On Jul 26, 2023, at 8:21 AM, Todd Pierce <todd.e.pierce@icloud.com> wrote:
Given that The American Conservative and Quincy Institute “showed their love” for Commandant David Berger so effusively and celebrated so exuberantly his ostensible redeployment of Marines from the Mideast, while ignoring that to the degree he did, it was only to redeploy them to the China and Russia war theaters, under the “Trump end the endless war plan” of expansionist US military aggression, someone needs to keep a tally of that USMC “Fight Against the Blob.” And just as it was designed for, and is succeeding at with "Force Design 2030,” by Berger and the incoming Commandant who was Berger’s partner, it is accomplishing everything they and their "Military Industrial Complex/Deep State/Trumpite” partners could have hoped for, as the furtherance of “U.S. Fifth-generation Warfare.” With Force Design 2030, the USMC also incites war hysteria against “peer competitors,” China/Russia, as Trump’s Military Strategy documents were designed for and did. Just as the false claim of a Missile Gap promoted by the Conservative Movement and their extreme militarist military partners did during the Cold War. With the celebrated “subversive strategy” of Force Design 2030 also providing for the financial enrichment of the MIC and their Oligarchical supporters, as it takes little imagination to know that Tomahawk Missile Batteries aren’t cheap. “Win, win, win!
But what I’ve found is that the "least intellectual” of humans are those who adopt the reigning ideologies of their society and in an Imperial State, those are created by the hyper-militarists amongst us, as originally in the 1950s Conservative Movement to give ideological support for the MIC they helped bring into existence as “Traditional Conservatives.” And as that continues to the present as can be seen in this article by USMC idolater William S. Lind, TAC’s resident military "expert,” in passing on Martin van Creveld’s Israeli-centric military theory to American Conservatives, and denouncing anything less than a militaristic culture, as they both promote: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-past-and-future-of-war/
A final way that states avoid crossing the threshold to conventional war is by taking incremental actions. As Mazarr notes, gray zone strategies reflect aspects of what can be called strategic gradualism. They will unfold over time, bit by bit, each step carefully remaining below clear thresholds of response. Over time, however, the architect of such a campaign intends for these incremental steps to sum up to a decisive change in the status quo.76
Experts at the Center for a New American Security have called this “tailored coercion for incremental revisionism.”77 Brands explains that these types of actions represent “coercion that is, to varying degrees, disguised; they eat away at the status quo one nibble at a time.”78
Incrementalism is effective because, like ambiguity, it can make it more difficult for an opponent to recognize the importance of any individual action and slow efforts to build support for a counter- vailing response. Schelling writes,
"If there is no sharp qualitative division between a minor transgression and a major affront, but a continuous graduation of activity, one can begin his intrusion on a scale too small to provoke a reaction and increase it by imperceptible degrees, never quite presenting a sudden dramatic challenge that would invoke the committed response.'79
"Moreover, Robert Powell describes how states can bring “coercive pressure to bear on an adversary by carrying out limited attacks in order to make the threat of future attacks more credible.”80 Therefore, incrementalism can both avoid a crisis and demonstrate credibility to escalate if a conflict does occur.
"For this reason,gradual approaches are often referred to as “salami slicing” or “cabbage peeling”— in which small actions eventually add up to a larger whole.81 As Admiral Michael McDevitt writes, these strategies “take small, incremental steps that are not likely to provoke a military response from any of the other claimants,but over time gradually change the status quo regarding disputed claims in its favor.”82 Some have compared this strategy to a form of political warfare in which “traditional statecraft is inadequate or ineffective, and large-scale conventional military options are not suitable or are deemed inappropriate for a variety of reasons.”83 The result of incrementalism is therefore similar to asymmetry and ambiguity—conflicts are less likely to escalate.” End Quote
I would say it takes little intelligence for the American people to recognize that that is the identical policy our "National Security Managers” are implementing as "Fifth-generation Warfare” against Russia and China, except I recall that “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” "Fifth-generation Warfare” is the au courant term for what used to be called variously, Low-Intensity Conflict, and/or “PsyWar” (Willmoore Kendall’s and James Burnham’s specialty), with “Cognitive Warfare” central to that, and all taken to a much higher level. So powerful is that in creating a “war-narrative,” domestically, or internationally, it has been in play for CIA coups for decades, and as well in political campaigning as taken to a higher level by Arthur Finkelstein’s “Six-Party Theory. And of course, to keep the US in a Perpetual War. Flynn’s charges here, must be seen as him being snitty for the “Left” adopting the “Right’s” tactics, of which Flynn and his friend Michael Ledeen were the supreme fascist practitioners of that.
While there is incessant, hysterical projection on to Russia, China, and Iran for waging "Fifth-generation Warfare” against the U.S., obfuscated in that is that it is the U.S. who is the 5G Warfare Superpower, which has been on full-display since 9/11. And Russia, China, and Iran know that full-well, even if American citizens will never understand. The attached file on war-narratives explains pretty well how that works:
<Callahan-WarNarrativesFraming-2006.pdf>
So the “fruits” of Trump’s and USMC Berger’s escalation of the Fifth-generation Warfare campaign against Russia can be seen in Ukraine, with the Russians recognizing that the US/NATO Command had arrived at the equivalent of “Pickadilly:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o861Ka9TtT4
And with China, our “salami tactics” which Trump/Berger accelerated, are to be seen in USMC “island hopping,” and heightening of lethality, already well advanced. But this all seems to have been missed by TAC’s/QI’s "USMC experts,” who instead “Stopped the Presses” to announce that Berger was "fighting the Blob,” to go with their false narrative that Trump was "ending the endless wars.”
Home»Aviation»Marines Activate First Tomahawk Battery
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Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sgt. Joseph Manwarren, the senior enlisted advisor and field artillery chief for Long Range Missile Battery A, 11th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, salutes the colors during the battery’s activation ceremony at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif., US Marine Corps Photo
The Marine Corps stood up its first-ever Tomahawk cruise missile battery at Camp Pendleton, Calif., last week.
Alpha Battery, which falls under the 11th Marine Regiment, is the first of three Long-Range Missile (LMSL) batteries that the service plans to procure starting in FY 2024.The Long-Range Fires Launcher will use the same ROGUE-Fires carrier of the Navy/Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) and mount a single Mk.41 vertical launch system cell, according to budgetary documents. Each LMSL battery will have 16 launchers, former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger said in a statement before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“This is a historic chapter in the Marine Corps and the 11th Marine Regiment. The American people expect the Marine Corps to prepare for war,” said Col. Patrick Eldridge, commanding officer of the 11th Marine Regiment, in the activation ceremony’s press release.
The Marine Corps has described the LMSL batteries as a way for the service to “provide Combatant Commanders with the ability to employ an agile, mobile, land-bases system, capable of launching Tomahawk cruise missiles to complement surface and sub-surface launched missiles.”
Tomahawks are one of the key assets being procured to achieve a long-range fires capability as the service gears up for challenges in the Pacific through Force Design 2030.
“These Marines have done phenomenal things. They took an idea and are making it work. The job just started, but this capability will be able to reach out and provide devastating and lethal fires,” Capt. Justin Hillebrand, Alpha Battery’s first commander, said in the activation ceremony’s press release.
Alpha Battery is the latest development in the Marine Corps’ anti-ship efforts. A few days prior to the activation, the 11th Marine Regiment also conducted a NMESIS live fire at Point Mugu. This was the first firing of the service’s Naval Strike Missile in two years,the last occurring in 2021.
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Marine Corps Long Range Fires Launcher is staged for the activation ceremony for Long Range Missile Battery A, 11th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, July 21, 2023. US Marine Corps Photo
While ground-based Tomahawks were used before during the Cold War, the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty restricted the deployment of ground-based missiles with ranges between 500 to1,000 and 1,000 to 5,500 kilometers. However, with the withdrawal from the treaty by the U.S. due to Russian violations and growing strategic competition with China, the U.S. has returned to the ground-based deployment and development of missiles within these ranges.Shortly after its withdrawal in 2019, the U.S. launched Tomahawk in a test to inform the future development of intermediate-ranged systems, such as the Marine Corps’ Long-Range Fires Launcher and the Army’s Typhon.
While the Marine Corps’ batteries provide fewer missiles, they are highly mobile through the ROGUE-Fires platform, allowing for the Marines to bring Tomahawks along for Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.
“I imagine someone pretty high up said, ‘We’ve seen what Marines can do with rifles, let’s see what Marines can do with Tomahawks’” Col. Eldridge said.