Just the Facts

Land of the Pure:

The Bush Administration just declared Pakistan (whose name translates into "land of the pure") as a Major Non-NATO Ally. You may be curious about what that means. Now you know.

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. - Thomas Jefferson

Operation Shoe-Fly:

Once again demonstrating the fundamental decency of the US military, the 214th Aviation Regiment has undertaken an unofficial operation to help the children of Afghanistan. Dubbed Operation Shoe Fly, it's an attempt to provide shoes for the kids. Any of you who are parents, and quite a few of you are, might go through your closets to see what the kids have outgrown. You can also send new shoes.

Ship the shoes to:

Operation Shoe Fly
B Co, 214th Aviation Regiment
Bagram, Afghanistan
APO AE 09354-9998

We've got some good people out there.

ORACULATIONS

Alarm! Alarm!

I'm sure you probably heard that 'a group of diplomatic, military and intelligence officials' printed a petition in the LA Times that was opposed to the Bush policy in Iraq. No big deal, you probably thought--you can find twenty or thirty former military people who will sign anything. This is because the military is so huge, and draws fairly broadly from America, which is also huge. Add in the State department and the intelligence services (presumably to include the FBI), and you've got so many people it would just be a matter of making the phone calls.

Indeed, I didn't give it a second thought either. It was only while reading around today that I discovered that a blog called Oraculations had put together a list of biographies on the signers. Unsurprisingly, most have ties to leftist groups--that's how they knew there was a petiton to sign, right? But then there is one really alarming thing:

Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner, the CIA Director under Carter (let's all remember that fiasco) who is pissed that Tenet was fired. This unbiased guy is a member John Kerry's Senior Military Advisory Group, now advising John Kerry.

Carter's CIA director is one of John Kerry's senior military advisors? I can't think of a single more damning thing that could be said.

INDOlink - US News - US Forces �Kill� 80 Militants In Afghanistan Operation

How I-War and War Relate:

Read over this article to see why a propaganda war is indispensible for guerrillas. The waters are muddy enough now that an independent news service doesn't know where to turn. Ultimately they just report everyone's numbers and let the reader guess which are true. They're so turned around they even put "kill" in scare quotes.

Jihad Unspun - A Clear View On The US War On "Terrorism"

Jihad Unspun: Vote for Kerry, Then Push Him Around

The weekend edition of Jihad Unspun contains a piece by anti-warrior Chalmers Johnson. It is not hard to see what the pro-Qaeda boys like about Johnson's argument. A victory for his faction would be the end of resistance to Islamist groups seeking to dominate the Muslim world.

[L]et me nonetheless end by noting that the political system may not be capable of saving the Republic. It is hard to imagine that any president of either party could stand up to the powerful vested interests surrounding the Pentagon and the secret intelligence agencies....

I believe that if the Republic is to be saved it will be as a result of an upsurge of direct democracy.... The first victory of this movement came on March 14 with the election of Spanish prime minister Jose Zapatero. If democracy means anything at all, it means that public opinion matters. Zapatero understood that 80% of the Spanish people opposed Bush's war in Iraq, and he immediately withdrew all Spanish forces. It's a great pity that Kerry criticized Zapatero for this. We need to duplicate the Spanish victory in Tony Blair's Britain, Silvio Berlusconi's Italy, Junichiro Koizumi's Japan, and in our own country.

Jihad Unspun would also like to see a repeat of the Spanish elections in America. Still, this appears to be a rather halfhearted endorsement. 'Vote for Kerry... but it probably won't be enough... we'll really need 'direct democracy,' by which I mean rule by protest-march rather than by Constitutional processes.' Oddly, given that he wants to prefer 'direct democracy' to these legal processes, Johnson argues that his movement is about the "Constitution and the need to restore its integrity as the supreme law of the land."

Still, apart from his sense that Kerry (unlike Bush) could be intimidated by protest into withdrawing from Iraq, Johnson has some praise for the man himself. Along the way he also explains his opinion of the volunteer military.

Kerry's stand as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War is one of the most honorable aspects of his background. It is a tragedy that we have become so militaristic he must disown the courageous stand he took thirty-five years ago in order to be elected. This reflects one of the major differences between our military during the Vietnam War and our military today. Then it was a citizens' army. Members of the armed forces were a democratic check on militarism because they were not volunteers. They were naturally concerned about the purposes of the war, how it would end, and whether their government and officers were lying to them. Today we have a professional military. People who serve in it are volunteers with a vested interest in advancing their careers through armed conflict.

This is a bit illogical. Although servicemen can vote, the military does not elect the president. Indeed, as we saw in Florida 2000, in a contested election the ballots of deployed servicemen are highly likely to be discarded due to the uncertainty of their arriving with all the requisite stamps. Lawyers representing a candidate who suspects that the military will not favor him can move to have those ballots discarded, and expect to succeed.

The reason Kerry has to disown his VVAW stance in order to be considered is because of a change in the populace as a whole. It is true that Kerry feels that he has to step away from the VVAW, and his earlier remarks that American forces should only be deployed under UN command and with blue helmets. That reflects not a change in our military, but in our society.

UPDATE: Apparently the jihadis aren't the only ones lukewarm about Kerry. As the Rottie points out, the speaker here is one of Kerry's campaign co-chairs.

AnAmericanSoldier

A Glass To the 4th Platoon "Bushmasters":

Drop by and see Drill Sgt. Rob over at "An American Solider." Graduation day is just past, and he's already got a retrospective on the cycle. It'll make any military man smile to read his reply to "PVT Krumme," and his tangent includes a story that had me telling my wife tales of fistfights past.

DM

Digital Marine:

Welcome to Digital Marine. DM is a new Milblogger, and his site is too good not to link. I've added it to the "Other Halls" section of the permanent links, down and right.

bloodletting.blog-city.com

Assault Weapons Ban:

Our own Doc Russia urges us on in the attempt to defend our rights. I have also contacted my representatives and Senators, and urge everyone to do the same. I wrote the following letter, which differs sharply from the 'form letters' I have seen suggested. Therefore, I offer it for your consideration.

Dear Sir,

I trust that you do not need to be educated on the right to keep and bear arms. In case you may be wavering, however, please note this constituent's opinion: Sen. Feinstein's recent attempt to renew the ban on so-called 'assault weapons' must fail.

I am a regular voter, and shall be watching you closely in this regard. I trust that I can rely upon you do perform your duty to uphold the Second Amendment, but not so much that I will fail to attend to the vote.

You will have heard from the NRA that a study mandated by Congress, a follow-up study, federal surveys, and police reports have shown that these guns are rarely used in crime.

The truth is that this is beside the point. In the current age, when America's enemies directly target her civilian population, the old ideal of the citizen-soldier must be reborn. No police organization, nor any 'homeland security' device or legislation can be everywhere. We, the free citizens of a free republic, can be.

We are, in fact, everywhere that the enemy wishes to strike. We alone can defend the republic in all the weak and lonely places. We, acting as citizens, can defend the republic without endangering civil liberties through intrusive police powers. We must be able to equip ourselves to perform this civic duty.

Citizens must be called to their ancient duties--the same duties that have pertained to the free man since the time of Alfred the Great, of Richard the Lionheart, of Robert the Bruce, and of Washington and Jackson. We have both the right and the duty to uphold the republic and the common peace. We must also have the tools.

CB

CB Terror:

One of the problems of policing is that you can't be everywhere. You have to make some decisions about priority. You can police the suburbs, but if all the crime is downtown that may not be the best use of your time. On the other hand, if you spend all your money downtown, you may find the criminals moving their operations to the suburbs.

The same is true when trying to figure out how to set up a national defense against chemical and biological terror. It may be--in fact, it is--the case that some of these chemical and biological weapons present a greater danger than others. Rather than building up your defenses against all known agents, it's a better idea to determine which ones are the largest threat, and optimize defenses against those before you worry about the smaller-scale threats.

How do you judge the relative danger? There are a few useful questions. Just how deadly are chemical and biological weapons? How hard are they to make? If a terrorist wanted to get his hands on some, would he need specialized tools, or are there "dual use" technologies that could do the job?

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has written a report on chemical and biological terrorist threats that seeks to answer exactly those questions. It's apt to be driving the debates in Congress for quite a while. Follow the link and read up--you'll be better informed, and better able to keep your politicians from playing games in favor of doing what really needs to be done.

Grim's Hall

Communist Propaganda, Again:

Readers of the Mudville Gazette will have seen this story on the joys of being a PRC POW:

"The Chinese army had always exercised 'revolutionary humanitarianism' towards war captives. Beat and curse were not allowed, nor a kick, because this were iron disciplines of an army. Chinese soldiers were forbidden from searching pockets of Americans, letting them keeping their cigarettes and other private items....

Our Volunteer cadres never beat or abused prisoners who made mistakes, but talked with them. If they really made serious mistakes, they would be placed in confinement, at most for one week.

Didn't know that the People's Republic of China was a paradise of human rights? You must have missed the article from a week or so ago, when we learned that the PRC is more respectful of religious rights than the US, too.

BLACKFIVE: The Cigar Marine and Don King

Ooh-Rah!

I always liked Don King. I never quite knew why--there was no obvious reason--but apparently my instincts were right on. That's a good story, B-5.

Intelligence dissemination system providing new capability

ISR:

JFCOM (Joint Forces Command) has proposed a new Real-time ISR system by 2008. ISR is an abbreviation for "Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance." It is part of C4ISR, which is itself a part of information operations generally. C4, in this case, is "Command, Control, Communications, Computers." When you add the two parts together, C4 & ISR, you get a mental model of how the military thinks about the information needs of the warfighter. (These things can be broken out in several ways; you'll people talk about C3I by itself, or C2I, or, as here, just ISR.)

The idea here is to develop a system, which warfighters can access, that will provide intelligence reports and SR data on a nearly to-the-minute basis. It doesn't take much imagination to see the benefit of having access to updated sat imagery, yesterday's reports from the DIA that may touch on your target, and maybe a scouting report from Marine Recon.

It seems to me that there are two critical challenges, one pratical and one technical. The practical challenge will be getting the intelligence aspects of this up to speed--intelligence products are analysis as much as information, and the analysis has to be done before the product is ready to be disseminated to the end-user. There will always be in any intelligence ops a competition between the desire to get these things out fast ("Hurry up with that report from al-Anbar province--we've got a series of ops there at 0200 Zulu!") versus getting things right ("Last week's reports were so rushed that we didn't notice two critical flaws, with the result that we lost men."). Putting things into a computer pipe increases the pressure for speed--think about how much less patient you are for news in the age of the Internet v. when you had to wait for tomorrow's morning paper ("Why aren't the results from the Belmont up yet? That race was over five minutes ago!"). Further, the analysis will have to be increasingly clear--they are talking about dissemination direct from DIA, not to a trained field intel officer, but to the tank-driver or platoon commander. Their needs will require clarity of analysis (in a hurry!). Keeping the balance will be that much more challenging under these twin pressures.

The technical challenge is security. Putting all this information on tap in one platform will mean that a security failure is devastating. Should an enemy (say, Chinese hackers) manage to access the system, we'll find ourselves in real trouble, real fast. Keeping on top of that will be the work of giants.

Khalid bin Al-Waleed: The Sword of Allah

Naked Dhiraar:

One of the things I've been reading lately are English translations of the old Muslim myths. Those of you who have been reading the Hall for a year or more will remember that we talked a lot about mythology during the invasion of Iraq. Mythology, out of which arise people's visions of who they are and what they ought to be, is probably more important than any political speechmaking. It is in the symbols of mythology where wars are really won, or really lost.

Here's a piece that I pass on largely without comment, except to say why it struck me as interesting. In the wake of certain recent events, we have heard a great deal about how being seen naked was an unmitigated humiliation for Arabs. Yet I find that one of the great heroes of early Islam was called Naked Dhiraar:

Because of the Roman archers, Dhiraar kept on his coat of mail and helmet, and in his hand carried a shield made of elephant hide, which had once belonged to a Roman. Having gone halfway to the Roman line, he stopped and raising his head, gave his personal battle cry:

I am the death of the Pale Ones;
I am the killer of the Romans;
I am a scourge sent upon you;
I am Dhiraar bin Al Azwar!

As a few of the Roman champions advanced to answer his challenge, Dhiraar quickly disrobed; and the Romans knew him at once as the Naked Champion. In the next few minutes, Dhiraar killed several Romans, including two generals, one of whom was the governor of Amman and the other the governor of Tiberius.

HMS Exeter

HMS Exeter:

We had a post recently about HMS Exeter, which is going to be engaging the PLA in exercises on the mainland. Still no word on how they're going to get the ship on shore--my own guess is that it'll be towed on rickshaws.

While searching for answers, I checked The Royal Navy's Offical Exeter Page. This part is the honest truth:

The ship was launched in 1979 by Lady Mulley and entered service in 1980. She is the 5th Ship to bear the name Exeter, her predecessor being famous for her role in the Battle of the River Plate and the sinking of the German "Pocket Battleship" the Graf Spee on 13 Dec 1939. The current Exeter saw service in the Falkland Island War in 1982.

Ship's Motto Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful)

Now how do you like that? Speaking of the Royal Navy, the Royal Marine Commandos have a flash game, if you want to see how they do their recruiting.

The Green Side

Another Letter from Dave:

Over at The Green Side, there's another letter from "Dave," whose previous letter home was featured here at Grim's Hall. The second one is at least as good as the first. If he could be asked, I imagine that Mr. Reagan wouldn't mind sharing the page with this Marine at all.

Here's an excerpt. For those of you who aren't associated in some fashion with the USMC, let me begin by noting that "aggressive"--unlike in civilian life, where it's normally employed as a synonym for "unemployable" or "unstable"--is considered a high compliment among Marines.

During one of the ordered pauses in the Falluja fight, we chopped a rifle company off the line with a very aggressive battalion commander. Basically he was told that we thought the muj were running lose in the area and that he should head up there and "develop the situation." I have gotten to know this guy pretty well here. He is a very good commander and a tough guy. In fact, I remember telling him that if he went past a certain point, he would be decisively engaged. We had estimated that if he got into a decisive engagement, he could be outnumbered by as much as 5:1. You can imagine what he did. He took his Marines right to that point.

Sure enough, the fight was on. It was a 360 degree engagement that lasted 8 hours. An 8 hour firefight is an eternity. To put it in perspective, this guy was in both OIF 1 battle for Baghdad as well as the Falluja fight. He states that the firefight up near this town was the toughest he has been in. We fired quite a bit of artillery and brought in a number of sorties of close air for them. By the time it was over, the estimates (now confirmed) are that they killed over a 100 muj. We could not understand why they kept coming but they did (more on that later). Throughout it all, very accurate mortar fire up to 120mm was falling inside the Marine position. Automatic weapons and RPGs were crisscrossing through the perimeter. The Marines just
laid their in the micro terrain and squeezed of well aimed shots.

The Battalion Commander stayed that day until his guys broke the muj and he "owned the field" (his words). He then withdrew back to his original position. In the same town, we now have Marines living 24/7. They are conducting joint patrols with the Iraqi Police and the ICDC (Iraqi Civil Defense Corps). When they first arrived, the people were very standoffish and even hostile. Now we are getting more and more walk up intelligence (where the locals literally risk their lives in order to walk into our lines and tell us where the muj are). The reason for the turnaround is simple. We have pushed through the bow wave of intimidation and terror that dominated the town when the muj were there. The Marines did it through aggressive raiding and downright obstinate refusal to budge regardless of the costs. The people were watching the entire time and have made up their own minds where their best future lies. It has gotten to the point where the mujahadeen are now firing mortars indiscriminately into the town as it is the only effective means of maintaining any kind of influence over the people.

Facta Non Verba

Facta Non Verba:

Rest in peace, Ronald Reagan, American, former President, honorary Doctor of Philosophy, honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. Of those titles, only the first two were of any real import, save that they showed the honor that men felt he deserved even in his own lifetime. I suspect that the honor in which he is held will only increase now that he is dead. It was not only the British, but the Swiss who saw nobility in him; the Swiss government registered arms in his name in 1984:

The arms are: Or, a bear rampant sable, armed and langued gules holding between its forepaws a mullet argent; on a chief of the second, standing on a ducal coronet of the first a falcon argent, armed and langued of the third, wings displayed and inverted. Crest: On a gentleman's helmet proper a demi-horse sable, unguled or, charged on the shoulder with an actor's mask of the last. Motto: "Facta non verba".

The motto translates, "Deeds not words." It was quite a list of deeds.

UPDATE: Some curiousity has arisen about the heraldry. I can't guess what it's meant to symbolize, except one part: the black bear on the field of gold. The Latin name of the black bear is "Ursus Americanus," that is, "The American bear."

UPDATE: From the day of the funeral procession:

No commentator I heard noticed that the Baroness Thatcher curtsied to the coffin--a gesture which protocol reserves at state funerals to the corpses of royalty. I am sure the Queen will not reprimand her.

Afgha.com - Famed Afghan gold to dazzle the world

Kelly's Heroes:

Now we know why we really went to Afghanistan... "Famed Afghan Gold To Dazzle The World":

The world could soon catch a glimpse of Afghanistan's fabled Bactrian gold, as preparations get under way to exhibit some of the 20,000 pieces that make up the country's most important ancient treasure trove.

Dates and locations have yet to be finalised, but the US, France, Germany, Japan and Greece are among the countries interested in hosting the 2000-year-old haul that has remained intact despite years of war and upheaval.

Hosting, yes... that's the word. It's all about the gold!

While other important archaeological sites are plundered or have been ruined by war, the Bactrian gold, discovered by a Soviet team near the northern town of Shiberghan just before the Red Army invasion of 1979, has had a number of narrow escapes, adding to its allure and mystery.

The Red Army found it, and it wasn't plundered? That is a narrow escape.

The favourites to host the collection first are the Americans and French, and Rahin hopes interest in the treasure will generate funds to build museums and combat looting.

Now what does this remind me of? Oh, yes...

BELLOQ: Dr. Jones, you choose the wrong friends. This time it will cost you.

Never can trust the French. Hand me my hat.

Bad Reporting

Bad Reporting of Naval News:

Today we have two examples of the worst in news service writing. The first is from the Associated Press:

A British Navy warship [The HMS Exeter] with 249 sailors aboard arrived in Hong Kong for a five-day routine port call on Friday, a consular official said.... The port call in Hong Kong is for ``rest and recreation'' but the vessel will participate in a series of training exercises with the People's Liberation Army on the mainland, Gould said.

How do you suppose they're going to get the ship onto the mainland?

The second example is from the Agence France-Presse:

A US navy carrier battlegroup is to launch a 'show of force' in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea off west Africa as part of an unprecedented global operation to demonstrate America's command of the high seas, a US diplomatic source told AFP on Friday.

Really? The diplomat said we were going to stage an exercise off "oil-rich" west Africa? The State Department's even worse than I thought.

BLACKFIVE

D-Day at 60:

Black Five has organized a MilBlogger's tribute to the D-Day operations. As we approach the 60th "birthday" of European freedom, it's worth taking the time to read through these retrospectives. The MilBlogs have mustered a lot of expertise and skill for this exercise, and the results are impressive.

Social Harmony

Social Harmony:

I was reading an article the other day, in the local newspaper, about an elderly Korean gentleman who has moved into town and opened a martial arts studio. He chastened the reporter who had come to interview him not to suggest that the martial arts were 'all about fighting.' "No!" he said. "The purpose is social harmony."

That is exactly right. The secret of social harmony is simple: Old men must be dangerous.

Very nearly all the violence that plagues, rather than protects, society is the work of young males between the ages of fourteen and thirty. A substantial amount of the violence that protects rather than plagues society is performed by other members of the same group. The reasons for this predisposition are generally rooted in biology, which is to say that they are not going anywhere, in spite of the current fashion that suggests doping half the young with Ritalin.

The question is how to move these young men from the first group (violent and predatory) into the second (violent, but protective). This is to ask: what is the difference between a street gang and the Marine Corps, or a thug and a policeman? In every case, we see that the good youths are guided and disciplined by old men. This is half the answer to the problem.

But do we not try to discipline and guide the others? If we catch them at their menace, don't we put them into prisons or programs where they are monitored, disciplined, and exposed to "rehabilitation"? The rates of recidivism are such that we can't say that these programs are successful at all, unless the person being "rehabilitated" wants and chooses to be. And this is the other half of the answer: the discipline and guidance must be voluntarily accepted. The Marine enlists; the criminal must likewise choose to accept what is offered.

The Eastern martial arts provide an experience very much like that of Boot Camp. The Master, like the Drill Instructor, is a disciplined man of great personal prowess. He is an exemplar. He asks nothing of you he can't, or won't, do himself--and there are very many things he can and will do that are beyond you, though you have all the help of youth and strength. It is on this ground that acceptance of discipline is won. It is the ground of admiration, and what wins the admiration of these young men is martial prowess.

Everyone who was once a young man will understand what I mean. Who could look forward, at the age of sixteen or eighteen, to a life of obedience, dressed in suits or uniforms, sitting or standing behind a desk? How were you to respect or care about the laws, or the wishes, of men who had accepted such a life? The difficulty is compounded in poor communities, where the jobs undertaken are often menial. How can you respect your father if your father is a servant? Would you not be accepting a place twice as low as his? Would you not rather take up the sword, and cut yourself a new place? Meekness in the old men of the community unmakes the social order: it encourages rebellion from the young.

The traditional martial arts tend to teach young men to undertake flashy and impressive, but not terribly effective, fighting techniques. Only as you grow older do the masters of the art teach you the real secrets--the subtle, quick, physically simple ways in which the human body can be destroyed. In this way, the old retain their power over the young--although they lack the speed and strength, they have in discipline in training more than enough to maintain the order. Social harmony is maintained in the dojo: the young revere the old, and seek to emulate them. Your father may be a servant, but he is still a warrior--and a more dangerous one than you. The father, being past that age in which biology makes us vicious, guides the son or neighbor to protect society rather than to rend it. It is not particularly different in the military.

If we would have a stable society, we must have dangerous old men. This means that, if you are yourself on your way to becoming an old man, you have a duty to society to begin your preparations. The martial arts are not the only road--my own grandfather did it through a simple combination of physical strength, personal discipline, and an accustomed habit of going armed about his business. There was never a more impressive figure--or, at least, there was never a boy more impressed than was I.

The martial virtues are exactly the ones needed. By a happy coincidence, having a society whose members adhere to and encourage those virtues makes us freer as well--we need fewer police, fewer courts, fewer prisons, fewer laws, and fewer lawyers. This is what Aristotle meant when he said that the virtues of the man are reflected in the society. Politics and ethics are naturally joined.