PrairiePundit

 Business Insider: Future wars may not be decided solely by who can strike the fastest or hardest. Instead, it may come down to space, a domain that multiple top military powers see as full of endless possibilities. And in order for the US to win future wars, a top Marine general says, it must prioritize space capabilities and control the final frontier. "Space is the most resilient capability we have," Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy, the deputy commandant for information, said at a conference on Monday, according to Defense News . "I'm telling you right now: We don't win the space domain? Don't even bother." The US military has made major jumps in space capabilities, but the quantity and quality of threats in space have also increased significantly in recent years, officials have said. Glavy called it "stiff competition." "No space, no chance," he said. The Pentagon has stated repeatedly in official policies and strategies tha...

 Michael Rubin: O n June 27, President  Joe Biden  ordered airstrikes on targets associated with Iranian-backed militias in both Syria and Iraq. The Pentagon executed similar strikes last February. On both occasions, senior officials rushed to assure that the action was proportionate. Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby called the first strike a "proportionate military response," and Speaker of the House  Nancy Pelosi  praised the second. "The defense airstrikes… appear to be a targeted and proportional response to a serious and specific threat," she wrote. The emphasis on proportionality is not simply an obsession of the Biden administration. After Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own population in 2017, the Pentagon spokesman assured, "The strike was a proportional response to Assad’s heinous act." Secretary of State Rex Tillerson thanked allies for their support "for our timely and proportionate response." Across admin...

Angelo Codevilla: ... Since 1917, our ruling class has promised that the wars it was waging were well designed to deliver peace. But because our ruling class waged them by Progressivism’s supposed wisdom, these wars have delivered involvement in other countries’ business coupled with neglect of our own. To make war—to kill and be killed—while pretending to be doing police work, nation-building, or enforcing international law, as the U.S. government did in Korea, Vietnam, and the first Persian Gulf War; and pretending to make war, as it has done since 2001 in every corner of the world without designating an enemy or having reasonable plans for victory, is to act as sorcerers’ apprentices. Incompetence is too kind of a description. In 2001, al-Qaeda’s violent Islamism involved only some 400 men, nearly all engaged in a domestic Afghan quarrel. Today some 30,000 such fighters infest the globe. What the U.S. national security establishment has achieved, impotent imperialism, recal...

Joseph Klein: Democrats and their progressive allies, including in the establishment media, are continuing their “Great Betrayal” of the United States. They tried to sabotage efforts by President George W. Bush’s administration to support the U.S. forces fighting in Iraq against Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorists. Now, we are witnessing Democrats, both in Congress and vying to run against President Trump in this year’s presidential election, treacherously helping the Iranian regime advance its 40-year war against Americans. The leftist media is right by their side. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is readying her Democrat-controlled House of Representatives to vote this week on legislation to tie President Trump’s hands in dealing with the blood-thirsty Iranian regime. Speaker Pelosi is peeved that she and her Democrat congressional colleagues were not consulted first before President Trump ordered the killing of Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani late last week. Too ...

NY Times: Their Fathers Never Spoke of the War. Their Children Want to Know Why. Seventy-five years after D-Day, families of World War II veterans are turning to professional researchers to piece their stories together from military records. I had uncles who fought in World War II but they rarely talked about their experience.  I usually learned about from other relatives.  I fought in Vietnam and about the only time I ever discussed it was with other Marines.  One of my uncles was an enlisted man on Gen. MacArthur's staff and another was a gunner on a ship in the Pacific.

Washington Post: California massacre sparks gun debate — again — with a community torn over the path forward In a state that already has strict gun laws, some believe in more gun control, others want to arm the public. Some are resigned to the status quo in an age of gun violence. PTSD appears to cause extreme paranoia in some cases, and the shooter, in this case, could be one example of that.  It looks and feels different from battle fatigue and shell shock casualties of past wars.  Perhaps it is because of the nature of the warfare being used by the radical Islamists in the current war.  They tend to use non-traditional tactics and IED's that are usually a surprise. I think the military and veteran healthcare providers still have some work to do in the treatment of this malady. As a Vietnam vet who was XO of a rifle company of Marines in Northern I Corps, I don't recall seeing anything similar.  When I was wounded and hospitalized, I don't recall any of...

Washington Post: ‘Like a World War I battlefield’: At least 15 dead as mudslides wipe away Southern California homes A storm of mud descended on the coastal community of Montecito with no warning, said officials, who expect the number of deaths to increase as rescue workers continue to look for people who are missing. Not to diminish the casualties in a mudslide, but the Battle of the Somme had over a million casualties total.  The British lost over 57,000 men on the first day alone.  In World War I, 14 casualties would be a relatively minor skirmish.  The casualties were so high in World War I because the machinery of warfare made past tactics obsolete.  It was not until planes and tanks came into play that combined arms operation made advances less of a bloodbath. California has had a tough year of weather.  It needs to focus more on fixing its infrastructure than pushing so many money pit social programs.

Mark Moyer: Strategic defeat often results from an accumulation of tactical failures. Repeated battlefield setbacks can destroy an adversary’s capabilities, as befell Napoleonic France, or its will, as befell Britain in the American War of Independence. In such cases, military organizations may deserve at least some of the blame for the strategic loss, because in most countries the military leadership bears primary responsibility for training, equipping, and commanding armed forces, functions that are fundamental to tactical effectiveness. Military strategy, by contrast, is often set by civilian leaders, and in the case of the United States it is the statutory prerogative of the civilian commander in chief. When a country enjoys tactical military success as consistently as the United States, responsibility for strategic success must rest primarily with those who make strategy. The American military could be held culpable for recent strategic setbacks were it highly influential in t...

NY Times: U.S. Escalates Role in Mideast Wars, With No Endgame In places like Yemen, Syria and Iraq, the United States is deepening its involvement in wars while diplomacy becomes largely an afterthought. The problem the US is up against now is that Obama gave the enemy eight years of hope that we would just walk away and let them have their way.  They need to be disabused of that notion.

NY Times: Trump Adopts Hands-Off Style on Military Operations The change reverses what aides and some generals say was the Obama administration’s tendency to micromanage. But the new approach could raise questions of whether President Trump is exercising enough oversight. Obama was an amateur when it came to fighting wars and surrounded himself with other amateurs on his national security team, keeping the generals and other military experts at arms length.  That is one of the reasons his policies were such a a disaster.  From his decision to retreat from Iraq and pull troops out of Afghanistan to his reluctance to engage against ISIS he made poor decisions.  He was the worst war time leader since Lyndon Johnson. One of the strengths of the US system for fighting wars is to give maximum flexibility to those charged with fighting it.  From Lieutenants to Generals, orders are given to take certain objectives and those who get the orders develop a plan to...

Washington Post: WWII made Patton a hero, but the ‘Great War’ made him a commander A World War I exhibit at the Library of Congress shows how the young George S. Patton saw the “white-hot joy” of battle. Before World War I, Patton was involved in the "punitive" strike against the Mexican bandits who were invading and killing Americans.  It was in the very early days of the automobile and he a group of soldiers took cars into Mexico to chase down one of the bandit leaders.  They found him at a hacienda, and successfully attacked him and his supporters. As a cavalry officer, he was interested in the relatively new invention of tanks and convinced Gen. Pershing that his experience in Mexico qualified him to lead a mechanized assault.  After the war, he worked with Eisenhower on improving tank operations before the government decided to do away them between the wars. BTW, the tanks got their name from the British who were trying to keep this new secret...

War on the Rocks: ... But what if these premises are wrong? What if Obama, Rhodes and their supporters wove a misleading narrative about what ailed U.S. foreign policy? Obama’s foreign policy worldview came from his self-conscious effort to learn the lessons of history — specifically, the lessons of the George W. Bush administration — which no one will fault. As anyone who has ever taken a class in history or political science knows, Obama knew George Santayana’s famous aphorism that “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” But learning the lessons of history can be difficult, even deceptive. Obama does not seem to have known Robert Jervis’ important riposte to Santayana that “those who remember the past are condemned to make the opposite mistake.” Obama made the opposite mistake. In his eagerness to avoid making Bush’s mistakes, he made a whole new set of mistakes. He over-interpreted the recent past, fabricating the myth about a hyper-interventionist establi...

Washington Post: After a SEAL’s death in Yemen, questions persist on Trump’s decision-making process Current and former officials said the discussions leading up to the Jan. 29 raid marked a departure from the more hands-on, deliberative approach of the Obama administration. Obama was one of the worst Presidents in history when it came to managing the war, precisely because he tried to micromanage an effort he was ignorant of. Not since Lyndon Johnson has a President done such a poor job of allowing the military to use its best judgment in achieving an objective as Obama did.  The man was ignorant of warfare and history and thought he knew more than those who were educated in the art of war. Trump is smart enough to go back to intelligent decision making that leaves the details of an operation up to people who know what they doing.  In war, there is always risk in every operation.  While casualties are an unfortunate aspect of military operations, ...

NY Times: A Year of Crisis as Terrorism Becomes ‘Our New Normal’ For Turkey, the murder of the Russian envoy was a bookend to one of the most turbulent years in its modern history. For Germany, the market attack pointed to an ominous future. His biggest error was his retreat from Iraq which allowed al Qaeda in Iraq to reconstitute as ISIL.  That one mistake has led to genocide and an expanded terror threat against the US and its allies.  ISIL, al-Qaeda and other groups such as the Taliban have also taken advantage of Europe's asylum policies to exploit them and use them as an entry into the West where they can engage n mass murder for Allah attacks. It all happened on Obama's watch.  His release of terrorist from Gitmo was also a huge dud.  As Gen. Mattis has said, "The enemy has a say when a war is over."  That is something Obama did not seem to comprehend and more people on our side have been killed as a result. Wars end when you per...

War is Boring: Whether or not you believe the CIA’s claim that Russia hacked into the Democratic Party’s servers to help Donald Trump get elected — and you should be skeptical of anonymous sources — it should be blindingly obvious that we’re in the middle of a new kind of conflict. This kind of conflict doesn’t rely on bullets or conquest of territory, but control of information. So be skeptical, but also remember the Kremlin barely hides its embrace of propaganda-driven hybrid warfare, expounded at length in Russian military publications, and which has accelerated in intensity during the past several years. And don’t just take the CIA’s word for it. According to the German BfV domestic intelligence agency, Russian tactics have extended to “ automated opinion-shaping ” methods via social networks. Methods include “propaganda and disinformation, often executed as ‘false flags,’” the BfV noted. “This methodology represents a previously unobserved MO in campaigns that are controlled by...

CNN: US military prepares for the next frontier: Space war It would be close to the equivalent of an EMP attack on earth that could potentially shut down the US economy and transportation.

David French: In Tuesday night’s debate, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine defended the indefensible — a strategic retreat from Iraq that threw away the fruits of American military victory, helped enable a terrifying genocide and empowered America’s enemies. Even worse, he did so while spouting a pack of deceptions and half-truths that exhibited a child’s understanding of American strategic interests. First, it was stunning that Kaine brought up as an accomplishment America’s dramatically reduced overseas deployments — as if the only measure of strategic success is the number of Americans in harm’s way. He said it was a “very, very good thing” that instead of 175,000 deployed, we now have only 15,000. Well, yes, if America’s enemies were defeated or contained. Instead, American retreat created power vacuums that our enemies filled. Jihadists control more territory, have more men under arms and are more effectively attacking America and American allies than when Hil...

Fox News: Army Capt. Paul “Buddy” Bucha faked out the enemy while leading a motley crew in Vietnam. The Medal of Honor recipient was hailed as a hero after he made North Vietnamese fighters believe his 187th Infantry Regiment was much bigger than it really was. The combination of bravery and cunning helped him earn the nation's highest military honor, an award bestowed upon him by the president. In 1967, Bucha — who graduated from West Point and earned an MBA at Stanford — arrived in Vietnam and was given a squad filled “with the rejects of all the other units,” including writers, intellectuals and men who had served time in military prison, he said. “We were called the 'clerks and the jerks,'" he recalled. "We were a few smart guys and a lot of badasses … considered the losers of all losers.” But as a company commander new to Vietnam, "I, too, was a loser,” Bucha recalled fondly years later. “So we were sort of meant for each other.” "They e...

NY Times: Wars of the Future? Picture Big Armies and Many Fronts After 15 years of fighting terrorists, American troops are training for hybrid wars: large conventional battles combined with insurgencies and cyberthreats. Cyber threats are already part of the new cold war between the US and adversaries like Russia, China North Korea and Iran.  There is also element of intimidation against surveillance actives in the air and on the seas.  The Russians are already waging a hybrid war with Ukraine in which the US has a very limited engagement. Some of this is happening because the Obama administration is seen as soft and unlikely to respond.  It has cut the defense budget to the point where it would be difficult for the US to respond in any large way to the threats.  The effect is to push back US influence is some regions and expand the influence of adversaries.

Daniel Hannan: ... "Somme," wrote a Prussian veteran afterwards. "The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word." The first day remains, by some measure, the worst in the history of the British Army: An almost unbelievable 19,200 men were killed. In the five months that followed, 400,000 British and Allied troops, and a similar number of Germans, lost their lives, without any noticeable gain or loss of territory. It was that territory, pock-marked by artillery, filled with toxic gas, devoid of any living thing except enemy patrols, that later inspired Tolkien: Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails on the lands about. ... Almost every British family was touched, as mine was, by the tragedy. My old school lost 749 students, a number which I still struggle to take in...