Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: US Military Page 1 of 3

What if We Threw a Civil War and Nobody Came?

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On August 28, 2024

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UPDATE: I forgot to include a hilarious bit of business involving the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation vs. the Millersville (TN) Police Department. Have added it below:

Sean Paul’s post on the 2nd Amendment got me thinking about the prospects for civil war in the USA, in particular this spicy quote:

So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?

Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.

It won’t be lard-ass militias that matter if there is a civil implosion in the US.

These things always come down to intra-elite splits and/or intra-military splits.

There seems to be a split between the Trump-supporting majority of American police forces, right-wing military personnel, some military officers & at least some FBI vs the Trump-hating “Deep State” CIA, NSA, Pentagon elite and the rest of the active duty military.

As NPR reported in 2021, some po-po’s were even willing to put their bodies on the line for whatever it was they were trying to do on Jan 6.

Nearly 30 sworn police officers from a dozen departments attended the pro-Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol last week, and several stormed the building with rioters and are facing federal criminal charges as well as possible expulsion or other discipline.

The officers are from departments large and small. There was veteran officer in Houston, the nation’s eighth-largest department; a sergeant in the small town of Rocky Mount, Va., and a group of Philadelphia transit officers.

Note that caveat in the headline about the vast majority of them being retired. Are we too “demographically advanced” ie old to get a war on?

Also check these nifty stats from Seton Hall’s “A Demographic and Legal Profile of January 6 Prosecutions”:

The government has won all but 12 cases brought to date (five died, four fled, one acquitted, two dismissed);

517 of 716 (72%) were charged as the result of tipsters and informants;

Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California are home to 43.9% of those charged;

Only states not represented among the 716 arrested were North Dakota, Nebraska and Vermont;

35.1% of defendants were identified as going to the Capitol alone;

25% were armed;

18.5 % had a background in law enforcement or the military;

Largest employment group identified is the Business Owner group, which accounts for 24.7%;

Only 35 of the 716 individuals were identified as unemployed;

22.2% had a criminal record.

Note that a disproportionate amount of the Jan 6ers came from just five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California.

And two of those states are “solid blue” and even the red and purple states each feature very Democratic cities.

If there’s no geographic continuity to the two sides are we just going to have a nationwide running gun battle instead?

But wait, the case for imminent civil war has a couple more points to make.

TX Gov Greg Abbott turning the Texas National Guard against the US Border Patrol was a very ominous sign:

Most explosively, Texas Governor Greg Abbott in January deployed the state National Guard to block the U.S. Border Patrol from accessing a 2.5-mile-long section of the border in the city of Eagle Pass. The section includes Shelby Park, a 47-acre city park along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender. Border Patrol officials had been using the park for processing encountered migrants. Now, they are effectively locked out of the park, and are mostly unable to access a heavily crossed border area to do their jobs.

Fl Gov Ron DeSantis’ creation of the Florida Guard outside federal control and his proposal to send them to the Texas border is another clown show that is also actually quite scary:

DeSantis established the Florida Guard on June 15, 2022, purportedly to enhance Florida’s capacity to deal with hurricanes. It was announced as a civilian force of approximately 400 volunteers to supplement the Florida National Guard, which balances both state and federal government control. The governor asked for $2 million.

Within a year, DeSantis and the super-majority Republican Legislature converted the small volunteer force into DeSantis’ expensive private army.

MORE BUDGET, MORE POLICE POWERS

House Bill 1285 skyrocketed the budget to $107.6 million, with half of the funds designated for “military” equipment. The number of “volunteers”— handpicked by the governor — increased from 400 to 1,500, and they were granted “police powers” to detain and arrest.

Although there is a titular head of the volunteers, the Guard may be “activated only by the governor and is at all times under the final command and control of the governor as the commander in chief of all military and guard forces of the state.”

And it is not under the state’s military control because the law further provides that: “The division [i.e. State Guard] shall not be subject to control, supervision or direction of the Department of Military Affairs in any manner…”

DeSantis moved quickly after that. He set up a military training center for millions of dollars and hired a combat-training company to recruit and train members of the Guard. The contractor was awarded a non-competitive $1.2 million contract and the company’s manual provides for hand-to-hand combat, busting down walls and interdiction in the sea.

These developments show an ominous willingness to escalate political fights into military conflict on the part of the two southern GOP governors.

But militarily this is pipsqueak stuff at this point. Were a war to erupt between the Feds and Abbot and DeSantis it would be over in a few savage minutes, as long as it takes for a pit bull to maul a baby.

And the yokel governors are not the pit bull in this scenario.

But things get very interesting, in the ancient Chinese curse sense, if Trump wins the presidential election and actually manages to place loyalists in key positions at the federal level.

But that’s a big if.

Politically Trump seems way off his game from 2016. Steve Bannon’s in jail and Trump has his head up his own ass. The rousing populism and ‘did he really say that?’ demagoguery are missing.

That makes it less likely that he could motivate supporters to truly crazy extremes.

Does Trump really seem to care enough to organize a civil war?

Also there’s the matter of social cohesion — oddly, it’s a critical ingredient for a civil war. Each side has to at least some internal unity to present a sufficient problem to the other side necessary for the brouhaha to go from “civic disturbance” or “riot” to CIVIL WAR.

Aurelian argues we don’t have enough social cohesion to get a war on.

For all the fashionable talk of “civil war,” a civil war requires organised parties competing for control of the future of the political system. We don’t have that, we just have individuals, and small groups without much cohesion, united only in their detestation for the system.

It may be the case that we can bumble our way into something really nasty without  leadership on either side capable of catalyzing discontent into a coherent force.

If there’s a major economic collapse or a military disaster on a foreign front all bets are off.

But even in those scenarios, I’d anticipate more of a gradual disintegration into warlordism than an 1860 type thing.

UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot to include the piece de resistance. This is a classic real-world example of a conflict between MAGA chuds in power locally vs. a state law enforcement agency:

In a perplexing pair of podcast interviews, the Millersville chief of police says the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has begun limiting his department’s access to certain sensitive law enforcement data.

It follows a scandal first dug up by NewsChannel 5 Investigates into the troubled police department for the community of 6,000 just north of Nashville.

“Once we start getting this bad publicity, our access starts getting cut off to financial reports, FinCen,” Chief Bryan Morris said in an interview with far-right podcaster Tom Renz. The interview was posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“We can’t do investigations,” the chief continued. “We don’t have everything in this office that we need, you know.”

Renz chimed in, “You need the tools provided by federal law enforcement and other agencies, and state agencies.”

“And now we’re being denied that,” Morris insisted.

…

Morris — who also serves as interim city manager — claimed his department is now cut off from one of the most sensitive law enforcement data sources available.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — sometimes known as FinCen — is a program run by the U.S. Department of Treasury that can give police access to certain banking and other financial records of individuals when there is a legitimate law enforcement purpose.

Morris claimed that, because of NewsChannel 5’s investigations into his conspiracy-minded assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor, the TBI has now cut them off.

Renz asked, “Have they given you a good reason that they are denying you access?”

“No,” the chief answered. “I’ve actually called down there and talked to them, and what I’ve been told is we’re on hold because they are auditing us.”

As part of Taylor’s many bizarre conspiracy theories — including claims that some of the nation’s most powerful political figures are involved in child sex trafficking — Taylor has sometimes boasted about having access to sensitive data linked to some powerful people.

That includes the banking records for U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s campaign.

 

When And Where Will A Great Power War Happen?

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On March 13, 2024

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I was asked this question by a friend today and I found myself uncertain if there would be a great power war or not.

My thoughts were roughly five:

  1. The US can’t win a war with China or Russia, in my estimation. Russia by itself is outproducing all of NATO by about 7:1 in terms of munitions. China has so much more industrial capacity that it’s insane. China won’t let Russia be taken out, if it has to it will intervene, in my estimation, because if Russia falls, it’s next. Russia provides the feed, fuel and mineral reserve it needs, in a form which can’t be interdicted by naval power.
  2. If there is going to be a war, the sooner it happens the better America’s chances, but right now, munitions are so depleted by Ukraine and Israel, that a war is essentially impossible. Since NATO can’t restore its munitions at current rates without years of effort, and has shown little ability to ramp up production, that means by the time the US/NATO is read for war, it’ll be even weaker comparatively.
  3. Western elites are incompetent idiots at anything but keeping power and accumulating wealth in their own nations. They continually blunder into wars they lose, they’ve shipped their industry to China, they’ve spent three generations systematically weakening their nations in pursuit of profit and power.
  4. Western elites also display breathtaking arrogance and assurance of their power and their ability push other people and nations around. They believe in their superiority and are isolated from any feedback which proves otherwise.
  5. Historically, great power transitions usually include large wars. Not always, but about two-thirds of the time. (Thucydides Trap, by Graham Allison goes into this in detail.)

Basically, the US is like Japan pre-World War II: powerful military, no way to keep up with losses during a war. Yamamoto famously noted that it was impossible for Japan to win against America, and was ignored. So the tiny island nation went to war with a continental power with far more manpower and industry than it had, and lost. America today is comparatively stronger than Japan was, but by less than people think, especially if China gets involved.

If there is a war, it could explode in any number of areas: Taiwan and the Lithuania/Estonia are possibilities, but if I had to lay a single bet I’d bet on Iran. Russia, China and Iran are currently conducting naval exercises together. Iran came to Russia’s aid in a big way during their war with Ukraine. Israel recently attacked Russia diplomatically, burning the good will there and Russia is hosting meetings between Palestinian factions to help them get over their differences so they are stronger. Iran has substantial industry, since it was blessed by American sanctions and is large enough to develop anyway. America is currently showing that its government is completely controlled by Zionist interests.

Iran is powerful, but it may look like a target America can win against.

Except that Russia and China aren’t likely to let that happen. If Iran looks like it will really lose, Russia might even intervene militarily.

But truthfully I don’t know. Americans would be insane to pick a great power war: the odds against them are way too high, even now.

But American elites are insane: completely out of touch with reality beyond their own inbred elite circle. They’ve been the world’s greatest power for as long as they can remember, feel entitled to the spot, and may not give it up without a fight.

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The Coming Draft And The Future Of Coercion

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On March 1, 2024

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So, the American military can’t make its enlistment quotas:

According to widely-reported leaks the US Army missed its recruiting target by an enormous amount in FY23 and will shrink by some 24,000 people going into 2024 – over 5% of its end strength. Apparently most of the positions being cut are already empty.

It’s no mystery why this is happening – most of the recruiting crisis is attributable to a catastrophic drop in accessions among white men. This is a huge demographic which disproportionately seeks to join the combat arms, so the impact to the Army’s combat power is disproportionately large even in comparison to those bleak numbers.

The usual explanation given for this is the one given at the link: it’s primarily about woke politics.

I’ve spent some time hanging around where US veterans talk, and there’s something to it. The people who aren’t enlisting seem to be disproportionately the children of previous veterans: those veterans used to encourage their children to enlist, now they are telling them not to. These are often families where members have served for generations.

But it’s not all culture war, and I’m not sure it’s even primarily culture war: complaints about under-pay, terrible base housing (including black mold) and forever-war abound. The only really good thing the army has going it for it now is that it still pays for college— or that’s the consensus. And enlistment issues were developing under Trump, even before Biden, it’s not primarily a partisan issue.

None of these problems can be easily fixed. The US military budget is already huge, but raising pay would require paying less for equipment and to contractors, and that’s how politicians, important donors and ex-generals get rich. Fixing bases might be slightly easier, since it can be done by contractors, but it’s not as high return to the political donor class as vastly over-priced equipment and shitty weapons. As for Forever War, well, the neoliberal and neoconservative factions are united in support.

There are two obvious solutions. The first is a draft and there has been floating of the idea. I think it will happen. Among the veterans and military hangers-on there’s a lot of doubt about it for a variety of reasons. It would require the army to organize to work with a draft, among other things, but one criticism is that it would be hard to enforce the draft because America is full of dangerous men with lots of guns and seizing people off the street the way the Ukrainians do wouldn’t go well.

I tend to agree, but that’s not how it will be done. Instead, if you don’t report, they’ll freeze all your accounts and forbid all financial institutions, including credit card companies, paypal and crypto exchanges from doing any business with you, including transferring money or even cashing endorsed checks (though checks are barely a thing any more.)

If your family aids and abets you, well, the same thing can be done to them.

This was pioneered en-masse during the Canadian truckers protest. I didn’t like the protest, but the way it was shut down was absolute totalitarian garbage. It worked, though. People can’t survive without money in this economy, and the cash economy is miniscule. Back in the late 80s I lived in it for a while, and it was easily do-able with very minor sacrifices, at least at the lower-class level. Tons of businesses would accept endorsed checks and checks were the main way wages were paid, for example. Landlords would take cash and didn’t sneer at it, nor did they check your credit rating. Full time jobs even existed which would pay in cash, and tons of part time jobs and casual labor paid cash, plus every business accepted it.

Now, not so much. No need to go into details, we all live in our near-post-cash shitty economy.

The reduction of the cash economy is the hall mark off all semi-totalitarian systems: systems which want to enforce how you spend your money and how you get paid. Much as I like them in other ways, this includes Scandinavian systems and much of Europe. Almost the first thing Modi in India did was remove all large bills from circulation, this was part of his authoritarian bent, and was economically disastrous.

Paper cash is freedom. Centralized electronic exchange is tyranny. As with all tyranny, it’s great for strop crime, but “crime” is defined by politicians and judges owned by oligarchs. Not sending your child to die for your country? Crime.

Now the second way around this is still not quite possible, but it will be very soon: autonomous killer robots. I remember reading that in the invasion of Armenia some people were killed by them, but they’ll soon be mainline because they are resistant to jamming and they don’t require operators.

Internally this is great: you don’t have the “will they fire?” issue that troops and even cops sometimes have when faced with dissent. All you need is techies to maintain and program them and someone to give the orders, none of whom have to be right there doing the killed and hearing the screams of the people they’re killing, right up and personal. Plus there’ll be lots of profit opportunities for the oligarch class, retired generals and politicians and their families.

Externally it’s great too. Who cares if your population won’t sign up for forever war killing gooks who never did anything to you?

Welcome to the future of war. Join the military or starve, and, increasingly, be killed by a robot.

(This will be a brief era, though it will seem long to live thru. Civilization collapse will deal with it, though not as fast as we’d like. Now that they’re perfected, drones/robots are not that hard to build. Rescue from them will probably require collapse of the semiconductor or battery industry.)

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Osama Bin Laden: The First Great Man Of The 21st Century

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On September 11, 2023

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Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Osama Bin Laden was not a good man.

Great is not a synonym for good. Genghis Khan was a great man. Hitler was a great man. FDR was a great man. Ivan the Terrible was a great man. Queen Elizabeth the first was a great woman. Of the five, only FDR was a good person.

Bin Laden didn’t quite win (though the jury is out), but he did accomplish much of what he wanted. His theory was simple: the US, the far enemy, was why when pious Muslims tried to reform their societies, they lost. The US supported the local governments or conservative/sell out forces, and with that support, the governments won.

This theory is a good one: it’s mostly true.

Bin Laden fought as one of the Mujahadeen against the USSR. He lead troops from the front. (He was a brave man, something most Americans refuse to admit.) He believed that the USSR broke up, in large part, because of their loss in Afghanistan. Pouring so many men and resources into the Afghan war put enough additional strain on the USSR to be decisive.

This theory is a good one: it has a lot of truth to it (though it’s only partially true.)

Osama also believed that the US military was fundamentally weak: they were good at battles and awful at prolonged combat. They were not tough: they could not win large-scale guerilla wars. Against tough warriors who wouldn’t give up, like the Vietnamese, they would eventually lose. This would destroy the myth of American military superiority.

So Osama’s plan was to suck the US into a war it couldn’t win, in Afghanistan. 9/11 was the method and it worked.

The US, under George W. Bush then also invaded Iraq, a self-inflicted wound.

And Osama was right, though more in Iraq than Afghanistan (which was fought more on the cheap.) The US won the initial battles, was bogged down and eventually forced out.

The cost was astronomical, and it did damage America, distracting America from its bleeding economic and social ulcers, and its real danger: China and the US. The money and men spent in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the endless “war on terror”; the attention paid to it, changed America in ways which made it weaker.

It didn’t, directly, cause the US collapse. America was stronger than the USSR had been in the 80s.

But Osama got much of what he wanted and planned: his wars; America defeated militarily, and America weakened. He found America’s trigger button and pushed it, and America acted as he wanted.

That he later died means nothing. His greatness was in making the greatest power of his time dance to his tune, and in so doing weaken itself.

The War on Terror was a great, essentially self-inflicted wound. Osama could never have damaged the US so much if America had not cooperated, but it did, because Bin Laden understood America enough to make it do what he wanted.

Bin Laden isn’t in the first tier of great men and women, but he qualifies for great: he made the world dance to his tune.

It’s important to recognize this. We can say of someone that they were evil and great. We can admit someone’s virtues if they are our enemies. If we can’t, we will underestimate them, and underestimating an enemy is sheerest stupidity, and a constant American vice.

You grant your enemies their greatness, or you are a fool.

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Dog Bites Man: The US (With Foreign Allies) Did Blow Up The Nord Stream Pipelines

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On February 9, 2023

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I mean, I feel kind of lame for even posting about this because unless you were stupid (or on the payroll) you knew it was either the US or an ally, and if an ally the US was involved.

Turns out it was the US and Norway. Seymour Hersh.

Of course he had to post this on his substack because not a single mainstream outlet will publish it.

A Dalek commented how surprising the CIA’s competence was in this operation, but what I find interesting is how effective media control is now: if no one will cover it, did it even happen? The level of control over the media is astounding, and the majority of it is tacit, I doubt the CIA had to call outlets and say “don’t publish Hersh”, the people in charge know what their job is and do it without any threats, then see themselves on the same side as the CIA and if a truth is too inconvenient, well, it isn’t important.

It really does remind me of the early post 9/11 and Iraq War period, where you just couldn’t tell the truth and be heard on anything mainstream, and trying was a career death sentence.

And yeah, I do think this is worse than it was in the past. The old media was corrupt and often complicit, too often, but it wasn’t this bad. A combination of almost every media asset being owned by just a few companies and the Ivy League takeover of journalism jobs, which used to be working class, has made the vast majority of the media little more than collaborators with the powers that be.

I’m a bit of a broken record on this, but I still find it extraordinary that they lied about Corbyn about 80% of the time. Amazing.

Anyway, Norway (who made 40 billion more a year from taking sales from Russia) and the US who has also made a mint selling Europe natural gas, turn out to be the nations responsible for destroying Nord Stream, which I’d say was an act of war. Turns out the nations with the most to gain were the criminals. What a surprise. (Though I did think Poland might have been involved, as they had other things to gain. Turns out greed was the primary factor, not ideology.)

Dog bites man. It is tedious that this had to be proved. The amount of cycles wasted by intelligent people proving what is obvious to anyone who isn’t a moron or dishonest is pathetic. (And this nonsense is why I rarely bother proving the obvious any more. It’s just meant to waste cycles and anyone asking for proof of the obvious is not an honest interlocutor.)

Note: corrected “cover” to “publish”, which was my original intent.

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Should NATO Exist? Will It?

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On September 20, 2019

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One of Trump’s constant cries is that American allies aren’t spending enough on their militaries and that the US is, thus, carrying them.

While there is a temptation to scorn this argument because it was made by Trump, it has a fair bit of truth to it, as Matt Stoller suggested today:

The American military umbrella is a bad deal for America and a good deal for our “allies.” Japan gets protected channels to Middle Eastern oil, for free. Germany gets protection from Russia, for free. They all export to us at terms unfavorable to our own industries/middle class.

The problem with this is that it is, well, true.

And that Europe “needs” America for defense against Russia is absurd:

Let us be clear, the EU’s population is 508 million. When the UK leaves, it will be 447 million.

Russia’s population is 143 million.

The EU minus Britain has a GDP of 18.1 trillion (purchasing power parity), Russia has an economy of 3.5 trillion (ppp). Germany alone has a GDP (ppp) of four trillion.

If Europe “needs” the US, it’s because it can’t be bothered to raise a proper army. That’s all. It is genuinely free-riding.

Chinese and American flags flying together

But then NATO is a large part of why Russia is a “threat”. The expansion of NATO, which Bush Sr. promised Gorbachev would not happen, is a large part of why Russia has armed up.

It’s not clear that NATO should even exist. Its purpose was to resist the Warsaw Pact and the USSR, neither of which exist. Russia has a lot of nukes, and is relatively strong militarily, but it is no USSR and has no grand alliance facing NATO. It is not a threat unless terribly mismanaged. (Which, I suppose, it has been.)

Disband NATO. Let the Europeans take care of their own defense, or lay prostate before the Russians as they choose.

Japan is a trickier proposition. What American military presence there does is simple enough: It prevents Japan from needing its own nuclear weapons. The same is true of American bases in South Korea. Leave and those two countries have to nuclearize or become Chinese satrapies (and Japan will need a much larger navy).

It’s also worth noting that the US didn’t start protecting “Japan’s oil.” The US needed foreign oil too; it is only recently, under Obama, that the US has again reached petrocarbon self-sufficiency and is able to say, “We’re protecting other people’s oil.”

WWII was won by the powers who had access to more oil. Generals and admirals at the time understood the war was, to a large extent, about oil.

America may not need foreign oil now, but it did for decades and that is why it protected maritime oil trade.

In general, however, a US withdrawal from its forward bases will be a good thing. A rebalancing of trade will also be a good thing, though it will hurt as it happens (Trump is not doing it well). Deliberately offshoring and outsourcing the US (and Britain’s) industrial base led, more or less directly, to Trump and other social ills. It created a group of people who have lost for 40 to 50 years. Their parents had better lives. They had better lives. They know it. You cannot lie to them with BS statistics and pretend otherwise.

So they are willing to vote for and support anyone who seems like they will wreck a system which doesn’t serve them. Maybe what happens will be worse, but what’s happening right now is shit.

This is not contradicted by Trump’s support from red-state elites. They are also scared, because they also know their situation is precarious and that power and wealth has flowed away from them. And they rule over Hell. It isn’t always better to reign in Hell.

So the world is changing. It was changing before Trump: The Trans-Pacific Partnership was intended to be a trade bloc AGAINST China.

Note carefully Stoller’s hostility to China. It is constant. The American elite is finally reorienting. They don’t see Russia as a primary threat. They’re moving away from caring about the Middle East as they now have enough oil of their own and see a post-oil future coming. They know the rising great/super power is China.

They want to reorient their alliances against China. The price of keeping NATO will be keeping China OUT. When Germany said they wanted to do more business with China, Stoller was angry and said it was an argument against NATO. No Huawei, no China.

The world is very likely to divide into trade blocs–probably two, maybe three.

China rises. The US moves to protect its position.

Great power politics continue, as they ever have.

There is no end to history, save an end to humans. Only fools ever thought so.

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This Concern About Trump Forcing the US Military to Commit War Crimes Is Beyond Farcical

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On March 4, 2016

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Look. When Iraq was invaded, the US Army committed the exact same war crime for which most Nazis were hung at Nuremburg. The US attacked a country which offered the US no threat.

The only defenses are the “Good German” defense and the “We didn’t know” argument (really the “I couldn’t be bothered to actually pay attention” argument). Or, perhaps, the “They keep us in a cage and feed us propaganda argument.”

But Iraq was a war crime. Once in Iraq, the US military deliberately targeted civilians, engaged in torture, and so on.

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Are people seriously wringing their hands about the prospect of Trump “making” the US military commit torture, and killing the families of its enemies, as if the US has not already done both?

Oh yes, hitting all those weddings and funerals with drones wasn’t “meant” to kill civilian members of the family. No, sir. It just happened to.

Over and over and over again.

Trump is only tearing off the pretense. If the US military revolts against his orders, it will not be because of what he is ordering, but because he does not leave them a fig-leaf pretense of honor, and because internal factions want to take him down, not because they give one fig about committing war crimes.

Trump’s crime is his refusal to veil his monstrosity with hypocrisy.

 

Military Effectiveness: ISIS, Taliban, Hezbollah

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On June 16, 2014

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I think it’s worth emphasizing that what we’ve seen over the past 30 years is a revolution in military affairs.  New model militaries have arisen which are capable of fighting Western armies to a draw in irregular warfare, or even defeating them on the battlefield (Hezbollah v. Israel.)  It’s not that guerrilla warfare wasn’t effective before (ask the Americans in Vietnam), it’s how stunningly cheap it has become and how brutally effective at area denial and attrition warfare.

People completely underestimate the importance of the IED.  With IEDs the cost for occupation soars, and entire areas of a country can be  made no-go zones except for large groups of troops.

But just as bad is the cost-effectiveness.  Western militaries are brutally costly.  Islamic “militias” are cheap.  The Taliban runs on blackmail and drugs, ISIS runs, to a large extent, on donations from rich Muslims along with some state support.  These armies cost peanuts compared to the US or British or Israeli military.  Nothing.  And they are capable, at the least, of tying down Western militaries for years, bleeding them white and eventually winning.  Hezbollah is capable of defeating, in battle, what was (before Hezbollah proved otherwise) widely considered one of the most effective militaries in the world.

Next we have the “won’t take casualties” issue.  Americans just cannot get this, nor can most Western countries. If you are occupation troops, your lives do not come first.  It is better to lose a few troops than kill innocent people in tribal societies. You kill one innocent, and a whole pile of people now hate your guts. Even if they don’t do anything personally, the provide the support the insurgents need to operate.

It is also true that in many military operations the willingness to take losses makes you more effective. Again, Americans just do not get this.  They’re all focused on “making the other guy die for his country.”  It doesn’t always work like that.

The rise of blanket surveillance is a direct response to the last fifteen years.  It also is working less and less well.  ISIS just does not use phones or the internet.  Hezbollah built its own comm network to avoid interception.  This issue is one that solves itself very quickly: people who use phone or the internet get dead.

This has led, most particularly in the case of Hezbollah, to the rise of the secret state: where members of Hezbollah’s military don’t even tell their family members.  If Israel doesn’t know you’re in the military, they can’t assassinate you. More importantly, they can’t drop a bomb on your family and kill your kids, parents and wife.

The willingness to die is complimented by recruitment.  Americans keep thinking they can assassinate their way to victory.  They can’t.  In any actual effective organization, lower level people can fill the slot above them, and the slot above that.  A strong ideology, and strong doctrine means that leaders are replaceable.  Western leaders don’t believe that because as a class they are narcissists, who think that leaders are something super-special.  Almost no leaders are actually geniuses, for every Steve Jobs or Rommel, there are a hundred CEOS or Generals who are just effective drones.  They don’t matter.  Any reasonably bright person with a bit of experience could run their company or army corp just as well and almost certainly better.  (Canadian troops were amongst the most effective in WWI in part because they weren’t professionals. So they did what worked.)

Western societies are hard to run  precisely because we refuse to actually fix our problems.  Temporizing, “managing” is hard.  Fixing problems is a lot easier.  I know, again, that most people don’t believe this, because they don’t remember ever living in a country that actually tried to fix problems, and have never worked for a company that wasn’t dysfunctional, but it is so true.

So the West uses assassination and highly expensive troops who don’t want to die and extensive surveillance.  And the various Islamic militias, on budgets that aren’t even shoestring, survive and grow stronger.  They are evolving: getting smarter all the time.  They are Darwinian organizations: if you screw up, you die.

A military doctrine which is hundreds of times more expensive than its main competitor has problems.  In general, in military affairs, effectiveness is more important than efficiency.  But if your effectiveness doesn’t actually let you win, in the sense of making it so your enemies stop fighting, then efficiency will start to run against you.

The West is not unaware of this: drones are cheaper than planes, for example.  Ground combat robots, which the army is working on hard, may be effectively cheaper than troops, as well as having the advantage of requiring fewer troops, meaning less danger to the elites and more likely to fire in the case of a revolution.

Finally, I note again, that I do not expect drones and the new ground combat robots (about 10 years out) to remain tools of the powerful for all that long.  Competent technicians will be able to make home brew models fairly effectively and quickly.

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