The View From Olympus: The China Threat

The December 4 Wall Street Journal’s op ed page headlined a piece by John Ratcliffe, U.S. Director of National Intelligence, titled “China is National Security Threat No. 1”.  Mr. Ratcliffe concluded his op ed by writing,

This is a once-in-a-generation challenge.  Americans have always risen to the moment, from defeating the scourge of fascism to bringing down the Iron Curtain.  This generation will be judged by its response to China’s effort to reshape the world in its own image and replace America as the dominant superpower.  The intelligence is clear.  Our response must be as well.

As is usually the case with op eds signed by prominent federal officeholders, the purpose of this piece is budget justification: intelligence agencies recently received a big budget boost for spying on China.  And Mr. Ratcliffe is right with respect to some aspects of our relationship with China.  It is an economic competitor, one that has pitted the enriching economics of mercantilism against the impoverishing economics of free trade.  More the fools us for allowing it to do so.

But on the whole, Mr. Ratcliffe and the rest of the dragon puffers are wrong.  They are wrong not because of bad intelligence about China, but because they miss the fact that for all Great Power rivalries, the context has changed.  Contests between Great Powers are no longer the primary force shaping the world.  Rather, what now shapes the world is the growing weakness of most states as the state itself faces a crisis of legitimacy.  Great Power contests now take place within this context, which means such contests are themselves counter-productive to all involved because they further weaken states, certainly the loser and often the winner too.  In effect, victories in state vs. state contests will henceforth almost always be Pyrrhic.

Just as Washington does not get this change in strategic context, neither does Beijing.  For China, which is, as Mr. Ratcliffe writes, attempting to become the top Great Power, the new context has at least three major implications:

• First, as it penetrates other parts of the globe through initiatives such as its “Belt and Road” project, it will find its presence there undermined and its goals blocked by increasing disorder.  As states weaken, Fourth Generation war spreads, and Chinese efforts in the face of constant attacks by non-state elements will simply become unprofitable.  This mirrors the European colonial experience but will occur much faster.  In fact, it is occurring now, as China’s penetration into much of sub-Saharan Africa finds its efforts swallowed by spreading disorder.  Where states are weak or merely fictions, one gang among many, efforts by outside powers will produce only a bottomless investment pit.  The cost/benefit calculation will be as red as the east.
• Second, where states are struggling to hold on to at least some shreds of legitimacy, an increasingly obvious Chinese role will threaten that legitimacy.  This, again, is already happening, especially in Africa.  Because one of the main factors driving Chinese expansionism is the need to provide jobs for Chinese people, Chinese projects hire little local labor.  That, plus a general resentment against outsiders, will also bog down, then reverse Chinese penetration.  The ugly Chinaman will get booted out, just as were the ugly American and ugly European.
• Third, because the legitimacy of rule by the Chinese Communist Party depends on rapid economic growth in China, China too may suffer a crisis of legitimacy of the state.  Like most authoritarian regimes, China’s Communist government is strong but rigid.  It will seem impervious to disorder right up to the point where it collapses.  China seems to think it has tamed the business cycle, but neither it nor anyone else has done so.  History’s rule seems to be that if a government can prevent frequent, fairly small economic downturns, it gets less frequent but larger ones instead.  Anyone looking at the house of cards that is China’s public and private debt can see what is coming.  And China has a long history of internal fractioning.  No Chinese state can assume it will always hold together.  Were the Chinese state to fracture, that would not only be a disaster for China but for the rest of the world as well, including the United States.  Once again, the new context touches and changes everything.

China appears to be repeating the mistake Japan made in the 1930s.  Japan attempted to build an empire just as European states had done, by conquest, but that era had passed.  China now seeks in similar fashion to become the top Great Power when that position has lost much of its meaning and will soon lose the rest.  Spreading state failure endangers the state system itself, and a successful defense of that system requires an alliance of all states, an alliance that must begin with the three current Great Powers, the United States, China, and Russia.  Russia acts as if it may have at least some understanding this is the case, while Washington and Beijing show none.  Nor does Mr. Ratcliffe, the Director of U.S. National Intelligence.  Is there in fact any intelligence in U.S. National Intelligence?

January 6: A Strategic Analysis

Despite all the howling of the mainstream media, the Republicrat Party, and the chattering class, the events in Washington on January 6, 2021, were a strategic victory for the political Right, and a big one.  Why?  Because the Right showed it could fight back.

Last summer, the Left rioted, looted, and burned in many of our cities, and in most cases the charges against those doing the looting and burning were dropped.  Conservatives have looked on, mute, as the Left ripped down statues of their ancestors and banned their symbols.  The “woke” crowd was praised as it condemned whites, men, and straights and demanded they grovel in the dirt or be “cancelled”, losing their jobs.

On January 6, that came to an end.  The Right not only called the Left, it raised it by all the gold in Ft. Knox.  The Left looted and burned small businesses; the Right took the Capitol in Washington, D.C.  Put that in your pot pipe and smoke it, said the Right to the Left.

The Establishment is calling the events of January 6 an “insurrection”.  A more accurate term is a “revolt”.  The oppressed majority revolted against an elite that simultaneously despises them and lives off their tax money.  The “makers” revolted against the “takers”.  Whites, males, non-feminist women (one of whom gave her life) and straights revolted against the cultural Marxism that condemns them as evil regardless of what individuals do.

The Biden transition team gave dramatic evidence of why that revolt came about.  Last week it announced the “anti-racism” training cancelled by President Trump will be re-installed for all federal workers and contractors.  These are Maoist “self-criticism” sessions in which whites must proclaim their “racism”, apologize to blacks and other non-whites and learn to mouth the lies cultural Marxism demands.  Anyone who doesn’t follow the script gets fired and blackballed.

Another strategic victory for the Right, still playing out, is that the two parties that rule Washington came together so openly that even the dullest civics teacher must acknowledge we live in a one-party state.  That fact legitimizes revolt: in a one-party state, revolt is the only way dissidents can affect the political process.  They are otherwise without representation.  President Trump did represent them, which is why the Establishment so hates him and will continue to persecute him even after he leaves office. 

Despite its overall strategic victory, the Right needs to draw some lessons from the events of January 6.  The most important is, keep it peaceful.  If a crowd is big enough, it can push its way into buildings without offering violence to persons or property.  In this kind of war, the way you win is by suffering casualties, not by inflicting them.  Every casualty becomes a martyr, and you win by accumulating martyrs.  That is how Christianity conquered the Roman Empire, it is how the civil rights movement won in the 1950s and ‘60s and it is how the Left is trying to win the culture war now.  They get this, and the Right must learn it or lose.

Under no circumstances should the Right vandalize, loot, or burn.  The point here is to offer a contrast with the Left.  Those actions, which they cannot control because of the nature of their forces, hurt the Left.  We should respond with positive actions, e.g. if they tear down a statue of one of our heroes, we should put a new one up in a place we control.

Under no circumstances should the Right injure police.  The death of a Capitol Police officer on January 6 was a crime, a tragedy, and a blunder.  Most cops are on our side in the culture war.  Because the Left hates them, we should support and protect them.  In any mass action, the Right should have leaders in the crowd whose job it is to prevent face-offs with the police.  Mass action is possible without violence, especially violence against the cops.  They don’t want to hurt us, and we should never hurt them, even if that means we get hurt ourselves. Those who have read Thomas Hobbes’ book Victoria were not surprised by the events on January 6.  In Victoria the federal government’s attempts to force cultural Marxism down the throat of every American undermine its legitimacy to the point where the state itself disintegrates.  If America is to avoid that fate, the Establishment needs to read the handwriting left on the walls of the Capitol on January 6.

The Fall of a Dynasty

On Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the Marxists’ dream came true.  A vast mob stormed and occupied the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Ordinary Americans sat in seats reserved for the rich and powerful.  But instead of carrying banners saying “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse,” the flags of the people bore only one name: Trump.  Oops.

As usual, the Left forgot the old rule that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  After watching Leftist mobs riot, loot, and burn in too many of our cities last summer, the Right decided to play by the same rules, except that we did not loot or commit arson.  The single party, the Republicrat Establishment party, rose as one to condemn the violence.  In doing so, they revealed why the dynasty they represent is falling: it is caught up in a crisis of legitimacy it cannot even acknowledge much less understand.

The root cause of the crisis of legitimacy is the Establishment’s attempt to use the power of the state to force cultural Marxism, a.k.a. political correctness or “wokeism”, down every American’s throat.  Since cultural Marxism seeks to destroy the Christian religion, Western culture, and the white race, it is not surprising ordinary Americans are not going along.  The battle is, for us, existential: cultural Marxism wants to make us choose between groveling before its “victim” groups or getting sent to a concentration camp.

From this perspective, the occupation of the Capitol is less important than the unbelievable, schoolboy error of a Capitol Hill pro, Senator Mitch McConnell, in allowing Republican Senators to become the only obstacle standing between most Americans and a check for $2000.  Of course the Republican Party lost both Georgia Senate races.  What else do you expect when people see their choice as between getting $2000 instead of $600, McConnell had no choice but to go along.  His refusal to do so was so dumb one has to wonder whether it was typical Republican stupidity or calculation.  Was he willing to lose control of the Senate to the Democrats just to besmirch President Trump’s legacy?  Stranger things have happened in Washington.

The effect of handing the Senate to the Democrats is to put the Left in a position to enact its radical agenda, which will push the system’s crisis of legitimacy to the breaking point and probably beyond it.  If they vote to end the filibuster, then ram through statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico on bare majority votes, the Senate will lose what legitimacy it has left in the eyes of conservatives.  If they then use the larger majority four new Democratic Senators will give them to pack the Supreme Court, all three branches of the federal government will be widely seen as illegitimate.  At that juncture, what happened at the Capitol on January 6 will seem like a tea party.

All this now lands in the lap of President Joe Biden.  His instinct will be to govern from the center, but without a Republican Senate he will be hard-pressed to explain to the “woke” crowd why he is not enacting their agenda.  If he yields to their demands, he stokes the system's crisis of legitimacy.

All this mess and more, including an overextended foreign policy, armed services that usually lose, institutions that require vast inputs for very small outputs and ever-looser and more valueless money are classic signs of the end of a dynasty.  In our case, the dynasty is a Washington-Wall Street-Hollywood oligarchy coupled to a vastly more powerful federal government than the one envisioned in our Constitution.  What will replace it I do not know, but it will not be cultural Marxism.  We are waiting either for our Augustus or our Hitler.

Merry Apocalypse!

It is traditional at Christmas for columnists, preachers, politicians, and pig farmers to lay back, smile, and talk about all the good things we should be thankful for.  Children sing, plastic cherubs circle overhead and we all remember the old hymn, “Angels we have heard on high, telling us to go out and buy.”  The fire is warm, the toddy is hot and all is right in the world.  

“Bah.  Humbug!” as one of my favorite people used to say.  A short piece by Rob Dreher in the “Review” section of the December 12-13 Wall Street Journal puts this year’s Christmas crap in perspective.  “We have gotten used to a world that past generations would have called the Apocalypse, said Solzhenitsyn,” Dreher wrote.

I think those past generations had it right.  This year’s Christmas is Christ’s Mass celebrated amid the Apocalypse. 

We tend to think of the Apocalypse as something sudden.  When it happens, everybody will know it because it will be the biggest bang since the Big Bang.  But what if that isn’t how it works?

We read repeatedly in Scripture passages that suggest Jesus and the authors of the Gospels had a sense of time different from ours.  When Christ says “This generation shall not pass away . . .” He uses “generation” differently from the way we use it.  We sing, “A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone. . .”  The Jews of Jesus’s time expected the Messiah to lead a victorious war against the Romans and restore the kingdom of Israel.  Rome did not fall until AD 476, or AD 1453 depending on how you define Rome.  Israel was not re-established until 1915 years after Christ’s death and resurrection.

If we think of the Apocalypse playing out in Biblical time, it has been welling up all around us without our noticing.  The latest start date I would give would be 1914, when the Christian West put a gun to its head and blew its brains out.  A better date would be 1789, the year of the French Revolution.  The Whig interpretation of history welcomes that fell event as a triumph of democracy over absolute monarchy (that wasn’t absolute; good King Louis XVI called the Estates General because he could not raise taxes without their approval).  They pass over the vicious assault the Jacobins launched on Christianity and those who profess it; the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was spiritually burned then, not last year, when the Revolutionaries turned it into the “Temple of Reason.”  The blood of Christian martyrs flowed liberally from the guillotine.

The three great Christian, conservative monarchies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria put the Jacobin furies back in the bottle for the century, but World War I swept them all from the board.  The whole political/cultural spectrum shifted sharply to the Left.  And the Apocalypse welled up and submerged everything good, everything beautiful, everything holy.

Step back from your day-to-day concerns and look around you.  Your fellow voyagers on this planet fall into every ditch, their eyes glued to an electronic screen on which images dance out every sin.  The war on God intensifies as cultural Marxists, aka “the Progressives,” demand He be first silenced, then banned.  Nietzsche’s “Transvaluation of all values” turns every sin into a virtue and every virtue into a sin.  President-elect Biden chooses as his Secretary for Health and Human Services a man whose personal objective seems to be aborting every baby conceived in America.  That’s quite a definition of “health” and “human services”--an Apocalyptic definition, in fact.  A growing number of prominent cultural Marxists are calling for anyone who opposes them to be sent to “Re-Education Camps”.  I wonder what gas they will use this time?

The grim fact is, there is little to be joyful about this Christmas.  Except--this is how Christians have always expected history to unroll.  We lose, we lose, and we lose, until almost no one and nothing is left.  And then, suddenly, we win.

Come, Lord Jesus.  Merry Christmas.

The View From Olympus: A Response to a Critique of MCDP 1, Warfighting

The October issue of the Marine Corps Gazette published a thoughtful, challenging, and important critique of the Corps’ doctrine of maneuver warfare and its primary official statement, MCDP 1, Warfighting.  Since I started the debate over maneuver warfare with a paper I wrote in 1976 and I was heavily involved in writing Warfighting, it is appropriate that I respond.

The Gazette article, “The Fantasy of MCDP 1” by Lt. Col. Thaddeus Drake, Jr., USMC, states its challenge up front:

Our doctrine, Warfighting, has transcended the generally recognized purpose of standard military doctrine and no longer provides a useful guide to Marine Corps operations in the 21st century.

Yet this is no ignorant dismissal of maneuver doctrine, of which I have seen too many over the years:

There is nonetheless much to love about MCDP 1.  Indeed, it is probably the most effective military doctrinal publication since the Wehrmacht’s Truppenführung.

Lt. Col. Drake offers three objections to Warfighting.  The first is that it does not meet traditional definitions of military doctrine:

The most essential issue around our doctrine remains the tension between the overall purpose of military doctrine: the aspirational versus the practical. . . In the Marine Corps, the commonly accepted understanding of doctrine is that it represents a collection of best practices and broad guidelines--that may or may not be followed, depending on the situation.  In contrast, the most generally accepted definition of military doctrine is Barry Posen’s suggestion that doctrine describes “what means shall be employed and how shall they be employed. . .” MCDP 1, our foundational doctrinal definition, fits in neither of these definitions.

What Lt. Col. Drake misses is that the definition of doctrine changes between the Second and Third Generations of modern war, which is to say between the French and German ways of war, attrition warfare or maneuver warfare.  Second Generation doctrine tells soldiers what to do, similar to Posen’s definition.  Third Generation doctrine is about how to think.  As it should, MCDP 1 fits the latter definition.  It was clear from the beginning that Warfighting is aspirational because its purpose was and remains moving the Marine Corps from the Second to the Third Generation way of war.  That purpose remains valid because, as Lt. Col. Drake agrees, the Marine Corps has not yet made the transition in terms of institutional structure, behavior, or culture.

Lt. Col. Drake’s second criticism is directed at Warfighting’s focus on systemic collapse.  He writes,

In the 30-plus years since the development of this doctrine, there are scant examples that show success in this sort of systemic destruction--despite the fact that the Marine Corps has been involved in combat for at least 25 of those years!

An obvious response is to point to the first phase of the Second Gulf war, the phase where we were fighting the armed forces of the Iraqi state.  Here, Lt. Col. Drake hits on a major change in war but does not grasp what it is:

It is also accurate to say that the Marine and Army elements penetrated the (Iraqi) enemy system, causing it to break down, and then it subsequently reformed itself into a warfighting system far more resilient and effective against U.S. conventional forces. . .

By creating a doctrine where we deliberately focus on systemic disruption as the ultimate goal, it is possible that the Marine Corps has placed its leaders and planners in an impossible situation, where they attempt to disrupt complex enemy systems, and in doing so created an endless spiral of more complex problem sets.

What happened in Iraq was that in collapsing the Iraqi armed forces we destroyed the state itself.  Welcome to Fourth Generation war.

Warfighting was written for a world in which war was fought between states.  That had been true for more than 300 years, despite occasional challenges from non-state elements such as tribes that always lost.  It is true no longer.  What happened is that, in the Second Gulf war, maneuver warfare worked perfectly until U.S. forces faced non-state opponents.

Does this call for revision of MCDP 1?  Absolutely.  Unfortunately, like the rest of the U.S. military, the Marine Corps refuses to think about Fourth Generation war.  It has chosen to live instead in a fantasy world where the main threat we face is China instead of spreading state disintegration.  Puffing the dragon is much more useful for padding budgets and seemingly requires little institutional change.

To fill the void, Lt. Col. Greg Thiele USMC and I wrote the Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook.  Until the Marine Corps wakes up and rejoins the real world, all I can do is recommend the Handbook to Lt. Col. Drake and other Marines who see Fourth Generation war raises challenges that cannot be addressed by maneuver warfare alone, as important as the culture of the latter remains.

Lt. Col. Drake’s third objection is that mission order tactics, Auftragstaktik, which are central to maneuver warfare, are not possible for today’s Marines, for two reasons.  First, neither contemporary American national culture nor the culture of the Marine Corps permit them:

Rarely have we addressed the difficulty and general inability of our culture to integrate the concept of Auftragstaktik wholesale.  Nationally, American culture may simply not support the idea of mission tactics.  Since militaries are necessarily the products of their larger society, the basic culture of that society will also be a part of its military. . .

The institutional Marine Corps also has a number of cultural characteristics that prevent the wholesale importation of mission tactics.  Compared to the originators of the concept, we are overly hierarchical, bureaucratic, and resistant to developing cohesive elements through deliberate manpower management strategies.  Indeed, since the inception of Warfighting, we have increased the bureaucratic complexity of our force. . .

I do not concur that broad American culture makes Auftragstaktik impossible.  German culture also presented obstacles to the concept, which the German military overcame through training.  For them, the problem was that broader German culture did not reward or (often) even tolerate initiative.  For us, it is the other cultural requirement of Auftragstaktik that poses a challenge: self-discipline.  But here again, the right training can deal with the problem.  Even with the Corps’ current process-oriented, Second Generation training, I have repeatedly seen enlisted Marines operate successfully with mission orders.  When has that happened?  When they were told they were aggressors.  From almost 50 years of observing Marine Corps training, I would argue that both the ability and the desire for Auftragstaktik live right below the surface of most enlisted Marines.  Their great frustration is that, even with Warfighting as the Corps’ capstone doctrinal statement, they almost never get the chance to show what they can do.

Lt. Col. Drake's second reason for believing mission tactics are impractical is changes in communications technology:

Finally, technology has a crucial part to play in the discussion regarding the efficacy of mission command.  In the modern world, where wireless communications and computer technologies enable the collection, transmission, and analysis of massive amounts of information, instant, ubiquitous, and constant communication is the norm. .  .  One of the fundamental reasons for the employment of mission tactics as a command style is to minimize the requirement for constant instruction from higher headquarters--originally designed this way because constant instruction was impossible. . .  This is no longer the case; worse. . . the society we live in has inculcated young men and women with an expectation of constant connection.  It is pure fantasy to believe we will be able to break our young Marines and Sailors of a literal lifetime of training with connected devices to instead execute mission tactics with no communications.

This challenge to Auftragstaktik is not new.  The German Army faced the same issue between the wars because of the advent of voice radio coupled with small radio sets that could be acquired in large numbers and carried virtually anywhere.  The debate was resolved then in favor of mission tactics in part because many German officers recognized that there are two problems with centralized control.  The first is that centralization can slow tempo even with modern communications technology.  The second, which Lt. Col. Drake overlooks, is that the picture of events at the front becomes more and more distorted as it moves up the chain of command.  This means decision-makers develop false orientations, which is a long standing and serious military problem.  Col. John Boyd said orientation was the most important element in the OODA Loop, because if you get that wrong, everything else will be wrong too.  Far from reducing this problem, computer technologies worsen it because computer graphics make the false picture transmitted up the chain seem even more real.

At the same time, I think Lt. Col. Drake is correct that the young people the Marine Corps takes in are accustomed to being in communication all the time, thanks to various mobile devices.  Indeed, many are addicted to these technologies.  Training can help diminish this dependence but it is unlikely to go away--even though, as Lt. Col. Drake acknowledges, in a war with a major power all communications may be shut down almost from the outset.

This situation must be addressed by advocates of Auftragstaktik.  My own solution would be not to drop mission tactics but to expand them.  They should be re-defined to allow Marines at every level, down to the greenest rifleman, to use their devices as they see fit to obtain the information they want from an open-architecture system.  That system would feed them very little, only what mission tactics have always required: the commander’s intent, the Schwerpunkt and their unit’s mission within the context created by the other two elements.  Beyond that, they would search on their own for what they want, within and beyond information provided by the Marine Corps.  At headquarters, commanders and operations officers would similarly take the information they want from the constantly changing, open-architecture network.  Headquarters should seldom need to ask subordinates for information because the connected generation will constantly be telling everyone who cares to listen what they are doing.  What if the enemy listens in?  The technologies easily adopt encryption, and because in maneuver warfare the tactical situation changes rapidly, by the time the enemy has processed information it will usually be outdated.  Obviously, more security is required at the operational and strategic levels, but few Marines will have to deal with that.

In addressing what is to be done about the problems with Warfighting Lt. Col. Drake perceives, he calls for eliminating a “false dichotomy” between attrition warfare and maneuver warfare.  He notes that Warfighting says attrition and maneuver exist on a spectrum, which is correct in a narrow context.  However, in a broader context it is not because when the terms are used to describe two different approaches to war, they refer to the Second and Third Generations, with the radical institutional and cultural differences between the two.  Of crucial importance is the fact that while a Third Generation military can do attrition warfare, a Second Generation armed service cannot do maneuver warfare once events outrun its initial plan.

Lt. Col. Drake identifies what is perhaps the central doctrinal issues facing the Marine Corps as he concludes his highly important article, which justly won the 2020 Chase Prize Essay Contest, the contradiction between what the Marine Corps says in Warfighting and what it does:

The contrast between what MCDP 1 states and the micromanagement that most Marines experience on a daily basis creates a massive say-do gap that undermines leadership and creates an enormous amount of disillusion throughout the force.

Col. Boyd argued that no institution can indefinitely survive such a say-do gap.  I agree.  Either the Marine Corps should make the changes in its personnel system, education, and training a Third Generation military requires or it should adopt doctrine that reduces war to merely putting ordinance on targets.  The former approach is what the Commandant called for in his initial guidance.  So far, no progress is evident, continuing a failure that has now lasted thirty years.  The second choice dooms the Marine Corps to failure against Third and Fourth Generation opponents; we have watched the latter failure unfold over the last twenty years. What it comes down to is simple: change or die.  If the Corps cannot learn how to win future wars, which requires it actually doing what Warfighting says, then the future Marine Corps will be one battalion of embassy guards.  As things now stand, that is where it is heading.

No Bended Knee?

Shortly after the end of World War II, there was a movement to unify the U. S. military services.  Perhaps the most salient point in this discussion was that the continued existence of the Marine Corps was called into question.  In a now-famous speech (at least among Marines) before the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Alexander A. Vandegrift, proclaimed, “The bended knee is not a tradition of our Corps.  If the Marine as a fighting man has not made a case for himself after 170 years of service, he must go.”  At the time, Vandegrift was asking Congress to save the Marine Corps from bureaucratic dismemberment.  Today, the effectiveness of the Corps is being sapped by the very Congress which once provided it support.  Perhaps worse still, no recent Commandant has even had the courage to offer a dissenting military opinion.  The bended knee actually does seem to be a new tradition among the Corps’ senior leadership.  Perhaps it is time to consider casing the colors and letting the Corps slip into history with its proud legacy intact, rather than wait for the current rot to run its full course.

For the last several decades, warfighting capability and effectiveness have slowly lost out to budgets and politics as key considerations for senior Marines.  An unmistakable sign of this transition came when Headquarters, Marine Corps moved from the Naval Annex to the Pentagon.  The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq added massive infusions of cash which contributed little to the Corps’ combat capability and may have actually hastened the decay by accustoming several generations of Marines to large budgets (and saddling them with equipment and physical infrastructure which now must be maintained).

Senior Marines, rather than remaining politically neutral and offering their best military advice, tacked with the shifting political winds in an effort to ensure they were on the “right side of history”.  No matter how destructive to combat effectiveness, there seemed to be no idea Marine generals would balk at so long as it meant political favor and a continued flow of money.

For example, opening all combat arms jobs in the Marine Corps to women passed almost unremarked.  Never mind that the Marine Corps had commissioned an experiment which had demonstrated that integrated units did not perform as well as non-integrated units.  This information was politically undesirable and was therefore ignored by Marine generals who did not want to raise a fuss over something which their political leadership had clearly signaled they desired.  It seems strange that not a single senior Marine (or, to my knowledge, senior officer from any service) has offered a protest or threatened to resign over something as important as the continued combat effectiveness of the units they command.  Why not?  The reasons are complex.  Many senior officers convince themselves that resigning would do nothing; someone else would quickly be found to carry out the desired policy.  It is an unfortunate fact that this is probably true, but it does not absolve those who implement such destructive policies of responsibility.  

I have serious concerns about the Marine Corps’ ability to fight a tenacious, determined, and resourceful enemy – to say nothing of a Fourth Generation Warfare opponent for which the Corps is entirely unprepared and unsuited.  I do not believe I am alone in my views.  There are still a lot of great Marines serving today, but their efforts are being undermined by leaders whose primary qualification for their role is their willingness to nod vigorously whenever a politician speaks.  

Given such circumstances, perhaps it would be better for the Corps to fade away or be dissolved into the other services than to continue its sad decline.  Perhaps it would be a better fate for the Marine Corps to cease its existence on its own terms rather than to come to an ignominious end after demonstrating a lack of capability.  This may well one day be the Corps’ fate unless a future Commandant can find the strength and relearn the lesson that the bended knee should not be an acceptable pose for a Marine.

The State's Crisis of Legitimacy Intensifies

As of this writing, the outcome of the Presidential election is uncertain although it appears Biden will “win”, thanks to questionable vote totals from urban areas.  The Senate looks as if it will remain Republican, and the Democrats have held onto the House although with a reduced majority.  The most important result of the election is, however, clear: the legitimacy of the state has taken another hit.

Regardless of who wins the Presidency, the opposing Party will not see the victor’s triumph as legitimate.  If Trump wins, it will probably be via the courts, and the Left will regard that as undemocratic and thus illegitimate.  If Biden wins after boatloads of votes from urban areas pour in, many after election day, the Right will view the election as stolen.  I have no knowledge of what is going on in places where those votes are being counted (or added).  But urban political machines, almost all Democrat, have a long history of stuffing the ballot box and intentionally miscounting votes.  The Right has every reason to be suspicious that it is happening again.

If in the end we have Biden as President with a Republican Senate and a Democratic House, the situation may stabilize for a time.  Biden’s personal inclination will be to govern from the center, and a Republican Senate will give him the excuse to do so.  He can tell the hard Left that he would like to do as they want, but cannot get it through the Senate.

However, control of the Senate may hinge on one or two Senate seat run-offs on January 5 in Georgia.  Nowhere has the vote count in the Presidential contest been more suspicious, because the Democratic machine that runs Atlanta is both corrupt and clever.  Late votes from Atlanta could give one or two more Senate seats to the Democrats, yielding them control of the Senate.  If that happens, it will be much harder for Biden to turn the crazies down.

That, in turn, would open the door to what could well be the American state’s final intensification of its crisis of legitimacy before its collapse.  Of the three branches of government, the only one that still has broad legitimacy is the Supreme Court.  If Biden proposes packing that court and gets his proposal through two Democratic Houses of Congress--no sure thing, as some Democrats will be wary--then that branch too will lose its legitimacy.  The Right will not accept judgements from a court that has been turned into an unelected legislature whose members have lifetime seats and whose decisions are unappealable.

There are other actions a President Biden (or Harris) could take that might bring about the dissolution of the republic.  One would be opening the southern border and admitting millions of “refugees”.  Another, seemingly unlikely but not so, would be a complete shutdown of American life to control COVID-19.  That would enrage millions of Americans while all but guaranteeing a second Great Depression, this time with mounting inflation instead of deflation (economists will tell you that is impossible but a quick look at Venezuela will show you it’s not).

The core problem is that no one in Washington realizes the state is already in a legitimacy crisis.  They thus make no effort to preserve the state’s legitimacy, such as it still is.  The Democrats think, well, if we win politically we will just use the normal instruments of state coercion, the police and the military, to force what we decide on the rest of the nation.  They cannot imagine that the police and the military, most of whose personnel voted for President Trump, might refuse to obey their orders.  Yet history is full of cases where it happened.

That, in the end, is what a crisis of legitimacy is all about: will anyone do what the state orders them to do?  In a legitimate state, people obey without being coerced because they accept the state’s decision even when they may disagree with them.  An illegitimate state can survive for a while through coercion if the police and the military will obey orders.  But even if that works for a time, that time runs out, as we have seen in recent decades in many Communist countries.

There, the result was a new government in some places, state disintegration elsewhere (including Russia).  Whichever awaits us (my bet is the latter), the election of 2020 has already moved us leagues towards our fate.

Equality, the *Original* Original Sin

If it seems that demands for “equality” lie at the heart of most of the troubles now facing our country, well, they do.  Equality is the ideal demand from those whose goal is our destruction because it cannot be met, no matter how hard we may try.  If there is one thing people are not it is equal.  We differ in so many ways that only iron tyranny, like that of Stalin, can create even an appearance of equality.  And in Stalin’s Soviet Union, some comrades were still more equal than others.  Stalin did not go hungry because millions of Ukrainians were starving.

It should not surprise Christians that those who make war on us often do so in the name of “equality”, because a demand for equality was the original original sin.  Revelation 12, verses 7-9, outline that sin:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels.

And prevailed not; neither was their place found more in heaven.

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Church tradition says the reason for war in heaven was Satan’s demand for equality with God.  That tradition is supported by one of Satan’s temptations of Christ, where he offers Christ all the kingdoms of the world if he will bow down and worship him.  Like today’s cultural Marxists, Satan demands equality but really seeks to be top dog (or, since we are speaking of the Devil, top cat).

The traditional Christian view rejects equality, defined now as interchangeability.  C.S. Lewis describes and defends that older view in his last book, The Discarded Image.  It is a defense of the pre-Copernican understanding of the Cosmos, where the earth was at the center and all else revolved around it.  Lewis knew that was not physically true, but he was talking about more than science.  The Middle Ages believed not only that the sun revolved around the earth, but that every person and every thing had an assigned place and function, unique to itself.  It or he had within a gentle force, which Lewis called “kindly inclining”, that would, if allowed by their will, lead them to that place and purpose.  For the spheres to be in harmony, everyone and everything had to be in his or its intended place, doing what God wanted them to do.

Nothing could be further from equality.  We are equal recipients of God’s love and of His hope for our salvation, but in no other ways.  No one else will have, in time or place, our role and purpose in the universe.

Since Lewis wrote, our understanding of the Cosmos has grown and changed.  We now have reason to think there are many earth-like planets, billions possibly.  We do not yet know, but at least some of those worlds probably have intelligent life, life modeled as we are on God, our and their Creator (the old name for the “Big Bang" is “the Creation”).

The relationship between science and Christian theology is also changing.  Mathematics and science have, in recent years, identified multiple dimensions we do not perceive and suggested there may be many parallel universes, which may not have the same laws of physics as our universe.  Astrophysicists have discovered that most of the matter in the universe cannot be detected through the five senses; now called “dark matter”, earlier centuries knew it as phlogiston.  Together, these findings may (I stress may) give us some insight into the world we enter through death.  As the late Jeffery Hart wrote, when the scientists finally reach the pinnacle of their Mount Parnassus, they may find the theologians already there.

Lewis gives us more to think about in this regard in his three science/theology novels, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.  Set within our solar system, the three books have other planets inhabited by intelligent life but earth the only place where that creature, man, fell.  That fall, the second original sin, occurred because Satan was cast into earth after his rebellion.  Had earth held no Satan, no one would have tempted Eve.

If we expand Lewis’s thesis to our entire universe, there is still only one God and one Satan, therefore only one planet into which Satan was cast, one planet where the creation modeled on God fell and one planet where the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate and died to redeem His fallen creatures.  In that sense, the pre-Copernican model of the universe may still be valid; because of those events, earth may be the spiritual center of the universe even though it is not so physically.  Lewis’s defense of the Medieval world view is thus justified and the discarded image born anew.

And evil and sin came into the world because of a demand for equality.  Should it surprise us that Satan is demanding it still?

Will There Be Blood?

The last time America faced an election where two incompatible cultures contended was 1860.  Then, the face-off was between the industrial culture of the North and the agri-culture of the South (as Wendell Berry reminds us, agriculture is culture).  The result was the bloodiest war in American history.  Now, the fight is between cultural Marxism, represented by Democrats, and traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture, defended (imperfectly) by the Republicans.  Will there be blood this time as there was last?

If President Trump is re-elected, as I expect, we will probably see a few riots conjured up by antifa/BLM.  They will largely be confined to cities whose governments tolerate them, places such as Seattle, Portland, and Oakland, California.  Elsewhere, the cops will be on full alert and any violence will be put down quickly.  The Left will realize that the antics of antifa, BLM, and the anarchists cost them the election, so even the Leftist mayors and governors will be looking to maintain order.  In all, violence should not amount to much.

If Biden wins but Republicans keep the Senate, I would again anticipate little or no violence.  Biden will have to govern from the center (his probable preference) because extreme measures won’t make it through the Senate.  Such a Democratic Presidency would largely be a repeat of the Obama years, which will do major damage to the economy.  In 2022, the economic downturn should give the Republicans the House and a larger Senate majority, rendering Biden largely a figurehead.  In other words, politics will be carried on within the political system, not in the streets.

If Biden wins and the Democrats take the Senate, the picture grows darker.  Everything will depend on whether Biden can say no to the crazies.  If he can’t, some actions would rip the country apart.  One would be abolishing ICE, opening the southern border and saying, "Welcome to the country where everything is free!”  As vast caravans of peasants begin to move north, Texas and Arizona, possibly also New Mexico, would mobilize their National Guards and send them to keep the border closed.  President Biden would respond by federalizing those Guard units and ordering them home.  If, at that point, the Governors and Adjutant Generals of those states refused the order, Biden would either have to back down or send active duty forces to fight the Guard.  I think the active-duty units would either refuse the orders or fragment along racial lines.  Secession would be a real possibility, and the country would be in free-fall toward widespread Fourth Generation war.

Similarly, if Democrats pack the Supreme Court, subsequent actions by that Court could dissolve the Union.  One would be ruling the Second Amendment does not protect private gun ownership.  Another would be finding that “hate speech”, which is any defiance of cultural Marxism, is not protected by the First Amendment.  Both of these measures would widely and rightly be seen as attempts to create a totalitarian, ideological state, a new Soviet America based not on Marxism-Leninism, but cultural Marxism.  Armed resistance would be general.

The last scenario is an election where the result is in dispute.  Let’s say that in Pennsylvania, whose Democrat-dominated Supreme Court just ruled mis-matched signatures do not invalidate a ballot, the Democrats “win” because such ballots are counted, but would otherwise lose.  President Trump and his supporters would (rightly) not accept that outcome because many of those ballots would be fraudulent.  If Pennsylvania made the difference in the Electoral College, either outcome, a win for Biden or President Trump, might not be seen as legitimate.  Here too, the potential for widespread violence would be high.

At the root of these potentials for violence and Fourth Generation war on American soil lie three facts the Left does not perceive.  First, most Americans will fight to prevent an ideological dictatorship in this country, especially one where the ideology, cultural Marxism, condemns them as inherently evil (i.e. white).  Second, the government's instruments of coercion, the police and the military, are manned mostly by the Right.  At a certain point, they will refuse orders from the Left and go over to the opposition.  Third, the federal government’s legitimacy is already thin and actions such as packing the Supreme Court may collapse it altogether.  Each of these outcomes can bring systemic collapse and dis-union.  All of them together would certainly do so.

We live in interesting times.

Critical Race Theory

To his great credit, President Trump recently ordered an end to “anti-racism” training for federal employees and contractors.  A number of articles discussing his actions have referred to “critical race theory”.  What is “critical race theory”?

Critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which in turn is a central element in cultural Marxism.  Like the bulk of that hideous ideology, it was created by the Frankfurt School, formally the Institute for Social Research, a Marxist think-tank founded in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923 (it still exists).  When Hitler came to power, the Frankfurt School relocated to New York City, where it remained until 1947 when it returned to Frankfurt.

The Frankfurt School translated Marxism from economic into cultural terms.  The Frankfurt School’s primary goal was to destroy Western culture, which it defined as “oppressive”.  Critical theory is a tool to that end.

The term is something of a play on words.  What is the theory?  The theory is to criticize.  By submitting every aspect of Western culture to constant, unremitting criticism, it would be discredited to the point where people would abandon the ways of thinking and living it embodied.  What would replace them?  The Frankfurt School refused to answer that question, although one of its key members, Herbert Marcuse, promised a world of all play and no work.  In the 1960s, college students in large numbers believed that promise, which is the philosophical equivalent of buying the Brooklyn Bridge.

Critical theory now wells up around us in many different forms.  Feminism endlessly criticizes the family, marriage, and traditional definitions of men’s and women’s roles.  Education theory demands children be taught certain “attitudes”, including disrespect for parents and elders, rather than skills or facts.  Critical race theory says that all whites are inherently evil “racists” and “oppressors”, regardless of what individuals do.  It demands whites grovel at the feet of blacks, endlessly apologizing for “discrimination” and “white privilege”.  Even if whites do what it demands, critical race theory continues to denounce them.  Like the rest of critical theory, its demands can never be satisfied, because then the criticism would end.  Remember, the theory is to criticize, endlessly, relentlessly, until any defenders of Western culture or traditional ways of living are silenced, “cancelled” or liquidated.

Critical theory, in all its forms, says its goal is “equality”.  This goal can never be achieved, because nature has made people unequal.  So the criticism must go on forever.  But cultural Marxism’s desire for “equality” is also a lie.  What it actually seeks to do is invert all existing relationships, relationships that have evolved over many generations and reflect reality.  Inversion includes putting blacks over whites, women over men, and gays over straights.  That was exactly what the “anti-racism training” President Trump cancelled was about:  whites were to crawl on their bellies before blacks, submitting themselves to whatever demands blacks made of them.  Sometimes this was literal: showing that critical race theory had conquered him, the head of Chick-fil-a said every white man should shine a black man’s shoes, then he did exactly that, on camera.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve eaten my last Chick-fil-a sandwich.

The essence of critical theory is that it can never be satisfied.  So why should we try?  If cultural Marxists denounce us as “racists”, “sexists”, or “homophobes”, who cares?  Their boogeyman words have no real power, and they are all lies.  Men and women are inherently different and their traditional social roles reflect their inborn differences.  There are differences among races and ethnic groups within races.  Does anyone think the Cleveland Cavaliers would have won the NBA championship if the team had been all-white?  Or that Sub-saharan Africa would be what it is today if it were inhabited by Chinese?  Who pretends there are no differences between, say, Irishmen and Russians?  How many people, looking for a good time on a Saturday night, go to a Russian bar?  And moral disapproval is not a “phobia”, an irrational fear.

President Trump showed courage in the face of cultural Marxism and we should do the same.  Break its rules, defy its commands, thumb your nose at its lies, and expose what it really is: a Marxist ideology no less totalitarian in its ambitions that was the economic Marxism of the Soviet Union.  As Rod Dreher wrote, live not by lies.

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

The Court

By dying when she did--I seemed to hear a favorite of Praetorius playing in the background--Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg finally did her country a real service.  After many years of working to turn the Supreme Court into a second and all-powerful legislature, she cleared the way for President Trump to nominate a real judge, one who will seek to interpret law rather than make it.  Amy Coney Barrett is an admirable choice and should be confirmed quickly.

The Democrats complain and say the next President should make the choice.  Everyone knows that if circumstances were reversed and a Democratic President and Senate had a Court vacancy and faced an election, they would do the same thing and act before the vote.  That is all within the normal course of American politics.

The Democrats’ threat to pack the court is something else altogether.  It is a direct threat to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.

It continues to astonish me that no one in Washington, Democratic or Republican, can grasp that the legitimacy of states everywhere, including here, is wearing thin.  So focused are they all on court (small c) politics, life inside the Beltway, that they do not see the hungry and increasingly angry eyes looking in the windows.  They do not doubt the legitimacy of the system that made them rich and powerful, so how could anyone else?  This is blindness that comes before a very great fall.

For many years polls have shown the public has little respect for Congress.  Presidents are respected (well, sometimes) by their own party and less so by the other.  But central to the legitimacy of the state itself is the legitimacy of the court system and especially the Supreme Court.

Because the Supreme Court has established its power to overrule both the legislative and Executive branches of the government--which may not have been the intent of the men who drafted our Constitution--it is the final resting place of the system’s legitimacy.  So long as the public has widespread confidence in its probity and objectivity, the system has at least some basis for its legitimacy.  Take that away and what remains?

That has been the great risk run by the liberal Justices, including Justice Ginsberg, presumably without knowing it.  Every time they invent new meanings to the Constitution, often in direct contradiction with what it says, they strike at the Court’s legitimacy and that of the state itself.  By seeing “penumbras” to the Constitution, interpreting the Commerce Clause far more broadly than the Founders intended, and adding new powers to the federal government beyond those enumerated, thus stealing from the states, they make the Court’s legitimacy questionable to growing segments of the population.  What happens when those segments add up to a majority?

Nothing would strike more powerfully at the Supreme Court’s remaining legitimacy than the Democrats’ proposal to pack the Court with new, liberal justices.  Who on the political Right would accept any ruling from a packed Court?  Once the legitimacy of the state is upheld by only one party, the state’s continuation becomes itself a partisan issue.  Because the political balance always shifts with time, at some point those who have rejected the state’s legitimacy will be in power.  What then?

In America and elsewhere, if the state is to survive, those in power must start paying attention to the question of legitimacy.  They simply assume it, but the days when they could do that and get away with it are ending.  All over the world, people are transferring their primary loyalties away from states to a wide variety of other things:  religions, ideologies, races, business enterprises, etc.  If the state attempts to suppress them with force, they fight back--and often win against state forces who are fighting for no more than a paycheck from a state they themselves despise.

If by packing the Supreme Court the Democrats destroy the legitimacy of that institution, the place where the American state’s legitimacy now most resides, they will pull the temple down on their own heads.  Justice Ginsberg’s replacement by Justice Barrett is normal politics.  De-legitimzing the Supreme Court in the eyes of half the country’s population is not.

Quoth the Maven, "Nevermore!"

I expect President Trump to be re-elected, probably by a large margin, and the Republicans to hold the Senate and retake the House.  Why?  Because by this point the number of Americans who are angry is greater than the number who are scared.  The Democrats are the party of fear and the Republicans are the party of anger.  So the latter will win.  

But what if fear does win out and Biden becomes President while the Democrats hold the House and take the Senate?  Biden is an old-line Establishment politician who is unlikely to do anything radical on his own initiative.  But he will be under pressure from the “woke” alt-Left, radicals in the House, and his own Vice-President to do some very stupid things.  If he yields, or if we suddenly find ourselves with a hard-Left broad from California running the country, the Democrats could take some actions that would rip the country apart.

The most obvious is an attempt to take away American citizens’ guns.  One Democratic hopeful who tanked early, Beto O’Rourke--it’s no surprise a Cuban sandwich made with boiled potatoes didn’t sell--said, “Are we going to take away your guns?  Absolutely!”  He’s gone, but that objective remains dear to many Democrats.  If they try it, perhaps after packing the Supreme Court and getting their kept justices to rule the Second Amendment does not mean what it says, we would see a massive urban-rural split.  One sign that Fourth Generation war is spreading would be checkpoints starting to go up in the countryside, manned by local volunteers.  More powerful still would be police and military personnel going over to the side of those saying, “Come and take it.”  In a case such as this I would watch for both.

A second possibility would be getting that packed court to overturn freedom of speech by saying “hate speech” is not protected by the Constitution.  “Hate” is the cultural Marxists’ term for any defiance of cultural Marxism.  So anyone who criticised their ideology or failed to bow before it would be on their way to the gulag.  This has already happened in other supposedly “free” countries including Canada, Britain, and France.  In Britain, a man was arrested for criticizing Islam.  At his trial, he proved that everything he said was straight from the Koran.  The judge sent him to prison, ruling that, “Truth is no defense.”  Truth is no defense in the country where our liberties originated?  Earlier generations of Britons would have ridden that judge out of town on a rail.  Americans would not be so meek, I expect, and resistance to loss of free speech could turn violent.

The action most likely to break the country apart would be opening the southern border and saying, “Come one, come all.”  ICE would be abolished, the Border Patrol would be told its mission is to rescue wandering immigrants, not expel them, and in Central America millions of people would join caravans rolling north.  The Democrats have made no secret of their strategy to overwhelm the votes of native-born Americans with those of immigrants from other cultures, guaranteeing themselves a permanent majority and making the rest of us strangers in our own country.

If they do that, I expect Texas and Arizona, at least, would mobilize their National Guard and send it to the border to hold the line against the invaders.  A Democratic President would federalize the Guards and order it home.  The Texas and Arizona governors, along with their states’ Adjutant Generals, could refuse the order.  At that point, Washington could find itself on the brink.  If it allowed its federalization order to be overridden at the state level, it would reveal itself as impotent.  If it ordered the regular military to fight the Guard, I think it would refuse.  If the generals, their jobs on the line, did order their troops to attack the National Guard, the military itself could fracture, probably on ethnic lines.  At that point, the scenario in Thomas Hobbes’ novel Victoria would have become a reality;  the federal government would have to let its cultural Marxism de-legitimize the state to the point where America comes apart.  Fourth Generation war would no longer be an intellectual construct but a dominating reality. I do not expect any of this to happen because I think President Trump will be re-elected triumphantly.  Anger will thumb its nose at fear.  If I’m wrong, history may say to our old motto, E Pluribus Unum, “Nevermore!”

MAWA

The cultural Marxists said in 2016 and said again this year that President Trump’s slogan, Make American Great Again (MAGA), is code for MAWA: Make America White Again.  The Left throws words around with little regard for their meaning; indeed, it claims “deconstruction” allows it to give any word whatever meaning it wants.  But those of us who have not fallen through the looking glass know words do have meaning, and we find once again it is useful to look at the Left’s slogan and ask what it means.

The first clue to what Make America White Again means is the word “again”.  We know America was never a really racially all-White country.  The Indians outnumbered Whites for many years after settlement began in Virginia and Massachusetts.  Blacks arrived as slaves as early as 1619.  (Had it not been for slavery, America would have very few blacks; 17th and 18th century Africans had neither ships, the navigational skills, nor the money to come here any other way.)  So whatever MAWA means, its meaning is not racial, because there is no earlier all-White America to return to.  “Again” must refer to something else.

The cultural Marxists themselves have made plain what a “White America” means to them.  It means a country that is culturally White.  The editorial in the September/October issue of The American Conservative magazine usefully shows this cultural orientation:

In their zeal to erase history, organizations like the Smithsonian Institution have. . . ventured into dangerous territory by labeling concepts such as “objective thinking”, “work before play”, “plan for the future”, and “delayed gratification” as “aspects and assumptions of whiteness” and therefore suspect. . .

Thankfully, the Smithsonian . . . issued an apology.

There was no need for an apology.  Those values and others like them are culturally White.  They represent the society-wide adoption of middle class values that began in the White 17th century Netherlands and triumphed in White 18th century England, a triumph marked by the popular success of Richardson’s novel Pamela, a paean to bourgeois virtues, in 1750.  By the Victorian period, named for a White queen, those White middle-class virtues were almost universal for all social classes in White Europe and North America, were being carried to other climes and races by White colonialism, and were being adopted by Black Americans and Hispanic Americans as well.  Middle class values work better than any others to create safe, ordered, prosperous, and free societies, and they were, and are, the creation of White people.  Oriental societies have at times had values, such as those of Confucianism, that led to safe, ordered, prosperous societies.  But those societies were not free.

If we look at the values the Smithsonian labelled “White”, we see why we should glory in them as great achievements of the White race.  “Objective thinking” means basing thought in reality.  If you want a bridge not to fall down, it helps if its engineers’ calculations were objective.  If we seek government policies that work, we must derive them from an objective look at social problems.  The opposite of “objective thinking” is magical thinking, and many primitive societies have been steeped in it.  That is why they remained primitive.

“Delayed gratification”, another “aspect and assumption of Whiteness”, is perhaps the single most important virtue in the creation of civilization itself, as well as for a successful individual life.  It means doing something that is difficult or unpleasant now because of the future benefit it will bring.  Absent delayed gratification, no capital, physical or human, can accumulate because it is all immediately consumed for momentary pleasure.  “Work before play” and “plan for the future” derive from the virtue of delayed gratification and, like it, are essential to any society or person that wants life to get better over time.  These “White” virtues--and they are White in their origins--are among Whites’ greatest contributions  to universal human happiness.  We should be offended, not that the Smithsonian labeled them White, but that it apologized for doing so.

Ironically, no part of America needs standard middle-class values more than the Black urban community.  It once adhered to those values.  That is why the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s succeeded.  White people said to themselves, “America’s colored people live the same way we do.  Why should they be subordinated just for the color of their skin?”  But just as American Blacks were on the edge of attaining the equal treatment they had long sought, cultural Marxism and its message of instant gratification flooded over the Black urban community and destroyed it from within.  The same Leftists who now portray Blacks as “victims” are themselves the victimizers.  They are the prisoners, and the middle-class virtues they condemn, White in origin, are the antidote.  Might there be a courageous rapper out there willing to don a MAWA hat in his next music video?

The View From Olympus: Maneuver Warfare and What Comes Next

The September 2020 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette announced a series of articles titled The Maneuverist Papers and offers the first, “Marine Corps Maneuver Warfare: The Historical Context,” by “Marinus”, whose initials I suspect are J.S.  The history it discusses and its analysis of the maneuver warfare movement's “success” is generally accurate and thoughtful.  I put “success” in quotes because, while maneuver warfare was adopted as official Marine Corps doctrine, the Corps left its personnel system, education, and training largely unchanged, which means it can talk about maneuver warfare but not do it.  The Italian Army did the same thing in the late 1930s; hopefully, the Marine Corps’ results will be happier.

Marinus’s article concludes by asking,

Will there need to emerge another Gray, Boyd, Wyly, or Lind?  Should or how should maneuver warfare adapt to recent and emerging changes in warfare?  Or, more fundamentally, has warfare changed sufficiently that the Marine Corps should reconsider its basic doctrine?  Most Marines would instinctively and emphatically say, “No!”--but does that mean the question should not be asked?

I appreciate his acknowledgement--I did after all start the debate over maneuver warfare with a piece I wrote in 1976- and I would also note that with the exception of John Boyd, the rest of us (including Jeff Grelson, whom the article forgot) are still alive, functioning, and probably have one last campaign in us.

But war is evolving in such a way that the situation is wholly different.  In the 1970s through the early 1990s, the Marine Corps could choose whether to stick with Second Generation (firepower/attrition) warfare or shift to the Third Generation (maneuver warfare).  Fourth Generation war offers no such choice, because it moves in next door.

The essence of Fourth Generation war, to quote Martin van Creveld, is that what changes is not how war is fought (although that does change) but who fights and what they fight for.  In the First, Second, and Third Generations of modern war, states primarily fight other states and the fighting is done by soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen.  In the Fourth Generation, many different kinds of entities fight wars, and wars are fought by anyone who wants to fight.  War therefore turns up in many guises.

We are seeing one aspect of 4GW being fought on the streets of American cities.  Groups of young people, primarily men, who want to fight, are fighting the state’s forces, in this case police, on behalf of many “causes” that represent their primary loyalties: anarchy, black supremacy (and sometimes white supremacy, although the Right is generally fighting defensively as it should), feminism, hatred for President Trump, and just out of boredom and desire to fight.  They are wrecking, looting, and burning businesses (many of them small businesses whose owners are ruined) and any building that is a symbol of the state.  Our primary force for 4GW, the National Guard, is already engaged.  Do Marines think this is going to stop before it reaches their doors?

Beyond our southern border, three drug cartels are already stronger than the Mexican state, and Marines have been deployed to that border in the past.  Do Marines think the cartels respect borders and will stop at ours?

Wise 4GW entities fight the state’s forces by taking them from within.  Do Marines not know that gangs have penetrated the Marine Corps, in part to learn combat skills they can use against the Marines?

I have been writing and speaking about war to Marines and others since the mid-1970s.  I, and others who played central roles in the maneuver warfare movement in the Marine Corps in the 1970s through 1990s, are still able and willing to help the Corps get off its eternal sine wave and make the institutional changes needed so its maneuver doctrine is real.  But while the Marine Corps has either vegetated or steamed in circles since General Gray retired, which is almost thirty years ago, war has not stood still.  As 4GW spreads on our own soil, the Marine Corps will either learn how to win it or disappear along with the state it will have failed to defend.  This time, it has no other option.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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