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Paine on War

by | Apr 25, 2025 |

“It may with reason be said, that in the manner the English nation is represented, it signifies not where this right resides, whether in the Crown, or in the Parliament. War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home: the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretence must be made for expenditures. In reviewing the history of the English government, its wars and its taxes, a by-stander, not blinded by prejudice, nor warped by interest, would declare, that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.”

—Thomas Paine

Army Fiasco Train in the 21st Century

by | Apr 24, 2025 |

Future Combat Systems - NamuWiki

I was astonished in 2009 when I saw the cancellation of the Future Combat System contract to usher in the next generation of armored vehicles. The Army cancelled the billions-dollar program and got to witness the Army continuing to burns through tens of millions a week after cancellation to fulfill contract obligations with nothing to show for it but a big smoking hole where the money had been wasted for nothing.

The XM1202 light tank was another ill considered blunder in the trail of tears that is the Sovietized and sclerotic acquisition system in the US Army and the DoD.

The U.S. Army spent over $21.4 billion on the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, which was canceled in 2009. While the initial estimated cost was $92 billion, and some estimates even reached $200-300 billion, the actual amount spent was just under $20 billion, with some debates about how much of that was for the termination process itself.

The 2006 budget estimates and rosy picture were typical of the fiscal idiocy of Pentagon spending.

Read and weep here.

Universal Failure | Charles MacFarlane

At the same time, the US Army had adopted its new camouflage uniform, the infamous and ghastly ACUs and dumped five billion dollars into it despite before and during adoption and quick retirement it never performed well against its competitors.

And the nonsense has been non-stop since 1945.

Perhaps the XM1202’s biggest drawback was that it was designed to fight conventional adversaries. Following the September 11 attacks, though, the strategic focus of the U.S. military shifted to a counterinsurgency (COIN) and counterterrorism (CT) model. In the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the XM1202’s long range was a useless advantage—and its light armor a critical disadvantage, leaving the vehicles far more vulnerable to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and other short-range attacks than the heavily-armored Abrams beasts.

The nail in the coffin for the XM1202 came after the 2008 financial crisis. In 2009, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates slashed his department’s budget in response to the downturn, targeting programs he believed were too costly or misaligned with the current needs of the force. The FCS MGVs, including the XM1202, were canceled due to their high cost and perceived lack of adaptability to evolving threats. No complete XM1202 was ever built, though a prototype turret and several hulls were created.

***

The XM1202’s cancellation underscored the need for adaptability in military procurement, as evolving threats like IEDs and hybrid warfare require flexible, multi-role platforms. The M1 Abrams, despite its venerable age, continues to serve as the Army’s primary MBT. 

At the same time, though, the revolution in unmanned systems that is occurring today is upending even the vaunted status of the M1 Abrams in America’s arsenal. At 44 years old, the M1 Abrams MBT has been the primary armor combat system for the Army for too long—and the success of nimble missiles and drones against the lumbering Abrams tanks in the Ukraine War has already highlighted their limits. 

Above all, the XM1202 is a reminder of how dangerous the Pentagon’s planning can be. They often try to envision future wars, and the systems needed for those wars, based entirely on past ones. As the tank’s example illustrates, what came before might not always be indicative of what is to come—and though foresight is always difficult, attempting it in earnest is essential.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/the-armys-xm1202-tank-fiasco-is-a-warning-for-future-weapons-development

The Public-School Chickens Come Home Again

by | Apr 23, 2025 | , ,

In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether parents of children in government schools have a constitutional right to opt out of programs that “expose” their kids to LGBTQ materials. Once again, the chickens have come home to roost.

By that, I mean that if politicians, bureaucrats, and elected boards did not run schools and force (tax) parents and nonparents to finance them, this problem could not arise. This should not be an issue for the political system, and you need not be an anarchist to see it. Free people are capable of educating or buying education for their children, just as they are competent to obtain other goods and services we take for granted every day. Freedom and social cooperation work when they’re allowed to, and parents ought to be free to raise their children according to their values. (Beatings and other forms of aggression are not relevant here.) This has nothing to do with the particular issue in the case (LGBTQ programs).

The question is not: “Do parents have a constitutional right to opt their kids out of this and other school programs they dislike?” Rather, it is: “Do parents have a natural individual right to educate their kids through purely voluntary means?”

The answer is yes! So-called public schooling relies on the initiation of force from financing to curriculum. How dare anyone propose that we be compelled to pay for or to send our or other people’s kids to schools we disapprove of? Even if you opt out of the schools or have no kids, you still must pay or lose your home, go to jail, etc. Such a system is unfit to exist.

(See my 1994 book, Separating School and State.)

“I now saw, I saw. I was made blind before. I now saw.”

“I now saw, I saw. I was made blind before. I now saw.”

by | Apr 23, 2025 |

I was going over the notes that I had taken for this current book that I am writing, and I found a quote from a conversation with a lady. I shall spare the details of what the focused conversation was about but she said something really interesting, “I learned who my husband was when he turned his parents in.”

She was born in Albania, now in her early sixties and fortunate enough to have migrated to Australia during the 1990s. She divorced her husband once they both arrived in Australia. It was easier to remain married during the application process. They had lived through communism, a form of state socialism that many Westerners will claim is not real communism or socialism. She had to suffer it regardless. It was a collectivist ideology all the same that used the delusion of Utopia via force as it’s basis. As she put it, “the State was our parent, and it was harsh.”

Her body had been owned by the government, she had learned this from a young age. It was not that she had surrendered it, she had been made to accept it. Born into it, after all the State was the parent. When she married her husband, she also soon come to learn that her body did not belong to her on some nights. One evening, he wanted her, she had not desired his attention, so he beat her. Thereafter, she understood. It was, his right. In a society that bludgeoned equality into the minds of it’s subjects, it was widely known that some had more rights than others. Like her acceptance of the government owning her body, it had left her numb. She said, “empty of care or want, what can I do?”

Despite him, she loved her in-laws, ‘they were good people, honest.’ Good people. They however were criminals, the were the worse sort of people under the umbrella of communism, they were blackmarketers. Her In-Laws grew produce and made things which they then sold ‘illegally’. Her husband decided that it would be politically expedient for him, to tell the officials. His parents were arrested. It is unclear from her retelling whether this profited him in his relationship with the government, it certainly did not with her. Despite the beating, the other assaults, she now truly hated him.

“I hated him, I hated the government. I now saw, I saw. I was made blind before. I now saw.”

He had continued to take her when he wished to, but her mind stirred with hate. She told me that she would fantasise about other men as he thrust upon her, she spat anti-communist insults upwards at him on a few occasions. He would slap her, though it would him that cried. This made her laugh. He never dared to tell the officials about her, if he did, then he would have been alone.

The communist regime eventually fell. He changed his opinions about communism, like many others did, after. She hated him all the more for it. When she came to Australia, she looked forward to freedom, the open air markets, conversations that were not illegal, sleeping in a clean bed…alone. Over time she told me that she had noticed a growing cowardice among Australians that she had experienced under the communist regime, a deplorable weakness to bow to authority even when it was wrong.

I told her that the Western belief in itself was that it celebrated liberalism, liberty, in reality it sought dependency. Even obedience.

In writing up my conversation with her, I felt a little lost, how to articulate the spirit in her words and the passion she had for otherwise mundane things that many of us once took for granted, things that are now banned, illegal, prohibited, regulated or costly. Each generation grows to learn this, it’s almost an expected cycle in most societies, the elders moan to the youth, “in my day we could do this.”

The malicious creatures that ruled communist Albania were all human beings, just like we all are. They were not evil, not monsters. They were doing jobs because it paid them, they believed or they did not otherwise care so long as they had food and shelter. Some were likely cynical and self serving but many were true believers, obsessed with control, convinced that with enough ideological implementation, human beings could become robots or made into children. They believed that they are the caretakers, benevolent and god-like in their hubris to lead, force, manipulate and rule. They may profit from this, ‘it’s a perk sure’ and they may have more rights in some instances, or at the very least the satisfaction of being right, so long as threat of violence ensures.

The violence is distant, implied, it’s assumed. Like her husband knew, peoples bodies are to be owned, his wife had a duty to him. The people to the government, society. She yielded it, she did not want to, but she had no agency. This was understood. It was easier to turn her head, endure, suffer, the threat of violence always there otherwise.

“How he treated me, is how they see me and you, them,” she pointed to strangers as they walked by. We both understood, who she meant by they.

He never took her mind, her spirit. Her dissident heart remained, the yearning for liberty never died. Even when many of those around her remained willing, complicit and obedient. It’s assumed and implied that your body does not really belong to you, your labour is taxed, told what you may ingest, permission required or not granted, business and homes governed to the smallest details, currency growing meaningless, censored and owned. For the greater good of her marriage, she suffered. For the greater good of society, so must many others. The benefactors and those who know better, they are all that matter. It’s for them that we must endure, must be made to suffer, the greater good is in their best interests. The marriage, was in his best interest.

She was able to get a divorce and move to Australia.

In this story, there are no more Australia’s left. No more divorces. So now, she like many others must again turn her head. My question is this, do you turn yours or do you keep thrusting? Then again, over time I have come to learn. You most likely don’t care.

Russia is Now the Apex Military Predator

by | Apr 22, 2025 |

mk82bombs

Rows of Mark 82 500-pound bombs line an ammo storage area at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. (Credit: US Air Force / Airman 1st Class Zachary Perras)

For those of you paying attention, the Institute has been far ahead of the curve in checking its bias and making a  bloody and dispassionate appraisal of Russian fighting abilities. The Coprophile Media has been in the the bag for the Ukrainians and had a tough time admitting what savvy observers knew from the beginning of the SMO, the Ukraine had no chance of winning.

Now some members of the journalist class are waking up from their propaganda induced stupor to realize the Russians may be the deadliest land force on Earth.

The writer at the Wall Street Journal aver:

Americans think the Russian army is not fighting like gentlemen.

WSJ writes that the Russian military is “blazing a trail in Ukraine, combining the brute force of the Red Army with modern technology.”

The Russian way of warfare, according to the newspaper, is based on drones that detect targets and “the power of bombs and artillery that pave the way for infantry to seize territory.”

“Each element of the attack supports the others, happening simultaneously or in waves. This can create a snowball effect, forcing the Ukrainians to retreat,” the article says.

In the next year, you will see an increasing shift to acknowledge what is playing out in that far flung blooded field. It will unflinchingly reveal to anyone paying attention that America and the west continue to cling to 20th century notions of warfare that will make their armies and fleets not fit for purpose for 21st century peer conflict and combat. The trillions spent on the military in the US has for the most part been a complete waste of time and resource to build insufficient forces and decades behind in technology on what the wars in the 21st century will require for achieving success.

Nothing less than a wholesale cashiering of all the flag ranks (no exceptions) and a complete stem to stern cleansing of outmoded thinking will set the DoD right.

https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/growing-focus-on-russian-tactical

 

The 250th Anniversary of the Colonial Divorce Proceedings

by | Apr 19, 2025 |

lexmilitia

This is the semiquincentennial anniversary of the “shots heard ’round the world” at Lexington Green on 19 April 1775. Some call this civil war the Revolutionary War. It was a civil war because when the alert muster activated and Paul Revere and his fellow horsemen were warning the countryside, Revere was saying “the regulars are out” because he was British that evening in the saddle.

This extraordinary event set in train the events that finalized the Atlantic seaboard divorce from the London overlords.

lexmap

I have walked this road in Massachusetts.

I published the “Three Strikes of the Match” broadcast in March 2023 (Episode 11 at the Chasing Ghosts podcast). I think it is well worth your time. Many thanks to my colleagues in the Appleseed Project where I was a ShootBoss for the marksmanship & history endeavor.

Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.

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