Kirsten Gillibrand's #MeToo Origin Story

With the announcement of New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s 2020 Presidential bid, the field of candidates for the Democratic Party continues to expand in all directions. Senator Gillibrand, who served shortly from 2006 to 2008 in her state’s 20th Congressional district before ascending to the New York Senate seat left vacant by Hillary Clinton’s selection for Secretary of State in the Obama administration, will undoubtedly have her hands full against a star-studded cast vying for the chance to engage in mortal combat with President Trump in 2020.

Winning election in 2006 in traditionally center-Right upstate New York, Senator Gillibrand entered the political stage conforming to her constituents. As reported by TAC in 2009, her campaign came out against amnesty and illegal immigration, sounded off for fiscal restraint and responsibility, and even held the line on gun rights. Today, however, the same cannot be said of her initial political persuasions. Her race to wokeness has been nothing short of alarming, or depending on who you ask, inspiring. Consider a Tweet from December 4th that generated significant buzz, the Senator declaring “The future is: Female, Intersectional, Powered by our belief in one another. And we are just getting started.” 

While diving into her past political contradictions is a worthy project, one position she has held resolutely over the last decade has been with respect to sexual assault and the #MeToo movement. Beginning around summer 2017, the #MeToo movement rose quickly into the national spotlight, snaring high level figures in Hollywood like Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein, politicians like Al Franken, and even funnymen like Louis C.K. But unbeknownst to the average civilian, the #MeToo movement has been festering in the military for quite a few years, with military men of all ranks fighting like lions to save their names and careers, and Senator Gillibrand has been leading the charge since her first days as a Senator.

Her work began as a member of the Senate Armed Services committee, introducing the Military Justice improvement Act (S1752) in 2013 and then, after it failed to gain traction, again in 2014. What was the gist of these bills? After sorting through the mountains of data her office rolls out, and arcane language the military is now intimately familiar with like restricted and unrestricted reporting and retaliation, the Senator’s main point of contention was this: adjudication authority. From her 2014 Bases Report, the “military system allows a commander, who could be in the direct chain of command of the accused and have minimal legal or criminal behavior expertise, to decide whether or not to prosecute.” And from her bill, the “reform moves the decision over whether to prosecute serious crimes to independent, trained, professional military prosecutors.”

What is the logic behind these bills and is it a sound, accurate depiction of how the military justice system operates? As Senator Gillibrand notes, there is a large disconnect between accusations of sexual misconduct and one, those that go to a trial for prosecution, and two, convictions for those cases which have their day in court. For example, in the 2014 Bases Report, which analyzed 329 cases across four major military installations, “just 22% of the 329 cases went to trial. Of those, only about 10% of these 329 sexual assault suspects were convicted of a sexual assault crime.” Note the language of the report. Just 22%, only 10%. It’s almost as if the report is insinuating that to be accused of sexual misconduct implies guilt of sexual misconduct. Sound familiar? 

And digging further into the 2012 Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO) report, there were a total of 26,000 estimated cases of Unwanted Sexual Contact (USC) across the Pentagon. This estimation was calculated by analyzing the results of the 2012 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Active Duty Members (WGRA). USC can range from inappropriate touching all the way up to and including rape. Gillibrand’s Senate page highlights that this represents around 6% of the female force and 1.2% of the male force. Not wanting to blaspheme the #MeToo gospel mystery that only women are victims and only men are guilty, Gillibrand omitted what the Washington Times noted concerning the 2012 SAPRO report. With an active duty male force of 1.2 million men and 200,000 women, these stats translate to 14,000 men and 12,000 women being victims of USC. Also in the 2012 report, which consists of hundreds of pages of slides and pie charts, only 3,374 total reports were filed, 302 went to trial, and of those 238 were convicted of a crime. So Senator Gillibrand’s reasoning is if there are so many allegations but few reports and almost no convictions, surely something must be wrong with the military justice system, which must be altered. The goal is results, convictions, to hell with due process.

Gillibrand is correct that military judges are not the ones making the adjudication decision, a yea or nay, it rests with military commanders, whose occupational training focuses on something outside of law like infantry, logistics, or aviation. She claims that only military judges should decide, not those untrained in legal matters. In the Marines when a command is gathering information and evidence for a sexual misconduct case, the O-6 or Colonel level commander decides whether to adjudicate a case. The decision is made with the advice and counsel of Marine lawyers known as Judge Advocate Generals, or JAGs, who also review and examine the preliminary findings. Gillibrand is under the delusion that a Marine pilot or infantry officer, ignorant of criminal law, is single handedly reviewing and deciding the fate of thousands of sexual assault cases. This would indeed be troubling, but her summary of the issue is a gross misrepresentation of the truth. These commanders draw on the advice and recommendation of military lawyers who have reviewed the cases, and then they decide. Why is there such a disconnect between accusations and adjudication and conviction then? Well, as in any criminal case, evidence is required. Without witnesses, corroboration, a he-said-she-said case cannot expect to survive in court. As noted above, of the 302 cases in 2012 that did receive a trial, 238 were convicted of a crime, indicating that a strong majority of cases referred for prosecution were legally sound. 

Of all the blessings of English law bestowed upon our country by our Founding Fathers, surely one of the most sacred and underappreciated is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. If you are accused of a crime--any crime--your character, your employment, your personal life, and your good name should be left completely intact until found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And well before the national soap opera of Kavanaugh v. Ford, countless other military men were starring in similar movies to defend their names. Men like Major Mark Thompson, an instructor at the Naval Academy, who in 2013 was found not guilty of sexual assault, guilty of five lesser offenses such as conduct unbecoming an officer and fraternization, only to have all the charges dropped at a subsequent military board of inquiry that was initially setup to discharge him from the service entirely. Or consider the case of Trent Cromartie, a West Point cadet who was charged with sexual assault of a fellow cadet, found not guilty, but then expelled anyway, his military career evaporating before his eyes. What about these men’s lives? Does anyone care for their situation?

Senator Gillibrand never misses the chance to voice her outrage at this “crisis”, and more recently she publicly flayed the Commandant of the Marine Corps over a nude photo sharing scandal that rocked the service. All allegations of USC should be taken seriously, because it is a serious matter. But should she and her fellow justice warriors really be surprised that allegations of USC are higher in the military compared to the civilian world? After all, in her book Off the Sidelines, she reminisces about her time in an all-girls high school, “as for boys, I was distracted enough just thinking about them.” Do readers really need reminded of the differences between the male and female sexes when it comes to hormones? The military recruits young, usually single, aggressive men to fight and win the country’s wars. If you think you can mix those men among a similar age group of women and expect saintly conduct you are naïve, especially when recruits are drawn from a culture that encourages sexual liberation. Or as General Mattis said in 2015, “when you mix arrows, and you mix affection for one another that could be manifested sexually, I don’t care where you go (in) history, you will not find where this has worked”. But then again, progressives usually aren’t fans of history, the hypothetical future is where they always look for answers.

The military has been watching the #MeToo movie for several years but with the crucifixion of Brett Kavanaugh, an inflection point has been reached. And now the boomerang is coming back. As Senator Gillibrand said during the Kavanaugh hearings in reference to Christine Blasely Ford, “I believe her.” That’s all well and good, one can believe in God, but belief isn’t evidence, and belief isn’t proof. And in English law, thank God, evidence and proof are required. The Presidential candidacy of Senator Gillibrand will be a public trial for the #MeToo movement, and hopefully the populace will bring the gavel down forcefully against this movement for the good names it has so shamelessly attacked and defamed in its race for “justice”.

Read Jeff Groom's satirical memoir about his time in the Marine Corps: American Cobra Pilot: A Marine Remembers a Dog and Pony Show.

The View From Olympus: Helping the Infantry

Although former Marine General James Mattis proved a disappointment as Secretary of Defense, he began one initiative that deserves to continue.  Called the Close Combat Lethality Task Force (CCLTF), this joint Army-Marine Corps program is aimed at improving the effectiveness and survivability of the men who do most of the dying in combat, the infantry. Such an effort is long overdue and deserves substantial funding, as Secretary Mattis intended.

However, as presently conceived the CCLTF has some problems. They begin with a misplaced focus on improving squad lethality.  Lethality and effectiveness are not the same thing. In maneuver warfare, including maneuver tactics at the small unit level, most of the enemy end up prisoners, not dead or wounded. Modern, i.e. Third Generation, tactics are not “close with and destroy”, much less “ bombard and attrit”. Rather, as demonstrated by the German infantry in 1918, they are tactics intended to “bypass and collapse”.  If you are constantly appearing in your enemy's rear and encircling him, he tends to give up.

From this perspective, I found it dismaying that none of the papers I have seen about the CCLTF have discussed the first requirement for helping our infantry, namely modernizing our infantry tactics and training. Modern tactics means at the very least adopting the “infiltration tactics” of the German infantry of 1918. Ideally, we should go beyond those tactics and adopt their more developed form, Jaeger or true light infantry tactics (what the U.S. Army and Marine Corps call “light infantry” lacks the Jaeger tactical repertoire and is really line infantry). Training must be in the new tactics, not the obsolete Second Generation tactics we now employ where the infantry's main task is to call in remote fires. 

That points to another problem in the CCLTF’s current approach: it places little emphasis on expanding opportunities for free-play training. While techniques and procedures can be taught in “canned” exercises, tactics can only be practiced in a free-play environment where the enemy can do whatever he wants to defeat you. At present, neither U.S. Army soldiers nor U.S. Marines get that much if any free-play training. Changing that should be one of the CCLTF’s highest priorities.

Rightly, the CCLTF is not emphasizing new equipment; better tactics and training are more important. But the CCLTF can and should sponsor an experiment with one piece of equipment most of our enemies have and our infantry does not, the RPG. I have asked combat-experienced Marine commanders at the tactical levels whether our infantry is at a disadvantage in Afghanistan because we lack the RPG, and most have said yes. If we look at Fourth Generation, non-state fighters around the world, we see many if not most carry an RPG.  It would not be difficult or expensive to design and run a test where we put an infantry squad or platoon through a series of problems, once with their current equipment and once with that equipment augmented with RPGs, one for each man (with reloads). If the RPGs make an important difference, they are inexpensive and widely available. We could equip our infantry with them in a very short time.

The CCLTF is also correct in emphasizing the need for changes in the personnel system so our infantry units can become and remain cohesive. Unit cohesion is the basis for why men fight: they fight for their buddies. But cohesion requires one thing the CCLTF dares not discuss (but I can): that infantry and other combat units be all-male. If women are present, the men will not cohere because they will view each other as rivals for the favors of the women. In combat, they will drop the mission to protect the women. This is human nature, and human nature is always more powerful than ideology, including feminist ideology. Combat is the ultimate “real world,” and in the real world all ideologies fail.

As important as Secretary Mattis’s CCLTF initiative is, the regrettable fact is that with his departure, the planned funding is likely to be cut or vanish entirely. If that happens, it may still be possible to help the infantry with a “bottom up” effort. Recently, some company-grade Marine officers and SNCOs has informed me about the Warfighting Society, a group within the Marine Corps modeled on Scharnhorst’s Militarische Gesellschaft. It would be both appropriate and useful if the Warfighting Society would do as Scharnhorst and his colleagues did and take on the problem of helping the infantry.  What the system cannot do without lots of money, thinking individuals can do.  Anyone wanting to participate can contact the Warfighting Society here. 

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

The View From Olympus: The Pentagon Declares Bankruptcy

According to the December 28 New York Times, the Pentagon has finally made its moral and intellectual bankruptcy official.  With regard to our failed war in Afghanistan, the Times reported that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., said that the Taliban “are not losing.”  The general is correct.  The Taliban are not losing because they have won.  All that remains is working out the details of their assumption of power and our departure.  To his credit, President Trump recognizes that reality.

But merely presiding over our defeat is apparently not enough for General Dunford.  In a truly breathtaking admission of strategic incompetence and intellectual bankruptcy, the general went on to say according to the Times,

“If someone has a better idea than we have right now, which is to support the Afghans and put pressure on the terrorist groups in the region, I'm certainly open to dialogue on that,” General Dunford said at a panel sponsored by The Washington Post earlier this month.

Wow. I doubt Moltke Jr. or even Keitel, whom the Fuehrer described as having the mind of a hotel doorman, sank that low.  Has General Dunford considered asking the chairwoman who cleans his office? Perhaps he could talk to his milkman or egg lady.  Certainly his driver should be consulted; after all he has some idea where he is going, which general Dunford, after sixteen years of war and several thousand American dead, admittedly does not.  In the long annals of military incompetence that's still one for the history books. Clio should award General Dunford the Golden Trash Can, First Class, with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds.

Let us imagine, for a moment, that we are a Prussian officer sent to advise General Dunford on how to turn a lost war around (That's what happens when you fart at the dinner table on board the Hohenzollern).  Taking the General’s statement quoted above as a description of his strategy, we see that “supporting the Afghans” has no meaning because it is a war of Afghans against Afghans.  As to “putting pressure on the terrorist groups”, “terrorists” simply means “the other side” and “pressure” means tactical pinpricks with no strategic impact.  It is seldom possible to reverse strategic failure at the tactical level, and kleckern, nicht klotzen is a prescription for failure at all levels of war.

So to begin we need to shift our focus to a strategic level. I suspect even General Dunford knows that the Taliban’s strategic center of gravity is its support by Pakistan. Take that away, and the Taliban is walking on air. How might that be done?  Recognize that so long as the current Afghan government is aligned with India, Pakistan has no choice but to support the Taliban.  Pakistan's threat is India, and Pakistan needs Afghanistan as an ally to offer it some strategic depth. Above all, it cannot have a hostile Afghanistan putting Pakistan in a two-front situation. So our first step is to give the current Afghan government a (secret, not public) ultimatum: cut all ties to India and become a loyal and subservient ally of Pakistan.  If they won't, our troops and money go home. The money, more than the troops, will concentrate their thinking.

When the Taliban sees this move and realizes the strategic threat it represents, offer them a peace that secures our limited objective while rewarding them.  Our objective going into Afghanistan was to deprive Al Qaeda of a base.  We have no quarrel with the Taliban per se.  So, we offer to recognize a Taliban-led Afghanistan as long as they do not invite back groups that seek to attack the American homeland.  Al Qaeda have worn out its welcome in Afghanistan before 9/11 and it now has more useful bases in other countries.  Plus, the Taliban is already fighting ISIS within Afghanistan. As part of a peace deal, we could offer to support the Taliban in that fight, not with troops but with the all-important ammunition in 4GW, money.

I doubt General Dunford will be willing to heed Prussian advice.  But if he's asking the whole world for input, he might recall that these services send their best and brightest young officers to serve the members of The Joint Chiefs of Staff.  As Chairman, he is well within his rights to say to those young officers, many who will have served in Afghanistan, what he said on the Post’s panel: if you've got better ideas than what we are now doing, please share them with me.  I suspect he would to get some useful feedback, perhaps along the lines I’ve outlined here.

Or he could just ask the chairwoman. Even she is likely to come up with something better than doing more of what has not worked in sixteen years.

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

tR Live: Episode 8

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week’s news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The Close Combat Lethality Task Force

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has created a “Close Combat Lethality Task Force” to fix problems with U.S. infantry forces.  The vast majority of these forces are found in the Army and Marine Corps.  Many of the task force’s ideas are encapsulated in a book by Major General Bob Scales, U.S. Army (Retired), called Scales on War.  In this book, General Scales calls for a comprehensive program to improve the lethality of U.S. infantry.  

The fundamental problem is that Scales has misunderstood the changes occurring in modern war.  Scales’ thoughts on past changes in war are muddled.  While he vaguely mentions changes in war as a result of societal changes, he provides a framework broken into “epochs”, each of which is defined by technological changes.  This leads naturally into a solution in which technology plays a central role.

Unfortunately, technology is neither the problem nor the answer.  If it were, the United States would not have difficulty defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan (as just one example).  War has changed and we are now facing Fourth Generation adversaries.  This change in war is based not on technology, but on who fights and what they fight for (as Martin Van Creveld has argued).  The truth is the U.S. military is poorly adapted to fighting Fourth Generation wars, where “lethality” can be disadvantageous.  Nowhere in Scales’ book does he demonstrate any understanding of this.

Scales also confuses tactics with strategy.  Scales believes American military ineffectiveness can be attributed to poorly trained infantry.  The solution is equally simple: provide massive resources to improve training and equipment and victory will be assured.  

This is a serious misunderstanding of what has gone wrong in U. S. military involvements since World War II.  American infantry can certainly benefit from better selection and training, but this will not cure the strategic disease which is crippling the U.S. military establishment.  One can have legions of the most effective and efficient killers the world has ever seen and still lose a war with poor strategy.

The United States has committed troops to poorly defined, poorly understood, and unwinnable conflicts yet demanded victory.  Senior military leaders who are little more than bureaucrats in uniform and lack either military sense or the ability to speak truth to power seem to do little more than nod when asked if the military can accomplish the mission.  The result in Vietnam was a disaster.  Although U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is still ongoing, after nearly 18 years and 16 years respectively, can anyone seriously believe victory is still possible?

In advocating improved infantry, Scales provides a tactical solution to an operational and strategic problem.  He does not understand that in war, results at a higher level trump those at a lower level.  Back in 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recognized that the United States could not kill or capture its way to victory in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Scales does not understand this.

Scales believes strategic victory can be won by stacking up tactical victories (and enemy bodies).  Unfortunately, war does not always work this way and this method has entirely failed in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Whether the Close Combat Lethality Task Force ultimately achieves anything other than spending a lot of money remains to be seen.  What is beyond question is that even if the program is wildly successful and the effectiveness of American infantry increases dramatically, until we gain a better understanding of Fourth Generation war, increased body counts will not improve our military’s ability to win wars.  If General Scales is providing a roadmap for our military, we are likely going in the wrong direction.

The View From Olympus: Another Personnel Blunder

On policy matters, President Trump usually does well when he follows his instincts.  But that does not appear to be the case on personnel decisions.  His worst, to date, was choosing John Bolton as his National Security Advisor.  We are already paying for that decision in worsening relations with a number of other countries.

If, on the one hand, you are going to raise the risk of hostilities, on the other hand you should be improving the quality of your military leaders.  But in another poor personnel decision, President Trump has chosen Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).  The combination of Bolton and Milley would be like choosing Ribbentrop to run your foreign policy and Graziani to command your army in the resulting wars.

By the low standards we set for our senior military leaders, Milley is not especially awful.  His main sin, which he shares with his colleagues atop the other services, is doing nothing about the fact that the Army is a Second Generation military in a Fourth Generation war.

Actually, in a way, General Milley did do something about that: he made it official.  Not long ago, he ordered the U.S. Army to return to its World War II-era uniforms, the so-called “pinks and greens”.  As costumes, the old/new uniforms will be a great improvement.  The fact that they are costumes recognizes the reality that a Second Generation army is useless for a real war and exists only to stage public entertainments.  All our Second Generation services are like armored knights on horseback in the 16th century.  Their heavy plate armor has reached its highest stage of perfection, but real battlefields are filling up with low-born musketeers and the knights “fight” only in tournaments, where damsels swoon, someone is occasionally unhorsed and nothing is decided.

I am hopeful that General Milley will do as Chairman of the JCS what he has done as Army Chief of Staff and make the theatrical nature of the other services official too.  The Air Force will go back to biplanes that stage dogfights over NFL football games.  Ironically, that might also make it more combat effective in the air, at least in what really counts, supporting the man on the ground.  World War I ground-support aircraft such as the Halberstadt and Hannoveraner CL IIs are better suited by far to the close air support mission than are F-35s.  And Fokker D VIIs are usually ready to fly and fight, which means they can easily defeat F-22s stuck in their hangers by their enormous maintenance requirements. 

The Navy tried to make its irrelevance official in the 1980s by bringing back the battleships, which look very impressive.  That effort, however, failed, because it did not go back far enough.  Chairman Milley, I hope, will direct the Navy to start building some new Constitution-class frigates, which will not only put on splendid shows on Navy Day but will require real sailors to man them, which might in turn compel the Navy to find some.  The new Zumwalt-class destroyers already look like zombie versions of C.S.S. Virginia; why not build some real Monitors and Confederate ironclads and stage naval battles in the Reflecting Pool, as the Romans used to do in the Coliseum (which could be flooded)?  And bringing back airships like Akron and Macon will wow the public while doing what the Ford-class carriers cannot, namely launch and recover airplanes (both of those airships carried Sparrowhawk scout aircraft).

The Marine Corps should not be touched.  Its continued focus on making amphibious landings on heavily defended beaches had already rendered it son et lumiere.

Regrettably, these wonderful follow-ons to the pinks and greens require vision, and general Milley has none.  We can, however, probably count on him to try to push the new Physical Fitness Test he decreed for the Army down the other services’ throats, so they too can witness a mass exodus of their staff NCOs.  Staff NCOs are the backbone of any military in combat, but what does combat have to do with “armed services” full of women?  Our military theater has reversed the roles in kabuki: it has women playing men.

There is an old saying on Capitol Hill that the Air Force is deceptive, the Navy is dishonest, and the Army is dumb.  As Burke noted, stereotypes arise from observation.

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

tR Live: Episode 7

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week’s news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

General McChrystal and General Lee

It is interesting that General Stan McChrystal recently admitted to getting rid of a portrait he had long cherished of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  One would think that McChrystal would have some sympathy for Lee, considering both presided over failed wars.  There is a world of difference between these two men and McChrystal does not benefit from the comparison.

Since his dismissal by President Obama, McChrystal has become an author in an attempt to trade on his celebrity status and high rank.  He has done well, with several popular books to his name.  At a recent book signing, McChrystal admitted his best advice was for the U.S. to continue to “muddle through” in Afghanistan.

Think about this for a moment.  McChrystal held the top command in Afghanistan for a full year (2009–2010) during which he was unable to chart a course to success.  He has had 9 years since he left command to reflect on his experience and the direction of the war.  After all this time, the best he can come up with is to “muddle through”?

No response could better encapsulate the professional failure and moral bankruptcy of our senior military leaders.  For the last 17 years, general after general has told a succession of U.S. presidents, “We can succeed in Afghanistan.”  McChrystal was one of them.  Afraid to be the one tagged with presiding over a defeat, each general believes the U.S. should stay the course, blindly hoping for a change of fortune which is unlikely to occur.  Doubtless no one wishes to signal all the sacrifice in blood and treasure has ultimately proven futile.  Unfortunately, that is the reality.  

McChrystal was a proud graduate of U.S. military schools.  He was carefully groomed for high rank and selected for great responsibility.  And he failed miserably.

It’s ironic McChrystal has decided to publicize his decision to give away a picture of Robert E. Lee.  Lee faced different challenges during the Civil War than did McChrystal in Afghanistan.  Unlike McChrystal, Lee actually had a plan to win the war he fought.  It may not have worked, but at least Lee knew what he was doing.  McChrystal cannot make this claim.  If Lee were alive today, he would likely get rid of McChrystal’s picture – if he were foolish enough to have one in the first place.

The View From Olympus: Hurrah for the President!

Finally, President Trump is doing what he was elected to do, namely ending our involvement in wars halfway around the world in which we have no interests at stake.  President Trump was elected as a peace president.  He promised to bring the boys home.  His opponent, Hillary Clinton, was neo-lib/neo-con interventionist.  He won, she lost.

Mr. Trump won not because he is a liberal peacenik who appealed to the Left.  His constituency was and remains the Heartland Americans whose sons do the fighting and dying in these wars.  They do not understand why we are involved in the conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq and Syria, and neither do I.  They know why we went to Afghanistan after 9/11, but not why we are still fighting there seventeen years later.  Again, neither do I, although I understand that military incompetence at the senior levels has something to do with it.  The Washington Establishment has careers and budgets at stake, so of course it wants wars to continue.  That’s not much of an argument in the rest of the country.

The President’s decisions to get out of Syria and Afghanistan are not only wise but necessary.  In Syria, if we stay much longer, we will have to choose sides between the Kurds and the Turks.  Turkey is going to go after the Syrian Kurds militarily, whether we like it or not.  If we side with the Kurds we will find ourselves in the inconvenient situation of going to war with a member of NATO.  We will also lose, simply because of geography: the conflict would be on Turkey’s border with Syria, where our logistics lines can only support a small American force.  If we side with the Turks or try to remain neutral, we would lose our only local ally who can actually fight.  At that point our forces in Syria would be surrounded by lots of enemies with no one to help.  As President Trump would say, “Not good.”  So we need to get out, now. 

In Afghanistan, our position is deteriorating at an ever more rapid clip.  President Trump is trying to negotiate with the Taliban for the only possible outcome that is not a catastrophe, an orderly and safe exit of our forces.  The alternative is a sauve qui peut rout where our losses could be serious.  Just ask the Brits.

The Establishment is running in circles, screaming and shouting.  It’s fun to watch.  Their latest cause for panic is Secretary Jim Mattis’s resignation.  Frankly, there is little reason to regret his departure.

I know General Mattis only slightly.  We had one meeting when he commanded the “Marine Corps University” at Quantico.  (As Universities go, it has more in common with McDonald’s Hamburger U than with Harvard.) No actions resulted from that meeting.

Mattis is unquestionably well-read, and I had great hopes for him as SecDef.  But he proved to be no better than his less well-read predecessors.  He did nothing to reform either the services or the Pentagon itself.  He promoted the strategic idiocy of turning away from preparing for Fourth Generation wars, the wars of the future, and instead making Russia and China our enemies of choice.  Does he not know that both are nuclear powers?  Is he unaware of why both the U.S. and the Soviet Union avoided direct engagements with each other’s forces throughout the Cold War, namely that whichever side were losing would feel immense pressure to go nuclear?  The Pentagon likes such a “strategy” because “peer competitors” justify vast budgets and programs, but the Secretary of Defense is supposed to represent the real world.  Mattis failed to do so.

Secretary Mattis began one initiative that deserves to continue after his departure.  Called the “Close Combat Lethality Task Force” (CCLTF), its purpose is to provide more resources and better training for the men who do most of the dying, the infantry.  They get a pittance of the resources devoted to, for example, tac air.  The CCLTF aims to change that, and it would be a pity if it died because its sponsor was gone.  The current concept for the CCLTF has some weakness, which I will address in a future column.  But the need for it is real.

So hurrah for the president!  He is ending stupid wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, trying to mend fences with North Korea and wants a good relationship with Russia.  All those initiatives are very much in America’s interest.  Could that be why the Washington Establishment hates him so bitterly?

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

tR Live: Episode 6

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week’s news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The Reality Principle

No one was more important than Herbert Marcuse to the effort to inject Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism into the Boomer generation.  His book Eros and Civilization, which became the Left’s bible in the 1960s, argued for replacing the “reality principle” with the “pleasure principle”.  The result, Marcuse promised, would be a world of all play and no work.

The actual result has been a culture of instant gratification and with it the growing social pathologies now engulfing us.  If we want to reverse America’s decline, we must again enthrone the reality principle.  The reality principle says that to succeed, our actions must be based on reality, on conditions as they are and not as we might like them to be.  This is especially urgent in five areas, where the relativities are:

• State capitalism is failing.  State capitalism is capitalism where cozy relationships between business and government change the basis for a company’s success from building a better product at a lower price to getting special deals from government.  Also known as “rent seeking”, state capitalism leads to ever-larger and more powerful corporate entities because the bigger a company is, the more money it has to give to politicians, and the more money it gives to politicians the less appetite the government has to rein in bad corporate behavior.  State capitalism leads to a society with a tiny, super-wealthy elite and an even-poorer middle class.  This is what the “yellow vests” in France are protesting, in what I think is only the beginning of a powerful political movement.  There is an alternative to state capitalism: not socialism, which impoverishes everyone, but a regulated market that has strict limits on scale.  Most finance, production, and consumption should be local.
• America’s grasp for world hegemony has already failed.  After the end of the Cold War, instead of bringing our troops home and minding our own business, the foreign policy elite and the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex (the MIC) attempted to make America the only superpower, “the universal monarchy” as it used to be known when Hapsburg Spain tried the same thing.  The result for both countries was mountains of debt, military failure, and economic decline.  (The best book on Spain’s experience is J.H. Elliott’s The Count-Duke of Olivares; the parallels are striking).  We have ended up force-feeding the flames of Fourth Generation war, war our military does not know how to fight, putting the whole state system at risk, and spurring massive invasions of Europe and North America by barbarians from the global south.  There is a plausible alternative:  America First, which means bringing our legions home and using them to man the limes, as President Trump is trying to do while the MIC works to block him.
• The civil rights movement has proven to be a false road for America’s blacks.  While it has allowed some blacks to integrate into the middle class, it has left a large residue in urban ghettos where they have essentially been written off.  Overrun by crime, drugs, illegitimacy, and welfare dependence, America’s urban black neighborhoods, too many of them, are factories of disorder, something no state can tolerate indefinitely without risking its own legitimacy.  In the hands of America’s current black “leaders”, civil rights has come to mean little more than endless demands for more handouts.  The promising alternative is the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, who argued that instead of saying “We’re victims, do something for us,” blacks should show by their own efforts that they can perform at the same level as whites.  I’m willing to bet they can.  If not, well, then they are not equal, and future policy will have to be based on that reality.
• Feminism has been a disaster for most women.  While it has benefitted a small elite in business and politics, feminism, with its demand for no-fault divorce, destroyed what most women depend on for lifetime security, marriage.  Men do better on their own than women, and the Boomer generation’s women find themselves, too often, alone, poor, and without a future as they get older.  Feminism’s pretense that men and women are interchangeable has led to growing dysfunction in more and more areas, as women are soldiers, cops, firemen, etc.  Can’t do the job but also can’t be let go.  The #MeToo movement is leaving young men afraid to approach women, which is building enormous anger in men cut off from sex.  When women get angry, they squawk.  When men get angry, they kill.  For both sexes, the alternative we know works is the Victorian doctrine of “separate spheres”, where women’s sphere, which Victorians considered the higher one, is home and family while the man brings home the bacon and both can look forward to a comfortable old age in each other’s arms.
• Cultural Marxism has proven greater failure than the old economic Marxism of the Soviet Union.  Both lead to the loss of freedom of thought and expression, but economic Marxism’s shared poverty was more bearable than the isolation and anomie cultural Marxism creates as every natural relationship is perverted and every difference is rubbed raw.  Cultural Marxism makes life in society impossible, which is just what its founders, Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, and Marcuse, wanted it to do.  Their goal was “negation” or “negative dialectics”, more commonly known as nihilism: simply bringing everything down.  Unless we want to live amid the ruins of our civilization, we need to turn to an alternative: retroculture.  Retroculture dismisses all ideologies and says, “We’re going to return to the old ways of doing things in our own lives and the lives of our families.”  As Gertrude Himmelfarb, the preeminent historian of the Victorians, has written, through the Victorian period the incidence of social problems steadily went down, while since the 1960s the incidence of social problems in our society has steadily risen.  There’s a lesson in that.

There are other areas where we need to restore the reality principle; indeed, we need it everywhere if we expect our actions to yield the results we intend.  Acting on any basis other than reality leads to randomness of results, disorder, entropy, and collapse.  It is John Boyd’s “false orientation”.  We’ve been doing it on a massive scale since the 1960s.  In each case, there are reality-based alternatives that could work.  Maybe it’s time for middle class Americans to start putting on those French yellow vests.

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

tR Live: Episode 5

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week’s news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The Marxism That Must Not Be Named

Much to my delight, the New York Times recently published an op-ed, “The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme is 100 Years Old”, written by Yale professor Samuel Moyn, that attacks me and Thomas Hobbes’ novel Victoria (for which I am proud to be agent).  The professor dislikes the book and me because both oppose cultural Marxism, the now-dominant ideology among Western elites that condemns Whites, males, Western culture and the Christian religion as “oppressive”.  But the professor does more than defend cultural Marxism; he writes, “Nothing of the kind actually exists.”

Well, yes, it does.  Cultural Marxism is, as the Times headline indicates, now 100 years old.  Its initial conception goes back to 1919, the year when Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, working independently, concluded that Communism could not be brought about in the West until the Christian religion and Western culture were destroyed.  Gramsci argued that Christianity blinded the working class to its “true” Marxist class interests, while Lukacs, when he was Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, wailed “Who will save us from Western Civilization?”  Lukacs began a program of what he called “cultural terrorism” that included introducing sex education into the Hungarian schools, because he knew that if you could destroy a country’s sexual morals you would take a giant step toward destroying its traditional culture.  

The detailed development of cultural Marxism, which most people now know as “political correctness”, began in 1930 when the Frankfurt School undertook the task.  The Frankfurt School, official known as the Institute for Social Research, was originally to be named the Institute for Marxism.  But its founders, who include Lukacs, decided they could be more effective if they gave it a neutral-sounding name.  That began cultural Marxism’s ongoing practice of concealing its real nature and objectives.  Is that conspiratorial?  What else does the word mean?

Professor Moyn simply denies historical reality.  He writes:

A number of conspiracy theorists tracing the origins of “cultural Marxism” assign outsize significance to the Frankfurt School, an interwar German--and mostly Jewish--intellectual collective of left-wing social theorists and philosophers.  Many members of the Frankfurt School fled Nazism and came to the United States, which is where they supposedly uploaded the virus of cultural Marxism to America.  These zany stories of the Frankfurt School’s role in fomenting political correctness would be entertaining, except that they echo the baseless allegations of tiny cabals ruling the world that fed the right’s paranoid imagination in prior eras.

My answer to the professor (of history no less) is “Read some history.”  The literature on the Frankfurt School is immense and most of it is written by scholars on the Left.  The definitive work is Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School.  Martin Jay is the principal American scholar of the Frankfurt School, and his book The Dialectical Imagination is also quite good, although it ends in 1950 and thus misses most of Herbert Marcuse’s influence.  Lorenz Jager’s recent biography of Theodor Adorno, simply titled Adorno, is excellent.  No open-minded person can read these books and not find in the Frankfurt School’s work the origins of what we now know as political correctness.

If Professor Moyn is too busy to read books--trying to nullify facts by calling them names must take a good deal of thought--I recommend the video documentary “The History of Political Correctness”, which only takes about twenty minutes.  It includes an interview with Martin Jay, then the Chairman of the History Department at Berkeley and no conservative, where Jay says that the Frankfurt School’s product is a version of Marxism and is also a basis of political correctness.  

And if all the volumes of scholarship are not enough, the parallels between Marxism-Leninism and cultural Marxism are obvious:

• Both eliminate freedom of thought and expression and attempt to impose totalitarianism on their suffering subjects, as we see on too many American university campuses.  Stalin’s and Mao’s tyranny was more oppressive than Hitler’s or Mussolini’s and killed far more people, probably at least ten times as many.
• Both see history as a product of only one factor, in Marxism-Leninism ownership of the means of production and in cultural Marxism which groups, defined by race and gender, have power over which other groups.
• Both define some groups of people as good and others as evil regardless of what individuals do.  Marxism-Leninism defines workers and peasants as good and capitalists and members of the middle class (the hated bourgeoisie) as evil, while cultural Marxism says whites, males, heterosexuals, and non-feminist women are evil while blacks, third world immigrants, gays, and feminists are good.
• Professor Moyn even quotes Victoria’s Governor Kraft as pointing to another parallel:  “Classical Marxists, where they obtain power, expropriated the bourgeoisie and gave their property to the state.  Where you (cultural Marxists) obtained power, you expropriated the rights of White men and gave special privileges to feminists, blacks, gays, and the like.”  Does Professor Moyn deny this has happened in universities all over the country, including probably at Yale where he teaches?

The easiest way to tell you are dealing with cultural Marxist is if he denies the existence of cultural Marxism.  Cultural Marxists seek to work in the dark because they know daylight is fatal to their cause.  If the average person figures out political correctness is a form of Marxism, he rejects it.  That is happening more and more widely, leaving the cultural Marxists with nothing to say but “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”  Their frantic name-calling and denials of historical fact sound more and more desperate because they are losing and are about to be swept from the board.

Meanwhile, read Thomas Hobbes’ Victoria.  That Professor Moyn doesn’t like it means you will. 

tR Live, Episode 4

William S. Lind and the tR editors discuss the week's news. Submit questions for the panel in the live chat or email here.

The View From Olympus: Our Failing Strategy

An article in the November 21 New York Times revealed two aspects of our ongoing strategic failure in Fourth Generation war.  First, it quoted a new study by CSIS that found the number of Sunni 4GW fighters has grown, not shrunk, since we began the “war on terror” on 9/11:

Nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants are operating around the world today as on Sept. 11, 2001, despite nearly two decades of American-led campaigns to combat Al Qaeda and the Islamic state, a new independent study concludes.

That amounts to as many as 230,000 Salafi jihadist fighters in nearly 70 countries, according to the study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. . .

. . .the Islamic State remains the predominant threat, with as many as about 40,000 members globally this year, up from 30,200 in 2014, when the group’s fighters seized the northern third of Iraq.

Second, the Times turned to another study to look at what our current strategy has cost:

Last week, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs released its annual report, the Cost of War study, in which it calculated that the United States will have spent $5.9 trillion on activities related to the global counter terrorism campaign by October 2019.

So, the war of attrition waged largely from the air that is our chosen 4GW strategy has, in seventeen years, cost us almost $6 trillion (not billion) while multiplying our Islamic enemies fourfold.  Can we see this as anything other than strategic failure on a grand scale?

The failure was easy to predict.  If we consider strategy not only at the physical level but at Col. John Boyd’s mental and moral levels, a war of attrition in which we remain largely untouchable, high above the clouds, could only work to rally young men everywhere to join whomever we are fighting.  Of course the number of our enemies has grown; we have spent nearly $6 trillion recruiting them.  Every time an American drone hovers ahead, every time we launch an airstrike, every time we flaunt our wealth and power as we bomb people who are poor and weak, we recruit more 4GW enemies.  We nourish and feed the hydra, then wring our hands as it grows more heads.

What might we do instead?  What alternative strategies should we consider? The Times quotes the CSIS study on one alternative:

 “Perhaps the most important component of Western policy should be helping regimes that are facing terrorism improve governance and deal more effectively with economic, sectarian, and other grievances,” the 71-page study concluded.

That won’t work either.  Just as our military fights wars of attrition because that is all it knows how to do, so our foreign policy establishment remains trapped in the ruins of Wilsonianism, the wholly unrealistic belief that we can instruct other people on how to run their countries and cultures.  We can tell them, but they are not going to listen, in part for the good reason that we are likely to be wrong.  Our policy elites’ understanding of how other societies work is both shallow and warped by “Globalist” ideology.  Outside Washington, almost everybody has figured that out, so no one listens to them.

There is an alternative strategy I think might work, or at least work better than recruiting more enemies.  It has two components.  The first is tight border security, far tighter than anything President Trump is planning, tight enough to keep all varieties of 4GW fighters from entering (we will still face the home-grown variety, who in the long run will be more dangerous).  The second component is invisibility.  Since what we are doing now feeds hydra, stop it.  Stop all overt actions around the world.  Bring the troops, planes, drones, and ships home.  Disappear, and thus take away our enemies’ main recruiting tool.  No longer will Somalis or Yemenis or Libyans or Syrians live with the constant hum of American drones overhead, waiting for the Hellfire missile in the night. There may still be drones, but they will not be American drones.  They will have to fight someone else.

And that will be just what we want them to do.  It’s the old strategy of “use barbarians to fight barbarians.”  Sunni jihadis have a lot of enemies besides us: Shiites, Alawites, Hindus, other Sunnis, other tribes, etc. ad infinitum.  Removing our overt presence will remove a unifying factor and encourage them to fight each other.  Covertly, there will be ways for us to ramp up that fighting--and we should.  In some cases, we may even be able to make money doing it.  Have we no Sir Basil Zaharoff?

Chosen as a strategy, inaction can be a form of action, one with far less blowback that our current failing strategy has generated--and far less expensive.  How many more years and trillions will we waste doing more of what does not work?

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

tR Live: Episode 3

The traditionalRIGHT editors discuss the week’s news and anything tangentially related with William S. Lind. Submit questions and comments in the live chat or send them here.

The View From Olympus: A Major Policy Blunder

A frequent sin of conservative governments is throwing away what they have achieved domestically by making major foreign policy blunders.  That danger now looms over President Trump’s government.  His domestic agenda is successful.  The economy is booming, new conservative judges are sitting on important benches and Left-wing regulations are being rolled back.  In the recent elections, a blue wave was met by an equal red wave.  The result was a normal off-year election for the party holding the White House, except the Republicans gained seats in the Senate.  There was no repudiation of President Trump or his agenda.

All this is now being put at risk because of the administration’s China policy.  President Trump has been right to challenge China on trade issues.  Free trade on our part has allowed a mercantilist China to hollow out our industry, depriving Americans of millions of good paying jobs.  China regularly steals intellectual property and forces American companies to turn over trade secrets if they wish to do business with China.  All this should have been challenged by previous presidents, Republican and Democrat.  Their failures to act left President Trump to deal with the whole mess.  To his credit, he is doing so. 

But that does not mean we want a generally hostile relationship with China.  On the contrary, friendship between China, Russia, and the United States is of central importance in confronting the Fourth Generation threat, the danger of state failure and collapse that will define the 21st century.  At stake is the state system itself, and a new Triple Alliance of the three Great Powers is essential to maintaining a world of states.  The alternative is anarchy. 

American policy should seek to separate trade from other issues, confronting China on the former while stressing cooperation in all other fields.  Regrettably, that does not appear to be where the administration is headed.  As the New York Times reported on November 19, “From Mr. Trump’s tweets to defense position papers and a major speech by Mr. Pence on Oct. 4, the United States has made clear that it sees China as a strategic threat.”  That is a blunder of the first order.

The worst of it, so far at least, is that the U.S. is raising the old Taiwan issue.  The administration cut off aid to several central American countries that withdrew diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and established relations with the People’s Republic of China (Beijing).  The White House has been making noises indicating we could strengthen our relationship with Taiwan, including militarily.  This is playing with fire. 

China can compromise on other matters, even her claims to the South China Sea.  But she cannot compromise on Taiwan.  I fear Washington does not understand why that is the case.

Throughout Chinese history, the greatest threat to China has always been internal disunion, break-up into warring states.  This happened over and over again, most recently in the 1920s and 1930s.  Every time it occurs, millions of Chinese die, civil war plunges China into renewed poverty and foreigners take advantage of China’s weakness to invade.  Every Chinese person knows this history, and any Chinese government that hopes to have legitimacy must make it clear that preventing such disunion is its top priority.

The danger Taiwan poses is that it is a Chinese province.  Both the Communist Party and the Kuomintang agree on that.  If one province, Taiwan, can gain independence from China, so can others.  Beijing cannot allow that precedent to be established.  It is an existential threat, and China must and will go to the wall to prevent it.  If that means war with the United States, China has to fight that war.

The Pentagon may think that a naval and air war with China will be an easy win.  China is highly vulnerable to a distant naval blockade.  But if the U.S. Navy were to intervene directly in an attempt to prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, our losses could be severe.  China has developed long-range ballistic missiles that can hit aircraft carriers, or at least come close enough to them, with nuclear warheads, they can either sink them or, with EMP blasts, fry all their electronics and render them floating scrap metal.  Such losses would mark the end of American naval dominance.  Worse yet, because Taiwanese independence is an existential threat to China, if China were losing at sea and in the air, she would feel immense pressure to escalate to the strategic nuclear level.

It is not too late for the administration to separate trade from other issues, continue to confront China on the former while acting to restore good relations in other areas.  Even the trade problem has an obvious solution: managed trade, where the U.S. and China agree on what each is to buy from the other so that the balance of payments is roughly even.  China has made some offers along these lines.  We can and should encourage them to do so until we can agree on the specifics.

Throughout the 20th century, conservative governments around the world overreached in foreign policy, got into wars that did not go well and ended up in disasters that put the Left in power at home.  I hope President Trump is aware of that history. 

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

traditionalRIGHT Live, Episode 2

The traditionalRIGHT editors discuss the week's news and anything tangentially related with William S. Lind. Submit questions and comments in the live chat or send them here.

The View From Olympus: An Emerging Dimension of 4GW?

The recent mass shooting at a country music bar in California again raises an important question: are such shootings, at least some of them, an aspect of Fourth Generation war?

When the killing is done in the name of Islam or some other cause, the answer, obviously, is yes.  But so far we know no motive for the California shooter.  So where, if anywhere, does it fit into Fourth Generation war?

The answer, I think, may be that this and similar cases are men’s reply to the war on men being waged by feminism.  When women get seriously angry, they talk.  When men get seriously angry, they kill.  And feminism’s war on men, which is being carried to ever-greater extremes, is making more and more men, especially young men, very angry.

The so-called “#MeToo” campaign is only the latest absurdity.  Of course most women have been subject of sexual advances from men.  It is hard-wired into human nature, and into the nature of most of the animal kingdom, that the male takes the initiative in sexual encounters.  Most women expect and want men to do so.  Remember the old saying, “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses”?  It was understood by all that girls want boys to make passes.  Pity the wallflower and the heart that is broken after the ball.

But feminism now decrees that any man taking the initiative risks being charged with that most heinous of all crimes, “sexual harassment”.  Even if the woman welcomed his advances at the time, if she later changes her mind, he is guilty.  He is presumed guilty until proven innocent and the woman’s word must be taken as true.  The man who is convicted is thrown out of school, loses his job, and may find his whole career path closed to him--all on nothing more than a woman’s word.  Of course men are getting angry.

There is another 4GW dimension that enters the picture here.  As women move into a field, men lose interest in it.  This has been evident in sports for a long time.  But as feminism drives women into more and more previously male venues, men find those venues no longer attractive.  The military is a case in point.  Absurdly, women are now present even in combat units.  Men have traditionally joined armed services in part to prove their manhood.  How do they do that when they have to take orders from women and be terrified that the women around them, in whom they must show no sexual interest, may make the dreaded “sexual harassment” charge against them?  Not surprisingly, the U.S. armed forces find it more and more difficult to recruit.

The Left is busy celebrating the large number of women elected to public office this November.  But one effect of this may be to alienate men further from the political system.  As I have pointed out many times, Fourth Generation war is above all a war for legitimacy.  Will a woman-dominated politics still be legitimate in men’s eyes?  Or will young men in particular respond by transferring their loyalty away from a state that has become a tool of female oppression to something else?  Such transference of primary loyalty lies at the heart of 4GW.

Feminism’s war on men is part of a broader drive of cultural Marxism to the extreme.  It seeks to outlaw more and more aspects of human nature.  Men are to be subjected to women, native-born Americans to immigrants, whites to blacks, and straights to gays.  This is Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values”, which the Frankfurt School made a central element of cultural Marxism.

But when human nature is forced into false channels, it rebels.  As the last two elections have shown, native Americans are rebelling against being submerged in a sea of immigrants and whites are rebelling by raising their own racial consciousness.  Few rebellions are likely to be more powerful than men’s rebellion against feminism, because few aspects of human nature are more powerful motivators than sex.  It may turn out that the “gender war” is more than a metaphor.  If so, it will take far more than gun control to prevent angry young men from killing.

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

The View From Olympus: Get Out While We Can

The American position in Afghanistan is not just deteriorating, it is deteriorating at an accelerating rate.  Historically, that is the last stage before a military collapse.

The November 3 New York Times reported in detail how a Taliban infiltrator penetrated a top-level meeting in Kandahar, killed one of Afghanistan’s top generals and almost got the American general commanding our forces there, General Austin S. Miller.  Our reaction made the bad situation worse.  The Times wrote,

The scramble to get the Americans out of the governor’s compound after General Raziq was killed led to a brief firefight between Americans and Afghan security forces, with the Americans crashing through a gate and shooting at least one Afghan officer dead as they left, American officials said.

Now, in the days that have followed, the Americans are being accused of General Raziq’s death, rattling the relationship between the allies.

 Perhaps not surprisingly, the November 4 Times reported another “green on blue” shooting, with one American soldier dead.

Afghanistan has a long history of being a place easy to get into but hard to get out of.  Successful retreats are perhaps the most difficult of all military operations no matter where they are conducted.  Conducting a successful retreat from Afghanistan is near the top of the list of daunting military tasks.

Everyone knows we have lost and will be leaving soon.  We are trying to obtain a peace deal from the Taliban which will permit us at least an orderly withdrawal.  That is wise on our part, and the Taliban are showing some interest.

If that does not happen, what we may face is a widespread realignment within Afghanistan in which everyone tries to get on the good side of the victor, i.e., the Taliban, with American forces still there.  Afghan government soldiers and police will have a tempting opportunity to do that by turning their weapons on any nearby Americans.  In that part of the world, “piling on” the loser is a time-honored way of changing sides to preserve your own neck.

The apparently widespread rumor that the Americans were responsible for General Raziq’s death illustrates the high level of distrust and dislike already present between U.S. and Afghan government forces.  This is one of the strategic factors that are almost always present when an outside power intervenes in someone else’s civil war.  We are foreigners, we have a different religion, our soldiers get far better pay, food, living conditions, and medical care than do Afghan soldiers and police, and we think we know what we are doing in a place we do not understand.  Add to that volatile mix the growing realization that the Taliban are winning and we will soon be leaving, and the incentive for Afghans to change sides grows.

It does not help matters that of our two exit routes, one goes through Pakistan and the other eventually goes through Russia.  Thanks to the usual idiocies from the Washington foreign policy establishment, we have bad relations with both countries.  Pakistan probably won’t slam the door in our face because they want the Taliban to win.  Why?  Because we stupidly allow the current Afghan government to align with India.  Does anyone in Washington know how to think strategically?  Apparently not.

What is needed most now is detailed planning by the Pentagon for a fighting withdrawal.  I am not saying we want to get out that way.  It is contingency planning in case we have to.  I fear that planning will not be done because it will be politically incorrect, since the military leadership still pretends we are winning.  Subordinates will be afraid to initiate planning that contradicts their superiors’ public statements.  But if we have to put a fighting withdrawal together on the fly, a difficult situation will become a great deal more hazardous.  I hope some majors and lieutenant colonels are developing the necessary plan now, even if they can’t tell their bosses what they are doing.

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