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.
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.
Forty one years ago, the 1st Battalion 8th Marines were attacked by the first modern suicide bomber at the Beirut International Airport. A dump truck packed with 12,000 pounds of explosives crashed through a flimsy gate and into a building being used as barracks for the Marines, killing 241 Marines and sailors. At the time, I was a Navy corpsman assigned to the Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. I was also the leading petty officer of the Surgical Support Team, and we were rapidly mobilized, vaccinated, and sent overseas to join the unit, replacing the devastated Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut. In the ensuing months, I witnessed, mostly from our ship but sometimes on the shore, an American military disaster.
Doc Lynch on the ground in Beirut. standing in front of what was left of the Barracks
Nobody in that operation knew what we were supposed to do on the ground in Beirut.
In November 1983, the various warring factions were stupid enough to attack the Marine positions, which allowed for some mission clarity. One thing Marines understand is killing people, so when attacked, they responded by killing everybody shooting at them. That caused the various warring factions to stop shooting any weapons anywhere near Marine positions. With no enemies attacking them, the Marines returned to displaying the flag as our political masters dictated. The Marines also found creative ways to trick Lebanese militia into firing their weapons near them so they could kill more of them. That’s what bored Marines do in undefined combat adjacent spaces.
The anniversary of that pointless disaster is the perfect day for the FJB administration to announce another pointless deployment of American combat troops into the Middle East, where they will do… What? Question number one is, who’s deploying them? It can’t be Joe Biden because he turned over his first cabinet meeting in over a year to Jill Biden. Is this Dr. Jill’s idea? Or is Cackling Kamala doing the saber-rattling? These are questions the regime media will never ask because the answers will reflect poorly on their democratic sponsors.
What the hell is this? Why are we forced to act like this is normal or acceptable?
Could you imagine the media frenzy if Melania Trump chaired a cabinet meeting? What if Melania took over a cabinet meeting, and the next day, the military made the following announcement:
“In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional U.S. military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region,”
We know precisely what would happen: the end of the world, with media hysteria cranked up beyond the endurance of mere mortals.
What will a “small number of military personnel” do in the Middle East? What capabilities do they bring to the fight? If the Pentagon wants to exercise “an abundance of caution,” how about you leave those troops in the United States? They cannot influence a damn thing happening on the ground in Lebanon. We tried that in 1983, thinking the mere presence of a Marine Corps expeditionary unit would stop the internecine fighting in Beirut. We stopped nothing. Instead, we presented an attractive target for Iranian-financed proxies to destroy in the biggest nonnuclear detonation in history.
We just completed a 20-year, multi-billion dollar effort to replace the Taliban with the Taliban and have learned nothing. The same “smartest kids in the room” who gave us the Kabul fiasco are driving this ridiculously under-resourced response to a war that is none of our business. It has been all war all the time in Lebanon for the past 40 years, and we’ve done nothing about it. Why start now by once again exposing our military to grave danger while failing to give them a mission, a desired end state, or adequate resources?
Maybe “Doctor” Jill thinks getting American troops killed overseas is a brilliant election-year strategy. It would certainly generate some “rally around our troops” support, forcing attention away from Kamala and FJB. That may be smart politics if you’re a raging sociopath. Melania Trump, who is fluent in five languages with a measured IQ an entire standard deviation higher than “Doctor” Jill, would never risk the lives of American troops for political gain.
In 1983, if the military said it was building a pier, it would have built one that could handle the moderate seas of the Mediterranean.
The truth lands with a thud and requires no further explanation. The truth is, we have no idea what we are doing in the Middle East. We didn’t have a clue in 1983, and we don’t have one today. Nor do we have a capable military, adequate naval shipping, or capable Marine Corps battalions. We can’t even build a temporary pier, something the Roman army was quite proficient at building 2500 years ago. Those capabilities have been sacrificed on the altar of equity and inclusion by men who placed access to power and post-retirement riches over the stewardship of their respective service branches. Other people’s children will be paying the price for that folly in the future. And it will be a painful lesson for all involved, just like Beirut in 1983.
This morning I saw an X from Tucker Carlson about an interview with my good friend Michael Yon. The first sentence stated “America is being invaded and destroyed with the help of our leaders”. That sounded ominous and with Michael being a friend I went to the Tucker website to watch the interview. Only I couldn’t because I’m not a member so I coughed up nine bucks to watch the Yon interview. It occurred to me that what Michael is warning against – an invasion of mostly Hispanic foreigners that will change our towns and communities forever, already happened in the Rio Grande Valley where I settled almost ten years back. Thus a boots on the ground report from the tropical portion of the southern border with Mexico where the whites comprise around 5% of the population.
The Rio Grande Valley
The Rio Grande Valley (RGV) borders Mexico and consists of Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy counties. The official statistics claim the valley is over 91% Hispanic which isn’t accurate because that count includes thousands of Winter Texans who only reside here from October through May. Our population distribution represents the future according to the great replacement theory. I don’t believe anyone outside the media, academia, or dysfunctional federal agencies believe this ridiculous theory and I offer as proof this NPR article which claims it has gone mainstream with the Whites whites. Over 25% of the 1.3 million Hispanic Texans in the RGV are immigrants, but not the kind of immigrants found in NPR programing because many of these immigrants, like the majority of Hispanic voters in the RGV, are Trump supporters.
Your typical Trump RGV supporter turning out to welcome the President to McAllen back in 2019.
President Trump won the RGV in 2020 election and his popularity with Hispanic voters continues to increase with each passing month of FJB incompetence at the border. But nobody who lives here categorizes people by bureaucratically created terms like “Hispanic” for many practical reasons. Take the young man in the photograph above, he looks Hispanic but he’s not, he’s Native American, and doesn’t speak Spanish. Most of the second and third generation Hispanic kids in the RGV also don’t speak Spanish, but there are plenty of Gringo’s around the valley who are fluent Spanish speakers. Add the inconvenient fact that humans (regardless of racial classification) segregate by class in America, not race, and you’ll understand why every strata of the social hierarchy here is dominated by Hispanics. And the degree to which one is or is not Hispanic has nothing to do with skin color; it’s determined by fluency with the Spanish language.
My buddy Cody Elmore is so white that after six months in the Helmand Province he looked like he spent the winter in Minnesota. But Cody is the son of diplomats who went to school in Europe and speaks perfect Castilian Spanish so when out and about in RGV he’s so Hispanic that real Hispanic’s buy him drinks when they hear him speak Spanish. Competency with upper caste European Spanish is admired in Tex Mex social circles.
What’s it like living in the future America where the whites are a distinct minority? It’s fantastic, like living in the America of my childhood but with rare tropical bird species, and Ocelots. This is due to the high level of civic trust found in communities that share the same values, beliefs, and culture. Granted the culture here is more Mex than Tex, but who cares when you live in a town with dozens of large parks that fill on Easter Sunday with extended families picnicking, their kids hunting for colorful cascarones (painted eggshells full of confetti) while the adults fire up the pit and grill stuff. Easter celebrations extend through the entire day as the kids’ band together and have cascarones wars while the adults relax in the only portion of America considered tropical.
Unfortunately, adult relaxation in the RGV invariably involves drinking cerveza’s which contributes to the region’s designation (by WalletHub.com) as the fattest city in the nation. I think the local tortillas contribute more because they come doubled up and deep fried in with queso cheese in-between them making local taco’s addictive as crack. But beer drinking is endemic to local culture so watching families arrive at a Quinceañera, the women dressed in fantastically elaborate ball gowns, the men in coat and tie each dragging a cooler of full of beer is totally normal. There is no Bowling Alone style collapse inside the local communities here because Hispanic people are serious about their religion and their extended families, even the ones with sneaky Gringo’s in the family tree. There are no Roof Dogs in the Rio Grande Valley despite their prevalence in Mexico, because America ain’t Mexico, and the RGV is populated by Americans.
Roof dogs are no bueno .
What kind of Americans you ask? The RGV is to Texas what the Helmand province was to Afghanistan; it’s Marineistan – full of Marines and Marine Corps history. Weslaco native Corporal Harlan Block, one of the six Marines to raise the flag on Iwo Jima is buried at the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen. Marine Corps Sergeant Alfredo Gonzalez, a native Edinburg won the Medal of Honor at Hue City during the Vietnam war. There are murals of Marines who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan painted on the underground electrical junction boxes around Edinburg and I’ve heard there is more of them in Brownsville. The Valley is home to one of the best historians who ever lived; T. R. Fehrenbach who was an Army officer, but his best selling book, This Kind of War, was about the awesomeness of the United States Marine Corps in Korean War. The Army get’s no love in the Valley for some reason and I have no idea why.
There are more of these tributes to dead Marines in the RGV than there should be from the 20 year long war against terror. Why are there only tributes to Marines? Because the RGV is Marinestan
A picture of Sgt. Gonzales’s mother accepting his Medal of Honor from the South Texas Museum in Edinburg, Texas. I am almost certain the last Marine on the left is GySgt John Canley who also won the Medal of Honor during the battle of Hue.
The Tucker Carlson interview with Michael Yon focused on the international NGO’s who facilitate the massive migrant movements through Central America into the United States. The lead agency organizing and paying for this illegal migration is the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) who have a posh office in Panama inside former Southern Command headquarters building in Fort Clayton. From Clayton IOM coordinates with the federal government contractors like Catholic Relief Charities and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to care, feed and move migrants to and through the US border. These contractors self-identify as NGO’s but any organization funded by the government that moves thousands of people across the border and then disperses them throughout the United States every month needs military-contractor grade accounting departments and former Feds in upper management. That is how the game is played.
In October of 1981 sculptor Dr. Felix W. de Weldon donated this full sized working model of the Iwo Jima Monument to the Marine Military Academy. Prior to that it was disassembled and stored in his garage in Newport, R.I. where my friends and I would try to get a glimpse of it because the garage was close to a main road and accessible to sneaky teenagers.
Did you know Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is a Jewish immigrant from Cuba? His parents fled Havana after the revolution and that background made him perfect for the board of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) prior to his government appointment. Michael Yon uncovered the HIAS connection when he noted that the HIAS Panama offices were next to the IOM HQ building in the Darien Gap. Which might explain why Mayorkas flew into the Darien Gap back in 2022 to meet with both the IOM and HIAS about funding improvements of what Yon describes as “the China Camp”. A camp with superior accommodations where Chinese migrants are housed but segregated from the other migrants. Why is our Secretary of Homeland Security funding illegal migration? Why is he dumping millions of no-bid federal contracting dollars on a “NGO” he once managed? What is the end game here?
Who know’s? But I know the southern border, which is supposed to be under the control of our Homeland Security Department, is instead controlled by narcotraficantes. The reason narcotraficantes control the entire southern border is they own the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador who prefers to be called AMLO because he just a humble public servant who, despite the conspicuous accumulation of massive personal wealth, is a man of the people.
The Riverside Dreamer still does a booming business hauling tourists for one or two hours tours of the Rio Grande River. The operator told me she has been giving boat tours for 20 years and never had a problem.
Last fall a ProPublica investigative reporter named Tim Golden published a long detailed story about the DEA’s effort to hold Senior AMLO accountable for taking millions of dollars from the Sinaloa drug cartel in 2010 in return for the names and addresses of his own State Police. But in 2010 Obama was in office and Obama made decisions based on what was best for Obama not for the citizens of the United States or Mexico. Holding Mexican officials responsible for their many and manifest crimes was not part of the Obama hagiography so the millions spent by the DEA investigation went right down the sewer next to the Marine Corps excellent study on the dreadful consequences of putting females in the infantry.
The RGV, known as Tropical Texas, is home to several exotic tropical bird species and home to the last remaining Ocelots in America. Photo from NatGeo.
The New York Times published a long form piece based in part on Tim Golden’s work which caused Senior AMLO so much consternation he doxxed the NYT reporter by giving out her name and cell phone number at a press conference. Mexico is the worlds leader in many unsavory categories including murdered journalists so one would suspect the New York Times and FJB’s administration would protest this blatant intimidate of an American reporter, but they have said nothing. Instead AMLO has demanded 20 BillionDollars from FJB to open talks about the border he does not control.
It’s not just people sneaking into the RGV from Mexico but Ocelots too. Last week one was killed by a car up in Jim Hogg county which was bad, but the DNA test showed the cat to be Mexican which was good. The RGV Ocelot population will need many more Mexican Ocelots sneaking across the border to bring much needed genetic diversity to their American cousins. Photo from San Antonio.com
Mexican drug cartels are not a benign presence in the RGV given their history of corrupting local law enforcement. Every county in the RGV has had sheriff’s arrested for taking narcotraficantes money. The sad case of Hidalgo County Sheriff Guadalupe “Lupe” Treviño from ten years back is typical. He was arrested and convicted for money laundering which is a growth industry with Mexican Cartels. What is amazing isn’t the number of local law enforcement officers arrested for being in bed with traffickers, it’s number who aren’t being arrested given the ridiculous amounts of money involved in narco bribes. The avergage Rio Grande Valley police officer appears to be honest, conscientious, and professional. They tend to be fluent Spanish speakers who can instantly recognize Venezuelans, Colombians, Guatemalans, etc. . . and give them the extra scrutiny they deserve without worrying about profiling beefs from federal prosecutors.
Great Kiskadee’s are one of a many tropical birds found exclusively in the Rio Grande Valley (and points south). Birding is big business in the valley. Photo from my backyard where this male Kissadee chases off all Kissadee competitors while terrorizing the House Sparrows.
Yet the corrupting influence of the enormous hordes of cash money Cartels deploy cannot be ignored. It is inconceivable that they have not penetrated local law enforcement agencies with the millions of dollars they have to spend. There is too much money involved for corruption not to impact local governments which makes eliminating the power and influence of Mexican drug cartels a time sensitive issue that is being ignored by the FJB administration. Federal politicians can ignore the spreading cancer of narcotraficante war lordism corrupting Texas border communities but we can’t which is why Donald Trump is going to win here in a landslide.
We rarely see the illegals who are processed daily and then dropped off at the McAllen bus station by the Border Patrol. The Catholic Relief Charities has a building across from the bus station where they feed, and house the migrants before sending them on their way with free bus tickets, or airline tickets out of state. In fact, the invasion of illegal immigrants benefits the RGV economically due to the resulting deployment of troops, flight crews and federal agencies, keeping our hotels occupied and restaurants full of well paid feds on per diem who tip well.
The migrants don’t stay here because the Cartels don’t want them here trashing the place up because they invest and vacation here. I see well dressed, fit, friendly Mexican men driving late model sports cars with Tamaulipas license plates all the time in McAllen. It is impossible for a non cartel connected Mexican to own and drive a late model European sports car on the highways of Tamaulipas and not get it stolen by one of the cartels. Everybody knows that is the reality of contemporary Mexico but we’re not rude about it down here because everybody is armed and an armed society is a polite society. Yet I yearn for the day when I see Mexicans driving late model cars with Tamaulipas plates in McAllen and not immediately suspect them to be well dressed, violent narco thugs.
This 35 year old Friendship Fountain between McAllen and our Mexican sister cities Irapuato and Guanajato is falling apart – the perfect metaphor for the condition of our southern border with Mexico.
Nothing good can come from allowing Mexican cartels to control the flow of both illicit drugs and illegal migrants across our border. And nothing good can come from allowing millions of people with limited English or practical skills to flood the country where they have no agency and easily trapped in situations that are worse than slavery.
Any American who actually understands the concept of human rights would demand the immediate closure of our border to cripple the massive human trafficking operation corrupting our communities with mountains of cash. The laws of unintended consequences are brutal reminders to the anointed that reality still rules on planet earth. Nobody wants a prosperous, functional and safe Mexico more than Texans, but that will not happen unless America forces some hard choices on the criminal political class ruling Mexico. When the President of the United States starts treating AMLO like FJB treats Israeli President Netanyahu, we’ll know the border crisis is about to end.
I just did something today which would have been suicidal 10 months ago. My colleague Little Mac and I, in the company of a Marine tank officer and Naval surface warfare officer (he’s a fires guy by trade) just strolled around the town of Naw Zad with no body armor, no helmets, no riflemen escorting us, munching on local bread and handing out candy to the kids. We are safer here than we would be in downtown Chicago. Naw Zad was once the third largest populated area in the province. By 2007 the civilian population had fled the area and there was nobody here except bad guys and a few hard pressed British and Estonian infantrymen.
This was the main street of Naw Zad bazaar a year ago. Official USMC photo
Naw Zad bazaar today
Fox company 2nd Battalion 7th Marines (Fox 2/7) arrived in Naw Zad to reinforce the Brits in late 2008 and were able to expand the security bubble but not by much. The Brits, Estonians and Marines fought side by side to expel the Taliban from this fertile valley but were hampered by restrictive ROE pushed down from on high by senior officers in Kabul who lacked common sense and experience at counterinsurgency warfare. The Marines and their allies lost a lot of men because they did not have the mass or firepower to do the job correctly. Way back then there was a lone voice in the blogsphere pleading with all who would listen to free up the combat power and let the Marines in Naw Zad fight. His name is Herschel Smith and his posts at the Captains Journal can be found here. It is worth your time to read them all.
Another view of the Naw Zad bazaar today
In the summer of 2009 the U.S. Marines had deployed the 2nd Expeditionary Brigade to Afghanistan and their first move was to clear out Naw Zad and the surrounding hamlets of all Taliban. The 2nd MEB was commanded by BGen Larry Nicholson who I was fortunate to serve with as a young Lieutenant back in the 80’s. He had his own Tac Air, his own artillery, his own rotary wing transport and gunships and he had his own ideas about how to fight. He didn’t have to go to the powers that be in Kabul or Kandahar because he didn’t need anything from them. He seeded the high ground overlooking the rat lines running into Naw Zad with sniper and recon teams in June. They immediately started collecting scalps and then on 2 July 2009 he launched Operation Khanjar dropping 2000 grunts onto Naw Zad and the surrounding villages to finish the Taliban off. The Taliban reacted as they always do when faced with superior forces – they broke contact and ran…into the sniper teams.
Fighting in the town of Naw Zad and its adjacent hamlets is long over. The Taliban can’t muster the manpower or firepower required to drive the Marines out so we are now deep into the “hold & build” stage of the operation and it is slow going. Every brick, piece of steel, bag of cement and all hand tools have to be trucked in from Camp Bastion or Lashkar Gah. My old battalion 1/8 has has deployed a rifle company (C 1/8) to Naw Zad for the past six months facilitating the hold and build while expanding the zone of safety further into the hinterlands. Actually the rifle company headquarters is based here with what looks like a platoon or so in the district center proper. The three rifle platoons are working areas to the north and southeast.
The Dahaneh Pass which is around 5 kilometers to the southeast of Naw Zad. The ANP/Marine outpost on the left hand finger was in contact when I took this picture. It was a typical Taliban nuisance attack – they still really suck at fighting but they are getting better at planting IEDs
The roads to the south of Dahaneh are controlled by the Taliban. They cannot stand and fight the Marines like they do the army in the east because there aren’t enough of them, the terrain doesn’t facilitate ambushes, and they can’t run to Pakistan for sanctuary. So they use IED’s… a lot of IED’s which, as IED’s do in Afghanistan, strike disproportionately against the civilian population. In order to get building material into the valley local truckers insist on being escorted by Marines. The Marines know the Taliban are going to plant IED’s and they literally walk the convoys into the valley. The 65 kilometer trip from Bastion to Naw Zad takes two days; most of that time is spent waiting for the engineers to blow IED’s which have been seeded ahead of them.
In 6 months C1/8 has lost 3 MRAP’s but no men to IED’s
50% of the IED’s made by the Taliban fail to function or blow up at some point in the deployment cycle. The remaining 50% go into the ground. One metric of success for the Marines is the number of them which are pointed out or dug up and turned in to the Marines. They are not paying money for these but still each morning at the District Governors compound IED’s are turned into the Marines for destruction
The villains have deployed countless numbers of IED’s targeting the Marines of 1/8. Only three of them scored hits but none have resulted in a fatality. One can only wish IED’s were so ineffective in other areas of Helmand Province. The Naw Zad area has been cleared; the hold and build underway. The Marines who are here would like to be somewhere else – preferably a place where the Taliban will stand and fight them. Infantry Marines, even after ten years of constant deployment, still hunger for a good fight. But that is not to be for 1/8 as they are stuck in place to do the hold and build. There was a time when Marines were dying here and there needed to be a lot more thrown into the fight. Now Marines are fighting and dying in other places like Sangin and they need more of their brother devil dogs to back them up. Now many of the folks I correspond with are starting to see what I was talking about when I opined that you need a hold and build force working directly for the ground commander. This is where contractors can save money, time and lives by freeing up the gunfighters to do what they do best. Kill villains, protect the innocent, and unmask the evil who prey upon the population.
