Is Trump right or wrong to withdraw from Syria?

In PJ Media, Richard Fernandez writes,

...Perhaps more people than were ever aware of the combat presence in Syria are outraged the US is leaving it and that is a good thing. The lack of awareness was the result of the breakdown of the national security debate and the abdication by Congress of its role in war-making. The public is now like a man waking up in a strange city with a 3-week growth of beard with no memory of how he got there.

As the Los Angeles Times noted the US inherited a whole bunch of shadow wars from the past administrations. "Before he took office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to end America’s grueling conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his second term, he pledged to take the country off what he called a permanent war footing. ... U.S. military forces have been at war for all eight years of Obama’s tenure, the first two-term president with that distinction. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan."

But they all went into the back pages. The wars vanished from public sight perhaps for political reasons but also because the nature of war has changed. The LA Times continues:

“The whole concept of war has changed under Obama,” said Jon Alterman, Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit think tank in Washington.
Obama “got the country out of ‘war,’ at least as we used to see it,” Alterman said. “We’re now wrapped up in all these different conflicts, at a low level and with no end in sight.”

...A recent article in West Point's Modern War Institute argues that conventional war (maneuver warfare) as we knew it is dead and has been replaced by a war-in-peace where the boundaries between diplomacy, economic competition, espionage, proxy conflicts and war itself are blurred.

If you're waiting for war to break out, it has. Except that like victims being hunted by the Predator we cannot see it because it is radiating in a non-visible wavelength. What we see are mysterious things floating about like tariff wars, sanctions, covert ops, collusion, corruption, etc without understanding what they mean. Meanwhile, legacy diplomatic and military programs have led to strategic confusion and stagnation. In our confusion, we continue to do things because we started on them. Who knows the answers to these questions?

What is the end game in Afghanistan (where until recently America was giving billions of dollars in aid to the Taliban's patron Pakistan.)

What should America do in Yemen, where the unsavory Saudis are locked in conflict with the unsavory Iranians?

What is the strategic goal in Syria besides keeping the weeds down?

Where does America stand vis a vis Iran? A France eager to see US forces remain in Syria to keep refugees from flowing again is nevertheless committed to the preservation of the Iranian nuclear deal. Iran received billions from the US even though Congress never ratified the nuclear deal any more than it approved military action in Syria.

And to return to the Modern War Institute's unanswered question: should America prepare for a coming war with a near-peer competitor or just more small wars of the kind it has now?

...Trump may be wrong about withdrawing from Syria, or he may be right. The important thing to understand is why.

Read more here.

"This one-armed veteran has a business to run. Unlike Iran, the country that took my arm, Obama didn't pay me millions."

At Ace of Spades, Open Blogger CDR brings us a tweetstorm from a Wounded Warrior. Think about this in terms of President Trump's ban on transgenders.

I served in Iraq in 2006. For the first five months, I was on a 12-man firebase out in the middle of nowhere in the desert.

Every day was Groundhog Day. Wake up and do the same patrols, the same shifts, every single day. It was so damn hot. 150° in the gun trucks.

Tracer fire would go overhead occasionally at night. IED's on the road were a daily threat. We got resupplied food every 8 days.

QRF was an hour away. After they made the minimum three gun truck rule after the guys got kidnapped, life got harder.

The stress of being out there and doing the same job every single day eats away at you. The younger guys had problems with that over time.

Any tiny little personal issue they had suddenly became a mountain. And that shit came out on that fire base. And they snapped mentally.

After stepping on each other's nuts living in the same can for five months, guys were at each other's throats. The stress made it worse.

Guys would literally snap over a dear John letter. Their personal issues came out and they were instantly combat-ineffective.

Now take someone confused about whether they are a man/woman. Take those psychological and emotional issues and put them in that environment

Take someone who is right off the bat not uniform or part of the same team. Give them special treatment because of their identity.

Take that person, put them in that stressful war environment and watch what happens. It's a fucking ticking time bomb.

You have to be incredibly tough mentally, physically and emotionally. War is not a fucking video game. It tests every ounce of your being.

You can't teach someone to be a fearless warrior in a fucking PowerPoint. You either have it or you don't. You can hack it or you can't.

We had guys who couldn't. When faced with combat situations they crumbled. They had mental and emotional issues. They were a liability.

To be successful at war, you have to become a warrior mentally, physically, and emotionally. You can't fake it and go through the motions.

In war if it comes down to kill or be killed, and you hesitate, you're dead. It's a simple as that. It's not a fucking video game.

War is no place for people who are mentally, emotionally, or physically confused or in turmoil. You have your shit together, or you don't.

And if you don't, you'll just get people needlessly killed. Political correctness has absolutely no place in the military.

Enough for now. This one-armed veteran has a business to run. Unlike Iran, the country that took my arm, Obama didn't pay me millions.

How journalists can make a war out of an accord!

Figuring it out?

h/t MOTUS

Don't let Hillary's owners play with matches!

Fred Reed writes,

A good reason to vote for Trump, a very good reason whatever his other intentions, is that he does not want a war with Russia. Hillary and her elite ventriloquists threaten just that. Note the anti-Russian hysteria coming from her and her remoras.

Such a war would be yet another example of the utter control of America by rich insiders. No normal American has anything at all to gain by such a war. And no normal American has the slightest influence over whether such a war takes place, except by voting for Trump. The military has become entirely the plaything of unaccountable elites.

...Letting dilettantes, grifters, con men, pasty Neocons, bottle-blonde ruins, and corporations decide on war is insane. We have pseudo-masculine dwarves playing with things they do not understand. So far as I am aware, none of these fern-bar Clausewitzes has worn boots, been in a war, seen a war, or faces any chance of being in a war started by themselves. They brought us Iraq, Afghanistan, and Isis, and can’t win wars against goatherds with AKs. They are going to fight…Russia?

...When Washington pushed the South into the Civil War, it expected a conflict that might be over in twenty-four hours, not four years with as least 650,000 dead. When Germany began WWI, it expected a swift lunge into Paris, not four years of hideously bloody static war followed by unconditional surrender. When the Japanese Army pushed for attacking Pearl, it did not foresee GIs marching in Tokyo and a couple of cities glowing at night. When Hitler invaded Poland, utter defeat and occupation of Germany was not among his war aims. When the US invaded Vietnam, it did not expect to be outfought and outsmarted by a bush-world country. When Russia invaded Afghanistan it did not expect…nor when America invaded Afghanistan, nor when it attacked Iraq, nor….

Is there a pattern here?

The standard American approach to war is to underestimate the enemy, overestimate American capacities, and misunderstand the kind of war it enters. This is particularly true when the war is a manhood ritual for masculine inadequates–think Kristol, Podhoretz, Sanders, the whole Neocon milk bar, and that mendacious wreck, Hillary, who has the military grasp of a Shetland pony. If you don’t think weak egos and perpetual adolescence have a part in deciding policy, read up on Kaiser Wilhelm.

Now, if Washington accidentally or otherwise provoked a war with Russia in, say, the Baltics or the Ukraine, and actually used its own forces, where might this lead, given the Pentagon’s customary delusional optimism? A very serious possibility is a humiliating American defeat. The US has not faced a real enemy in a long time. In that time the armed forces have been feminized and social-justice warriorified, with countless officials having been appointed by Obama for reasons of race and sex. Training has been watered down to benefit girl soldiers, physical standards lowered, and the ranks of general officers filled with perfumed political princes. Russia is right there at the Baltic borders: location, location, location. Somebody said, “Amateurs think strategy, professionals think logistics.” Uh-huh. The Russians are not pansies and they are not primitive.

...The same danger exists incidentally with regard to a war with China in the South China Sea. The American Navy hasn’t fought a war in seventy years. It doesn’t know how well its armament works. The Chinese, who are not fools, have invested in weaponry specifically designed to defeat carrier battle groups. A carrier in smoking ruins would force Washington to start a wider war to save face, with unpredictable results. Can you name one American, other than the elites, who has anything to gain from war with China?

What has any normal American, as distinct from the elites and various lobbies, gained from any of our wars post Nine-Eleven? Hillary and her Neocon pack have backed all of them.

I note, pointlessly, that probably none of America’s recent martial catastrophes would have occurred if we still had constitutional government. How many congressmen do you think would vote for a declaration of war if they had to tell their voters that they had just launched, for no reason of importance to Americans, an attack on the homeland of a nuclear power?

There are lots of reasons not to vote for Clinton and the suppurating corruption she represents. Not letting her owners play with matches rates high among them.

Acts of war

While Obama celebrates in Cuba, jihadists continue to wage war against civilization. Defense Secretary Carter called the attacks in Brussels a tragedy. Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

...Our enemies are at war with us. They continue to execute acts of war, not tragedies, against us. We cannot “end” the war by withdrawing from it; we can only lose that way. We cannot prevail, or even adequately protect ourselves, without seeing the enemy plain: radical Islam — Islamic supremacists determined to impose sharia on the world, with jihadists as the pointy end of the spear, and ideological sympathizers as their support system.

...Because the latest round of war crimes occurs in the context of our momentous decision about who will be the next commander-in-chief, it is worth observing that Ted Cruz, whom I support (and on whose advisory team I serve), has stressed a recognition that the enemy is radical Islam. This is not just campaign rhetoric. We know, nearly a quarter century after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, that jihadist cells arise and thrive in ideological enclaves; that is where the radicalization, recruitment, fundraising, plotting, and injection and protection of jihadist immigrants occurs. We cannot deny reality by rationalizing that if we admit the truth we will be misunderstood as being “at war with Islam” — as in all Muslims.

What we like to think of as “radical Islam” is actually a legitimate and rabidly anti-Western interpretation of Islam that is followed by millions of Muslims. It is irrelevant to non-Muslims in the West whether theirs is a correct or incorrect construction of Muslim scripture. The remorseless fact remains that its adherents believe it — with a fervor that inspires the kinds of attacks we’ve seen today and have seen over and over again. Those adherents include Muslims who lack the commitment to carry out attacks themselves but nevertheless provide moral (and other) support to those who do, and who populate the Western immigrant enclaves in which the ideology thrives.

It’s a welcome fact that there are other ways of interpreting Islam that do not endorse war and hostility against the West; those who offer these interpretations are our allies, and we should be encouraging them rather than turning to enemies such as the Muslim Brotherhood to help us conduct “community outreach.” Still, the fact that there are pro-Western Muslims and authentically tolerant interpretations of Islam does not — and cannot be allowed to — obscure the fact that Islamic supremacism is a mainstream construction of Islam. It is not “false” Islam, or “anti-Islam.” It is Islam that competes, violently, with other constructions of Islam.

It is not our job to broker the claims these competitors make regarding what is the “true Islam.” It is our job to protect ourselves and our allies, and to crush the jihadist armies and cells that are prosecuting the war against us. If we do not acknowledge what the threat is and where it is coming from, we will continue to embrace the policies that empower the enemy. In a time of war, we cannot indulge a policy of mass immigration from countries where sharia supremacism is a significant presence.

With respect to Muslim immigrant communities that are already here, we must have sensible surveillance policies that identify and focus police attention on mosques and community centers that endorse anti-Western Islamic supremacism. That is not a dragnet against all Muslims; it is the arena where pro-American Muslims can step up and help us. No law-enforcement or intelligence agency wants to waste its time and resources investigating innocent people. But we have to be clear that Muslims who endorse Islamic supremacism, who want our Constitution supplanted by sharia, are on the wrong side of this war, regardless of whether they cross the line into violence.

Finally, we cannot tolerate jihadist safe havens anyplace on earth. The administration recently conceded that it has no strategy to deny the Islamic State — which has claimed responsibility for today’s attack — their sanctuary in Raqqa (to say nothing of their other strongholds). Let’s be clear: If ISIS is orchestrating attacks on the West from Syria and Iraq, that is an American national-security challenge, not just a civil war in a faraway place. American national-security problems cannot responsibly be delegated to other forces who will carry out our defense and war-fighting responsibilities for us. This is our problem.

There has not yet been a serious bombing campaign against ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq, and it is fair enough to say that the number of troops we may have to commit hinges on how committed we are to an intense air campaign. We should not delude ourselves, however: The jihadists are planning to attack the United States as well as Europe, and it is going to take American military commitment to destroy them — not to carry out an experiment in democracy-building, but to eradicate the threat to our nation and our allies.

Read more here.

Communist China's silent war against the United States

Are we currently in a war with China?

Casey Fleming, CEO of BlackOps Partners Corporation, which does counterintelligence and protection of trade secrets for Fortune 500 companies, spoke about the dangers posed by the army of spies at work against the United States under the direction of the GSD.

“It is clearly America’s biggest threat,” he said.

“It’s a war of the technology age, an economic war, a war where bombs are not dropped and guns are not fired, but it’s a war we’re squarely in,” he said.

One way to estimate the damage done in this war is through the cost of intellectual property theft, most of which is done by the Chinese regime.

The Commission on the Theft of Intellectual Property estimated such theft costs the United States $300 billion and 1.2 million jobs a year.

Fleming said, based on research from his company’s intelligence unit and client situations, the cost is closer to $500 billion worth of raw innovation that is stolen from U.S. companies.

That $500 billion would otherwise generate revenue, profits, and jobs. In a previous interview, Fleming estimated the total loss to the economy from the theft of innovation is $5 trillion each year when considering the expected 10-year life of the research and development.

The Chinese regime’s theft of intellectual property for economic gain is just one piece of a larger strategy to fight a war while avoiding troop-to-troop combat. The report states, “Hybrid warfare involves a state or state-like actor’s use of all available diplomatic, informational, military, and economic means to destabilize an adversary.”

The report outlines China’s uses of hybrid warfare, which include, “trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare, and international law warfare.”

Fleming, whose company runs counterintelligence operations and researches the Chinese regime’s systems for espionage and unconventional warfare, said that under the Third Department there are 20 operational bureaus and between 250,000 and 300,000 soldiers dedicated to cyberespionage. The New York Times has also reported 20 bureaus.

Under the Second Department, between 30,000 and 50,000 human spies are working on insider operations targeting U.S. and foreign companies.

No source has been able to give an estimate on the number of operatives under the Fourth Department, which works on electronic intelligence.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “is not a national army belonging to the state,” states a Nov. 12 report from the Congressional Research Service. “Rather, it serves as the Party’s armed wing.”

The PLA is not fighting its war on behalf of the Chinese people, and the soldiers under the GSD’s spy departments are being used to further the financial and political ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party.

Read more here.