After Monday’s event to announce the rollout of the new ETI think tank, retired Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle, president of the National Defense Industrial Association, repeated a well-known joke that China was the actual winner of America’s 20-year global war on terrorism.
“While we were spending trillions of dollars and all of our innovative spirit in [the Middle East], they were studying us. They were studying everything we did,” he said. “The chief of staff of the Chinese air force told me, ‘We watched what you did and we did everything in our power to counter every advantage you have.’”
Pentagon must pick up the pace to counter China, top general warns
This is what happens when you are a conquered, occupied country that has your military power used in the interest of the occupying power.
The Pentagon Brass engaged in rational self-interest and kissed up to the powerful, pissed down on the powerless, and did what they could to ingratiate themselves to the occupiers and position themselves to cash out after retirement by joining the “private defense sector” thus acquiring generational wealth.
Perverse incentives, perverse behavior. As President George W. Bush informed us, the Constitution is just a piece of paper. Pledging your loyalty to the Constitution is just as meaningless as pledging your loyalty to God. Both the Constitution and God say whatever you want them to say.
Ultimately, the real loyalty is to Mammon, the real God and the real Constitution.
Do a simple experiment. Go stand on the street corner and try to pass out Constitutions and Bibles. You will find few takers.
Start handing out money – you will become the most popular person on the block in no time.
Money talks, bullshit walks.
The US military is loyal to their paychecks, and nothing else. They will shoot whomever they are paid to shoot.
Including Americans, without the slightest hesitation.
What If the US Lost a War and Nobody Noticed?
The U.S. should refrain from fighting the next war because we’ve already lost, long before even one shot has been fired.
The source for this ultra-defeatist news is not just a teacher at a sailor’s college, sited on a salty bay. No, the source is no less than a serving, 4-star general whose job title is Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. … The U.S. military conducted a major wargame last fall and “it failed miserably,” said U.S. Air Force Gen. John Hyten earlier this week.
According to a Pentagon spokesperson, one key scenario of this wargame involved U.S. forces battling with China over Taiwan. From Hyten’s summary, U.S. forces became sitting ducks and were destroyed piecemeal and systematically.
The overarching problem was, basically, everything. … the issue was the very essence of how the U.S. military forms strategic concepts and conducts operations.
Per Hyten, in last fall’s war game, “We basically attempted an information-dominance structure, where information was ubiquitous to our forces. Just like it was in the first Gulf War, just like it has been for the last 20 years, just like everybody in the world, including China and Russia, have watched us do for the last 30 years.”
But the so-called “blue team” (meaning U.S. and allied forces) lost access to communications and data networks almost immediately. Satellites went away. Seafloor cables were cut. Bandwidth died. In general, it was impossible to utilize the electromagnetic environment, and within moments nobody could talk with anybody.
According to Hyten, “in today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if you’re aggregated and everybody knows where you are, you’re vulnerable.”
Opposing forces wrecked the entire complex of U.S. logistics. Rear bases came under fire, while aircraft and ships at sea were targeted by long-range missiles. There’s just no hiding anymore from people with sufficient technology to find you.
It’s not overstating to say that, in this one wargame, far from home the U.S. lost vast numbers of people and equipment. In real world terms, think of casualty numbers in the tens of thousands. Of entire bases obliterated. Of hundreds of airplanes lost. Of dozens of ships sunk. And that’s just in the first few days.
Afghanistan was not so much a 20-year war for America, as a one-year war fought 20 times by a corps of officers, senior non-commissioned officers and civilian government personnel and contractors who made careers out of it.
Come the next real war, U.S. forces won’t own space or the skies. Won’t run the electromagnetic spectrum. Won’t have unfettered communications. Won’t control logistics. Won’t have good targeting data. Won’t have air supremacy, let alone sea supremacy or undersea dominance. And many of the expensive weapon systems simply won’t work in the degraded environment.
Banned Hipster 
Always good BH. This is scary to think about because they’re just turning their efforts domestically, in some sick way I actually hope the ZOG’s military does start shit with China and rightfully gets obliterated. It’s absolutely infuriating that 20 years in Afghanistan, the trillions spent and all the lives lost and what do we get? Another quarter million people, most likely more, imported, the Taliban is easily taking back the country, like they just hibernated for 20 years and everything is going back to before the ZOG’s military ever showed up. I’m really glad my stupid ass will never be a dictator because I would really get creative with the suffering my justice will mete out for these soulless double dealing scumbags.
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@Black Label
We need to find ways to leverage our strengths and attack where they are weak.
Our greatest strength is our numbers, but to leverage numbers you need to organize and that has always been our Achilles’ Heel.
Their greatest strength is money and control of social and economic choke points (such as mass media including the Internet) and unparalleled organization.
I don’t have any answers, per se, instead I’m trying to figure out ways to think about the problems and potential solutions.
Ten years ago Bob Whitaker’s Mantra was ignored and even attacked by the “White Nationalists.” Now, the term “anti-white” is on the lips of normie Republicans. The “movement” was never anything but a black hole. Whitaker’s BUGS was a strategy that worked, until the mass censorship. But the seeds had been planted, and due to enemy mistakes the normies have taken up the cause, and they can’t really be censored in the same way.
Right wing politics in general is a black hole – I can’t think of a single “Dissident Right” that offers anything but bloated verbiage and defeatist ideologies. Left wing politics is similarly useless. Political messaging should be directed right at the center, which is culturally moderately conservative and economically moderately populist.
Your typical movementard would call it “NatBol” which is, of course, the exact sort of losing self-marginalizing crankery that the “movement” is all about. Similarly, the high brow “Dissident Right” has no interest in winning anything, but very much wants to virtue signal about “rejecting egalitarianism” and other such navel-gazing. Brett Stephens and Z-Man – these are the guys that would say, “oppose Covid checks!” So, instead, all the new money just goes directly to BlackRock instead, and you get the inflation anyway and alienate younger people who could use that $2,000.
Elenor Roosevelt supposedly said, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” My hunch is it is best to do the exact opposite. Ideas are only useful in influencing people to act, thus causing events. Focus on people first, action second, and leave the “ideas” to the time-wasters.
Just some ideas – ironically.
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There is no incentive for them to actually take Taiwan just like American oligarchs have no incentive to actually move meaningful semiconductor production outside of the Chinese mainland. The yellow peril is just a neocon meme.
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@WhyAreYouOnFacebook?
I thought most semiconductor production was on Taiwan? Or at least those used by US/Europe. Wasn’t that the whole blow up with Huawei?
It’s a tag team. The Democrats fearmonger over Russia and the Republicans scream about China.
No one is really going to go to war. What USA is worried about is them telling a Chinese boat not to get any closer and the Chinese just ignore them. That’s a huge loss of face and then the Chinese will just keep doing it.
It just happened to the UK in Russia.
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Money has never been more important than it is right now. People have halved and halved again their family sizes so they can have more discretionary income. It’s the phenomenon of the rich: those who have want more and more. It’s insatiable.
The founder of Kinko’s was asked in a documentary if he wanted another billion dollars. He said sure, yeah. But for what conceivable reason? Billionaires say things like after a certain point the dollars are for counting score, but what the fuck kind of reasoning is that? The greed of these men is unbelievable.
— Catxman
http://www.catxman.wordpress.com
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@Catxman
> Billionaires say things like after a certain point the dollars are for counting score
Some truth to that, but here is where “we” differ from “them.”
When Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have to launder their billions into a charity, they do something “universal” like Vaccines for Africa. The Koch Brothers put theirs into “ideology” like “Libertarian Capitalism.”
Larry Fink and George Soros put theirs into Jewish Charities, and the latter into anti-European “activism.”
Because Fink and Soros are dedicated ethnic activists while Gates and Buffett are not. That’s the principle problem.
The traditional way of dealing with this problem was Christianity. Christianity was a sort of substitute, idealistic ethno-centrism. It used to work, at certain times in history. Clearly, it doesn’t now. Back in the 1920’s, American “Darwinist Nodicism” was a successor ideology, that worked like gangbusters which is why it was so heavily demonized and eventually destroyed. That was pushed by the wealthy and successful WASP oligarchs, but I don’t think Elon Musk is ever getting on board. So we’ll have to fund something ourselves.
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>Our greatest strength is our numbers, but to leverage numbers you need to organize and that has always been our Achilles’ Heel.
>Their greatest strength is money and control of social and economic choke points (such as mass media including the Internet) and unparalleled organization.
I think we can still fight for the Internet with certain technical countermeasures (hence the name). The Fediverse has some properties of what we want: a bunch of interconnected little servers that TPTB have to play whack-a-mole on. Getting people over to this or (ideally) an improved successor network should help coordination somewhat.
The good news here is that the once a sane individual really understands that TPTB are sociopaths / psychopaths then that person’s loyalty to the System is usually gone forever — it’s then just a matter of getting them into a tolerable anti-social media network.
It might be helpful to make a “survival manual” for how people who have figured out a large chunk of what is going on can protect themselves from being ground up.
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@Countermeasures
Decentralized, censorship-proof online social media platforms are a tactic but they aren’t the point. The point isn’t to be able to shitpost without censorship. Using mainstream Social Media like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook had a mainstream audience that could be influenced by our content.
I almost think the best way to organize online is to spam people content about getting offline and organizing in real life, friends and family. “Online communities” aren’t real, after all.
The best use of online media is to disrupt anti-whiteness, like The Coach always told us, but frankly, it worked, and now the normie Republicans are going to their school boards demanding their children stop being taught “Critical Race Theory” – anti-whiteness.
The other is exposing enemy networks and tactics, which I guess is what I try to do. You can usually avoid censorship if you aren’t being “edgy” and “subculturish” and “Fedposting.” I wrote about “the JQ” a lot, so I have to be particularly careful about the nuts and feds trying to drag me down into (((Tripe Parens))) 4chan type crap. That had its place, at one time, in a specific context, but some people just can’t move on.
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>I almost think the best way to organize online is to spam people content about getting offline and organizing in real life, friends and family.
This makes sense — certainly I have been preparing my family and trusted friends to better cope with the nonsense going around.
I wonder if one of the goals of the COVID lockdowns is to interfere with this sort of local organization. Many people didn’t see their extended family for over a year.
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Reblogged this on Vermont Folk Troth.
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I COMPLETELY agree the last 20 years of GWOT has left the United States socially, politically and economically vulnerable. China has played a simple strategy brilliantly against a rival that if it weren’t so bogged down in its own corruption would have easily been thwarted.
HOWEVER, studying, building, and war-gaming only get you so far – ask the French in 1940 – and 20 years of hard experience is irreplaceable. Granted, the US military’s systems have been tested against piss-poor guerilla armies for that long, but that’s still more than any other military in the globe. China hasn’t fought a real war since Korea.
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