Archive for the 'War & Warfare' Category

The superiority of tactics and training over equipment.

At reddit/Firearms.  I can’t guarantee the video will stay up.

Ridiculous.  After wasting the blood of the sons of America on that shit hole, the ANA surrenders en masse to the Taliban.

The men who sent Americans to perish in that war have blood on their hands and will answer to God for their actions.  We fought a campaign of armed social justice.

But hey.  At least the bankers and defense contractors got rich.  That’s the point of war, right?

This is a debate I want to steer clear of, except to say that I think any civilian should be able to purchase any guns or tactical equipment available to the U.S. military.  I also think that pretending isn’t doing, and while pretension over YouTube is innocent enough (and I really don’t care about that sort of thing even though it seems to bother Dakota), the real problem with this sort of thing is with militarized police.  I notice Dakota Meyer says nothing about that.  Militarized police are the standing army that so worried the American founders.  Let’s see Dakota take that one on.  How about it, Dakota?  I think it would be awesome if a MoH winner would point out to SWAT teams around the nation that they should fly across the pond if they really want to do that sort of thing, and that Americans have rights.  So are you all in on this?

On another front (and changing the subject, for which I don’t apologize), following the comments on this video, and then on to other comments on other forums, and so on down the road like a spider web, I notice that there is an awful lot of apprehension in the reports given by Marcus Luttrell in his after action report and book.  I have said a good bit about Operation Red Wings, and I may have more to say about this operation in the future.

But for now it’s enough to point out that the operation was a total flop, and the main instigator of the trouble, Ahmad Shah, and his band of bad boys, had to be killed by Marines in Operation Whalers.  The Navy SEALs learned of Marine Corps plans and decided to take the action away from Marines.  This was a huge mistake.

Finally, I’ll point out two more things about Operation Red Wings.  First from Mohammad Gulab, who saved Marcus, and next, from a Marine Corps infantry officer.

On the night of June 27, 2005, with a sense of dread creeping over him, Luttrell and his fellow SEALs—Michael Murphy, Matthew Axelson and Danny Dietz—headed out for a recon mission in a dangerous part of Kunar province near the Pakistani border. A sniper and a medic, Luttrell packed a scoped military assault rifle and 11 magazines—three more than usual, he wrote in Lone Survivor.

While Luttrell wrote that he fired round after round during the battle, Gulab says the former SEAL still had 11 magazines of ammunition when the villagers rescued him—all that he had brought on the mission.

Gulab wasn’t the first to question the accuracy of Lone Survivor. In his 2009 book, Victory Point, the journalist Ed Darack wrote about the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment in Afghanistan, the unit that planned the mission. He uncovered a bevy of discrepancies in Luttrell’s account. Some are small: He got the name of the operation wrong—it was Red Wings, like the hockey team, not Redwing. Others are more significant: The target, Ahmad Shah, wasn’t an international terrorist or a close bin Laden associate. He was the head of a small Taliban-linked militia. Citing reports gleaned from phone and radio intercepts, Darack estimates only eight to 10 militants attacked the SEALs, not 80 to 200. In fact, two graphic videos the gunmen shot during the firefight show only seven men in Shah’s militia.

“[Luttrell’s claims] are exaggerated nonsense,” says Patrick Kinser, a former Marine infantry officer who participated in Operation Red Wings and read the former SEAL’s after action report. “I’ve been at the location where he was ambushed multiple times. I’ve had Marines wounded there. I’ve been in enough firefights to know that when shit hits the fan, it’s hard to know how many people are shooting at you. [But] there weren’t 35 enemy fighters in all of the Korengal Valley [that day].”

Take careful note.  I’m not saying that Luttrell’s account is wrong or exaggerated.  Others are saying that.  I make no claim to knowing these things for certain.  But I think it’s interesting, and I also think there is a lot more study to be done about this fateful operation, why it should never have been conducted, and the specific failures in personnel, weapons, tactics, techniques and procedures.

I’ve often wondered why the SEALs would have taken radio equipment only to be frustrated by mountains when trying to communicate their predicament (and ultimately killing Murphy), when they could have carried a sat phone with a MilStar uplink?

But one thing is for sure by all accounts, including post-mortem and forensic reviews.  Matthew Axelson was a stud.  He continued to lay down fires even after being shot in the head, up to and including emptying both his rifle and pistol and all backup magazines.

This is a story that in my opinion is yet to be fully told.

Prior: A Marine Corps View Of Tactics In Operation Red Wings

Note the statement by Kissinger, who for all of his elitist, globalist faults, was correct in this: “A conventional army loses if it does not win.  The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.”

Instapundit posted this on the lockdowns, but all of the links are broken.  Shocker.

But via WRSA, this video explains the entire issue.

You’ve been had.

I had seen other analyses of the tunnel rats, but this expose does even better at outlining the extent of the networks.

Breitbart.

Soldiers were told the list came from the Department of Homeland Security and was an updated list of what federal and local law enforcement need to be “on the lookout for,” according to the source.

Henry “told us that if anyone gets caught wearing, buying, selling, affiliated with in any way, any of those things on those list, that the first thing he’s going to do is chapter us out of the Army. The second thing is, he’s going to handle the investigation by sending it over to the DHS,” the source said. “He didn’t quite outright say that we would be arrested, he used the word ‘detained.’”

Some of the imagery on the slides clearly refer to hate symbols, such as a swastika or other Nazi-related symbols. However, also included is “Pepe the Frog” — an internet meme frequently posted by members of the political right to troll the political left.

[ … ]

More worrying for some soldiers, however, is the list’s inclusion of imagery popular among members of the military long before the racial unrest of the summer of 2020, such as the “Three Percenters” symbol — the Roman numeral III with 13 stars around it.

In fact, until recently, graduates of the SWMG’s Trauma III course had the option to buy a shirt with a Three Percenter logo on the front, the source said.

“Now those shirts, all of them have to be thrown away, and cannot be worn again and they have to change the logo because it’s been associated with these extremist behavior,” the source said.

[ … ]

I was 18 when I got it. It was described to me as the percentage of colonists that rose up against the government of the British … . I was like, ‘Wow, that is such an American sentiment, a patriotic sentiment.’ Coming from a military family, I thought that really spoke to me. I always was proud to be an American. I’m very proud to be an American.

Rohrwasser also had the American flag, “Liberty or Death,” and “Don’t Tread on Me,” tattooed on him, but nevertheless apologized for the Three Percenters tattoo and had it removed.

The slides, which are marked “law enforcement sensitive,” describe the “Three Percenters” as a “North American militia movement/paramilitary-style group with members who adhere to a far-right/libertarian ideology with a primary focus on firearms ownership right and opposition to expansive U.S. federal government authority.

Well, firearms ownership is a right granted by God.  And most people with a brain and a conscience are opposed to totalitarianism.

Good Lord.  He apologized for a tatoo?  He had it removed?  That’s painful and expensive from what I understand.

So I guess we’re left to conclude that the DHS, to whom people with tattoos are to be turned over, think that the war of independence was immoral and would have been in support of continuing to be subjects of the king?

What else could we conclude?

Anyway, hopefully ‘Karen’ feels safer today.  That’s what most important.

Via WiscoDave.

Matt Bracken offers up these possibilities.

1. The Left being stopped kinetically, as in Chile in 1973. This is not possible in 2021, because the military is fully cucked, “woke,” and tilting hard-Left. Battlefield warriors are being replaced by social justice warriors. Americans holding traditional conservative values are being intentionally driven out of the military. This is the true purpose of forcing the Left’s trans insanity into the military, transforming it into a hard-Left organization whose leaders and troops consider the Constitution and Bill of Rights to be obsolete parchments penned by white racist slave owners. Don’t look to the military to stop the current slide into Communism, they will be fully on board with it.

2. An eventual full-out Communist victory leading to a Stalinist “deep winter” end state like Cuba or North Korea. This is unlikely because A. the conservative Right is too well armed, and too well trained in military special operations to be defeated kinetically, and B. the federal government is too weak, with an American economic implosion looming as trillions of digital fiat dollars are created out of thin air.

 3. Economic implosion leading to a collapse of federal power, a breakdown in food and fuel distribution, leading to a civil war that will resemble Weimar Germany colliding with Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at the same time. This new civil war, unprecedented in its horrors, might eventually lead to some type of pyrrhic conservative victory, but only on top of the ashes of the American constitutional republic, and at an enormous cost in lives lost and property destroyed.

That’s an extremely bleak assessment.  But it does appear that a massive realignment is taking place with the dropping of Facebook, Twitter, etc., and migration towards other platforms.  It’s even happening with Amazon.  This post by James Wesley Rawles is telling.

In addition to quitting the Amazon Associates program, I will also cancel my own Amazon Prime membership (now $119 per year), cancel my Amazon account, and stop making any new blog links to Amazon products. And I’ll try to come up with a script that will automatically rip out the thousands of Amazon links that are in SurvivalBlog’s database. (We now have more than 31,000 archived articles, columns, and letters.)

I encourage you to read the rest of his article.  This is a big deal for him – this means turning away money.

Also make sure to read the comments (at this reading there are 202 comments).  This is occurring everywhere.  It may or may not be enough to affect Amazon.  I doubt it.  But what it does do is show that given an information war, a mass migration is occurring within that domain.

The two sides have self-identified, and there is no turning back.

Wired did a hit piece on The Gunsite Academy.  We already discussed this – they’re going to go after tactical trainers.

DTG was a WordPress blog, and he was taken down.  I had seen screen shots for a few days over reddit/firearms but didn’t want to jump until I was sure.

David Codrea links another troubling bill.  According to Mom-at-Arms.

Going after those that teach gun safety now. In short, if someone teaches a firearm safety class in the safe handling of weapons and a student later goes out and commits a crime or “domestic terrorism” during a time of a civil disorder, the instructor will be held liable.

https://nmlegis.gov/Sessions/21%20Regular/bills/house/HB0070.pdf

David has some thoughts as well.  This sort of training is needful, and while making the prediction that they will go after such training, I’ll also make this prediction.  This training will happen whether official and formal or recognized by any specific entity.

Where there is a need, there will be a product or service to fill that need.

One of the things the awful governor of Virginia tried to do is shut down tactical trainers for civilians.  I don’t know how that turned out.  Some media outfits are also targeting tactical trainers.  Wired has a hit piece on Gunsite Academy.

We had all signed up for a two-day tactical firearms course, where we’d be learning how to shoot as if we were engaged in small-unit armed combat. Once the purview of law enforcement officers and military operators, these kinds of skills are increasingly being passed down to ordinary, armed Americans by a sprawling and diffuse industry. Gun ranges and private facilities around the country teach the art of tactical shooting, in setups that range from the fly-by-night to the elaborate: At a Texas resort, you can schedule a combat training scenario inspired by the Iraq War after your trail ride; at an invitation-only facility in Florida, you can practice taking down a mass shooter at the Liberal Tears Café; at Real World Tactical, a former Marine will teach you how to survive “urban chaos through armed tactical solutions.”

Under the aegis of his one-man company, Green Eye Tactical, Dorenbush says he trains SWAT teams and military contractors, but that about half of his students are people who don’t carry a gun professionally. In recent weeks, he’d worked with a 22-year-old mechanic who’d been robbed at work, a teenage girl, and several married couples. “Everyone has different things they’re preparing for, different threats,” he said.

[ … ]

But the tactical shooting world also attracts a much wider range of people: gun bros and gamers, preppers and adrenaline junkies, LARPers who want to spend their weekends cosplaying as commandos, and crime victims seeking a particular flavor of empowerment. Women make up a growing proportion of students, and the industry is increasingly catering to preachers and teachers who want to know how to face a mass shooter. “We’re getting a lot of nontraditional gun owners, and some people who don’t want people to know they’re learning to shoot guns,” says Ken Campbell, the CEO of Gunsite, which claims to be the country’s oldest tactical training facility.

As we head into an era that seems destined to be marked by escalating vigilantism and political violence—or, if we’re very lucky, just the fear of them—it’s time to reckon with the whole of American tactical culture. For all its power to shape this moment, that culture has roots that long precede it. The tactical world is a byproduct of years of rampant mass shootings and of our nation’s longest wars, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a space where paramilitary ideas thrive and where ordinary gun owners learn to see themselves as potential heroes; but it’s also where many Americans have simply gone looking for a way to negotiate living in a country where there are more firearms than people. To try to understand it better, I spent this fall absorbing its mix of skills training, political indoctrination, and camaraderie. Sometimes it felt like CrossFit with bullets; sometimes it was more alarming than that.

The gun world we live in today, in which millions of Americans don’t blink an eye at the idea of eating lunch with a loaded pistol on their hip, is a relatively recent invention, and part of the credit goes to Gunsite’s founder, Jeff Cooper. Cooper, who died in 2006, is revered at Gunsite, where his photo hangs on the classroom wall and his house is preserved as a museum. An upright, broad-chested man with a stern, scholarly manner, Cooper was a veteran of World War II and the Korean War with a degree from Stanford and a library full of history books.

[ … ]

It was over fast—we’d secured the hostage, Dorenbush declared. During the debrief, I cried. Dorenbush stood next to one of the targets, a visibly pregnant woman gripping a pistol. “You just shot a pregnant female—how does that make you feel?” he asked Jody. Realistic training was important because it helped acclimate the body to stressful situations, he explained. “You’re taking steps to help yourself so it’s not such a drastic departure from your reality. You inoculate yourself to trauma. It takes time to build that up to where it’s not bothering you that much anymore.”

She would cry more if she ever had to suffer the indignity and assault of rape.

As for the alleged societal change of people eating lunch with a weapon on their side, she isn’t educated enough in history to understand that not so long ago, gentlemen and churchgoers carried firearms to worship.

I think I related an experience I had several years ago when my mother-in-law had to be removed from her home and placed in assisted living. Her home was a wreck, and had to be repaired, worked and cleaned for days.

The duty fell to me.  I used the weekends for the job, while my wife had to stay and tend home.  The home where she lived had become known to the locals as having had break-ins and strange visitors due to the absence of my mother-in-law.

Every weekend evening for several months – because after work, the evening was as soon as I could get there – I arrived and knew I had to engage in some tactical work.  I would engage in “room clearing” as taught to me by my son.

I never found anyone, usually only found the results of critters who had wandered in despite the locked down house (I never did figure out how they were getting in).  I also noticed that windows were unlocked, when I know that I had ensured all windows locked before having left the home the last time.  If someone was getting in, I never could figure out how, but this did add to my discomfort.

It was difficult to hold the weapon steady and upright for ten or fifteen minutes to check every room and every closet, to turn lights on as I entered or left rooms, to maintain awareness of rooms behind me (because light bulbs had burned out and I had very little light), and nerve racking to continue that until finished.

It helped when I had my Heidi-girl, a 90 pound Doberman, who would usually go ahead of me, but I didn’t always have her.  I was alone at times.

If you think you don’t need that skill (and I’m not here claiming that I have a skill set beyond the very basic), you’re mistaken.

Here is a prediction.  In the near future, it will be illegal to give this training to civilians.