Reading the Long Arc of Human History

The Trojan Horse, Packed With Transvestites

Jehu is at it again.  He has announced to the watching world that there is to be no room, no tolerance for trans-genderism in the US military.  A pet "achievement" of President Obama just bit the dust.

James Delingpole tells us why he thinks this is an important matter.

President Trump just did – again – what literally no other leader in the world is doing right now. He took a step towards saving Western Civilization.  I wish this were an exaggeration. I wish Western Civilization were so secure that it was quite beyond the power of the U.S. president or anyone else to shake or shore up its foundations.

The fact is, though, that Western Civilization is in the direst of trouble.

In A Time of Peace . . .

The US Secretary of Defense and the High Schooler

This is an interesting story on a number of levels.  The first is to acknowledge that a high school reporter in the US managed to score  a personal interview with Secretary of Defense, James Mattis.  Another aspect is the apparently quirky way the mind of the Secretary works--that he would grant the time for an interview.  A third facet is the way Mattis does not talk down to the high school student, but answers in an adult fashion.  And, finally, there is the content itself.  

High School Reporter’s Interview With Secretary Of Defense James Mattis

Dana
Patterico

No matter how one feels about Donald Trump being elected president, I think it’s safe to say that most Americans are pleased with his selection of James Mattis for Secretary of Defense.

With that, back in May when the Washington Post published a photo with James Mattis’s phone number on it, a motivated reporter called the number, and then texted Mattis to request an interview. To the young high school reporter’s surprise, Mattis said yes. Teddy Fisher is a reporter for the Mercer Island High School Islander newspaper.

The interview took place on Memorial Day, but did not appear in the school paper until late June. Here are a few excerpts from the excellent, content-rich and informative interview. Subjects covered, and providing much to chew over, include foreign policy, national policy, political ideologies, the Middle East, Iran, and advice for high schoolers. But if you think the interview is geared for high schoolers, think again: “I speak the same to high schoolers, college grads, or congressmen,” [Mattis] said. “I’ve found high schoolers to be plenty bright.”

Excerpts:

No Firsts Among "Equals"

False Egalitarianism

We were irritated to read recently about an elite special military unit--consisting of both Australians and New Zealanders--whose courage, skills, and exploits have been suppressed for decades.  For no good reason, it would seem.

One can understand suppression of military exploits that might expose those who participated to danger.  Or, if the danger would come to those presently serving, we can understand keeping things locked in a deep, dark dungeon.  All of this would appear very reasonable.  But not this time.

Families of a forgotten World War II crack commando unit are calling on the New Zealand Government to officially recognise their behind-enemy-lines feats more than 70 years on.  There were 22 New Zealanders who signed up to the ultra-secret Z Special Unit which caused mayhem waging a guerrilla war against the Japanese in the Pacific.

But after the war, they were silenced by 30-year secrecy agreements.  Many died before they could tell anyone - even their wives and families - exactly what they did in the war. [NZ Herald]

What state, or military secrets were being protected, one wonders, by the secrecy?  The Aussies have at last seen the light and decided to allow their heroes to come out into the light.  But not NZ.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

A Six-Inch Swath of Orange Shag

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

So the other night at the recent Republican debate, three candidates said they would be fine with women having to register for the Selective Service. Those three were Christie, Bush, and Rubio. After the debate, Cruz said that he thought the idea was “nuts.” “We have had enough with political correctness — especially in the military,” Cruz said.

You traditionalists need to develop a more
realistic view of what it would actually
be like to have women in combat.

So let us talk about this for a minute, shall we? I have some random thoughts on the subject, which will probably require systematic organization later.

First, I want to say that there are a number of striking things about Rubio’s conservatism that I like. I like his free and open confession of Christ. I like how unabashedly pro-life he is. But this answer of his reveals that he is not functioning with an integrated biblical worldview at all. This is a profound and radical inconsistency in his professed conservatism.

Once you have signed off on the nation/state conscripting your daughters to go serve in combat roles, whatever it was you thought you were conserving — thus allowing you to call yourself a conservative — has had a fork stuck in it and is done. Nothing really to conserve any more.

A nation that conscripts its daughters for its defense is a nation that no longer deserves a defense. We may have to fight later as a practical matter, but this is a matter of rudimentary allegiance.

The compromise runs deep also (as it does with Christie and Bush), because the formal legality of women serving in combat roles is merely weeks old.

Cultures and Warfare

When Ignorant Armies Clash By Night

Nations not infrequently fall into the trap of thinking that the armies and military of other nations are relatively useless.  It can trap them into a false sense of security.  It can also make them more bellicose and trigger-happy, persuading them that going to war is a small matter.  It will all be done and dusted in five minutes.  Or so we are told.  Nationalistic fervour is never a reliable guide in such matters. 

The history of nationalistic fervour leading to underestimating one's enemy is not exactly garlanded with laurel leaves.  Norvell De Atkine, a U.S. Army retired colonel with eight years residence in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, and a graduate degree in Arab studies from the American University of Beirut, acknowledges some of the spectacular failures that have resulted from underestimating an enemy.  In an article entitled, Why Arabs Lose Wars, he writes:

Global Freeloaders

The Follies of New Zealand's "Defence" Policies

New Zealand's history as a non-aligned nation lasted about a nano-second--and even then existed only in the imaginations of a few peace-niks.  New Zealand has never been non-aligned.  It has always relied upon other nations to defend itself.  Relying upon other nations requires alignment.

Our unwillingness to take responsibility for the defence of the country is one of the most shameful aspects of our national life.  Relying upon other nations to come to our defence if attacked is a dereliction of fundamental government responsibilities; it also is an indictment upon the citizenry.  We are global free-loaders.

New Zealanders and their politicians maintain an unjustified pride in the false narrative that we "punch above our weight" in global affairs.  We don't.  The most fundamental duty of a state government is that it defend its citizens against armed aggression from other states and random malefactors.  In this sacred duty, successive New Zealand governments have failed.  Instead we have chosen the cheap option--all the while congratulating ourselves on how clever and cunning we have been. 

For well over a century or more, New Zealand has relied upon "others" to defend our shores.  Ironically this has resulted in our soldiers and military going to war to assist other nations--with which we have become aligned by means of mutual defence treaties.

The Lt Dan Band

Hold The Troops in Due Honour

Now, this is rather neat.

Regular readers of this website will know that we have been staunch critics of US global military involvement to "make the world safe for democracy" or, whatever.  The idea that the US would arrogate to itself the role of being the world's saviour, protector, redeemer and messiah is not just misplaced, it is offensive and blasphemous.  There is only One to Whom the Living God had given that honour, power, and authority, and He does not  tolerate idol-pretenders in His presence.

But we are not anti-war.  Far from it.

No Collateral Damage

 Unscathed Dog

OK--this post is for those who maintain a keen interest in military technology and hardware.  Enormous strides in recent years have made it increasingly difficult for the "bad guys" to hide.

We have come a long way since that deadly night fighter, the (wooden) Mosquito took to the air in 1942.

The circumstances and specifications are detailed below. 

This video was taken from inside the cockpit of an A-10 by the pilot.

It was a night view. What you see is from 9,700 feet away (almost two miles)..
Four terrorists are walking along a street with no clue that someone is watching them.....

from almost 2 miles away in the dark..
The A-10 fired a 30 mm cannon WITHOUT injuring the dog nearby, who escaped
unharmed. You can see the gun camera shake a bit as the pilot fires.
Then count about 4 seconds for the rounds to travel 2 miles. Every
tenth round is a tracer, so the bullets you actually see are every tenth.
They are getting hit with hundreds of rounds, but the dog is unscathed.

Muzzle velocity on the 30mm cannon is 2,430 feet per second. The result is that four
fewer guys won't be blowing up women and children anymore!
The dog, in the upper right, just safely gets  out of there.

 

Thanks to our humble correspondent who sent this through.  

A Medieval Weapon of Mass Destruction

The Peasant's Weapon of Choice

Rodney Stark, commenting upon the weaponry of the Crusaders:

But no armor, not even a plate-armor suit, was very effective against the invention that made the crusaders to lethal in battle--the crossbow. Although it was widely used by the crusaders, remarkably little has been written about the crossbow because it was thought to be quite shameful, even sinful, to use it. In 1139 the Second Lateran Council prohibited its use (except against infidels) "under penalty of anathema, as a weapon hateful to God and to Christians," and this ban was subsequently confirmed by Pope Innocent III. However, European armies ignored the Church and made widespread use of the crossbow until it was made obsolete by firearms. Thus, for example, the Knights Templar garrison at the castle of Saphet in northern Galilee in about 1260 consisted of fifty knights and three hundred crossbowmen.

The "moral" objections to the crossbow had to do with social class, as this revolutionary weapon allowed untrained peasants to be lethal enemies of the trained soldiery. It took many years of training to become a knight, and the same was true for archers. Indeed, it took years for archers to build the arm strength needed to draw a longbow, let alone to perfect their accuracy. But just about anyone could become proficient with a crossbow in less than a week. Worse yet, even a beginner could be considerably more accurate than a highly skilled longbow archer at ranges up to sixty-five to seventy yards. . . .

The projectiles fired by crossbows were called bolts because they were much shorter and heavier than the arrows fired by regular bows. While this reduced the range of crossbows, it greatly increased their impact at shorter ranges. The fact that so little training was required meant that huge numbers of crossbowmen could be assembled quickly; the Genoese several times fielded as many as twenty thousand for a single battle. Stark, God's Battalions, p.72f

We think Stark is probably right.  Even to this day the crossbow remains underrated.  In the Anglo-Saxon world this may be due in part to childhood stories of Robin Hood and the celebration of the English longbow. 

Once again these observations underscore the need for military doctrines and tactics constantly to evolve and adapt to technology.  When this does not happen, disaster is around the corner.  Witness how the machine gun made serried rows of infantry obsolete in World War I.  Another lesson is never to underestimate low tech advances put in the hands of infantry en masse.  Imagine the devastation represented by infantry brigades equipped with high powered, long range hunting rifles, each with telescopic laser sights.  Suddenly every man is a sniper, with a modicum of training. 

So, if New Zealand cannot afford modern weaponry, why not take this route, deployed via a universal military subscription of at least two years?  If a sniper behind every tree worried Hitler's generals when they were contemplating invading Switzerland, how much more would New Zealand's defensive capability be enhanced if every adult in the country could drop an enemy combatant at a thousand metres with consistent deadly accuracy, particularly when an enemy would face very long supply lines if an invasion of the country were attempted. 

This would represent a far stronger defensive capability than we have now.  Any invader would likely find the cost of proceeding not worth any gain.  The country would be much safer--much safer than our piddling around the globe participating in Obama's wars of choice in the vain hope that it obligates "others" to come to save us were New Zealand to be attacked. 

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Full of Surprises

Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, January 17, 2011

Not having said anything about the monkeyshines of the erstwhile CO, Captain Honors, of the U.S.S. Enterprise, allow me to do so now. Since the videos that cost him his command were a few years old, the first thing that occurs to me is that he was probably done in by some competitor. We can file this under "yet another Social Media firing." You know the kind of thing . . . someone calls his boss a jerk on Facebook, his boss reads it and lets him go. The former employee, meanwhile, wants to claim that the firing was an invasion of his privacy. Somebody read what I published for the whole world to read, and this is unconscionable.

Back to the Navy. We have multiple problems here, layered like they were chocolate cake, with raspberry filling in between the layers. Only the problems aren't chocolate, and they don't taste good. But they are layered.

The first is that we see how inadequate professionalism is an an antidote to the unregenerate heart of man. You take a bunch of sailors, who act like sailors always have, and who like what sailors all have always liked, and you send them out on a floating city for months at a time. You put some women on board for some reason, for what could possibly go wrong, and they all have access to video equipment. This means that it is just a matter of time.

And it is just a matter of time before this kind of thing is masterminded by the mastermind, by some guy at or near the top. The lame defenses that were offered for Honors after the fact sometimes appealed to context, and to the fact that Honors was just trying to "raise morale." Everybody knows that raising morale is a good thing, right? Everybody should also know that there are two kinds of football coaches -- the kind who think that discipline is indivisible, and who insist on a strict code of conduct on and off the field, and then the other kind who say that the football field is the only place where discipline matters, and who don't care how many strip clubs the guys hit the night before the game. The latter think that they are "leaders of men," but they are actually just bribers of men.

The military has always had this kind of leader, but it should be known that it is this kind of leader who, after the city falls, allows his troops to go in for a little compensatory rapine, pillage and slaughter. To build morale. Slack hand leadership is the kind of leadership that creates excesses like the Abu Ghraib debacle.

So this is no defense of raunchy behavior, no "sailors will be sailors" defense. Sailors need discipline, but they need the kind of discipline that can only grow out of a Christian civilization. They need, in short, the kind of discipline that can flourish in a culture saturated by gospel norms. And even then, in order for such discipline to exist at sea for months at a time, you need leaders who are extraordinarily competent, and who themselves have been shaped by a gospel-shaped culture.

Our military prides itself on being "professional." And that is a good thing. But like all good things in the world, it is not itself the gospel, and cannot do a single, blessed thing about the wicked heart of man. Furthermore, it cannot sustain itself. Professionalism and competence are fruit, not root. Morality at sea is fruit, not root. A tight ship is fruit, not root.

The laughable thing about all this is the delusional state of those who think that you can bring up a generation through a godless system of education, have them steeped in degraded entertainment, support their right to get condoms from the school nurse ad libitum, and then have a mysterious change come over everybody as soon as they join the Navy, they cast off the last line, and put out to sea. Life is full of surprises for the unteachable fool.

And with the repeal of DADT, we have now in effect privileged homosexual expression at sea, and you can't do that without accepting what comes from it. He who says A must say B . . . whether or not you really want to say B.

In order to live by a particular code, men need reasons. Maintaining discipline at sea would be hard enough, even if the whole culture knew that Jesus is Lord, and that He, the Savior of mankind, is in the process of restoring heaven and earth. But if the reason is that we used to have some reasons two hundred years ago, reasons that morphed into core values of some sort, and we think they still might be around here somewhere . . . and yet we still feel an emotional need to keep up the pretence of professionalism, then we will get the kind of Navy we are building. Sooner or later, you wind up where you are going.

Without Jesus, you have no way of dealing with sin. Without Jesus, you have no way even to define it. A Navy captain showed a video of some women showering together. So?