whole China Scare is a sham, at least as far as a shooting war is concerned (our economic conflict is real, as President Trump understands).  It’s one more con job on the American people, intended to keep the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex rolling in dough.  When the massive defense budget cuts hit, which they soon will, remember my suggestion; let both countries’ navies roll in real dough.  That we may still be able to afford.

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Racial Justice

It is occasionally useful to know what words mean.  A demand for “racial justice” is the cultural Marxists’ latest cry (often uttered as they wreck, loot, and burn small businesses).  If we parse the phrase and consider it carefully, what is its actual meaning?

I think we determine that best by starting with the noun, “justice”.  My American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1969 edition, offers seven definitions, of which the fourth seems the most applicable here;  “Fair handling; due reward or treatment.”  In that definition, the word “due” is critical.  “Due” reward or treatment means that a person’s actions determine their reward.  Good actions get something good as a reward, but bad acts receive something bad, including bad treatment.  That is what justice means.

Coupling justice with the word “racial” in “racial justice” clearly means races are to be rewarded well or badly, and treated well or badly, depending on what is “due” their race based on their actions.  Here the slogan immediately breaks with our long legal tradition and also with Christian morality.  Both have traditionally held that justice can only be individual, not collective, because free will--the choice to act well or badly--is individual.  Because cultural Marxism sees everything driven by which groups, defined by race, sex, and sexual normality or abnormality, have power over other groups, it rejects individual justice for “racial justice”.  Where does this lead us?

It leads to big trouble for blacks.  If we are compelled to award justice collectively by race, the “due” reward or treatment of blacks must reflect collective actions by blacks as a race.  Unfortunately, when we look at the numbers, what is “due” blacks is punishment and bad treatment.  Their rate of violent crime is twelve times whites’ rate.  Their illegitimacy rate is about 80%.  They have the highest rate of welfare dependency of any major ethnic group.  Their rates of “lifestyle”, diseases such as obesity and diabetes, are higher than other races--and they depend on public funds to take care of them more often than other races.  By almost every measure, “racial justice” puts blacks in the worst position among racial groups in this country.

At the same time cultural Marxists demand “racial justice”, they also denounce “white privilege”.  Yet the two slogans are contradictory.  Racial justice for whites means we should be privileged in America.  Why?  We built it.  It was whites who turned a vast wilderness inhabited by a few million savages into what was, as recently as the 1950s, the best country on earth.  If we really want to base national policies on “racial justice”, “due reward or treatment” puts whites on top and blacks on the bottom.

The problem, as I hope is evident by this point, is two-fold.  First, trying to substitute groups, however defined, for individuals where justice is concerned is wrong.  It leads to widespread injustice, as individuals who have earned good rewards by their actions are instead handed bad treatment.  Group justice is inherently unjust.  “Racial justice” is an impossibility, a contradiction of terms.

The second problem is that, as is so often the case with ideologies, cultural Marxists’ call for “racial justice” is really something else.  What they are actually demanding is racial license, permission for blacks to do whatever they want, and suffer no penalties.  This is, if anything, even worse for blacks than real (collective) racial justice would be, because it would promptly drive all the other races in the country together in resentment and anger against blacks.  Blacks are only 13% of our population.  When 13% gets the other 87% angry at it, it is in serious danger.

The cultural Marxists don't really care about America’s blacks.  They see them as a tool they can use to further their destruction of our society.  If the tool gets destroyed in the process, the cultural Marxists will care not at all.  Their goals are wholly defined as “negation”: bringing everything down.  The question is, do blacks really want to let themselves be used as someone else’s tool, with disastrous consequences for all of us?

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

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The Suicide of the Left

The cultural Marxists think they are riding high.  Thousands of kids are demonstrating for “Black Lives Matter”.  The Left’s long-running war on police is surging as panicked politicians throw the cops under the bus.  Not only Confederate war memorials but those to Union forces as well, along with the World War ll memorial in the Washington mall, are desecrated.  A commune is declared in a six-block area in Seattle.  Anyone in the Establishment who offends in the slightest, most trivial way against Political Correctness is off to the guillotine.  The Terror is again in full swing and the Jacobins are elated.

What is really happening here is not the triumph of the Left, but its suicide.

As I wrote in my last column, the young demonstrators are out there just to be out there, after two months of confinement, “social distancing”, masks, etc. have left them bored out of their skulls.  Their commitment to “Black Lives Matter” (except to other blacks, who kill each other like flies) is a mile wide and an inch deep.  The “cause” could as easily be vegetable rights, Save the Cockroaches, or banning discrimination against bovine flatulence.  Anything that justifies their getting together in large numbers and making trouble works for them.

As the Left gives ordinary Americans a choice between the cops and the vandals, looters, and arsonists who have destroyed small businesses in too many of our cities, the people are lining up with the police.  Here in Cleveland the anger over the destruction on Euclid Avenue in the heart of our downtown is deep and lasting.  People had put their lives into building those businesses and restaurants and now they have to start over.

If you want to make people fight, there are few better ways than attacking their ancestors and war memorials.  The Left will find Confederate flags flying more places, not fewer.  I hope southern towns and rural areas will start erecting new Confederate memorials as the Left vandalizes old ones.  There are plenty of Confederate reenactors who would be delighted to defend statues honoring their ancestors, perhaps with some brass 12-pounder Napoleons loaded with grape.

The Left’s illusion of victory is leading it to over-reach to the point where its madness is obvious.  Defund the police?  That’s insane.  The police are the thin blue line we all rely on when something goes seriously wrong.  With the police banned from the Seattle commune, it’s turning rapidly into Lord of the Flies.

What we are witnessing here is the Brinton Thesis in action within the Left.  The Brinton Thesis, created by historian Crane Brinton based on his study of the French Revolution, says that revolutions move in a series of coups leading ever-farther to the extreme until the coup of Thermidor brings it all back to the center.  He was looking at countries as a whole, but in this case his thesis can be applied internally to the Left.  (Now you know why in my photo, I’m dining on Lobster Thermidor.)

In America as a whole, I think the reaction will go far beyond a return to the center.  In response to the cultural Marxists’ threat to the majority’s culture and its freedom of thought and expression, we are likely to see a massive shift to the Right.  When reality returns, it will come in a tsunami.

I fear the blacks may bear the brunt of the reaction.  The cultural Marxists are using the blacks as weapons against whites, much the way Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War used local blacks against whites.  That poisoned race relations in the South for a century.  I don’t want to see the same thing happen nationwide now.  Most blacks just want to live normal, middle-class lives.

The irony is that cultural Marxists, who pretend to be black’s “advocates”, did the black urban community in this country more damage than Simon Legree and Senator Bilbo put together.  It was cultural Marxism that, from the 1960s onward, preached a culture of instant sensual gratification in books such as Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.  In college, white kids “did their own thing”, then got MBAs and law degrees and went to work on Wall Street.  In the ghetto, blacks just kept on doing it, creating the widespread moral and cultural collapse we now witness in our black inner cities. 

The real enemy of whites and blacks alike is cultural Marxism.  I hope the day comes when we unite to fight it.

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

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Sub-optimization

Enough time has passed since COVID-19 paid its first call on this country to see that we overreacted.  My state of Ohio has suffered just over 2000 people dead from the virus.  The Ohio Department of Public Health recently announced that 70% of those deaths were suffered by people who were patients in nursing homes.  We are not supposed to say this, but we all know that most people in nursing homes are just being warehoused until they die. That means Ohio really lost about .05% of our population to the bug.  It’s not exactly the Black Death.

No one knows whether the economy of Ohio or the nation will recover quickly or not.  The markets are betting on a quick recovery.  The establishment media are doing their best to panic everyone so they stay home, don’t buy, and by election day we find ourselves in a second Great Depression.  To the establishment, that’s worth it to get President Trump out of the White House and an establishment politician back in.  Remember, the establishment does not care about the rest of the country.  It only cares about remaining the Establishment, which means it must control all senior positions in government.

It is safe to say, at least here in Ohio, that the economic damage we have already suffered was disproportionate to the health threat.  So why did it happen, beyond the Establishment’s desire to wreck everything while Mr. Trump is in office?

A major reason has been and continues to be sub-optimization by healthcare professionals, especially those in charge of public health. What is sub-optimization?  It is something virtually all professionals in every field do in their area of expertise. It is not nefarious in origin; it is simply how human nature works. Simply put, sub-optimization occurs when a professional optimizes everything for his speciality.

When lawyers write laws, they sub-optimize by making the law impossible to understand unless you are a lawyer.  When preachers and priests sub-optimize, they urge you to sell all that you have and give it to the poor.  When the designers of fighter planes sub-optimize, they sacrifice all other qualities of the aircraft to combat maneuverability (well, unless they are recent American designers, whose planes maneuver like bricks).  And when health professionals sub-optimize, they tell us to shut down the whole economy to prevent the spread of disease.

They have not thereby done anything wrong.  From their perspective, that is what their expertise required.  They would see themselves as derelict in their duty had they urged anything less.

The fault lies with our political leaders, at every level.  It is their job, not the job of doctors, or lawyers, or preachers, or fighter plane designers, to reconcile all the many sub-optimizations the professionals offer into a balanced package. 

The political leader is supposed to be a generalist, not a specialist.  He is charged with reconciling a wide variety of competing visions, interests, and recommendations, from all the specialists in all their many specialties, into policy that best serves the broad interests of society as a whole.  That is not what has happened with COVID-19.

In the beginning, shutting down most places where people congregate made sense.  We did not know how deadly (or not) COVID-19 would turn out to be.  But now we do know.  Ohio’s Republican Governor is moving smartly to open everything back up.  By the end of May, 95% of all businesses will be open in Ohio.  But two important questions remain.

The first is, did not those in charge, i.e., top political leaders, including governors, know before the rest of us that COVID-19, while highly contagious, is not very deadly except to old people who are already at death’s door?  If they did not know sooner, why didn’t they?  And if they did know, why did they allow the sub-optimization focused on public health to continue longer than it needed to, at vast economic cost?

The second question is, now that we do know COVID-19 is not very dangerous, why are our political leaders not taking to task the mainstream media that continue to promote panic?  Those media are crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater, in terms of the danger to our economy.  Yet not even President Trump is calling them on it.

We need political leaders at every level to urge people to resume normal economic life, such as shopping in person in retail stores and going out to eat.  Where is the leadership for that?  Hiding, it seems, as the public health officials still want us all to do, under the bed for fear of the virus while the house that is our economy burns down around us.

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

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

Kids, Cops, and Race

The death of George Floyd while he was in custody of Minneapolis police was the trigger for the recent riots, but it was not the cause.  What we have seen in the past two weeks is only the first of what are likely to be many large-scale social and political events resulting from the coronavirus.

So what was the cause of the riots?  Boredom and intolerable social isolation for two months by millions of kids.  The riots were an example of what I call “supply-side war”.  What do young people with no school to attend, no jobs, no money, and no prospects do?  They fight.  Much of the conflict we witness in the Middle East is supply-side war.  Now, it has paid us a visit.

George Floyd’s death provided the perfect excuse for our own bored kids to get outside, gather with other kids--the hell with masks and “social distancing”--and have fun.  Kids consider creating trouble a form of fun.  Floyd’s death gave them moral cover.  They weren’t having fun, they were “protesting”. Yeah, sure.  The riots had more in common with the vast snowball fights that developed when everyone was cramming for finals at Dartmouth when I was a student there than with civil rights marches in the early 1960s.  The path it opened for some (mostly black) kids to loot and burn was just icing on the cake, as was the opening the “protests” created for (mostly white) kids on the alt-left--anarchists, Antifa, Marxists, etc.--to damage government facilities and “capitalist” enterprises like Colossal Cupcakes here in Cleveland.  Those cupcakes (very good ones) were obviously products of white supremacy.

The people on the receiving end of the “rage” were the cops.  The tactics used by the Minneapolis police in detaining Floyd were terrible.  It is right that the four cops involved got fired and one (so far) has been charged with murder.  Good police tactics seek de-escalation.  As soon as someone is on the ground and in cuffs, police should turn to helping and protecting him.

But here, the “fake news” mainstream media have shown again how they offer fake news.  Not one major publication or broadcast has dared tell the truth that cops face every day: the black rate of violent crime is twelve times the white rate.  Not double.  Not triple.  Not quadruple.  Triple times quadruple.  Who has to deal with this?  The cops.  (My sources for the twelve times figure are Jared Taylor’s The Color of Crime and Ron Unz’s study published several years ago in The American Conservative magazine; both were based on federal government data.)

Cops react to young black males the way they do because they have to.  Almost all violent black crime is committed by young males.  Cops cannot treat them equally with whites because they do not behave equally to whites.  Cops have to be realists.  Both their ability to do their job and their lives are at stake.  The fake news media and the rest of the establishment can live in a fictional world where whites and blacks behave the same (as blacks used to, as recently as the 1950s).  Cops cannot.

So what is to be done?  Three actions are called for, in my view.  First, as President Trump has suggested, the cops and National Guardsmen backing them must act faster and more aggressively to stop rioters, looters, and arsonists.  The state arose to establish and maintain order, and if it cannot, the state has failed and it loses its legitimacy.  Far too much property damage was allowed.  Traditionally, looters and arsonists got shot.  That is as it should be now as well.

Second, we need vastly improved police training.  In most police academies, 90% of the time is devoted to firearms training.  Instead, 90% of the time should be devoted to learning how to de-escalate situations.  Good cops are streetcorner politicians, not gunmen.  The Police Corps program worked out how to train cops for neighborhood policing.  Their work should be revived and made SOP.

Finally, the black community needs to confront its own failure to bring down violent crimes by blacks--most of which is committed against other blacks.  The hypocrisy of “Black Lives Matter” reeks to the heavens.  They never talk about black-on-black deadly violence.  The number of unarmed blacks killed by police is trivial compared to the number killed by other blacks with guns. 

The last of these is the most challenging, but until blacks remove the beam from their own eyes, they should not expect the rest of us to deal with the mote in our own.

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

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The Gathering Storm

As I write this in late April, the most probable course of the coronavirus (a.k.a. Flu Manchu) is that it is at or past its peak medically and case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths will decline steadily hereafter.  Economically, the country will have one bad quarter and come back quickly.

But there is another possibility.  The country will not recover economically, or at least will take a long time to do so.  While the medical threat from the virus will diminish, the public’s fear will not.  Restaurants, bars, stores, hotels, etc. will reopen, but people won’t come in adequate numbers so that anyone can make a profit.  Instead of businesses rebounding, business failures will become more numerous.  That in turn will create growing unemployment.  At the same time that demands on state services increase, state revenues will plunge further.  All over the country, individuals, businesses, cities, and states will be screaming for more federal help as other sources of money dry up.

The federal government will oblige, adding many trillions more to the four-plus trillion dollars the Treasury and the Fed have already committed.  But that will make other lenders increasingly uncomfortable, so private lending will dry up.  As the sea of freshly printed money deepens, more and more people around the world will begin to question the safety of the dollar.  Inflationary pressures will rise.

As the economy worsens, we will have accumulated evidence that we over-reacted to the threat the coronavirus posed.  Because 50% to 80% of people who caught it had few or no symptoms, we greatly overestimated the death rate.  Outside a few dense urban areas, the country as a whole was in a position to manage the epidemic without extraordinary measures.  We will know countries that remained open, including Sweden, did not suffer an apocalypse.  We did not need to shut everything down.

The combination of an economic depression and wide public awareness that it did not have to happen will be socially and politically explosive.  The public will be enraged at the medical professionals who, sub-optimizing as all professionals do, thought only about people’s health and not their need to earn a living when they issued their dire predictions.  It will be even angrier at the mainstream social media that did its utmost to generate panic--successfully.  No current politician or political party will be credible.  Politics will move beyond parties and elections in new, uncharted directions.  In a country where Left and Right were already so far apart that it was difficult to accommodate both in one political system, the split will widen further, as it did worldwide during the last great depression.

This storm is already gathering.  We see it in the demonstrations in more and more state capitals where people who have lost their incomes and have so far received no government aid are demanding businesses be allowed to reopen.  We see it in poor urban areas where rent strikes are brewing.  We see open rebellion against rules that make sense in cities being applied in rural areas.

As I have written many times, no conservative can want disorder.  I hope this scenario does not unfold.  I still think it likely the economy will rebound, so long as most states move quickly in May to reopen all businesses and do so without rules that prevent those businesses from being profitable.  At that point, just as we all had a duty to stay home in March and April, I hope we will all do our duty by resuming our normal lives: eating in restaurants, shopping in person rather than on-line, and going to church.

But if we do find that, in the end, we were swindled into a great depression, all bets are off.  As I wrote in my last column, I think what emerges will be a politics that is culturally Right but economically Left.  How we get to that new politics may be messy.

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A Six Hundred Dollar Mistake

The measures taken thus far by President Trump, Congress, and the Fed to provide financial relief to companies and individuals during the coronavirus panic seem to have been the right ones--with one possible mistake.  What is that?  Giving people who have been laid off $600 per week in addition to their normal unemployment benefit.  While well intentioned--we all want to help those who are struggling--it is already having some negative effects and promises more down the line.

The problems stem from the fact that, for many hourly workers, they are now receiving, thanks to the extra $600, more money in unemployment benefits than they normally earn from their job.  Some unintended consequences are already visible.  While many businesses have been hurt by the panic and related closures, others have seen sales grow enormously.  Those businesses need more employers to meet the demand.  Here in Ohio, 40,000 jobs are going begging.  Why should people take those jobs when they get paid more to stay home, thanks to the extra $600?

It gets worse.  The federal government is offering forgivable loans to small businesses, on one condition: they keep paying their employees.  But the employees make more if they are laid off.  So they want to be laid off, but the company they work for has to pay the loan back unless they remain on its payroll.  In many cases, while a forgiven loan, which means a grant, would enable the business to remain a going concern, a loan it would have to repay would make it go under.  So now the employer and the employee are at loggerheads, with the latter endangering their post-panic jobs unless they remain on payroll at less money than they would receive off it.

What concerns me more than these temporary problems is some long-term effects.  Let’s face it, many of the jobs people are being laid off from are from jobs they hate.  They have to stand up all day, the work is boring at best, and the pay is low.  At some point, as the economy picks up again and the extra $600 in unemployment cash ends, they will have to turn from enjoying life at home for more money to working again for less money.  That may cause massive social and political dissatisfaction, even anger.

It’s a pity Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race for the presidency.  He could say,"When you stayed home for more money, that was socialism.  Having now to go back to work at a crappy job for less money is capitalism.  Which do you prefer?"  That might have been a hard question for President Trump to answer.

This in turn points to what I think will be the successful politics of the future: culturally Right but economically Left.  On the one hand, people, especially white people, are tired of being told they are “oppressors” who should hand over their earnings to blacks and Third World immigrants who are too often just takers.  They are sick of the Left’s endless attacks on Western culture, the Christian religion, whites, men, non- and anti-feminist women, etc.  And they have had it with cultural Marxists telling them what words they may and may not use, what thoughts they may and may not think.  Who elected them censors?

At the same time, middle America is angry at the one percent, not because it has done well (although its conspicuous consumption is rightly resented) but because it gets ever richer while the American middle class gets poorer.  If the middle class’s standard of living were also rising, the resentment would be much less.  But it isn’t.  The blue-collar middle class of the 1950s and '60s has almost vanished; many of those people are now poor.  The white collar middle class knows it is headed down the same road.  Unlike in the 1950s, both husband and wife must now work, and even with two incomes the only way they can keep up a middle class lifestyle is by going ever more deeply in debt.  It is not merely the Left that wants a re-balancing and is willing to see the government do it.  That sentiment is now widespread among the culturally conservative middle class as well.

Will the resentment caused by the end of the extra $600 a week be enough to birth a new politics that is culturally Right but economically Left?  On its own, probably not.  But it may well mark a further step along that road.  On the surface, the Democrats would seem likely to benefit most.  But they have the millstone of cultural Marxism fixed around their necks, seemingly permanently.  Establishment Republicans are in bed with the 1%.  But anti-Establishment Republicans are well positioned to accomplish the new synthesis. 

Who will grasp the opportunity and make it happen?  Out of mistakes sometimes come opportunities.

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

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COVID-19 and Culture

I went to the grocery store this morning in my enjoyably white suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, and was surprised to find that perhaps a third of the customers were black.  I don’t know why; perhaps the panic buying had cleaned out their stores on their side of town.  But their presence brought an immediate problem: at least two-thirds of them paid no attention to social distancing.

The Left is now howling about the fact that COVID-19 is much more widespread in black and Hispanic areas than in places where whites live.  This is true not only of cities--compare Cleveland with Detroit--but within cities as well, including in our epicenter of the plague, New York.  As usual, they are blaming it on “inequality”.  And in a way, they are right.  One factor that explains the difference is inequality among cultures: some cultures work a great deal better than others.

The white, Christian, northern European culture that is the origin of America’s civic culture is one of the best functioning cultures on earth.  That is easy enough to see; compare life in northern Europe to life in southern Africa.  One characteristic that differentiates northern European culture from most other cultures is the former’s high level of civic virtue.  Most northern Europeans and white Americans have internalized the idea that you owe something to the people around you, simply because they are there.  This is, by world standards, a highly unusual belief.  In most cultures, including Hispanic culture, you owe nothing to anyone who is not a member of your family, clan, or tribe, in that order of importance.  The public realm is simply a combined dump and sewer.  Why not?  The people who inhabit it, except your relatives, mean nothing to you.  Civic virtue, in such cultures, is unknown.

What this means in our country as it confronts the coronavirus is that in black and Hispanic areas, people do not follow the rules to the same degree as do people in white and east Asian areas (east Asian culture is a culture of order, even though it does not have northern European culture’s concept of civic virtue).  That is of course not the only explanation for the difference in infection rates: population density and people’s need to physically go to their workplace are also factors.  Once the pandemic passes, it would be informative to compare infection rates in black and Hispanic neighborhoods with those in poor white neighborhoods.  That probably won’t happen for fear the results would point to cultural differences, which would be politically incorrect.

A third example also points to civic virtue as an important variable: the high infection rates in some orthodox Jewish neighborhoods.  Ultra-orthodox Jews are rule-followers of the highest order--but only their own rules.  Like black and Hispanic cultures, their culture dismisses anyone not from their group.  The public realm beyond their shtetl means nothing to them, unless they are doing a “good deed” in that realm, which some sects do require.  Otherwise, they hold the world of the goyim in contempt, as that world holds them in contempt, which is why the Holocaust was popular in much of central and eastern Europe. 

That fact points to the danger to minority groups which, in societies with strong concepts of civic virtue, refuse to practice such virtue themselves.  In normal times, the result is irritation and friction.  In abnormal times, irritation and friction can boil over into a determination to either enforce civic virtue on those who will not practice it voluntarily or find a final solution to the problem.  We are, I hope, a long way from the latter.  But if we were dealing not with the flu but with a plague that had a much higher mortality rate--as at some point we will be--the fate of those who refuse to follow the larger society’s rules and practice civic virtue could be grim.

In the meantime, I will be happy when the other shoppers in my grocery store are again from groups that practice civic virtue.  I will be overjoyed when our politicians acknowledge that some cultures are superior to others, and ours is, or was, the best.

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

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

The View From Olympus: Did the Marine Corps Just Commit Suicide?

The new Marine Corps Commandant, General David H. Berger, recently announced a series of major changes in the Marine Corps’ mission and structure.  When General Berger released his Commandant’s Guidance last summer, I supported it strongly. But the actions he just announced are so mis-directed that I fear they may add up to the suicide of the Marine Corps.

According to the Commandant’s letter announcing the Corps’ redirection,

The Marine Corps is redesigning the force for naval expeditionary warfare in actively contested spaces, fully aligning the Service with the direction of the National Defense Strategy (NDS). . .

Some of the key changes that will shape the future force include:

  • Expansion of long-range fires.  A 300% increase in rocket artillery.
  • Marine Littoral Regiment.  These purpose-built naval combined arms units will be capable of long-range precision-fires and equipped with anti-ship missiles.
  • Lighter, more mobile and versatile infantry.
  • Ground combat units to focus on naval missions.
  • Aviation units re-scoped for naval missions.
  • Investments in unmanned systems.
  • New capabilities for maritime mobility and resilience.
  • Air defense improvements.

The Marine Corps subsequently identified the cuts it will make to existing force structure to free resources for the new programs.  These will include all tanks, sixteen of twenty-one tube artillery batteries, three infantry battalions, some F-35s, and significant numbers of helicopters.  Total personnel strength will drop by 12,000.

Most of the critical response thus far has focused on the cuts to force structure.  On the whole, I do not see them as too problematic, although I would keep three tank companies and all existing infantry battalions.  Some of what General Berger is calling for is good, including making infantry lighter and more mobile (assuming that includes becoming true light rather than line infantry) and moving toward more, smaller amphibious ships, some based on commercial designs.

Unfortunately, the mistakes here cut far deeper than fewer or more units of this or that.  The proposed changes include three strategic errors, at least two of which are sufficient alone to put the Marine Corps’ continued existence in peril.  They are:

  • Re-aligning the Corps to the NDS, which is to say focusing on war with China.  We are not going to fight a war with China, because China is a nuclear power. Nuclear powers do not fight each other conventionally because the risk of escalation to nuclear war is too great.  The whole NDS is a work of fiction, designed to justify patterns and levels of defense spending that flow out of the Cold War or in some cases (especially the Navy) World War II (a cynic might say all our services have become clubs for World War II reenactors).  Worse still, General Berger’s changes build a fiction inside a fiction, namely that when we fight China the Marine Corps’ mission will be taking Chinese-held islands, presumably in the South China Sea. In the war with Japan, Marines took Japanese-held islands to create a chain leading to air bases that put us in bombing range of Japan.  The islands now held by China, except Hainan, have no strategic significance. In World War II, we bypassed such islands (thereby undermining Japan’s strategy). Even Hainan is significant only as the base for the South China fleet. Fleets are mobile. If we took Hainan, it would simply sail north. What all this adds up to is re-configuring the Marine Corps for a campaign that makes no sense in a war that will not happen.  That great blunder puts the Corp’s existence in peril.
  • So does a second blunder: focusing on “hi-tech” war built around long-range fires.  The Marine Corps survived the 20th century because it offered capabilities the other services did not.  The U.S. military already has a vast surplus of long-range fires, courtesy of the Navy and the Air Force.  Now, with these changes, the Corps will define its capability as adding a pea-shooter to a broadside of 16-inch guns.  Even if we take our fictitious scenario as real, the Chinese would not even notice the Marine Corps was involved. Becoming like the other services, a strategic blunder the Marine Corp began making in the mid-1990s and will now carry forward aggressively, means we won’t need a Marine Corps any more, except perhaps a battalion of embassy guards.
  • A third strategic blunder will probably not be noticed outside the Marine Corps but it will nonetheless reduce the value of what the Corps offers the nation.  While the Commandant references maneuver warfare with regard to dispersing amphibious forces, a move that has merit, focusing on trading long-range fires with any opponent marks a return to a firepower/attrition understanding of war.  In effect, it says future war will be a contest between trebuchets flinging pianos at each other. If we look around the world, that is not where war is going. In almost every case, state armed services that have vast superiority in long-range fires over their Fourth Generation opponents are losing, including us in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  Doctrinally, the Commandant’s vision faces backwards.

There is an obvious alternative that solves all three problems: return to the vision the Commandant first laid out in his Commandant’s guidance and focus on making maneuver warfare something the Marine Corps actually does instead of just writes about, including the changes in education, training, and personnel policies he identified.  Then, let the other services make the blunder of re-shaping themselves to accord with the fictional NDS and go instead where war is going, to become the nation’s force of choice for Fourth Generation war overseas. Just as the other services neglected amphibious warfare during the 1920s and ‘30s and the Marine Corps of that time created a unique capability the country ended up needing, so it can do the same now with 4GW.  It need not follow the other lemmings over a cliff.

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

The Year That Was

                                                                                                 December 31, 2020

That was the year that was; it’s over, let it go.  And boy, are we happy to see the last of 2020. 

2020 has already gone down in history as the year we made fools of ourselves.  Yes, the Chinese Flu, as most people now call it, started it all. But nothing from China forced us to panic the way we did.  The panic was all grown right here in the U.S.A., in the infernal hothouse known as the media.

When the Chinese Flu first hit, nobody knew much about it.  Fear, maybe even a bit of panic, was understandable. The government was right to put the classic measures against epidemics into effect: quarantining the sick, closing places where people gather, ordering “social distancing”.  But by the time the Chinese Flu really got going in this country, we had hard data telling us this was not the Black Death. It was more contagious than the common flu, and had a slightly higher death rate, still less than 1% in the end.  But the new flu didn’t force us to shut down the whole economy. Panic did that. While various public figures were saying the epidemic might last all summer or even all year, we knew from the experiences of China and South Korea that it ran a bell-shaped curve lasting about eight weeks.

By March, we had a vaccine undergoing human trails; now, at year’s end, it is available to anyone.  Also by March we had human trials underway of existing antiviral drugs to see if some were effective against the Chinese Flu.  Not surprisingly, some were and people who did get the bug could usually be cured at home with a prescription. Some hospitals did get overwhelmed briefly in early hot-spots of infection, but there was no nationwide shortage of beds.  Most important was the discovery that people who continued to go to work because they were in essential jobs did not get infected at a significantly higher rate than those who stayed home. Once that fact was established, many businesses could open again, businesses that should not have been forced to close in the first place. 

A few retrospective numbers are interesting.  The 1968 Hong Kong Flu epidemic killed more than 100,000 Americans, far more than the “coronavirus”, but we didn’t shut the economy down then.  The 2019-2020 run of the ordinary flu we get every winter infected 38 million Americans, hospitalized 390,000 and killed 23,000, according to the March 22 New York Times, when the season was not yet over.  In every case, those numbers are higher than they ended up for the new Chinese Flu.

What really has us hanging our heads in shame was the economic panic.  Everyone, including all those high-paid geniuses on Wall Street, forgot that epidemics run their course.  The Chinese Flu was short-term, while the underlying economy was strong long-term. The new flu’s eight week run gave us one down quarter, and the economy came roaring back the next  quarter, making up all its lost ground and then some. The President and Congress were right to spend trillions to take care of workers and businesses during the down time, and the FED also did the right thing in providing an ocean of dollars to prevent a liquidity crisis and lending freeze.  But it should have been obvious that these measures would work. In the end, as usual in panics, a lot of fools lost their shirts selling in a down market and a few smart guys made fortunes buying in the same.

Even this cloud has its silver lining.  After handing out trillions in a few weeks, everyone in Washington knows we face another long-term debt crisis unless we put our house in order.  We need to generate a budget surplus and start paying down the debt. It’s not that hard; we did it in the last years of President Clinton’s second term, with a Democratic President working with a Republican Congress.  President Trump, who tried to warn against panic but was out-shouted, has promised to work on a bi-partisan basis to get it done during his second term, knowing we need the Dems on board even though the Republicans again control both Houses of Congress.  We all feel badly for Joe Biden after that debate where he couldn’t remember his own name, but most Americans are glad President Trump will have four more years. After a slow start, he handled 2020 pretty well.

Since people don’t like being made fools of, we’re all mad at the media.  They created the panic. For years, they had been hyping everything to the max, even the weather, which has become weather porn.  But this time they shouted fire in a crowded theater, and they are paying the price. It was the video-screen media that did it, much more than our old familiar friend the newspapers, most of which offered accurate information.  People are responding by shutting off the TV and the computer and subscribing again to the morning paper. The newspaper is also useful in case another shortage of TP; try using your phone for that.

Anyway, it’s over.  As of midnight tonight, 2020 is history.  We are heading into 2021 with a growing economy, plenty of jobs, and bright prospects across the board.  The Chinese Flu did teach companies a lesson about the risks of global supply chains, and many are bringing their manufacturing back home.  That doesn’t just mean jobs, it means good jobs that pay enough so a blue-collar guy can give his family a middle-class life. After the clouds comes sunshine, and we’re all tanned, rested, and ready for a good year ahead.

Yes, I know the Chinese recently arrested some astronomers for saying an asteroid is heading toward earth, but. . .

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

The View From Olympus: A Dry Run

Despite the current unnecessary panic, the coronavirus may end up doing us a favor. It has led the government to carry out a full-scale, force-on-force exercise, a dry run if you will, of what will be necessary when a real plague arrives. That plague will be a gift from the hellish technology of genetic engineering, either as an accident or as a weapon of mass destruction in Fourth Generation war.  States will rightly be afraid of using such weapons because of the potential for blowback. Some 4GW entities will have no such concern.

The government's actions thus far have been prudent, and with them-- quarantines, closing gathering places, shutting down travel, etc.-- we need not worry excessively about the coronavirus from a medical standpoint.  The New York Times recently offered some hard data on infection rates.  Despite statements like that of the idiot Merkel that 70% of Germans may end up infected, nothing like that is happening.  On Friday, March 13, the Times noted in a chart on page A7 that the rate of infection (not deaths) in Italy, the current global hotspot, is 25 per 100,000 people.  In South Korea, where the virus seems to have peaked and is now declining, the infection rate has been 16 out of 100,000. The Sunday, March 15 Times published a column, “Is Obsessing Over Statistics Helpful?” by Ellen Peters, that said:

According to data from John Hopkins University, Hubei, the Chinese province where the virus emerged, has reported 67,760 infected people out of a population of about 59 million, an incidence rate of 0.11 percent.  This means that 99.89 percent were not infected. . .

Chinese numbers are not reliable, but even if we multiply the number of infected in Hubei province by ten, we still get an infection rate--again, just infection, not death--of 1.1 percent.  Of those infected, about 80% seem to have mild cases or show no symptoms at all.

With proper measures in place, the coronavirus is not a major threat.  Again, it has been a good test, one that shows the practices developed over centuries of dealing with epidemics still work.  Like past epidemics, this one appears to follow a bell-shaped curve, one lasting about eight weeks. China is now reporting fewer than ten new cases a day and the economy is beginning to function again.

Our economy will take a big hit, because consumers are not spending.  But in and of itself, the epidemic should only give us one bad quarter.  If it sets off the overdue international debt crisis, that is a very different story.  The Federal Reserve Bank is aware of the danger and it acted forcefully last week to bolster the short-term debt market, injecting $1.5 trillion into it.  Cutting interest rates, or President Trump’s proposed payroll tax, will do little because both are pushing on a string. But the President’s proposal to make hourly workers’ pay whole is important, as are interest-free loans and grants to small and medium sized businesses that have had to close.

Most of the lessons from this massive field exercise are old ones.  Science has not made epidemics a thing of the past; on the contrary, it makes very dangerous future epidemics certain.  Many of the things we “have to do” or “have to have” are unnecessary; living quietly at home has much to offer (especially if we turn off the electric noisemakers and panic-spreaders in too many people’s lives).  Having a well-stocked larder and at least some ability to eat from what your land produces are wise practices. A fishing pole may help put dinner on the table, as may knowing how to hunt. In a more serious situation than this one, governments would be smart to declare open-season, no-limits on deer--you know, those big brown things that destroy our gardens, wreck our cars, and are of no use to us unless we kill and eat them.  They are not in short supply, nor are Canadian geese or wild turkeys.

Turning back to the old ways, Retroculture as I call it, ways proven over centuries of human experience, will come to the fore whenever reality returns.  Consumerism, “hi-tech”, and a frivolous culture where “being entertained” is the highest good are not reality. Epidemics are. Will we put this dry run to good use and start to get real again, or will that take a kick in the stomach instead of a kick in the pants?

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Uncategorized William Lind Uncategorized William Lind

It's Not "Realism", It's Reality

When a friend of mine was a student at the National War College (which should be called the National College because there is no war in the curriculum), he was counseled by his advisor for “letting his realism show”.  If you want to be a member of the Washington establishment, you dare not do that. You must be deeply devoted to “idealism”, the magical belief that we can somehow make every fly-blown, flea bitten hellhole country in the world into another Switzerland.  All it takes is sanctions, bombing, and perhaps invasion, for which they will love us.

Now the equally wooly-minded European foreign policy establishment is facing what the idealists fear most: a reality that suddenly attaches a high price to idealism.  Turkey, trying to compel Europe to back its intervention in Syria’s civil war, has opened the refugee floodgates again. Last time, Europe got drowned in a sea of more than a million immigrants, almost all Muslim, most with neither skills nor a European language. Wherever in Europe they have gone crime has risen, the welfare rolls have exploded and European voters have turned away from the Establishment to parties that want to defend their countries from invasion. Most inconvenient, that democracy stuff.

The Establishment media floods Europeans with pictures of crying children in distress, but most of those now piled up at Greece’s border (and Europe’s) are hard-eyed young men, not Syrians but Iraqis, Iranians, and Afghans, not “refugees” but economic migrants. Wherever they go, they bring disorder.

In a story titled “E.U. Tries to Tread Line in Greek-Turkish Clash on Admitting Migrants”, the March 5 New York Times described European elites’ anguish. It quotes Mr. Robin Nibblett of Chatham Hose in London saying:

In the sense there is the beginning of a more realistic European foreign policy, which will continue to pay off Mr. Erdogan (Turkey’s president) to avoid a new wave of refugees. 

“but of course you cannot build a formal foreign policy like that and get any support from European parliaments, because it goes against all Europe stands for in its values,” Mr. Niblett said.

I have a message for those European parliaments and the whole “idealist” elite: it isn't “realism”, it's reality.

It is reality that these Moslem migrants become a huge burden on any country stupid enough to let them in. It's reality that they will not accept European culture because their religion tells them not to. It's reality that they lay enormous new costs on European countries' social services.  It's reality that they turn in large numbers to crime because that is what they can do, that they will attack European women on the street because that is okay in their culture if a woman is out alone, that they force Europeans to become aware all the time of threats to their personal security, something Americans are accustomed to but Europeans are not.  When I lived in Vienna in the early 1970s, no woman thought twice about walking alone through a public park after nightfall. They had better think about it now.

The idealists prate endlessly about democracy, but they face the dilemma that their world-view can only prevail where democracy is outlawed.  In a democracy, when a country’s natives lose their personal security because of the elite’s idealism and the flood of human waste (sometimes literally) it brings, they vote the idealists out and vote in parties that will defend them.  In fact, Mr. Niblett is wrong: a growing number of European parliaments now have majorities that favor recognizing reality and acting on it. Europe does not stand for idealism in its values, only small political and cultural elites do.  European voters are increasingly showing those elites the door.

In the end, reality always wins against whatever ideology demands people and nations depart from it (in this case, the ideology is cultural Marxism).  The greater the departure, the more painful the correction. The cultural Marxist elites that have welcomed millions of Moslems into Europe because they serve that Marxism’s goals of destroying Western culture and the Christian religion have guaranteed Europe’s correction will be vast and probably bloody.

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

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