No, I’m not referring to that meme that originated from HanAssholeSolo about Donald Trump beating up CNN – hysterical though it was.
I’m talking about the severe dressing-down that His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, gave to his most senior generals and military advisers a couple of years ago:
The account states Trump repeatedly interrupted the lesson after apparently being triggered by a word or phrase uttered by the military leaders. One example given is that he heard the word “base” during the lesson, which sparked him into launching a tirade about how “crazy” and “stupid” it was that the U.S. paid to build and maintain bases overseas.
His first grievance was reportedly against South Korea, when he suggested charging rent for a $10 billion missile-defense system the U.S. built there to protect South Korea and American troops. He then complained about NATO, saying it was in “arrears” to the U.S. for not spending enough money on defense—a complaint he’s repeatedly raised during his presidency.
Trump is then said to have complained about President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal, and the length of the war in Afghanistan. Each time, his generals reportedly tried to gently explain why his view of these complex geopolitical issues might not be entirely accurate. It was reportedly during a conversation about Afghanistan that Trump blew his top.
The president reportedly called Afghanistan a “loser war,” and told his military leaders: “You’re all losers… You don’t know how to win anymore… I want to win… We don’t win any wars anymore… We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we’re not winning anymore.”
[…]
In his most incendiary comment, Trump… is said to have told the assembled forces, “I wouldn’t go to war with you people… You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”
[…]
One senior official summed up the meeting: “We needed to change how he thinks about this, to course correct… They were dismayed and in shock when not only did it not have the intended effect, but he dug in his heels and pushed it even further on the spectrum, further solidifying his views.”
[h/t to our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) for this one]
Obviously, we do not know exactly what the God-Emperor said in that meeting. It is impossible to know and most of the eyewitness accounts come from sources that are not exactly sympathetic to His Majesty.
But, even those hostile accounts inadvertently give away a lot of truth about the mindset of the God-Emperor.
The Daily Beast is of course a shitty Fake News outlet run by a bunch of loser Gamma hacks who hate His Majesty the God-Emperor because he is a mythic hero made flesh, while they believe in the myth of an honest journalist. (A contradiction in terms, especially these days.)
Nonetheless, there is no doubt that what happened subsequent to that meeting largely bears out the contents of that conversation.
Rex “T-Rex” Tillerson was fired as Secretary of State because he tried to “moderate” the God-Emperor’s policies and maintain the status quo, instead of, y’know, doing what he was hired to do, and deliver on his President’s priorities.
Those priorities very clearly indicate a radical shift in mindset, away from the “benevolent empire” view of past Presidents since Reagan, and firmly toward treating nations that rely on American largesse as vassal states.
That this is humiliating for the vassals is rather beside the point. Empires are NOT good for nations. Having an extensive overseas empire is a terrific way to ruin a nation, destroy its currency, crash its culture, and collapse its civilisation.
But, if one must have an empire – and America is clearly a heterogeneous empire right now, held together entirely by the threat of force – then it makes far more sense to charge client states that are not part of the host nation for the maintenance of border forces that are not in conflict zones.
This is simply good business sense, if nothing else. Pretty much every successful empire in history has done exactly this. The Roman Empire, for instance, received enormous amounts of tribute from its vassal states in Egypt, Africa, Greece, Gaul, and Anatolia for several centuries, simply because maintaining the world’s most powerful and feared heavy infantry forces was bloody expensive.
More to the point, though, the God-Emperor understands quite well that the war in Afghanistan cannot be won.
As a more general rule, these endless “savage wars of peace” cannot be won, at all, because the American military and civilian leadership has no clue how to fight a truly ruthless, brutal – and therefore successful – war against enemies of their civilisation.
Such a war would essentially require the sacrifice of America’s very soul. There is no getting around that fact. There is no point pretending otherwise.
But such brutality would work.
My reading of the God-Emperor is that, despite his many and manifest personal and moral failings, he is essentially a deeply good and decent man. He loves the American people and the American nation. His allegiance is to the people who put him in power, and he takes that obligation and oath extremely seriously.
And because he is fundamentally a good man, he is not willing to commit to the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Afghanis in order to win a 20-year-long war.
So the next best thing for him to do is simply to draw down all remaining troops in those hostile war zones in the Sandbox and the Rockpile, and bring them all home – preferably to stand shoulder-to-shoulder right along the Great Border Wall, and shoot invaders from Mexico on sight and leave their bodies to rot in the desert.
He probably will not do this anytime soon – partly because he can’t. It takes quite a bit of time to draw down troops stationed in big expensive bases. Withdrawing troops stationed in Germany and Japan and South Korea and Iraq and Saudi Arabia would require a great deal of time to move all of the billions of dollars stationed in the big-ass LOG bases in those same countries.
That does not mean that withdrawing the troops should be stopped or delayed. It needs to happen. It must happen. And the sooner that the God-Emperor does so, the better off the American empire and its vassal states will be.
As for the targets of the God-Emperor’s wrath – the generals, military strategists, and civilian leaders who have led America from disaster to catastrophe to bloodbath to quagmire with almost monotonous regularity – they absolutely deserved the dressing-down that they received.
There are a number of active-duty and retired military personnel who read this blog. Many of them fought in the Sandbox and the Rockpile themselves. They saw their brothers wounded and killed in intense combat. And they understand what it is like on the ground in those locations, in a way that I do not and cannot.
I wager that if you asked them, they would tell you that the American military is not fighting those wars to win them. It is merely fighting them in order to further the spread of “democracy and freedom”, whatever that means – and as a result is singularly failing at that objective.
Here’s the reality:
You don’t spread freedom and democracy by fighting for it.
You spread freedom and democracy by crushing your enemies so completely, massacring their leaders so thoroughly, beating them physically and psychologically so thoroughly, to the point that their people scream and beg and plead for mercy, lest they be annihilated and their way of life destroyed.
Then, and only then, do you proceed to replace their system of government. And the brutal reality is that you can only do this by initially using a harsh military dictatorship in order to rebuild a broken former enemy’s institutions to the point where it can stand on its own. See for example Gen. Douglas Macarthur’s effectively dictatorial rule over Japan after they surrendered, or the way that the Allied powers effectively dismembered Germany and forced the expulsions of millions of Germans from the Sudetenland, and used German PoWs for forced labour.
(That latter is a dirty little secret of post-WWII Allied politics. As always, never, ever trust the official histories. They are virtually always wrong.)
America does not have the stomach for that kind of war. If it did, then Afghanistan would not have turned into a 20-year-long, horrendously expensive, pointless and useless endeavour in which the Taliban still controls large parts of the country and will almost certainly take over the rest of it once American forces finally leave.
If the USA actually wanted to win that war, the American military would simply have massacred ten percent of the entire population of Helmand Province and other Taliban-controlled strongholds, destroyed every mosque in the country, imprisoned every imam, and used a ten-for-one principle of reciprocity for every American soldier killed or wounded in the fighting.
That is not the American way of war. For better or worse – and I thank God that it is very much for the better – American warriors see themselves as paladins, fighting on the side of God and all that is good.
And, for the most part, they genuinely are like that. People around the world can bitch and moan and hate on American troops all they like – but when shit gets real, NOTHING breaks the trust and respect of ordinary people in the American grunt, swabbie, airhead, or leatherneck.
None of that changes the fact that the military advisers that the God-Emperor commands, need to get in line and start executing his foreign policy vision. He is now the Commander-in-Chief.
His predecessor, Odumbass the Lightworker, molded the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel to suit his priorities, and as a result a lot of the really competent and skilled commanders and tacticians simply left the Puzzle Palace and the armed forces.
It will take a lot of time for the God-Emperor to undo that damage, but it is happening even now. When his successor comes along – and I hope for America’s sake that it will be his son, the Second of His Name, who takes over – then he will in turn have the right to promote his own foreign policy and military views.
The final lesson here is: As always, trust in the God-Emperor and give him time.
He is very much on the side of all that is Good, Beautiful, and True. It is very clear that he has been chosen by the Lord to do what he can to bring America back from the brink. And he is almost surely doing the best that he can given the constraints that he has to work with.
His instincts are the right ones, and his core beliefs simply have not changed for roughly 30 years – if you read his book, The Art of the Deal, as I am doing right now, you will see that the way he speaks right now is basically exactly the same as it was back in the late 1980s.
Time will tell whether he will succeed in what he is trying to do. So far, though, he has been wildly successful even by his own standards. Pray God that this WINNING!!! continues, because we could really use plenty more of it.
11 Comments
''You spread freedom and democracy by crushing your enemies so completely, massacring their leaders so thoroughly, beating them physically and psychologically so thoroughly, to the point that their people scream and beg and plead for mercy, lest they be annihilated and their way of life destroyed.''
…Or just drop a few containers of sex robots, movies and music that have to do with mainstream American culture and watch as they self destruct. Also burn vast amounts of poppy plants to halt heroin production in Afghanistan and steal all of their most fertile and beautiful women and leave them t crumble. Wishful thinking I know. I wish it was easy as a sandbox game. It would probably be much easier without politics in the way, but at the moment that is wishful thinking as well.
Or just drop a few containers of sex robots
It's Afghanistan. They would have to be sex-goats )).
steal all of their most fertile and beautiful women
A) They don't have any;
B) Even if they DO have any, it's impossible to tell under the burqas;
C) Recall "goats", above;
It would probably be much easier without politics in the way, but at the moment that is wishful thinking as well.
That reminds me of the old saying… "There are few problems in the world that cannot be solved through liberal application of napalm".
"That does not mean that withdrawing the troops should be stopped or delayed. It needs to happen. It must happen. And the sooner that the God-Emperor does so, the better off the American empire and its vassal states will be."
It's almost as if someone suggested to Trump that he read Chalmers Johnson's books on the "empire of forward operating bases" …
That's really what the American Empire amounts to these days: an empire of forward operating bases, several hundred of them in fact.
The roots of this American base empire come from the notion of projecting power in order to reduce the influence of "capitalist encirclement" by the socialist world, something referred to by Stalin in the 1920s and then made a part of American policy via George Kennan's "long telegram" in 1946.
But what has changed since then?
"… if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so …"
Indeed, the Russians still behave this way, and so do several other world powers, but this behaviour does not apply as a general rule.
And so rolling up with a few billion dollars worth of forward operating base so you may proceed to intimidate any would-be adversaries with your faith that you would rarely engage them with shows of force?
It's a breed of stupidity in the form of Zahavi's handicap principle, but with the plumage of barracks, air fields, and mobile surface-to-air missile regiments.
The Cold War is over, but America's been fighting The War On Terror as if it were a new escalation of the Cold War with a different set of adversaries, one that magically happens to behave like the previous set of adversaries.
What Trump understands is that you don't need an easily targeted empire of forward operating bases in order to counter an adversary that you may well be forced to destroy, and that his transition of forces away from the forward operating base empire puts forces more at the ready when it comes to dealing with these types of adversaries.
Kennan's "containment theory" doesn't work when you no longer intend to contain anything, but instead to extinguish the worst so that the others may learn à la Voltaire.
"… if situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns …"
Because the new adversaries understand the ideation of operations that came from Kennan, they understand that the best way to engage their enemies with Cold War hangovers is to show them for the unprestigious drunks they really are.
Thus they are completely unsurprised that what once worked on the Soviets amazingly continues to work on the Americans today.
But Kennan's "long telegram" has a lot of wisdom that still applies today.
His observations about the use of "democratic-progressive" elements?
They're still absolutely spot-on, and the "projections of power" take a newer form through the so-called "mainstream media" which maintains a continued barrage of "democratic progressivism" through what it likes to call "the news".
Kennan couldn't have known it, but some of what he described could also apply to "spheres of influence" during the 2020s as the logic of deploying forward operating bases eventually circles back to America itself.
What is CNN but an electronic media mobile infantry unit operating out of Atlanta?
These are very good points. Kennan's "Long Telegram" laid out a doctrine of "containment", but the core reality of the USSR's economic weakness was not noticed by anyone pretty much until Ronald Reagan came along. And he didn't need FOBs to destroy the evil empire – he used a four-pronged multi-layered strategy encompassing military reforms, economic pressure, political isolation, and paramilitary funding around the world to do it instead.
And in Reagan's War, Kennan's theory of containment didn't apply.
That same theory does not apply with fundamentalist Islam either. It can't be contained. It can only be submitted to, or destroyed outright.
Maintaining a large international network of FOBs in countries that are no longer under any kind of direct threat of attack from either Russia or China is sheer lunacy – and extremely expensive lunacy at that.
I fought in Afghanistan, and people DO ask me that question, and I give an answer similar to the tone of this essay. The Afghans don't want democracy; the majority would be fine with the Taliban returning to power. As far as I understand, after the initial punishment strike, we've been getting not just 'no' results, but 'negative' results in Afghanistan.
You are, of course, wrong in thinking that the military doesn't know HOW to fight with ruthless brutality (books about the Soviets in Afghanistan were on the pre-deployment reading list). We simply choose not to.
You are, of course, wrong in thinking that the military doesn't know HOW to fight with ruthless brutality
I never wrote or said that the US military doesn't know how to fight with brutality. I simply wrote that it's not the American way of war.
I know that American warfighters and strategists understand the Laws of War very well. One of them, LTC Tom Kratman, reads this blog and has written extensively on how to apply those laws with maximum effect to actually win wars. The problem is that, if the USMC or Army ever actually fought with that level of controlled savagery, the soldiers and commanders involved would be crucified by the media and hanged by the court of public opinion – simply for obeying ancient battlefield rules concerning proportionality, lethality, and treatment of civilians versus enemy spies.
There's only one way to win a war. Crush the enemy's will to fight.
It doesn't matter if anyone KNOWS how to win a war. Because the Humanists own the media, and if anyone DARES crush an enemy's will to fight, the Media immediately crushes OUR will to fight. The Media forced us to lose in Vietnam, and the Media prevents us from smashing the enemies to our south.
When Donaldus Magnus said the Media was the enemy, he was not speaking in euphemisms or allegory. they ARE our enemy, and have been the boot on our face for a very long time.
When Donaldus Magnus said the Media was the enemy, he was not speaking in euphemisms or allegory. they ARE our enemy, and have been the boot on our face for a very long time.
Yes indeed. They are the enemy and the God-Emperor is the first President in a very, very long time – perhaps ever – to recognise them as such, call them by their names, and attack them on their own ground. The media are rapidly losing that war, but in their own hubris and folly, they don't recognise it yet.
"… if the USMC or Army ever actually fought with that level of controlled savagery, the soldiers and commanders involved would be crucified by the media and hanged by the court of public opinion …"
Then the solution presents itself: the next major weapons platform implementation should move with such stealth and such speed that the media and public sentiment refuse to identify it as a form of warfare at all.
It's not as if this hasn't been seen before: the "Spanish Flu" of 1918 serves as a great example of the principle at work.
Even today, nobody's really sure whether it was a military camp "accident of convenience" in Kansas, something imported from China, the result of horrid British military hygiene in a French camp, and so forth.
This of course means that the emergent biowarfare platform of 1918 actually out-manoeuvred both the print media and public sentiment at the time.
Of course, once you see the pattern as a possibility, you're more likely to see the pattern as an actuality should it appear … or does exposure to information actually confer immunity to ignorance?
Politics by other means, warfare by other means — what follows next from Clausewitz?
Ultimately people choose to rely on naming these things by other means, because they can't countenance a monstrous possibility as an even more monstrous actuality.
Or, for that matter, a more monstrous Actualité, pardon my French. 🙂
What is the Washington Post but a print and electronic media regiment garrisoned in Washington DC?
And the caissons go rolling along.
RE "I never wrote or said that the US military doesn't know how to fight with brutality. I simply wrote that it's not the American way of war."
I was referring to this statement:
"the American military and civilian leadership has no clue how to fight a truly ruthless, brutal – and therefore successful – war against enemies of their civilisation."
Yes. When was the last time that the American military truly used epic brutality against its enemies, of the kind that Genghis Khan employed? Or that the Romans used against Carthage?
Probably the last time was Sherman's March to the Sea, or the various wars against the Indian tribes. And that was a LONG time ago.
Furthermore – and this is not merely hair-splitting – I stated that the leadership doesn't have a clue how to fight a truly pitiless war. I stand by that statement because it is true. If it were not, both the civilian leadership in Washington and the military leadership in the Puzzle Palace would have realised around about, oh, year 5 of a 20-year-long military occupation of a foreign country, that their strategy wasn't working.
I did not say that the military does not know how to fight a truly harsh and brutal war. I'm well aware of the fact that a number of theorists and practitioners of warfare, at the level of LTC or below in the Army and Marines, understand full well the flaws in fashionable doctrines like "COIN" and "hearts and minds".
The problem is that those practitioners don't seem to last too long in the modern military. And I am sorry to see this, because I do believe that the US military is home to some of the best soldiers in the world – but they aren't being allowed to do what they are supposed to do, which is to win wars.