(with Sean Duffy filling in for Tucker Carlson)
Marines Fired As China Ramps Up Its War Machine
Our Military Continues To Fire Marines While China Cranks Out More Warships
Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Thursday, December 23, 2021
Washington Prepares To Fail In Ukraine
This chapter will not end well for President Biden or Washington’s political class
Guards patrol the border between Russia and Ukraine. (E.Kryzhanivskyi/Shutterstock)
DECEMBER 23, 2021|12:01 AM
DOUGLAS MACGREGOR
It’s an indisputable fact: Washington leads the world in self-delusion.
Washington’s political class is poised to march into a hurricane of its own making in Ukraine, a perfect storm of foreign- and defense-policy blunders likely to plunge the American people into future crises and conflicts. Having refused to acknowledge Russia’s vital strategic interest in Ukraine, Washington now wants to subject Ukraine and the NATO alliance to a dangerous and unnecessary test by confronting Russian conventional military power. In turn, Washington and its allies now face a test—one that they could have avoided but are now likely to fail. First, the facts.
The Biden administration is spending $768.2 billion for national defense. Russia spends only $42.1 billion, less than the $48 billion spent by the Republic of Korea. Yet Russian ground forces are superior in capability and striking power to the U.S. Army and Marines, even if both countries’ ground forces were able to deploy to Ukraine.
Russia’s conventional-ground-force superiority stems, in part, from the strategic advantage of fighting close to Russia. Its potency is also a reflection of President Vladimir Putin’s insistence on fundamental defense reform and reorganization. The reform process involved years of struggle to expel old generals who resisted change and install new, resolute fighting forces, composed of young, single men with a profound sense of Russian patriotism and toughness. The policy has resulted in an operationally flexible grouping of smaller capability-based Russian fighting formations, designed to ruthlessly exploit the striking power of Russia’s rocket artillery, tactical ballistic missiles, and loitering munitions.
Far to the west and behind the Polish border sits an awkward collection of U.S. Army and NATO Ground Forces that, despite decades of cooperation, are still challenged to fight effectively as one force. In the last 20 years of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, most of America’s allies seldom had anything to contribute to our efforts, save a flag and inexperienced troops who were forced to operate under political restrictions. Thus, like the U.S. Army that leads them, the allied ground forces cling to the illusion that NATO can fight future conflicts on land the way Anglo-American allies did during World War II—with large, densely packed divisions, corps, and armies. These are lucrative targets for Russian strike formations.
Additionally, institutional policies to impose diversity and inclusion on the U.S. Armed Forces at the expense of demonstrated character, competence, and intelligence, demoralize our troops. As a result, the dedication, cohesion, and pride of achievement required to sustain America’s professional fighting force have been seriously damaged.
The implications are clear: A U.S.-Russian confrontation in Eastern Ukraine could easily resemble the 1940 Anglo-French experience, with the Wehrmacht provoking a serious backlash at home. Supply-chain bottlenecks, consumer-goods inflation, and soaring energy costs could all worsen if events in Ukraine spiral out of control. As more and more Americans wake up to falling standards of living, how will they react to yet another war for suspicious aims that have absolutely nothing to do with their own vital strategic interests, and make their daily lives even harder?
Reality is sitting on Ukraine’s eastern border, not in the South China Sea or in the strait of Taiwan, and there is ostensibly nothing Washington can do about it. The questions that should concern Washington’s political class are: Will NATO survive its ignominious retreat in the face of superior Russian military power? And, why is Washington conducting policy not from strength, but from weakness—a weakness thus far disguised by the outward show of military power against weak opponents without armies, air defenses, or air forces?
Nietzsche said, “War makes the victor stupid.” After 1991, America’s senior military and political leaders found many reasons to spend enormous sums on defense, but no reason to change the way U.S. forces fight, or to devise a national military strategy tied to tangible, concrete interests and the preservation of American national power.
As John Kenneth Galbraith warned, “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.”
Washington’s corrupt and morally bankrupt leaders are walking into a minefield. If they embroil U.S. and allied forces in Ukraine, extraordinary discontent at home and abroad awaits them. However, like so many privileged classes before them, the Biden administration may prefer “complete destruction” rather than acknowledge that its most cherished beliefs are utter delusions. It’s safe to say that whatever happens in Ukraine, this chapter will not end well for President Biden or Washington’s political class.
Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books.
Friday, December 17, 2021
The Joe Piscopo Show 12-15-2021
Description
Joseph diGenova, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia
Topic: House votes to hold Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress, Ethics committee says Cuomo must pay back $5.1 million from book deal
Col. Douglas Macgregor, retired U.S. Army Colonel, the former senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense, author, and a senior fellow at The American Conservative
Topic: "The Ghost of Ukraine's Future"
James Gonzalez, President & CEO of Broadway House
Topic: Broadway House
Thursday, December 16, 2021
Black Market Leadership® Podcast Part 2 of 2
Ep. 38 - Margin of Victory, Part 2 of 2
part 2 of podcast (audio)
https://blackmarketleadership.libsyn.com/ep-38-margin-of-victory-part-2-of-2
part 2 video
https://youtu.be/3eJk0svHzOo
Backup video link:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/vW45XKYpPthO/
Info on Part 1 posted last week (12/8/2021):
Black Market Leadership® Podcast Part 1 of 2
Ep. 37 - Margin of Victory, Part 1 of 2
part 1 of podcast (audio):
https://blackmarketleadership.libsyn.com/ep-37-margin-of-victory-part-1-of-2-1
part 1 video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvlPzvjQQvc&t=3s
Backup video link:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/MOF68WxSFFxG/
Monday, December 13, 2021
The Ghost of Ukraine’s Future
Vladimir Putin would probably prefer to find an alternative way to derail a U.S. alliance with Ukraine if Biden is prepared to bargain. But if Washington refuses to recognize that Russian redline, he may well be prepared to fight—and there is not much the United States could do to stop him.
by Douglas Macgregor George Beebe
12/13/2021
What happens if Washington attempts to force Russia into concessions over Ukraine through a Reaganesque display of strength, when in fact the United States has a comparatively weak hand to play? That is the unenviable situation that President Joe Biden finds himself in after his video meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin this week and his tough talk about not recognizing any Russian redlines.
The notion that the United States is at a disadvantage in contending with Russia strikes most Americans as far-fetched. After all, America’s gross national product is many times larger than that of Russia, and we dominate the international financial system. Our military is larger and much more capable, our offensive cyber capabilities are unparalleled, and we enjoy the support of a large array of treaty allies and military partners in Europe and around the world. By contrast, Russia has few friends and allies, a middling economy largely dependent on energy exports, and a declining population hit hard by Covid-19. On paper, the United States appears to hold many cards in this high-stakes game.
But in practice, the ability to bring force to bear in specific circumstances matters far more than aggregate measures of national power. When it comes to Ukraine, Russia is better able to move large numbers of combat-ready forces into battle, more familiar with the local terrain, and far more prepared to go to war than is the United States, for which Ukraine is not a matter of existential importance. Russia’s military has a recent track record of success in Syria, not to mention in Ukraine itself. And Moscow has very likely planned for the possibility of draconian U.S. and European sanctions and other punitive measures that Washington might impose in response. If push comes to shove in Ukraine, Russia is very likely to win—and quickly.
Should Moscow opt to invade, a Russian campaign would probably be aimed at effectively turning territory in southeastern Ukraine into an extension of Russia itself. As many as 200,000 Russian ground forces could be arrayed in an arc from north to south along a 600-mile front. Publicly available satellite photos show that the largest concentration of Russian military forces currently lies between Voronezh and Crimea. Forces north and northwest of Kiev may constitute a supporting attack with the goal of preventing Ukrainian forces in and around Kiev from moving south to reinforce Ukrainian defenses from Voronezh to Luhansk and Donetsk. Since the battle would take place on Russia’s geographical doorstep, leaders on both sides would be intimately familiar with the terrain they must fight over.
The Russian maneuver units consist of approximately 100 battalion tactical groups (BTGs): reinforced armored and armored infantry battalions of roughly 750 to 1,000 soldiers including artillery, engineers, and support elements. The vast majority of this force is positioned in southern Russia, capable of striking west across the border with Ukraine along multiple axes with operational objectives south of Kiev along the Dnieper River. Roughly twelve BTGs are positioned to move west along the Black Sea coast toward Odessa, the seizing of which would transform Ukraine into a landlocked state.
The ground maneuver force would operate within the framework of tightly organized intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance (ISR) elements linked to powerful strike formations. There might be as many as 100 batteries of rocket artillery in the assembled force. These include systems like the BM-30 Smerch, a system often referred to as a high-end conventional weapon of mass destruction (WMD). A single salvo of five BM-30 Smerch’s firing 300mm rockets can destroy an area the size of New York City’s Central Park with the explosive power equal to a one-kiloton nuclear warhead. In addition, the Iskander mobile missile system, M a precision-guided tactical ballistic missile, would attack Ukrainian airfields, operational headquarters, and logistical infrastructure with explosive 1,058-pound conventional warheads carrying HE fragmentation, submunition, penetration, and fuel-air explosive at ranges between 180 and 300 miles.
Meanwhile, at every level—tactical, operational, and strategic—integrated air defenses composed of S-400 and S-500 Russian air and missile defense systems would protect Russian strike and maneuver formations from Ukrainian air and missile attack. Any Ukrainian or NATO manned or unmanned, low-flying, subsonic platform, whether it were a conventional rotorcraft, a tilt-rotor, or a fixed-wing prop/turboprop aircraft, would be highly susceptible to detection, engagement, and destruction.
If Russian forces attack, the skies over Ukrainian forces would be crowded with a mix of Russian surveillance drones, manned aircraft, and, potentially, Russia’s new loitering munitions. These are effectively cruise missiles designed to hover over the battlefield for hours and engage beyond line-of-sight ground targets. These attacks would be rapidly followed by precision-guided rocket artillery fire.
Under these circumstances, it is not unreasonable to assume that Russian ground forces would reach their operational objectives along the Dnieper River in as little as seventy-two to ninety-six hours. Whether Moscow would decide to press further west and seize the port of Odessa is hard to know, but the action would place Russian forces in close proximity to the pro-Russian Moldovan separatist republic of Transnistria on Romania’s border, rendering Odessa a tempting target.
Kiev’s ability to contend with such a campaign is highly questionable. It is vastly outmanned and outgunned by the Russian military. Its goal would be to retain as much territory east of the Dnieper River as possible while delaying the Russian advance, in the hope that Russian momentum would slow and buy time for immense international pressure on Moscow to halt its offensive.
The Biden administration is reportedly not considering direct military intervention in the event of an invasion of Ukraine. And with good reason—it could do little on the battlefield to counter such moves. The United States has only three combat brigades in Europe, and two of these are lightly armed with antiquated equipment. Although we could realistically employ advanced combat aircraft in Ukraine, they would have to contend with advanced Russian air defenses and formidable Russian electronic jamming capabilities. U.S. air superiority, which has been central to our military operations against lesser powers since the end of the Cold War, would not be assured in Ukraine.
Knowing this, Washington is threatening to impose harsh consequences on Russia outside the battlefield, using “sanctions from hell” and other unspecified measures, in the hope that this will stay Putin’s hand. Unfortunately, it is very likely that the Russians have long anticipated what the United States may do. Along with China, they have prepared for the possibility of being kicked out of the international SWIFT system. They have alternatives to the newly built Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, should Europeans decline to allow its use, and they may even be prepared to choke off their supplies of gas to Europe in mid-winter in retaliation. To deter possible U.S. action against their satellite systems, they have signaled their willingness to take out U.S. satellites by conducting a successful anti-satellite missile test just two weeks ago despite vehement U.S. protests, and they have built land-based backup systems should their own communications and navigation satellites cease operations.
The good news is that Putin almost certainly understands that an invasion of Ukraine would lead to a complete break in relations with the West, rendering Russia in effect a dependent junior partner of China. Moreover, he probably realizes that Russian forces would very likely have to deal with guerrilla resistance in occupied Ukrainian territory, and that unoccupied portions of western Ukraine could become a host for U.S. and NATO forces over the longer term. It is doubtful that these are outcomes he finds appealing. He would probably prefer to find an alternative way to derail a U.S. alliance with Ukraine if Biden is prepared to bargain. But if Washington refuses to recognize that Russian redline, he may well be prepared to fight—and there is not much the United States could do to stop him.
Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a decorated combat veteran, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, and the author of five books.
George Beebe is Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for the National Interest. He is a former director of Russia Analysis at the CIA, a former staff adviser to Vice President Cheney, and author of The Russia Trap: How America’s Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Catastrophe.
Saturday, December 11, 2021
US military man’s take on Berlin’s new foreign minister
‘Baerbock is a crusader looking for a reason to crusade – and that’s a problem’
By JAMES CARDEN
DECEMBER 11, 2021
Annalena Baerbock of the Green Party is Germany's incoming foreign minister. Photo: Wikipedia
Incoming German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has tapped Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock as foreign minister.
Baerbock, a 40-year-old diplomatic novice, has consistently espoused liberal interventionist views that one left-wing American news site has described as a combination of “aloof complacency, ignorance and aggressiveness.”
To help understand the implications of this appointment, Douglas Macgregor (left), a retired US Army colonel and an expert on US-German relations, was asked about what he thought of the incoming German foreign minister.
Macgregor, a fluent German speaker who holds a doctorate from the University of Virginia, was former president Donald Trump’s choice to become US ambassador to Germany. Ultimately, he served as senior adviser to acting secretary of defense Christopher Miller in the last months of that administration.
During his military career, Macgregor was awarded a Bronze Star with a V device for valor as a tank commander in the first Gulf War
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
James Carden: Does the incoming German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, represent a kind of break with the more traditional, more cautious German foreign policy we saw under outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel and her predecessors?
Douglas Macgregor: Very much so. I think at least insofar as the things Baerbock has said, she’s likely to be a profound break from the past. It might be useful to go back a little bit to talk about Merkel, because Merkel represented a certain amount of continuity. And I would argue that the Germans are not alone in this.
All the Germanic countries [in Europe] are very similar in the sense that the populations are conservative. They like continuity, stability and order. Austrians, Germans, Swiss, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians … everyone largely falls into the same category. “What do we want? Well, we want stability. We want prosperity. We want order.”
And Merkel, even though I didn’t necessarily sign on for all of her thinking, represented all that, much like her predecessors.
And this has been true in the history of the German-speaking peoples and in the Germanic countries for centuries. This is nothing new. So what is new about Baerbock?
First of all, she is unusually young. She has a different kind of background in education. She spent a year as an exchange student in Florida, much as I spent a year as an exchange student in Germany.
She was born into a Germany that wasn’t quite united yet, but a Germany that was extraordinarily prosperous; in 1980, West Germany had a very high standard of living. So she grows up in this environment without strife, without struggle, without conflict, without poverty, without any of the things that her predecessors knew.
In other words, there’s no history of experience with the things that Germany went through during and after World War II. And as a result, she sees the world very differently. She is more American in her outlook, quite willing to moralize.
JC: She seems like she would fit right in with “humanitarian” war hawks like Samantha Power, Susan Rice and, above all, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, to whom Baerbock has compared herself. To me she sounds alarmingly like the liberal interventionists in the United States who, along with their neoconservative allies, dominate the US foreign-policy establishment.
DM: She’s a crusader of the type you see in Washington, DC, all the time. But this is a big break from the past for the German Foreign Office. Even after World War II and into the ’70s and ’80s, we had people whose families were involved in foreign affairs in Germany as diplomats during the interwar period, and even before World War I.
In the old foreign offices of Germany, people spent a great deal of time trying to understand the interests that shaped behavior in the international environment. In other words: What are Russia’s interests? What are the interests in Prague? What are the interests in Paris or in London? That’s a very different approach to foreign affairs than we’ve heard from Baerbock.
She seems to have no sense of the interests that drive things around the world in all of these major capitals. No sense of that at all. [Her perspective seems to be,] “Our interest is in making the world a better place.” [For Baerbock and similar-minded politicians,] everything is about reshaping the world to conform to some sort of ideologically pure and good and morally upright picture that always fails in the end, frankly.
Baerbock is a crusader looking for a reason to crusade. And that’s a problem.
JC: And it becomes an even more dangerous problem given the current tensions now involving Russia and Ukraine. What is concerning is that Merkel’s caution may now give way to a kind of Atlanticist recklessness embodied by Baerbock. So I’m wondering, as you are a career military officer who has actually been under fire, why do we seem so close to a war between Russia and the West?
DM: Well, a couple of quick points. First of all, Baerbock, along with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the other so-called luminaries that we currently have running the State Department, [is] now dealing with Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister.
I’ve met him. I had the good fortune to spend almost an hour with him and listening to him. He’s one of the most exceptionally talented and intelligent men I’ve ever met. And he is very much in the traditional mold of great European statesmen.
This is someone who understands [Russia’s and other countries’] interests, and he is infinitely more gifted in pursuing those [interests] than anyone … [the US has].
And … [in Russia, President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov] are at a loss to understand … [the US] because we don’t seem to be interested in our own interests. We tend to embrace other … [countries’] interests and then force them down the throats of the Russians and others. They [Putin and Lavrov] really don’t understand us.
But what’s worse is that we’re busy pursuing the same sort of illusory policies inside the military that Baerbock and others want to pursue internationally.
And the Russians know this, so they are now telling Washington and Brussels, “Look, we’ve gone about as far as we can go with you and we’ve made it very clear what we will not tolerate on our borders. We will not tolerate it if Ukraine becomes a platform for the projection of armed hostility toward Russia. And otherwise, we’re not interested in having someone on our borders who is committed to subverting our government and our social order.”
… [The Russians are] telling us that unless … [the US is] willing to sit down and come to arrangements that recognize the limits of our interests and theirs, which essentially means no more expansion of NATO, then they are going to take military action.
This article was produced by Globetrotter, which provided it to Asia Times, in partnership with the American Committee for US-Russia Accord.
https://asiatimes.com/2021/12/us-military-mans-take-on-berlins-new-foreign-minister/
Friday, December 10, 2021
US going to war with Russia over Ukraine would 'court destruction of the known world': Macgregor
We should 'celebrate' that Russia is no longer the U.S.S.R., colonel says.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/united-states-war-russia-over-ukraine-court-destruction-macgregor
Col. Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army officer and tank commander during the Gulf War, told Fox News on Tuesday that President Biden and the neoconservatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties are courting global turmoil with their current overtures toward Russia and its leader, President Vladimir Putin.
Macgregor told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" that Washington's political class has become the "land of the stupids" – noting that by leaving open the potential of taking action, should Putin invade Ukraine, Kiev and its presumed U.S. reinforcements would likely be defeated.
He noted that Biden, the Democrats, and some Republicans in Congress including Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Joni Ernst of Iowa, are making remarks about Russia 80 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
MOSCOW, RUSSIA - DECEMBER, 28 (RUSSIA OUT) Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
The 1941 attack on the Hawaiian military base "dragged us into a two-front war for which we were completely unprepared," he said on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
"Listening to the comments by Wicker and others, it strikes me that Joe Biden has lots of friends on the Hill, all of which are living with him in the early '90s. They seem to think that Russia is prostrate -- that Russia has no alternative but to submit to whatever we tell it to do, which is ridiculous."
The retired officer added that if any potential conflict turned nuclear to "rescue [a U.S.] conventional failure, then we are courting the destruction of the known world."
Macgregor went through several possible outcomes, including the conflict reaching across the Black Sea to Turkey, which would further complicate matters, as well as a regional "bloody war" that would likely spark a refugee crisis into Eastern Europe.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, shakes hands with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III during their meeting in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2021. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)
Host Tucker Carlson added that Ernst's recent remarks about potentially telling Putin the U.S. won't allow further construction of the NordStream II pipeline – which stagnated during the Trump years and was assented to later by Biden – would not hurt Russia but instead stymie Germany and Luxembourg during the coldest months of the year.
"We have one interest, Tucker: To prevent a war from breaking out between Ukraine and Russia," Macgregor later continued, adding that neocons appear to be on a "revenge mission" against a country they essentially still view as the enemy U.S.S.R., which dissolved on Christmas Day 1991 when the Soviet flag last was lowered from the Kremlin.
He said Russia is now essentially reverted to its pre-Soviet construction: "a Russian State that rests on the foundation of Orthodox Christianity – it's back to what it had been for 1,000 years."
"We should celebrate that, not destroy it," he said.
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
Responsible Statecraft
Are the hawks taking flight over Berlin?
The elevation of Green Party co-leaders Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck to key ministries should trouble restrainers.
DECEMBER 8, 2021
Written by
James Carden
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/08/are-the-hawks-taking-flight-over-berlin/
Two months after the German federal elections of September 26th, a governing coalition has been formed: Social Democrat Olaf Scholz will succeed Angela Merkel as Chancellor; Christian Lindner of the pro-business Free Democrats will take over the finance ministry; and Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock will become foreign minister.
Advocates of realism and restraint should greet this last appointment with dismay. Given Baerbock’s limited foreign policy experience and past statements, including support for arming Ukraine and for humanitarian interventions generally, she may become an obstacle to the policies of detente and strategic autonomy currently being pursued by French president Emmanuel Macron. She may also emerge as an opponent of U.S. president Joe Biden’s stated policy of “stability and predictability” with Russia.
Baerbock, a 40-year-old diplomatic novice, had been the Green Party candidate for chancellor in the German federal election. Worryingly, and in a break with recent German government policy, she has consistently espoused interventionist views that one leftist American magazine has described as a combination of “aloof complacency, ignorance and aggressiveness.”
This stands in contrast to the foreign policy of the outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel who, back in 2015, helped put the brakes on president Obama’s brief flirtation with the idea of arming Kiev. Merkel has also been an instrumental player in the four-power Normandy format which resulted in the Minsk Protocol.
In another troubling sign, Baerbock’s Green Party co-leader Robert Habeck, who will serve as German vice chancellor as well as manage the government’s climate and economic and energy ministries, has also been an outspoken supporter of sending arms to Ukraine.
Retired U.S. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, an expert on U.S.-German relations, tells me that in his view, Baerbock is “a crusader, the type of person you see in Washington all the time, the type that proclaims, ‘I am changing the world. I’m going to make everything new and different.’ And this would be a big break from the past for the German foreign office.”
Macgregor, who was nominated by President Trump to be ambassador to Germany, but ultimately served as senior advisor to the secretary of defense in the final months of the administration, sees a lack of strategic empathy within Baerbock’s liberal internationalism.
According to Macgregor:
“In the old foreign offices of Germany, people spent a great deal of time trying to understand the interests that shaped behavior in the international environment. They’d ask: What are Russia’s interests? What are the interests in Prague? What are the interests in Paris, in London? That’s a very different approach to foreign affairs that we’ve heard from Ms. Baerbock, who seems to have no sense of the interests that drive things in these major capitals. Everything is about reshaping the world to conform to some sort of ideologically pure and good and morally upright picture that always fails in the end, frankly.”
Given the high level of tension between Russia and the West, Baerbock’s moralizing approach seems ill-suited to the moment, not least because it discourages both sides from pursuing diplomacy. And not pursuing diplomacy would seem a grave mistake, given that the balance of power in the region overwhelmingly favors the Russian military.
According to Macgregor, the Russians “are telling us that unless we are willing to sit down and come to arrangements that recognize the limits of our interests and theirs, which essentially means no more expansion of NATO beyond the current limits in the East, then they are going to take military action.”
This becomes all the more of a concern now that Germany has a new chief diplomat with seemingly little interest in diplomacy.
Black Market Leadership® Podcast Part 1 of 2
Ep. 37 - Margin of Victory, Part 1 of 2
Black Market Leadership®
part 1 video
Backup video link:
Tucker Carlson Tonight 12/7/2021
Biden and Putin Meet Virtually As Tensions Rise In Ukraine
Republican Senator Says He Wouldn't "Rule Out" Military Strike On Russia
Sunday, December 5, 2021
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
2021 Foreign Policy Conference
Edited for Colonel Douglas Macgregor participation clips
If you would like to watch the entire 4 hours and 48 minutes, click on the YouTube video below:
Saturday, November 6, 2021
The E-Ring gang that couldn't shoot straight, with Col. Doug Macgregor
with Kelley Vlahos
Col Macgregor starts to talk at 14:30
Longtime insider critic Col. Doug Macgregor schools us on what the military's real motives are as it continues to hype up the threats and build up for WWIII in the South China Sea. He talks about how the generals — there are way too many of them — turned out to be far less capable, less competent, and over-estimated than anyone gave them credit for in the last 20 years. In the first segment, Dan and Kelley talk about Afghanistan on the verge of economic and social collapse, and why the Biden Administration is still refusing to work with the Taliban to avoid it.
Friday, October 15, 2021
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
Milley's China scandal indicative of civilian oversight of the military becoming 'abuse': Col. Macgregor
The military has become somewhat politicized from the top over the years, colonel claims.
By Charles Creitz | Fox News
Published September 20
Published September 20
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley's allegedly rogue phone call with his People's Liberation Army counterpart is not surprising given the continued politicization of the military by the civilians charged to oversee it, according to retired U.S. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor.
Macgregor told Fox Nation's "Tucker Carlson Today" that while civilian control of the United States military is sound policy and tradition, over time those civilians in charge of the military have increasingly sought out commanders and officers whose politics align with their own.
Host Tucker Carlson alleged Milley's phone call with Gen. Li Zuocheng is "clearly a crime" but more so "suggests a total lack of civilian leadership of the military in a culture that most of us didn't understand exists."
Macgregor replied that he wasn't surprised by the revelation – made by Washington Post journalists Robert Costa and Robert Woodward in their new book.
"Unfortunately, civilian oversight and civilian control of the military has become over time abuse of the military. What civilian leadership has tried to do over many decades is essentially put officers into senior positions who are politically attractive to them. People that shared their views, whatever they were, and that has now come back to haunt us in a dramatic way," he said.
Hearkening back to a time before the joint chiefs chairman position even existed, Macgregor pointed to President Franklin Roosevelt's ultimate choice of Gen. George Marshall – notably remembered for his ‘Marshall Plan’ – and how the aggressively partisan Democrat lamented the fact many of the military's top-tier officers were Republicans — or at least opposed his left-wing New Deal-ism.
Macgregor explained that Marshall singled himself out as an officer whose politics would be irrelevant to his role and duty if chosen to chair the president's council as the U.S. Army Chief of Staff.
"So Roosevelt went from not trusting and liking Marshall to not sleeping well with Marshall out of the city. He epitomized a professionalism in the sense, being fundamentally apolitical. And you never saw Marshall used by FDR as a political prop."
From there, such situations became rarer and rarer, the colonel claimed, pointing to President Kennedy choosing Gen. Maxwell Taylor to be joint chiefs chairman – from which Taylor went on to become ambassador to Vietnam as "the disaster unfold[ed]"-- in the colonel's terms.
I think what we've had over the last 20 [to 30 years], a similar phenomenon, where after Desert Storm-- I remember Desert Storm as one of these things that people didn't appreciate how dramatically warfare had changed – they also didn't appreciate the quality of the force that had emerged, and so they were surprised that this whole thing went so well."
"And the generals were quick to rush forward and take credit for something that they didn't have much to do with, but that's what they did."
Macgregor, who also earlier in the episode explained how his Quaker upbringing in Philadelphia's Germantown led to his decision to join the Army, added that essentially from Bosnia onward, service members who wanted to advance as officers and officers as commanders have to politically align themselves with the administration in power to realize their goals.
"In other words, this interventionism became something you had to attach yourself to it. You had to co-emote with the leadership. All right, well, we got to get those bad Serbs. We've got to get these bad people in Somalia," he said.
"And again, that made me very unpopular, because I advocated the elimination of these large ponderous World War II divisions of 15,000 to 20,000 men that you can't maneuver easily and are designed for a form of warfare that has long since vanished. Unfortunately, the army since then has not only refused to change, it's going backwards. It's becoming more like the 1942 force."
"So if you look at the way the army is structured to fight on Poland's border with Russia or White Russia or Ukraine, you're looking at something that is indistinguishable from the front that we had in the Ardennes in 1944," Macgregor concluded.
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Thursday, September 23, 2021
The American Conservative
From Marshall To Milley
Four star generals and the process of their promotion, then and now, are worlds apart.
By Phil Pasquini/Shutterstock)
SEPTEMBER 22, 2021|12:01 AM
DOUGLAS MACGREGOR
On September 1, 1939, Brigadier George C. Marshall took the oath of office as the 15th U.S. Army chief of staff, a post he held until November 1945. When the ceremony ended, General Marshall confided to his aide de camp, “There is enough dead wood in the Army’s officer corps to light several forest fires.”
Marshall was more right than he knew. If the U.S. Army and Army Air Corps fought shoulder to shoulder with the French Army in 1940, American arms would have suffered the same fate as the French and British Armies—total defeat at the hands of the German Wehrmacht. This fact was made painfully obvious 14 months after the Second World War broke out.
In February 1943, 11,000 German troops smashed through the 30,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army’s II Corps at Kasserine Pass. The U.S. commander, Major Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, a swaggering blowhard, was relieved and sent home. It was not the last time that a cigar-chewing imitation of a real general would fail in action against the German onslaught, but the experience strengthened Marshall’s intolerance of general officer failure in action.
Dwight D. Eisenhower thought Marshall had picked Fredendall—an officer with no combat experience despite serving in the First World War—but Fredendall was actually chosen for command by Lieutenant Gen. Lesley McNair for the energy he demonstrated in training. Though Fredendall had not gone ashore to join his troops until the fighting was over, Eisenhower decorated Fredendall for the II Corps’ successful landing in North Africa. Sadly, once Fredendall was selected for the wrong reasons, only disaster in combat with a capable opponent could reveal Fredendall’s deficiencies as a battlefield commander.
Unfortunately, the practice of tolerating mediocre officers with friends and sponsors in the four star ranks persists today.
Today, the task of finding senior military leaders with character, competence and intelligence is immeasurably harder than it was in Marshall’s day. Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the American media’s adulation for four stars transformed general officers such as Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Allen, and Austin into instant celebrities.
Four stars now automatically become part of a mutual general officer admiration society, that cheers even mediocre performance in general officers chosen for high command, because, like “made men” in the Mafia, senior leaders agree not to turn on their peers. Eliminating failed general officers, even when failure is found out the hard way in action, is deemed dangerous to a promotion system based on nepotism that presents itself as infallible.
Political leaders are of no help. Almost no one in the Senate asked relevant questions of nominees for four stars after 9/11—questions like: Is this mission really achievable? Will the proposed operations have a decisive impact and accomplish the mission? What do Americans gain if this the proposed operation actually works? And what do the American People lose if the mission fails? Should Americans really expect the Army and Marine Corps to impose a Western system of government on Iraq or Afghanistan? Are cultures really congruent?
Consequently for aspiring four stars, advocating the commitment of more soldiers, more cash, and more time in Afghanistan and Iraq became customary. Carrying on the failed policies of the military and political leaders who nominated them for four stars ensured that the future four stars would have a chair when the music stopped. Senators and Congressmen either could not evaluate the nominees or they were reluctant to admit that the system had gotten things wrong from the beginning.
Rather than address the hard issues, political oversight of the armed forces focuses more on policies designed to please constituents or create jobs in their states and districts, policies that neuter the military’s ability to punish substandard performers or to link promotion to merit. The end result justifies the divisive practice of advancing individuals—frequently women and minorities—who are less qualified or not otherwise “selectable” by reducing the numbers of qualified individuals from selection to create spaces.
Clearly, officers who express concern about these policies do not go unnoticed in political circles. These officers are frequently viewed as politically unreliable and are eliminated from promotion to the senior ranks. However, those officers who strongly identify with these policies make themselves known not only to their superiors in uniform, but to members of the House and Senate with an interest in promoting their ideological fellow travelers in uniform to flag rank in the armed forces.
The point is that General Mark Milley is not an isolated example. He’s the product of an environment that has existed for nearly 30 years, if not longer. Behind Mark Milley stand another two dozen four stars ready to take his job that are indistinguishable from him in their attitudes and career patterns.
Is the situation hopeless? History answers with an emphatic “No.”
After the defeat of the U.S. Army’s II Corps, General Sir Harold Alexander, Eisenhower’s British deputy, commented on Fredendall to his American allies, “I’m sure you must have better men than that.” Eisenhower agreed. Major Gen. Patton, a man who but for the outbreak of WWII would have retired as an obscure cavalry colonel, replaced Fredendall.
Will the abysmal outcome in Afghanistan, or the revelations that four stars actively conspired with President Trump’s opponents to undermine his authority, make any difference to how we select the brass? Time will solve the mystery.
Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books.
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
Tucker Carlson Tonight 9/20/2021
A short clip of Colonel Macgregor talking with Tucker on Tucker Carlson Today
The full interview is on foxnation.com
Thursday, September 16, 2021
The Joe Piscopo Show 9/16/2021
Description
Col. Douglas Macgregor, retired U.S. Army Colonel, the former senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense, author, and a senior fellow at The American Conservative
Topic: Gen. Milley's alleged phone calls to China
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Tucker Carlson Tonight 9/14/2021
BREAKING FOX NEWS
New Woodward Book: Milley Had Secret Conversations With The Chinese.
Milley Told The Chinese He Would Warn Them Of An Attack.
Milley Repeatedly Undermined The Trump White House.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/fzSVN7d3M08y/
Thursday, September 2, 2021
POLITICO
National Security Daily
From the SitRoom to the E-Ring, the inside scoop on defense, national security and foreign policy.
Monday, August 30, 2021
The long march to disaster
The US military spends money but cannot win wars
August 24, 2021 | 2:06 pm
Written by:
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
FROM THE MAGAZINE
In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Americans came together in a spirit of grief, resolve and shared national pride. It didn’t last long, but this potent energy animated the US military’s mission and a new generation of recruits who signed up to ‘do their part’ in the wake of the tragedy.
Twenty years later, it is not the same military. As an institution, its impunity, hubris and access to unprecedented financial spoils have led to corruption and mediocrity at the top. The exploitation of all-volunteer forces to fight protracted wars of choice without proper care and attention to their consequences has left veterans jaded and skeptical of the value of their service in a system that continues to fail them. And without candor now about what went wrong, another 9/11 event could again trigger the same egregious policies, and the same mistakes.
At the height of the wars, high-profile brass such as Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, who both led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, showed themselves to be overtly political, out of touch and self-serving. They pushed troop surges while obscuring facts about true conditions on the ground. Critics say such men represent the modern senior officer corps, bred not for innovative and bold thinking but subservience to power, and that those who did push back during the wars were marginalized and squeezed out. As a result, the entire system became a steel bubble, with the rank and file left badly served by a simultaneously inflated and atrophying leadership.
The corruption of the post-9/11 wars spread in a variety of ways. The military took advantage of young, poor kids to fill recruitment quotas, with seemingly amazing opportunities like the ‘quick ship’ $20,000 enlistment bonuses they gave out during the height of the Iraq insurgency in 2007. Standards were lowered, waivers granted to felons. The US shipped out men and women with psychological profiles that should have set alarm bells clanging, and repeatedly redeployed already traumatized veterans.
As the post-9/11 years wore on, the civilian-military gap grew. With less than half of one percent of the population serving, many Americans stopped scrutinizing what the armed services were doing. By the time Eddie Gallagher was court-martialed for allegedly stabbing to death a teenage Islamic State fighter in Afghanistan and posing for a photo with his corpse, Americans had lost the capacity for outrage. Like the Bowe Bergdahl case before it, Gallagher’s story became so hyperpoliticized that no one had the guts to ask the real question — was endless war dehumanizing our celebrated special forces in the field?
‘So September 11, 2001 really did serve as a trigger for every bad idea that had been dismissed since the Cold War and Vietnam to be inserted into the military process — and they failed,’ says Doug Macgregor, a retired Army colonel. Macgregor, a hero of the Persian Gulf tank wars and a respected tactician, may have killed his own military career by questioning plans to send in hundreds of thousands of troops for the Baghdad invasion. In 2002, he famously told Centcom commander Gen. Tommy Franks and a roomful of brass that all they needed was 30,000 armored troops to be reinforced by another 15,000 infantry soldiers to ‘cross the Euphrates and get into Baghdad as quickly as possible’. The plan, he thought, should be to depose Saddam and ‘get out’.
‘Subsequently I wrote a memo saying everyone they had in [Army] command they had to get rid of because none of them had any experience with combat whatsoever,’ Macgregor tells me. ‘From the beginning I got nothing but resistance, no willingness to do anything that made any sense.’
The rest, as they say, is history. ‘The generals all marched in, occupying Saddam’s digs, signaling we were an occupying power. My opposition to all this made me persona non grata.’
Macgregor believes the proliferation of generals in the post-9/11 era has killed the military from the inside; the statistics are compelling. Writing for the National Defense University’s Joint Force Quarterly, Col. Gregory McCarthy records that in 2017 there were approximately 900 active-duty general-rank officers among the 1.3 million active-duty component: one for every 1,400 troops. During World War Two the ratio was one for every 6,000. This ‘rank creep’, according to McCarthy, ‘clutters the chain of command, adds bureaucratic layers to decisions, and costs taxpayers additional money from funding higher paygrades to fill positions’.
Macgregor is more blunt: ‘It’s just a bureaucratic nightmare at this point,’ he says. ‘The higher up the rank structure you go, the less substantive work you get. Headquarters tend to be places for sycophants. That’s been a huge problem for us.’
Efforts to deflate the bloat at the top have been largely unsuccessful, but Macgregor is right. Increasing the number of commands after 9/11hasn’t made our military more successful, but it’s been a boon for those who know how to play the game. Rather than creative thinking and competence, he says, the institution rewards loyalty and political shrewdness, the defining qualities of career yes-men.
As the number of senior officers metastasized, so did unaccountability for losses in the field and corruption at home. Generals repeatedly testified that the war was ‘turning a corner’, and perennially pressed for more troops, without the follow-up that would have assessed results. Meanwhile, the military became riddled with scandal, with generals and admirals demoted, relieved of duty and even court-martialed for crimes ranging from fraud to sexual assault. Petraeus was charged with mishandling classified information when he let his mistress, a lower-ranking officer, read his personal diaries in the field and lied about it to the FBI. Some 19 current and former Navy officials have been convicted so far in the massive ‘Fat Leonard’ bribery scandal, in which officers were found to have directed Navy ships to Asian ports controlled by Leonard Glenn Francis, a portly Malaysian contractor who suborned them with gifts and parties. They include Rear Adm. Robert Gilbeau, who has the distinction of becoming the first flag officer in modern American history to be convicted of a felony while on active duty.
‘The system that’s evolved over the last 100 years does not test moral courage,’ retired Army officer Donald Vandergriff told me in 2014. ‘It does not test strength of character or the ability to tell the truth regardless of harm to one’s career… We don’t do things like that. We are looking at people who follow the process, fall in line, don’t cause waves, aren’t open to innovation, and these personality traits leave them open to scandal.’
Promoting people for the wrong reasons and then throwing a bunch of resources and power at them like blank checks was a recipe for disaster. As if the diffused responsibility at the top weren’t enough, the post-9/11 order also saw an unprecedented outsourcing of security and support capabilities.
Companies such as Halliburton and their subsidiaries won rights over multibillion-dollar Logcap (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program) contracts with little or no competition. A handful of top contractors dominated food, construction, security, IT and other services, and even when they knew they were being overcharged or stuck with shoddy work, the Pentagon continued to work with the same vendors. At the wars’ peak in 2010, there were more contractors (207,000) than US military (175,000) in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
‘There is simply no way that the active-duty US military as it is currently sized and structured would have been able to run the occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan without the massive support of private military industry,’ says Peter W. Singer, a military analyst for the New America Foundation. In 2013, Singer wrote a paper for the Brookings Institution in which he warned against the military’s overreliance on contractors:
‘It has created a dependency syndrome on the private marketplace that not merely creates critical vulnerabilities, but shows all the signs of the last downward spirals of an addiction. If we judge by what has happened in Iraq, when it comes to private military contractors and counterinsurgency, the US has locked itself into a vicious cycle. It can’t win with them, but can’t go to war without them.’
The bad behavior of some contractors, as in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad involving private Blackwater guards, and their inevitable for-profit ethos made winning hearts and minds among civilian populations more difficult. It also allowed the military to carry on operations even as the number of active-duty troops was reduced. Last spring, as the US began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, 18,000 contractors, including 6,350 Americans, were still on the US payroll.
Mercenaries may well be the future of western warfare: they are quieter, less expensive and require less training and regulation. They also have their own interests, which is why governments have often preferred to develop and use their own forces. It’s hard to sustain a sense of mission based solely on paychecks, with few ties of patriotism or duty.
Of course, contractors take on many of the same risks as official military personnel. An estimated 8,000 contractors have been killed in the post-9/11 wars along with more than 7,000 US servicemembers. All are vulnerable to IED blasts, traumatic brain injuries, PTSD and respiratory illnesses including the cancers connected to the burning of unregulated trash pits on major forward-operating bases; contractors are not offered the healthcare that the US military provides.
And there will be long-term need for that healthcare. Some 92 percent of those wounded in battle survived our recent wars, compared to 75 percent in Vietnam. That’s good news, but it means enormous lifelong healthcare costs. As of 2018, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the 4.1 million post-9/11 veterans make up about 16 percent of those served by the Department of Veterans Affairs, and are as a group less healthy than veterans of earlier wars. ‘The VA estimates,’ says the study, ‘that the 10 year cost of caring for post-9/11 veterans with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) alone will be $2.4 billion from 2020 to 2029’, and future expenses are estimated to run into the trillions.
It’s not as if healthcare for veterans is at all adequate, given the sacrifices we expect the men and women of our armed services to make. The rush to fight a two-front conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq left huge gaps in medical-care access which linger still. Veterans still experience cruelly long wait times, particularly for mental health treatment.
This catalogue of problems has left the US military deflated and depressed. Poll after poll finds that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans not only favor full withdrawal from those wars, but now believe they were not worth fighting in the first place. This is an extraordinary indictment of the conflicts themselves and shows profound loss of faith in the institutions that led the country into them.
‘No one is drinking the Kool-Aid anymore,’ says Gil Barndollar, who served as a Marine infantry officer in Afghanistan for two tours between 2006 and 2016. He reports that his peers are glad the US is leaving Afghanistan and long ago shed their illusions about solving the problems there. He’s most incensed about the ‘lack of moral courage’ within the military.
On a practical level, Barndollar says, the real challenge today is the strain on the National Guard and Reserves. National Guard members made up 45 percent of the overall deployments in the Global War on Terror, and 18 percent of the casualties. The ideal of the part-time citizen soldier is long gone. To this day, National Guard units are engaged in routine deployments, with equipment sent overseas that should be stateside. There are significant new domestic duties the Guard is expected to deal with as well: patrolling borders, dealing with protests and natural disasters, helping in the fight against COVID-19.
‘I’d like to hope the rising generation of military leaders — today’s colonels — who grew up as lieutenants and captains in Iraq and Afghanistan, have the moral courage to tell future politicians and their appointees what the US military can and can’t accomplish,’ Barndollar concludes. ‘Will any of these future generals have the integrity to put their stars on the table when the time comes?’
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2021 World edition.
Friday, August 27, 2021
American Greatness
Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Tomorrow We Get a Nero?
Will our social disorders combine with economic hardship to produce a furious storm that overwhelms the Biden Administration like the one that overwhelmed Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic?
By Douglas A. Macgregor
August 26, 2021
In April 1925, a German journalist wrote to a friend in England, “Today we vote for Zero. Tomorrow we get Nero.” When Germans voted to make a retired 77-year-old German Field Marshal named Paul von Hindenburg president of the Weimar Republic, many Germans like the aforementioned journalist feared the old war hero was a placebo for the republic’s deeper ills; at best a substitute Kaiser or a political “zero” who would be replaced by a dictator.
Four years into his presidential term, Hindenburg struggled to maintain the republic as it was in the throes of a severe economic depression. War debt and hyperinflation crushed the German economy. Political violence erupted as communists squared off against fascists in Germany’s largest cities. Criminality, prostitution, and drug abuse became widespread. In 1933, Hindenburg made Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany.
Invoking images of the failed Weimar Republic is a harrowing prospect indeed. The parallels between Weimar Germany and Biden’s America may be instructive, however, especially given the poor prospects voters face to lead them out of this mess.
Let’s look at some of the similarities:
Criminality: America’s largest cities saw a 33 percent increase in homicides last year, a massive crime wave that continues into the present. Defunding the police, legitimizing criminal behavior by releasing convicted criminals into the population, and failing to punish new criminals, is producing a crime spree unparalleled in American history.
America’s borders are undefended. Americans of all ages are dying at record levels from fentanyl poisoning as the Mexican drug cartels work closely with Chinese transnational criminals to finance and distribute fentanyl, a drug that is now both cheaper and more widely available than cocaine and heroin.
Texas and large areas of the Southwest are overrun by masses of illegal migrants trafficked into the United States by criminal drug cartels. The flow of migrants through Mexican territory fuels countless criminal activities, including the illicit business of transporting migrants, along with those who rob, extort, and exploit them. Large sections of the American electorate feel less secure under the Biden Administration.
Political violence: The Antifa movement in the United States is a rather obvious analog to the Communist tactics during the Weimar Republic. Eventually, Communist aggression provoked opposing violence from fascist groups like the Brownshirts. Is it possible an opposing force of brownshirt equivalents could emerge to combat Antifa’s terrorism?
The growing potential for political violence is truly worrying.
There is plenty of data to show that Democrats and Republicans alike are inclined to justify violence as a way to achieve political goals. How much of the vandalism and looting in 140 cities across the United States in 2020, producing at least $1 to $2 billion of paid insurance claims, is a precursor to future political violence?
Economy: Inflation is soaring with the result that the prices of food, energy, and a host of consumer products are breaking household budgets across the United States. It would be wrong to suggest that an economic collapse is imminent, but it would be equally foolish to ignore these unsettling indicators, especially in terms of inflation.
There is an estimated 34 percent more money in the U.S. system than there was 14 months ago. Inflation is real and it’s significant. At the same time, the U.S. debt-to-gross domestic product ratio rose during the first quarter of 2021 to 127 percent—a level that is substantially higher than the 77 percent tipping point recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
National defense: The light-speed collapse of Afghanistan has cast doubt upon the conduct of America’s senior military leaders in the minds of the public. General officers—once widely respected—are turning out to be creatures of the same broken political system in Washington, D.C. that voters increasingly loathe.
The Afghan debacle also raises questions about the supremacy of U.S. military power—the most expensive military establishment in the modern world. The weak performance in Afghanistan is disconcerting and reminiscent of “Operation Eagle Claw,” President Jimmy Carter’s attempt in April 1980 to rescue 52 U.S. embassy staff members held captive in Tehran.
These points notwithstanding, America is still in better shape than Weimar Germany. Crime is rising as is inflation, but economic recovery post-pandemic appears to be gaining momentum.
The FBI recently released a report confirming that there was no attempt to overthrow the government in January as many on the Left contend. The admission bodes well for a potential de-escalation of tensions in the near term.
Further, America’s leaders are unpopular, but there is still great confidence that Washington has the tools in place to improve the economy and fix many of the nation’s structural problems in education, healthcare, and elsewhere. Still, at the center of the nation’s troubles is an entropic and soporific septuagenarian who seems to lack the awareness and, most importantly, the political support to put the country back on a positive trajectory.
Will these social disorders combine with economic hardship to produce a furious storm that overwhelms the Biden Administration like the one that overwhelmed Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic? In 1932, it was not just the destitute Germans who demanded action and a figure like Adolf Hitler to lead it. The popular German concept of law and order called, above all, for a greater commitment to the German nation symbolized by real unity of purpose embraced by all classes. Very few voters wanted the Communist Party to rule Germany.
Is Joe Biden a zero, an empty suit? Will Biden eventually be replaced by some new figure like the Roman Emperor Nero? Americans will know the answer when the gap between what Americans demand and what they get becomes intolerable. Then, as Crane Brinton warned in The Anatomy of Revolution, all things are possible.
Douglas A. Macgregor is a retired U.S. Army Colonel, author, and consultant.
Tucker Carlson Tonight 8/26/2021
Deadliest Day For U.S. Troops In A Decade
Biden's Benghazi: Botched Evacuation Cost Lives
Biden's Benghazi: Botched Evacuation Cost Lives
https://www.bitchute.com/video/OOOBHiwFON0c/
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
The Ingraham Angle 08/25/2021
Taliban Captures U.S.-Made War Chest
DOD Pretends It Can Stop Taliban From Taking Gear
DOD Pretends It Can Stop Taliban From Taking Gear
Thursday, August 19, 2021
The Ingraham Angle 8/18/2021
Biden Surrendering America To The Woke World
Biden's Military Leadership Is Clueless
Biden's Military Leadership Is Clueless
Tuesday, August 17, 2021
TUCKER CARLSON 08/16/2021
https://www.bitchute.com/video/GnpnnbVfyACl/
Biden Blindsided By Shocking Afghanistan Collapse
Afghanistan Collapses On Biden's Watch
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