Category: Advise and Assist

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The Foot Sergeant

*Although based on actual events, this is a fictional story of love and forgiveness that seems timely on Easter Sunday. But this is a man’s story, so there is no actual love or formal forgiveness, because that is not how men love each other.

When the 1MC (ship loudspeakers) erupted with “Mass Casualties Inbound,” I hustled down to the hangar bay and started to set up stretcher stands. Ship-to-shore communications were not robust in 1983, so we had no idea how many wounded we would see when the elevator came down from the flight deck. It was just one Marine on a stretcher; the red shirts from the flight deck deposited him in front of us; one of the squadron corpsmen was with him, and as he talked with the surgeon, the other corpsmen and I started prepping him for the Operating Room.

The Marine was a sergeant, but he didn’t look like any of the Marines from Beirut International Airport that we had previously treated. His camouflage utilities were clean and starched, and the boot he still wore was shined. He didn’t smell from weeks without showering, yet he was lying before us, missing a good bit of his right hand and left foot. The battalion aid station had administered morphine before he flew out to us, so although alert, he wasn’t feeling any pain. When I removed his boot, I gasped in amazement. The surgeon and Marine looked at me, so I pointed to the intact foot, saying: “Holy shit, his feet are clean, and toenails trimmed; he doesn’t even smell bad. I’ve never seen a wounded Marine who wasn’t filthy; I think he might be a homosexual.”

I made the joke because the sergeant was starting to freak over the severity of his injuries; getting him focused on something else was a professional move. Back then, you could joke about the gays without fear because the military was male-dominated. Men don’t coddle other men – they teased them, often unmercifully, even if they were friends. The Foot Sergeant was a public affairs Marine assigned to the USS New Jersey and had been riding a CH-53 ashore to do man-on-the-street interviews of the grunts for his ship’s newspaper. The pilot thought he saw an RPG grenade launched at his aircraft as he was landing and dumped the collective, skipping his tail rotor off the deck. The rotor shattered on impact, and pieces flew into the big airframe, hitting the Sergeant, the only passenger. When the sergeant heard my allegation, he protested his innocence as expected, starting a heated back and forth with me until the Anesthesiologist put him under. We were professionals, after all, and knew how to handle injured Marines, even clean ones.

The surgeons trimmed up his lower leg stump and right hand, and both were elevated with Penrose drains inserted in the wound tracts to facilitate proper healing. The sergeant joined another recently wounded Marine in the USS Guam’s seven-bed sick bay. The other Marine was a machine gunner from New York City nicknamed Second Best. He had been wounded in the right leg by First Best, a Syrian machine gunner. They had been dueling for fifteen minutes before Second-Best, who was lying prone behind his gun, was hit by a round that traveled the length of his leg. Although the wound track was long, the injury was minor, allowing Second Best to return to duty in a few weeks for another attempt at his Syrian nemesis.   

The Foot Sergeant would be sent back to Bethesda Naval Hospital at some future date. For now, he was stuck on the USS Guam because all our helicopters were ferrying the equipment and entertainers for a Bob Hope Christmas Special to the ship. The lineup included TV stars Brooke Shields, Cathy Lee Crosby, Ann Jillian, and Miss USA Julie Hayek. This would be the last Bob Hope Christmas Show for service members deployed in a war zone, making it a big deal. Not that the Pentagon was admitting Beirut was a war zone, but the loss of over 250 Marines, sailors, and soldiers over the months made it seem damn close to one.

The big show was on Friday, the 23rd of December, and was impressive. The Marines had flown a few hundred of the grunts in from the beach, and they were given the front-row seats. I had a dirty pair of Marine Corps cammies stashed in my locker for just such an occasion and was hanging out close enough to the stage to be selected to go up and get a Christmas present from Brooke Shields, who kissed me on the cheek on national television. I couldn’t have had a better day before Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve, I strolled into the ward to check on the Foot Sergeant and Second Best, who were restricted to their racks while their wounds drained. The Foot Sergeant asked if one of the Hollywood stars or Miss USA would be dropping by, and I said they would, but added, “Not to see you; they want to see wounded Marines, not a closet homo injured by a shitty pilot.” My joke was not well received; instead of calling me foul and filthy names, the Foot Sergeant started to cry. I didn’t know what to do and looked to Second Best for some guidance, but he called me a motherfucker for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried. I felt like shit and apologized profusely, but the Foot Sergeant was inconsolable.

I had to make things right; it was Christmas Eve, a time to share joy and love with your fellow man, even those with clean feet and trimmed toenails. I glanced into our two-room ICU and was suddenly inspired. I told the Foot Sergeant to calm down as I was moving him into the ICU, where we could cover him with bloody bandages, hook him up to the EKG, and lure a Hollywood starlet in to spend some time comforting him. The sergeant thought about it for a minute and decided he liked the idea, so I got a wheelchair and moved him over to the ICU.

Pulling Liberty in Haifa, Israel, with one of the Foot Sergeants’ Marine buddies

In 1983, the ICU aboard the USS Guam had an illegal washer and dryer set up in its bathroom. The washer and dryer ran 24/7, except when patients were in the ICU, so the room was hot, and the floor was covered in dust bunnies from the dryer vent. The ICU beds were bigger and taller than the medical ward racks, so the foot sergeant fit comfortably in one, wearing just his pajama bottoms. I covered up his chest and head with gauze, poured a little blood on him, hooked up the EKG monitor, and put an oxygen mask on him without connecting the hose to oxygen (that required doctor orders), so it hung down on the deck.

I sat at a portable stand with a logbook open, mimicking the ICU critical patient watch because the Foot Sergeant looked like a goner. A chair was between the two ICU racks for the Hollywood stars to use if they felt compelled to comfort the fallen warrior. The Foot Sergeant was happy; Second Best was delighted too but bitching about not being in the ICU with us, and I felt like I had made up for teasing the Foot Sergeant until he cried (which was gay, as I pointed out to him later). The stage was set, and we didn’t have long to wait.

The first VIP to wander down the passageway was Bob Hope, who appeared to have had too many celebratory drinks. He was escorted by the Surgeons from Mobile Medical Team 11 and my boss, Dr. Derbert. Fortunately, they, too, had been drinking because they overlooked the missing Foot Sergeant when they escorted Bob Hope to meet with Second Best. I had closed the door to the ICU when I saw them coming, saving the Foot Sergeant for one of the starlets. When I saw a gaggle of news photographers in the passageway, I opened the ICU door and told the Fort Sergeant to stand by. Brooke Shields was the first celebrity to poke her head in, but she immediately decided against entering. Miss USA did the same; looking at the bloody, bandaged spectacle of the Foot Sergeant, she took a pass. But not Ann Jillian. She and her husband immediately entered the ICU, asking how badly the Foot Sergeant was injured. I made up some bullshit about him being shot multiple times when he ran into the no man’s land to rescue a small child in the middle of a firefight. I finished my report, telling the couple we did not expect the Marine to survive the night.

The story moved Ms. Jillian; she had wedged herself into the chair between the ICU beds and was stroking the Foot Sergeant’s blood-matted hair while whispering in his left ear. As I watched, I realized that the Foot Sergeant may not handle this attention well. The room was hot, so he just had a thin sheet covering him; his pulse was starting to skyrocket, which we could hear on the monitor, and suddenly his breathing became labored. That was most likely due to dryer lint clogging the open end of the O2 mask tubing. Then nature stepped in to refute my claims about his sexual orientation. Suddenly, the Foot Sergeant had a massive, rock-hard erection that lifted the sheet covering him like a tent pole.

When that happened, the poor guy turned bright red and began making strange noises as he struggled to breathe. Being a sharp lad, I shouted, “Oh my God, he has a priapism. I’m afraid you must leave now.” I thought I was home free as I escorted the pair to the passageway. But when they left the ICU, they ran into the ship’s doctor, who looked in to see what was happening. “What the fuck is going on in here?” He shouted, probably because he, too, had been drinking.

As the other physicians crowded into the ICU, I explained that some of the corpsmen had been teasing the Foot Sergeant about maybe being gay for some reason. I wanted to make amends for their despicable behavior by getting him some one-on-one attention from a Hollywood starlet. My boss, Dr. Derbert, wasn’t having it; “Bullshit, Lynch, you’re the one who started that rumor when he arrived in the hangar bay, and you’re the only corpsman to tease him about it ever since.” That wasn’t true; one of the other corpsmen occasionally teased the Foot Sergeant, but I was still screwed. The only thing that saved me was the propensity of the American military to cover up embarrassing incidents.

When the officers piled into the ICU, one of the nurses escorted Ann and her husband from the room. He confirmed to them that the badly wounded Marine would probably not survive, while Dr. Derbert read me the riot act. The medical men then gathered in a scrum to get their story straight before heading to the bridge to report to the Captain what had happened. When everyone cleared out of the ICU, our charge nurse, Frank, stood there looking at me with a wry smile. He was a good man, and we got along well, but I was still surprised by his following comment.

“Look at the bright side, Lynch; you got the physicians so pissed off they didn’t notice the washer and dryer. Your illegal laundry is safe for the time being.”

That was a big deal; clothes washed in the ship’s laundry returned damp, smelly, and wrinkled. If I had been responsible for losing our machines, I might have been even less popular with the crew. My new reputation for being the guy who took advantage of Ann Jillian’s kindness and sympathy was bad enough.

At Captain’s Mast, the skipper fined me three hundred bucks for being a dumb ass but suspended half of it after Nurse Frank read a statement from the Foot Sergeant about the impact Ann Jillian had on his flagging morale. The Foot Sergeant was a stand-up guy, and we stayed in touch. He married and left the Marine Corps for the big leagues in 1990. In 1992, he won a Pulitzer while writing for the New York Times. Then the son of a bitch got leukemia and died in 1995. I don’t think I ever cried as hard as I did the night his wife called to tell me. The fucking Foot Sergeant was a good man, and It’s been lonely growing old without him.

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Fitness Standards for the Combat Arms

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made headlines last week for ordering the military services to review their fitness standards for troops assigned to combat arms units. His goal is to create uniform standards to replace gender-based fitness tests. Although Hegseth is on record as being against women in combat, this (in theory) wasn’t about that. Hegseth reinforced his order with a video on X where he stated:  

“We need to have the same standard, male or female, in our combat roles; soon, we’ll have nothing but the highest and equal standards for men and women in combat.”

That is great news, except it won’t work because standards can be waived, exceptions made, and rigorous standards challenged when senior officers or SNCOs cannot meet them. We didn’t end up with female officers graduating from the Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course because IOC lacked standards. General officers of my generation seemed to honestly believe that introducing women into the infantry was a good idea as soon as they were selected to flag rank. But I don’t want to explore flag officer complicity because some of the men involved are friends of mine, and Marines have rules about what one says about one’s friends in blog posts.

Except for Joe Dunford, the best Marine Corps Commandant in my lifetime, who designed and authorized the 2015 Marine Corps Force Integration Plan experiment. That rigorously controlled, detailed experiment showed that forcing females into the combat arms would degrade overall performance and lethality.

Here is a sample of the data collected during the study:

  • Female Marines averaged 15 percent lower anaerobic power and capacity levels than their male counterparts.
  • In anaerobic power performance, the top 25 percent of female performers and the bottom 25 percent of male performers overlapped.
  • Female Marines demonstrated levels 10 percent lower on average in aerobic capacity than male Marines.
  • Over the course of the assessment, musculoskeletal injury rates totaled 40.5 percent for women, more than double the 18.8 percent rate for men.
  • In all, female Marines sustained 21 “time-loss” injuries, which took them away from task force duties for a day or more. Nineteen of the women’s injuries were lower extremity injuries, and 16 percent took place during a task that required movement while carrying a load.

 Here are some highlights from the nine-month, 36-million-dollar study:

  • All-male squads in every infantry job were faster than mixed-gender squads in each tactical movement evaluated. The differences between the teams were most pronounced in crew-served weapons teams, which had to carry weapons and ammunition in addition to their individual combat loads.
  • Male-only rifleman squads were more accurate than their gender-integrated counterparts on each individual weapons system, including the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle, and the M203 grenade launcher.
  • Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system at levels ranging from 11 to 16 percentage points.

The detrimental effects of forcing women into ground combat units were beyond dispute, and the way forward for then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Maybus was crystal clear. Maybus ignored the study (pilloried in mainstream media), and the standards for IOC were dropped so women could make it through. Putting those standards back will not fix the problem because they never were the problem; women were.

How can the senior flag officers insist it is imperative to put females into every combat formation when they would never force women onto the football teams of West Point or Annapolis? Is winning football games more important than the lives of the men and women they command? Of course not. If you forced a woman into the starting lineup of the Army or Navy, the ensuing disaster would play out on national television, and the ridiculous experiment would be terminated.

The same dynamic will play out if we ever expose our mixed-gender combat units to the sustained ground combat we experienced in Vietnam, Korea, or World War II. During the twenty years we spent fighting the Global War on Terror, the military fought a few battles, lots of firefights, and hundreds of ambushes, but it did not engage in sustained ground combat. When faced with the tactical problem of improvised explosive devices or separating insurgents from the local population instead of tactical solutions, the Pentagon made the money printers go brrr. They purchased thousands of gigantic Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles to protect every fireteam leaving the wire. When we abandoned Afghanistan, we also abandoned the MRAPs. They were no longer needed, and there was no budget or manpower to maintain them.

The Pentagon has lost the ability to make the money printers go brrr. In the future, tactical problems will need tactical solutions, which will be easier to find without the self-inflicted wound of women on the front lines.

I was watching one of the more popular Special Forces influencers, Nate Cornacchia, at the Valhalla VFT channel explain that the Special Forces Q course and Ranger School have already returned to the original, rigorous standards, effectively eliminating women from those courses. Nate explained in great detail why he believes in returning to the former standards. I think I agreed with everything he said, but he took so long to explain things that I skipped through the video. Too much computer screen time has reduced my attention span so much that my wife calls me Desi.  My 2 ½ -year-old grandson Desi is not known for sitting still in quiet contemplation for longer than 5 seconds. But he’s cute as shit and can climb like a monkey because he’s fit, just like his granddad.  

So I’m watching Nate, who looks like your typical former Special Forces operator. He’s wearing a tank top, has the tats, is jacked, and has the obligatory beard and ball cap. I was wearing a tank top, too, and I have a couple of tattoos but no beard, and I don’t habitually wear ball caps. I take a screenshot of myself watching Nate to compare, thinking I might be able to duplicate his SF mojo and become a corporate-sponsored military influencer. I might have a shot if all it takes is being fit enough to wear a tank top and some military tattoos.

Retired Special Forces operator Nate Cornacchia
Retired Marine infantry officer Tim Lynch watching Nate and realizing he was in grade school when Lynch retired from the Marine Corps

So, with a little more color in the background, I’m one expensive microphone away from the influencer lifestyle. Then, I remembered that America already has a retired Marine Corps infantry officer influencer, my friend Asad Khan. I then went over to his Sentinel 360 YouTube page to grab a picture of Asad in mid-rant.

No ball cap, wife beater, or Tats for Asad, who, like me, is just a regular infantry officer. If you can’t tell, he is a no-nonsense, very bright guy who can be a scary dude when aggravated. He took his battalion into Afghanistan back in 2004 and battled the Taliban to a standstill in Uruzgan Province.

When I went to fetch a shot of Asad, I noticed that Nate Cornacchia had another video up about the same topic. This time, he has another former Green Beret dude on, and they spent almost two hours going over the same territory. Once again, I agree with everything they said in principle because I skimmed through the video. Those guys sure can talk a lot, and I wonder if it’s the ADHD meds that seem prevalent in Gen Z, not that there is anything wrong with getting treatment for ADHD. It would explain why they are both wearing their ball caps backward while getting pedantic over what women can and can’t do in the SF community.

Then it dawned on me why I find the generational differences perplexing.

Chivalry.

Chivalry was taught to boomers at a young age as the masculine way of maintaining social decorum. Men were expected to protect women, children, and the elderly. Before you can protect your community, you must be able to protect yourself, so fistfights were expected as part of coming of age in the 60s and 70s. Our teachers taught us that violence never solves anything but our archaic masculine culture taught us it is really the gold standard.

An armed society is a polite society

Generation Z was taught that chivalry was an archaic, misogynistic artifact of Western European colonizers. They were taught manners instead of chivalry, with schools instituting zero-tolerance physical altercation policies. Chivalry is concerned with the right behavior; manners are concerned with the right appearance. One is the product of a masculine society, the other of a feminized culture. This might explain why testosterone levels are plummeting in younger Americans.

What happens to a military that denounces masculinity as toxic? Mannerism as disconnected from reality today as it was during the Italian High Renaissance. Colonel Susan Myers, commander of the 821st Space Base Group in Greenland, recently displayed classic girl boss mannerism. Col. Myers wrote this in an email to her command last week after hosting the Vice President and his lovely wife.

“I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the U.S. administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base. I commit that, for as long as I am lucky enough to lead this base, all of our flags will fly proudly — together.”

No adult who has taken a hard, straight right to the face would ever talk like that. As the ancient stoic Mike Tyson observed, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.” So what was Col. Myers’s plan with her girl boss email? She had no plan. I’m uncomfortable with military commanders who continue to use passive-aggressive, malicious compliance to ‘flex’ against the bad orange man.

It is not only cowardly but also ungentlemanly to voice your personal “concerns” about the Vice President of the United States when you are in command of a military establishment. Military officers are taught from a young age that with politicians, they are to respect the office, not the man, which was a useful heuristic when serving under Clinton or Obama. As I sat here ruminating about loquacious Green Berets and shit-bird Space Force Colonels, a notification popped up that Sentinal 360 had posted another video. I checked it out, confident it wasn’t another 2 hours about women in combat.

Asad is interviewing retired Marine Colonel C.J. Douglas, who went through IOC when I was on the staff. C.J. is a great Marine and funny as hell, but as you can see, Asad is a serious-looking dude.

I was not disappointed because Asad had one of his generation’s best-retired infantry colonels, C.J. Douglas. Colonel Douglas distinguished himself during five combat tours and with his all-source intelligence-gathering capabilities. He consulted Free Range International for Afghanistan updates prior to deploying there, which he revealed by mentioning his old mentor (me) during his first interview with Asad, which automatically put him into the Free Range Hall of Fame.

And I know CJ Douglas can think after taking a punch to the mouth because I put him through the Room of Pain at IOC. The room of pain was designed to exercise decision-making while exhausted and fighting an enlisted close combat instructor, followed by an IOC instructor after being thrashed to the point of exhaustion by calisthenics.

As you look at the picture above, C.J. is smiling and is genuinely happy because he’s talking about killing bad guys. Asad is being Asad – interesting and candid, but not somebody you’d want to provoke because he’s a hard dude. CJ is, too, and if you’re not a personal friend and he’s looking at you with that big happy smile, he’s probably working his day job with the New York State Police, and you’re probably going to jail. Chivalrous men delight in tales about well-laid ambushes or nailing a high-value target and are genuinely happy when incarcerating anti-social drunks or petty criminals.

Then, praise the Lord, I found an article that might wrap this rambling post up nicely. It’s too late for me, Asad, CJ, or the Green Berets to be legitimate influencers because influencers are now considered obnoxious. I had no idea there were male fitness influencers who filmed their 6-hour morning routine. Another fitness guru (Dr Edward Group) drinks his urine every morning, claiming it’s the best source of stem cells. Is it possible that Dr. Group is correct? Of course. Should you drink your own urine every morning? No. Chivalrous men don’t drink their own urine or concern themselves with self-improvement via injections.

The antidote to influencers is authenticity, which is why the podcast market is booming. That’s why I enjoy the Sential 360 channel so much—Asad is fun to listen to because he is authentic, interested in the military, knows his history, and has great sea stories. As you watch him interview CJ Douglas, you can see the mutual respect and genuine love of the country and the Marine Corps in both of them.

Increased fitness standards will not rid the military of females in combat arms occupational specialties because they make meeting arbitrary fitness standards the issue. As Saul Alinsky, the patron saint of DEI, noted, “The issue is never the issue.” The issue of women in combat isn’t about fairness and equity for women; it’s about political power and the maintenance of the progressive elites’ narrative. Secretary Hegseth should announce the removal of women from all combat arms occupational specialties, not because they can’t meet some standard but because they have no business being there in the first place. It is high time to make Army infantry look like the West Point football team, not some utopian vision of a color-stratified America.

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President Trump Responds to the Water War . . . But

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but just days after I posted on our current water war with Mexico, President Trump responded decisively by cutting American water to Tijuana. This is a very strange development because the Mexicans have not met their 1948 treaty obligations since 1948. Once a year or so, Texas politicians issue a hysterical la proclamación threatening to withhold building permits until Mexico coughs up some of the water we are owed. In the past, this allowed the captured media to portray the matter in whatever light their democratic overlords told them. These days, it allows sharp bloggers to bring up yet another indecency we decent Americans are facing, thanks to progressive globalists. But that’s where the issue is supposed to end – expecting Washington, DC, to do something about it would be like pulling a diamond out of a goat’s ass.

Yet here it is, as explained in this statement from the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs:

“Mexico’s continued shortfalls in its water deliveries under the 1944 water-sharing treaty are decimating American agriculture — particularly farmers in the Rio Grande valley Valley” the bureau said. “As a result, today, for the first time, the U.S. will deny Mexico’s non-treaty request for a special delivery channel for Colorado River water to be delivered to Tijuana.”

I had never heard of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, but I had to correct their statement. They had the valley in Rio Grande Valley in lowercase and were missing a comma. Not bad for government work, but I’d love to see DOGE go to work on their books for one reason. Whatever the mission of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs was when it was formed, it is not its mission now. Bureaucracies, by their nature, grow and expand, losing focus over time, but they aren’t of nature, so they have no predators to keep their numbers down and personnel in fighting trim. To be healthy, federal bureaucracies should periodically be ruthlessly scoured by DOGE autodidacts who test low for the empathy character trait.

It is also worth noting that the attached story credits Senator Cruz for alerting the President to this sorry situation and not the Free Range International Blog. This is probably true, but the timing is suspect, given my last post. Still, I’m amazed that the President acted on something that the federal government has studiously ignored for 78 years. It’s morning in America again! What could possibly go wrong now that we have an awesome president getting things done? And then I saw this:

The 6th generation F-47 can expect cost overruns, production delays, and fatal performance glitches that will be worked out after it has been fielded—just like every other modern jet fighter we have built in my lifetime.

President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth bragging about the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform, which is designated the F-47. There is no better example of Pentagon gold plating inefficiency than acquiring next-generation military aircraft. I thought President Trump, with the able assistance of Secretary Hegseth, was going to trim down and toughen up our military. Their counterrevolution against the pathology of wokeness and political correctness in the military has been impressive. But another massive investment in a “next-generation” manned fighter is a depressing signal that the status quo with our military-industrial complex will continue unimpeded by logic or fiscal responsibility.

The F-47 is the replacement for the F-22 Raptor, which was supposed to replace the F-15 platform. However, we still have lots of F-15s because the F-22 was a nightmare for the Air Force. Only 186 of the 750 F-22s anticipated by the Air Force were delivered, and only 130 of those aircraft were operational. The number of F-22s in service today is classified but suspected to be in the double digits.

Why are these people being trusted to build a sixth-generation air dominance fighter?

We cannot build F-22s anymore because much of that industry was retooled to produce the F-35, another super high-speed ‘next-generation’ jet plagued by reliability, maintainability, and availability problems. The cost of the F-35 program has soared past 2 Trillion Dollars. It is a flying computer that requires periodic updates and modernization that significantly reduces sortie rates. Additionally, the F-35’s current engine and thermal management systems must be fixed. But the Department of Defense hasn’t figured out how these repairs will be accomplished. So we don’t know how much this will add to the 1.6 trillion dollar projected sustainability costs.  

It’s hard to believe that the F-47 program won’t face the same challenges, but for what benefit? To have the best air dominance platform in the world? We already possess that capability with our few dozen remaining F-22 Raptors. No hostile Air Force in the world can”dominate” the F-15EX, which the F-22 was supposed to replace. Israel could give the Air Force fits on its home turf, but they are friends, not foes.

Speaking of Israel, its F-35 fleet performed flawlessly against Iran’s sophisticated air defense systems. And speaking of F-35s, the Marine Corps paired theirs with Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie unmanned drones under the “loyal wingman” concept. We currently have the stealth capability married to drones that can defeat any air defense system in the world. The question isn’t why we need a new-generation jet fighter but why we would invest Trillions in developing a new manned air dominance fighter.

I’m not sure these are the people we want building passenger planes, let alone stealth fighters

There may be a logical explanation for the F-47, but we won’t know what it could be until somebody tells us what it is designed to do. Online speculation about its size, shape, and capabilities is all over the map but can be summed up as more lethality, speed, greater range, and additional (undefined) weapons. Every new “air dominance higher” is supposedly more lethal and faster, with longer legs and increased sortie rates due to decreased maintenance cycles. Yet, the exact opposite always proves to be the case.

And we are now supposed to believe that Boeing will deliver this plane on time, on budget, and without a long list of expensive, nearly insolvable problems? Boeing? Are you joking me? What are the chances this plane will be in production and operational by the end of President Trump’s term as currently planned? I say zero. What are the chances that Boeing will deliver this aircraft on budget? Who knows? The price and capabilities of this plane remain classified; we’ll never know how much the program will cost over budget.

Do you believe Boeing will build the F-47 in under four years?

The plane has been designated the F-47 to honor our 47th President, Donald J. Trump, and that’s the kind of bullshit that should have caused instant program termination. Hegseth and Musk are supposed to protect Trump from swamp creatures adept at appealing to the great man’s vanity. Elon Musk called the F-35 design “shit” and derided the “idiots” making the fifth-generation stealth fighter. He met with SecDef Hegseth just before the F-47 announcement and has remained mum on the topic. The SecDef had the appropriate level of gravitas for the situation, but comfort with this new unfunded liability was hard to read.

Gravitas is a word that became common during Bill Clinton’s administration. The paid corporate media used it to describe Clinton when he got that deer-in-the-headlights look while telling what we now know to be bald-faced lies. It is obvious that Secretary Hegseth and his public relations shop will need some serious gravitas to navigate the disaster they unleashed by greenlighting a program they did not have the time to review or understand. The future suddenly does not look so bright, and getting a few more hundred thousand acre-feet of water from Mexico will not change that.

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Suddenly the CIA is Competent?

This morning America awoke to the news that the CIA had run down and arrested the man responsible for the Abbey Gate bombing. The new CIA director said he called Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and told them a man named Mohammad Sharifullah (aka Jabar) was inside the Northwest Frontier or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or hanging out near Chitral – somewhere on the border that Pakistan barely controls. He claimed Jabar was the man behind the Abbey Gate bombing, so the ISI and CIA launched a raid, captured him and brought him back to the USA to face justice.

ISIS terrorist Mohammad Sharifullah arriving in the USA last night. ISISK is turning into a problem for both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and it is a safe bet that this dude deserves everything he has coming. But it is hard to believe he set up the Abbey Gate attack having just been released from the Bagram jail

The chances that this story is true are not high for the following reasons:

  1. The last time the CIA went after the “man responsible for Abbey Gate” they killed a Kabul-based NGO worker along with a carload of women and children. At the time the morbidly obese Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said it was a “righteous strike” before being forced to admit they killed ten innocent civilians.
  2. The ability of the CIA to gather accurate intelligence inside of Pakistan or Afghanistan was compromised by the ISI, who took our money, gave it to the Taliban, and forced-fed target lists to the CIA, which benefited Pakistan – not America
  3. The ISI is and always has been an enemy and they proved that with 20 years of interference and lying.
  4. The CIA was so incompetent that the military started their own private spy network, which identified dozens of lucrative targets in Pakistan that the military serviced with their drones. That enraged the Pakistan ISI who threatened to throw the CIA out of the country if we didn’t stop hitting targets they had not been nominated or approved.
  5. The military private spy ring identified OBL’s Abbottabad compound in 2008 and even sent the architectural drawings to their boss, retired CIA legend Dewey Clarridge. I know that’s a fact because I sent the drawings through our secure DARPA funded internet connection from the Taj in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
  6. One of the most proficient CIA analysts with a proven regional counter terrorism track record, Sarah Adams, said the Abbey Gate attack had two organizers, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Sanaullah Ghafari: two men who had the means, intelligence, motivation, and a long history of attacking Americans. Sarah was on the Shawn Ryan Show and some other podcasts I listen to and she’s impressive.
  7. It is impossible to believe that some low-level jail bird had the ability to organize, arm and execute a suicide bombing mission so quickly, having been locked up in Bagram until mid-August. The bombers needed the assistance of a senior terrorist experienced in launching suicide attacks in Kabul. The Taliban leadership had one man who fit that bill, Sirajuddin Haqqani, now the Interior Minister of Afghanistan.
The first attempt to exact retribution for the Abbey Gate bombing killed an innocent family.

Like most Americans, I have been thrilled to see President Trump dominate the deep state. If it is humanly possible to turn the CIA from a renegade political opposition operation into a functional organization that subordinates itself to the Executive Branch and is actually capable of doing spy work, I believe President Trump will do it. However, Trump is not a superhuman, and it is going to take a Herculean effort to clean out the Augean Stables of the CIA. It would be easier, safer, cheaper, and more efficient to dismantle the CIA and let Eric Prince of General Michael Flynn build a new organization using the Office of Strategic Services model.

The idea that the CIA suddenly became a functional, nonpartisan intelligence agency during the FJB era is hard to believe. As is the claim, that “Jafar” has confessed to his crimes. Confessions by Hill Pashtuns under the tender ministrations of the ISI are meaningless. American jails are full of men who have “confessed” after very little pressure to crimes that DNA proved they never committed.

Confessions, absent hard, solid, SIGINT complimented by human intelligence are meaningless. The CIA has a 20-plus-year record of failure generating accurate human intelligence in Afghanistan or Pakistan. There is a show on Netflix that proves the point. They think they are depicting a competent human intelligence operation. What they show is two old Warlords taking the agency to the cleaners over fabricated bullshit. My assessment of that amusing spectacle is here.

CENTCOM Commander Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., USMC is responsible for the disaster in Kabul and should have been held accountable.

Accountability for the disastrous Kabul NEO mission should start at the top because it was preordained the day we abandoned the Bagram Airfield. On this episode of All Marine Radio, I predicted exactly what would happen the month before Abbey Gate, making me one of maybe 10,000 people who recognized that fact at the time. The CENTCOM commander, Marine General Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr. should have never allowed Biden to give up Bagram. The Pentagon had already perfected thwarting presidential directives under Trump, so why, suddenly, did their attitudes change with Biden? I suspect they thought the 2020 election marked the ascendancy of the deep state apparatus. So McKenzie played ball knowing he would be handsomely compensated upon retirement while never held accountable for the fiasco he created.

My generation’s senior Marine Corps general officers are not proficient in reading historical trends. I know most of them and once respected and admired them more than any other group of men on the face of the planet. With age comes wisdom as well as the disappointment of seeing your heroes exposed by fate and circumstance as being petty, vindictive shits because all the cool kids in DC thought that the Bad Orange Man was a kook. They thought wrong, but it’s going to take more than six short weeks to repair the damage done by their long march through our institutions.

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USAID Was a Racket: It Deserves to DEI

The United States spent 54 Billion dollars on economic development and reconstruction in Afghanistan. The reconstruction effort was a comprehensive, across-the-board failure characterized by shoddy workmanship from shady contractors invariably connected to powerful national or provincial government leaders. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was the lead agency in these efforts, and they are responsible for the failure of the reconstruction battle. You will be shocked, shocked, I tell you, to learn that nobody at USAID was ever held accountable. In fact, the concept of accountability is foreign to USAID. Accountability is organic to organizations with meritocratic competence hierarchies. But meritocratic advancements, like trigonometry, two-parent households, and high standardized test scores (according to the FJB era zeitgeist), were all signs of white racism and, therefore, never considered relevant at USAID.

I was the project manager for the first US Embassy Kabul security guard contract in 2005, which included the USAID compound across the street from the Embassy. The USAID staff lived and worked in a small, tightly packed compound that was connected to the embassy by a tunnel under Masood Road. They worked long hours in tight quarters, and they had unlimited access to inexpensive, top-shelf booze. Thursday evening is the start of the weekend in Islamic lands, and Kabul provided a heady brew of wartime danger in an exotic land far from home. I got an unusually intimate look at USAID officers operating in the wild. and was not impressed. They drank too much, which is saying something coming from a retired infantry Marine.

Wheat for sale in the Qala-e-Naw Bazaar in December 2006. I was inventorying wheat stocks for USAID, and every one of those 50lb bags said, “Gift from the People of Canada to the People of Iran.” No idea what USAID thought about that, as my report was received without comment. Qala-e-Maw is the Capital of Badghis Province.

I should be grateful to USAID for funding some of the greatest adventures of my life. The 2006 Winter Emergency Food Assessment of Western Afghanistan jumps immediately to mind, as does the refurbishment of the Nimroz Province irrigation systems from 2010 – 2012. But the truth is I was working with such nominal sums (5 – 15 million annually) that our USAID supervisor was an Afghan employee. He was a good man, high in trait conscientiousness and impeccable honesty, but he refused to leave Kabul to inspect our operations. He gave us everything we asked for (in additional funding) because we finished every project on time and on budget.

Critics of international aid observe that it takes money from the poor residents of rich countries and gives it to the wealthy residents of poor countries. That certainly happened in Afghanistan, but internal corruption doesn’t explain why the billions of aid dollars spent to build infrastructure and governmental capacity produced such limited results. The failure of aid programs in Afghanistan started with money flooding into the country faster than it could be absorbed and ended with the lack of oversight in project implementation.

Every large USAID implementation partner working in Afghanistan’s countryside followed the UN Minimum Occupational Safety Standards (UN MOSS). These mandated enhanced security measures included hardened compounds with RPG screens on top of massive exterior compound walls, a hardened safe room with radio communications to regional UN security offices, armored SUVs, and personal security details provided by approved international professional military companies PMCs.

Typical CADG cash for work project targeting the central canal in Kandahar City – not the most pleasant work, but it paid well

Brand new armored SUVs drew unwanted attention and were bullet magnets in most of the country. The PMCs providing protection details knew this and limited trips outside the compound walls accordingly. Nobody expected international project managers working in places like Kandahar, Lashkar Gah, or Jalalalabad to inspect any of their multiple projects. I was working for Central Asia Development Group (CADG), a Singapore-based company owned by an American couple. They had direct implementation contracts that allowed us the freedom to ignore UNMOSS rules and travel into any area we felt had adequate security.

We found that wearing a local dress driving beat-up Toyotas, living in nondescript local compounds, and minimizing the use of English when out and about gave us the ability to safely move around contested districts. CADG Provincial managers closely supervised all projects, most of which were simple cash-for-work public works projects. We were working in highly kinetic districts in Kandahar, Helmand, Paktia, Khost, Nimroz, and Uzgon Provinces, so we traveled armed.

Panjwayi Tim (on the left and cropped out on his request) rapping some of our Gaardez workers in Pashto. Notice how the Afghan men in this completely Taliban-dominated town reacted to us when we showed up to inspect projects or pay our workers. Panjwayi Tim was out of Kandahar, and also my boss in 2009 and always happy to help out on paydays (which were dangerous).

Our projects were manpower intensive, so paydays involved Retrieving between $70,000 to $100,000 in American dollars from a local bank, driving it to a company compound, and converting it into low-denomination Afghani. Transporting suitcases full of Afghani to the payday site, which was normally the city mayor’s compound. Then, holding a pay call for 5,000 Afghan laborers. Moving large sums of money around Jalalabad, Lashka Ghar, or Kandahar was inherently dangerous. Moving large amounts out into rural projects or deep into the Dasht-e Margo (Desert of Death, which was an intensely cool place to visit) was even more dangerous.

Our USAID manager in Kabul steadily increased our annual budgets and approved every project we submitted. I was moved down to Lashkar Gah in 2010 to be the Southwest Regional Manager for the USAID-funded Community Development Program. There was a USAID officer stationed with the British PRT there who immediately reprimanded me for carrying a pistol. He then explained to me how project approvals were now going to work because the British Aid Agency was in charge, and they had different protocols for project approval. The next day, I flew out to Camp Leatherneck to talk to the Marines. I was sent to the G9 and told him I had 20 million in USAID Community Development funds and planned to spend all of it in Nimroz Province, where the Brits and USAID had no say in what I did.

The only way to earn a seat at this table is consistent, competent performance over a span of years, not months. The idea of leaving a protected firm base to participate in culturally enriching events like the gladiator fights that dedicated this fine stadium my team and I built was inconceivable to USAID managers.
We didn’t really see gladiator fights but impressive Taekwondo demonstrations from the local youth clubs.

I was a big fan of the governor of Nimroz, Abdul Karim Brahui. Governor Brahui was a graduate of the Kabul military academy who founded and commanded the Jabha-e Nimruz (Nimroz Front) as part of the Mujahedeen Southern Alliance against both the Soviet army and the Taliban. He was a lead-from-the-front commander and the rare Afghan politician who concerned himself more with the people’s problems than accumulating additional power and wealth.

Explaining my understanding of how USAID works to the Governor of Nimroz Province

Governor Brahui was as close to an honest politician as one could be in Zaranj, given that the local economy revolved around plastic jerry cans. They were used to smuggle petrol or heroin across the border or to haul water from various sources for sale to one of the two municipal water treatment plants. Teenage boys selling petrol or diesel out of 5-gallon jerry cans dotted every major road in the city. The only way to generate income in Nimroz was to fix their massive, district-level irrigation systems.

We built a large main irrigation canal in Charborjak district that extended 56 kilometers and services every farming hamlet in the district. We were going to do 60 kilometers but ran into a minefield at the tail end of the canal and could not find a way around it.

The easiest and fastest project was the Chakhansor district because the Khashrod River, which fed the irrigation system, was dry for most of the year. Using 1,500 local laborers, we rehabilitated 300 kilometers of canals and rebuilt a 170-meter reinforced concrete check dam to capture the spring run-off. The Chakhansor irrigation system served 7,200 farms, and the first post-project wheat and melon harvests yielded outputs three times greater than pre-project averages. The Baloch of Nimroz no longer had to import melons from Kandahar, and if you knew how much Afghans love melons (which are excellent), you would understand the significance of that accomplishment, and we weren’t even getting started.

Opening ceremonies for the Charborjak irrigation system.

The Chakhansor district project was completed by Mullah John while I was still in Jalalabad. With the large fiscal year 2010 budget, we could do both Charborjak and Kang districts simultaneously, which would mitigate some of the heavy equipment costs. That year, we built 400 miles of irrigation canals, turning 25,000 acres of the Dasht-e Margo into highly productive farmland, allowing the Baloch to get in on the poppy boom. We hired over 18,000 workers to dig these canals in the middle of the desert where the temperature could hit 120° daily.

Opening the Kang district irrigation system.

The key to completing these so quickly was we were replacing systems, not building new ones, and we hired as many of the engineers who had built the original weirs and dams as we could find. The only problem with this massive project was the USAID stipulation that no material originating from Iran could be used in the construction. Instead of using high-quality Iranian concrete at $5.00 per 50lb bag, we were supposed to import low-quality concrete from Pakistan, which the State Department insisted was our ally. We worked around that somehow, I don’t remember the details, and finished on time and on budget. But we had a problem: the Helmand River was low due to maintenance at the Kajaki Dam, so our new intake check dam dammed the damn river.

We arrive at the ceremony site – you can see dust trails from the escorts who have been working the flanks and are just now crossing the Helmand. Which is dry downstream. Because we built a check dam that is apparently checking the entire river at the moment.

Only after I inadvertently dammed the Helmand River did USAID and the Brits in Lashkar Gah find out I had built two regional irrigation systems, and they were furious. But I had been working for the Marines, and the Colonel running the G9 shop ran cover for me because that’s what Marines do. He also attacked USAID for not doing anything in Nimroz Province except cancel the one Women Empowerment Program that actually worked. The Baloch people dominated Nimroz Province, and they had different cultural expectations for their women who wore the Iranian Chador, not the Afghan Burqa

One of our Zaranj students in our USAID-sponsored rug weaving class. We ran several training programs for women that were ended by USAID, who wanted us to stop training women in order to “build capacity,” whatever that meant.
This takes arrogance and hubris to new levels, revealing exactly how reckless USAID officials were in producing propaganda that enraged local Afghans. Rather than spend a few thousand dollars setting up Afghan women to run their own beauty shops or rug-weaving companies, we spent millions on a handful of elite young women to participate in a meaningless feel-good competition that placed their families and everyone associated with the effort in mortal danger when we cut and ran.
I’m all about providing technical training to Afghan kids of both genders, but you have to do this from the ground up, not the top down. Jalalabad kids in the MIT-sponsored FabLab. August 2008
This little girl would have never received a minute of academic instruction if it were not for the MIT grad students who ran the FabLab. She damn sure would have never received the opportunity to be on a USAID-sponsored computer team, although she developed skills that could have got her a spot; her parents were dirt poor farmers, not connected Kabul elites.

USAID did a great job taking money from the poor residents of America and giving it to the wealthy residents of Afghanistan. They spent 20 years inside a little Kabul compound from which they never ventured and created an alternative reality for themselves where workshops on women’s rights and protections for the LGBTQ community made perfect sense. They endangered the lives of the elite children they showcased in international events like the robotic competitions while ignoring the needs of the rest of the children in Afghanistan. USAID will disappear from the international stage without a whimper; they will not be missed, and hopefully, most of them will find their way into 12-step programs. Fat, drunk, and stupid is not a recipe for the good life, and there are thousands of swamp creatures about to find that out.

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A Bittersweet Veterans Day

Election Day was long and busy as I was the judge for the Cayetano Cavazos Elementary School polling station. This is a blue county, and I was appointed an election judge because I was one of the few Republicans who volunteered to work the polls. Shout out to the Vet the Vote organization, which is where I got the idea to volunteer. Regardless of political affiliation, the people working this election were professional, conscientious, and pleasant to be around. It was a fantastic experience.

Throughout election day, I was asked if I was a veteran, and when I confirmed I was a retired Marine, I was thanked for my service. That made me uncomfortable because our failure to win the Global War on Terrorism has left this country in much greater peril than it was in 2001. Not only did we do exactly what Osama bin Ladin predicted, which was to fight a long war we could never win, only to withdraw in humiliating disgrace. But we degraded our military capabilities and are now ruining the fighting spirit of the fighting men at the pointed end of the spear.

Our military is a broken, demoralized joke that cannot meet its recruiting or retention goals. When I enlisted in the Navy in 1978, the military was considered a hollow force, but that force was full of mean bastards who could fight. And we had the ships, combat aircraft, and officer corps required to take those rowdy misfits into a fight and crush any other adversary in the world. Now, we have a diverse force with women in the infantry and trans moralism making a mockery of the profession of arms. We no longer have the sea lift or aircraft to meet our peacetime obligations, let alone fight a peer-level war.

Battalion Landing Team 1/9 exercising in Australia during the summer of 1987. The Marine Corps can no longer insert and sustain a battalion in the field from Amphibious shipping. A task that was routine when I was on active duty. Photograph of 2ndLt Lynch and my radioman LCpl Kline courtesy of Marines magazine.

Our Navy has shrunk to the point it can no longer control the busiest shipping lane in the world. Instead of using the Red Sea, commercial ships are now re-routed around the horn of Africa, adding 3500 nautical miles to their transit, which takes 12 extra days and a million extra fuel dollars per trip. The Navy can only field 12 Amphibious ships worldwide because a former Marine Corps Commandant reduced the number of amphibious ships the Navy was required to maintain from 38 to 31. He did this to free up money for the Navy to build a new class of ships called Landing Ship Medium, which would support his Force Design 2030 plan. Those ships have not been designed, funded, or built and will never be because of this harsh rebuke from the Congressional Research Service over the ludicrous FD 2030 concept.

The Navy/Marine Corps team can no longer perform the missions they have been assigned for the past 85 years. Now that President Trump is returning, Congress suddenly has buyer’s remorse for agreeing to the radical reorganization it allowed under the commandants Berger and Smith. This article by a former mentor to officers of my generation, Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC (Ret), sums up the state of play well. I’m pasting his last two paragraphs below because they describe exactly how we ended up with a broken Marine Corps.

There are two types of incompetents, active and passive. Active incompetents don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they don’t know they are incompetent. They are dangerous because they act on the zany ideas. Passive incompetents know that they don’t know what they are doing. They are dangerous because they tend to defer to the active incompetents.

Berger and Smith are active incompetents. Biden and Congress have been passive incompetents. Shame on them. If Congress acted today to repair the Navy and Marine Corps and return it back to 2018 capabilities, it would take at least a decade to recover. Our civilian leaders were sold snake oil, and the rubes bought it.

Those same rubes are now plotting to undermine President-elect Trump. These are the same people who had no problem abandoning Bagram airbase when FJB arbitrarily and recklessly cut the troop numbers in Afghanistan. Without Bagram, there was no way to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan in an orderly manner. Everyone (not inside the Pentagon) who knew anything about Afghanistan recognized that total abdication of service stewardship. The resulting fiasco in Kabul was as easy to predict as it was uncomfortable to watch.

General Furness and Mac hosting me for the 2011 Marine Corps Birthday at Camp Dwyer in the southern Helmand province

However, all is not lost because these two fighting generals, LtGen Dave Furness, USMC (Ret) and MajGen Dale Alford, USMC (Ret), who know how to train and lead Marines, may have been sidelined, but they are not forgotten. They are featured in this All Marine Radio podcast that dropped yesterday, and listening to them is a tonic for the souls of concerned military professionals. It is worth listening to if you (like me) are alarmed by the current state of our military and think the current crop of general officers are a collection of sycophantic yes-men. LtGen Furness tells me the other services still have talent hidden in their flag officer ranks, too, which is remarkable given the ongoing war on competence being waged by DoD diversity/equity mandarins.

I made the mistake of listening to this while lifting weights and damn near broke my back when LTGen Furness popped off with, “I’m just happy somebody gives a shit about what I have to say.” Listening to two of the best generals of my generation will instill some much-needed confidence in today’s broke-ass military.

Have a Happy Veterans Day, and let us hope the incoming Trump administration taps these two retired generals or others just like them to resuscitate our broken, demoralized military.

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I Spy: How Human Intelligence is Supposed to Work

Once again, highly classified American intelligence documents have been published on the Internet. This was not a massive leak by some low-level enlisted soldier or disgruntled contractor but a focused leak of two intelligence products regarding Israel’s current preparations to strike Iran. The documents are revealing for several reasons. The first is that they reveal our intelligence community’s sources and methods, which is bad. Second, Israel no longer trusts the Biden-Harris administration and isn’t telling them anything about its current or future operations, which is good.

An excellent summary of the situation can be found on John Schindler’s Top Secret Umbra substack. It is worth reading to understand how serious the leak is and who inside the Biden-Harris most likely leaked the material. The most likely culprit, a POS named Rob Malley, couldn’t be the leaker as his security clearance was revoked in 2003 for spying for Iran. During that investigation, he was caught lying to the FBI, so guess what happened to him? Not one damn thing because Rob Malley was the architect of Obama’s 2015 Iran deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Laws in Obama-Biden-Harris America only apply to the little people or associates of President Trump.

President Trump demonstrated geostrategic common sense by placing the interests of the American people over the “legacy” of Obama when he canceled the JCPOA. President Biden demonstrated partisanship over common sense and complete disinterest in the safety and security of America by trying to resurrect the JCPOA but ended up with a spy scandal centered on Malley instead.

Note the difference between the treatment of General Michael Flynn, who was tricked into a supposed lie by nefarious FBI shenanigans, and Rob Malley, who was and is a straight-up traitor. The rule of law in America today is non-existent if you’re a Democrat. If you’re a patriot who served this country with distinction for 35 years in uniform and a Trump supporter, you will be prosecuted and financially ruined for the most trivial offenses.

General Flynn was instrumental in setting up the Eclipse Group, a private spy network providing desperately needed human intelligence (HUMINT) in Afghanistan. The Eclipse Group was created by a former CIA legend, Dewey Clarridge, who knew the CIA could not deliver HUMINT for several reasons, including institutional risk aversion. You can see that for yourself by watching the CIA get taken to the cleaners in a bogus HUMINT operation on the NETFLIX series Spy Ops. My post explaining that ludicrous operation (the segment is titled Taliban Spies) is here.

Eclipse started operations after my recruiter, Willi 1, and I (Willi 4) met with some senior CENTCOM staffers in Dubai in July 2009. Not long after we started, Kabul’s CIA station chief sent cables to Langley, complaining vociferously about our activities. Nobody in the Pentagon or CENTCOM gave a shit what the CIA had to say about us because they sucked and weren’t providing anything useful to the military. The CIA then turned to their favorite New York Times reporters Matt Mazzetti and Dexter Filkins, who wrote several articles full of half-truths, outright lies, and innuendo. The articles referred to my friend Willi 1 and me  (my source code was Willi 4) as “commercial Jason Bourne’s,” which we found amusing.

After driving the Khyber Pass from Jalalabad, the Commercial Jason Bournes Chilling in Peshawar, Pakistan.

But this post isn’t about that I want to explain what a legitimate HUMINT operation looks like by lifting some material from my unpublished book Free Ranging Afghanistan. On the morning of September 26, 2010, I received a panicked call from the senior Afghan official who ran my spy ring in Regional Command East, comprised of Nuristan, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Laghman provinces. He told me he was on his way to my guesthouse with bad news about the kidnapping of an aid worker. He had been told one of the women working for DAI, a large American aid implementor, had been kidnapped on the Asadabad to Jalalabad highway. That was incorrect as I knew DAI personnel would never be allowed to drive that highway and, being a USAID implementor, would have had an armed ex-pat personal security detail. But I knew exactly who would be on the road without an armed escort, and that was one of the girls working for the Idea New program, and there was only one of those: Linda Norgrave.

In 2010 I was working as a heavily armed humanitarian for the Central Asia Development Group (CADG), doing massive irrigation and cash-for-work projects in the cities of Jalalabad, Asadabad, and Gardez. CADG was a “direct implementation” outfit, which meant we did not have ex-pat security teams, B6 armored SUVs, or UN Minimum Occupational Security Standard (UNMOSS) rated living compounds. Idea New was also a direct implementation outfit that was associated with DAI, and they lived and worked out of the DAI Jalalabad compound.

I was at my guesthouse, The Taj, which contained a Tiki Bar that we opened every Thursday evening for the international community (mostly aid workers) that was then thriving in Jalalabad. Like every other international working in Nangarhar province, the British ex-pats working for Idea New came over with the DAI crew every Thursday evening for happy hour. One night, my Aussie wingman Ski and I listened to their program manager explain their modus operandi, explicitly mentioning his belief that being armed was ridiculous, but we said nothing. He went on to challenge us on the wisdom of an armed westerner trying to fight his way out of a Taliban ambush, and we still said nothing. We never thought we could fight off a Taliban ambush on our own, but Linda was not taken in an ambush. She was kidnapped by Taliban associates on a main road, something that would never happen to us. Gun-wielding Westerners introduced a lot of friction into a kidnapping equation, which was the point of being armed.

I immediately emailed Willi 1 and Dewey to explain that Linda Norgrove was a British national working for the American USAID contractor DAI on the Idea New program. Idea New duplicated our (CADG) technique of low-profile unarmored cars, singleton international program managers, wearing local dress, attempting to blend in with the locals as much as possible, etc…, but they were not armed. Dewey called me on Skype which he (incorrectly) thought the NSA couldn’t hack to ask what we had, which wasn’t much. He told me to stand by to support one of Willi 3’s assets, which was inbound and might need comms, guns, or money.

As was typical for Willi 3’s network, his guy found the kidnappers by the 29th of September and passed on their names, some fuzzy cell phone pictures, their chain of command, and a working theory for the kidnapping. The crew that had grabbed Linda had been identified in my order of battle reporting a month prior when they arrived from Pakistan, and that report was added to our targeting package. Willi’s access agent linked up with us, and he was exhausted. We let him sleep for a day, fed and refitted him with serious walking around money before he returned to Kunar.

Dewey passed our reporting onto both MI6 and the American DIA; the Brits read everything we wrote, and the Americans ignored everything we sent. President Obama talked the British Prime Minister into allowing the American military to take over the case because the Regional Command (RC East) was 100% American. On the 30th of September, the American military took over the kidnapping case. On the 1st of October, I received a call from the RC East Human Terrain Team asking me to come in to “talk with a friend.”

“About fucking time,” was my curt response.

Thirty minutes later, I was introduced to a DIA agent in the Human Terrain Team office. He looked like every other DIA agent I had met: bearded, in his mid-30s, slim, fit, and wary. I was taken to a separate office so we could talk alone, and the first question he asked was if I knew Linda Norgrove. I was stunned and looked at him hard to see if he was jerking my chain. I then asked a question I hated asking: “Do you know who I am”? He did not; he claimed to have never heard of the Eclipse Group, Dewey Clarridge, or the Pentagon private spy ring. It appeared he was telling the truth, not that I cared, so I asked what they had so far, and he said the grid where her car was found. I didn’t believe that for a second but didn’t care because I came bearing gifts.

Instead of trying to explain the mountain of information we had on the kidnapping – primarily via Willie 3’s excellent network, we walked down to the Human Terrain Team office, where my friend Kerry Patton lent us his desktop computer. I pulled up our AfPakrp.org website and scrolled to report #825, which was a summation of reports 820, 823, and 824, and cross-referenced report 621a, which was when the Taliban kidnap team leader, Mawlvi Baseer, first popped up on my network. Dewey had resorted to putting our products on a password-protected internet site after the New York Times hit pieces successfully ended our original contract. With the loss of the contract, we lost our man in Kabul, who had been placed there specifically to feed our intel products into the ISAF intelligence flow.

Ski and I jocked up for a trip into Kunar Province. Do we look like dudes you can kidnap during the day?

The DIA agent was stunned; Kerry said, “I told you, man, you should have listened to us sooner; these guys are the shit.” I told him to call me if he had any additional questions, knowing he had a lot to digest and would want to hustle over to the CIA building on the other side of the airfield. He asked me if there was anything he could do for me, so I requested a case of German sparkling mineral water. I had heard through the grapevine that the CIA had flown in hundreds of cases..

On October 3rd, I asked for another meeting to inform my DIA contact our guy was at the outer cordon in the upper Dewagal Valley and about to slip into the village of Dineshga, where he thought Mawlvi Baseer was keeping Linda. I gave him our agent’s Thuraya sat phone number and the three cell numbers he had recently reported for the head kidnapper, Baseer. On the 6th of October, our spy was back outside the cordon, having located Linda. The DIA called me in because they had intercepted his sat phone calls and now knew where Linda was. When I arrived at FOB Fenty, the DIA agent was almost giddy with excitement and gave me a case of German sparkling mineral water from the CIA stash.

He asked if we could send our access agent back inside Dineshga to identify Linda’s exact location. Willi 3 had anticipated this and already agreed to send his man back. I asked how the SEALs would ID our guy as friend, not foe, and was told I’d be briefed on exactly how to do that when the time came. I knew that was bullshit, as did Willi 3. Our man went back, made an innocuous sat phone call from just outside the building housing Linda, and then rapidly exited the scene. A few hours later, the SEALS launched and raided the compound we had identified as containing Linda. In the ensuing melee, one of the SEALs accidentally killed her with a fragmentation grenade when he mistook her for an armed combatant.

At that time, I had been living in Afghanistan for four years. Willi 3 had lived there off and on for over thirty years. Human Intelligence operators working in a country like Afghanistan needed to have years of time on deck before they could become remotely proficient at gathering legitimate intelligence. Without that deep knowledge and relationships forged over years and years, any attempt at creating a spy ring would result in getting taken to the cleaners by willy Afghans, as demonstrated by the ridiculous Netflix show, or taken out back and shot in the head.

With four years of continuous service in the country, I qualified as a trusted liaison with ISAF and to outfit and harbor an access agent. I could have never found Linda with my assets, which were considerable back when the Pentagon paid us regularly. Willi 3 was the only Eclipse operative I knew (and I knew only four of the dozens in Eclipse) who had the ability to conduct human intelligence operations at that level. He was fluent in Dari and Pashto and had spent enough time developing the relationships required to run legitimate HUMINT spy rings.

Our intelligence agencies are incapable of duplicating the Eclipse Group because they refuse to put in the time on the ground or accept the risk that comes with living and working with the Afghans. The night we lost Linda, I was stopped and detained by Unit 02 – the CIA-sponsored Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Team for Nangarhar Province. But that’s a story another time – if you want to hear it, hit me up in the comments section.

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The IDF: Modeling Competence over Equity

I join the freedom-loving peoples of the world in congratulating the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)  for eliminating the genocidal bastard Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar was the head of Hamas and claimed that when the time came, he would stand and fight, dying as a martyr. When the time came, he was running away with a fake ID and a pocket of donor dollars, hoping to go to the ground in Rafa. You remember Rafa, the town the spinless cowards running the United States, United Kingdom,  France, Canada, and Egypt told the Israelis to avoid. Cackling Kamala even warned Israel about Rafa, saying, “She had studied the maps,” whatever that meant.

Yahya Shin-was after playing a game of FAFO with a competent military.

Israel is modeling the consequences of valuing competence over diversity in national leadership, intelligence organizations, and a hard-fighting army. They are not constrained by ridiculous rules of engagement from on high. Compare and contrast what we have watched the IDF do over the past year to how we handled fighting terrorists embedded inside Afghan communities. This conversation between Shawn Ryan and Nick “The Reaper” Irving is most informative on that exact topic. You should watch all five hours of this podcast to understand the quality of the human capital wasted by our feckless national leaders and their yellow generals.

There are enough warning signs about our hollow military and its morally bankrupt leadership for a hundred blog posts. From drone swarms loitering over our military bases. unmolested, the Pentagon killing hundreds with an experimental drug treating a virus that was not a threat to servicemen, to an army helicopter rotor washing civilian hurricane relief supplies, the signs that our military is broken cannot be ignored. But I want to focus on the one area I find the most upsetting: women in our combat arms.

West Point and the Naval Academy will roll into the weekend with undefeated football teams. If you look at those teams, you will notice they resemble Israeli combat formations in that they are all male. Our military leadership insists that there are no differences between men and women in mental capacity or physical strength despite several millennia of human experiences and our own lying eyes.

Men and women are born with dramatically different capabilities, which can be seen every time a woman’s national soccer team is beaten by an under-15 boys’ squad. It’s not polite to mention that fact, which most of us find merely amusing. But when women are inserted into ground combat units, the delusions of our elites are no longer funny. One of the many reasons our military faces a recruiting and retention crisis is this callous disregard for the lives of enlisted men who are saddled with females in combat zones.

The boys who thumped the women’s team were Texans which might explain it maybe. . .

Let me tell you about women in combat. On a warm summer day, I witnessed a Marine Corps patrol walking through the Nawa Bazaar in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. I could see the point man was furious, as were the men behind him, and stopped to watch. Then I saw why; the men were carrying the weapons and body armor of their female “Lioness” Marines. The women were stumbling in a gap-mouthed stupor, hanging onto the body armor of the man in front of them. The locals crowding the bazaar were laughing and openly mocking the Marines. It was such a sad spectacle that I couldn’t take a picture of it; I was too embarrassed

What’s the current perception of the Marine Corps Lioness program? A quick Google search reveals dozens of articles about the trailblazing female Marines or the Special Ops: Lionesses TV show. That TV show stars Zoe Saldaña, who is 45, Nicole Kidman, who is 56, and Morgan Freeman, who is still kicking at 86. Can you imagine people that old on the battlefield? It’s a joke, insulting to our intelligence, but it’s a reality for too many of the idiots comprising our elite managerial class.

So, how is the recent deployment of paratroopers into the Middle East going? Unlike my deployment to Beirut in 1983, the current mission is not the subject of informed debate in the regime media. We have no idea where these troops are or what they are doing. Everything the Pentagon does now is top secret. Whatever these troops are doing, it does not impact the conflict that allegedly caused their deployment. One more display of gross incompetence at the national command level.

The Marine Corps Lioness program paid dividends only because our generals were incapable of the tactical adaptation of warning residents in targeted areas to get out before we came in. No military in history has done more to prevent civilian collateral damage than the Israelis. But once warned by them, the civilians who stay risk becoming collateral damage because the Israelis prioritized winning battles and preserving their troops over rules of engagement designed to appease their political masters.

Congressional cowards reacting to protestors who are not from Antifa or Black Lives Matter or unhinged women shrieking at conservative Supreme Court nominees.

The IDF is delivering a master class on intelligence operations and conducting ground combat operations. There are no women at the pointy end of their spear, just as there are no women from Ukraine or Russia slugging it out in the trenches of Ukraine.

There shouldn’t have been any American women at the pointy end of our spear during the 20 years we spent replacing the Taliban with the Taliban. But our senior generals aren’t as competent as Isleali generals, so they came up with workarounds that made female congresspeople swoon while leaving our best warriors like Nick Irving alone, exposed, and unable to call in the fire support they needed to survive. A military organization that places winning collegiate football games over the lives of its soldiers and Marines is not worthy of our support or admiration. They have earned nothing but our contempt.

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Targeted: Beirut

I wrote my last post about Beirut the day before Jack Carr released his book on Targeted: Beirut. I had pre-ordered the book, so I immediately read it for his opinion on the debacle. My assessment that: “Nobody in that operation knew what we were supposed to do on the ground in Beirut” was spot on. My assessment may have been a bit wordy and awkward, but  I’m no Jack Carr.

Beirut October 1983

Targeted: Beirut was excellent reading, and it transported me back to the moment I first heard about the barracks bombing. I was driving into the Newport Naval Hospital, where I would be standing duty in the medical laboratory for the next 24 hours. It was a beautiful fall morning, and as passed Easton’s Beach I heard the news on NPR. I don’t remember much else about the day other than I was upset and angry at the attack on our Marines.

101st Airborne arriving in Cyprus September 2024

I was the Leading Petty Officer of the hospital’s Mobile Medical Augmentation Readiness Team (MMART), a collateral duty that allowed me to wear Marine Corps camouflage utilities once a month, which I thought was cool. We were mobilized after Grenada to augment Mobile Surgical Team 11 from Norfolk after they were overwhelmed by casualties from the Ranger contingent of that invasion. My other distinct memory of that time was the Personnelmen processing us before we deployed (who were women; the Personnelmen rating was changed to Personnel Specialist in 2005) were in tears. They thought we were heading into harm’s way, which wasn’t the case, as we would spend the deployment on the USS Guam LPH 9.

Marine wounded in Beirut October 1983

Our contribution to the Beirut story was a minor part of Targeted: Beirut, which focused on the Marine Amphibious Unit that was attacked on October 23, 1983. Carr weaves the book around the stories of several Marines and sailors as they endure their deployment ashore. Some of those men made it home, the others did not, and you don’t know who the lucky ones were as his face paced narrative unfolds. It is a masterful display of storytelling that will interest anyone curious about how the war on terror started.

Having been a participant, I knew most of the story but was unprepared for the one thing that immediately caught my attention. The difference in how the military and our government handled combat deployments in the 80s. There was severe tension between the State Department and the Pentagon; putting the Marines ashore in Beirut, where they were sitting ducks, was unpopular. The Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff didn’t want the Marines ashore; the National Security Council and State Department thought it a splendid idea, and that played out in the press.

101st Airborne arriving in an undisclosed location September 2024

President Regan sent the Marines in, and he made repeated primetime addresses to the nation explaining his rationale. The Marine position at Beirut International Airport was flooded daily with American press and TV crews from National, regional, and even local media. The media environment was so different 40 years ago that reading about it today was jarring.

Something I did not know was that Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger ignored a Presidential finding that ordered him to retaliate for the Beirut Barracks bombing. Our intelligence agencies had intercepted message traffic that pinpointed precisely who had ordered and carried out the attack. President Reagan then ordered the navy to retaliate, but at the last moment, Weinberger ordered them to stand down, explaining, “I just don’t think it was the right thing to do.”

Beirut October 1983

In one of many speeches after the Beirut bombing, President Regan said:

“Let no terrorist question our will, no tyrant doubt our resolve. Americans have courage and determination, and we must not and will not be intimidated by anyone anywhere.”

Cap Weinberger didn’t have the courage or determination to do a damn thing. His unilateral action undermined the President, and the ensuing 40 years of terrorist attacks have revealed him to be a petty, naïve, Ivy League fool. We have a surplus of over-credentialed nitwits in our country who have sacrificed the lives of thousands of servicemen by declaring preposterous concepts like “proportional response” or “courageous restraint” viable military strategies.

When we were in Beirut with the 22nd MAU there was no proportional response. The gloves were off and the Marines responded to every provocation, no matter how small, with overwhelming force. My friend Mike Ettore and his platoon were assigned to the University Library where the local Amal Militia commander would taunt them by having dinner every evening across the street from them. After his militia attacked the Marines one too many times Mike got permission to take him out. He called in a sniper team to shoot the fool in the face when he sat down for dinner. Mike if I have that story wrong don’t correct me, its too good to retract.

101st Airborne somewhere in the Middle East September 2024

President Regan and the faction supporting the deployment of the Marines were dead wrong. That was made clear by Carr when he explained how we ended up with Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, a feckless alcoholic with a libido problem worse than Bill Clinton’s. Amin replaced his capable brother Bashir Gemayel as President after a car bomb killed Bashir.  

New York Times reporter Milton Freedman wrote that Bashir was “something of an expert in gangland murders.” That may have been true; the New York Times was considered a legitimate news organization back then. What was also true was Bashir had the respect and cooperation of the other ethnic minorities in Lebanon. His drunk-ass playboy brother had no support among the Shia, Druze, or Sunni minorities. Treating him like a legitimate partner for peace was a fool’s errand, just as it was with the leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan. Believing that a battalion of Marines could accomplish anything was likewise ridiculous. However, in 1983, that controversy played out in the press, allowing the American people to have an informed opinion.

Compare that to last week’s deployment of the 101st Airborne to the Middle East. Do you see any discussion about placing American troops in harm’s way to accomplish an undefined mission in today’s gaslighting media? No. What does the Pentagon think about this deployment? Who knows? These days, everything the Pentagon does is classified. Do you know where those troops are? What they are doing? Why they are there? Nope, all we know is they were deployed “out of an abundance of caution.” Weasel words that mean nothing describing a deployment that will accomplish nothing, ordered by an unknown member of a failed administration.

Beirut October 1983

I’ve salted this post with pictures from Beirut and the few images I found of last week’s deployment of troops into the Middle East. Have you noticed the difference between the two? Forty years of “diversity is our strength,” DEI mandates, witch hunts for nonexistent white racists, and race crime hoaxes have resulted in the tip of the spear being lily white. How the hell did that happen? I liked it better when the infantry was multi racial.

101st Airborne somewhere in the Middle East September 2024.

But that isn’t the worst of it. Today, Our military is less capable by orders of magnitude than in 1983. We don’t have a fleet oiler to refuel our Atlantic, Mediterranean, or Red Sea ships. We don’t have the amphibious ship lift to move more than a puny Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), the smallest Marine formations once available for crisis response. Today’s Marine Corps MEU lacks enablers like tanks, engineers, medium-lift assault helicopters, Armored  Amphibious Tractors, snipers, or organic mortars. Marine infantry battalions are 41% smaller than they were in 1983. And those infantry battalions are saddled with the dead wood of female infantry, inflicted on them by yellow generals who believe that the difference between men and women is a mere social construct.

As you read Jack Carr’s excellent historical account, you will frequently see quotes from parents and generals expressing the hope that the Marines did not “die in vain.” Likewise, you will see a standard trope: “Where do we get such men?” when reflecting on the sacrifice of the Marines in 1983. Yet those men died in vain, as has every service-member lost during the war on terror. We may well have a handful of “such men” serving in today’s hollow force, but not many, and they will be chased out by the DEI mandarins who despise competency because it threatens the bankrupt concept of equity. When you cannot do what is important, the unimportant becomes important. That sums up our broken, hollow, woke military today; it’s a national disgrace somebody’s children will pay dearly for in the near future.

But don’t let my glum assessment of today’s armed forces be the last word. Buy Jack Carr’s new book and enjoy an excellent read about a day gone by. I promise you’ll enjoy every minute spent with this page turner.

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The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: The United States of America

The United States has never been weaker, or more vulnerable in my lifetime. The President is clearly incapacitated, yet he refuses to step down, our DEI centric military lacks the manpower, weapons, or leadership to be a credible deterrent. I enlisted in the navy in 1978, during the days of the low morale, high drug use, “hollow force”. Back then we had (literally) twice the number of ships, tanks, artillery pieces, amphibious vehicles, and infantry battalions but the units were undermanned and poorly led. Marine officers carried loaded sidearms while on duty and had every expectation of needing them.

Ole Doc Lynch pulling liberty on Saint Patricks Day, 1984, in Haifa, Israel. Brawling in shady bars was an expectation back then but the Israelis were so damn nice to us that I don’t think anyone got into a ruckus. Hard men aren’t necessarily violent, just violent when necessary.

In the late 1970’s the military fell on hard times when full of hard men who, when they had their sailors at sea, or their Marines out in the field, established good order and discipline the old fashioned way; with their fists. I did it myself because it was only one way to get your peers to stop blasting music after 2300 in the Bethesda Naval Hospital enlisted barracks. The modern military may still have a few hard men, but they would never receive tacit support or encouragement from their chain of command to use traditional old school discipline to establish and maintain good order and discipline.

We live in soft times, more disconnected from nature than ever before, with a military full of soft men/women/undecided who are uninterested in and unfamiliar with interpersonal violence. The current military is incapable of repeating the miraculous transformation into a highly competent, well funded, and drug free force, that occurred during President Regan’s military revitalization in the early 80’s. Public confidence in the military, extraordinarily high since the mid 1980’s is trending back down to where it was after Vietnam. Confidence in all the institutions that matter, the press, congress, the legal system, academia, “The scienceTM”, and Medicine are at historic lows. It’s so bad regional law enforcement agencies will no longer share information with an FBI they do not trust.

Proving the FBI has IFF (identify friend or foe) issues two FBI agents paid a visit to a friend of mine yesterday who is the hardest Marine Corps infantry officer I ever knew. Asad Khan was a legend in the Marine Corps known for an impressive work ethic, exacting standards, and tactical savvy. I was huge fan and when suddenly bumped up to the 1/8 operations officer while still a young captain then Major Khan graciously gave me a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) saving me untold of hours of tedious staff work. He wasn’t a dick about it either despite knowing that I knew he would never take another battalion’s SOP knowing he could write a better one.

That’s as close to a smile as you’ll get from Asad when he’s wearing the uniform. Not that he smiles much on his podcast now that I think about it. . . .

Asad led the first Marines into Afghanistan landing in Bagram where they boarded rented buses to drive to Kabul and re-claim the American embassy. On the way there they ran into a one tank roadblock in a wadi crossing with a sign demanding payment to pass. LtCol Khan, a fluent Pashto speaker, walked over to the tank, knocked on the crew hatch and asked the lone occupant inside what he needed, the old man said shoes. Khan gave him chow and water and told him to wait there until he returned with shoes and in the meantime to put the main gun in neutral position and let the Americans coming behind him pass unmolested. The old man agreed and was inside the tank days later with Asad returned with shoes, clothes, a coat and some money. Khan was both hard and smart – I don’t think any other Marine officer of our generation could have navigated that situation so well back in 2001.

I ran into Asad several times in Afghanistan, in fact I met his son in Kabul when he showed up with then Colonel (now retired LtGen) Dave Furness who was working in the congressional liaison office at the time. Asad hosts the Sentinel podcast on Youtube and you should listen to a few episodes to get a feel for what the FBI considers “anti-American” these days. You can listen to him describe the FBI visit here and when you’re done you tell me if you’d like to see Asad investigated by the Feds or moving into the house next door.

Some pictures are truly worth a thousand words

We are watching the government/media/academia axis of evil employs brute digital force to whitewash the disastrous incompetence of the Biden regime and it’s new leader Kamala Harris in real time. Already the allegedly non partisan GovTrack has deleted her ranking as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. Axios spent years calling Kamala the Border Czar now insist that they never said that and she was never really the border czar. Amazon has suddenly banned an unflattering book on Kamala as the media’s Soviet style airbrushing of the most unpopular Vice President in history continues.

The Orange and Velvet revolutions foisted on various countries by the U.S. Department of State targeted regime legitimacy through incremental non-violent means to generate a preference cascade leading to regime collapse. It is useful to remember this when reviewing the mountain of disinformation, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories we have had to endure since Donald J Trump announced his candidacy in June of 2015. A trendy acronym from the recent pass explains the ramifications of gaslighting American citizens: POSIWID: The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. If the ends pursued by the Regime are functionally identical to the ends of warfare, then the Regime is waging war. Ask LtCol Asad Khan USMC (Ret) about it, I’m sure he has an interesting take.

The purpose of regime media propoganda is to demoralize to opposition

Years ago progressive America declared war on biology with their refusal to accept the reality that gender is not a social construct and men and women are not interchangeable. Biology in this context is a synonym for nature and it’s Mother Nature who determined woman would never be as physically capable as men because they are designed and built differently . The difference between the sexes emotionally was just demonstrated during the FBI/Secret Service congressional hearings. US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle took such a beating that she resigned the next day, but she lost her job not because she’s a woman, but as a woman she never had to learn how to fight at the apex predator level. Showing poor tactical awareness she allowed herself to be ambushed at the Republican convention when she arrogantly strode the floor, assuming she had the juice to do so unmolested. When confronted by her ridiculous prior statements concerning roof slopes she was clearly embarrassed. When attacked by both sides of the isle she was unable to mask her emotions.

Mother Nature is tough on the small, the weak, the stupid, and the defenseless.

FBI Director Christopher Wray strode into the capitol and not only obfuscated shamelessly he smirkingly added this poison pill to his testimony:

“I think with respect to former President Trump there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that, you know, hit his ear.” 

Utter rubbish concocted out of thin air that was walked back the next day but it wasn’t meant to be taken literally. That was Wray sending congress a two word message, first word starts with F and the second is You. He was telling congress they didn’t intimidate him and he would counterattack anyone who crossed him. That kind of naked bureaucratic power can only be wielded effectively by men who fought their way to the top of a meritocratic system. Women reach the top of federal agencies by other methods, not by consistently outperforming their male peers every step of the way for decades on end.

Regardless of who is in charge of our massive federal bureaucracies they are not going to allow the Trump/Vance ticket to gain landslide sized momentum unmolested. Their bizarre attempts to stop him have already surpassed the surreal, but have only made him stronger. The next four months are at the very least going to be weird, but I’m afraid the progressive establishment will reach for the last tool they have; political violence. Our country is leaderless, the people adrift in uncharted waters with DEI hires at the helm and FBI agents at the door; this can’t possibly end well.

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