PrairiePundit

 Yahoo News: The method – the Resistance Operating Concept (ROC) – was developed in 2013 following Russia’s war with Georgia a few years earlier, but its value was only realized after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014. Read also: In Zaporizhzhya, Russia threatens local resistance with death penalty The doctrine is not intended to create or support an insurgency; its goal is to establish a government-sanctioned force that will carry out activities against a foreign occupier with the goal of restoring sovereignty. CNN said that the ROC provides an innovative and unconventional approach to warfare and total defense that has guided not just Ukraine’s military, but also involved the country’s civilian population as part of a concerted resistance against Russia’s army. Read also: Resistance in Melitopol kills 100-plus invading Russian troops, half of residents have left city, says mayor Early in the conflict, the Ukrainian government created a website that explains...

 Marine Corps Times: Marines in the middle of recent experiments, unit and equipment changes can look to the Ukraine conflict for real-world previews of how the Corps’ war-fighting concept might unfold in a future fight. Small units using devastating weaponry to destroy large enemy formations. Sinking ships from shore and then fading quickly into the background. Cycling information so rapidly that the enemy can’t keep up, shattering the ability to run effective combat plans. All of these scenarios are happening now as Ukrainians fight off the Russian military invasion. But they could also be pulled from the pages of a variety of combat concepts and force design overhaul that the Marine Corps started nearly three years ago. ... Berger first cautioned that many of the lessons of Ukraine are yet to be learned, but do hold value even early in the conflict. “I’ve learned to be a little patient in learning about a conflict while it’s going on over my career,” Berger said. And there are ...

 Victor Davis Hanson: Deterrence is the ancient ability to scare somebody off from hurting you, your friends or your interests — without a major war. Desire peace? Then be prepared for war. Or so the Romans believed. It’s an easily understood concept in the abstract. But deterrence still remains a mystical quality in the concrete since it is only acquired with difficulty and yet easily forfeited. The tired democracies of the 1930s learned that lesson when they kept acquiescing to Hitler’s serial aggressions. Hitler’s Germany foolishly later attacked a far stronger Soviet Union in 1941, given Moscow’s lost deterrence after its lackluster performances in Poland and Finland, its pact with the Nazis, and its recent purges of its own officer corps. Deterrence is omnipresent and also applies well beyond matters of war and peace. The current crime wave of murder and violent assault in our major cities is the wage of loud efforts to defund the police and contextualize crimes as somehow soc...

 Josiah Lippencott: Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in June that he wanted to understand “white rage,” why “thousands of people” tried “to assault this building and … overturn the Constitution of the United States of America.” If Milley really wants to understand the “rage” of the American people he should start by asking why he and his fellow generals can’t win any wars. As a Marine Corps officer who served at the tail end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I saw firsthand the rapid ideological transformation pervading the military in the wake of these disasters in the Middle East. Unable to win wars overseas, the military’s leaders went “woke.” Currying ideological favor is easier than trying to end insurgencies. It is also necessary if military leaders want to keep the gravy train of taxpayer funding. Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy and his devastating critique of George Bush and Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2016 elec...

Leonid Bershidsky: Russian and U.S. generals have made no secret lately of the fact that they each view other as their No. 1 adversary. Modern weaponry plays a big role in these mutual threats. But Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov is now fretting that the U.S. will deploy a “Trojan horse” strategy of fostering a fifth column within Russia and its allies. That the general should be looking so publicly over his shoulder at his own people should trouble citizens. On Saturday, he talked about the threat in a speech at a conference at the Academy of Military Sciences. He said: The U.S. and its allies have set an aggressive vector for their foreign policy. They are developing offensive military actions such as a “global strike” and “multi-domain battle,” using “colored revolution” and “soft power” technology. Their goal is to liquidate the statehood of undesirable countries, to undermine their sovereignty and replace their legally elected governments. That’s what happ...

Defense One: President Donald Trump has dramatically expanded the war on terror. But you—and perhaps he—would never know it. Since he came into office, Trump has reportedly abandoned Obama-era rules governing the use of drones in non-combat theaters such as Somalia and Libya. Whereas Obama operationally expanded but bureaucratically constrained drones’ use, from what we can tell, Trump’s new rules instead vest strike decisions with military commanders, without requiring approval from the White House. Superficially, this approach may have some logic to it. Use of drones, like most all counterterrorism efforts, is complex and multifaceted, requiring a careful balancing of military necessity with concepts of morality, legality, and fair play in war-making. Behind closed doors, the Bush and Obama administrations spent a great deal of time learning critical lessons on their employment as these newer platforms were tested on battlefields unlike any the United States had fought on before (...

USNI: The Marine Corps wants to focus its continental U.S.-based forces training for a high-end large-scale war, in case a conflict on the Korean Peninsula or elsewhere requires a massive surge force. Whereas most training over the last decades has focused on smaller-level operations – training for a Marine Expeditionary Unit deploying aboard a three-ship Amphibious Ready Group, or training for a deployment to the Middle East – Marine leadership today wants CONUS forces training for a joint fight that might include 20 warships, Air Force bombers, a hefty Army presence and Marine Reserve units. “You may see two different MAGTFs (Marine Air-Ground Task Forces) emerging all within the same Marine Corps. There’s the constantly forward-deployed aspect of the Marine Corps on Navy ships that’s going to be inside the adversary’s area, if they decide to light up their systems one day. We have to be the contact and blunt layer. Someone’s got to do the job, and those Marines and amphibious ...

Austin Bay: Indignant media elites and European toffs continue to scorn President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the official name of the “Iran nuclear deal,” but they are once again missing the big news: The Trump administration has launched another “maximum pressure” foreign policy operation, this time targeting the heinous religious dictators and Al Quds terrorists commanding the Iranian regime. The phrase “maximum pressure” applies to both Team Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal and the administration’s North Korean denuclearization operation. In early 2017, the administration began using the term to describe the combined effect of its coordinated diplomatic, information, military and economic “elements of power” strategy on the Korean peninsula. On May 9, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders employed the term as a rhetorical weapon when she told the press corps: We are 100 percent committed to making sure that Iran does...

Telegraph: 'We lost everything'  Millions caught between drought and al-Shabaab at risk of famine in Somalia The famine in Somalia is man-made.  Their weather conditions are not that different from any other country in the region.  What is different is that al-Shabaab goal is to starve those who oppose it.  They are creating a man-made famine the same way they did in the early 90's that led to attempts by the US and aid organizations to provide hunger relief.  The aid shipments were considered an act of war by the terrorists because it struck at the heart of their strategy.  It also led to their attacks on Americans and the Black Hawk Down operation.

Washington Examiner: The defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria rapidly accelerated during President Trump’s first year in office, beginning with the fall of East Mosul on Jan. 25, and continuing with a cascading series of defeats for the brutal terrorist group over the next 11 months. The campaign liberated twice as many people and twice as much territory as in the previous 28 months under President Barack Obama, according to Defense Department figures. On Jan. 20 — the day Trump was inaugurated — an estimated 35,000 ISIS fighters held approximately 17,500 square miles of territory in both Iraq and Syria. As of Dec. 21, the U.S. military estimates the remaining 1,000 or so fighters occupy roughly 1,900 squares miles of mostly barren desert primarily in Syria, where few people live, and where they will be forced to surrender or die. Between September 2014 when the counter-ISIS campaign began, and January 2017, U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Syria liberated 13,200 squar...

US Naval Institute Proceedings: When is the United States going to do the killing necessary to beat its terrorist enemies or eliminate them entirely? Those given the awful task of combat must be able to act with the necessary savagery and purposefulness to destroy those acting as, or in direct support of, Islamic terrorists worldwide. In 2008, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Admiral Michael Mullen said, “We can’t kill our way to victory.” Ever since, many have parroted his words. But what if Admiral Mullen was wrong? The United States has been at war with radical Islamists four times longer than it was with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II. And those previous enemies were far more competent and aggressive than the terrorists. It is time to kill a lot more of them. Too many commanders and their “operational law” judge advocates have neutered U.S. military forces with far too restrictive rules of engagement and investigations. 1 One Army infantry batt...

We Are the Mighty: The U.S. and South Korea are developing new wartime operations plans to achieve rapid victory over the North should conflict occur, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff revealed Monday. “We are drawing up a new operational plan while re-estimating overall conditions, including our capabilities in accordance with North Korea’s new advanced threats,” Gen. Jeong Kyeong-doo said, amid reports that previous war plans were pilfered by Pyongyang’s hackers, according to NK News. The South Korean military is still unsure exactly what North Korea got its hands on, but among the stolen military documents are believed to be joint war plans and Seoul defense strategies. These plans were created several years ago, and North Korea’s capabilities have dramatically improved since then, as the regime now has an intercontinental ballistic missile and a staged thermonuclear bomb designed to level cities. The new strategic plans are intended to secure victory for the allies in ...

Times: At the end there was no final, suicidal shoot-out. A few dozen Islamic State fighters retreated, first to Raqqa’s hospital, then to the stadium. The jihadists, all foreigners, English, Russian and French-speakers among them, dragged their families behind them. One little boy wore a suicide vest. They were shooting, but the advancing Kurds held their fire because of the women and children. “They looked like professionals,” Bahoz Ocalan, 33, a Kurdish fighter, said. “The way they were fighting and defending their positions, they looked like they were with a professional army.” The situation was hopeless though, and the will of the militants wilted. Ammunition was low and a surrender was offered. In the end, 28 fighters trooped out of the stadium, Mr Ocalan said. A new form of war had triumphed in Raqqa, with the victors deploying an overwhelming technical advantage to methodically destroy a city. This was done in the name of saving lives. The London-based Syrian Observat...

NY Times: More Than 1,000 ISIS Fighters Surrender The militants turned themselves in after the latest in a string of humiliating defeats in Iraq and Syria. Many claim not to have been soldiers, but only cooks or clerks. Since President Trump unleashed the military and its support for allies in the region, ISIS has gone from defeat to defeat and its troops are starting to finally realize their cause is hopeless.  Obama's policy of micromanagement by amateurs gave the enemy hope, just as his retreats in Iraq and Afghanistan did.  These surrenders look like a prelude to victory over ISIS.

Paul Mulshine: Did you see all those front-page stories last week about how ISIS is getting trounced in Syria? Neither did I. In recent weeks I read more about the high heels that Melania Trump wore on a trip to Texas than I did about the positive developments in a war that was at the center of the foreign-policy debate in last year's presidential election. ... That may be the reason that you need to go to military-oriented blogs like Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis site to read how ISIS is being squeezed in Syria. There, you can read in infinite detail about the efforts to clean up what an Army spokesman termed "holdouts" in provinces such as Idlib and Deir al-Zor . The work is proceeding apace, and the real story now is how the endgame will play out. Not good for the Beltway crowd, said Lang. The establishment types wanted to remove Assad because he was too close to the Iranians and the Shiite militias such as Hezbollah. Now he's a lot closer to them ...

Cipher Brief: ... “Generally, [leadership decapitation is] most effective against the organizations that are extremely hierarchical and don’t have a lot redundancy in their command structure, or that are led by one extremely charismatic individual who holds the movement together,” said Mike Leiter, Cipher Brief expert and former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “The broad sense of leadership decapitation that was pursued against what was once known as al Qaeda senior leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan was extremely effective.” According to Robert Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, a critical factor that contributed to the weakening of core al Qaeda was the group’s lack of connection with the local populace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Certain al Qaeda affiliates, such as AQAP and al Shabaab, receive backing from and maintain strong ties to various indigenous communities and are therefore able to regenerate more effectively even ...

Breaking Defense: Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley , has ordered a review of service’s longstanding shortfalls in electronic warfare , officers told me in an exclusive interview. The ultimate goal: give commanders from platoon to corps the ability to shut down enemy radio and radar as readily as they now call in airstrikes and artillery . It’s a critical part of the Army’s plan to hit future enemies from all possible angles at once, a concept called Multi-Domain Battle . The EW review, which Milley officially launched in April, is separate from a high-profile review of Army networks we’ve previously reported on. The network review focuses on streamlining and strengthening a wide range of Army systems so they can better withstand cyber/electronic attack . The EW review, however, looks at more active measures to detect, deceive, and disrupt enemy radio and radar. Those are capabilities the Army almost entirely disbanded after 1991, only to relearn from Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukra...

CBS News: ... First, our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome, worthy of the tremendous sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifices of lives. The men and women who serve our nation in combat, deserve a plan for victory. They deserve the tools that they need and the trust they have earned to fight and to win. Second, the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable. 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in our history, was planned and directed from Afghanistan because that country was ruled by a government that gave comfort and shelter to terrorists. A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists including ISIS and Al-Qaeda would instantly fill, just as happened before September 11th and as we know in 2011 when America hastily and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq. As a result, our hard-fought gains slipped back into the hands of terrorist enemies. Our soldiers watched as cities they had fought for and bled to liberate and won were...

NY Times: Is Trump Deploying the ‘Madman Theory’ With North Korea? When President Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury,” he could have been employing a strategy used by Richard M. Nixon. If that is Trump's strategy, the media has certainly been pushing a literal belief that Trump is crazy enough to do something rash.  Despite all the hand wringing in the media, Trump has been acting pretty sane when it comes to North Korea.  He is pursuing diplomatic alternatives with others in the region and his threats have actually played into his approach in getting other on board at the UN. When it comes to North Korea direct diplomacy with the regime has a long history of failure.  The Bill Clinton deal put forward the evil day while helping to sustain a shaky regime.  The same can be said for Obama's approach to Iran.

Daily Mail: Under Trump, gains against ISIS have 'dramatically accelerated' with nearly a THIRD of all territory taken from ISIS in Iraq and Syria since 2014 having come in the past six months Donald Trump's increased delegation to the military and a 'campaign of annihilation' that spares no militant has helped spur wins, a State Dept envoy said. Pictured: The reclaimed city of Mosul. The Obama micromanagement of military operations was ISIS's best friend.  It gave them both room and time.  Taking those things away with quick strikes and maneuverability made a big difference in beating back the Islamic religious bigots.