A Hybrid World War
The war you never knew existed has been slowly growing around you for decades
Washington DC 20OCT2023
The ‘War to End All Wars’, the ‘Great War’, ‘World War I’ - all refer to the same event. The only thing that changed was perception. The transition tells a story of fearful aspiration giving way to the acceptance of unpleasant realities. The lens through which the experience was understood changed over time as new connections were made between the ‘War to End All Wars’ and the war that soon followed in its wake. World War II created the concept of World War I. They were part of a continuum that was understood in real time only by a very few. Winston Churchill and FDR grasped the essence of the problem early (1930s) and were widely criticized by those with far less knowledge or imagination until events years later proved them right.
In the same manner, the condition in which the world finds itself today is only now taking shape. Very few grasp what is going on. MIL maintains that a Hybrid World War (HWW) has been raging since 9/11 and the sooner we realize it for what it is, the better. The problem is time is running out. Those who are pressing to overturn the global order in new and misunderstood ways have the advantage until the rest cotton-on to what is really happening.
Shocks
Typically, shocks drive realization. Yet so far the shocks to the system have not produced much situational awareness: Jan 6, Ukraine, Oct 7. This is largely because so many people in the West have been suborned from the inside to support those seeking to destroy what the West has built. In the 1930s, those in the West that supported fascists and communists were in the minority. That is not the case today.1
What does “Hybrid World War” mean?
The ‘World War’ part should be clear - it refers to the interconnectedness of events occurring in different locations.2 Calling what we are experiencing ‘WWIII’ does not work for a few reasons.
First, the popular association of that name with global nuclear war (truly a war to end all wars).
Second, the concept of ‘World War’ is associated with the earlier wars “in the series” that were characterized by mass conventional military operations seeking decisive battlefield victories. This feature is creeping into current circumstances, but it is not dominated by it. For twenty years the dominant feature has been unconventional operations - largely unseen and thus not associated with “war” in the popular imagination. As will be discussed below, HWW is principally concerned with narrative not guns.
In the US at least, popular culture still harbors and cultivates what MIL calls the “History Channel” idea of war, that simply does not reflect current realities.3 This is a tremendous advantage for the aggressors because their targets have no clue they are under attack and resist their own governments efforts to resist or counterattack hybrid warfare. Russian manipulation for the 2016 US election is a classic case in point. Some correctly explained the US was “under attack” but the description fell flat because it did not conform to ‘History Channel’ war.Third, HWW is not a continuation of WWII. The opposing sides are similar - the West versus an Axis of Revanchism. Politically, it is a repeat of WWII in the sense that totalitarianism is the driving force against democracy. Like last time, authoritarians seek revenge for their internal weaknesses and continued failures. There, the parallels end.
Today the Axis is comprised of a loose group lead by Russia, and including China, Iran, and North Korea , plus various terrorist movements. This has been referred to as four-plus-one or Four +1.4 Russia is the fulcrum of the Axis.
Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea and various terrorist movements are all revanchist totalitarian powers with varying fascist characteristics. They are not traditional fascists as the simplistic “History Channel” would present them. This gives them an advantage because the threat they pose is not understood among their target populations in the West. Any comparison to historical fascism is pooh-poohed by their fifth columns and third party commentators who are wittingly or unwittingly, historically and/or politically, illiterate. Nothing facilitates their political agenda better than their targets denying the true political character of the threat. This empowers revanchists, like Chairman Xi, to claim democracy is weak and an inferior model compared to their “strong man” systems. Those messages are then repeated by anti-democratic political forces in the West as justification for their agenda. The circularity is invisible to most.
Those seeking revenge include enemies “inside the wire”. Unlike America and Britain in WWII, fascists movements have been elected to office in the West, have mounted coups, and continue advancing programs to end democracy. There continues to be a symbiosis between the aims and ideas of enemy totalitarian leaders and major political parties in Washington, Rome, Budapest, et al, and until recently, Warsaw.5
Forth, domestic autocratic alliances. As noted, the Axis also enjoy a coincidence of interests with major political parties in the West that are themselves seeking to destroy democracy. They exploit their population’s inability to tell fact from fiction and flood the zone with their own fictions that a sufficiently large segment of the population believe, thereby eroding faith in institutions, policy, and national will.
Accordingly, the alternative name for the Axis noted in 3 (a) above should be Four + 2 to account for the domestic allies of the Axis.Fifth, Hybrid warfare reverses the concepts of strength and weakness. The Western concept of these measures is material, whereas the Axis concept is ideational.6 This is by necessity. For the Axis, military victory is unobtainable and thus, irrelevant.
The Finish armed forces could be in Moscow within a week, such is the military overmatch between the West and the Axis.7 Yet the West is imploding from within based on demonstrably ridiculous whispers. An inability to understand this essential fact by the West will ensure defeat.
The strength of the Axis is its ability to manipulate the West’s speech freedoms to convince target populations to believe self-defeating lies. It’s a classic case of “the mouse that roared” intimidating the elephants with angry squeaks. This works because Western target populations have reached epistemic collapse. They are so bombarded with up-is-down propaganda and both side-isms that they are largely unable to tell fact from fiction. This opens Voltaire’s door: “those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.Sixth, moral imbalance is essential to the culture of hybrid warfare. There are no rules for the ‘weak’ who may use any means necessary. The strong must scrupulously adhere to every standard, law, rule and norm of civilized conduct. If they waiver, they don’t need enemies to point to their failures - their proponents are their harshest critics.8
Meanwhile, the aggressors are free to engage in limitless barbarism, subversion of political rights and all the rest, free from serious inquiry let alone censure. A Syrian dictator, backed by his Russian ally, kills 306,887 civilians, some with chemical weapons and there is not one protest. A democracy under attack from terrorists who behead infants and hide in hospital basements,9 attempts to defend itself and the world erupts in support of the terrorists. This is the reversal of Thucydides dictum, in hybrid war, the weak do what they can and the strong suffer what they must.Seventh, when nothing is as it seems, conflict duration (and its handmaiden, impatience) becomes a weapon for self inflicted wounds, and narrative becomes more important than bombs. The sole purpose of violence is to fashion narratives that deliver political victory. Hamas is a case study in narrative war.10
In summary, Hybrid or Gray Zone War refers to the messy reality of war today where virtually none of the “History Channel idea” of war exists - by design.11 Key to the concept is engaging in all forms of warfare (political, economic, and narrative [influence, perception], terror, kinetic - hence ‘hybrid’) that do not stray past a threshold to outright combat - hence neither white (peace), nor black (war), but gray.12
Mao’s Revolutionary War
Hybrid war relates closely to phase two of Mao’s revolutionary war. It can operate independently of the other phases or as part of a comprehensive strategy.
Phase one, allow the aggressor to penetrate deep into the interior, stretching out its lines of communication, forcing it to split its resources between offensive operations and occupation.
Phase two, once stalemate is reached, wage a protracted guerilla war against the aggressor - leading to heavy losses, war weariness, increased frustration, wavering support at home, at the front, and among allies, low morale, loss of discipline, and resulting in war crimes (or perceptions of same) that can be used to generate international condemnation of the aggressor.
The final phase, transition to conventional military operations to beat and expel the exhausted occupier.
The Vietnamese war against the United States is a textbook example of revolutionary war. It was repeated by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iranians against the US in Iraq.
In HWW, these phases are asynchronously happening all over the world between the West and the Axis.
For the Axis of Revanchism, Military victory is unobtainable and thus, irrelevant. An inability to understand this essential fact by the West will ensure defeat.
Thats the Theory - What about the Practice?
The above outline is a very brief explanation of HWW. The question is how does this all work in practice? Which way is the tide flowing?
Currently MIL assesses it is flowing in the Axis direction principally because of the growth and success of pro-Axis forces inside the democracies. The United States is the prize. It has already fallen to Axis influence operations. Should that trajectory continue and it succumbs to its own anti-democratic forces, world history changes completely.
The following brief presentation is illustrative of how this has come about in practical terms.
America’s Vulnerability to HWW
The US has suffered one wrenching crisis after another in quick accelerating succession over the past twenty years that have made it fertile ground for Russian hybrid attacks. None have been fully mitigated, let alone well managed.
From the 9/11 attacks, to decisive loss of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, to the 2008 economic crash, to the Charlottesville rally in 2017, the 2020 civil rights protests, the 2020 global pandemic, the 2020 attempted coup d’état, the continuation of the “slow moving coup”, and the even slower response from legitimate state authority to confront the threat. Just in terms of timeline alone, it may already be too late to save America from losing its democracy.
Putin was able to create strife not just in America’s periphery (Iraq/Ukraine/Israel), but deep within the heart of America itself.
Through a combination of hard work, propitious politico-economic and social settings, incredible timing, and dumb luck, the enemy of my enemy became Putin’s obsession and boy did it pay off.
After decades on K St as a partner in Black Manafort Stone & Kelly LLC, [yes that Stone], Paul Manafort went international. He worked for a wide variety of unsavory international clients, including Viktor Yanukovych who was Putin’s puppet in Ukraine. Manafort got Yanukovych elected and later assisted him to attempt to cling to power against a popular pro-democracy movement. The “Orange revolution” drove Yanukovych from office. As Ukrainians toured his palace, with its zoo and ‘pirate ship’ on an artificial lake, Putin descended into a fury from which he never recovered.
Hillary Clinton was SECSTATE at the time and thus became enemy #1. When she ran for President, the die was cast.
Serendipitously a resident of Trump Tower, after Manafort returned to the US from his Kiev adventure, he was selected out of the blue to be Trump’s campaign manager for the 2016 election. Manafort reported offered to do the job for “free”, but there is no such thing as a free lunch in global power politics. The connections between the Trump organization and Russia are extensively documented in government and investigative coverage. These findings are controversial in some quarters, but the outcomes speak for themselves.
There is a reason the intensely isolationist “America First” Trump Administration got deeply involved in Ukraine. It was not out of some innate curiosity in the political, economic and social wellbeing of eastern Europeans. Trump was led to believe that if he threatened the popular democratically elected leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he would be rewarded with dirt on his political rival Joe Biden whose son was involved in business dealings with Burisma.
Why he was led to believe this, by whom, and for what purpose, should be obvious to anyone with a passing understanding of influence operations. There were a cascading series of other interlinked activities, but one photograph and one moment captures Putin’s triumph in all its glory:
When an American president stood before the world professing his faith in Putin over and above the advice of his own intelligence agencies, Putin knew he had won a major victory in his hybrid war against America.
Putin’s America policy culminated on Jan 6 2021. He had achieved what Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev could not - he made America its own worst enemy and set it on a course to self destruct. How is this possible? I will let Yewleea explain.
“Yewleea” is a narrative warfare analyst based in Ukraine. In this video she offers the best concise explanation MIL has ever seen about the power of narrative warfare to defeat conventional military might. I urge readers to watch this in its entirety and to follow Yewleea.
Following the attempted coup by pro-Russian forces in Washington DC, of the kind Paul Manafort had rigged for Putin’s puppet regime in Kiev, America entered a period of chaos and turmoil from which it has yet to recover. On the contrary, US instability continues to grow and the pathway to self destruction appears to be getting more slippery and sloped to Putin’s advantage with each passing domestic crisis. Almost a year to the day after the attempted coup in Washington, Putin felt secure enough to undertake a full scale invasion of Ukraine to finish the job he started in 2014.
Putin in a fight for his life
However, the Ukrainians, America, the EU, NATO and the international community did not react as they had in the past when Russia first invaded in 2014. Suddenly, Putin found himself in the fight of his life. Indeed, it was as if he had succumbed to phase one of Mao’s revolutionary war plan being played by the West. Putin, the savvy political operator, was confronted with the fact he made multiple sweeping miscalculations about everything.
The essential failure was the assumption that the Jan 6 attempted coup in Washington DC had weakened the US to the point it would acquiesce in the face of Russia’s brazen aggression. Accordingly, he knew he had to do everything in his power to stop American support for Ukraine. This included working with all of his proxies and allies of convenience, whose activities might contribute to that objective, in the US and abroad.
Putin-Hamas-Iran
The Hamas attack on Israel is a case in point. Iranian-backed Hamas attacking Israel and luring them into a trap in Gaza is a golden opportunity for Putin. This event has taken all the oxygen from the room. No one is talking Ukraine any more. It distracts the world’s attention from Moscow’s massive military failures in Ukraine and Russia’s gaping national weaknesses.
Russian links to Hamas go far back and have been renewed and strengthened as part of Moscows hybrid strategy. Richard Kraemer writes in The Hill
Russia [is no] stranger to Hamas. Hamas leaders met with Russian government officials in March and September of this year. The former Kremlin proxy Wagner Group is alleged to have trained Hamas fighters in Africa. So it is no coincidence that, on the eve of Hamas’s October 7 attack, Russia preemptively doubled down on its offensive to take the strategic town of Avdiivka in Ukraine’s east. Recognizing that global attention would shift to Hamas’s carnage and Israel’s response, these signs indicate that Russia was informed of the coming bloodbath on the Gaza-Israel border.
The Hamas attack is a case where Axis interest converge. Iran is desperate to stop Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states from working with Israel against their common enemy - islamic extremism - especially of the kind backed by Iran. Here the Sunni-Shia divide really matters. The Gulf has been liberalizing for decades and both the governments and the people of the region realize the benefits that come from carefully-planned, well managed, and moderate opening. They have nothing in common with Iran and have only suffered because of that regime. By contrast, they have so much more to gain by normalizing with Israel.13 Of course this is why Iran wound-up and dispatched its proxies on the warpath against Israel. Another classic example of mutual interests of Axis powers using HWW tactics, techniques and procedures, against the democracies.
As MIL recently proposed, if Israel was smart, it would have not invaded Gaza and concluded the accord with Saudi Arabia and encouraged it to lead a coalition of the willing to assume control of Gaza and the West Bank and to transition them to a new Palestinian state without Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, while conducting strategic strike operations against billionaire Hamas leaders in their mansions in Doha and their backers in Tehran. But Israel’s leader had other ideas.
Netanyahu’s constitutional crisis
In a timeline that might feel eerily familiar to Americans, prior to the Hamas attack, Israel was in the middle of a constitutional crisis. Netanyahu was under intense legal pressure for various crimes, and had rigged the courts to ensure he remained free of consequences for his actions. Unprecedented mass protests running for 39 weeks straight flared up in response to Netanyahu‘s conduct. Things were so contentious that IDF members refused to serve in the military until Netanyahu was expelled from office. Former heads of the intelligence services were concerned about civil war - not Hamas breaching the border.
One analyst has argued persuasively that the interests of Netanyahu and Hamas coincide
"There's been a lot of criticism of Netanyahu in Israel for instating a policy for many years of strengthening Hamas and keeping Gaza on the brink while weakening the Palestinian Authority," said Mairav Zonszein of the International Crisis Group.” In August 2019, former prime minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio that Netanyahu's "strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking … even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] … in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah." The logic underlying this strategy, Barak said, is that "it's easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there is no one to sit with and no one to talk to."
This begs the question, was there an “intelligence failure”, or had Israel been conditioned by constant domestic distractions, chaos and turmoil, that it ran out of bandwidth to cover down on all threats foreign and domestic? How much of the trouble was organic and how much was manufactured by those who would benefit from the national security establishment all looking in a different direction?
Lessons for America
What lessons are there for the United States in this recent history? MIL maintains many - the most important of which is seeing the linkages between Russian backed turmoil in the Middle East and here at home. If the connections are made, and there is growing awareness of the HWW - perhaps it can be countered. The challenge is HWW is so hard for people to grasp because it is much more about influence and politics than it is about things blowing up - at least in the first instance.
Americas rolling constitutional crises
The United States is experiencing a very similar situation to Israel. A corrupt political leader, engulfed in a string of legal crises, continues to trigger a series of constitutional crises, including but not limited to: Jan 6, Speakership spills, budget failures, spending by CR, debt brinkmanship, and government shutdowns or endless threats of the same. The same leader has created profound internal divisions accompanied by unprecedented erosions of democratic norms, with a corresponding growing willingness to resort to political violence to end democracy.
The sense of constant crisis conditions the population to a deep sense of instability. That erodes faith in the ability of democracy to save itself from its domestic enemies, directly paving the way for the triumph of autocracy. The more America and the world appear to be in chaos, the more likely Americans will demand strongman leadership. There is evidence this is working surprisingly well.
In all of this, Putin is the unmistakable winner.
He has managed to turn America’s most virulent anti-Russia party into a cheerleader for “strongman” political solutions that favor Russia. Pro-Putin forces in the US Congress have used crises they themselves have created as a pretext to successfully cut all aid to Ukraine. They try to argue that the US is unable to support Israel and Ukraine at the same time. This is patently ridiculous to anyone with a passing knowledge of the sums involved.
Defeating Russia in Ukraine has cost the US about 4% of the annual Pentagon budget.14 In exchange, the mighty red army has collapsed like a pack of cards. All of America’s spending for the entire the Cold War did not achieve
“Nearly half of the Russian military’s front-line armor has been destroyed, abandoned, rendered useless, or captured by Ukrainian forces.”
The same party that says $43 bn in military aid to Ukraine is unsustainable handed out $7.8 trillion in tax cuts to billionaires in a single year, nearly doubling the national debt overnight.15 They then use the spike in the debt as the reason to play politics with the budget via the rolling chaos of CRs and threats of government shutdowns and defaults.
One day in the not so distant future, the American chaos party will default on the debt. Then they will instantly find out just how far they have advanced Putin’s goal of destroying America.
Hybrid War Works
Militarily ruined, politically weak, struggling with a heavily sanctioned economy, and living in mortal fear of dying by the sword like Gaddafi (who was sodomized by a bayonet), Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is on the cusp of destroying America and winning the HWW.
Update 21 Nov 2023 - INTERNATIONAL—— Multi-front War - Axios report in full below
Never before have we talked to so many top government officials who, in private, are so worried about so many overseas conflicts at once.
Why it matters: We don't like to sound dire. But to sound a siren of clinical, clear-eyed realism: U.S. officials say this confluence of crises poses epic concern and historic danger.
Behind the scenes: Officials tell us that inside the White House, this was the heaviest, most chilling week since President Biden took office just over 1,000 days ago.
Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates — who ran the Pentagon under presidents of both parties, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — tells us America is facing the most crises since World War II ended 78 years ago.
He explains the White House's system overload like this: "There's this gigantic funnel that sits over the table in the Situation Room. And all the problems in the world end up coming through that funnel to the same eight or 10 people. There's a limit to the bandwidth those eight or 10 people can have."
Not one of the crises can be solved and checked off. All five could spiral into something much bigger:
1. Israel's response to the Hamas terrorist attack, and growing fear of a spreading war that reaches to Iran and beyond. Officials point to the protests, threats and deadly, anti-American warnings of Arab nations after they thought — incorrectly — Israel struck a hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds. This is a preview of what they fully expect will be a worldwide response to the expected Israeli invasion of Gaza.
The U.S. is deploying two aircraft carriers to the region. A U.S. Navy destroyer on Thursday shot down missilesfrom Yemen that appeared headed toward Israel. U.S. troops were fired on this weekby drones in Syria and Iraq.
2. Vladimir Putin meeting in China this week with Xi Jinping to further strengthen their anti-America alliance. In a new Foreign Affairs article that top officials are sharing, Gates argues that both leaders believe America and other big democracies "are past their prime and have entered an irreversible decline." Putin and Xi sniff weakness and are activating on many fronts, top administration officials tell us.
This Reuters headline says it all: "Russia says it is coordinating Middle East policy with China."
3. A malicious Iran. It's unclear how involved Iran was in orchestrating or assisting the Hamas terrorist attack — but officials seem certain there are ties. More worrisome: U.S. officials fear Hezbollah — a much bigger terrorist group than Hamas, funded by Iran — will strike the moment Israel gets stuck in Gaza.
Biden said Thursday night in his Oval Office address: "Iran is supporting Russia in Ukraine, and it's supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups in the region."
4. Then there's the unhinged leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, and his frequent testing of long-range, nuclear-capable missiles. As Gates points out, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea combined could have twice as many nuclear weapons as America in two years.
5. A new weapon is being deployed in all these conflicts: a massive spread of doctored or wholly fake videos to manipulate what people see and think in real time. The architects of these new technologies, in background conversations with us after demonstrating new capabilities soon to be released, say even the sharpest eyes looking for fake videos will have an impossible time detecting what's real. (We'll have a column coming soon to Go Deeper on this topic).
Fake video, on top of bots (fake people) and fake written content, is being used aggressively by all anti-American actors, intelligence officials say. Some experts estimate that more than 90% of content on the internet will soon be fake or manipulated.
What scares officials is how all five threats could fuse into one.
The State Department on Thursday issued a rare "Worldwide Caution," warning U.S. travelers abroad of "increased tensions in various locations around the world" that raise "the potential for terrorist attacks, demonstrations or violent actions against U.S. citizens and interests."
These simultaneous threats are hitting at the very moment the American political system seems — and sometimes is — literally broken.
It's not just that Republicans don't have a House speaker and can't seem to elect one, or that we might shut down the government in the middle of this mess, or that we're hurtling toward another toxic presidential election in which big chunks of both parties want different candidates.
Former top intelligence officials tell us domestic unrest is one of their biggest fears — whether it's triggered by court rulings against former President Trump or protests over war in the Middle East. Biden allies frame these flare-ups as a reminder that global chaos requires calm and experience. "With age comes wisdom," Ron Klain, Biden's first chief of staff, told us.
But there has been a total collapse of people's trust in the opposing party, the media, what they see or share on social platforms, and even the top-secret intelligence the government relies on to measure these threats.
This, as much as the five individual threats above, is what worries officials. They know things could get worse — fast — and require tough actions — fast. And no one knows whether Congress or the public could unite in an emergency.
DOMESTIC —— TTN Holding Congress Hostage - Dana Millbank in The Washington Post - edited for content
Almost a year ago, voters entrusted Republicans with control of the House. And this is what they have done with it:
Fifteen rounds of voting to choose a speaker in January. Nine months of lurching between crises and failed votes on the House floor. A march to impeach President Biden on fabricated charges. The ouster of the speaker. A successful coup to topple the man Republicans nominated to replace the ousted speaker. Two failed speaker votes (and counting) on the House floor for the man who led the coup. Seventeen days (and counting) without a functioning House of Representatives at a time of two wars and a looming government shutdown. And no solution in sight.
The House majority is paralyzed, unable to govern and unwilling to work with Democrats for the good of the institution or the country.
[Jim Jordan’s record is as follows]
An instigator of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and facilitator of Donald Trump’s attempted coup who defied a duly-issued subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the insurrection.
A legislator who hasn’t enacted any legislation in his 16 years in Congress — but who issued 45 subpoenas this year alone.
A thuggish bully described as a “legislative terrorist” by one of his predecessors, former Republican speaker John Boehner.
[Death Threats]
Now, that member of Congress, Jordan, true to form, is terrorizing fellow House Republicans who won’t support him for speaker. Jordan-allied lawmakers, conservative activists and right-wing media figures such as Sean Hannity and Steve Bannon have led an intimidation campaign of phone harassment, social media attacks and threats.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R- S.C.) told us that opponents’ “phones are going to be lit up.”
On Sunday, a Fox News producer for Sean Hannity sent an intimidating email to the holdouts — or “snowflakes,” as Hannity called them on air — that was intercepted by Axios’s Juliegrace Brufke. Hannity also provided phone numbers so his audience could harass Jordan’s foes.
On Thursday morning, Rep. Drew Ferguson (Ga.) said that after he voted against Jordan on the second ballot, “my family and I started receiving death threats.” He had switched his vote away from Jordan in the first place because of the “threatening tactics and pressure campaigns Jordan and his allies were using.”
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (Iowa), who, after voting for Jordan on the floor on Tuesday, withdrew her support on Wednesday, said she, too, received “credible death threats” and a barrage of abusive calls. “One thing I cannot stomach, or support, is a bully,” she said in a statement.
Rep. Nick LaLota (N.Y.), a Jordan foe, posted one of the obscene death threats he had received. Rep. Don Bacon (Neb.), another Jordan opponent, reported that even his wife had received threatening emails and texts, and vulgar voice messages, some of which he shared with Politico’s Olivia Beavers.
Officially, Jordan condemned the threats, yet they kept coming. These are the same sorts of threats that have been visited on Jordan’s usual opponents — Democratic lawmakers and targets of his committee probes — for years.
Fortunately, on Tuesday, 20 courageous Republicans stood in the breach and blocked Jordan’s terrorist takeover of the speaker’s gavel. But this also means that 200 House Republicans — including all members of GOP leadership and several self-styled moderates — voted for an extremist takeover of their majority. This was no aberration: The next day, 199 of them did it again in a second vote.
It’s no longer a matter of the Republican establishment being disrupted by fanatics. As this week’s votes show, the fanatics now are the establishment.
House Republicans launched into one of their now-frequent episodes of self-loathing. Among the ways lawmakers described their own caucus to reporters:
“A ship that doesn’t have a rudder.”
“We need to ... get our heads out of our rear end.”
“A broken conference.”
“All thrust and no vector.”
“A bunch of idiots.”
“Pretty dysfunctional.”
Rep. Jim Banks (Ind.) burst out of the meeting calling the idea “the biggest F.U. to Republican voters I’ve ever seen.”
Rep. Troy Nehls (Tex.) renewed his call to make Trump the speaker.
Jordan bullied most of his opponents into submission. For example, Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) had called herself a “hell no” who would “absolutely not” back Jordan. But after the speaker-designate and his thugs gave her the treatment, Wagner said Jordan “has allayed my concerns.”
But a brave band still opposed him: a combination of lawmakers on the Appropriations Committee (Jordan routinely votes against their appropriations bills); swing- district moderates (who fear the extremist label Jordan would give them); and a few old-bull institutionalists (who actually care about things such as honoring election results).
134 million Americans don’t believe elections will solve America’s most fundamental problems. 18 million Americans would support violence to restore former President Donald Trump to power. Half of the country believes there will be a civil war “in the next few years”. A slightly lower number, 40% believe that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy”. In a different study, an estimated ~4.5M Americans are “very or completely willing” to “commit violence against government, election and health officials, & police and military”.
It is easier to destroy than build. Chaos is easier to create than order.
The History Channel idea of war can be summed up as follows: battles in the air, land and sea, by millions of men in uniformed armies, using massed conventional military forces, seeking decisive battlefield victories. Win a _sufficient_number of battlefield victories and ‘the tide will turn’ in your side’s favor. Win a decisive number, plant your flag in the enemy capital, sign a surrender document on a battleship, and the war is won. The moral clarity of the war means that the narrative of the victors is accepted by all - including the vanquished. The loser accepts unconditional surrender, and is forced by an occupying army to adapt its national culture to one imposed by the winner. In History Channel war, there is a high degree of clarity about everything: the sides, the morality of the cause (good guys v bad guys), the battlefields, fronts, supply lines, and sanctuary of rear echelons from which to mount war. Mass mobilization of the population and industry requires everyone to participate in war making. War is played by rules accepted by all sides, like the Geneva conventions and the laws of war. Combatants are treated with respect, and when excesses happen, they are easily attributed to the perpetrators who are brought to justice and suffer consequences.
The US Army recently changed its uniform back to the WWII style. Various explanations were given but one that resonated in this context was something along the lines that the Army wanted to remind the public and itself about a time when the Army fought morally unambiguous wars and won. No doubt leveraging the impact of WWII movies and the History Channel on popular American understanding of war.
Events and their sequencing are not necessarily determinative or directly linked. In most cases, a confluence of events serve multiple interests. Actors in the system will seek to derive advantage from passing opportunities. Sometimes planning and coordination do take place, but to assume there is a secret lair where the bad guys are in constant meetings making infallible plans would be a mistake.
This has been carefully cultivated by go-betweens like Steve Bannon who was just as active in Brexit and European fascism as he was in the US.
The West has comparative material superiority compared to the Axis, so it is natural that it plays to this strength. Consider the following facts: The US is growing by 4.9% and unemployment is 3.8%. NATO has incredible military capabilities (the US alone has 12 nuclear powered aircraft carriers, each with more airpower than most air forces of sovereign states) and the capacity to sustain conventional combat operations for years on end. Whereas, Russia is on day 615 of its 3 day war, China’s economy is teetering on the brink, and Iran is under attack at home and surrounded by enemies abroad.
In fact, it is worth focusing a bit more on Iran as emblematic of flipping strengths and weaknesses. It has been struggling with a disastrous economy - “Only about 27.5% of Iran’s population has been in formal employment over the past decades”; a restive public who daily grow more audacious in their resistance to a regime 81% of them hate; and it is surrounded by enemies. Iran has not helped itself by funding and operating a terror crescent aimed at its neighbors. In fact, its foreign policy has achieved a remarkable milestone. It has driven the Arabs and Israelis into one another arms. Much like China’s foreign policy has significantly strengthened the Western alliance system in the Indopacific. The Hamas attack may have stalled the Saudi-Israel peace treaty but it may also have cemented its future as vital to addressing the true origin of the threat - the regime in Tehran.
Finland is NATOs newest member. It has a long history of neutrality. To maintain that status in a credible way, Finland has a large, robust, powerful and very capable military built for the sole purpose of repelling Russia - without the assistance of allies. Now added to NATO, both sides have vastly gained and Putin has lost - including the encroachment of NATO directly on 800+ miles of Russia’s border. This has many benefits for NATO particularly in the ISR realm.
Finland is unique in having beaten a Russian army in combat.
Finland, a nation of 3.7 million confronting one more than 40 times larger, seemed doomed. The Red Army had more than one million soldiers already deployed on its borders; Finland, prior to mobilization, had just 33,000. The VVS and Soviet Navy deployed 2,300 aircraft; the Finns had just 114. But the offensive quickly degenerated into a drawn-out slugfest, with the thrust into central Finland ending in a grim landscape of abandoned vehicles and frozen, snow-covered corpses. Everywhere white-clad Finnish snipers took a deadly toll, as did ski troops, attacking swiftly out of the woods with submachine guns, grenades, and tank-destroying Molotov cocktails. Stalin’s Navy suffered from coastal artillery, its landing attempts repulsed. But nowhere did the Finns fight more tenaciously than in the air. Finland’s ferocious defense saved it from having to form a puppet state and sharing the fate of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Soviet empire eventually absorbed each of those once-independent nations. More than a million Baltic citizens vanished into the labor camps of the gulag, where most were shot or worked to death.
This is as it should be in normal polities. The problem is we are in a deeply abnormal era. Rapid political, social, economic and technological change rarely ends well.
Under Al Shifa hospital in particular, they say, “the militants…have spent the better part of 16 years building a vast command complex,” according to the New York Times. “The hospital, Israeli officials said, was spared in past Israeli operations out of concern for civilian life, but at the cost of leaving whatever may be underneath it intact. It is a mistake that Israel will not repeat this time, the officials said.“
Hamas is attempting to bait Israel into exactly this trap in Gaza. Indeed, without even entering Gaza, Israel is already under sustained narrative warfare attack that appears to have generated significant support for Hamas’ terror tactics around the world. MIL anticipated early calls for a cease fire to protect innocent Palestinians in Gaza who are themselves hostages of Hamas. But we did not expect large scale support for Hamas itself. Hamas ≠ the Palestinian people just as much as Netanyahu ≠ the Israeli people. Hamas hides under hospitals, and shoots at the buildings above, and then claim hundreds died when none of this actually happened. Once this is discerned from the evidence of craters and fire damage, and the story is exposed as propaganda, the world has moved on.
CWII does not like these terms but accepts them as generalizations most people will understand. In military circles, hybrid and gray zone, are addressed by irregular and unconventional warfare. However, there is much useless debate about definitions. Equally, these terms tend to refer to operations and not so much to grand strategy - which is a holistic concept that touches on how a society uses its national power to agree on, and pursue, political objectives. National power utilizes military capabilities but goes much further to include espionage, economic, societal, propaganda (influence), and political warfare.
Hybrid war is a strategy of the militarily weak. Specifically, those who do not have major conventional military forces; or militarily powerful allies; or an economic, financial, industrial, or population base capable of sustaining major conventional military operations.
Israel is an active partner already in a range of low-profile but important areas of cooperation. Agriculture is a great example. Israeli ag-tech and investments have made important contributions to feeding the water-scarce region, promoting mutual interests and a channel to see one another as equals not enemies.
Mark Thompson for the The Project on Government Oversight reported on 26 July, 2023
So far, the U.S. has said it is providing Ukrainian with $43 billion (PDF) in military aid (or) about $2.5 billion a month since the war began. Meanwhile, the cost of the U.S. military (in general)… has been about $70 billion a month. This crude calculation suggests the U.S. (and its allies) are subcontracting out the decimation of Moscow’s military for about 4% of the Pentagon’s annual budget.
Treasury Department data shows the gross federal debt rose by about $7.8 trillion on Trump's watch. As reported by The Washington Post, based on Treasury Department data, “Trump inherited a $20 trillion debt when he took office, increasing to $27.8 trillion when he left, an increase of 39 percent”. "Under Trump, our national debt increased roughly 40 percent and currently 25 percent of our national debt was accumulated during the Trump presidency,"