Category Archives: Military

Expect More Military “Liberal Interventionism” Under a Joe Biden Presidency Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Electoralism/Democratism, Military

By Derek Davison and Alex Thurston

The Jacobin

The liberal establishment is desperate to return a centrist to the White House in November and reestablish the country’s more stable military dominance of the world order, disrupted only briefly by Donald Trump. Joe Biden’s terrible track record on foreign policy — including his championing of war in Iraq — suggests a return to Obama-style strong military interventions abroad.

To the consternation of many on the Left, Joe Biden formally secured the Democratic Party’s nomination yesterday. And if polling both nationally and in several key battleground states is accurate, he stands a reasonable chance of defeating Donald Trump to become the 46th president of the United States. As voters consider their options this fall, and as leftists prepare to navigate the next four years, it is reasonable to fast forward a bit to examine what a potential Biden administration might look like.

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Let’s Be Real: President Biden Would Probably Be More Hawkish Than Trump Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Electoralism/Democratism, Military

By Caitlin Johnstone

People who dislike Trump are often reluctant to talk about this, but it looks likely that a Biden administration would be more warlike than its predecessor.

In a recent interview with US Department of Defense newspaper Stars and Stripes, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said it’s important to keep troops in the Middle East to fight terrorism, and that it’s likely that America’s bloated military budget will not only remain at its current size but may actually increase under his presidency due to the need to focus on “near peer” threats like China and Russia.

This is not a deviation in messaging from Biden and his crack team of beltway string-pullers, but a continuation of already established patterns. His campaign has been consistently out-hawking Trump on foreign policy by attacking him for insufficient aggression toward Venezuela, China, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and of course Russia, as well as criticizing Trump for not acting like a “wartime president“.

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Trump Connects the Generals and the Military-Industrial Complex Reply

by • Military

The real reason the majority of the power elite hates Trump. He’s a loose cannon, not a team player, too candid, and makes the state look like what it is, the mafia writ large.

By Hunter Derensis

The American Conservative

Once again, the whispers of phantoms masquerading as administration officials have attempted to put Donald Trump on the defensive only two months before the fall election. And in typical fashion, the roused president has gone on an immediate rhetorical offensive.

Trump has doubled down on his affirmations towards the U.S. military and the American soldier, while simultaneously confronting the class of generals who command them. “I’m not saying the military’s in love with me—the soldiers are,” Trump said at a Labor Day press conference. “The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

This is a dramatic shift in perspective from the man who spent the first two years of his presidency surrounding himself with top brass like Michael Flynn, John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, and James Mattis (along with almost being beguiled into nominating David Petraeus as Secretary of State). Perhaps Trump learned the hard way that the generals of the forever wars don’t measure up to the twentieth-century soldiers he adulated growing up.

For instance, when George Marshall oversaw the deployment of 8.3 million GIs across four continents in World War II, he did so with the assistance of only three other four-star generals. In retirement, Marshall refused to sit on any corporate boards, and passed on multiple lucrative book deals, lest he give the impression that he was profiting from his military record. As he told one publisher, “he had not spent his life serving the government in order to sell his life story to the Saturday Evening Post.”

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Could There Be Another Civil War in America? 3

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right, Military

This is a good discussion. A key issue the speakers point out is that the military clearly does not back Trump and that military leaders obviously regard him as an incompetent moron and a nuisance. I would add that the Deep State has worked diligently with the media and the Democrats to get rid of Trump. The QAnon-types are largely correct about that. The Left’s fear that Trump is on the verge of becoming a fascist dictator is undermined by the lack of support for Trump in the Deep State. A counterargument might be that Trump has tried to staff the federal administration with cronies and yes-men, and turn federal police agencies into a personal militia. There are elements of truth in those claims, but Trump has been very inept in such efforts. It’s clear that the upper strata of the power elite (the top industrial-technological-financial-nuclear-military-intelligence sectors) are very anti-Trump, as is the wider network of the international power elite.

The scenario that Noah Smith describes is what I suspect a “civil war” in the US would look like, with left-wing and right-wing militias fighting each other, while the military remains uninvolved, although the police and federal agents would likely be involved (as they have been in the present civil unrest). On the ground, a civil war would be a bloody mess like Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. However, it is certainly possible the Deep State and military-industrial complex would merely stand by and let this happen because a civil war in North America is not necessarily antithetical to their interests. What they are about is building a global financial-technological-technocratic empire under their control. They do not necessarily oppose civil wars within individual countries.

In fact, they are perfectly happy to turn individual nations or even entire regions into failed states as a means of preventing actual opposition to global power elite rule from happening (Iraq, Syria, and Libya are obvious examples). The US power elite would consider a domestic civil war in the US to be preferable to a culturally unified country in which class conflict is the basis of political mobilization. The very last thing they want is for “the people” to put aside their other differences and engage in a collective struggle against the corrupt US ruling class.

Why the US Military Usually Punishes Misconduct but Police Often Close Ranks Reply

by • Military, Police State/Civil Liberties

By Dwight Stirling

The Conversation

Many U.S. military members publicly disavowed President Trump’s decision to pardon Edward Gallagher, the former SEAL commando convicted of killing a teenage detainee in Iraq in 2017.

Gallagher’s alleged war crimes were nearly universally condemned up the chain of command, from enlisted men to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer. Indeed, it was Gallagher’s SEAL colleagues who reported the former commando’s actions.

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Two Cheers for Nuclear Weapons? 2

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Military

Nukes have made inter-state war cost prohibitive which opens the door for the fourth-generation forces.

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

Several weeks ago, the world got a glimpse of what future war will look like among Great Powers. The weapons were rocks and clubs.

Indian and Chinese troops battled each other over worthless ground along their undefined border high in the Himalayas. It was a classic case of two bald men fighting over a comb. But at least 20 Indian soldiers died, along with an unknown number of Chinese.

What is interesting about this skirmish is the weapons employed. Both India and China have sizable arsenals of modern weapons. They employed none of them. Instead, they fought with rocks and clubs.

I find the deafening silence over this choice of weapons, including from the U.S. military, to be interesting. It certainly should draw the attention of anyone who studies where war may be going. Why did such a bizarre scenario unfold? Because both countries have nuclear weapons.

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Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion Reply

by • Fourth Generation Warfare, Military

The kids are alright.

By Nick Turse

The Intercept

In the face of protests composed largely of young people, the presence of America’s military on the streets of major cities has been a controversial development. But this isn’t the first time that Generation Z — those born after 1996 — has popped up on the Pentagon’s radar.

Documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a Pentagon war game, called the 2018 Joint Land, Air and Sea Strategic Special Program, or JLASS, offered a scenario in which members of Generation Z, driven by malaise and discontent, launch a “Zbellion” in America in the mid-2020s.

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Report EXPOSES how Biden team profits off endless war Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Electoralism/Democratism, Military • Tags:

A Biden regime will consolidate the “neoliberalism in economics/neoconservatism in foreign policy” ruling class paradigm while coopting the left by strengthening totalitarian humanism through all kind of woke legislation and policy initiatives while continuing Barr’s initiatives toward enacting greater repression against authentic enemies of the system.

St. Louis man who went viral defending his property speaks out on ‘Tucker’ 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right, Military, Strategy

If opinion leaders, activists, “radicals,” BLMs, etc. are wise they will outspokenly oppose the criminal prosecution of these two. The last thing that needs to happen is for public support for repression to increase, for inter-tribal warfare to escalate, or for Red State/conservative middle-class Falangists to emerge. The Left and/or minorities will not win a civil war. Forty percent of the US armed forces are Southern working-class whites, who are heavily concentrated in combat divisions. Many others are white ethnics from the North. The conservative middle-class sectors only want order, and the liberal sectors of the middle-class (of any color) are not going to sacrifice their class interests to any significant degree, regardless of how “woke” they claim to be or think they are. While the lumpenproletariat is the natural vanguard class of an anarchist revolution, they are driven by egoism, not spartan military discipline. Think tactically, folks.

Glenn Loury: ‘We’re Being Swept Along by Hysteria’ About Racism in America Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Fourth Generation Warfare, History and Historiography, Law/Justice, Left and Right, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Race and Ethnicity, Secession, Strategy, Therapeutic State

A somewhat interesting interview with a leading black conservative.

I would be inclined to argue that, at present, substantial sectors of the capitalist class (including some major capitalist entities) along with their allies in the new clerisy/new class that dominates the “ideas industries” are fueling anti-racism hysteria in order to deflect attention away from the class-based nature of the insurrection. They do this because a race war is less antithetical to their interests than a class war. However, contra the Marxists and left-anarchists, it doesn’t stop at class either. Even a class war is more co-optable than a direct war against the state itself.

All of this follows an easily identifiable pattern in US history.

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The Military Must be De-Funded Along with the Police 1

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military

The USA accounts for 35% of all global military spending, most of which is corporate welfare.

By Dan Kovalik

As Vijay Prashad explains in his book, Red Star Over The Third World, domestic fascism in the West has reflected the West’s pre-existing colonial practices abroad. Citing Martinique communist Aimé Césaire, Prashad explains: “What had come to define fascism inside Europe through the experience of the Nazis – the jackboots and the gas chambers – were familiar already in the colonies. . . . [F]ascism was a political form of bourgeois rule in times when democracy threatened capitalism; colonialism, on the other hand, was naked power justified by racism to seize resources from people who were not willing to hand them over. Their form was different but their manners were identical.

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Police detain armed militia members after man is shot at Albuquerque protest Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Military

By Katie Shepherd

Washington Post

Protesters in Albuquerque wrapped a chain around the neck of a bronze statue and began tugging, chanting, “Tear it down,” shortly before sunset on Monday. Their efforts to pull down a monument of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate suddenly stopped as four shots rang out.

Most people instinctively turned toward the noise, videos from the scene show. A few screamed. Just yards away, a group of militia men sporting militarylike garb and carrying semiautomatic rifles formed a protective circle around the gunman.

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Top General APOLOGIZES for Trump photo-op participation Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Military • Tags:

The most interesting aspect of the insurrection has been the way that the actual Deep State and MIC leadership has told Trump to fuck off over the idea of using US troops to suppress the uprising. This confirms my longstanding argument that the formal political government, including the Prez, are just managers, not actual rulers.

Krystal and Saagar discuss General Milley’s apology for appearing in photo-op with Trump after forceful removal of protesters.

‘What I saw was just absolutely wrong’: National Guardsmen struggle with their role in controlling protests Reply

by • Military, Police State/Civil Liberties

The regimes in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites were toppled only when large numbers of rank and file military and police turned on their backs on the state. That is what has to happen in the US as well for the revolution to be successful. Anything that conflicts with this objective is tactically unwise.

By Daniel Lippman

Politico

Pvt. Si’Kenya Lynch, a member of the D.C. National Guard, was on duty at Lafayette Square near the White House last Monday when U.S. Park Police cleared the area of protesters ahead of President Donald Trump’s now-infamous photo op.

Lynch said she supports the protests, and that her brother was among the demonstrators on the other side of the line, adding that “he coughed a lot” due to the tear gas fired into the crowd.

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Trump Moves to Halt Bid to Drop Confederate Names From Military Bases Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Military

Once again, the pathetically limited nature of “liberal” thinking is revealed. What matters is not the names of military bases. What matters is the dissolution of the military-industrial complex, national security state, and imperialist empire for which it is the enforcer arm. Liberals typically think all of that is fine as long as it is properly sanitized, multicultural, feminized, and rainbowized. Ideally, military bases would be called “Anti-Imperialist Militia Training Centers.” However, the success of the revolution depends on the desertion, defection, or acquiescence of rank and file military, about 40% of whom are the hated southern white, and who are heavily concentrated in the infantry. Think strategically, folks.

By Michael R. Gordon, Nancy A. Youssef

Wall Street Journal

President Trump on Wednesday sought to extinguish a growing national debate over whether 10 U.S. Army bases honoring Confederate officers should be renamed.

“My Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations,” Mr. Trump said in a series of tweets. “Our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with. Respect our Military!”

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