Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Bragging about treason to the Constitution. Looks like another state to add to the list of my law-breaking career.

"Gun control that works for New Jersey and is a model for the U.S."

The seductive siren song of Sunstein, the Killer Tomato.

Long-time readers will recall my allergic reaction to "social scientist" Cass Sunstein (he actually bears as much resemblance to a social scientist as Josef Mengele did to Dr. Albert Schweitzer).
Four years ago almost to the day, I sounded the alarm on Sunstein and his ilk in "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes." Now Sunstein is up to his old "change agent" tricks with this: "Don’t Buy the Slippery-Slope Argument on Guns."
Yup. Definitely a candidate for the war crimes trials, if these collectivist mokes get their way.

'Shills of the gun industry' trying to expand 'prohibited purchaser' list

With "friends" like this, who needs enemas?

Obama’s 'hatred' of new media understandable but selective

Well, I get why he would hate me. ;-)

Gratifying. The original video of my speech in Hartford passes 20,000 hits.

Link. That's not counting all the embeds out there, either.

Local Jewish newspaper wants 'conversation' about guns; history not invited

"The uncompromising pro-armed citizenry stance of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) is the only logically defensible--or morally defensible--product of any accurate reading of history."
You know, I wonder what this mother would say to them if she and her baby were still alive, that is. Here is my comment there, which I doubt makes it past the moderator:
There is an iconic photograph of a Nazi soldier shooting a Jewish mother holding her baby (easily found at the top of my blog Sipsey Street Irregulars at the link below), and I wonder what she would have to say about the various efforts to disarm the American citizenry. Or the Bielski brothers, for that matter. They knew quite directly what happens when there is a government monopoly of violence. They also could tell you how foolish it is to count on unchecked government to secure anything for you, whether it is your liberty, your property or your lives.
The Jews of the Wiemar Republic were quite comfortable with that government's gun registration laws until the Nazis took over -- legally -- and began using those registration lists to disarm their opponents. Do you think there is some sort of house rule that forbids tyranny from coming to America? To believe so is to whistle past the mass graves of history.
You are quite correct that there are those of us who are as uncompromising as a brick wall (although putting the NRA in that class merely demonstrates your ignorance of the legislative history of 80 years of gun control laws in this country -- Indeed, the NRA is the least of your worries as you proceed down the slippery slope of progressive citizen disarmament).
It has always seemed the twin apices of ignorance and irony that people who advocate citizen disarmament in this country do so in the delusion that this will "stop the carnage" of common criminals and lunatics who use firearms to work their evil will upon people. It is ignorant because you believe that you can accomplish that goal without starting a new American civil war with the likes of us "bitter clingers" and ironic because starting said civil war seems an odd way to "stop the carnage."
For we, if not you, have internalized the true lesson of the Holocaust and by extension the founding of the state of Israel. As my good friend Aaron Zelman once observed: "If every Jewish and anti-Nazi family in Germany had possessed a Mauser rifle, twenty rounds of ammunition AND THE WILL TO USE IT, Adolf Hitler would be a footnote in the history of the Wiemar Republic."
The Mauser rifle, I might add, was the military pattern "assault weapon" of its day.
The difference between you citizen disarmament advocates and us well-armed, well-trained "bitter clingers" is that when we say, "Never again!" we mean it -- and we have the means to make it stick.
Mike Vanderboegh

Comments on Jersey City Police Threeper article.


Well, this came as somewhat of a surprise.

'Three Percenters' founder: Wrong to discipline Jersey City police officers.
A group of Jersey City police officers should not have been disciplined for being a part of the "Three Percenters" movement, one of the movement's founders said this morning.
In a brief telephone interview from Tennessee, Michael Graham said that he believes the officers have a right to have their own political beliefs -- and in fact that there are many police, firefighters and veterans among the "three percenters."
Apparently "one of the founders" refers to this Facebook page. I guess it was a mistake not to do Facebook, as much as I despise it.

Monday, April 29, 2013

There will be only two posts today, both of them below.

I figure it will take everybody plenty of time to absorb the Absolved excerpt. My suggestion is to print it out and read it at your leisure. Take your time, make margin notes. I will be happy to answer any questions about the content. As always, feel free to copy, link and distribute to as large an audience as possible. I'm taking the rest of the day off to go see a man about a mule. ;-)


 Excerpted from the non-fiction introduction to Absolved: A cautionary novel of the Three Percent and Fourth Generation Warfare by Mike Vanderboegh.


So reads the plaque on Phil Gordon's wall in his Sipsey Street home the moment before all hell breaks loose. In 'Absolved', I try to explore the depths of Locke's belief to discover where it might lead the United States in a civil war set in the near future. . .
"The Useful Dire Warning"

Darryl Bates: What started it?
Jed Eckert: That simple, is it?
Col. Andy Tanner: Or maybe somebody just forgot what it was like.   -- Red Dawn, 1984.



One wonders what might have happened prior to September 11, 2001 if someone in authority had taken Tom Clancy’s “useful dire warnings” about a pilot deliberately  flying a fuel-laden jet into the Capitol building and killing the President and top leadership (Debt of Honor , 1994;  Executive Orders, 1996) about enemies of this country crashing airliners into public buildings in Washington, D.C.   Clancy himself reacted to the 11 September 1001 attacks by Al Qaeda:

But the vignettes that will hopefully coalesce into a narrative that flows from the terrible opening to a logical conclusion (and I hope a good read in between) are also presented with such detail for a purpose. If this book is to operate as a "useful dire warning," then both real sides in my imaginary civil war must be able to recognize the real threat to avoid the conflict.  

You may ask, which sides and what kind of conflict?

On one side, just as in 1775, will be the Three Percent, on the other, Locke’s “Arbitrary Power” -- and it will be a Fourth Generation War.  All three concepts require explanation.
The “Arbitrary Power”
"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban (on so-called semi-automatic ‘assault rifles”), picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it.” – Senator Dianne Feinstein, CBS-TV's 60 Minutes, 5 February 1995.
When the Founders declared independence, they prefaced that declaration with a detailed indictment of the offenses of the King and his ministers.  I will not waste time or space here by comparing the present federal government’s excesses of arbitrary power with those of King George III.  Go and read the Declaration and you will marvel at how today’s advocates of central power not only track quite closely but make Lord North and Company look like kindergarten bullies in comparison.
The important thing to understand about today’s arbitrary power is that it, like its predecessor, is a corruption of – indeed, a subversion of – a constitution that should have restrained it.  It was the failure of the English Constitution which led to our first Revolution.   It will be the failure of our own Constitution which will lead to our next civil war.
So when, after 150 years of letting Americans run their own affairs, the British government began to meddle malignly with their liberty once 22-year-old George III became king in 1760, following the death of his grandfather, George II, the colonists unsurprisingly responded to the interference with outrage. After decreeing new colonial customs duties and stricter enforcement in 1764, London imposed its first direct levy on the colonies in 1765 in the Stamp Act, taxing every colonial newspaper, journal, legal document, almanac, playing card, and other paper product, in flagrant contravention of the “standing Maxim of English Liberty,” as Livingston had quoted it more than a decade earlier, “ ‘that no Man shall be taxed, but with his own Consent.’ ” As Washington wrote to a friend, “I think the Parliament of Great Britain hath no more Right to put their hands into my Pocket, without my consent, than I have to put my hands into your’s, for money.” Property doesn’t belong to the government, and the social contract gives government no right to tell you what to do with your own.
The American Revolution, then, was doubly limited in its aims: limited to making only a political change without altering social or economic arrangements, and determined to set strict limits to its new government, fearful that any governmental power beyond the barest minimum necessary to protect liberty too easily could become a threat to liberty itself. . . – The Americanism of the American Revolution, Myron Magnet, City Journal, Autumn 2012.
And, as we now know, the Founders’ system of limited government has been crushed by a century of encroaching Federal power.
"All laws which are repugnant to the Constitution, are null and void." Chief Justice Marshall, Marbury v. Madison
 The advocates of the “arbitrary power,” of course, say that they have the right to tell you what to do because they were “democratically elected,” ignoring the fact that the Founders themselves feared pure democracy as much or more as they feared any other kind of tyranny.  Without the limits of a constitutional republic, “democracy” is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.  The fact that the “arbitrarians” win elections claiming “mandates” and have rigged the court systems to prevent their diktats from being overturned means nothing to people who, like the Founders, believe that their rights to liberty and property are God-given and inalienable.  The most uncompromising of these are the Three Percent.
The Three Percent – the so-called “bitter clingers.”



    marched south with Jackson to overcome the Creeks; the grandsons
    died at the Alamo.’





History, for good or ill, is made by determined minorities.  It is estimated that during the American Revolution, the active forces in the field against the King's tyranny never amounted to more than 3% of the colonists. They were in turn actively supported by perhaps 10% of the population. Cheering on these dedicated revolutionaries were perhaps another 20% who favored their cause but did little or nothing to support it. Another one-third of the population sided with the King (by the end of the war there were actually more Americans fighting FOR the King than there were in the field against him) and the final third took no side, blew with the wind and took what came.

The Three Percent still exists today, described by Barack Obama a few years ago as “bitter clingers.”  Put simply, these are firearm owners who will not disarm, will not compromise and will no longer back up at the passage of the next gun control act.

Today’s Three Percenters say quite explicitly that they will not obey any further circumscription of their traditional liberties and will defend themselves if attacked.

They intend, like John Locke and the Founders who studied him, to maintain their God-given natural rights to liberty and property, and that means most especially the right to keep and bear arms. Thus, they are committed to the restoration of the Founders' Republic, and are willing to fight, die and, if forced by any would-be oppressor, to kill in the defense of themselves and the Constitution that they all took an oath to uphold against enemies foreign and domestic.
It is the sons of Three Percenters who make up the bulk of the tip-of-the-spear units in today’s military simply because they were raised by families to whom service to the Republic is as automatic as breathing.  Socio-economically, today’s Three Percenters are not exclusively the descendants of the Scotch-Irish that Hank Messick describes above, but they are surely represented heavily.  So, too, are descendants of the Texans, of whom S.C. Gwynne wrote in Empire of the Summer Moon:
The (vanguard of the) westward push of the Americans. . was not federal troops and federal forts but simple farmers imbued with a fierce Calvinist work ethic, steely optimism, and a cold eyed aggressiveness that made them refuse to yield even in the face of extreme danger.  They were said to fear God so much that there was no fear left over for anyone or anything else . . .  –Page 20.
When the Texans discovered the tactical utility of the Colt’s revolver gave them parity with the fearsome Comanche lance on horseback, it spelled the end of that tribe’s ceturies long dominance of the plains.
(T)he game had changed completely.  The Texans were not the Spanish or the Mexicans.  They were tougher, meaner, almost impossible to discourage, willing to take absurd risks to secure themselves a plot of dirt, and tempermentally well-suited to the remorseless destruction of native tribes.  They did not rely on a cumbersome, heavily-mounted, overly bureaucratized, state-sponsored soldiery; they tended to handle things themselves, with volunteers who not only were not scared of Indians but actually LIKED hunting them down. – Page 82.
Texans certainly ranked among the Three Percenters of their day.

Three Percenters today do not claim that they represent 3% of the American people, although they might. That theory has not yet been tested. They DO claim that they represent at least 3% of American gun owners, which is still a healthy number somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million people. Remember, history, for good or ill, is made by determined minorities.  They are one such minority. So too are the current domestic enemies of the Founders' Republic who seek to disarm them.  What remains, then, is the test of will and skill to determine who shall shape the future of our nation.

That test of will and skill will be fought by warfare in the Fourth Generation.

"Cherish your enemies - they teach you the best lessons" -- Ho Chi Minh.

Fourth Generation Warfare

For those unfamiliar with the term, here's one succinct definition from the best single book on the subject:
(Fourth Generation Warfare) uses all available networks -- political, economic, social, and military -- to convince the enemy's political decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly for the perceived benefit. It is an evolved form of insurgency. Still rooted in the fundamental precept that superior political will, when properly employed, can defeat greater economic and military power, 4GW makes use of society's networks to carry on its fight. Unlike previous generations, it does not attempt to win by defeating the enemy's military forces. Instead, via the networks, it directly attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy the enemy's political will. Fourth-generation wars are lengthy -- measured in decades rather than months or years. . . Strategically, 4GW attempts to directly change the minds of enemy policy makers.  This change is not to be achieved through the traditional method of superiority on the battlefield.  The first- through third-generation of destroying the enemy’s armed forces and his capacity to regenerate them is not how 4GW enemies will attack . . . Both the epic, decisive Napoleonic battle and the wide-ranging, high-speed maneuver campaign is irrelevant to them.  Their victories are accomplished through the superior use of all available networks to directly defeat the will of the enemy leadership, to convince them their war aims are either unachievable or too costly.  These networks will be employed to carry specific messages to our policy makers and to those who can influence the policy makers.  -- COL Thomas X. Hammes, USMC, The Sling and the Stone, p. 208

And what were the previous three generations?  William S. Lind offers this in his essay, the Four Generations of Modern Warfare at the Lew Rockwell blog:
The First Generation of modern war began with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War. It also marked the state's assumption of a monopoly on war; thereafter, war became something waged by states, for raison d'etat, with state armies and navies doing the fighting. The First Generation ran from 1648 to about the time of the American Civil War, and it was characterized, on the whole, by a battlefield of order. The battlefield of order created a military culture of order, which endures to this day.







Daniel Morgan

“Sure won’t his Majesty’s Government train them for me?”

Of course there have been Fourth Generation insurgencies for thousands of years, as well as the use of 4GW tactics and strategies by state militaries against other state militaries.  (See Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.)  The American Revolution began as an insurgency of largely non-state actors and used militia guerrilla tactics throughout the war even after the development of the Continental Line.  (See Paul Revere’s Ride and Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer.)

The most remarkable and effective field commander of the Revolutionary forces was Daniel Morgan, whose ability to integrate militia and regulars at the battle of Cowpens set up Cornwallis’ ultimate defeat at Yorktown.  (See A Devil of a Whipping by Lawrence F. Babits, also Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman by Don Higginbotham.)

A veteran of the French and Indian War, Morgan commanded one of Virginia’s two rifle companies sent to support the Siege of Boston in late June 1775.  Morgan had served as an officer in the Virginia Colonial Militia since the French and Indian War. He recruited 96 men in 10 days and assembled them at Winchester on 14 July. He then marched them 600 miles to Boston in only 21 days, arriving on Aug. 6, 1775.  Known as Morgan’s Riflemen, they soon discouraged British raids out of Boston with the accuracy of their long-range fire, something the British could not match.  He also initiated tactics which first targeted the British formation’s Indian guides, then their officers, then their NCOs.  The British found this to be “barbaric.”

Morgan was an impressive field commander, big in size yet poorly educated, he enjoyed drinking and gambling but the troops never forgot who was in command.  Morgan had served as a civilian teamster during the French and Indian War. After returning from the advance on Fort Duquesne by General Braddock's command, he was punished with 499 lashes (a usually fatal sentence) for punching his superior officer. Morgan, not surprisingly, hated the British army.  He later served as a rifleman in the Provincial forces assigned to protect the western border settlements from French-backed Indian raids, and in 1774 he served in Dunmore's War, taking part in raids on Shawnee villages in the Ohio Country.

During the Saratoga campaign, Morgan’s riflemen played a key role at the preliminary battles of Freeman’s Farm and later at Bemis Heights, where at his order the British General Fraser was mortally wounded at his order by rifleman Tim Murphy.  This was the single most important rifle shot of the war, since the loss of Fraser caused the British attack to collapse and the subsequent surrender of the entire British force persuaded the French to enter the war.

After Cowpens, Morgan went home on sick leave, but he had certainly paid the British back for those 499 lashes.  There were many Revolutionary officers and men who had  acquired their military experience in the French and Indian War.  And like Morgan, many of them had also acquired an acute understanding of what the British army could and could not do in the terrain of North America.

This formation of young soldiers in the crucible of war is a constant found throughout history.  The primary lessons were moral ones, not military.  And morale is critical in 4GW.

As Hammes describes in the beginning of The Sling and the Stone:
From 1987 to 1990, I got a small taste of the practical aspects of insurgency. I spent those years training insurgents in various locations of the world. This was the tail end of the Cold War and the United States still had vested interests in the outcome of a number of insurgencies. The most intriguing part of the tour was the opportunity to talk to these men. I was particularly impressed with two aspects of the men I met. First was their utter determination to continue the struggle despite the odds. They were not deterred by fear of death. In each case, they were engaged in a struggle with a government force that possessed many times their military power. In each case, they knew the odds and were not deterred. They believed in their cause and were sure that belief was powerful enough to defeat the government. The idea they fought for was central to their resistance. In fact, they were counting on political power generated by that idea to neutralize the overwhelming military power of the government. As I worked with these men, I realized this fact should be obvious to Americans. An idea kept our American revolution alive during seven long years of war. (Emphasis supplied, MBV. It should also be noted that for most of the key leaders of our Revolution, the struggle began a decade earlier with the Stamp Act crisis.)

The second outstanding trait was the remarkable ingenuity they displayed for overcoming problems. Whether the problems were tactical, logistical, doctrinal, or political, they often attacked them from a direction that simply would not occur to a Western-trained soldier. I found insurgents are not impressed with conventional power. They respect it but seek ways around it -- and have consistently succeeded in finding those ways. They often used tactics and techniques that were outside the training and experience of the government forces. Despite years of war, they consistently surprised government forces with their ingenuity and determination. Insurgents are living proof of why man is at the top of the food chain. We are the most creative, treacherous, loyal, aggressive, and determined life form to yet evolve. Any nation that assumes it is inherently superior to another is setting itself up for disaster.

I would add to that last sentence that the same goes for political elites, only more so.  This is perfectly understood by 4GW fighters.

Michael Collins, perhaps the 20th Century’s most accomplished virtuoso in 4GW, fought in the disastrous 1916 Easter Rising, and afterward was being paraded with other prisoners through the streets of Dublin on their way to prison.

Michael Collins

As the column passed the ruins of Liberty Hall, a young woman caught up with her cousin (Collins) and called out to him.  “What will you do now?”  “Do?” asked Collins, “Do?  Sure I’ll get ready for the next round of course.  I’ve got some of the names taken down already . . . The best of men.”  His cousin was flabbergasted.  “But …. What? . . . How are you going to train them?” she called out.  Collins replied, “Sure won’t His Majesty’s Government train them for me?”  (See Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan.  Also, Collins’ best field commander in West Cork, Tom Barry, was a British Army veteran of the Iraq theatre during World War One.  See Barry’s Guerilla Days in Ireland.)

This is something that the governments who seek to fight 4GW don’t understand.  The 4GW warrior thinks in terms of decades, not months or years.  He or she will fight until victory or death.  The long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then, can also be seen as universities for American armed citizens in 4GW tactics and techniques.

So, who invented 4th Generation Warfare?

Says Hammes in The Sling and the Stone:
This new form of war did not arrive on the scene as a fully developed instrument but has evolved over decades and continues to evolve at widely scattered locations.  We are not in the middle of a revolution in military affairs but rather an evolution.

Different authors assign different origins to 4GW.  Hammes traces it to Mao Tse-Tung, yet we know that much of Mao’s theory was based upon the ancient Sun Tsu.  Hammes then discusses the “Vietnamese modification” and the “Sandanista refinement.”  In each of the latter cases the insurgents were fighting for control of the mindset of the United States Congress through popular opinion within our country.  But of course this is precisely how the Founders of our own country defeated the British -- the defeat at Yorktown caused Lord North’s government to collapse and the new government that replaced it came in with a promise to end the North American war, which it promptly did.

(For more on the Vietnamese example, see Street Without Joy by Bernard B. Fall, who suggests that the principal theorist of 4GW on the communist side was neither Ho Chi Minh nor Vo Nguyen Giap but Truong-Chinh.)

The American example also inspired Michael Collins, who added his own improvisation which proved decisive:
Collins evolved a new concept of guerrilla warfare that in time would be copied by guerrilla leaders all over the globe from Mao to Shamir.  The Collins philosophy was based not on the capture of enemy bricks and mortar, but of its information.  Traditionally Dublin Castle, the seat of British administration in Ireland, had used a network of spies and informers to infiltrate and then snuff out movements directed at securing Irish independence.  Collins perfected a system of spying on the spies.  Every important branch of the Castle system, whether it was banking, policing, the railways, shipping, the postal service -- whatever -- was infiltrated by his agents.  These were not highly trained, CIA-style operatives, but ordinary men and women, little people whom nobody had ever taken notice of before.  Collins gave them a belief in themselves, a courage they did not know they possessed, and they in return gave him a complete picture of how their masters operated. . . For the first time in their history the Irish had a team of assassins trained to eliminate informers. . .

Held back from making a full-scale use of their Army by the force of world opinion -- largely Irish-American opinion -- the British tried to fight a “police war’ carried on by hastily-formed forces of ex-servicemen and officers troubled by little discipline and less conscience.  The Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries wrote new chapters of horror in the bloodstained story of the Anglo-Irish relationship.  Reprisals for the activities Collins and his colleagues included the burning of homes and creameries, random murder and the widespread use of torture . . .

In addition to his campaign of warfare, he ran a national loan, which was banned by the British so that either its advertisement or sale became illegal.  Yet the loan was fully subscribed, and every subscriber got a receipt.

(Again, see Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan, as well as G2 In Defence of Ireland: Irish Military Intelligence 1918-1945 by Maurice Walsh.)

As brilliant as he was, Collins would later claim that he drew much of his own inspiration from the lessons learned by the Boer commando Christiaan Rudolph de Wet.

British General Rupert Smith, in his very useful book The Utility of Force, passes over the American Revolution with a few words and then identifies the “war amongst the people” (his term for 4GW) as being invented by the Spanish and Portuguese guerrillas in their “little war” against Napoleon’s forces.

It is safe to say that 4GW has been evolving over at least the past couple of centuries, not the decades Hammes suggests, and certainly in terms of timeline, the American revolutionaries of 1775 can lay as good a claim as any to being its inventors.  This is an opinion that the current American Three Percent have no problem adopting.
However, a 4GW civil war waged by men and women who are loyal to the Founders’ concepts would not fight an unrestrained Al Qaeda campaign but one specifically targeted to spare civilians and to target the war decision makers.  The next American civil war will either successfully break new ground in 4GW tactics and techniques or it will descend into a welter of blood and massacre.  Governments have a tendency to do that when they’re losing.  The 4GW warriors who claim to represent the Founders’ Republic will have to require of themselves far more discipline and intelligence -- no Fort Sumters and no Oklahoma City bombings.  

The Utility of Force by a Regime to Impose its Will, or Lack Thereof.
War amongst the people is both a graphic description of modern warlike situations, and also a conceptual framework: it reflects the hard fact that there is no secluded battlefield upon which armies engage, nor are there necessarily armies, definitely not on all sides.  To be clear: this is not asymmetric warfare, a phrase I dislike invented to explain a situation in which conventional states were threatened by unconventional powers but in which conventional military power in some formulation would be capable of both deterring the threat and responding to it.  War amongst the people is different: it is the reality in which the people in the streets and houses and fields -- all the people, anywhere -- are the battlefield.  Military engagements can take place anywhere : in the presence of civilians, against civilians, in defense of civilians.  Civilians are the targets, objectives to be won, as much as an opposing force. . . Labeling wars as asymmetric is to me something of a euphemism to avoid acknowledging that my opponent is not playing to my strengths and I am not winning.  -- General Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, pp. 5-6

The advocates of the disarmament of the American populace such as the aforementioned CSGV always begin by saying that no group of citizenry can oppose the might of the federal government because of the vast array of weaponry including aircraft, artillery and even nuclear weapons that the federals could bring to bear if they are opposed trumps any number of armed “insurrectionists” with rifles.  This ludicrous argument is not only contradicted by many examples throughout history but begs the moral question of resistance to a predatory government itself.  If a government is so depraved as to use nuclear weapons against its own people on its own soil, it will not long survive the condemnation of even the people who otherwise support it.  The same goes for artillery and air strikes, even so called “surgical, decapitation operations.”  (More about that in a minute.)  Such weapons are, in 4GW, merely expensive but useless, appendages, especially in an uncontrolled media environment.

The fact that CSGV and its collectivist familiars even suggest the nuclear boogeyman as a real threat by the federal government merely marks them as moral pariahs -- inciters of holocaust -- and tells you everything you need to know about such people.  THEY are apparently the ones who are willing to see millions of their own citizens dead in pursuit of gun control and a government monopoly on violence.  They are bloodthirsty people indeed.

The utility -- practical or moral -- of using even precision-guided munitions from artillery or aircraft in a civil war upon your own people, in your own territory and athwart your own logistics tail is also militarily problematic, especially in a media environment that includes the Internet, even more especially in a country such as the U.S. which depends upon it for so much of its own economic activity that it cannot be totally shut down.

First, such strikes are not entirely “precision-guided” as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to “collateral damage” (a sanitary military euphemism for dead civilians) and moral discredit.  Remember such a civil war would be “amongst the people” in General Smith’s term and for their loyalty.  Thus any smart 4GW operator is going to eliminate the possibility of his side creating “collateral damage.”  Notice I said “eliminate the possibility.”  Only a fool or a government agent would try to advance his or her cause by committing an Oklahoma City bombing with a day-care full of innocent kids in it.  Remember, too, that 4GW warfare is designed to change the minds of the war making elite in their opponent’s capitol.  OKC bombings merely strengthen their hand, not discredit it.  (Recall that after he was re-elected in 1996, Bill Clinton told reporters on Air Force One while traveling back to DC from Arkansas that “Oklahoma City broke the spell.”)

Indeed, if you are looking for a weapon that is in fact “precision-guided” you need look no further than a bolt-action rifle aimed at an identified target and wielded by someone who knows what to do with it.  This, in fact, defines the Three Percenters, who, being limited to rifles, know them very well and compete with each other to win competition matches somewhere in this country every weekend.  Can this be why Senator Dianne Feinstein -- a long-time advocate of “turn ‘em in, Mr. and Mrs. America” -- is so obsessed with “sniper” rifles that can “puncture a limousine” or “take down an aircraft”?  (See “A Short History of Long Range Shooting in the United States” by Hap Rocketto in The Rifleman’s Journal, September 2009.)

Second, such bad publicity might be endured if the civil war was quickly put to an end by such tactics, but in 4GW this is not only uncertain, it is fantasy.  
The final critical characteristic of 4GW is that its timelines, organizations, and objectives are different from those of earlier generations.  Of particular importance is understanding that the timelines are much longer. . .

The United States wants to fight short, well-defined wars.  We went into Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq convinced we could “clean it up” quickly.  In each conflict, our leaders told the people we would be out in a year or so. . . For the United States, a long war is five years . . .

Unfortunately, 4GW wars are long.  The Chinese Communists fought for twenty-eight years (1921-1949).  The Vietnamese Communists fought for thirty years (1945-1975).  The Sandinistas fought for eighteen years (1961-1979).  The Palestinians have been resisting Israeli occupation for twenty-nine years so far (1975-2004).  The Chechens have been fighting for more than ten years -- this time.  Al-Qaeda has been fighting for their vision of the world for twenty years, since the founding of MAK in 1984.  Numerous other insurgencies have lasted decades.  Accordingly, when getting involved in a 4GW fight, we should be planning for a decades-long commitment.  From an American point of view, this may well be the single most important characteristic of 4GW.   

Next, we need to understand that 4GW organizations are different.  Since Mao, 4GW organizations have focused on the movement’s long-term political viability rather than its short-term tactical effectiveness.  They do see themselves as military organizations but as webs that generate the political power central to 4GW.  Thus, these organizations are unified by ideas.  The leadership and the organizations are networked to provide for survivability and continuity when attacked.  And the leadership recognizes that their most important function is to sustain the idea and the organizations -- not simply to win on the battlefield.  --  COL Thomas X. Hammes, USMC, The Sling and the Stone, p. 221-2.

Much is made in Third-Generation Warfare of “getting inside the enemy’s OODA Loop” (for observe, orient, decide, and act) in order to disrupt their operations.    Hammes points out that 4GW warriors don’t even try.
Finally, because of the long timelines, even the objectives are different.  Fourth-generation-warfare opponents do not seek to service more targets faster to disrupt an enemy’s OODA loop.  They do not seek to destroy an opponent’s industrial base using the U.S. Air Force’s  concept of targeting key segments of an opponent’s society.  Nor do they seek to dislocate the enemy’s armed forces so that their decision cycle fails and the enemy collapses.  In fact, it is essential to 4GW strategists that the opponent complete his strategic OODA loop -- with the resulting decision that the war is too costly to continue.  -- Hammes, Ibid.

For the government monopoly of force advocates of CSGV, I would like to point out that it is impossible to nuke an idea to extinction, especially on your own soil.

Hammes concludes the chapter:
Fourth-generation-warfare opponents focus on the political aspects of the conflict.  Because the ultimate objective is changing minds of of the enemy’s political leadership, the intermediate objectives are all milestones in shifting the opinion of the various target audience audiences.  They know that time is on their side,  Westerners in general, and Americans in particular, are not known for their patience.  We are not a people who think in terms of struggles lasting decades.  Fourth-generation-warfare enemies will not seek immediate objectives but a long term shift in the political will of their enemies.  They will accept numerous tactical and operational setbacks in pursuit of the goal.

Colonel Harry Summers noted in his book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War that after the war he told a North Vietnamese colonel that the United States had never been beaten on the battlefield.  The North Vietnamese replied, “That is true.  It is also irrelevant.”  It is essential to understand that 4GW opponents do not focus on swift battlefield victories.  They focus on long term strategic approach.  They focus on winning wars, not battles. -- Hammes, Ibid.

In an American civil war between  an ideas-based Three Percent and a disarmament-bent federal government, who then would lose interest first?  You cannot destroy an idea, not even an obviously bad and evil one -- witness collectivism in all its forms.  And Hammes further points out “At the operational level, all an opponent has to move is ideas.  (Emphasis supplied, MBV.)  He can do so through a wide variety of methods, from email to snail mail to personal courier to messages embedded in classified advertisements.  He will try to submerge his communications in the noise of the everyday activity that is an essential part of modern society.  It will be extraordinarily difficult to detect the operational level activities of a 4GW opponent.”  (Page 218.)

Yes, it will.  Especially in a civil war set in your own highly-developed country.

Potential 4GW Civil War Targeting: The Federal Government’s and the Three Percent’s
Military Target (ordnance)

Any industrial plant, city, or other object, or any person, group of persons, or force marked as a target for destruction, damage, injury, or capture because of its direct or indirect use in the conduct or support of an enemy's military endeavor.

In restricted usage, a military person, force, installation, or area marked as a target because of its use, or potential use, in direct military operations.




David Bushnell's Turtle

Early in the war, the following incidents occur:


The Ranger




In addition, any federal government of the United States which wishes to make war on its own people must overcome a few statistics unrelated to the Three Percent or 4GW.  The United States is made up of 3.79 MILLION square miles with somewhere around 315 million people living there.  This makes it the third largest nation in the world by both land area and population.  There are, not unimportantly, something on the order of 100 million firearm owners scattered across our vast country and about 200 to 300 million firearms.

By comparison, Iraq is only 168,754 square miles in area (about the size of the state of California) with only 31 million in population.  Afghanistan is a bit bigger with 250,000 square miles in area and a population also of around 30 million.  What kind of bloody-minded fool would deliberately ignite an insurgency in a country -- especially his own -- 9 times larger than both of those combined and containing 5 times the population, many of them armed and skilled at the use of those arms?


“Don't you ever stand for that sort of thing. Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back. -- Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly, 2002.

After more than a decade in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American policy elite believes it has a pretty good bead on counterinsurgency in 4th Generation Warfare which rests principally on one tactic: decapitation.
Leadership decapitation is a high-profile tactic that involves the capture or killing of top insurgent leaders. It is frequently used against guerrilla insurgencies: in the past two centuries, top insurgent leaders have been killed or captured in just under 50 percent of counterinsurgency campaigns. Yet we know little about the nature of the relationship between leadership decapitation and counterinsurgency effectiveness. Is capturing or killing insurgencies’ leader(s) an effective tactic?  Or is it counterproductive, radicalizing insurgent movements, strengthening their resolve, and making them more difficult to defeat? Or does it have no effect at all?  The general consensus is that leadership decapitation of guerrilla groups is ineffective.  These conclusions should give scholars pause: they are based on unsystematic research designs, minimal empirical data, and incomparable units--usually terrorist organizations or foreign leaders.  Patrick Johnston, “The Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation in Counterinsurgency”

Johnston himself believes decapitation is effective and though he criticizes the critics of decapitation, his work shows an almost entire ignorance of 4GW which presumably decapitation is supposed to defeat.  How does a drone strike, for example, kill an idea?  A broader consideration with a little history is found at Michael Zenko’s Politics, Power, and Preventative action blog at the Council on Foreign Relations:
The United States did not always carry out targeted killings (or assassinations) of perceived national security threats. To the contrary, the norm against targeted killings outside of battlefield settings was established by President Gerald Ford in 1976, when he issued Executive Order 11905: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” Until the late 1990s, U.S. targeted killings were officially proscribed and rarely seriously considered or authorized by senior officials.

When President Ronald Reagan was asked about the failed assassination attempt of Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah in Beirut in March 1985, for instance, he replied: “Never would I sign anything that would authorize an assassination. I never have, and I never will, and I didn’t.” Actually, Reagan signed a directive on November 13, 1984, that was interpreted as “truly a ‘license to kill’ provision.” Sixteen years later, U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk stated: “The United States government is very clearly on the record as against targeted assassinations. They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.” However, after the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa in August 1998, President Clinton issued three top-secret Memoranda of Understanding authorizing the CIA to kill Osama bin Laden and several key lieutenants—if they resisted capture.

Despite these exceptions, U.S. targeted killings were extremely rare. Since 9/11, however, targeted killings in nonbattlefield settings steadily grew under President George W. Bush—roughly 50 between November 2002 and the end of his second term—and exploded under President Barack Obama—almost 350 and counting.

As some operations are covert—when the lead executive authority is the CIA—while others are obliquely acknowledged with few specifics—when it is the Department of Defense—there are ethical, moral, and legal questions that have gone unaddressed, due partly to lack of public debate and congressional hearings. Just as there remains intense disagreement among former officials about whether enhanced interrogation techniques (i.e., torture) against suspected terrorists “worked” to produce useful and/or actionable intelligence, it is difficult to know whether U.S. targeted killings are a successful and sustainable means of achieving U.S. short- or long-term strategic objectives.

Zenko’s column consulted several experts, including Johnston.  Among them,  Daniel Byman, a professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and the research director of the Saban Center at Brookings, the author of A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism, wrote:
Targeted killings work—just not in all places and at all times. They can steadily attrite a terrorist group’s leadership and, over time, leaving it with fewer impressive leaders and fewer skilled personnel. Their biggest impact, however, is often in what the terrorist organization does not do. Leaders must spend their time hiding and changing locations in order to survive. They must curtail phone communications and avoid interacting with large groups of followers, all of which make them far less able to guide the organization, inspire followers, and enforce their will. Leaders often instigate witch-hunts in order to go after supposed traitors who provided the lethal intelligence, further reducing the group’s effectiveness.

Targeted killings, however, are a tactic, not a strategy. The inevitable civilian deaths that occur can at times, but do not always, create significant numbers of additional enemies as well as carrying a moral burden. And politically it is tempting to ignore the broader dimensions of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency as long as bad guys are dying on a regular basis. These faults and limits, while serious, should not lead to the rejection of targeted killings but rather a recognition of its costs and why alone they will not suffice.

Again, this shows an imperfect understanding, even by Al Qaeda and the Taliban, of 4GW.  4GW does not require organizations to be successful, merely the transmission of ideas to independent actors of like beliefs who organize locally and attack locally, even if the targets are of national or even international, significance.

Sarah Holewinski, executive director of Center for Civilians in Conflict, a human rights advocate and critic of U.S. drone policy, comes closest to understanding the limited use of decapitation in a 4GW world.
They may kill some of the people they’re intended to kill some of the time. But as a stand-in for long-term counterterrorism policy, covert drone strikes in particular may be doing more harm than good to national security. They’re supposed to rid the United States of enemies without the cost of troop lives or the muck of a traditional invasion.

But on the other side of the balance sheet, drone strikes are creating anger—not only among locals in Pakistan and Yemen, but among people elsewhere who want an excuse to hate America. Even for America’s fans, strikes call into question U.S. commitment to responsible use of force, thanks to the information vacuum around who can be targeted, why, under what legal framework, and how CIA and Special Forces protocols protect civilians.

A fight worth fighting comes with sacrifice. Drones have relieved much of the sacrifice born by the soldier but not the civilian, who lives in constant fear of sudden death. Regardless of civilian casualties, which are highly disputed, the psychological trauma, displacement, and suspicion among neighbors of colluding with one side or the other has turned communities into war zones, even with no visible boots on the ground. No wonder ordinary people are chanting “Death to America” after strikes.

There are no numbers on how many formerly agnostic civilians are now skeptical about U.S. power nor how many terrorists may arise as a result of the current drone policy. That X factor is reason enough to pause before claiming a counterterrorism panacea.

The American people are largely supportive of decapitation as applied in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but what happens when the targets are in Marion, Ohio or Salt Lake City, Utah? What happens when the killings of their friends and neighbors go on and on because the federal government can think of no better way to compel obedience to unjust, unconstitutional diktats contrary to the Founders’ Republic?

Back on 17 September 2009, in a column on my blog Sipsey Street Irregulars, I noted Patrick Johnston’s embrace of decapitation strategies -- “Dark Thoughts -- Misadventure, Spasm & Decapitation. How I spent Constitution Day” -- and commented on how, hypothetically, that might play out.  




Decapitation, I have tried to explain to people, works both ways in 4GW.  I continued:



Hypothetical: They kill some of (the Three Percent), at first accidentally perhaps, but almost immediately thereafter intentionally. The spasm of defensive killing begins, targeted at their leadership. They spasm in return. They would not be able to scuttle into their "green zones" fast enough. For each clumsy attack on (the Three Percent), they receive a lesson in the 500 meter war, one bullet (or many bullets) at a time. They commit "collateral damage" of our innocents, (the Three Percent) stay(s) within the rules of engagement and kill only war-planners and war-wagers.


This is what 4GW means in an American civil war in the 21st Century.  Can you understand now why I am trying to get that “useful dire warning” out to as many people as possible?   Only if both sides understand the possibility of bloody civil war can it be avoided.

“Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun."  -- Mao Tse-Tung, from Problems of War and Strategy (6 November 1938), Selected Works,  Vol. II, p. 224.

Which brings us to today.

Once again we hear demands for bans on semi-automatic rifles and for federal control of all private transfers of all firearms (the so-called “gun show loophole).  This time, it is said, there will be no “grandfather clause” of existing weapons and that confiscation of all military-pattern semi-auto rifles is intended.

Yet the Three Percent will not obey such laws and they will defy the federal government to do anything about it.

I was once told by a “gun safety” advocate back in the Nineties that he favored total civilian firearms confiscation.  Only the military and police should have weapons he averred and what did I think about that?  I began to give him a reasoned answer and he cut me off with an abrupt, “Give me the short answer.”

I thought for a moment and said, “If you try to take our firearms we will kill you.”

It was true then, it is true now.
The “arbitrarians” believe that they can continue to encroach upon the liberty and property of their fellow Americans without consequence to them.  They cannot.

When democracy turns to tyranny, the armed citizen still gets to vote -- with his rifle.  Any grasping would-be tyrant who ignores that truth does so at his or her own peril.
I pray, then, that Absolved is viewed as a useful dire warning in time to prevent the Fourth Generation Civil War it describes.

"Pro-militia clique"? Jersey City Police Officers Get In Trouble For Wearing Threeper Patches.

Sometimes it's better to wear your Threeper patch on your heart, not your uniform -- Jersey City police brass identify a pro-militia clique in the department and say they’ve been stopped
The deputy chief said there were officers who were disciplined over the matter.
Three-percenters are an “anti-government extremist” movement that has grown since President Barack Obama took office, according to the Anti Defamation League, a nonprofit that combats what it believes to be anti-Semitism and bigotry.
Mark Pitcavage, the ADL's "militia expert."
The three-percent movement promotes the idea that the federal government is plotting to take away the rights of American citizens and must be resisted, the ADL says on its website.
Pitcavage in his natural state. Back in the 90s, he used to have a pet called "Sparky the Militia Watchdog." Rumor has it that one day Pitcavage sat on him and didn't notice that the poor dead creature was stuck to his ass for three and a half weeks.
The three-percenters apparently get their name from the notion that 3 percent of American colonists took up arms against the British crown during the Revolutionary War, according to the Three Percenter’s Club on Facebook, which has more than 17,500 followers.
“The (three-percenter) honors and is sworn to uphold and enforce the Constitution of the United States of America... (Three-percenters) are soldiers who have sworn to defend this country against all enemies foreign and domestic,” the groups says on its “About” page.
Followers sometimes call themselves “Oath Keepers” and associate with self-described pro-militia “patriot” groups that support gun rights and “engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing,” including the idea that the Sept. 11, 2011, terrorist attacks were perpetrated by the federal government, according to the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.
MBV Note: What horseshit. Oath Keepers may be Threepers and Threepers are certainly oath keepers but they are two distinct groups -- one an organization, the other a movement without membership lists or dues. And quoting the Southern Preposterous Lie Center claiming we're 9/11 Truthers is just more conflation and smearing. I, for one, am NOT a Truther. As for other "groundless conspiracy theorizing" I have had little experience, unless you count Fast and Furious. It ain't a theory if it's a real conspiracy.
It was not clear if the disciplined officers belonged to any particular three-percent group.
An anonymous letter sent to The Jersey Journal says that some ESU officers wore a patch saying “ONE OF THE 3 %” and the letter includes a picture of a patch. The letter also says some official ESU patches were altered by adding “3%” to them. The letter also includes a picture of such a patch.
Finally, the letter includes a patch with the image of a skull and says ESU officers wore the skull patch and Three-Percenters patches while on patrol.
Nalbach confirmed that officers were wearing a patch and said “It was removed because we don’t allow unofficial patches.”
The letter also includes an image of a Three-Percenters flag and said it was hung in the ESU gym. Nalbach said he was not aware of a flag.
Poll: Do you agree with Jersey City's actions in dealing with a clique of "Three Percenters"?

Sunday, April 28, 2013

"Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever."

There's no price the big banks can't fix.

The Good Guys Are Not Coming To Save Us

No one is going to ride in and save you. If you want things to get better, then YOU will have to make them better. YOU will have to stand up and take the arrows, yourself. Liberty, at this stage of human development, requires risk and pain.

Putin agrees with anti-gun U.S. ‘monopoly of violence’ promoters

Well, of course.

Interesting question about Craft International Services hired guns at the Boston Marathon.

Why Such Secrecy about Private Military Contractor’s Men Working the Event?

"A tale of 2 nations: Patriots and Patricians"

A Sioux Ghost Dance Shirt. It did not stop the white soldiers' bullets.
Patrice Lewis asks, what if 225 million Americans simply said 'NO'?
Ms. Lewis left out two important classes of allies that the patricians have: the proles who exist on their handouts derived from their thefts from us patriots and the praetorians who guard them. The patricians will launch both at our throats if we say "no" without also having the means to resist them in our hands and ready to use. To think we can simply say "no" without violence is naive and sets the predicate for defeat. As for myself, I do not want to be remembered as some latter-day practitioner of the "Ghost Dance" at some future Wounded Knee Massacre. I prefer to win.

Anniversary: The Eve of the Fall of Saigon

In my travels to the northeast, I was grateful to meet several escapees from Communist tyranny -- from South Vietnam, Albania and Czechoslovakia. It was the Czech woman in New York who most impressed me. Her father had been a loyalist of Jan Masaryk and had fled the country after his murder by Soviet intelligence in the Coup of 1948. To punish his family when they couldn't get hold of her father, this then-young girl was thrown in prison for two years. It was humbling as she thanked me for speaking about the lies of collectivism at the New York Oath Keepers meeting. (It was live streamed but I don't know if a copy exists on the Web.) The conversation reminded my of my own past sins and so, on the anniversary of the eve of the fall of Saigon, I would like to reprint a piece from four years ago, when the blog was young: A Missed Anniversary: "Vous les Americains Sont Pires que les Francais."
29 April 1975

















Chieu Hoi and Hoi Chanh.








David understood the reference.



We also know that we can't go back.




"Vous les Americains Sont Pires que les Francais."














And they made their choice, by the thousands.




They didn't come. . .









Chip Beck's sketch of General Khy Hak.







Recovering your conscience too late.






I can never and will never go back.

