MilPub

"What did you do in the Iran War, daddy?"

2026-08-18T11:08:02.063-07:00

Luckily, nothing.

For the first time in my adult life I've been completely uninvolved in a U.S. war - or whatever this clusterfuck is - in the global hinterlands. It's given me an interesting perspective.

I didn't think it was possible to craft a geopolitical scheme that combined fairly blatant foreign economic and political opportunism (or, to be more honest, the combined Deadly Sins of Greed and Wrath) with domestic indifference (and a huge helping of cynicism and outright lying and deception) more 1) strategically misinformed, 2) tactically inept, and 3) operationally mismanaged than Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure.

Yet, here we are.

But what feels even stranger to me is the way this is playing out here in the Land of the Big PX.

Which is to say; it isn't.

I thought I'd seen the ultimate in "American Empire" in the complete indifference of the U.S. public to the actual conduct of the wars in Southwest Asia during the Oughts and Teens. Outside of the occasional spasm of reaction to breaking news like the recent USS Abraham Lincoln stories, today the Great Unwashed can't even be bothered with the most performative sorts of yellow-ribbon-magnet "patriotism".

Even with gasoline prices reflecting the effect on petroleum production and processing and the multi-billion-dollar cost of this futile air and sea warring providing the usual Republican scolds the opportunity to discuss slashing public pension programs like Medicare and Social Security, there's been absolutely no public outcry.

I've seldom seen the U.S. military put on such a visible collision of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence since the Fredricksburg Campaign of December 1862.

The public response?

Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a goddamn thing.

Not even when we're smacked in the face with shit like this:

That's...I honestly don't know what the hell to say about this beyond "WTF..!?"

Especially when you combine that with the move to dispatch the USS George Washington group to CENTCOM to replace the Lincoln. The geopolitical incoherence of this combined with Tubby's public backhand to the ROK is pretty stunning.

It removes INDOPACCOM's primary naval power projection piece, and has domino effects through the entire U.S. naval strategic planning setup. There's an internet commenter who blogs as "Empty Bag of Ducks" who put up a fairly thoughtful dive into the Washington/Lincoln move that's worth quoting in full:

"I want to talk about the USS Abraham Lincoln (and her relief by the GW) in terms of strategic risk, readiness, and morale. For those curious about high level military decision making, you might be surprised by how much time (should) is spent discussing risk. Let’s talk “risk to mission” first.
Risk to mission is pretty much what it sounds like. In this case, what is the risk to INDOPACOM’s mission for the GW, the only carrier currently deployed in theater, to be transferred to CENTCOM. As the only forward deployed nuke carrier, the GW clearly has a role in IPC’s mission.
Clearly, a question from Hegseth to the IPC Cdr should have been, can you conduct your mission without the GW? Or, how do you categorize the risk, and what actions do you recommend to mitigate the risk? This is essence of strategic risk. We never have everything we need, so we have to make risk informed decisions and decide if the risk is acceptable. Of course, the mitigation actions also have risks associated with them since there’s always a robbing Peter to pay Paul, but the goal is to move down the risk ladder.
Next is “risk to force” which really gets us into the realm of readiness. By deploying the GW out of theater, what is the impact to the rest of the carrier force (and associated escorts)? Is one of the mitigations to pull another carrier out of scheduled maintenance early, or defer a carrier? The Ford is an example of what happens when you extend a vessel well beyond a scheduled deployment cycle. Every decision that you make that is outside the Navy’s force generation model has ramifications leading to decreased readiness. At some point you have to buy that readiness back.
And to do that you’re likely going to have to accept increased risk to mission at some point by pulling carriers out of service for extended maintenance, repair and overhaul. Then there’s the impacts to the readiness of the crews and air wings. Over time, those degrade during a deployment...there’s simply the physical and mental weariness created by operating for months on end in a high stress, high optempo environment. That’s why the COA of keeping the Lincoln on station was likely not viable. You can break a unit, and you can break a force.
Which is to what degree is Hegseth breaking the force (or at least the Navy)? Resiliency is intrinsically tied to morale, so the experience of the Lincoln should make us wonder what is the morale across the force? hat’s an open question, and I don’t know the answer, but there are plenty of warning signs that should give a true leader, and not a martinet like Hegseth, real pause and cause them to put their senior enlisted leaders and IGs to work exploring. Good leaders don’t fear the truth."

But, as we've discussed here, the current Secretary of ~~Defense~~War is not that leader.

MAJ Pushups is locked into a testosterone-fueled roid rage vision of combat-centric videogame-play "leadership" that's all about shooting things and blowing stuff up and not boring details of LOGPACs and supply chains.

I've read people making fun of Sun Tzu's admonitions to the rulers of medieval China about things like "Remember, soldiers need food", but it's fairly clear that the China of Sun Tzu's time had more than it's share of Hegseths and, yes; they needed to be reminded of things like that. Hegseth doesn't have a Sun Tzu and the effects are showing up in the Gulf.

What he, and his mad king, appear to have managed so far is to:

Lock the United States into a difficult position in the Middle East. The Iranian hierarchy has little motivation to accommodate Trump's need for a "win" (and no reason to trust that he'll keep any sort of "terms" in an agreement short of a full-on capitulation "win"), the Gulf States have little reason to continue providing support for U.S. operations in hopes of some sort of escape from this trap, and the Israel of Netanyahu is always going to keep poisoning the water in hopes of accomplishing Bibi's Final Solution to the Palestine problem, meaning prolonging the fighting to keep the PM out of fucking jail.

Further toxify the relations between the U.S. and former allies in Europe and Asia. No one wants to get dragged into their wingman's stupid brawl, so neither the EU or any of the Asian democracies are or are likely to step up in a way that will appease Trump or aid in his war. Indeed; if I was Poland, or South Korea, or any other former U.S. geopolitical partner with a large, powerful, potentially aggressive neighbor such as the PRC or Russia (or North Korea, for that matter...) I'd be looking hard to make other arrangements for my protection that don't involve the U.S. Even when his death frees us from the Phantom Trump Menace the fact that the U.S. public (combined with it's electoral system) placed this clearly incompetent wannabe-tinpot-caudillo back on the throne means that We the People can't be trusted to do that again with some other gormless (or vile, stupid, and otherwise unfit) idiot.

Make it clear that the competing Powers (including the minor "nuisance powers" like the DPRK) can act with impunity up to some point (and that point seems very poorly defined, so the possibility of one or more crossing it into a hot war or something dangerously close is increasingly risky).

The current Administration's behavior makes it clear to me, at least, that any other polity that looks to the U.S. for assistance needs to be prepared to offer up a massive bribe to have any hope, and the problem with even that is feeling assured that someone as avaricious as Trump will stay bought.

Go a long way towards destroying the logistical, operational, and managerial competence that was the strength of the U.S. military system. Here at MilPub we've discussed to death the problem with U.S. geopolitical/military strategic thinking (or, more specifically, the lack of it). And I'm not going to argue that the U.S. government has done a terrific job since 1953 in picking it's fights, or figuring out how to accomplish it's geopolitical objectives without fighting.

But when it gets into a fight, the U.S. has - generally - managed the operational, theater-level management, and logistical sides of the conflicts fairly well.

The Fourth Gulf War may well be the first time since the Spanish-American War that the U.S. has shown a Third World/thug-army (think Saddam's or similar sorts of warlord militaries) level of operational incompetence.

(As an aside, friend of the Pub Sven asked in the comments on the last post whether this clear showing of the Trumpkins' wholly incompetent ass to "the troops" will shake the snuffies' allegiance to the MAGA Creed. My comment is that it hasn't on the civilian side - the rock-bottom level of support for Trump looks like it's settled above the Crazification Factor into about 30 to 35% - and GIs in general tend to be more "conservative" than the public at large. The GOP is the only "conservative" game in the U.S. political town, so the joes and mollies are likely to grumble but stick with Their Guy.
Meaning that if Trump orders them to seize ballots in November? They almost certainly will.)

And let's not even go into the whole "catapults will be saved...by steam!" and moving carrier islands forward and Trump "battleships". The examples from the last Great Power whose Leader liked to fiddle-fuck around with warship and warplane and military vehicle design and construction are...not good ones.

Where does this leave the "rest of us"?

I don't know.

Not in a good place, surely.

The problems that this Administration, and this war, have exposed, are multivariate and difficult to solve. The "guardrails" of unwritten Executive conduct, as stressed as they may have been by former "imperial" Presidencies and undeclared "wars", are visibly meaningless to the current regime. The primacy of the Congress, as supposedly written into black-letter Constitutional law, has proven to be utterly meaningless when the majority Party in the legislative branch cowers in terror of it's own Chief Executive. The notional competence of the Judiciary to reign in Executive or Congressional illegality has been shown to be illusionary when the highest court can be captured by the faction(s) committing those illegal acts (as well as the Executive responding to the slightest check with the Jacksonian "well, let him enforce it..." sneer).

I keep coming back to the conclusion that Bret Devereaux came to months ago; that while it's not possible for both parties to win a war, it is possible for both sides to "lose". Mutual destruction - in the short and long term - is very clearly not just probable but likely the longer the war drags on. Or one side exhausts itself defeating the other to the point where a third power can then defeat the "winner" of the original dispute.

Will we someday look back at the Fourth Gulf War as the United States' Syracuse Expedition, and Donald Trump as America's Alcibiades?

Surely, though...at least the last of the Alcmaeonidae had better hair.

Right?

"Siri, what was the leading cause of death in the U.S. Army during the final year of World War 1?"

2026-04-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

Asking for this dumbfuck:

Mind you, this fits with this overpromoted dumbass' worldview, where pushups always trump logistics (yswidt) and military learning.

His abysmal ignorance of why the US military has been aggressive about things like preventive medicine, field sanitation and hygiene since 1941 explains a lot (tho this jackass is on record boasting that he doesn't wash his hands after dumping a load, so YMMV...).

I wrote a whole series on "The Imperial Japanese Army in WW2: What Went Wrong", and one of the single biggest failures that hammered the 大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun was the whole manly-man/bushido cult of warriorness that neglected beans and bullets for swords and spirit.

The notion that somehow a poorly-supplied, under-resourced and -armed fighting force would beat more logistically and tactically competent enemies because of some sort of mystical whatever-the-Japanese-is for "cult of the badass"?

That's our boy!

So when I see stuff like this sad Fourth Gulf War Navy chow:

I think, yep, that's Major Pushups at work.

If the present Administration has a constant through-line, it's that if you can think up some way to do the dumbest thing possible in the clumsiest, most ridiculous way, the Trump people will find some thing that is so much more idiotic to fuck up in a way so ludicrous that you would dismiss it as an improbable fiction? That's what they'll do.

If it wasn't that innocent people will be hurt and killed by this dumbfuckery I'd just laugh.

Instead it makes me so goddamn furious I long for a sharp knife and their throats.

Madman minute

2026-04-09T14:57:00.000-07:00

The current situation of the Fourth Gulf War is...

...yeah, well, okay, I have no fucking idea either.

It looks like 1) after Felony Fats' went utterly nuts (as in "hanged after Nuremburg for being a huge goddamn war criminal" utterly nuts) on Monday 2) some sort of Iranian proposal - that had been on the table for some time previously, AFAIK - gave him and the Fraudulency Administration a sorta-ceasefire-offramp and they took it.

But 1) as we've discussed, one of the biggest problems facing the Trumpkins (beyond "these are not bright people and things got out of hand") is that the way they got reeled into this clusterfuck has basically made Trump & Co Bibi Netanyahu's bitch, so 2) when Bibi continued to paste southern Lebanon and the Iranian proxies therein, it was inevitable that 3) Iran went all "fuck you assholes!" and took the most immediately troublesome course of action they could, shutting down movement through the Strait of Hormuz.

Now it's difficult to be sure where Iran and the U.S. are geopolitically. Israel? Those worthless fuckers have gone Full Apartheid State and don't care. They've quit even pretending that they want some sort of modus vivendi with the non-Jewish people around the Levant. So any settlement coming out of this war has to accept that Israel will fuck with it and find a way to workaround that.

Problems being that 1) Trump is too stupid and ignorant to understand that and 2) none of the people around Trump will get that through his foot-thick skull. So Israel will end up having some sort of effective veto on the "settlement" to the degree they can and the MAGAts will let them.

Here's the real bottom line I see.

1) At this point the Iranian government - what- and whoever that is - has no real reason to simply "give up" (i.e. unconditional surrender), which is the only "settlement" Tubby and his bobos want or will accept, but

2) The U.S. dare not risk physical invasion, which is the only sure way to compel that unconditional surrender. Short of millions of soldiers actually occupying the nation the only tool in the U.S. bag is death and misery for Iranians.

3) But the current Iranian regime has made it brutally obvious that it could give a shit how much death and misery it's people suffer! Shit, one of the many bullshit "reasons" Trump sharted out for this fiasco was how many Iranian people had been killed protesting the mullahs' rule.

4) So the two sides appear locked in place; American bombs and missiles will blow shit up in Iran, Iran will reply to the degree they can. Rinse, repeat.

It's worth hammering, again, on several things:

The U.S. has been fucking around in the Middle East since the 1940s.

During that whole time, U.S. political and military assessments of the potential risks of dragging Iran into a local (or, worse, regional) war included concerns about the difficulties created by the sheer size of the Persian nation and by its potential for creating problems - that is, largely, destabilizing - throughout the region.

In particular the production and supply of petroleum, either from production (extraction, refining), or in transit, particularly through the Strait.

Which is largely why, despite U.S. geopolitical concerns about the Islamic Republic, the various armed adventures former U.S. administrations ginned up in the region were crafted to ensure that the Iranian responses were limited and peripheral. Not even the vast reservoir of ambitious belligerent ignorance contained within the Bush the Lesser Administration allowed the "Real Men Want To Go To Tehran" faction off the leash.

Now?

We can see why even those evil dumbfucks didn't do this.

I don't see how any of this ends "well" for anyone. As Bret Devereaux pointed out:

"...the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.

Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer."

To which I can add only...

Yep.

One last thought: Fred Kaplan has a long piece at Slate (here's the link but, well, fucking Slate; it's paywalled) about how Tubby's ignorance has a lot to do with the whole Death of NATO story. He concludes:

"At his press conference on Tuesday, the president capped off his tirade against the NATO allies with a particularly petulant remark.

"It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, “Bye-bye.”

This is an unserious man. I take back my suggestion at the top of this column that someone needs to brief Trump on what the NATO treaty says. It doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t listen anyway."

I'd walk it back even past that, though. It's not NATO. It's the whole Greenland nonsense and what it says about the inside Felony Fats' fat head.

Specifically the statement "We want Greenland"

We want Greenland.

WE want Greenland.

As Tonto asked in the joke;

Who the fuck is this "we", Porky?

Me? Fuuuuuck no. I'm fine not "wanting" Greenland. You? You want a big-ass ice slab in the middle of the North Atlantic? No? How 'bout you? (kicks the back of the seat in front of him) What? No, no, not "Greenburg", GreenLAND! Eskimos! Polar Bears! Y'know...no? Forget it.

Nobody gives a shit about Greenland except you, fat boy.

People who understand how the 1951 agreement works (that'd be me, among others...) understand that we "have" Greenland in any sense that matters to "us" as citizens of the United States.

People who don't are...well, they probably don't even know where the damn island is. So.

No. What these three words do is open an inspection port to the ridiculous mess that occupies this dim bastard's skull and exposes the tangle of decay and stupidity within.

Because inside his head "we" - We the People - want what HE wants.

And what he wants IS what "we" want. So he "should" get it.

He really, truly, no fucking shit, believes that what he wants, anything, everything he want - Greenland, more money for him, dead darkies, women's genitals - is what We, the entire country, wants. So "we" - that is, HE - should get it.

That's...something beyond just insane.

I've seen Trump referred to as "our Mad King".

But this?

This is the most up-front truly gonzo, bull-goose-looney, outright batshit thing I think I've ever heard, and from Trump?

That's saying a lot.

The Return of Baghdad Bob

2026-04-02T20:10:00.000-07:00

Soooo..? How's our Splendid Little Gulf War going this week!?

Well, Felony Fats supposedly gave one of his patented Fireside Weaves Wednesday evening. I say "supposedly" because I didn't listen to it...

(Confession; it's not so much the projectile vomit of lies, more lies, and even weirder "is this even a lie? WTF?" that comes out of Orange Foolius' piehole that keeps me away from his YouTube fodder; it's the tone. The actual sound of him; that nasal, whiny, Queens-white-trash thing he always does. No matter what he actually says - and Jim Wright does a perfectly good job of describing his Wednesday word salad - it's that nails-on-a-blackboard sound of his voice that drives me to instant loathing. So I read the transcript.)

...but apparently we've won.

But we're going to keep winning for just another Infrastructure-Week-slash-GOP-heathcare-plan-units (hint: two weeks) and then...something something build a Victory Arch.

The IRGC and whoever else is sending the commo check messages from Tehran seem to disagree that "...we are on the cusp of ending Iran's sinister threat to America and the world." and as Clausewitz (drink!) would remind us, the enemy gets a vote, too, so.

Included in that vote are the numerous Iran-connected Shiite militias in Iraq, which, since all this explosive winning ("Their leaders, most of them and the terrorist regime they led, are now dead,") has removed the IRGC liasons that acted as strategic dampers on the angry Shiite guys in the basement of the Basra Rite-Aid, are now coming out of the woodwork, as anyone who'd lived through Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure would have told you was as predictable as a Republican lying about immigration, health care, or Social Security.

From the link:

"For years, Iranian-backed groups like Kataib Hezbollah have targeted U.S. and coalition bases, headquarters, embassies and other facilities in Iraq. While these groups have been supported by Iran with funding, weapons, intelligence and command and control, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has also reigned them in. With the IRGC fighting for its own survival now, and its command and control structure decimated, their grip over the militias has loosened."

Y'think? And even if those IRGC C&C operators were in place, why would they want to go all kumbaya on the angry boys from the Muqtada al-Sadr Memorial Marching and Chowder Society? Why would the Iraqi militias want them to?

Fuck. If I were a twenty-something taxi driver in Mosul, y'know what?

I'd be hating on some American ass. Any American. ALL Americans.

Because it'd feel like every ten or twenty years the fucking ferenghis show up and just kill a shitload of people who look like me.

For "reasons". Kuwaitis. Oil. "Freedom". Geopolitics.

Me in my taxi with the Twelver iconography and the radio tuned to that Emirati pirate hip-hop station? Like I give a shit about the "reasons". These murderous sonsofbitches are about as welcome as a dose of the clap. If I had the chance to blow some Yankee bastard into fun-sized pieces, y'think I wouldn't take it?

Meanwhile back here in the Land of The Free Because Of The Brave? What are We the People getting for all this multibillion-dollar gold-plated explosive winning?

"President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending."

Ummm...

Talk about saying the quiet parts out loud.

Oops.

Of course, Tubby's spokesliars had race out and walk, no, run, his blabber back inside the Bodyguard of Lies, because showing the rubes too much of the script behind the GOP kayfabe might actually scare some of the less-uninformed normies:

“President Trump was referring to rooting out the billions of dollars of fraud in these vital programs — and his record proves he will always protect and strengthen Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement. “The President proudly signed historic legislation eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits for nearly all seniors and barring illegal immigrants and other ineligible individuals from fraudulently receiving Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Trump economic agenda will continue to lower costs, making everyday life more affordable for hardworking American families.”

Okay. "Waste, fraud, and abuse"?

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha(gasp)hahahahahahahaha...

Suuuuure, Livvy. Gotcha. Enter the DOGE Boyz, pursued by a bear.

Back in the day there was this guy;

Muḥammad Saʿīd Al-Ṣaḥḥāf. He was the Saddam-version of the Nightly News, and was tagged with the nicknames "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob". His job was to rep the Iraqi "version" of what was happening as the Westerners blew the ever-loving hell out of Iraq.

He was widely mocked; ridiculed because his "version" was - had to be, given the one-sided nature of those earlier Gulf Wars - a ridiculous farrago of lies, evasions, bullshit, and bombast.

And, no matter how hard he spun his version, the brutal reality of those wars - that Saddam's Iraq was hopeless before reality, that his master had no plan, no scheme, no one secret trick that would have allowed Bob's bullshit to become fact - meant that in the end he was and is remembered only as a sad, tattered clown whose performance was nothing but a tawdry sideshow, a kayfabe of nonsense that was buried beneath a charnel heap of death.

Whose American authors were, in turn, shown to be fools for the fooling, liars and cheats that lied and cheated for nothing, whose imperial ambitions came, in the end, to ruin and merciless hatred.

The ironic twist to the end of Tale of Baghdad Bob is that, in the fullness of time and the foolishness of the goddamn American public...

...his enemy has become him, the speeches of his enemy's leader have become as bloated with lies and foolishness as his speeches were, and those lies have come full circle, and the meaningless pile of destruction has turned round upon it's maker.

(Cross-posted to Graphic Firing Table)

...it was a mistake

2026-03-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

So just the other day we were talking about the...whatever the fuck the Trumpkins are doing in the Persian Gulf that's not-a-war.

(Here's Mike "My Balls Are In A Drawer In The Resolute Desk" Johnson today: "We're not at war, we have no intention, we have no intention at being at war. The president and the Department of Defense have made it very clear, this is a limited operation.". So it's a "limited operation"? A "punitive expedition"? A cabinet war...no, it's not! It's not a war! IT'S NOT A WAR!

Not a war. Are we clear on that now?)

Sure. Okay.

Anyway, the historical examples we discussed as looking real similar to whatever-this-is included Libya and Syria because 1) the U.S. part of those wars was largely limited to airstrikes, and because of that 2) they largely just resulted in dead and maimed people and blown up buildings and destroyed military things like tanks and aircraft, leaving behind nothing but chaotic failed states that served principally to spread disorder and violence to nearby parts of North Africa and the Levant.

Now.

Just having soldiers to occupy the targeted polities doesn't promise success, either; Iraq is the test case for how you can send a bunch of guys to walk around with weapons and still have no fucking clue how to use them effectively.

But experience (and common sense) would suggest that if the actual end state for - let's us at least be honest and call it what it is- the Fourth Gulf War is something other than "chaotic failed state" someone's are going to have to actually go into Iran and make claim to the actual physical ground, buildings, animals, and people. In war, as in any tort, possession is nine-tenths of the Law, and infantry are the bailiff's men.

Do any of these wanna-be Iran filibusterers wandering around the blanket fort at Mar-a-Lago have a plan for that?

Well...supposedly the spooks at the CIA do:

"The CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces with the aim of fomenting a popular uprising in Iran, multiple people familiar with the plan told CNN. The Trump administration has been in active discussions with Iranian opposition groups and Kurdish leaders in Iraq about providing them with military support, the sources said."

If so, then we're out of Libyan territory and closer to Syria, where the anti-Assad rebellion included Kurdish soldiers aligned with the U.S. (who were then abandoned by the U.S. when they became inconvenient to U.S.-Turkish relations, so I'm not sure they'd be the right people to ask about this cunning CIA plan).

What this Kurdish Free Iranian Army idea reminds me more than anything else is the early stages of the Afghanistan incursion, when the idea was to "go in light", using only U.S. Special Forces to augment the "Northern Alliance", an outfit largely made up of - as the name says - the northern tribes in Afghanistan; Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras.

Which wouldn't have been a problem, except for that the largest, most influential, and traditionally most powerful group in Afghanistan has always been the traditional rivals of those groups, the Pashtun, who also comprised the bulk of the Taliban that were the target of the 2001 invasion.

Enlisting the northern tribes meant that even after the Taliban was driven out of the major cities into the mountains of the Afghan southeast the locals who remained behind, the population that the U.S.-led occupying force and the Afghan regime it supported, were mostly Pashtun and were unlikely to cozy up to these damn outsiders. Afghanistan might be the most extreme form of "me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the outsider" kind of clannishness.

So if the Pashtun didn't rally to the government in Kabul - and they largely didn't, for a number of reasons but tribal loyalties being a major part of them - the chance of getting far enough ahead of the Taliban counter-occupation insurgency was slim, at best.

We know how that worked out.

What's the story in Iran? What would sending a Kurdish proxy force into Tehran look like?

Here's a Reader's Digest version of the ethnic makeup of modern Iran:

Pre-modern Iran was known a "Persia", and the people who lived and live there are Farsi-speaking Indo-Europeans (closely related to Afghanistan's Tajiks, in fact). "Persians" are about 60% of the population of the modern country.

The second-largest group of people are Azerbaijanis, a Turkic-related , that make somewhere between 15% and 20% of the country. The Kurds are about 10%, and there's a couple of percent of various smaller groups like "Lurs", Baluchis, Turks, and Arabs.

What does that mean for a Kurdish "Western Alliance" on the ground in Iran?

Not much good.

A Iranian Kurdish-led ground force wouldn't be much different to the rest of Iran than an Iraqi or, for that matter, a Saudi or Jordanian army. Or how a bunch of Tajiks or Hazaras walking around Pashtun territory were in Afghanistan.

They'd be outsiders.

And we've been there and done that, and seen how that fucking went.

"Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublie'"

Worse than a crime...

2026-03-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

I don't really have much to add about the Fourth Gulf War to what all of you probably know by now.

Unless the U.S. and/or Israel can convince some sort of alliance of Middle Eastern allies - or, if they're really insane, on their own - to invade and occupy Iran there is...well, perhaps not "no chance", but a infinitesimally tiny chance that this latest round of killing people and breaking shit in Southwest Asia will leave the region more peaceful, less violent, and better governed that it was before the missiles and drones began exploding.

Remember "we" (in the sense of "the Bush claque of imperialists, isolationists, filibusterers, and nitwits") already tried that in Iraq, a much smaller and less turbulent polity.

It was an utter, bloodyhanded failure.

Afghanistan?

Same.

How about the other Middle Eastern countries that Israeli, or some mixture of the U.S/Israeli/Western Europe has tried to bomb (or at least claimed to be bombing) into liberal democracy?

Libya?

That's enough to make a cat laugh.

From a post right here seven years ago:

"Well...that didn't work out very well. Libya has, since 2011, devolved into a semi- (or completely, depending on your definition) failed state. So far as I can tell there is a "government" in the old capital of Tripoli, but this "government" is, in most parts of the country, purely notional and those parts are in the best post-colonial, post-dictatorial tradition swarming with outlaws, rebels, armed insurgents, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists."

Syria?

G'wan. Pull the other one.

From this post, also seven years ago:

"Update 10/14: What a fucking shitshow:
"Rarely has a presidential decision resulted so immediately in what his own party leaders have described as disastrous consequences for American allies and interests. How this decision happened — springing from an “off-script moment” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, in the words of a senior American diplomat — likely will be debated for years by historians, Middle East experts and conspiracy theorists.

But this much already is clear: Mr. Trump ignored months of warnings from his advisers about what calamities likely would ensue if he followed his instincts to pull back from Syria and abandon America’s longtime allies, the Kurds. He had no Plan B, other than to leave. The only surprise is how swiftly it all collapsed around the president and his depleted, inexperienced foreign policy team."
Stable genius!

Update 10/16: Sweet Holy Jesus Fucking Roosevelt Christ, get the fucking net!
"Syria may have some help with Russia, and that’s fine. It’s a lot of sand. They’ve got a lot of sand over there. So there’s a lot of sand that they can play with."
What the...what the actual fuck..?

One thing I think is important is not to overestimate the rock-bottom level of Orange Foolius' actual understanding. I don't know much about the topography and geography of Syria, but right off the top of my head I don't think there really IS a "lot of sand over there". The deserty parts of eastern Syria are mostly rocky desert (the Hamad) or bare soil (the Homs desert).

But here's the thing; when this simple fucker hears "Arab" he probably really does think "Ahab, the A-rab, Sheik of the Burnin' Sands".

Seriously.

It's like having a really simple ten-year-old as a president.

Jesus wept."

So far as I know there has never been a successful internal "regime change" from a use of military force that didn't include physical invasion and occupation of the targeted nation.

The closest anyone has come might be the 1954 Guatemala coup which was primarily accomplished by psyops and an almost-comic air "campaign" which included bizarro stuff like lobbing pop bottles from the aircraft because they made a loud noise when they broke.

But even that mess - which, remember, resulted in the assassination of the U.S.-installed caudillo and a decades-long, savage civil war - required a notional opposition invasion army to make it stick.

And, as the specific Libya and Syria and Guatemala coup examples make the case in general, the usual result of the flyby shootings is just more chaos. Civil war, as often as not. Often dragging in neighboring states and factions.

Just as in Iraq, Iran is a polity with little or no experience, and little or no internal frameworks, for peaceful democratic governance. There's no Washington, or even a Mandela or Gandhi, to walk the people and nation from autocracy to democracy and the rule of law. There's not even a U.S.-backed potential caudillo in the wings. Not even one of the sad-act Chalabi variety.

But that's kind of the point here, at least from the U.S. citizen's view.

It's difficult to tell from the outside whether the pointlessness of the death and destruction in Iran and the surrounding area is because the Trumpkins don't actually understand this, or whether they just don't care.

Many of the people now in power in D.C. - Republicans, and particularly the Trump clique - are deeply stupid. Many of them, although not always the same people, are profoundly ignorant. A large number are implacably captive to irrational, illogical, or magical thinking, ranging from supply-side economics to Christiantist theocracy to pure Trump-Love Derangement Syndrome.

So it's entirely possible that there literally is no reason for all this beyond gullibility, short-term anger, greed, and stupidity.

Or it's possible that there's a "plan", but one, since it almost has to have been devised by the combination of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that drives damn near all that passes for "policy" in the Second Trump Administration, that is based on nothing but some bizarre combination of credulity and ignorance.

It's worse than a crime. It's a mistake.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope that somewhere in the U.S. government there's an actual cunning plan for this war. I'm not real hopeful, mind you; these are the same idiots who keep insisting that what the U.S. domestic economy needs is more 1890-style McKinleynomics. The bar is pretty fucking low for these goobers.

But that's all the hope I've got.

Short of a successful decapitation strike on Mar-a-Lago, We the People are stuck in the audience for this Trumpian GOP shitshow, replaying all the Dick n' Dubya's Greatest Hits only without the attempt to make them sound sensible to the normies.

In the words of a different Frenchman:

"Ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublie'"

"They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

"That's what we're talking about. We're not talking about vast wealth. We're talking about sand and death."
~ Donald Trump on the Middle East, 2019.

Operation Free the Petroleum!

2026-01-04T20:43:00.000-08:00

I think it’s worth recalling the last time wingnuts were strutting around D.C. declaring "victory", boasting about making their own reality, and how they were going to show the rest of us how “war works”.

Didn’t end up so fucking well, did it?

And that was with Dick Cheney & Co., an administration stuffed with people like Paul “The Stupidest Guy on the Face of the Earth” Wolfowitz, but who looks like fucking Metternich compared to this bunch of idiot grifters.

At least the Cheneyites knew they were booting the post-war occupation. These dumb clucks? I'm not even sure they understand the whole "Phase IV" concept. Yes. They're that stupid.

Couple of quick notes here:

First (as a geologist); the whole "OMFG Venezuela has SO MUCH PETROLEUM!" thing misses one really important point. That much of - as in "a very large to overwhelming percentage of" - the Orinoco Belt is nasty, dirty, tar-sand type deposits, full of sulfur and organics and other shit.

While they're supposedly less filthy than the Canadian tar sands, they're deeper and more difficult to recover, and only slightly less costly to process. Compared to the light sweet crude pumped out of the Gulf region, or even out of our own domestic fields, they're a fucking pain in the ass to access, expensive to process, and unlikely to be worth the oil majors' time and investment unless global crude prices rise, and rise a lot.

Felony Fats is too goddamn stupid to know that, or even understand it if it was explained to him. But the point is that while the selling point of this whole dick-waving exercise was "take the oil" that's been stuck in his brain cell since Iraq, the actual oil that's there? Ain't that big a seller.

Second, I'm not sure that anyone in this crew really understands, or is even close to understanding, the volatility of the region, but let's just put it this way; if you thought that the Middle East was an unpromising locale for freedom to reign after whichever despotic sonofabitch got the chop?

You'll love the northwest parts of South America.

Colonialism - and Spanish colonialism, so the worst of the European lot - social friction, extreme wealth amid extreme poverty, deeply corrupt (hello? Spanish colonialism?) "institutions", such as they are, dysfunctional governance...there's a houseful of dynamite inside the former Gran Colombia, and dozens of potential sparks that could set it off, one way or another.

So…we’ll see. My bet is that these nimrods haven’t got a plan for the same things that screwed the Bushies in Iraq. I hope for the sake of the people in Venezuela that the sparks that set Iraq on fire aren't struck in the shantytowns of Caracas.

But I sure as hell wouldn't be surprised if they were.

Still here?

2026-01-01T04:36:00.000-08:00

I can't imagine why.

I don't know what more there is to say about the kinds of subjects we once so loudly debated here.

Just the past year has been a bughouse of lunatic nonsense emanating from (or inspired by, or the result of actions and/or words issued from) the golden throne currently occupied by the capacious backside of the 47th President of the United States.

We only thought that the Cheney Administration was a sweltering clusterfuck of geopolitical idiocy.

Holy shit, did we underestimate how quickly and thoroughly the American Right would go full-on, bull-goose, pure-D, stomp-down batshit crazy. Rule of law? Hahahah! Laws of war? Pshaw! Fiscal probity? For losers! Geopolitical foresight? LULZ!

Now there's a USN task force farkling around South America exploding dinky motorboats with million-dollar missiles, while here there's tariffs on this, that, and the other...or maybe not, over there are Afrikaaner "refugees" while over here there's masked goons snatching people out of bodegas and drywall jobsites.

The official "national defense plan" of the United States spends more time gibbering in terror about impoverished immigrants than assessing nuclear-armed peer, and likely rival, nations.

There's supposed to be an Arch of Triumph in D.C. A fucking Arch of Triumph.

It seems, well, trivial to discuss geopolitics as though any of this made sense, or could be made sense of. It feels kinda like debating grammar inside a screeching loony bin.

I wish I thought that 2026 was going to be...well, less nuts.

But I wouldn't sure as fuck wouldn't bet on it.

Radio check

2025-07-15T20:06:00.000-07:00

It's been well over a year since I even looked at this site.

All the original contributors are gone except me, so it's unlikely anyone else has, either.

So I just wondered...is anyone else still here?

It now just seems empty and desperately sad, looking around the empty room and remembering the many boisterous conversations (and disputations, and digressions, and commiserations...) we shared that are now as gone as the smoke from a distant fire.

Aviator Al and Charles Gittings are gone forever.

Ranger Jim is...still somewhere, no longer speaking.

Lisa, when last seen, was going Full MAGA, which makes me just want to weep.

And the rest of us are living through a time I never thought I'd see, in which a real estate grifter and serial liar is overseeing the gutting of the United States that ruled the last half of the 20th Century.

What is there for a blog about military geopolitics to say about that, other than "that seems like a bad choice"?

As we used to say around here:

WASSSSSSSSSF.

Decoration Day, 2024

2024-05-28T08:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as I often do this time of year, I drove down to the southeast, to the big national cemetery up on Mt. Scott in the Lents neighborhood to spend some time with my Army brothers.

Willamette National Cemetery was its usual peaceful, pretty self. Shining in the morning sun, colorful with rank upon rank of little flags...

(which made me think, as it always does, of the unlucky bastards detailed to work their way along the rows of markers shoving little flag-sticks into the lawn. Given the lack of available privates, tho? Probably contract workers. Shame, that's kind of a perfect distillation of Army tradition; detailed, painstaking, back-achingly wearying, and boring all at the same time)

...which the Coasties had, again, infiltrated with their special Coast Guard flag-planting strike force. What IS it with those guys? Overcompensation? I mean, I like the USCG; they are the only uniformed service with jobs that 1) they get to do 24/7, and 2) don't have to include killing people and breaking shit. They're builders, not destroyers. Isn't that good enough for government work? Why this obsessive need to let everyone who visits, on this one day we set aside to ostensibly remember our dead, those of which wore the Coast Guard blue by being the only dead people with their own little service flags?

I still don't get it.

I drove through the glossy lawns down to the back side of the hill, looking for plots X, Y, and Z, where most of the dead of my generation are buried.

I didn't find them.

Well, there was this one poor joker, an E-Deuce who'd done his time in one of the Gulf Wars and made it home sound only to go toes-up at 44.

Damn, dude. Sorry.

But as always my contemporaries were lost amid the huge crowd of the Greatest Generation. The WW2 and, to a lesser extent, Korean War people. And, I noticed, many more of the Vietnam era folks who are now running out of time.

But from the Little Wars of the Oughts and Teens? Hardly anyone, and (because of the crowds on this day, the only day the park sees crowds...) I got caught in the one-way traffic routing that spit me out on the far side, irked and with my can of Pfriem IPA - shit, guys, I tried! And brought the good stuff this time! - unshared.

So fuck it. I drove home.

I putzed around the house, splitting time between chores and helping my soon-to-be-ex with the divorce paperwork (and if you think that military paperwork is grueling, get divorced; it's ridiculous), until finally I couldn't stand it and threw on my gym shoes and went to PDXStrength for the annual Murph.

This is apparently huge for the CrossFit crowd and is named for a Navy SEAL officer who was KIA in one of the many "how the fuck did you even think this would work..?" SEAL operations in Southwest Asia.

But despite the CrossFit/SEAL connections that would normally give iconoclastic Army me the giggy, it's a Memorial Day thing that involves effort, so I shoved a 35-pound plate in my old rucksack and got stuck in.

(The gist of this Murph thing is that it starts with an aerobic event (a mile run, usually) followed by strength events (pullups, pushups, squats) closed out with another mile run.

Well, my replacement parts rule out running, so I rucked a half-mile and quickly recalled how much I hated humping that thing when I had to do it for a living. Christ it sucks, hammering your back and legs no matter how hard you try and glide-step instead of jogging.

And, since pullups aren't my friend (and they're more of a sailor and marine thing, anyway), I substituted situps, and knocked out my sets of ten until I reached my age in reps; 66 pushups and situps are kind of my limit these days, anyway, then rucked up again and set off into Cathedral Park.

Where I couldn't help thinking that this young woman was enjoying her holiday much more than I was:

But that's the weird thing about this "holiday"; it's not supposed to be about fun.

It's supposed to be a reflective, sorrowful remembrance of people who died. Many of them in great suffering, and all of them because of choices We the People made, or refused to make.

But We the People kinda suck at reflective. And sorrow. So Memorial Day is what it is; barbecues, mattress sales, lolling in the grass on a sunny summer day.

Okay, then.

Finally I returned to the gym. Shook some hands, ate a deviled egg (or four. Or six; fuck, they we fine), yarded the plate out of the damned ruck, and returned home to cook dinner.

In all? It was yet another in the string of semi-dissatisfying Memorial Days I've been having.

My connection with my service days is waning, my irritation with my nation increasing. Now that, as the old jingle runs, the "...danger is passed and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted" it seems even more futile to pretend to mourn or revere the war dead of our recent wars.

There are so few; no wonder the silent crowd of the wars of midcentury shoves them into silence.

I can't help but worry that my generation of soldiers will always be forgotten. I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead.

As always today: this.

Commo check

2024-05-05T15:23:00.000-07:00

It's been so long I'd almost forgotten this place, but what seems deeply ironic is that just as I thought we had nothing more to talk about - the Forever Wars in SW Asia were winding down - the Putin government of Russia decided to re-imagine the last years of WW2 by attacking westwards into the plains of Ukraine.

Whoodathunkit?

Plus the Netanyahu government of Israel decided to respond to a bloody provocation raid by going from apartheid to active ethnic cleansing.

Let's say that I didn't have this stuff on my foreign policy bingo card.

Is there any enthusiasm for discussion of any of this?

Not sure what I myself can add; I don't see anything hopeful coming out of either conflict. Instead it seems increasingly likely that all the parties involved will end up worse off, proving that the destructive nature of modern warfare has gone a long way to reducing its utility as "politics by other means".

But if there IS any interest feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.

Gasbags

2023-02-04T13:14:00.005-08:00

So I'm kind of intrigued by this whole "eeeeeevil tricksy Chinese spy balloon" thing.

Apparently the Chinese are having a hoot with it, too:

I mean...I guess it seems deeply weird. The oldest "reconnaissance overflight" thing in the world seems to be "when you see the enemy hide under a bush".

How hard would it be to hide from this party favor?

The PRC obviously knows that the U.S., a hugely militarized nation bristling with surveillance gadgets would track this. Was it some sort of way of drawing aerial surveillance fire? Getting the U.S. to give away it's ability to track, umm...a big fat slow moving object?

And the PRC obviously has reconnaissance satellites, too - possibly not as sexy as the USAF/Spaceies have - and those are perfectly capable of looking down at the continental U.S.

Like I say...the whole thing just seems truly, deeply weird. I'd love to know what the fuck this goofy thing is and what it's supposed to do. Is it just stupid? Or, as my old drill sergeant used to say, if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

And speaking of deeply weird and stupid, this is the Republican U.S. Senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance...

...apparently guarding his woodpile from a Chinese balloon that is floating at something like 9 or 10 kilometers of altitude with an AR-15 knockoff that has a maximum effective (horizontal!) range of about 400 meters.

Don't look at me. I sure as hell didn't vote for this nimrod.

Update 2/4/22: Andy (in the comments) suggests this gasbag was basically a SIGINT thing...which sounds as reasonable as anything else. Kinda hard to go completely radio silence for the whole time this birthday party favor floats by, but who knows?

Apparently this is a sort of thing; several more of these rascals over flew over the Trumpies' heads, too, but (I suspect) the biznay was kept on the downlow so Donnie didn't look like he was being cucked by his pal Xi.

Anyway...just kind of funny and kinda cool that here we are - flying faster and higher than anyone in the 18th Century could have imagined - but the Montgolfier Bros tech still works.

Update 2/16: Wins the Internet for today:

Last Call

2022-12-30T20:40:00.004-08:00

I think it's time to officially turn out the lights.

Unless there's any demand from whatever remains of the readership - and since we (well, I, since there is effectively no one left here other than me) haven't posted since April my guess is that's not much - to continue I think I'll see if I can delete this blog altogether.

It's painful to see it just drifting here, there's nobody but me writing here, and if you want to hear from me you can stroll over to my personal blog Graphic Firing Table, where I still post about military affairs occasionally.

So.

Time, please.

Drink up, folks. It's...

Naval makeover! (cruiser-to-submarine)

2022-04-16T06:55:00.007-07:00

The cruiser Москва has passed on.

He is no more.

(Russian naval vessels are by tradition "he's" rather than the "she's" of English or American sailor tradition)

He has ceased to be, expired and gone to meet his maker. Bereft of life, he rests in peace, has shuffled off his mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

Okay.

Rule #1 of war is "Shit happens", and the fact that this vessel is now full of water is not in itself either shocking or particularly interesting.

If one was in a snarky mood one might make the same sort of observation Bismarck might have made about continental powers like Germany or Russia wanting (let alone "needing") large capital ships: "...the fuck?" (only in the original German, of course...).
If one was in a snarky mood.

To me there are two interesting parts about this, though.

The first is that the Russian official line is that the cruiser was lost "under tow in heavy seas after an internal ammunition explosion".

Not because nasty enemy missiles turned him into a flaming pyre, no, no! Just your basic head-on-collision-twenty-car pileup of fucked-up munitions handling and/or storage, piss-poor damage control, and incompetent seamanship.

I kind of get the dictator-grade level of "not wanting to admit that your enemy hurt you" propaganda. But to want to make the story "our sailors are lethally incompetent" seems...a bit louche' at best. Tell me...how does that make things in your navy sound...better?

Now, that said; damage control at sea is goddamn hard. It requires constant, repetitive, realistic training led by good petty officers and planned and overseen by competent and demanding officers.

Even the best navies have their bad days; we saw that back in 2015 when we talked about the loss of HIJMS Taiho during the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

The 日本海軍 Nippon Kaigun - the Imperial Japanese Navy - was one of the best-led (at the tactical level, at least...) and best-trained in the world in 1944. But that didn't prevent the sinking of one of their newest carriers because of poor damage control after a single torpedo strike.

On the other end of the military scale, though? Damage control is one of those massive-training-fail issues that seems to be endemic in "gangster" military organizations. Think Idi Amin's or Saddam's "armies" if you want a model.

If nothing else this Russo-Ukrainian War has done a pretty good job of throwing a nastily bright light on exactly how fucking brutally bad the Russian armed services are. As bad as the Ugandans or the Iraqis.

Turns out that when your national model is "kleptocracy" your national military is just about as good as you'd expect based on that.

When your soldiers and sailors are "led" by people - from petty officers and NCOs through general officers to their political masters - whose whole mode of thought is "steal what you can, neglect what you can't, and lie about everything to everyone both above and below you" and those troops are either not trained for shit (or completely untrained) and their "leaders" are often incompetent, either because the system is designed to ensure the leaders are piss-poor, or unable to demand they aren't, to find that the entire organization those soldiers and sailors are part of ends up being criminally incompetent at the difficult business of war, including the difficult task of naval damage control, should hardly be shocking.

If you choose shitty crooks to "lead" you, you shouldn't be shocked when they "lead" you into shitty crookedness.

Which leads me back from the shores of Ukraine to the shores of North America.

Because you'd think that this sort of military clusterfuckery would be a cautionary tale for those of us here on the sidelines in the United States about the whole business of being all enthusiastic for dictators because, say, they hate homosexuals and you do, too. That getting your dream of "leaders" hating on liberal soy-boys and darkies and uppity women isn't worth the sort of incompetent "leadership" that ends up getting your sailors killed and their capital ships sunk.

Even for the most foaming-mouthed-rabid MAGAt groupies of Tubby and his crooked little weasel pals.

But, no.

They won't believe that.

Ever.

And that's a problem, a problem deeper than the bottom of the Black Sea, where the Москва now rests.

Lessons learned in blood and fire

2022-03-20T17:56:00.006-07:00

I've been kicking this around for a while, and wanted to get it down before I wander away from it.

What have we learned from what's been happening in Eastern Europe over the past month or so?

1. Thucydides is still correct: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

We like to think, we pampered wealthy white Americans, that there is a "justice" that transcends simple brute force. If we're Christian we like to think that there's a "God" (and his kid) who cares about people and sort of wants them to do justly and love mercy.

And then comes something like Ukraine, where the ugly reality is impossible to hide.

So no. There's no arc of history that bends towards justice. If people want justice, they need to defend it, by force at times, with their lives if they must.

That lesson is bolded by the actions of Russia in Ukraine. But it should resonate with us here, since we have steadfastly refused to take action against those who have already attempted once to use force to "do what they can" thinking that they were the strong and we are the weak. If we do not, then we ARE the weak, and they will do with us what they can.

Putin isn't the only leader of authoritarian goons in the northern hemisphere.

2. When someone tells you what they are, believe them.

Vladimir Putin has said one thing consistently since loooong before he was Donald Trump's mancrush; that the devolution of the USSR was the Worst Thing EVAH and that if he could he would get the band back together.

Well, because the successor state to the Soviet Union looked like a shitshow and its' dictator seemed full of shit like many other dictators, a lot of us got complacent about how serious he was.

Ask the resident of Kyiv how serious.

If I was a Latvian or and Estonian right now I'd be hugging everyone who insisted that the Baltics scurry into NATO as soon as the Сове́тский флаг came down.

Now the NATO countries - including the U.S. - need to accept that those former Soviet republics are all on Putin's list. That means taking Article 5 seriously. Is Riga worth Manhattan? We might find out sooner than we like, because...

3. The Russian military is proving what a bad fucking idea personal autocracy is.

We in the Western militaries listened to and, often, believed the tales the Russian media and government told about the modernization and professionalization they'd done with the successor to the old Soviet Red Army.

I'm not sure if they were fooling us, or themselves, or both, but boy fucking howdy were they full of shit.

Turns out that the Russian conventional forces are bad. Reeeeally bad. "Iraqi Army" bad.

It's hard to imagine that Putin kicked off this war knowing that Saddam's Republican Guard made his regulars look like an anime goon squad. So I suspect he's been fed the diet of bullshit and flattery that people who can kill you whenever they please tend to get. His military advisors told him what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to hear.

"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

But the bottom line is that modern warfare is goddamned hard to do, and the Russians are no better at it than you'd think given the open kleptocracy and brutal autocracy that permeates Russia the country.

That's...actually kind of a Bad Thing for us as well as for them.

Because if the Russian armed forces would get waxed in the first 48 hours of combat with a Western military?

All Putin has to swing is his nukes.

And that should worry all of us at least a little bit.

Update 3/21: Someone named "Kamil Galeev" has an interesting thread discussing one of the main reasons that the Russian ground force is so damn bad; it's designed that way. It's a feature, not a bug. Long read but worth a look to think about why a putative Great Power would want to handicap its military in the way we've seen in Ukraine.

4. Smedley Butler is still right, too; war was a racket and still is.

No matter the outcome in Ukraine, everyone involved is likely to be the worse for it. Obviously the dead, but those wounded, or homeless, the refugees, the prisoners, those impoverished by war or sanctions or economic collapse. Those who have lost family, friends. The citizens of Russia's "near abroad", who must now fear that success in Ukraine will make them next in line for death and mayhem.

Of course, the Russian leadership is likely to be insulated from all that. War "leaders" -unless they make the mistake of losing war and being captured by the victors - are seldom punished, no more than the "leaders" here that committed the identical war crime of waging aggressive war in 2003 were punished.

It's always the "ordinary" people who suffer when the Great and the Good amongst us choose to use force to get - or try and get - what they want.

So, like most rackets, it's the bosses that profit and the footsoldiers - military and civilian - that die.

I wish I had a happier conclusion.

But, just like Ukraine today, there is no lightness; only ruin and hatred, the strong doing what they can and the weak, well, suffering.

The lights are going out...

2022-02-20T16:37:00.018-08:00

It appears that it's extremely likely that there will be war in Eastern Europe for the first time since 1944. While there is obviously no "legal" grounds for Russia's decision, it appears that the Russian leadership has decided that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. It seems clear that Moscow has decided that to use the mere threat of force to win political gain will not achieve their political aims.

How - or if - the rest of Europe, and the world, responds will have a great deal to do with the way this plays out

Consider this an open thread to discuss.

Update 2/21: Fred Kaplan has some ideas about why the attack didn't happen Sunday.

Interesting political note; in case you're wondering why the response from the U.S. Right seems so peculiar, consider that while Putin polls at about 75% negative amongst self-identified Republicans, Biden polls at minus-90%.

Hmmm.

Update 2/21pm: Max Seddon (Financial Times Moscow bureau chief) live-tweeting Putin's speech:

Not promising. Worth a scan of the whole thing; sounds like Putin is taking his "I alone can fix Russia by making it the old USSR again!" for a long walk.

Update 2/21 p.m.: I'm reading that Russian maneuver forces are moving into the two eastern oblasts, and particularly towards the city of Donetsk. This is consistent with Putin's speech identifying the eastern regions as part of Russia. Presumably these will complete the takeover of the entire Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts from the Ukraine government.

The real crux of the biscuit will be if the forces along the southern border of Belarus strike towards Kyiv. The distance between the border and the Ukraine capital is relatively short, and the lure for Putin and the Russian Army leadership of a "decapitation strike" must be very strong...

Update 2/24: It now appears that Putin's goal is full-on subjugation of Ukraine.

I'm not sure if this will involve prolonged Russian occupation; if Putin doesn't, I'll bet his military chiefs remember both the Chechen and Afghan nightmares as well as the post-WW2 Ukrainian resistance. But the actual conquest is pretty much guaranteed; the relative strengths of the two militaries all but ensures that T-90s will be parked in the Maidan fairly soon.

My guess is that after a brief occupation and ratissage of Ukrainian nationalists the Russians will leave behind a Quisling government including a mini-KGB/FSB and antipartisan militia to hunt the resistance. I could see this working at least well-enough to get by in the eastern regions.

How well this will work in Ruthenia is anyone's guess. But "not so well" would be mine.

Now...my further, and more worried, question is whether the success of this move will embolden Putin to go after his other lust-objects, the pieces of the former USSR.

The Baltics? Georgia? One of the lessons of the fascist 1930s is that once a fascist dictator is on a roll he's often unwilling or unable to stop himself.

For a long time I thought that Putin was too canny to go full-on Hitler.

Now? I'm not convinced he has.

But I'm not so sure he hasn't, either.

And...it's worth noting that if there are any "good options" here I don't see them.

Sanctions on Russia? Ask the Cuban government how well that works. Military action? Against a nuclear power run by what increasingly appears to be an aggressive dictator who DGAF?

The brutal reality that young Mr. Putin is reminding us is that in international relations the strong CAN do what they please and the weak WILL suffer what they must.

I don't have to like that and neither do you.

But that changes this atrocity not a whit.

Update 2/25: Juan Cole observes that Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraqi Adventure "enabled" the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over here our reliable commentor Sven makes pretty much the same point.

I have a fair amount of respect for Cole's opinions on the Middle East, and Sven's opinions overall, but I think they overstate the case.

Reassembling the old Soviet Union has been an obsession of Putin's for as long as I've known about Putin. I can't believe that some sort of move to re-absorb Ukraine wasn't on his bucket list for a loooong time; the recent Ukrainian move to try and become more closely integrated with its western neighbors rather than Russia probably moved it up the list as well as making armed force more plausible.

(and, while we're on the subject, who the hell would WANT to be a "Russian" given the current conditions in Russia? Life as an American wage-slave sucks pretty big ass. Throw in open kleptocracy for the discreet American version along with shittier living conditions? Ugh. Our return-to-the-Gilded-Age economy may make life pretty grinding for the 99%, but I can't see voluntarily wanting to swap that for life in the post-Soviet Russia. There's frying pans and there's fires.)

Anyway, I agree with Cole that American foreign policy makes it harder for the U.S. to oppose other's military fucktardry. I agree with Sven that the U.S. and the West has done badly, both in general and in Eastern Europe.

But I disagree that Putin needed any help to decide to kill Ukrainians, or that anyone else deserves to go directly to Hell for that decision.

The U.S. was wrong in Iraq, just as it's been wrong all over the world in places like Nicaragua and Vietnam. Iraq is and was a war crime, making aggressive war, the crime for which the victorious Allies hung Nazi leaders. Dick and Dubya should be in jail, not enjoying a comfy elder statesmen's retirement.

But that simply makes Putin just as guilty.

They all should be sharing a cell in SuperMax, and We the People of the United States should be ashamed for letting them do otherwise.

To those Russians who are trying to stop Putin...I have no words, and doubt I have that kind of bravery. I wish I thought you could succeed. I hate what I know will happen to you

And I'm just sorry, sorry for this sorry world that has so much wrong in it.

Update 2/26: The fighting continues in Ukraine, with the Russian forces doing surprisingly poorly (relative to the preponderance of weight-of-metal on the Russian side...). I still doubt the outcome is in play - poor or not, quantity has a quality all it's own (just hard on the people in the "quantity"...).

My opinion remains unchanged. As much as the U.S. has been a bad actor globally that doesn't excuse this. In the last words of the guys on Snake Island, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself."

Krugman has a column that makes a good point, though; for all that fingers are pointing at Putin and Russia right now, there's a mote/beam problem related to our own plutocratic/kleptocratic economies and the malefactors of great wealth therein that emphasizes the degree to which We the People have casually let the very sort of corruption endemic in Putin's Russia become less blatant but almost as endemic all over the West.

That makes even economic war problematic.

"There are two uncomfortable facts here. First, a number of influential people, both in business and in politics, are deeply financially enmeshed with Russian kleptocrats. This is especially true in Britain. Second, it will be hard to go after laundered Russian money without making life harder for all money launderers, wherever they come from — and while Russian plutocrats may be the world champions in that sport, they’re hardly unique: Ultrawealthy people all over the world have money hidden in offshore accounts.
What this means is that taking effective action against Putin’s greatest vulnerability will require facing up to and overcoming the West’s own corruption.
Can the democratic world rise to this challenge? We’ll find out over the next few months."

Remember the "Panama Papers"? The revelation of the vast coterie of Western vulture capitalists that were thieving and cheating right alongside the cartoon Latin caudillos, African "strongmen", and Russian oligarchs? Remember how many of them we prosecuted, convicted, mulcted of their stolen lucre, and sent to the Crossbar Hotel?

Yeah, me neither.

I'm not saying "Oh, we're just as bad as Russia, so we can't point fingers." Sure we can - we just need to be willing to point fingers at our own when they go wrong. We haven't done that. The fact that people like Dubya and Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and a gajillion Wall Street thieves and, yes, Trump are still walking around free is living testimony to the degree we've failed.

Putin is still a sonofabitch.

We really need to use this occasion of naked kleptocratic criminality, though, to think hard about how much rope we want to give our own oligarchs.

End of an Era

2021-12-10T12:21:00.002-08:00

Some eighty years ago the Battleship Era ended in a flurry of bombs and torpedoes that sank the two capital ships of the Royal Navy's Force Z.

Yes, aircraft had been involved in sinking the most capital of capital ships prior to December 10, 1941. But the circumstances allowed battleship fans to temporize.

An aerial torpedo ensured the doom of Bismarck, but the actual sinking occurred during a surface gun action. Battleships were sunk by aircraft at Taranto and Pearl Harbor, but those were surprise attacks on unsuspecting moored warships.

There was no gray area on December 10. Aircraft found and sank two of the Royal Navy's heavy units, one, Prince of Wales, one of the newest and most powerful British battleships extant.

The "moral" I've always been told that this story taught was that in the 90 minutes it took the air attack to sink both Prince of Wales and Repulse the battleship era ended and any naval organization that pursued heavy gunpower rather than carrier airpower was foolishly incompetent.

What's kind of intriguing about one "counterfactual" is that Force Z had come within five miles of an IJN task force consisting of "six cruisers" - I've been unable to discover which six these were, but at least one was Chōkai (鳥海), a Takao-class heavy cruiser.

Neither task force was using radar effectively. The Japanese because IJN radar technology was crippled throughout the Second World War, the British because Prince of Wales' radar had gone down earlier in the mission, supposedly through overheating in the tropical heat and humidity.

(Worth noting that in this the PoW lived up to her reputation as a "hard-luck ship"...)

Let's assume that at least three or four of the other "six cruisers" out that night were also heavies. The Japanese heavy cruisers were beasts, especially heavily armed with the big 24-inch torpedoes, and the IJN trained extensively in night gun and torpedo action as the encounters off Guadalcanal the following year proved.

Let's suppose that the two task forces had, instead, bumped into each other in the night.

The British weight of metal would probably have torn the Japanese cruisers apart, but the IJN night fighting and torpedo tactics might well have either sunk or badly damaged the British capital ships to the point where their sinking by aircraft the following morning could be written off the same way that the battleship aficionados wrote off Bismarck, Taranto, and Pearl Harbor.

The "end of the battleship era" might now be attributed to the naval and naval air actions off the Philippines in 1944.

No real point here other than to consider how things we take for received wisdom often turn on small, nearly insignificant events, like the failure of the British radar the night of December 9/10.

Thoughts?

Posse Stupidtatus

2021-12-09T11:48:00.005-08:00

So it turns out that sending U.S. soldiers to be ersatz Border Patrol was a pretty stupid idea.

"Leaders initiated more than 1,200 legal actions, including nonjudicial punishments, property loss investigations, Army Regulation 15-6 investigations and more. That’s nearly one legal action for every three soldiers. At least 16 soldiers from the mission were arrested or confined for charges including drugs, sexual assault and manslaughter. During the same time period, only three soldiers in Kuwait, a comparable deployment locale with more soldiers, were arraigned for court-martial.
Troops at the border had more than three times as many car accidents over the past year — at least 500 incidents totaling roughly $630,000 in damages — than the 147 “illegal substance seizures” they reported assisting.
One cavalry troop from Louisiana was temporarily disbanded due to misconduct and command climate issues — an extremely rare occurrence."

Gee. I wonder? Where did we have the occasion to learn - and recently - that soldiers are usually good at soldiering, usually not so much as domestic - or foreign - policemen.

"Tensions were ignited on April 28, however, when soldiers from the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment opened fire on a group of protesters in front of a school, killing 15 and wounding more than three dozen others. Although the military said the soldiers fired in self-defense under attack from Baathist provocateurs, residents said many of the demonstrators were unarmed.

The shooting set off a cycle of violence that wracked the city for weeks. Exchanges of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks started to occur almost daily."

Oh, shit, yeah. That.

I swear, we're the fucking 21st Century Bourbons. We learn nothing but we forget nothing.

New York for Kyiv? Boston for Taipei?

2021-12-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

Now that the United States doesn't have bodies coming home from the lesser paved parts of the world (the bodies we're generating tend to be locals and remain where we drop them...) the U.S. public can go back to sleep regarding it's foreign policy doin's around the world whilst the foreign policy nabobs can go back to the sort of stuff they enjoy; pondering Great Power rivalries.

And current events have had a way of bringing those rivalries up in the nightly news.

First back in October we had worries that the People's Republic of China was - at least - thinking about forcibly re-uniting the island of Taiwan with the Motherland.

Now the focus has shifted to eastern Europe, where Russian military moves appear to be directed against Ukraine.

The larger questions that arise from these potential conflicts are the same ones that have been in place since the end of WW2, namely that 1) as the Western hyperpower the United States is, effectively, the Western "big stick" in Great Power confrontation, but 2) there is always the question of the degree to which a United States would be and will be willing to risk escalation with the other big nuclear powers - Russia and China - over threats to the U.S.'s non-nuclear allies.

Some "allies" don't believe the U.S. is willing to do this at all; one of the prime drivers of the Israeli nuclear program was the desire to be independent of U.S. political will. France much the same (with a heaping helping of post-1940-defeat-shame).

My understanding is that the U.K. was the only Western nuclear power who hung on to the "special relationship", developing their nukes purely as a way to avoid sitting at the geopolitical kid's table.

There's also the issue of diplomatic linkage.

The European nations are militarily bound up with the U.S. in NATO. You nuke Berlin, it's going to cost you. Israel, too, has always had a (in my personal opinion an unhealthily) close relationship with the U.S.

In theory those polities can depend on U.S. military power to back their integrity if threatened. They can act as if they had a portion of that power, which gives them a certain degree of geopolitical freedom and international influence beyond their inherent military strength.

(At least that was the c.w. until Trump; now the GOP is full-on ethno-nationalist and "America First" and, frankly, if I was Berlin or London I'd be hesitant to make plans based on the notion that Uncle Sammy had my back 24/7/365. President Trump 47 (or Tom Cotton or Marjorie Taylor Greene) may very well be most unwilling to go to the mat for latte-sipping socialist Eurotrash.)

Smaller states with relations short of full alliance like Ukraine and Taiwan don't have those options. They pretty much have to design their relationships with their larger neighbors based on their assessment of the willingness - or, particularly, potential unwillingness - of the Land of the Big PX to risk a bigger fight rather than give their rivals the win.

And that means that the U.S. itself has to - or, at least, should - think hard about the degree to which it's willing to risk that fight for those polities.

After twenty years of lies, damned lies, and delusion the current U.S. administration finally admitted that there was nothing in Afghanistan worth the bones of a West Virginia grenadier.

Will a non-America-First administration be willing to risk that, and more, to ensure that Taipei remains free of PRC occupation? To keep the Donbass as part of the Ukraine?

What frustrates me about this, and the only reason that I'm writing this post, is because of the combination of indifference, stupidity, and hubris that seems to characterize the U.S. public and most political discussion about these topics.

The U.S. press spends about five or six more times the amount of talking nonsense about "critical race theory" than it does these potential collisions. The degree of public literacy about the risk-versus-rewards of an aggressive Taiwan policy in the linked article above is appalling; if damn near 70% of the U.S. public want their government to recognize Taiwan as an independent nation?

They've been face-down in the edible weed far too long.

There's discussion to be had - and, potentially, arguments to be made - for resisting Chinese and Russian aggression in places like the West Pacific and eastern Europe.

Those discussions are difficult and complex...and are not going on.

Instead the public and, it appears, most media and political talking heads, are trying to reduce the issues to simple us-versus-them jingoism.

Yes. I realize that's how a lot of "geopolitics" gets done here in the Land of the Freedumb.

But, frankly, after the twenty-year-long disaster that has been the Phony War on Terror?

It's really time that We the People grew up and started putting away these childish things.

A collision with China or Russia may, indeed, be inevitable (or, as Andy will remind you in the case of China, is already happening...)

But I'd like to think that if it happens it will happen for sound geopolitical reasons. For U.S. national interests.

I'd like to think that the systems of supposed self-government - the "free press", the representatives of the People in Congress, the foreign specialists in the Departments of State and Defense - would have conducted a thorough discussion and analysis of the potential gains and risks before it happens.

But.

That would mean thinking geopolitical strategy and, as former friend of the blog Seydlitz would tell you, the United States don't do "strategy".

We do the shit out of "critical race theory", though, so there's that.

Jesus wept.

Into the Darkness

2021-11-11T08:11:00.009-08:00

Our longtime friend-of-the-blog Sven (from Defence and Freedom) dropped by to ask what the hell was wrong with us? Why hadn't we had any content here for so long? And it took me a while to consider that, yes, I should say something, rather than let this place just drift along into the darkness.

So.

First, we've taken massive casualties. Look at the right-hand column. There, under "bar staff"? Seven names.

Well, here I am.

Lisa and jim, from Ranger Against War) left us after the 2016 election. Lisa, largely because (so far as I can tell) she went headfirst down the Trumpkin rabbit hole. She had been Trump-curious during the runup to the 2016 election and by that autumn had completely bought into the idea of Trump as a "rulebreaker" and "iconoclast" that was what was needed to shatter the corruption and oligarchy that had and has overtaken the United States.

She's right about the problem...but there was a massive dustup over her choice of solution, and we "parted brass rags" as theBrits used to say, and she decamped.

Jim, sadly, seems to have just given up in disgust. If you go to the RAW site and go to the comments on the last post, the second comment is jim's, and he says: "I cannot take fire from inside the perimeter.
If Lisa wants to write about Trump then i'd respectfully request that she start a new blog and not use up the RAW that we built so artfully."

And that's it. Radio silence since then.

We lost PF Khans some time shortly after that. He was already getting quiet, and I have to reach our to him and say how grieved I am for him. The ending of the Umpteenth Afghan War is hard for those who gave their youth and their strength in fighting it. I'm still certain that it had to end and that the ending we got was as good as ever possible...but that doesn't change the grief and loss that comes from seeing that end. I'm sorry, PFK, and I hope you and yours are bearing up.

Mike has just got too much else going on, and has largely (as so many others have) moved over to Twitter and the other short-form social media.

Seydlitz (of the immortal memory!) had moved on long before 2016. I miss his insightful wisdom and should be better about looking for him where the runs these days.

Sheerahkhan was a very rare poster and is evident (when he is) only in the comment section these days.

So it's just me.

I've - as everyone does - got a lot going on, too. Work. Home. Family. Other interests outside geopolitics. Knee surgery - I had both knees replaced at the end of the summer and I'm still achy and tottery on the new parts.

And I'm also sick and sad at what I'm seeing here in the Land of the Big PX.

But to explain that I have to go back a bit and give you some dreaded backstory.

I was born in Whittier, Califormia, in 1957 - yep, Dick Nixon and I are homeboys - to a chemical engineer of the 1951 postwar Cornell crop and his buxom redheaded HomeEc major wife. I was raised in what was a stereotypical Father Knows Best Fifties and Sixties middle-class white Protestant household in Chicago and outside Philadelphia as his big company moved my father around in classical Mid-Century Big Company fashion.

The old man was a poster child for Mid-century Middle Class White Guydom. Golfed. Smoked a pipe - an actual no-shit serious pipe (I still remember the smell of his favorite bowl, something called "Heine's Blend" that came in a big blue-and-white faux Delft tin...).

And was Republican because...of course he was.

So I was.

We stood for all things that Mid-century Republicans stood for. Prosperity. National greatness. Low (but fair) taxes. "Personal Responsibility" - sure, we accepted the New Deal, because nobody wants their granny to die in poverty, but you had to pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, goddammit!

We were "Rockefeller Republicans"; "liberal" on social issues - we didn't care who you screwed or what you did so long as your fist stayed away from our noses - but "conservative" on fiscal and geopoltical ones.

I think the beginning of the end came in the Civil Rights era and Vietnam.

One thing that my parents, lovely complacent white folks that they were, couldn't deny was that the Land of the Free was kind of a tough place if you weren't...well, what they were. And they wanted to see that change.

They were also pretty smart people, and as such refused to fall for the classic blunder of supporting a land war in Asia.

And so it hurt them - my father most - to see the Dixicrats peel off and become Republicans, and to see Nixon cynically manipulating the war for political gain. While no fan of LBJ and the Democrats...these were the first cracks in the marriage.

Then came Reagan - who my father had seen and distrusted in the embryonic stage back in California - and his "voodoo economics" and his magical thinking and the goofy foreign policy adventures (Iran-Contra disgusted him and GHW Bush's pardons made him furiously angry; treason was treason and should be punished, the public be damned...).

And then came Newt Gingrich and the movement that metastasized first into the "Tea Party" and then into the real lunatic fringe, the QANuts and Three Percenters and the whole freakish shitpile of imbeciles and bigots that we have today running the rest of the GOP scared.

Thank God he died before Trump. That alone would have killed him, seeing that we both knew Trump from his shenanigans in the Tri-State area back in the Eightes and knew him as the ridiculous, egomaniac, corrupt buffoon he is...

And that's not even to take into consideration the mad rush on the American Right to return to the economic ways of the Gilded Age and Lochnerism. Tom Jefferson had some pretty goofy political ideas, but he was right about this - a democratic republic cannot be governed by a polity of wage-slaves. If your livelihood depends on the largesse of your patron - whether that patron is the Duke of Sandringham or Jeff Bezos - you cannot act against the patron's interests.

You can have a concentration of great wealth, or democracy. Not both. We Rocky Republicans were totally jake with the 90 percent top marginal rate, remember?

Today's GOP does not.

Anyway...that was my road to Santiago de Compostella - through my father's eyes, watching his beloved GOP become the party of Critical Race Theory and January 6th and the Bundys and Taylor Green and - even more terrifying - Tom Cotton, who has all the right Falangist genes and none of Trump's insane emotional problems.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because I see this country as poised on the edge of desuetude.

We have 30-40% of the U.S. public who, in the face of a pandemic, insists in fantasy "treatments" like equine dewormer while spurning effective vaccinations.

That insists that perfectly normal elections have been "stolen".

That is willing to believe, and act with violence to support, in the craziest things that their "leaders" say.

That supports a Supreme Court that appears poised to throw out not just the most sensible firearms regulation but the legal concept of "nondelegation" that will undo the Twentieth Century.

And I despair.

The U.S. needs a "conservative" political party (and the electoral reality of the US means that there will be only two large parties, one "liberal/left" and one "conservative/right").

But it needs a sane conservative party.

And it doesn't have one.

Right now we - all of us - are confronted with perhaps the single most massive issue we will face over the next century; the way we are heating up the Earth's atmosphere.

It's not a mystery. C'mon! About 200 years ago we the human race started burning stuff - first wood, then coal, then oil - and all that smoke had to go somewhere. The receipts are impossible to ignore. It's going to push us close to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum if we don't do something, LOTS of somethings, and that is a world unlike anything we know.

And the mantra of one of the two political parties we allow ourselves in the US is "Crisis? What crisis?"

Confronted with that...well, spending three or four hours writing a post about field artillery seems...louche, at best.

I'm sitting here as almost half my country becomes something I don't even recognize. Or, worse, that I recognize as a bad dream from earlier times; No-Knothings, Klansmen, Birchers. All the whackaloon things that I thought that We the People had outgrown.

Is the Left a treat?

Christ, no. Idiotic things like "Defund the Police" ensure that my impatience with the American Left has not grown any lesser.

(Mind you, the Portland Police Bureau is still an incompetent shitpile of ignorance and arrogance just as it always has been; we'd be better off to replace it with a troop of sentient raccoons...)

But what the hell is a democratic republic going to do when damn near a third of it's citizens think - and act - like wearing a piece of fabric over your nose and mouth is an intolerable assault on Freedom?

That's just not supportable.

Look at the Congress this past summer?

A bill to fix all the things we know are breaking or broken - bridges, electric lines, roadways - and to help people and to bring some change to the warming climate - has been deadlocked despite massive support from the public largely because a handful of the notional "Left" - Manchin and Sinema - have been bought by big money - and the Right would rather own the libs than help out (although 13 of them finally did - good on you, Baker's Dozen! - and are getting pilloried all over the conservative airwaves for doing it).

We can't even fucking govern ourselves anymore. Geopolitics? How the hell can we hope to do that when we can't even rule ourselves?

So I'm looking around me and seeing an end to the nation and the people I thought I lived among and grown up in .

And I feel like Smokey the Bear standing helpless, with my dungarees and shovel and hat, watching all the trees in the world burn down around me.

Because watching a politically-indigestible minority of my supposed-fellow-Americans cheer enthusiastically for a New Gilded Age and home-grown Franco- or Peronism?

The only response I can come up with is an inarticulate roar of rage and anguish.

And who wants to read that?

Which is why I've been so silent.

The Dreamers Wake

2021-08-17T11:20:00.003-07:00

This poor bastard is one Dr. William Brydon. He's arriving in British-held what is today Pakistan, the sole surviving escapee of the British Afghanistan expedition of 1844. He could probably have told you what it's like in Kabul today.

It's kind of pointless to refight all the fights we've had over this slow-motion disaster. Largely because we knew, or should have known, that the people who were supposed to be running this goat rodeo knew and have known for years that they were building nothing; that the ridiculous pile of blood and treasure had gone completely to waste.

The only point left to make is the point the GIs in Vietnam used as their summary of the clusterfuck: "Don't mean nothin'." That there was no point at which that rock was going to roll uphill, and the only question was who'd be left standing when the music stopped.

Of course this is a human tragedy. Thousands of people are going to suffer, many of them will die, because of all of this; the initial bizarre "constitution" doped out in Europe that tried to make a conventional Westphalian state out of Afghanistan, Rumsfeld's refusal to accept Taliban terms in 2001, the unwillingness to face the reality of what was happening to the place and the people, the constant insistence that just a few more months and a few more lives would change things.

To me, anyway, the truly "tragic" part - in the classic meaning of the term - is the fate of the poor Afghan sods that worked with and for the occupation. The images out of Kabul are horrifying...and yet...how else could this have ended?

To have ramped up an evacuation program six months ago, say, would have been as much as announcing to the Afghan government and the ANA that the U.S. had no confidence in their ability to hold. That lack of confidence would have been and is, obviously, fully justified. But it would have likely resulted in this disaster happening in February instead of August.

And I honestly can't see a way - short of slamming in a full division complete with heavy artillery support - to have held a perimeter around Kabul long enough to get everyone out. If it was my call to make I might have made it. But it wasn't, and I can see why it wasn't.

So the fever-dream of hustling the East ends, as such dreams so often do, in blood and heartbreak.

Will the waking dreamers learn from this?

Sadly...my guess is that not only will the Western foreign and military organizations not learn, they will refuse to even accept that there is a lesson to be learned here. There will be a brief search for scapegoats, and then the entire episode will be shoved unceremoniously down the memory hole so the next time we need to slay Afridis where they run.

WASF.

The Swinged Cats Strike!

2021-06-29T17:16:00.001-07:00

And those dusky border ruffians are put on notice! The Mount Rushmore State Mosstroopers - a whole platoon of the hardened veterans! - will fan out and become The Wall! No pasaran!

Seriously. Some Republican fatcat is paying for a whole platoon or so from the South Dakota Guard to TDY down to Texas to stop the Brown Hordes.

Be assured that now the Republic is safe from La Raza.

Hey, Abbot? Hey, Noem? I seem to recall we tried this once. It didn't go all that well.

"We left the border for Parral
In search of Villa and Lopez, his old pal.
Our horses, they were hungry,
And we ate parched corn.
It was damn hard living
In the state of Chihuahua
Where Pancho Villa was born."

Update 6/29: Dan Nexon wins the Internets:

Unloading Chekov's Gun

2021-06-18T05:43:00.002-07:00

The U.S. Congress has, in the usual scatterbrained and dysfunctional way that body seems to work, taken up the issue of repealing the 2002 "Authorization to Use Military Force" that was the legal cover for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the mess-o-potamia that followed.

I trust that no one who regularly visits this place has forgotten the appalling clusterfuck that resulted from that cynical bit of Great Power stupidity, so it's obvious on its face that it is time and past time to flush the boneheaded and dangerous thing, full of more lies than nuts in a fruitcake, and I wish they'd 86 the 2001. 9/11, version while they're at it.

The notion of having a political rule just lying around that provides any U.S. government who wishes the "legal" authority to start throwing projectiles around the globe seems dangerously stupid. It's not like illegality will stop a cabal that wishes to do that, but to give them a sort of real-life "C'est par mon ordre et pour le bien de l'Etat que le porteur du present a fait ce qu'il a fait."?

That 's a Bad Idea.

Both of the 2000's AUMFs are Bad Ideas spawned by my country's weird and ugly combination of geopolitical hubris and laziness, the sort of mindless aggressive response to any sort of provocation that makes every problem a nail to be militarily hammered.

It's unfortunate that the mindset that produced them cannot also be repealed. But at the very least - given the lessons that the mindless ruin and merciless hatred that the two have spawned should have taught us - these two loaded guns need to be unloaded.

We'll see if there's enough political sanity left in the U.S. capitol to do that.

Sunk Cost and Lessons Learned?

2021-03-21T08:05:00.003-07:00

We had a fairly long discussion here about the "lessons learned" - or, rather, whether lessons that seem obvious in hindsight were, in fact, too difficult for the military boffins of 1914 to discern - in the first catastrophic war of the 20th Century.

Now the NY Times discusses a pointless (and "catastrophic" in the sense of "blood and treasure wasted for no geopolitically valid objective") war of the 21st Century, the mess that the United States has made in the Grave of Empires:

"It’s not as if Mr. Biden is being pressured to stay in Afghanistan with a cogent argument; most analysts freely admit that the United States has no plausible path to victory, that the military isn’t trained to midwife democracy and that the Afghan government is grievously corrupt.
Rather, the national security community cannot bear to display its failure. That’s why many who advocate continuing the war are left grasping for illogical or far-fetched justifications. In a meeting of National Security Council principals, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, reportedly made an emotional plea to stay in Afghanistan, after “all the blood and treasure spent” there."

This is the classic "sunk costs" theory that has been used to justify military shenanigans since the Peloponnesian War, and certainly we've seen modern Great Powers do this repeatedly (I'd argue that the real problem isn't that the U.S. foreign policy establishment was "traumatized" by the disaster in Vietnam but, rather, that the lessons IT taught were not learned, either...)

To me, the big question that the rolling clusterfuck that is the U.S.'s misadventures in the whole "land war in Asia" business is "is there a way for Great Powers - or, indeed, most polities - to make foreign policy decisions that are based on "national interests" that are, indeed, based on the interests of the bulk of the people in the polity"?

It's hard to see too many examples that prove that there is, so my question for the readership is "can you think of an example of a policy (or set of policies) or decision(s) that show that this sort of intelligent geopolitics IS possible?"

Is there (are there?) examples that, say, the "blobs" of various nation-states could look to for a way to see their way through to avoiding the very sort of complete clusterfuck on display when you look at the U.S. foreign policy camorra and it's work in Afghanistan since 2001?

Over the Hegemon

2021-02-24T16:37:00.001-08:00

I get that there is a fairly large subset of the U.S. public (and the pundits that natter to it) that refuses to use the word "empire" for the United States.

Imperial is as imperial does, but, fine, whatever.

But I can't think that there would be any disagreement that the U.S. has been the global hegemon for quite some time.

My question for the readership would be, then, is this worth going to Cold War with the PRC over?

I won't even argue with Rubio's contention that the PRC wants to replace the U.S. as the global hegemon.

Would that, however, present "as great a threat as any in history"?

Threat of what?

Would it harm the U.S. public in a material way if the U.S. was no longer the premiere Great Power but, instead, the second behind the PRC?

Keeping in mind that mainland China has a fairly horrible human rights record, would that translate into a worse world in general if the PRC had the ability to conduct whatever they'd call the "Ledeen Doctrine" on regional powers? A worse United States?

I have some ideas, but at this point I'm curious to hear yours; is this an actual thing (or is it just scaremongering)? If it IS a thing, is it really the MOST scary thing ever? And if it IS...is it worth hatting up for a new Cold War (with the attendant sorts of small Hot Wars between proxy states and non-state actors of the sort fought between the US and the USSR between 1945 and the 1990s)?

Let's discuss in the comments.