Friday 29th of March 2024

understanding the military mind...

minds

All the military brass would really snigger at our feeble attempts to understand the military mind — and at our lame satire trying to denigrate this powerful focused amazing thinking — “military intelligence” being an oxymoron to us, loony cartoonists. 

 

 

We, the populace, don’t know the intricacy and the training that turn ordinary pimply adolescents into efficient killing machines on the battlefields. The protocols of teaching/learning warfare are complex and demands a powerful acceptance of hierarchy and command, as well as of tactical systems and dexterity of weapon handling. 

 

 

Rogue elements are not welcome. Even the Lawrence of Arabia characters, who seem to be freelancing Rambos, act under orders from the top echelons of the governments through the auspices of MI6 or the CIA. They are trained in the art of deception and adaptation while negotiating favourable outcomes for the government they serve, against tribes they loath and trick. Then the troops can take over with delicate boots and all. One must say here that not all tactical moves end up in success, but if there is failure with plan A, plan B and C will be used as back ups. Revenge will be a good motivator...

 

 

Meanwhile, organising, maintaining and improving a military complex demands specific targeted policies, training academies and technological superiority. This is why about 20 per cent of the workforce in the USA is directly or indirectly employed in supplying  the military with hardware, software, equipment and cornflakes. The military is divided in various areas of responsibility but united in its end-purpose: control the battlefield which for the US at present is planet Earth, including the space above, beyond the moon. 

 

 

Thus the generals in charge of the US military machine, from its airforce to the submariners, are not dummies. They have been through the mill, trained in respecting/understanding decisions of command, and when in charge, they are able to make sound and valuable choices of resource allocation and strength. It can be a difficult job, but they are up to the task, even if they don’t get the recognition they should from the commander-in-chief, in Washington, or London.

 

 

Say for example the leader of the airforce in England during WW2, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding — an expert in encouraging-enforcing the development of better planes such as the Spitfire (and the Hurricane) and better crews — did not get any proper public recognition until the 1970s, despite his outfit winning “the Battle of Britain” against a far superior German airforce. According to some historians, Dowding got sidelined in the middle of the war after the death of his wife and started to indulge in the dark art of the ouija board, or such. The modern military works by using intelligent biffo, not through the occult. Despite praying to god, allah and yahweh, the troops have to be more reliant on guns and top brass tactics — dumbing pills, brandy or awakening drugs — though a belief in the all powerful moron in the sky above can make death more acceptable as a future.

 

 

The development of an engine such as the Merlin at Rolls Royce did not happen by chance. People are put to the task, military and civil engineers, to create a more powerful, lighter power-plant with ingenuity that presently culminates with massive 80,000 pounds of thrust turbines that have been fitted on an A 380. Thus some of the technology of warfare, eventually trickles down into the civil world. Every nutters in the USA are equipped with semi- or fully-automatic M16 (AR-15). 

 

 

The Russians have developed a ramjet engine that can travel at 27 times the speed of sound at zero altitude… This is a challenge to the US military. For many years they had similar plans in their books but the cost and engineering difficulties were too much, until spurred by the Russians. Yet the US in the 1960s had the Lockheed D21, a ramjet drone they tried to use for spying on Russia and China, after the U2 disaster.


At any stage, one needs to know the strength of the “enemy” should one wish to wage war and win. One needs to know the “enemy’s intentions and movements. The “Battle of Britain” was won by a very inferior number of British planes fighting against a massive armada of German bombers and fighters. Theoretically, the English would be rooted. Yet, the surprise element of the German attack was lost because of the RADAR system along the English coast. Thus the spitfires and other English planes could set an ambush, knowing the altitude and direction of the invasion, and not be caught napping like the Americans in Pearl Harbor later on. The German aviators soon guessed the English had some sort of detecting devices, like an early warning system. They developed their own.


Every machine, say like an aircraft such as the Spitfire, as already mentioned did not come out of the blue nor was it a rickety wheelbarrow. From the beginning of the war to the end, its engine was improved from say 800 horsepower to more than 2000 horsepower. As well its armament and range were improved. Building such planes, servicing them, checking the equipment — radio and instruments — demanded a crew of technicians and engineers on the ground. The pilots on their own bat would not have sufficed. They also needed to be briefed in regard to tactics and weapon use, including the cross-hair aiming devices that would “ensure a kill” rather than a miss.



But the era of the drone, even after the failure of the ramjet D21 — possibly being too advanced for its time, like a 1962 Hillman with an electric clutch and semi-auto electric gearbox — has been going in leaps and bounds, without losing personnel. The D21 has to be launched from a "mother-ship” already at speed, in order for the ramjet to work. The “Blackbird” itself used as a launching vehicle, was to some extend a hybrid, as its engine could switch from ordinary supersonic jet engines to ramjet setting.


Despite great care in the design and construction, the machines still had some problems and quite a few were lost. 

 

 

On another military front (an affront to our intelligence), we know that the WMDs of Saddam Hussein were non-existent and we also know that the military had to know this in order to “attack”. You cannot attack an enemy, the strength of which you don’t know. This is warfare 101. You will end up with a couple of black eyes…. Thus, "intelligence failures" never happened. Fake intelligence is deliberate and paramount to prime the public on the value of war, through a compliant media. The reality is that war is a business where precision and conviction of purpose is important, including the reinforcement of the lies — political and military — that will lead to a successful invasion or a specific confrontation for your public to claim “victory” (or a president to say “mission accomplished”). Meanwhile, we needs to make sure our gun barrels are clean… and that the hospitals are ready to accommodate the wounded. 

 

 

The dead are honoured at the end of the day with a mournful brass band rendition, buried in a mass grave, then on some occasions, little crosses are planted at a respectful distance from each other to maximise the impact of sacrifices made by the fodder. We cannot avoid shedding a few sincere tears for the courage and altruism… Did we say that many mistakes were made by commanding officers in sending troops on open fields like in 18th century warfare, against 20th weaponry? The modern brass have learnt from this. It can be bothersome to have to bury 10,000 men by sunset and still be holed-up in trenches.

 

 

At the core of a military mind is a purpose: win the war or at least contain a situation with minimal casualties if the need of prolongation demands it. And this needs the best hardware possible. This is the role of the Pentagon: supply hardware and the core idea of waging war successfully. On their sides, the Chinese and the Russians have their own military centres from which defence and offence can be controlled efficiently. 

 

 

Meanwhile the politics are a bit crazy, especially in the South China Sea at present. Even the Aussie diggers, famous for being a bit aloof with the brass, have to tow the line while playing soldiers with the US navy in war games that are on the border of the real thing. The power of the new weapons is no joke. A wrong move and the entire world blows up. We know this…

 

 

Enters a mad man. A new president-clown who has no clue about the precise structures and specific tactical positioning of troops and of diplomatic counterpoints which have been set up since Eisenhower. These delicate adaptable manoeuvrings are in flux, as situations change. A country has to be bombed, a new enemy weapon has to be matched or bettered. The new president is a real estate merchant with oversized red shoes, a kerosene blue ill-fitted suit and a Zapata red tie — an accoutrement that contrasts with the impeccable military uniform. This already sets the tone for discord. The new president seems to be a a loony opportunistic anarchist, used to pocket his dosh by getting investors to loose their money through bankruptcy. His style of warfare: economic and personal punishment of other countries' representatives — including allies — in order to pander to the gun-totting nutters while squashing the swampy Deep State that for too long has been involved in too many wars that also end up in bankruptcy of mind and cash… 

 

 

A lead balloon would have more chance to be popular than the new guy. 

 

 

In the past, presidents would have academic qualifications in the art of management or gone through the political ranks where the tactics of diplomacy could be studied in details as well as the structures of defence… Here the new guy comes from the street, where low blows are allowed to win the alley-way.

 

 

The new president has no clue and his general wince like flies caught in vinegar. Their carefully cultivated baby, the military machine that has extended its precise tentacles around the planet, is being ridiculed and brought back home in crates. They polished their cranium with sandpaper in despair. They comb their hair with blunt razor blade. This deliberate pain distract them from the pain from the newfangled system of command which is turning into Dr Strangelove.

 

 

The brass have to stop the rot. They will switch allegiances to the most likely warrior party of the time. They do not have a particular colour of political attachment and they go with the Democrats or the Republicans in charge of the command, as long as they are ordered to go to war. With a president who is weary of the military to the point of carelessness, they will support the next lot, because it’s their destined existence, to be under fire while dishing blows to the “enemy"...

 

 

One can imagine all the brassed-off generals now plotting to remove the incompetent leader in the top job. 

 

 

The military has spend trillions on engineering and perfecting the machines of wars, and the president in charge is no more informed than a two year old kiddie, as if an F-35 was like a rubber-band propelled model aeroplane — or even a paper-plane. 

 

 

But the new president is okay with spending more cash on rubber bands, if this makes the old kids in the arm forces happy.

 

 

When one is in the possession of the ultimate weapon, one train for its usage in the sequence of possible needs, often invented needs. Presently this sequencing takes any military mind to the edge of war, like a cocked revolver ready to fire… Suddenly, in comes Uncle Buck with his big flat shoes and jocular bad jokes, taking the decorated brass as if they were dunny cleaners...

 

 

Understanding the military mind is not Uncle Buck’s forte, though he will use the military-might like one smacks an opponent with a rubber chicken...

 

 

Good laughs all around, except in the milit’ry mind…

 

 

The next guy will reset the military mind to its proper level and order the bombing of Damascus...

 

 

 

Gus Leonisky

 

Clown (retired).

democracy...

 

Please visit: 

 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/12409

 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11276

 

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/37019

 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35087

 

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34994

 

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34605

 

the ten commandments...

and all relevant articles on this site in regard to warfare...

 

Democratie by Rimbaud:

 

"The flag goes through the putrid landscape, 
And our babble muffles the drum beats." 
In the city centres we'll nurture 
The most cynical of prostitution. 
We'll massacre idealistic insurgencies. 

In spiced up and rain-drenched lands! 
At the service of the most monstrous 
Exploitations, industrial or military. 
"Farewell here and there, no matter where. 

Conscripts of good will, 
Ours will be a ferocious philosophy; 
Ignorant of science, and rapacious for comfort; 
And let the rest of the world croak. 
This is the real advance. Marching orders, let's go!
Let's go!


dangerous pentagon...

 

The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine

 

 

by Thierry Meyssan  

For two decades, the Pentagon has been applying the "Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine" to the "wider Middle East". Several times, it thought of extending it to the "Caribbean Basin", but refrained from doing so, concentrating its power on its first target. The Pentagon acts as an autonomous decision-making center that is effectively outside the power of the president. It is a civil-military administration that imposes its objectives on the rest of the military.

 

In my book L’Effroyable imposture [1] [2], I wrote, in March, 2002, that the attacks of September 11 were aimed at making the United States accept : 


- on the inside, a system of mass surveillance (the Patriot Act [as written by Joe Biden]) ; 


- and, externally, a resumption of imperial policy, about which there was no documentation at the time.

 

Things only became clearer in 2005, when Colonel Ralph Peters - at the time a Fox News commentator - published the famous map of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the map of the "reshaping" of the "broader Middle East" [3]. It came as a shock to all chancelleries: the Pentagon was planning to redraw the borders inherited from the Franco-British colonization (the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreements of 1916) without regard for any state, even any ally.

From then on, each state in the region did everything in its power to prevent the storm from falling on its people. Instead of uniting with neighboring countries in the face of the common enemy, each tried to deflect the Pentagon’s hand to its neighbors. The most emblematic case is that of Turkey, which changed its position several times, giving the confused impression of a mad dog.

 

However, the map revealed by Colonel Peters -who hated the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld- did not make it possible to understand the overall project. Already, at the time of the September 11 attacks, he had published an article in the US Army magazine, Parameters [4]. He alluded to the map that he did not publish until four years later, and suggested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to carry it out by means of atrocious crimes that they would have to subcontract in order not to dirty their hands. One might think that he was referring to private armies, but history showed that they could not engage in crimes against humanity either.

The final word on the project was in the "Office of Force Transformation," created by Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon in the days following the 9/11 attacks. It was occupied by Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. This famous strategist had been the designer of the computerization of the armed forces [5]. One could believe that this Office was a way to finish his work. But no one disputed this reorganization anymore. No, he was there to transform the mission of the U.S. armed forces, as the few recordings of his lectures in military academies attest.

Arthur Cebrowski spent three years lecturing to all senior U.S. officers, thus to all current general officers.

 

What he was teaching was quite simple. The world economy was becoming globalized. To remain the world’s leading power, the United States had to adapt to financial capitalism. The best way to do this was to ensure that developed countries could exploit the natural resources of poor countries without political obstacles. From this, it divided the world into two: on the one hand, the globalized economies (including Russia and China) destined to be stable markets and, on the other, all the others that were to be deprived of state structures and left to chaos so that transnationals could exploit their wealth without resistance. To achieve this, the non-globalized peoples were to be divided along ethnic lines and held ideologically.

The first region to be affected was to be the Arab-Muslim area from Morocco to Pakistan, with the exception of Israel and two neighboring micro-states that were to prevent the fire from spreading, Jordan and Lebanon. This is what the State Department called the "broader Middle East. This area was not defined by oil reserves, but by elements of the common culture of its inhabitants.

The war that Admiral Cebrowski imagined was to cover the entire region. It was not to take into account the divisions of the Cold War. The United States no longer had any friends or enemies there. The enemy was not defined by its ideology (the communists) or its religion (the "clash of civilizations"), but only by its non-integration into the globalized economy of financial capitalism. Nothing could protect those who had the misfortune not to be followers, to be independent.

This war was not intended to allow the US alone to exploit natural resources, as previous wars had done, but for all globalized states to do so. Moreover, the United States was no longer really interested in capturing raw materials, but rather in dividing up work on a global scale and making others work for them.

All this implied tactical changes in the way wars were waged, since it was no longer a question of obtaining victory, but of waging a "war without end", as President George W. Bush put it. Indeed, all the wars started since 9/11 are still going on on five different fronts: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen.

It doesn’t matter if allied governments interpret these wars in accordance with the US communication: they are not civil wars, but stages of a plan preestablished by the Pentagon.

 

The "Cebrowski Doctrine" shook up the US military. His assistant, Thomas Barnett, wrote an article for Esquire Magazine [6], then published a book to present it in more detail to the general public: The Pentagon’s New Map [7].

 

The fact that in his book, published after Admiral Cebrowski’s death, Barnett claims authorship of his doctrine should not be misleading. It is just a way for the Pentagon not to assume it. The same phenomenon had taken place, for example, with the "clash of civilizations". It was originally the "Lewis Doctrine", a communication argument devised within the National Security Council to sell new wars to public opinion. It was presented to the general public by Bernard Lewis’s assistant, Samuel Huntington, who presented it as an academic description of an inescapable reality.

The implementation of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski Doctrine has had many ups and downs. Some came from the Pentagon itself, others from the people who were being crushed. Thus, the resignation of the commander of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, was organized because he had negotiated a reasoned peace with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran on his own initiative. It was provoked by... Barnett himself, who published an article accusing Fallon of abusing President Bush. Or again, the failure to disrupt Syria was due to the resistance of its people and the entry of the Russian army. The Pentagon has come to burn down crops and organize a blockade of the country to starve it; revengeful actions that attest to its inability to destroy state structures.

During his election campaign, Donald Trump campaigned against the endless war and for the return of the GI’s to their homes. He managed not to start new fronts and to bring some men home, but failed to tame the Pentagon. The Pentagon developed its Special Forces without a "signature" and managed to destroy the Lebanese state without the use of soldiers in a visible way. It is this strategy that it is implementing in Israel itself, organizing anti-Arab and anti-Jewish pogroms as a result of the confrontation between Hamas and Israel.

The Pentagon has repeatedly tried to extend the "Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine" to the Caribbean Basin. It planned an overthrow, not of the Nicolás Maduro regime, but of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. It finally postponed this.

 

It must be noted that the Pentagon has become an autonomous power. It has a gigantic budget of 740 billion dollars, which is about twice the annual budget of the entire French state. In practice, its power extends far beyond that, since it controls all the member states of the Atlantic Alliance. It is supposed to be accountable to the President of the United States, but the experiences of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump show the absolute opposite. The former failed to impose his policy on General John Allen in the face of Daesh, while the latter was led astray by Central Command. There is no reason to believe that it will be any different with President Joe Biden.

The recent open letter of former US general officers [8] shows that nobody knows who is in charge of the US military anymore. No matter how much their political analysis is worthy of the Cold War, this does not invalidate their observation: the Federal Administration and the general officers are no longer on the same wavelength.

William Arkin’s work, published by the Washington Post, has shown that the federal government organized a nebulous group of agencies under the supervision of the Department of Homeland Security after the September 11 attacks [9]. In the greatest secrecy, they intercept and archive the communications of all people living in the United States. Arkin has just revealed in Newsweek that, for its part, the Department of Defense has created secret Special Forces, separate from those in uniform [10]. They are now in charge of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine, regardless of who is in the White House and what their foreign policy is.

 

When the Pentagon attacked Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001, it used its conventional armies - it had no other - and those of its British ally. However, during the "endless war" in Iraq, it built up Iraqi jihadist forces, both Sunni and Shiite, to plunge the country into civil war [11]. One of them, derived from al-Qaeda, was used in Libya in 2011, another in Iraq in 2014 under the name of Daesh. Gradually these groups have replaced the US armies to do the dirty work described by Colonel Ralph Peters in 2001.

Today, no one has seen US soldiers in uniform in Yemen, Lebanon and Israel. The Pentagon itself has advertised their withdrawal. But there are 60,000 clandestine, i.e. non-uniformed, US Special Forces creating chaos, via civil war, in these countries.

 

 Thierry Meyssan  Translation 
Roger Lagassé

 

 

Read more:

 

https://www.voltairenet.org/article213164.html

 

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It has to be noted that Trump tried to stop this mad project and suffered many ills, from being "impeached" to the mediatic exposure of his idiocy... Biden is back on track to do the biding for the Pentagon, but the techniques of US induced uprisings in various countries (including Belarus) have been adapted to the new conditions... "The serpent slithers while we're all a bit arachnophobes"...

 

See also: https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/40604

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