Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Also, too.

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

What fresh hell is this?

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Not all heroes wear capes.

Han shot first.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

Too inconsequential to be sued

Women: They Get Shit Done

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

How has Obama failed you today?

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Word salad with all caps

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

This is a big f—–g deal.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

Good luck with your asparagus.

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Military

Grifters Gonna Grift Open Thread: Trump Publicly Offers to Rent Out American Troops

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… which is the most generous possible framing here. Perhaps he hasn’t actually sold American soldiers’ lives to his Saudi bankers — yet. Trump says a lot of stuff that’s ‘just marketing’, after all. Maybe he’s just doing a little advertising, in case anybody in the area’s looking for some well-equipped military muscle…

Elsewhere…

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Pertinent Read: “The First Woman Scholar to Translate ‘The Art of War’ Vastly Improves It”

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If pressed to extract a single overriding ‘message’ from the text, it would be this:
Perform your calculations for everything liable to calculation, but also think very deeply about what people are capable of. — (from the Amazon link)

This might be the book that finally convinces me to download Kindle, even though I find reading more than two pages of text on a screen exhausting:

… Michael Nylan, a professor of early Chinese history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a few academic books of history and criticism, has completed a fresh translation of The Art of War — fresh both for the fact that she is the first woman scholar to do so and also because she has worked to move the reader’s focus away from the book’s brute military elements, which comprise only two of the 13 chapters, and toward its psychological and peacemaking ones…

GEN: How is your interpretation of “The Art of War” fundamentally different from previous ones?
Michael Nylan: The people who’ve been interested in The Art of War are, of course, not only men, but [most] tend to be interested in the war part of it when, actually, The Art of War is pretty much an anti-war treatise. It’s only if you haven’t been able to outmaneuver your enemies by various means and you’re attacked that The Art of War will tell you how to conduct a war as ruthlessly as possible — but that’s about two chapters’ worth out of 13, and most of the rest is far more interesting…

Throughout the book, there’s unusual concern for those at the lowest rungs of society. There’s unusual concern that you don’t kill innocent civilians. There’s unusual concern that you consult people as widely as possible and that when you have to calculate going to war, you do so in the hopes that you will be killing as small a number as possible…

What’s a significant, specific divergence between your translation and previous ones?
For one, many of the previous translations treat it more or less like Machiavelli — all about deception and duplicity when, actually, deception and duplicity are pretty much [confined to] a single chapter that is usually translated as “spies.” For instance, the same word that means “spies” means “a gap that has been introduced,” so a lot of that chapter should not specifically be about spies but rather about how to introduce a division within the enemy’s population while keeping no division within the home forces…

Was your translation a collaborative process?
I had three students fairly well along in their PhD program, all of whom had a specific interest in Sun Tzu, so we formed a little working group. Since one of them had done two tours in Iraq, he brought quite a bit of expertise that the rest of us lacked. I believe that none of us, no matter how smart, is sufficient unto a good text. People will have insights that would simply escape me…

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Iran’s Response: Unconventional and Most Likely Embarrassing

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Cole muses:

Given the asymmetry in the types of military power between the US and Iran, as well as the ability to wield it, Iran’s response to yesterday’s strike that killed Suleimani and Muhandis, and tonight’s strike near Taiji (Taiji is where Abu Ghraib is for those wondering about where Taiji is – it is the northernmost of the agricultural districts, or qadas, that ring Baghdad and separate Baghdad Province from the surrounding provinces), will undoubtedly be unconventional. But it is important to keep in mind that an unconventional response doesn’t mean an unconventional use of military power. The Iranians, like all states, have other elements of national power that they can leverage and use to respond. We refer to these elements of national power as the DIME-FIL (Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Legal). The Iranians also have a well developed and effective cyber operations capacity. And the cyber domain, the tools used to operate effectively in it, and the cyber operations themselves are all very effective ways of utilizing the non-military forms of power.

As we consider what the Iranians might do, we need to move beyond the low hanging fruit of attacks by their proxies on US and our Coalition partners in the region. Or attacks on the petroleum sector in our regional partners that would spike oil and gas prices. I’m not suggesting these won’t happen, I’m sure there will be some of them, but these are obvious and we can plan for them, to manage them, and to mitigate them. There are also less obvious targets and less obvious weapons and tools that the Iranians can use to strike back.

This past fall DHS, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Arlington, VA Police Department participated in a table top simulation, dubbed Operation Blackout, focusing on the 2020 election. They were the Blue Team (the good guys). The opposing force, or Red Team (the bad guys), were a group of white hat hackers. The Red Team were not permitted to hack the actual election in the simulation, they couldn’t hack machines, voting systems, anything like that. So what did they do? They hacked everything else. And, as a result, within the simulated world of the exercise they created so much chaos that martial law was declared by the person on the Blue Team playing the president in the exercise and the 2020 election, within that notional world, was cancelled. You can read the Red Team’s write up of the exercise here.

In early 2018 I prepared a strategic analysis on Russia’s active measures campaign. I wrote:

Putin’s cyberwarfare has also targeted actual American infrastructure. Russian for cover officials have been tracked mapping US critical physical infrastructure, such as the communication and power transmission grid. This was in support of a cyberwarfare campaign to infiltrate and compromise another important American center of gravity: the US power generation and transmission grid. Putin’s ability to weaponize information and the platforms where American’s get their information combined with his ability to bring down all or portions of the US power grid should have every national security professional very, very, very worried. Putin’s cyberwarriors have already tried to create a response through planting false social media stories of actual fake news reports about a foreign terrorist attack on the US energy sector, an ebola outbreak, and a riot in response to a police shooting. All of which never happened. Imagine what happens when Putin starts turning parts of the US power grid off during extreme weather events while at the same time he’s spreading disinformation made to look like actual news reports or official municipal, state, and/or Federal responses to the disaster he’s created. This is the threat we face.

Now imagine what happens when the Iranians start doing the things that I described above or creating the type of chaos that the Red Team created in the 2020 election simulation. And not in or just in New York or DC or LA or Seattle or Miami or Atlanta or Chicago, but in more suburban and rural areas. In red states that have no where near the state and local capabilities to respond. Imagine what happens when they hack into banks and the financial service sector and start stealing financial information and manipulating the markest. Imagine what happens when they release the Signals Intercepts they have of US elected and appointed officials, as well as those of people running major corporations or the news networks and newspapers.

And this is where the embarrassment comes in. If you want to strike back at the President, you do so in a way that gets under his skin. Skin that he demonstrates daily on his Twitter feed is exceedingly thin. The President is noted for spending hours speaking to world leaders, his outside advisors and friends on an unsecured phone from the White House residence each night, or from one of his properties when he goes to Mar a Lago or plays golf at his clubs, presents a target rich environment all on his own. The Iranians have a target rich environment given the President’s well documented poor Op-Sec and Info-Sec practices. The Iranians have a target rich environment given Rudy Giuliani’s poor Op-Sec and Info-Sec practices. The Iranians have a target rich environment because Jared Kushner communicates with Muhammed bin Salman on WhatsApp, which is  not secure. The Iranians have a target rich environment in the largely wide open US information and cyber domains. And they have the ability to exploit weaknesses in those domains to leverage power, other than military power, across the DIME-FIL. And they will leverage those capabilities to wage an unconventional war against the US and one of the strategic objectives will be to embarrass the President. And that embarrassment will be both an end in itself and done to goad him into badly overreacting out of anger, which will then provide the Iranians with further opportunities to wage their unconventional campaign.

Open thread!

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Breaking: The US Has Struck Against the Iranian Militia In Iraq Killing Both Ktaib Hezbullah’s Leader and Quds Force Commanding General Qassem Suleimani

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I cannot emphasize enough how significant this is! Major General Suleimani was not just Iran’s point man in Iraq, he was also coordinating Iran’s proxy forces in Syria and Lebanon. When Suleimani arrived in Syria in 2013 he took control of the theater on behalf of Iran, its Syrian client Assad, and Assad’s other benefactor Putin, which is what initially turned around the fortunes of Assad’s forces. Suleimani was, arguably, the best strategist in the region who was native to the Middle East. Dexter Filkins wrote a long profile of him in 2013 for The New Yorker.

Reuters is now reporting that the US is responsible for the strike that killed Suleimani and Muhandis.

What we don’t know yet, what we will not know until they inform us through their actual response, is what the response from Iran will be. For that we have to wait.

Update at 8:50 PM EST

As I’ve now had a bit of time to digest the news, here’s a bit more developed initial analysis:

My initial take regarding the killing of Suleimani is that this decapitates Iran’s capabilities in the Twelver Shi’a sphere of influence they were trying to build from Iran through Iraq and Syria into Lebanon in the short term. Suleimani was their theater commander, specifically coordinating the proxies in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. It is also my professional opinion that he was the best strategist in the region who was native to the region. So a major blow to Iran’s, as well as their proxies, immediate capability. Suleimani was also very powerful back in Iran. There were mutterings he might succeed Khameini as Supreme Leader despite not being an ayatollah.

This strike will also enrage the Iranians and provide the Iranian government with an internal opening for influence and propaganda to rally support for the Iranian state among a domestic Iranian population that may be wavering. So it will likely retard reform in general and attempts at democratization in specific in the short to medium term. Especially if there is immediate Iranian response and/or escalation to today’s attack and a US response to Iran’s actions that can be used by the Iranian government to reinforce its standing with the Iranian people.

Finally, I don’t see why anyone in the Iranian government would talk to anyone in the US government at this point while the current administration is in place. The President, his senior officials, and surrogates have made it clear that they really aren’t interested in talking. Last week Putin announced  that he’s not going to go along with the sanctions regime against Iran any longer, which further reinforces to Iran that they don’t need to talk to us as they have Putin to leverage as a patron. I also expect that Iran will sell their oil to the Chinese because Xi could care less about our sanctions. There is no way to squeeze the Iranians economically as the government is impervious to the pain and has ways to sell its oil to ease that pain. You can find my take on why making war in Iran would be strategic malpractice unless we were prepared for total war and even then it isn’t a good idea at West Point’s Modern War Institute.

Open thread!

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The Assault on US Embassy Baghdad Has Ended. For Now…

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Over the past couple of days Iranian backed Shi’a militia in Iraq, which describe themselves as Islamic Resistance, have attacked the heavily fortified US Embassy in Baghdad in what appears to be an attempt to besiege or occupy it or parts of it. It is important to keep in mind that US Embassy Baghdad is a large and heavily fortified compound. Perhaps the most heavily fortified diplomatic compound that we or anyone else has anywhere. The damage that was done by Ktaib Hezbullah and Nujabaa was largely done to buildings and structures around the perimeter. That doesn’t make the assault on the facility any less frightening or dangerous for the US diplomatic and Interagency personnel that live and work within the fortified embassy.

The Washington Post’s Baghdad Bureau’s Mustafa Salim is now reporting that the assault and attempted siege or occupation is over.

There are two outstanding questions: 1) what happens now? and 2) why did this happen. To answer the first, the quick reaction forces of the 100 Marines that were sent midday yesterday and the initial quick reaction companies from 82nd Airborne Division that were mobilized shortly after that are en route. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team/82nd Airborne Division (3BCT/82ndABN – the Panther Brigade) is the US’s designated rapid reaction brigade, but it is partially deployed to Afghanistan right now, so it is unclear just how much of the BCT is available if they have to deploy an entire brigade combat team. I would also expect the State Department’s Regional Security Officer (RSO) is conducting crisis action and contingency planning, as well as wargaming scenarios with his or her staff, as well as with counterparts from the Department of Defense. I expect that a Non-combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) contingency plan is being prepared in case the assault on the embassy is restarted.

The second answer is provided by Salim:

What Salim is reporting is that the Iranian theater leadership decided that the US was responsible for the emerging Iraqi displeasure with the Iraqi government, its ties to Iran, and to Iran’s presence and actions in Iraq. This displeasure also appears to once again be breaking along tribal and sectarian lines. One of the major ongoing problems in Iraq that leads to instability is not just the tribal or sectarian divide, but the divide between the Iraqis that never went into exile and the Iraqis that did and came back. Especially those Iraqi Shi’a that went into exile in Iran, came back, and have been running the government since the US’ Coalition Provisional Authority empowered them to form the majority coalitions in successive governments. I spent almost six months conducting between 40 to 50 interviews with both Sunni and Shi’a tribal and religious leaders (often the same people as many sheikhs are also imams) across central Iraq in the summer and fall of 2008. With the exception of some of the sub-sheiks or sheiks of very small, rural tribes, all of the sheikhs and imams I interviewed, including and often especially the Shi’a ones, made it very clear that they did not like and did not trust the Shi’a political leaders that went into exile in Iran and had been empowered by being given control of the Government of Iraq (GOI). It was during this time that then Prime Minister Maliki, leading a coalition government with a Shi’a majority made up of leaders, like Maliki, who had gone into exile in Iran, began to telegraph that he was going to move against the Sawha (Awakenings movement) and Sons of Iraq (the tribal militias we were training and partnering with). These tensions have never been resolved, have begun to bubble over again, and Iran decided it was a threat to its influence in Iraq and needed to change the narrative. And the collateral damage from the retaliatory air strike this past week provided the Iranians with the opening they needed.

Now we wait to see if cooler heads can and will prevail.

Open thread!

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He’ll Kill Again

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Long story in the NY Times about the SEALS who testified against Eddie Gallagher:

The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.

“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”

Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.

They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.

“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.

Gallagher, of course, claims that he is innocent, and that he is being framed and that he had the odd luck to be attached to the ***ONLY*** SEAL team in history to be composed of a bunch of wimps. I wish I was kidding:

“My first reaction to seeing the videos was surprise and disgust that they would make up blatant lies about me, but I quickly realized that they were scared that the truth would come out of how cowardly they acted on deployment,” Chief Gallagher said in a statement issued through his lawyer.

“I felt sorry for them that they thought it necessary to smear my name, but they never realized what the consequences of their lies would be. As upset as I was, the videos also gave me confidence because I knew that their lies would never hold up under real questioning and the jury would see through it. Their lies and N.C.I.S.’s refusal to ask hard questions or corroborate their stories strengthened my resolve to go to trial and clear my name.”

MMhhmm.

Two things. First, it is not in the least bit surprising that Trump has chosen to rush to this guy’s defense, because Trump’s view of the world and the military is so perverse that he really does think the military is composed of nothing more than butchers and murderers. Additionally, Trump loves to be surrounded by loudmouth bully boys like Gallagher, Lewandowski, his bigmouth longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller, and who can forget how tough Michael Cohen once acted. He, himself, is such a wimp that he compensates by surrounding himself with what he fancies to be tough guys.

Second, if what all these SEALS are saying about Gallagher is true, and I find no reason to disbelieve them, then this is not the last we have heard of Gallagher. He will kill again. It may be his wife, it may be a neighbor, it may be someone who cut him off in traffic, or it may be some person of color who looked at him funny or had the temerity to wear a head scarf in his general vicinity.

Like all loaded guns that are bandied about carelessly, he will go off again. It’s only a matter of when and who the unfortunate victim will be.

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Young Idiots & Their Enablers Open Thread: Circle Gaming

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We… are… SPARTANS! (But the no-homo kind, okay?)

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Open Thread: Trading SPACE FARCE! for Paid Parental Leave

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But seriously… I doubt it will happen, because the Repubs don’t want a bunch of ‘low-level bureaucrats’ (federal employees) to get ‘freebies paid from our taxes’, especially right before Christmas (because they can’t enjoy their holiday unless they know other people are suffering). But I would happily trade an expansion of paid family leave in return for, let’s be honest, years of scheduling Very Serious Hearings about a sixth branch of the military. The Washington Post is a good guide here, IMO, because they’re reporting on what they consider a local pocketbook issue:

… The deal is part of a defense authorization bill that is slated to pass this month. If consummated, the agreement could mark one of the biggest deals President Trump has cut with Congress. It would secure a massive expansion of benefits for federal workers, something Democrats have long sought, in exchange for a realignment of the U.S. military that Trump has sought to secure as part of his legacy…

One Democratic congressional aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the parties are “nearing agreement on a final deal.” The package could be voted on as early as next week, the aide said.

If it is approved, the extension of paid family leave to federal workers would represent a major benefit to more than 2 million federal civilian workers, who are only eligible for unpaid leave under federal law.

It would mark a reversal of sorts for the White House, which has sought to strip pay and benefits from federal workers since Trump took office in 2017. Instead, it would mark one of the biggest extensions of a new work benefit for the federal workforce in recent history…

Trump has become increasingly fixated on Space Force as his administration faces the House impeachment inquiry, according to one senior administration official. But it has not been clear if House Democrats would approve of his request.

The Pentagon has already reestablished a Space Command that will be headed by a four-star general. But the Space Force, if approved, would stand up an organization to train and equip specialized forces whose mission would be to accelerate the country’s response to the militarization of space…

A senior defense official with knowledge of Space Force discussions said Thursday that the Air Force convened a planning task force months ago and is weighing “myriad” issues, including how service members would be transferred from the Air Force to the Space Force, what Space Force uniforms would look like, and what rank structure would be used…

Still, there are a variety of more complicated issues that will take the Pentagon time to hammer out, the official said. They include logistical issues, such as where Space Force headquarters will be housed in the Pentagon, and practical ones, such as whether the Space Force will have its own security forces on the ground or rely on other branches of service.

For federal employees, the deal represents not just a rare new benefit, but a victory in a three-year war with the Trump administration that from the start was suspicious of the career bureaucracy of 2.1 million employees.

The White House has gone to war with unions that represent federal workers and won. In recent months it has gotten reprieves from the courts over a union challenge to a series of White House executive orders designed to weaken labor’s hand in collective bargaining.

The administration has slashed long-established benefits such as telework in many agencies and taken steps to more aggressively fire workers it deems poor performers. And while Trump has proposed a raise for the workforce for next year, he did not want an increase this year until Congress intervened, demanding it under the terms of a budget agreement that ended the partial government shutdown…

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Some Context on the Naval Air Station Pensacola Shooting

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Some Context on the Naval Air Station Pensacola Shooting

NBC/MSNBC is now reporting that the shooter at Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola is a Saudi national. Which will, of course, turn a tragedy into an absolute shitshow.

I wanted to just take a moment and provide some context here for our readers and commenters who don’t have a lot of exposure to the US military education system. The US military education system, referred to as Professional Military Education (PME), governs how we prepare the force across all three cohorts (officer, enlisted, and warrant) and across the scope of one’s career in the military. At the Joint level – encompassing all four services – the controlling instructions can be found in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction (CJCSI) 1800.01E, better known as the OPMEP (Officers Professional Military Education Policy and CJCSI 1805.0B, the Enlisted Professional Military Education Policy referred to as the EPMEP. Each Service has their own Service specific guidelines and policies, which are further broken down by branch, military occupation specialty, and/or functional area and are supposed to be nested within the Joint policies. US military personnel spend significant parts of their careers, no matter how long or short, in the schoolhouse or training center. A significant part of generating the force is educating them, training them, and running them through exercises as experiential learning. We’re also supposed to be encouraging them to do individual self development, but that usually gets lip service rather than incentivized. Overall, PME is something the military really does well – it invests in educating and training and then continuing to educate and train the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines throughout the course of their career arcs. This is largely a function of scale as the force, across all the Services, is large enough to have significant portions in the schoolhouse or in training without compromising readiness or operational capability.

Part of US PME includes multinational training. There are several reasons for this. One is that the US military is intended to operate within a JIIM – Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, and Multinational – environment. So we want our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines exposed to our allies and partners through PME, as well as operationally. But we also want our allies and partners military personnel to be exposed to how we prepare our forces and how we operate. And this means that large numbers of foreign nation military personnel are in the US attending PME programs alongside our own forces. Another reason for doing this, especially at the higher education levels (Senior Leader Colleges/War College, strategist schools, Command & General Staff Schools, and, in some cases even at the Service academies), is to try to socialize these foreign military personnel to US Civil-Military (CIV-MIL) norms. It is also to have personnel from opposing sides of conflicts have to learn and socialize together across their careers. The goals here are aspirational. That these foreign officers, especially from states without strong, or even any, liberal democratic systems will internalize some of our CIV-MIL norms, take them home, and when they’re senior enough actually put them into effect if the opportunity presents itself. It is also to create and foster relationships and friendships that survive the course of study, so that if a conflict looks like it will break out, potential adversaries might call their former classmates and try to deescalate. Like I said, very aspirational. Also, somewhat quintessentially American.

Almost all of these foreign military personnel attending US military PME are covered under the International Military Engagement and Training (IMET) Program. The who, what, and why of IMET are:

Purpose:

The goals of IMET are to:

Train future leaders

Create a better understanding of the United States

Establish a rapport between the U.S. military and the country’s military to build alliances for the future

Enhance interoperability and capabilities for joint operation

Focus on professional military education

Allow countries to use their national funds to receive a reduced cost for other DoD education and training

Provide English Language Training assistance

Who:

Secretary of State determines which countries will have programs.  Secretary of Defense executes the program.

Funding:

Annual appropriation

The now identified shooter at NAS-Pensacola as a Saudi national was most likely in training there under the IMET program as a pilot. And that’s how a Saudi national would most likely be assigned to Naval Air Station Pensacola. The foreign nationals in the IMET program are usually selected by their own countries and there are usually no significant problems as they’re vetted by both their own governments and by the US military. But like everything else involving humans, you do get the occasional issue, though usually nothing like what happened this morning. Sometimes a coup or other change of government will happen and we’ll have foreign military personnel as students that can’t really go home because they were sent by the previous regime and they and their families’ lives are at risk. Sometimes you just get a knucklehead. My second year at USAWC, one of the foreign officers in the resident course got himself into a serious gambling problem, went AWOL trying to run for the Canadian border, got picked up by law enforcement, and ultimately wound up escorted back to his own country by two senior law enforcement officials sent by his government to babysit him. The point here is that these aren’t really problems with the IMET program itself, they’re individual problems that arise because the people in the program are humans. And humans do all sorts of stupid things.

I expect that regardless of the actual motivations of the shooter in Pensacola this morning, this will provide further fodder for the neo-nationalists and neo-fascists that have been able to capture the US’s immigration system under the current administration. What is most likely a tragedy in human terms will be capitalized on by a bunch of xenophobic, racist, white supremacists to push their agenda of whitening America as quickly as possible. And, like everything else that gets in the way of achieving their goals, the IMET program is likely to be in for a rough time as a result of this morning’s shooting. Which is a shame, because it is an excellent program that, while aspirational in a lot of its goals, provides real value for the US, its allies, and its partners.

Two final notes:

  1. Firearms are not authorized on Naval Air Station-Pensacola, or any other base, with a couple of exceptions. Military Police, Shore Patrol, and DOD and Service Police are armed as part of their duty assignments. All other Service issued arms are secured in an arms room/armory and can only be checked out for a legitimate training reason and under the supervision of an Armory Officer/Armorer. Those personnel residing on post are allowed to register their personal arms with the Provost Marshal on post. Those arms are also secured in an arms room/armory and can only be checked out under the supervision of an Armory Officer/Armorer. They must be unloaded and secured in locked containers when this is done. We don’t know how the shooter got his firearm on to post this morning, so beware of speculation about how this happened. I have some thoughts, but I’m not going to speculate at this time.
  2. There is always a spike in homicides, especially domestic/familial/intimate partner and workplace homicides, as well as suicides during the holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Years. This happens every year. There is a robust criminological, sociological, and psychological literature trying to understand and explain it. But it is a very real effect. So expect to see increased incidences of violence between now and the first week of January 2020.

Open thread!

Full disclosure: During my four years assigned as the Cultural Advisor at USAWC I directly supervised as the faculty advisor (frontline supervisor) five foreign officers. I also directly supervised as the research advisor (equivalent to a thesis advisor) ten foreign officers. And I served as the faculty sponsor of two foreign officers. These officers ranged in rank from lieutenant colonel to major general.

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Meanwhile in Ukraine

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While everyone is focused on all the President’s, his political appointees’, his personal attorney’s, and the variety of post-Soviet state oligarchs’/post-Soviet state mobsters’, and various other riffraffs’ ongoing attempts to screw around with and screw over Ukraine until President Zelensky announces an investigation into the Bidens, which he’s not going to do, and Guiliani and the various post-Soviet state oligarchs/post-Soviet state mobsters he’s working with to shake down the Ukrainian natural gas industry, life actually goes on in Ukraine. And that life is one where part of Ukraine has been scarfed up by Vladimir Putin and another part has been invaded by Putin. And, as a result, Ukraine is at war with Russia in order to preserve its territorial integrity.

As a result of all of this, President Zelensky has learned some hard lessons in his short time in office. His views below are just one of those lessons.

I don’t trust anyone at all. I’ll tell you honestly. Politics is not an exact science. That’s why in school I loved mathematics. Everything in mathematics was clear to me. You can solve an equation with a variable, with one variable. But here it’s only variables, including the politicians in our country. I don’t know these people. I can’t understand what dough they’re made of. That’s why I think nobody can have any trust. Everybody just has their interests.

He also knows that at least for right now, he’s largely on his own despite the US’s international agreement obligation to preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

“If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us,” he said. “I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo.”

Ukraine has just reached an unfortunate milestone, for lack of a better term.

Since the beginning of the fighting in the Donbass, human casualties from explosive objects amount to more than a thousand people. Mine killed 300 civilians, including 27 children. About it reports ArmyInform  with reference to management of ecological safety and mine action of the Ministry of Defense.

According to preliminary estimates, the area of ​​areas contaminated with mines and explosive objects is about 7 thousand square meters. km controlled areas and approximately 9 thousand square meters. km of occupied territories.

Infrastructures are in a critical condition because sometimes they cannot be accessed through shells and improvised explosives.

This is a humanitarian nightmare and is going to take decades to fix even if a ceasefire was put in place immediately and was quickly followed by the withdrawal of Russian and Russian proxy forces and the reestablishment of Ukrainian sovereignty over the occupied territories in Donbass.

This is the actual effects on the Ukrainian citizenry not only of the occupation and the war, but the mine fields:

Here’s more from Christopher Miller at Buzzfeed (emphasis mine):

When he’s not engaged in gun battles with Russian-led forces on Ukraine’s eastern front line, Stas, a scruffy 26-year-old soldier, likes to cozy up in his bunker and brush up on his English skills by watching Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live. He cracks up at Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of President Donald Trump.

Watching political satire on American TV — when he’s able to get a strong enough signal on the battlefield to access YouTube — is also how Stas learned that Trump had frozen $391 million in US security aid meant for the Ukrainian armed forces over the summer. The news made him angry. The fighting was hot at the time, and he and his fellow soldiers were stuck with mostly crappy, old gear.

“Look at this. It’s old and falling apart,” he complained of his Ukrainian government–issued bulletproof vest in accented English. It was barely stitched together and slouching on one side. “It’s a piece of shit.”

There’s one thing Stas and the soldiers in Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade positioned in the village of Novooleksandrivka do have, which they say has helped them spot enemy soldiers who creep within grenade-throwing range of their trenches at night: a pair of US-made night vision sights.

The only problem? They don’t fit on the Ukrainian rifles.

He explained that “they would definitely be more effective if we had them on our rifles,” which is impossible without a special adapter. He demonstrated how he has to hold the sight in one hand, pick a target, lower the device from his eye, and try to remember where he was looking as he aims and fires his weapon. Despite all this, an extra pair or two would be good, he said.

He wondered: Would his brigade have gotten at least another sight if the security aid hadn’t been held up? If only Americans knew how much the equipment would help…

“Nobody in your country knows what’s happening here,” Stas continued, waving his arms in frustration. “They don’t know how we are fighting for our lives with almost nothing.”

Fought for more than five years in trenches cut through some of Europe’s most fertile farmland, Russia’s war in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas has killed around 14,000 people and brought under its control a chunk of a territory larger than the state of New Jersey. Yet — despite it being fought with $1.6 billion of US help in the form of military aid and training since 2014 — the war had largely been forgotten before it was catapulted into the headlines amid the House impeachment inquiry against Trump.
“While they were playing with our aid, I wonder, did they know we were dying out here?” asked Oleksandr, a sergeant in the 14th Mechanized Brigade who goes by the call sign “kuvyrok,” or “somersault.” As we crept through trenches outside the village of Krymske, 40 miles northwest of Stas’s position, careful to keep our heads down and out of Russian snipers’ sights, Oleksandr said at least two soldiers were killed at the position over the summer.

According to statistics from the Ukrainian military, at least 46 soldiers have been killed since July 18, when word spread throughout the Trump administration that the president had secretly frozen aid for Ukraine. Around 19 of those deaths came during the window of time in which the aid was delayed. While there’s no way of tying those deaths directly to the lack of new US aid at the front line, more than two dozen Ukrainian soldiers — located at four fighting positions, a tank base, and a military hospital — told me they were disappointed by the news. Their morale suffered, and they felt vulnerable and abandoned by their biggest supporter.

The soldiers, whom I met over the course of a week this month while traveling along the snaking 250-mile front line in eastern Ukraine, painted a clear picture of just how important US military assistance is for Ukraine in its war against Russia. The soldiers spoke on the condition that their surnames not be used for security reasons. In what many described as a David-and-Goliath-like fight, they shared several stories about how the US aid has helped level the battlefield and stop the larger and more powerful Russia from grabbing more of their land.

They also said that any aid freeze — even a temporary one — jeopardizes not only themselves but perhaps the very future of Ukraine.

There is much more at the link.

14,000 Ukrainians – Soldier and civilian alike – have been killed in Ukraine’s attempt to resist Russia’s incursion into Donbass. And to establish enough of a position of strength so that Ukrainian officials can negotiate a ceasefire and peace agreement that maintains Ukraine’s territorial integrity and gets Crimea back as well. That isn’t going to happen without the US backing it up. Which means it isn’t going to happen until, at least, January 2021 and despite the US’s international obligations to preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity. What the US would need to do today is much harder than it would have been in 2014 and in 2021 any response will be that much harder than it would be today. And throughout it all Ukrainians are dying – Soldiers and civilians – because Putin has decided that he gets to draw the borders of eastern Europe wherever he likes. And that cannot be allowed to stand. However, because Ukraine has now been turned into another partisan issue, just as trade, Israel, healthcare, education, climate change, and so many other issues, as long as there is a Republican president and/or at least one chamber of Congress in Republican hands, stepping up and doing the right thing for Ukraine, as well as for the rest of our European and NATO partners is going to be a very heavy lift. Because it is going to be a partisan lift.

When you see the domestic news reporting on Ukraine, where Ukraine is simply a sort of funny sounding part of the horserace coverage of domestic American politics, keep in mind that the real focus here should be Ukraine; should be on the fact that Ukraine has been invaded and been occupied for going on five years; should be on the fact that the US has an actual international obligation to safeguard Ukraine’s territorial integrity; and that it isn’t just another partisan football so the talking heads on the news shows have something to stroke their chins about.

Open thread!

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Daydream Believers Open Thread: One Step Forward

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We can’t change history, but we can (sometimes) stop lying about it. Per the Washington Post:

… On Wednesday, two Senate Democrats unveiled legislation to strip the Medals of Honor from the American soldiers who participated in the Wounded Knee massacre. The bill, known as the Remove the Stain Act, was announced Wednesday by Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.), and serves as the Senate equivalent of a House bill introduced this year.

In a statement, Warren said the bill was “a step toward righting wrongs against Native peoples.”…

The Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers at Wounded Knee have long been criticized as unjustified decorations for a lopsided massacre where little fighting occurred, and where evidence has pointed to many U.S. soldiers wounded by their own men rather than by Lakota Indians…

As the Medal of Honor gradually evolved to become the nation’s most rare and distinguished military award, Native Americans have fought to have them rescinded for participants in the massacre. In 2001, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe passed a resolution requesting the U.S. government revoke the medals. The National Congress of American Indians has issued resolutions dating back to 1997 that make the same request.

Later, in 2019, the NCAI issued another resolution that supported the House bill introduced by Reps. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), Denny Heck (D-Wash.) and Paul Cook (R-Calif.)…

Upon unveiling the new House legislation in June, Haaland said she hoped that it “shows the continued work and strength of the Native American people who have fought for over a century for the United States to acknowledge the genocide of our people that has taken place on this soil,” Stars and Stripes reported.

“We have a responsibility to tell the true story of the horrific Wounded Knee Massacre,” Merkley said in a statement on Wednesday. “We cannot whitewash or minimize the dark chapters of our history, but instead must remember, reflect on, and work to rectify them. The massacre of innocents could not be farther from heroism, and I hope this bill helps set the record straight.”

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: Florida (Thanksgiving) Man

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Cranky grandpa, like others of his ilk, gets hauled away from his comfort zone for the big media-friendly “family” holiday. (Hey, it’s not like anyone in his biological family was gonna miss him.) Kudos to his handlers, who seem to have succeeded in readjusting his meds to the point where he can, however briefly, perform well enough to excite the Media Village Idiots. Such as Politico, back to d/b/a Mr. Pierce’s Tiger Beat on the Potomac:

… It was a journey shrouded in more secrecy than usual even for a presidential trip into a war zone. And it merged the made-for-TV drama Trump savors with a military display he loves: the U.S. commander-in-chief on Thanksgiving, less than a year from the next election, surrounded by cheering troops in Afghanistan.

For a president who at times seems to be at war with his own military leaders, it was a celebration of America’s troops that a small circle of White House aides planned carefully for weeks to prevent leaks that could scuttle the trip…

This time, 12 of the 13 journalists who traveled with Trump — representing news wires, print and broadcast outlets — were picked up on the roof of a public parking garage near Joint Base Andrews just outside Washington and not even told where they were traveling until just before they arrived in Afghanistan. Cell phones, hotspots and any other devices emitting a signal were confiscated from everyone traveling on Air Force One — yes, even the president himself…

The president moved through the sprawling base in a 15-vehicle motorcade that included tan Toyotas with soldiers standing in the truck beds holding combat rifles. Trump was followed into each location by teams of heavily armed combat troops in fatigues, helmets and night-vision goggles.

[Just like a Tom Clancy movie, if Tom Clancy’s hero was a fat old man who can barely strut from his motorcade to his golf cart.]

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Late Night Open Thread: Clowns for the Clown Car God

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I *think* we can still joke about this, because Spicer doesn’t “look great on TV”, and Priebus hasn’t shown sufficient doglike loyalty to the Oval Office Occupant. As long as Pete Hegseth doesn’t want to give up his Fox News duties…

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DisOrder & UnDiscipline: An Out of Control E7, an Out of Control Fox & Friends Weekend Loud Mouth, and an Out of Order Chain of Command

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The Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, has accepted being terminated (no one told me you could ignore that sort of thing, but what do I know…). His resignation letter is below.

At this point it is unclear what actually has transpired with Secretary Spencer’s termination. The initial reporting was that he’d made an end run around Secretary of Defense Esper, which led Secretary Esper to ask the President to fire him. In this recounting of events, Secretary Spencer is accused of going to the President and ensuring him that if the President let the Naval Special Warfare review board convened by Rear Admiral (RADM) Green, commanding admiral of Naval Special Warfare, play out, then Secretary Spencer would ensure that Eddie Gallagher would retire shortly at the rank of E7, as a member of the SEAL community/with his trident, and with his full benefits.

All of this occurred after several days of reporting that Secretary Spencer and RADM Green had made it clear that if the review process regarding Gallagher remaining a SEAL, as well as three officers in his chain of command at the time of the crimes he’s alleged to have committed, was not allowed to play out, then they’d both resign. This was quickly followed by Secretary Spencer stating he’d never made this ultimatum. So if you’re confused, that isn’t surprising. Until the all too predictable leaks occur over the next several days to fill out the narrative, we won’t really know how this all went down.

We do, however, know that a major problem here is that the President is, as usual, not listening to the people he actually hires and/or promotes into the positions to advise him on issues and manage those issues for him. This leaves the President susceptible to influence by those with their own agendas. In this case Gallagher himself, as well as weekend Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth. Hegseth hosted Gallagher this morning on the Sunday weekend edition of A Blonde with Two Boobs on a Sofa, D/B/A Fox & Friends Weekend. Hegseth honorably served in the US Army National Guard for 11 years, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, earned the rank of major (O4), and has basically been influencing the President’s views on the US military and the VA from both his weekend perch at Fox, in private meetings, and on calls with the President on the President’s unsecured cell phone (Estonia, if you’re listening, and we know you are…) since the President began his campaign. During his appearance with Hegseth this morning, Gallagher publicly went after his chain of command, especially RADM Green, accusing him of being derelict in his duty by trying to suborn the clear orders and guidance of the President, as Commander in Chief of the US military, regarding Gallagher’s case.

I cannot express not only how irregular what I’ve just recounted is, but how BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE it is as well! Serving US military personnel, and to a lesser extent DOD and the Service civilians (civil servants) do not speak to and/or engage with the news media unless it has been approved by the Public Affairs Officer at their command. And they certainly don’t go on a cable news talk show program and publicly accuse their commanding officers of being derelict in their duty and insubordinate. If you were wondering if Gallagher was a disciplinary problem waiting to happen and a real impediment to good order and discipline, wonder no more. What he did this morning should dispel any doubt. And if you were Gallagher and trying to show the review board and the commanding admiral that you weren’t either or both of these things, going on Fox & Friends Weekend and making these statements is a really stupid way to demonstrate that you’re not a problem child and a shitbird.

Even before Gallagher made himself the poster boy for an out of control culture within the SEAL and Naval Special Warfare community, Rear Admiral Green had already begun a commander’s strategic initiative to try to understand the problems that have developed within the Naval Special Warfare community’s culture and develop specific ways and means to address and correct them. His initiative is inline with those of GEN Clarke, the Commanding General of US Special Operations Command, who has instituted a similar strategic review. GEN Clarke, as well as RADM Green and GEN Clarke’s other subordinates at the Army, Air Force, and Marine special operations commands are rightly concerned that the corrosive nature of war, especially a war in it’s 18th year, that is poorly defined at the strategic level, and that is overly reliant on Special Operations at the tactical and operational levels, has done major harm to America’s Special Operations Forces. And the effects of the corrosion that this ongoing war has caused on US Special Operations culture and those within that culture needs to be assessed, analyzed, and understood so that corrective measures can be developed and put in place.

What we’ve seen with the way Gallagher behaves, obviously empowered because he feels that his advocates like Hegseth have the President’s ear and, therefore, the President has his back, is a very public example of the cultural corrosion that GEN Clarke, RADM Green, and their peers in the Special Operations community are concerned with. Just for his actions today, Gallagher should be facing an Article 15 hearing, popularly known as a captain’s or admiral’s mast, first thing tomorrow to answer for his public insubordination. What he did today on Fox & Friends should make whether he keeps his trident the least of his worries.

At this point, however,  I have no idea what is going to happen. RADM Green, GEN Clarke, ADM Gilday the Chief of Naval Operations, GEN Milley the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary Esper, and RADM (ret) Braithwaite, the announced nominee to be the next Secretary of the Navy all know by now they have both a good order and discipline problem and that the public face of that problem’s name is Gallagher, who thinks he’s untouchable. The President’s undue command interference in Gallagher’s trial and the post conviction handling of him as a personnel matter, as well as several other military prosecutions and disciplinary matters all involving accusations of or convictions for war crimes, has created a good order and discipline problem within the ranks. Leadership knows that if they don’t make an example of Gallagher, then any Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine who gets in trouble and can get to Hegseth or anyone else who has the President’s ear, has the ability to short circuit the military justice system. And unless that notion is quickly disabused, then good order and discipline is going to become nothing more than a hollow slogan. And this problem is as dangerous as the message the President’s interference in military justice for Gallagher and others sends both our allies and adversaries about the behavior that will be tolerated by the US military because it will be tolerated by the President of the United States. That makes our allies uncomfortable and provides aid and comfort to our adversaries by giving them seeming approval to conduct war however they like, regardless of the Law of Armed Conflict, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the Rules of Engagement for any specific operation.

Open thread!

Full disclosure: I served as a Senior Special Operations Fellow at SOCOM’s Joint Special Operations University from May through August 2015.

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In Non-Impeachment News, the President Has, Apparently, Shifted the Republic of Korea Into an Alliance With the People’s Republic of China

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Faced with the President’s demand that the Republic of Korea (ROK) increase their cost sharing of the basing and sustainment of US military and civilian personnel in the Republic of Korea to $5 billion, the ROK’s leadership was not amused and very concerned. Especially, as this would mean not just a four to five time increase, but that the ROK would be covering the entire cost, rather than sharing it. Earlier today, things took a turn for the worst.

The United States broke off talks with South Korea on Tuesday over how to share the cost of the two nations’ military alliance, injecting fresh tension into the relationship over Washington’s demands that Seoul pay sharply more.

President Trump has demanded South Korea raise fivefold its contribution to cover the cost of stationing 28,500 U.S. troops in the country, asking for nearly $5 billion, officials on both sides said. But that demand has triggered anger from Korean lawmakers and sparked concerns that Trump may decide to reduce the U.S. troop presence in the Korean Peninsula if talks break down.

The top U.S. negotiator, James DeHart, said the U.S. side decided to cut short the negotiations on Tuesday morning, the second of two days of planned talks. In a rare public show of disunity between the allies, he blamed South Korea for making proposals that “were not responsive to our request for fair and equitable burden sharing.”

“As a result we cut short our participation in the talks today in order to give the Korea side time to reconsider,” he said in a statement. “We look forward to resuming our negotiations when the Korean side is ready to work on the basis of partnership, on the basis of mutual trust.”

This year, South Korea agreed to pay about $890 million toward the cost of stationing U.S. troops in the country, a little more than 40 percent of the day-to-day expenses. It also provides land for bases rent-free, paid more than 90 percent of the $10.7 billion cost of moving the main U.S. base out of Seoul, and buys significant amounts of U.S. military equipment.

But Trump insists that South Korea, as a “very wealthy nation,” needs to pay more. His demand for up to $5 billion would imply South Korea was effectively not only being asked to cover local costs but also the entire wage bill for the U.S. troops.

This genius move of walking out on a negotiation, which is not taught as part of how to conduct a negotiation to any career US government officials, such as Mr. DeHart who is a career foreign service officer, is a hallmark of the President’s understanding of how to conduct negotiations. Specifically, make an outrageous demand, posture and preen, throw a fit at the negotiations and walk out, then wait for the other party to come back and grovel for a deal. The Republic of Korea is not going to play the President’s game.
Here’s the text from Yahoo News:

The defense ministers of South Korea and China have agreed to develop their security ties to ensure stability in northeast Asia, the latest indication that Washington’s longstanding alliances in the region are fraying.

Mission accomplished!

Open thread!

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