Today I will be joined by Keith Preston for our fourth and final installment of Pan-Anarchism to discuss the hard question of national defense.
Category Archives: Fourth Generation Warfare
The War on Terrorism is a Complete Loss for the Empire Reply
After 17 years and a series of failed wars, the number of Sunni fundamentalist terrorists is larger than it was in 2001.
By William S. Lind
Traditional Right
An article in the November 21 New York Times revealed two aspects of our ongoing strategic failure in Fourth Generation war. First, it quoted a new study by CSIS that found the number of Sunni 4GW fighters has grown, not shrunk, since we began the “war on terror” on 9/11:
Nearly four times as many Sunni Islamic militants are operating around the world today as on Sept. 11, 2001, despite nearly two decades of American-led campaigns to combat Al Qaeda and the Islamic state, a new independent study concludes.
That amounts to as many as 230,000 Salafi jihadist fighters in nearly 70 countries, according to the study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. . .
. . .the Islamic State remains the predominant threat, with as many as about 40,000 members globally this year, up from 30,200 in 2014, when the group’s fighters seized the northern third of Iraq.
Second, the Times turned to another study to look at what our current strategy has cost:
Last week, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs released its annual report, the Cost of War study, in which it calculated that the United States will have spent $5.9 trillion on activities related to the global counter terrorism campaign by October 2019.
So, the war of attrition waged largely from the air that is our chosen 4GW strategy has, in seventeen years, cost us almost $6 trillion (not billion) while multiplying our Islamic enemies fourfold. Can we see this as anything other than strategic failure on a grand scale?
An Anarchist Defense Force? Reply
Matthew VanDyke is the founder of Sons of Liberty International, a security firm that advises, trains, and supplies vulnerable populations to defend themselves against terrorists. He is preparing for an independent mission to Iraq during which he’ll train Iraqis to fight back against the Islamic State.
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Actually Yes, the Left Can Defeat The United States Militarily Reply
By Dr. Bones
Gods and Radicals
“just imagine the idea that the bitter infighting on the Left could somehow be a tactical advantage. It’s almost too good to pass up.”
From Dr. Bones
Liberty Fighter: Matthew VanDyke Interview Reply
Getting Grand Strategy Wrong Reply
By William S. Lind
Traditional Right
One of the iron laws of warfare is that a higher level dominates a lower. You can be brilliant tactically, but if you are defeated operationally, you lose. You can win tactically and operationally, but if you get beaten strategically, you lose. And if you get your grand strategy wrong, you lose no matter how well you did at the lower three levels. The German Army was the best in the world for almost eighty years, but Germany lost both World Wars because its grand strategy was terrible.
Having failed to copy tactical and operational excellence, we now appear instead to be imitating Berlin when it comes to grand strategy. The new national security strategy published by the White House on December 18 is a disaster. The strategy it recommends was obsolete before the ink was dry.
Problems with the Private Production of Defense Part 3: Strategy 1
Todd Lewis is joined by Will Mclean to finish our discussion on the privatization of defense. Today we will be focusing on strategy and tactics envisioned by the libertarians.
China and Russia Train for War with U.S. if Trump Invades North Korea 1
The withering away of the antiwar movement during the Obama era, and the failure of the Left to oppose the Trump administration’s efforts to strengthen the position of the Atlanticist-Zionist-Wahhabi axis (or to even take notice) indicates that US imperialism will have to be defeated externally rather than internally. This will be achieved by a combination of ongoing military defeats by fourth generation warfare forces, and the rise of counter power on a geopolitical level. On the former point, the US is now 0-5 in the 4GW conflicts that have been fought over the last quarter century (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria). Meanwhile, the “triangular resistance” of the BRICS, Shia-led Resistance Block, and the Global South is rising to create a multipolar rather than unipolar world. The US has largely retreated from Latin America, and will gradually do the same in Asia and Africa in the future.
By Tom O’Connor
Newsweek
China and Russia may be devising a plan to attack U.S. forces in the event of an imminent war breaking out on the neighboring Korean Peninsula, according to two former military officials.
Lieutenant General Wang Hongguang, the former deputy commander of the western Nanjing Military Region, warned “the war on the Korean Peninsula might break out anytime between now and March next year”; his comments came during a conference hosted Saturday by ruling Communist Party newspaper The Global Times. The following day, the nationalist outlet expanded on the retired general’s remarks with insight from Chinese military expert, commentator and author Song Zhongping, who said China could potentially engage U.S. forces if they posed a threat.
Terr’ism Reply
Instead of a Blog
If you don’t like what we tell you to believe in we’ll kill ya.
– Misquotation of G. W. Bush
After 9/11 a lot of ‘terrorism’ think-tankery poured out of academia and media, most of which was totally garbage. Atheologians and Objectivists wrote fanatical tracts about the need to nuke Mecca to convince those crazy savages that their God couldn’t protect them from science. Christian Zionists were no less enthusiastic to point out the barbaric and violent history of Islam.
There is some truth to this, but the overall historical arc of terrorism suggests that it is an actual effective means of achieving certain military and political objectives. It’s not always effective, but due to its low cost and disproportionate potential reactions it can trigger it can result in an increased flow of personnel and resources to the ‘terrorist’ organization and similar networks. Even if terrorism fails to achieve its utopian goals – to create a caliphate, to abolish the Russian government – it can still serve the immediate interests of terrorist organizers, suppliers and the ‘enemies’ of terrorism who profit from fighting (and typically inspiring more) terrorism.
Neocons Seek War with Iran, Ethic Cleansing of Palestinians Reply
As a I have long suspected.
William S. Lind
Traditional Right
Those of us who supported President Trump in last year’s election because he promised a less interventionist foreign policy need to be aware of a rising danger. Neo-con influence in the Trump administration seems to be on the increase. Rumored high-level personnel changes could put neo-cons into key foreign policy positions. Just as their neo-con predecessors led President George W. Bush into the disastrous Iraq war, a gift that keeps on giving, so today’s neo-cons want a war with Iran.
The obvious question is, how could anyone be so stupid? War with Iran is a lose-lose proposition. If the Iranians defeat us, we lose. If we defeat them, we also lose because there is a high probability the Iranian state would disintegrate and Iran would become another stateless region. That would be a huge victory for our real enemies, Islamic non-state entities such as Al Qaeda and ISIS that wage Fourth Generation war.
The neo-cons refuse to see this because they are playing another game, a game driven by the misconceived interests of a foreign power. To put it bluntly, many influential neo-cons are part and parcel of Israel’s Likud party. Years ago, around the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, they helped Likud devise a strategy for Israel. That strategy called for the United States to destroy every Middle Eastern state that could be a threat to Israel. That was why the neo-cons pushed the Bush administration into war with Iraq.
A Future Global War between States and Non-State Actors? 1
Bill Lind’s analysis of the emerging world order is absolutely correct. If I were a statist, I would be taking the exact same position as Bill Lind, i.e. that the main threat that states now face is not each other but the rise of non-state actors and fourth generation warfare forces. The difference is that Bill, being a Hobbesian conservative, is rooting for the statists while I, as an anarchist, am rooting for “the other side.” It is easy enough to envision a future, more radical version of the Non-Aligned Movement of the kind proposed by the International Secessionary Movement, representing a global alliance of startup societies, waging a common insurgency against the emerging global imperial system.
By William S. Lind
Traditional Right
As President Trump knows well, he has not been very successful in getting the measures he wants through Congress. One way to improve his chances of doing so is to change the context.
Relations with Russia provide an example. The president knows our hostility towards Russia makes no sense. Communism has fallen, we have no interests that should lead us to oppose Russia and Russia is resuming her 19th century role as the most conservative of the great powers. Russia should be our ally, not our enemy.
The Washington establishment wants a hostile relationship with Russia because it is still thinking in the context of a world of states in conflict. Any other powerful state (including China) that does not bow to American hegemony must be seen as an enemy. The purpose of all the clucking and squawking about the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia is to scare the administration away from improving relations with Moscow. Unfortunately, that trick seems to be working.
But what if the administration responded by changing the context? President Trump could easily explain to the American people that the real threat we face is not any other state (except perhaps North Korea) but “terrorism” (really 4GW) from non-state entities, of which ISIS is only one. To beat the terrorists, we need an alliance with Russia and China, because they are the other two great powers. In fact, that alliance would only be the beginning. We should work with Moscow and Beijing to create an alliance of all states against violent non-state entities. If we want a relatively peaceful, ordered, and safe 21st century, that is what we have to do.
The Hezbollah Model Wins Reply
The model that all anarchists and anti-statists need to be studying. One of our objectives should be to develop non-state political and militia confederations that will usurp many of the functions currently provided by states, with the goal of eventually superseding states.
By William S. Lind
Traditional Right
When we think of ISIS’s enemies, we usually list religions other than Islam, Islamics who reject Sunni puritanism, local states, Western states and so on. But from the perspective of Fourth Generation war theory, ISIS’s most important competition may be with Hezbollah. These two Islamic Fourth Generation entities represent two different models of 4GW. Hezbollah’s model hollows out the state where it is based but leaves it standing. The ISIS model does away with the state and creates a replacement in the form of a caliphate, which is a pre-state type of government. (Ironically, the ultra-puritan ISIS proclaimed a caliphate that, under Islamic law, is illegitimate, because the legitimate caliph is still the head of the house of Osman; the Ottoman sultan was also a caliph).
Arcane Semantics: Keith Preston – Tribalism, Anti-Statism & 4th Generation Warfare Reply
A recent interview. Listen here.
Charlottesville Was a Massive 4GW Failure Reply
“Failure” doesn’t even begin to describe it. I would argue that Charlottesville was the end of the Alt-Right’s opportunity to be anything other than a fringe subculture. In 4GW, the propaganda wars are the most important of wall, and the Alt-Right essentially suffered a Hiroshima attack in Charlottesville. At this point, Richard Spencer is simply the “new David Duke,” Matt Heimbach is merely the “new Tom Metzger,” and the Alt-Right generally are now the “new skinheads,” or at best the SJWs and Antifa of the Right. The Alt-Right may not have wanted it to turn out this way, but that’s how it is. The more radical people on the Alt-Right will remain on the fringes from here on, and the more moderate people will be absorbed by the system as a kind of “racial conservatives” who will play a role similar to the religious right in terms of their relationship to mainstream conservatism.
By Titus Quinctius
Traditional Right
’m sure that a lot of folks in the alt-Right, of whatever stripe, are feeling pretty black-pilled right at this moment. As well they should, because the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was a disaster. There’s no way to get around that. Don’t take what I’m about to say in the post below as “punching right”. Rather, understand it as me giving some well-meaning, and I believe much needed, counsel.
What everyone who is interested in this needs to understand is that the reason the Unite the Right (UTR) rally was a failure was because it completely neglected to take into account 4GW (Fourth-Generation Warfare) principles which can very easily be applied to civilian situations remaining at conflict levels below outright armed conflict. In fact the leadership at UTR and during the subsequent chain of events once the rally got started broke just about every rule of 4GW that could have been broken.
My advice for any serious alt-Righter of any stripe who wishes to avoid future debacles like UTR would be to first, first, FIRST read Victoria by William Lind, and then familiarize yourself with Lind’s other materials on this subject. If you haven’t done this yet, then stop what you’re doing, alt-Right involvement-wise. You’re only going to hurt, not help your cause.
However in the meantime until you can do this, I’ll provide a few pointers as overview.
How Will the State Respond to Growing Antifa/Alt-Right Violence? 2
By Keith Preston
The State exists for the purpose of maintaining a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a particular geographical territory in order to more effectively control resources, exploit subjects, protect an artificially privileged ruling class, and expand its own power both internally and externally. The State does this while maintaining a self-legitimating ideological superstructure, and buying the loyalty of the middle class by suppressing the lower/underclass. The State is what you would get if the Mafia managed to eliminate all of its competitors, including the State itself, and consequently become a state of its own.
At times, the State will seek to maintain total control over every aspect of social life (e.g. the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, present day North Korea or Islamist regimes like ISIS, the Taliban, and Saudi Arabia, or Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories). However, most modern states allow for a fairly robust civil society to exist that may actually have the effect of affording the average person a fair amount of comfort. States of these kinds, so-called “liberal democracies,” may even encourage intense political debate within certain narrow parameters (or even fairly broad parameters). Some states will allow or even encourage a fair amount crime and disorder in order to legitimize the expansion of state power to an even greater degree (what the late paleconservative writer Samuel Francis called “anarcho-tyranny’‘). For example, isn’t it interesting that in spite of the massive police and prison systems that now exist in the United States, one third of all murders go unsolved?
However, no state can allow disorder to spiral too far out of control, or it will lose its legitimacy in the process. A state of this kind is a protection racket that continues to engage in extortion and exploitation, but can no longer offer actual protection. Hence, states tend to be very sensitive to perceived threats to their own legitimacy. At present, the violence that is taking place between the Antifa, Alt-Right, and their various allies certainly poses no threat to the state. America in 2017 is light years away from Weimar Germany in 1932. But the important question involves the issue of to what degree the State will continue allow such violence to persist, if indeed it does persist, which it may not. That remains to be seen.
National-Anarchist Movement Conference 2017: A Summary Reply
By Keith Preston
Special thanks to Peter Topfer, Adam Ormes, Thom Forester, and Sean Jobst for their assistance in the writing of this summary.
On June 17 and 18, the first ever conference of the National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM) took place in Madrid. The process of arranging this conference was certainly not without its difficulties, and the organizers deserve much praise for their diligence in this regard. Originally, the conference was supposed to be hosted by the Madrid section of N-AM, who dropped out of the project shortly (and out of N-AM altogether) before the conference took place. This led to the irony of a conference being held in Spain where no actual Spanish people were among the attendees. Because National-Anarchists are widely despised by leftists who mistakenly regard N-A as a “fascist” tendency, security was a paramount concern.
No, It’s Not about “Globalism vs. Nationalism” 1
It’s about globalism/globalization vs non-state actors.
Some thoughts on the present political polarization, geopolitical rivalries, the G20, and “populist-nationalism.”
The present political polarization represents an effort by the various factions of the ruling class attempting to create constituencies for themselves. Most of the mainstream media represents the dominant centrist and center-left factions, academia represents the furthest left faction of the elite, FOX/GOP/talk radio represents the right-wing of the ruling class. I actually think the Trumpians represent yet another faction that wishes to pursue a new geopolitical strategy devised by Kissinger, but is being thwarted by the dominant faction and the Deep State in the process. https://www.the-american-interest.com/…/donald-trumps…/
One of the many problems with these populist-nationalist tendencies that have emerged in various Western nations is that they are not revolutionaries or even radicals, but reactionaries who resist globalization in the same manner that the anti-modernist movements of the19th century resisted industrialization. The populist-nationalists simply want to turn back the clock to the 20th century model of relatively autonomous nation-states that are middle-class oriented and ethnically, culturally, and religiously homogeneous. They’re not going to be any more successful at this than the Luddites were at blocking the Industrial Revolution, or the throne and altar traditionalists were at blocking the rise of liberal bourgeois republicanism.
Anarchism or Vanguardism? Critique of Guerrilla Ideology of the IRPGF Reply
The Free Online
Guerrilla ideology reduces all revolutionary questions to quantitative problems of military force. Nothing could be more disastrous. – James Carr,
Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its “military” dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as 
commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”.
The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.
To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems — in short for everything that plays down the role of the common man. – Gilles Dauve, When Insurrections Die
Trump to Arm Syrian Kurds, Even as Turkey Strongly Objects Reply
How ironic that the overlords of the American Empire might be backing the Murray Bookchin-inspired libertarian socialist insurgents of the Kurdish territory. But this is actually in keeping with a strategy that I have long advocated for anarchist, anti-state and anti-imperalist movements around the world, i.e. building on the ground resistance while seeking aid from the official enemy of whatever state they’re fighting. Consequently, the on the ground resistance movements located in the nations of the Anglo-American-Zionist-Wahhabist axis should seek aid from the nations of the BICS-Shia-Global South axis, and vice versa. It is perfectly appropriate for the Kurds to accept aid from the USA just as it would be perfectly appropriate for the EZLN, Calexit or the Republic of Texas to accept aid from the Russians, Iranians, and Chinese.
By Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt
New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump has approved a plan to arm Syrian Kurds so they can participate in the battle to retake Raqqa from the Islamic State, a strategy that has drawn deep opposition from Turkey, a NATO ally.
American military commanders have long argued that arming the Y.P.G., a Kurdish militia fighting alongside Syrian Arab forces against the Islamic State, is the fastest way to seize Raqqa, the capital of the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate.
And Mr. Trump, who made fighting Islamist militants a priority during his campaign, again showed the high regard he has for Pentagon generals by endorsing their advice when faced with a policy dilemma.
Greek farmers fight police in Athens over tax hikes Reply
Greek farmers armed with shepherd’s crooks and stones fought riot police in a violent protest against tax hikes outside the Ministry of Agriculture in Athens.
Trump Foreign Policy: Same Old, Same Old? Reply
By William S. Lind
Traditional Right
The big question about the new Trump administration is whether its foreign policy will reflect President Trump’s views or long-standing Establishment positions. It is too early to offer a firm answer, but early indications are worrying.
The past several weeks have seen senior administration officials traveling the world, offering reassurances to our (mostly worthless) allies that no policy changes are coming. We will continue to be committed to war with China over the Japanese Senkaku islands, which are uninhabited; war with Russia over the Baltic states (which Russia is unlikely to attack); and, most worrying, to continued confrontation with Russia for no reason in particular.
Preventing Civil War in the United States Reply
Bill Lind has a proposal that is very similar to certain ATS positions.
By William S. Lind
Traditional Right
Low-level Fourth Generation war has been underway in the U.S. for some time, largely in the form of gang activities. That is likely to continue, as will occasional terrorist incidents. This low-level warfare is a problem, but it does not threaten the state.
However, the Left’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump as president points to a far more dangerous kind of 4GW on our own soil. Trump’s election signified, among other things, a direct rejection of the Left’s ideology of cultural Marxism, which condemns Whites, men, family-oriented women, conservative blacks, straights, etc. as inherently evil. Not surprisingly, those people finally rebelled against political correctness and elected someone who represents them.
