Its official name is “Perimetr” but many Soviet-era nuclear control officers called it “The Dead Hand.” David Hoffman’s book with that title won him a Pulitzer prize. Now you can imagine President Trump tweeting away over how Harper Lee should give him hers. And, now, you should stop – it’s horrifying. [openlibrary]
It appears certain that Stanley Kubrick heard something about PERIMETR and uploaded it into Doctor Strangelove. Hollywood, since then, has treated us to a number of movies that take on on various options about these sort of scenarios, and are often wrong. This posting may make you feel a bit better, in the current times – knowing that if President Trump loses his shit and orders a nuclear strike, it probably won’t happen. Or, if it does, it will represent a shared decision within the US military to use nuclear weapons, regardless of whether the president is compos mentis or not. “The Football” is nuclear theater, intended to provide a false sense of civil control over these massively destructive devices. In this posting, I will explain some of that. Your immediate reaction might be that I am lying, but I am not – as they say “do your own research” but more importantly “let’s think about this a bit.”
A good source for this is Schlosser’s “Command and Control” but also Richard Rhodes’ “The twilight of the bombs” and “The Wizards of Armageddon by Fred Kaplan. Since Doctor Strangelove is a sort of fictional exploration of what a disaster regarding nuclear weapons might look like, it’s also a primary resource for this stuff. But what we need to understand is the more complicated stuff – when Kubrick was learning about Mount Weather, Multiple Independent Re-Entry Vehicles (MIRV) were being tested. The 70s inevitably turned into the 80s and we no longer had B-52s flying dangerous long-loops out of Thule Air Force Base (on Greenland) and there were MIRVs and cruise missiles, and – of course – ballistic missile submarines capable of single-handedly wiping out most of the human population of Earth. You are allowed to step back and take a deep breath and think about all this stuff about hypersonic missiles.
I’m going to tell you three things about hypersonic missiles, and then we’ll resume with the disaster.
1) Hypersonic missiles are very de-stabilizing weapons but fortunately the military field they are destabilizing is already unstable. So, uh, um.
2) Hypersonic missiles are absolutely cool as shit.
3) There is nothing magical about MACH-5 except that was Speed Racer’s car, and it’s an absurd speed. I will comment a bit about that aspect, eventually, but from a perspective about strategic technology, when the bombs arrive is more interesting than how but when we are having that argument, we are deep into the strategic region where mankind is most likely fucked.
The main value of speed is first strike.
If you are an Iain Banks fan, please join with me in thinking disdainfully this is all stupid. Imagine there is a nuclear war and archeologists are trying to figure out what happened. Sequencing the splat-marks will interest an archaeologist but not a strategist, because they know that they are likely to be boiled into the soup of their own creation, during the first two MACH-5 minutes. The point of all this is that, if someone starts a nuclear war, they will want to tilt the odds so that as many of their MACH-5 weapons or stealth weapons arrive on the enemy’s command/control sites, and known missile erection systems (think: those big trucks that carry around Oreshnik missiles). In that event, the US is going to more likely than not launch first, and will probably sever command/control systems via a process of vaporization. There is no place in that story for PERIMETR. Of course there is a place for a Russian first strike but there are a lot of complications about that; let’s maybe go into them if it still seems interesting.
One think we all need to understand is that hypersonic missiles have been around for a while. In fact, there is an absolutely absurd number of missiles on tap. We humans are very, very unwise.
There is also a huge number of various cruise missiles, many of which can be launched by submarines. Let me summarize roughly: if it’s worth putting into a submarine, it’s almost certainly stealthy and certainly carries a nuclear warhead. Cruise missiles are not “retaliatory” weapons, in the sense of Mutual Assured Destruction: they are stealthy first-strike weapons designed to be shot from close to their target so they arrive extremely quickly. There are threescenarios, none are good: 1) first pre-emptive strike on Russia, 2) pre-emptive strike into the middle of a Russian strike, 3) conventional strike first strike using stealth, speed, and precision, followed by negotiation from force.
I think I did a blog post about this a few years ago; the US strategy has not changed. A conventional first strike, backed up by stealthed nuclear assets like B1 lancers and B52s, would watch from very high up and if there was action after the first strike, nuclear weapons might be used because “take off and nuke it from orbit” is the only chance. I am fairly sure the US could win a conventional first-strike with follow-up threat; there is actually very small chance the Russians would care to do anything after that, especially when doing so would result in horrible destruction. Watch closely what I just sketched, MAD is dead and has failed; we have something else. Russia’s command/control and strategic assets (and population) are mostly in 5 or 6 concentrations within Russia. The US’ command/control and strategic assets are squirrelled away all around our allies’ countries. There are US nukes hidden all over the planet. A rapid stealth strike could depopulate Russia. A rapid stealth strike from Russia a) is unlikely to work but b) are they going to start nuclear wars with every country that has a US base in it? The US should have ended the cold war in the early 90s, based on that strategic calculus alone – but the US is politically divided within and does not think coldly. I’m happy about that, BTW. Russia has been afraid of letting its particularly naughty weapons out of direct control; which means that if the leaders of Russia have an authentic high explosive experience, their weapons’ systems’ control will go with them, individually.
There are the submarines, with the US (POLARIS) and cruise missiles, and the Russian subs which might well sink or blow up if someone tries to launch something strategically nasty from them. Thats based on Russian engineering and maintenance. But, worse, the Russian subs are loud clanky old things that are practically steampunk. They have something like 13 DELTA-class subs off the US coast, and three Borel-class. The US operates around 50 attack subs, Virginia class, Los Angeles class, and Seawolf class. It’s a safe bet that a US attack submarine is following each of the 16 Russian subs and if they start making sounds in the water like they are preparing to launch (as opposed to sounds like they are preparing to sink like Kursk did) they will be transitioned fairly quickly into preparing to sink. One of the worst aspects of that situation is that the poor commanders of the Russian subs know they are being stalked by much better gear, but they can’t tell if they are being stalked by how many of what until they hear a massive howl of fusillades of torpedoes bearing down on them. They’ll know their ships are so bad, that the Americans probably will not nuke them since they don’t have to. They will just disappear into the depths. If one of them makes it and starts readying to launch a ballistic missile, then they will – again – disappear into the depths, just … faster.
A number of features of “prompt global strike” are also acknowledgements that MAD is over. One of those is that some of the satellite systems are capable of detecting the “bulge” in the surface a submarine makes when it goes by. Isn’t that cool?! I mean it’s cool if you are American. Then there are some other things the US has flying around up there, which might be horrific bad news for Russian subs. Some of my friends who know more than I do, say that the space shuttle could look down through a lot of water, and see things. The X-37B can probably do some cool multi-spectrum stuff. Many armchair generals think the X-37B probably has some nukes on board. Well, I doubt that with 400 day mission times it has humans. A space-reentrant anti-submarine missile would definitely be “rocket science” but not prohibitive. Remember Trump’s “golden dome” missile defense system? [nationalinterest] Sure, if we have to, we will fling the entire kitchen sink including the locations of a small number of our Virginia and Los Angeles attack ships, and some information about what is on the X-37B.
Meanwhile, let’s talk about the point of this article: the football.
When you hear about it, it sounds like PERIMETR in a box. But, it’s not. Every since the US started PAL (Permissive action link) on warheads, and offered the technology to the Russians, the “football” can best be described as “a storage box for all the detonation confirmation for the missiles that have PALs.” We have PALs in various places, but they really aren’t that important, since we have moved away from MAD logic into a different space. The problem is that the Russians may have never built any PALs. The US built them in a few places but, in my opinion, the wrong ones. For example since the theoretical MAD framework still applies to ballistic missile subs, they are officially treated as retaliation weapons, in spite of the fact that they also carry stealth cruise missiles. But, since they exist under the MAD framework, there is a great rigamarole for unlocking the missiles and the warheads. [Red Tide was pretty fun, but…] The non-rigamarole version of all this is to look at the parts of the strategic system that require humans to operate. A Russian Oreshnik missile cannot drive itself out of its revetment, nor can it top erect its own missile container, balance its truck, etc., etc. Russian and US subs that are about to launch missiles have to have humans in the command center “level the boat” and prepare a large number of things for launch. Ballistic missile subs don’t have PALs because they cannot depend on getting the firing codes from a National Command Authority that has crashed into the side of Mount Weather. Then, you get down to “battlefield tactical weapons” that cannot be restrained because, something something someone might need to die – but the US MLRS battery commander, usually a Major, also may have control over a “special weapons truck” containing MLRS rockets with warheads basically similar to the MK-81 enhanced precision bomb. That Major can make the decision, independently, to launch. I know a guy who was in that job during Gulf War I. The US President can bash buttons on “the football” until he is satisfied but the MLRS are not remote-controlled, nor are they remote-operated, nor can they be launched without a pretty intense check-list being run through. A ballistic missile submarine captain has the same independence. There is a lot of rigamarole but it is almost as though the US Department of Military Rigamarole showed Doctor Strangelove to Dwight Eisenhower and he asked “can we do that?”
Back in the days of MAD, the Strategic Air Command commander was Curtis Le May. Basically, he felt his toys weren’t particularly over-aweing. So Le May figured out a strategy [discussed in Fred Kaplan] – the bombs in B-52s didn’t have PALs either, because they had to be dropped from a bomber and were triggered by altimeters. Cool. Le May realized he could just order a pre-emptive strike if Russia was looking threatening, and so the entire SAC was ready for years to just go light up the world when Le May said so. He had the same loyalty during the Korean War when Bomber Command bombed every single target in N Korea. Some 2 million people were killed, none of them by weapons with PALs on them.
If it came down to it, and the US was about to bomb somone, the football is rigamarole. Imagine the situation room, and they are about to bomb Iran’s refinement facilities with a penetration bomb, but some idiot starts asking where the football is. Stanley Kubrick would have loved it.
[Stanley Kubrick arranges a screening of Doctor Strangelove for Ike. Both men look serious and unhappy. Nano Banana AI and mjr]
So the good news is if the president goes nuts and launches a strike – it will go down mostly well, with no complaint from the brass in the War Room. Just like what happened when Trump bombed Iran because their uranium enrichment plants might be enriching the Epstein files. Oh, wait, that’s the bad news. The bad news is that US has built a tremendous military, in which the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is the punchline of a joke, and when the orders are given, of course everyone obeys them. That is the tragedy of this whole rigamarole.
Hey, you remember that idea where the government listens to its people, who tally their preferences and opinions? Did you ever vote for a single one of these civilization-destroyers? I wanted government-sponsored health care. What did you want? But look what you got.
Off topic (or is it?) angry rant:
Every American right now can watch a video of a legally armed white man get then set upon by a group of masked armed thugs, disarmed, and shot to death – ten (or was it 11? In all the excitement I lost count myself) shots onto an assailant who could have posed no credible threat to the large group of armed and armoured men who had put him on the ground.
If your reaction to that video is “that is the last straw. NOW I’m going to actually DO something”… that is fucked up, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
If your reaction to that video is NOT “that is the last straw”, then “fucked up” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
This is what they are doing now to WHITE MEN, KNOWING THEY ARE BEING FILMED FROM MULTIPLE ANGLES. It goes without saying that this is what they’ve been doing (are still doing) to people of colour, and women, and children, away from the cameras all along. It’s just that now they’ve reached the point where there is literally nobody they don’t feel fully comfortable executing in broad daylight in front of a crowd. Nobody who isn’t a billionaire can any longer pretend that this is something that’s happening to “other people”.
I’d be interested to know, if you’re reading this in the USA, whoever you are and whatever you are, what positive, active steps you’re taking to stop this now.
Then again – I’m expecting a positive reaction from people who are obviously OK with children being shot in their schools, because fuck all has been done about that.
Good points, especially the one about the probable state of Russian hardware.
The upkeep of this statement-of-stupidity-of-a-supposedly-rational-species machinery costs a bundle, and I do wonder about the actual status of everyone’s death-dealing flying dildoes, not only the ones in Russia.
For one, I wouldn’t bet a lot on the readiness of the Minutemen III still in operation. Still using those ferrite-ring computers?
For two, I sometimes wonder about the state of Pakistan’s mil nukes, considering they are supposed to have a full infrastructure for fissile-material production, reprocessing, building the rockets, the warheads and so on. Monstrous bills, in a country which is (after some horrid enviro catastrophes) literally coming apart at the seams.
Here’s a classic show (British of course) expressing similar doubts far better than I can:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKQlQlQ6_pk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgkUVIj3KWY
Lastly, concerning what Sonofrojblake says, words fail.
Just look how headlines from Iran and the US are starting to resemble each other.
@1 sonof…
Let me see if I have this right. Americans, in record numbers, are marching in the streets in protest; they are out in their communities, helping their neighbors from this horror, and for their humanity, some of them are being beaten, arrested, shot and killed. Meanwhile, numerous Americans are filming these actions, risking their own safety, so that there will be records of these atrocities, and making sure that the videos are shared with responsible news organizations in order to reach the widest possible audience, along with the eye witness testimony of others in the area, thus refuting with plain and clear evidence the manifold lies this administration tells about these events.
I’m serious when I say this. What else would you have the people do? Would you have them assemble and storm the Capitol like the Jan 6 insurrectionists did? Would you have more of them directly confront the DHS thugs and effectively commit “suicide by cop”? Or maybe you advocate snipers taking out federal agents? Anarchy in the streets? I’m sure all of those would work out very well. Perhaps we should start stockpiling tumbrels?
Look, most Americans understand that our country has problems, and many of us understand where they come from; the deeper systemic issues. Do not mistake our current inability to change things (instantly and nonviolently) for complacency or acceptance.
You know, at one time, I used to enjoy your comments as they were usually insightful and contained a bit of snide humor. These days, not so much. It’s mostly just sweeping anti-American sentiment. I don’t what’s going on in your life, but you either need a reality check or possibly some professional help. As for me, I think I am pretty much done with FTB. The majority of the blogs are no longer operational, many of the posts are from sources I already read (e.g., The Guardian), and many of the comments have devolved into little more than verbal flailing and personal rivalries. I can count the consistently good commenters on one hand (Hi Dunc!). I guess I’d rather spend my free reading time with Paul Krugman or Heather Cox Richardson.
@jimf: Thanks for the compliment.
Warned you it was an angry rant. And the sentiment, this time, is not sweepingly anti-American, it’s mainly bafflement.
In my lifetime Britain put armed men on the streets of Northern Ireland and they shot and killed civilians in broad daylight. The populace responded with snipers and bombs. They kept it up for decades. They killed soldiers. They killed civilians. They killed children, two of them in a town near where I live with a bomb I literally must have practically sat on, because I lounged on the bin that exploded about 20 minutes before it did so but only found out about it when I got home. And eventually, they got what they wanted, and there are no longer armed men routinely on the streets of Northern Ireland.
I’m honestly baffled what good whistles and cameras and memes are supposed to be doing. People are obsessively documenting their extermination like they think it’s going to make it stop. Hint: it’s not going to make it stop. Nobody is coming to save you, because you – the USA – are already the pre-eminent military power in the world – nobody would dare intervene or even try to help, and that’s by YOUR design. Your “leaders” – the ones who aren’t actively enabling the killing of civilians in broad daylight, that is, the ones you elected – the “opposition” are very, very keen to say “don’t retaliate”. And I can understand that, because the people in power have literally said, out loud, “one of ours, ALL of yours” before any of theirs have been killed or even seriously hurt. There would, it’s true, be serious consequences if and when someone grew a pair and started picking off ICE agents with a high powered rifle from 200m away (assuming there’s anyone in the US with basic marksmanship skills, which going by your recent record of “attempted assassinations” seems debatable). It’s likely martial law would be declared… and that then the federal agents would start going door to door confiscating guns from their legal owners. Because again, they’ve SAID OUT LOUD that simply owning a gun justified the killing of Pretti. The mental gymnastics 2nd Amendment worshippers must be going through right now to square that circle don’t bear thinking about.
The best any foreign power can do is offer space for refugees – which Canada is doing, per videos I’ve seen offering places for medical professionals who no longer feel safe in the USA.
I expect within the next year to see some Facebook post by some American whining about the cost of living, and in particular about the exorbitant price they had to pay for admission to the gas chamber, and complaining that their neighbour who’s a little bit browner than them got to go in first “because of woke”. You’re lining up like sheep and tutting about the wolves even as they close their jaws on your throat.
What would I have them do? I’d have them use their imagination. Passive resistance only works against an opponent with a conscience and a sense of shame – and that is NOT this regime.
Trump has already, here at the end of January, said OUT LOUD that “sometimes you need a dictator”. He has said OUT LOUD that you “shouldn’t have” midterm elections. He’s selling Trump 2028 baseball caps. Everyone treated him as a joke in 2015, and here we are, STILL TREATING WHAT HE SAYS AS A JOKE.
Ten years and three days ago he said this: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” And everyone laughed. Oh, Donny, he’s a card that one. A character. A rum bugger. He’s got no chance of beating Clinton, but he’s good for a larf.
And here we are. Still laughing? Because his voter numbers have only gone up since then – 63 million in 2016, 74 million in 2020, 77 million in 2024. Think they won’t go up again in 2028? Think it matters? Think you’re going to be better of when he inevitably dies and JD fucking Vance steps up – you think he’s going to be any better? He’s Trump but with a functioning brain – isn’t that worse?
From outside, it looks (to me at least) like there’s already a civil war in progress but only one side got the memo and bothered to bring any guns. “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?” goes the old anti-war slogan. It appears not to have occurred to the people who use that slogan that there’s another possibility – they gave a war, one side turned up in all their tactical gear and started shooting, but the other side just… rolled over. Blew whistles. Posted videos on Tiktok. Held up signs. Shouted “Shame on you”. It’s really not what people from outside the US expect of you, given the cultural output you export, given the image you portray at every opportunity.
I said to a friend today – what the US needs, but does not seem to have, is a Luthen Rael. Someone who recognises what they’re fighting and uses the tools of the enemy to fight them, someone prepared to be damned for what they do for the greater good. Because from my outside perspective, this pacifism and commitment to doing what’s right just isn’t working.
I get it – empires fall, and it wasn’t a case of IF the USA was going to fall it was always WHEN. I just didn’t expect it to happen quite so soon and quite so… stupidly.
Sorry for the offtopic ranting. I wish anyone who can’t afford to leave the US right now the very best of luck, honestly, unless you ever voted Trump, or didn’t vote, in which case I hope you have the day and decade you deserve.
@ sonof… OK, so you suggest snipers and bombs. Armed conflict. Got it. It may come to that. I certainly hope not and wish to explore all avenues before going down that one-way street.
Funny thing, though, you mentioned The Troubles in N. Ireland, but you also asserted that non-violence only works with an opponent who has a conscience. How well do you think the N. Ireland situation would have worked out if, at the time, the UK was controlled by the equivalent of Trump and the GOP? Do you think that the UK leaders were just as bad as Trump in this regard? (I did not follow UK politics too closely, although I came to the conclusion very early on that Thatcher was a real shit, but for other reasons.) I recall seeing news reports during the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but I am an ocean away and do not have the relevant insider info on this.
I will close by mentioning that, while the US has a reputation for violence, we also have a history of successful non-violent protest. We should not forget that we had literal Nazis and racists fighting against civil rights. We’re talking about support for racism from street level all the way through state/fed governments to the very top. Hello George Wallace. People were beaten, murdered, “disappeared”, but ultimately, civil rights won the day. Of course, racism never went away completely, and it is something we still have to deal with, but even today under Trump, it’s nothing like it was in the 1950s or earlier.
@4 sonofrojblake
That was 20th century tech. We are firmly within the 21st century, and Israel’s genocidal rampage through Gaza is a preview of what will happen to anyone who gets the bright idea of armed conflict inside the U.S.. The feds would fall back into their fortresses and Minnesotans would have to contend with a communications blackout and loitering drones dropping explosives on them instead.
If nonviolent resistance doesn’t work, we are all monumentally fucked. The Zionist forces and the thugs they train here in America have no compunctions about leveling cities into a moonscape mix of blood-soaked dirt and concrete dust.
@beholder, #6:
Well, you’d know, seeing as how you helped put them there.
jimf@#5:
Funny thing, though, you mentioned The Troubles in N. Ireland, but you also asserted that non-violence only works with an opponent who has a conscience. How well do you think the N. Ireland situation would have worked out if, at the time, the UK was controlled by the equivalent of Trump and the GOP? Do you think that the UK leaders were just as bad as Trump in this regard? (I did not follow UK politics too closely, although I came to the conclusion very early on that Thatcher was a real shit, but for other reasons.) I recall seeing news reports during the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but I am an ocean away and do not have the relevant insider info on this.
Gandhi famously said that the reason he chose non-violence was because the Indians couldn’t fight for shit and had no chance against the british. He was right.
If the Kaiser’s army, and then Hitler’s couldn’t take on the british, the only force on earth that could stand up to them was pure, raw, imperial incompetence. That, and the upgrade treadmill for a world-dominating navy is completely crazy – since the premise of naval architects is that your navy might fight any other one, every navy wants to be able to beat all the others in a fairish fight. And the technology ramp cost can suck an entire empire down like a black hole. Consider the british navy: built a whole navy to fight napoleon’s france. it rapidly became obsolete. Then, while the continentals were farting around having the Franco/Prussian war, the everyone built another navy because changes in gunnery and armor would have resulted in the Trafalgar fleet being smashed by one or two dreadnaughts. SO everyone built dreadnaughts until the eve of WWI when the Japanese conclusively demonstrated that the old 1890s dreadnaughts were lunchmeat against the 1900s dreadnaughts (RIP: russian fleet at Tsushima) “OMG” screamed Churchill and The Kaiser and everyone “WE NEED A NEW FLEET” so the 1900s fleets were built: sublime floating islands of steel, bristling with huge guns, and the british and germans hosted a grand event where they sailed them around in some fog banks, exchanged a few shots with brutal effect, and were largely incompetent all around. After WWI the british and germans side-eyed eachother and built NEW FLEETS in preparation for BLOWING THEM UP AGAIN, which they did in the 1940s except what is notable is that the naval battles in the atlantic were pretty wimpy and it was the americans and japanese handing out thrashings all around. When the war with japan started, of course, WE BUILT A NEW FLEET. You can’t really count this stuff in terms of fleets but global power has (and still) rests on deployable “force projection” which means you can send your fleet and bombers and stuff out and hammer someone while they are at home, since navigating fleets around in the fog is not as fun as turkey-shooting eachother’s civilans.
Then as to the question of whether the british were still bastardly enough after WWII – we gave them nukes (sort of, via Canada) and stationed a bunch on the island, making it a sort of unsinkable aircraft carrier, while the british, broke and crippled, could not build another navy and wisely didn’t try.
Interesting, you’ll hear stuff about how we have to compete with the chinese navy which is really interesting to me since the chinese navy has a range of about 800 miles – i.e.: long enough to police the area china wants to police, but not long enough to come all the way over to the US, just to get sunk. (like the russians at tsushima)
sonofrojblake @#4:
In my lifetime Britain put armed men on the streets of Northern Ireland and they shot and killed civilians in broad daylight. The populace responded with snipers and bombs. They kept it up for decades. They killed soldiers. They killed civilians. They killed children, two of them in a town near where I live with a bomb I literally must have practically sat on, because I lounged on the bin that exploded about 20 minutes before it did so but only found out about it when I got home. And eventually, they got what they wanted, and there are no longer armed men routinely on the streets of Northern Ireland.
That is a very important point. The Irish put on a good insurgency. It was a classic: rely on the cost of force protection to drain the enemy for a long time, then make some strategic attacks that show them they’re not safe at home, when you want to drag them to the bargaining-table.
Insurgency is the answer that’s sitting right in front of us, and it’s going to be phenomenally painful. I don’t think that right wing fascists are as right as they think they are, about how tough they are. Someone elsewhere commented about the new troops they are deploying in Minneapolis: 1,500 elite troops. That’s not even following the Rumsfeld Doctrine (“just enough troops to lose”) but, literally, a good brawling mob that was not afraid to take casualties, could relieve them of their guns and pants and a few of their lives, pretty quick. Those guys are fire-and-maneuver experts and great shots and they do not understand how to deal with a non-stupid rush.
What is a “non-stupid rush”?? It’s like what the Vietcong handed the french at Dien Bien Phu: lots of troops, expected massive casualties, started the attack with a diversion, then hammered them with a big surprise, and did a meat-wall rush on the other side of the base. Their plan was “no french get out alive” which is the vietcong equivalent of “bring me all the guns and all the pants” After the poundez-le-cul the french got at dien bien phu, they have literally sulked ever since.
It’s basic insurgency tactics and it needs to build. For one thing, if you start too strong your enemy will freak out and maybe nuke you. Not joking. Look at what the Ukrainians have done to russia: sucked them in and drained them dry until suddenly they discover they aren’t really a national army anymore, and whenever they threaten to use nuclear weapons they’ve got to know they will get replies in kind, and both parties are within a short range shot of eachother. It’d be “shotguns at 10 paces” I personally think that the US could probably be defeated with a good enough propaganda war and some insurgency moves. Personally, I’d replay a lot of tropes from V For Vendetta because the scenario is remarkably similar, and the propaganda angle is beauty.
Meanwhile, the department of war would have to be sourcing plastic explosives. Lots of plastic explosives. Maybe Venezuela would like to spare a few dozen cases. Rational america has tons of rifles and handguns but insurgencies run on high explosive. That would be part of the propaganda: “This is Sister V, she’d like to show you how the explosively formed penetrator we just made works on a 2″ thick steel plate.” The media messages would be: “look we are not starting an insurgency yet but if you keep shooting us we’ll have to. then, we will take your guns and your pants. and if you don’t play nice in that vein then we’ll start hanging you from trees after our sharpshooters headshot you” The basic rule in insurgency is asymmetric warfare: drive the enemy’s cost of force protection up, and they either a) leave or b) try to wipe out the entire population. Look what Russia did in Ukraine. So, high explosive is item one. Drones, drone controllers, ESCs, night vision cameras is next. 3d printers. radios. The department of propaganda would have to issue a release saying “OK we are ready to go now, and if you kill one more civilian, we will kill 10 of you.”
There is a story I read when I was researching some of my pieces on the KKK. One small cluster of black-owned farms was attacked by the KKK and the entire KKK force disappeared. Of course the farmers did, too, But the KKK didn’t come around any more. They interviewed (maybe it was the BBC voices from the past?) one old lady who was there. The point of that is: if you’re scary special forces and 20 people open fire on you at once, you’re not scary anymore. The vietcong were great – they’d do things like fill a ditch with fuel oil and homemade napalm, then when a patrol came by, they’d shoot one or 2, the rest would jump in the ditch, and the ditch was on fire and the VC were already split up and running.
There is also the counter-intelligence aspect of this. Get a job as a database person for the FBI. Or a system administrator at AWS. Or learn how to drive Palantir. The organizations that will oppress us will be growing too fast to weed out anyone who wants to leak information.
Let’s talk about a quick force protection horror scenario. Protesters are hammering on ICE cars as they drive through crowds. 10 of the protesters have “apple tag” trackers with double-stick tape, and tag the cars in non-obvious places – that guy who fell down, his hand went under the bumper… that kind of thing. OK, now we know where they are sleeping, where they are moving, etc. Of course, by following them, we can do that to. Figure out which hotel they are staying in and drive dump trucks up and block the doors, set the place on fire with a bunch of molotov cocktails, and start shooting everyone who comes out. Or just put a bunch of propane tanks outside the door and blow them with an explosively formed penetrator. Industrial reagents would be good to start collecting before the insurgency starts. Buy all that chlorine, KCN, Nitric acid, maybe even a big carboy of hydroflouric acid… it will all come in handy. But after that hotel burns down with 30 troops in it, the establishment’s gonna have to send 300, or rockets, or some kind of heightened response. Word of it will get around.
One very effective anti-nazi agent was a young attractive belgian girl who sometimes lured german soldiers for make-out sessions that ended with a bunch of guys with bayonets. There was one, I forget, but she got over 20 nazis dead, then they caught her and hung her.
None of this is fun. I don’t like imaginging this kind of “escape from new york” scenario because it makes me feel like a bad person. But that’s the point – we’re not helpless. If we’re treated horribly we can get horrible right back and deal with the PTSD in therapy later. I’m 63. At any point I can take the easy way out with a bottle of pills, some music, and vodka. I’m sorry for today’s kids who are going to have to deal with this shit and the global agricultural collapse will be coming right around the corner. That is what is so fucking offensive about this whole thing – these nazis are trying to take over something that will be a catastrophe soon enough.
Back when I was a consultant, I was involved in a situation where a company I was advising decided that they were going to spin off a whole new type/style of system, and the guys who were going to do it were the software engineers. I said, “this sounds like an opportunity to find another thing to be bad at.” Why would a software engineering organization that was failing to hit its marks, want to start more projects.
So, when I saw a few people on instagram commenting about how the guys from Alaska (some airborne unit, right?) were basically super-soldiers, I asked if they were the ones that cowered in the Green Zone in Baghdad, or got cut to pieces in Fallujah, or driven in a panic out of Kabul, or got their asses blown up in Da Nang or A Shau. The US is terrible at fighting long wars and I don’t think that a war with ourselves will turn into the kind of extended slugfest Ukraine has turned into. The US is great at conquering and bad at holding, and then there is the whole “hearts and minds” thing – we don’t have a domestic terrorism problem but if you blow up some appalachian housewife’s man, now you have one domestic terrorist. The US winds up roaring in and conquering, then when the time comes to hold … as soon as an insurgency starts, they hole up, build a fortress (“the green zone!”) (“kandahar airport!”) and adopt a defensive posture except for “search and destroy” missions (war crimes). So if the US triggers an insurgency against itself, the military will be getting some action but it might well wind up hunkering down while crazy cliques shoot eachother.
The history of John Brown is really interesting. This guy got so pissed off about slavery, and supporters of slavery, that he went postal on them. He rode around with his family, would ride up to a house and see if they had slaves and – if they did – slaughter the owners and tell the slaves they were free. “Um…. thanks, I think…?” But before brown screwed up, he had slave-owners absolutely shitting their pants. He was a horrible person, and he let it all hang out. Remember the panic when there was that “sniper” in the DC area (was not a sniper)? I think he killed 4 people or something? What if someone started popping red hats with a silenced rifle? Press release from the insurgency: “If you are tired of living, wear a red MAGA hat”
The Zionist forces and the thugs they train here in America have no compunctions about leveling cities into a moonscape mix of blood-soaked dirt and concrete dust.
That is what the US military does.
Why bother with a silencer?
From personal experience, if you’re up against someone who is (a) well concealed and (b) a good shot it is nigh on impossible to tell where they are. I was never a sniper – I’m not a good enough shot, I didn’t qualify. I could hit only a DVD (remember those?) at 300 metres, or a THROWN DVD at 100m, but that was the rifle and the sight working, not me. My buddies who were good could hit a coin at those ranges. Which is to say I was never going to be the guy hunkered down shooting at the advancing platoon – I was going to be IN the advancing platoon. Naively I started out thinking I was glad I wasn’t the poor bugger who had to take point, because obviously he was the one who was going to get killed. And the recruit training sergeant told us no, that’s not how it works – the sniper doesn’t shoot the point man. The sniper shoots the guy two or three or four separations back from point – and because he’s a sniper he does it not from two or three hundred metres away, but from more like 600 metres.
There are a number of practical effects of this. First, physics: the bullet arrives first. The sound the rifle made when it was fired only arrives a couple of seconds later, after the back of your buddy’s chest has blown out and you’re already panicking (if you were at the back) or while you’re turning around to look at what just made him grunt (if you’re at the front). There is no second shot, and when the noise arrived the guy who was closest to the shooter was looking the wrong way. When you work out what’s happened, obviously you fire a couple of shots in the vague direction the shot came from – assuming you have ANY idea – you run five yards in a zigzag, hit the deck and crawl like fuck until you’re behind something… for a given value of “behind”. The powerful message sent by shooting the guy in fourth position is “AT LEAST half of you (but let’s be honest – all of you) are fully in my kill box.” The sniper doesn’t need to shoot again because that platoon is pinned and is going to retreat, VERY carefully, until they’re sure they’re out of range. I was told an Argie sniper – one guy – held up an entire battalion like this for THREE DAYS… and they never saw him. He didn’t even kill that many guys, he just kept shooting once and evaporating. The point is – even out in the open, on medium rought terrain with no buildings, when a man falls down and you look at him THEN there’s the sound of a shot, if you ask the seven guys left in the that section where the shot came from you’ll get seven different answers.
Now: my training from the 90s taught me how to fight in the Falklands in the 80s, and it would have worked well against Argies. Wouldn’t have done so well in the Gulf, and it’d be no fucking use at all nowadays because drones with thermal exist so that sniper has a short, short life expectancy, no matter how good his ghillie suit is. But Minneapolis isn’t Goose Green. For starters, it’s evident that as far as engaging ICE is concerned, 200m is “long range”. Your guy just needs to drop one ICE agent with a shot from the back of a van 200-300m away, then that van and the seven identical ones around it just calmly drive off in different directions, slowly and without fuss. Any faintly competent shooter could manage it, and with just ONE shot, in a built up area, none of those goons with their faces and ears covered is going to have a fucking clue where that shot came from, and the competent shooter won’t need to give them any clues by needing a second shot.
Another scenario springs to mind: these people sleep somewhere – once that place is identified, it’s not rocket science to shoot out one of the windows. You could do that from half a kilometre out. With the window gone, a hobby FPV drone with a hand grendade could get in and make short work of whoever’s in there.
Why is this not already happening?
Baffled.
it’s not happening, because it’s not quite that bad for most people yet, and killing one of these ICE agents will bring the full power of the state down on you.
Deciding to snipe an ICE agent may seem logistically and tactically simple, but most of the proposed plans need several people, with resources, to plan and coordinate. That’s a lot of loose ends for the U.S. to throw it’s complete surveilance and “anti-terror” resources against. It may take a while, but eventually they will nab someone associated with that act, and send them off to get waterboarded and “force-fed” in Guantanomo. And that persons family and friends will likely be arrested and “questioned” as well.
Yeah, there are lots of violent actions that could be planned/executed that would be “easy”, but the chances of not getting caught are pretty much zero. And I fully suspect the FBI and whoever else has honey-pot/entrapments/etc. fishing around all over the place, trying to encourage violence-prone leftists to go and place a “bomb” or take up a “sniper position” or some such shit.
@7 bluerizzler
You must have me confused for someone else. Well, either that or you’re flat out lying. In either case, your smug attitude comes across as an unfortunate brain injury.
sonofrojblake@#12:
Why bother with a silencer?
Correctly tuned to the rifle, it’ll completely eat the muzzle flash, plus bring the aiming point right back to where it was. Think recoil control not sound abatement.
Why is this not already happening?
The situation hasn’t gotten that bad, yet. To put it simply consider the world as consisting of only 2 kinds of people. The bad people run around threatening, thugging, sometimes killing, gassing, etc. The good people hang back and keep hoping that the justice system will bestir itself, and the police will pick the right side, and things will get better. If they continue to be bad for too long, individuals will become insurgents (when they talk about “terrorists” they say “radicalized”) but, basically, pissed off enough to feel justified shooting someone.
I started to write a piece about this, but made the mistake of asking ChatGPT to give it a read-over. GPT then proceeded to identify some really bad structural flaws in parts of the concept namely, if I’m right, the way the protesters are responding right now is optimal because they are the people on the spot, balancing the push and pull. Each time the bad guys do something bad, they build justification for harsher responses against them, but from where we are to roaming snipers is a ways off. And that’s good.
One of our best responses right now is to do what the protesters are doing: build a true narrative of events in case we ever get a chance to air this out in court. Whether it’s formal or informal. We can’t have a situation like they did in some of the camps in Germany, where the cleverer camp guards melted away and tried to hide their identity. Pictures will prevent that. Pictures also allow control of the truth elements of the narrative – right now the administration is making idiots of themselves coming up with these weird hypotheticals like “maybe that was a Sig, and they very sometimes go off if dropped when loaded” It’s really important because the bad guys will come up with a bullshit story and start rolling out, then someone posts video that blows their story to pieces. After a couple of rounds of that even the White House fell silent.
There are a couple of ways to navigate this situation and if you want to tilt things toward survival, the most obvious thing to do would be to blend in with the bad guys. If you can avoid doing any crimes that someone witnesses, you probably will not get put up against a wall and shot by your own side. You can blend in with the bad guys intending to be invisible, or you can blend in with an eye toward providing intelligence (or documenting crimes) or even just breaking stuff and otherwise causing system failures. Or create dissention. The fracture lines of the bad guys will be race and religion. You can go outside of the system and be a saboteur. Expect to die under torture if caught. Or you can become an assassin. Expect to long for death for a while. What is almost completely not needed at all is warriors. Those are final stage entities and your best bet is to recruit them from your enemies if there is no evidence of them doing crimes against humanity. You can be a logistician, figure out where the enemy’s supplies flow and fuck them up. No need for plastic explosive – a little diesel fuel on the sacks of rice will do the trick. If the idea of a danger-rush mission interests you, don’t snipe an enemy commander if you can steal a case of grenades.
Then there are the top-tier terrors: drone operators, builders, maintainers, designers, and IED builders. IT specialists who can drive a 3D printer or whatever. High explosive is ultra-rare stuff to be used only strategically. You need HE to make explosively formed penetrators, which is the worst thing that you can do to the bad guys. I’m too old but someone could get a blasting license. I really doubt that things will get to the ultimate horror-point (but I could be wrong!) but if I did, I’d probably be stockpiling reagents like various acids. America is awash in guns and bullets, it’s going to be blasting caps and C4 (for the drones!) that will be hard to get.
Elsewhere I mentioned the force protection problem. I did not adequately explain it as an asymmetric problem – you can control how much pain the enemy suffers the bigger the force they start to stage. The US has lost every insurgency it has gotten into, and most other countries have, too. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the casualty rate could be 4:1 or 10:1. (By the way one of the things Saddam Hussein did that really fucked the US invasion was they opened the arsenals and handed out weapons like it was candy. Saddam’s insurgents had blasting caps, semtex, mines, etc.)
There are 2 things that make an insurgency work or fail. 1 is a reservoir/porous border where as the insurgency grows, you can get some distance. Mexico and Canada? Pirates of the Caribbean? Also, contact another nation nearby that has an interest in the situation improving and some regime changing, and start getting to know their intelligence folks. The insurgency in Syria took, what, 5 years and that was with the CIA dark-flighting them cargo planes full of evil. This is standard drill, repeat after me, “we want stinger missiles.”
Last thing to remember is that none of it fucking matters at all. They’re taking over a government that’s going to collapse spectacularly when the temperatures start hitting 105-110. Power grids are vulnerable. But that’s what I mean by deciding who you are and what you want to do. Blowing a power grid when the temperature is 110 is going to kill more grandmas than soldiers. But it will kill soldiers. If the fascists manage to take over the government, they’re probably going to lose it within 20-30 years because the population will be starving and very, very angry.
So I think what’s going on is that the good guys, who are less certain and less prone to violence and dominance displays, are waiting and watching and getting to understand themselves and the bad guys. Watch the utter lack of self-control when the ICE goons go into a violence frenzy. That’s their fantasy world. If that’s your fantasy world, you’re on the wrong side. They’re imagining getting to be tough studs like Kyle Rittenhouse – as the situation slips out of their control they will become more frantic.
beholder@#14:
your smug attitude comes across as an unfortunate brain injury.
I have one of those. Make offer.
I’m out of popcorn.
lochaber@#13:
Deciding to snipe an ICE agent may seem logistically and tactically simple, but most of the proposed plans need several people, with resources, to plan and coordinate.
That’s why stochastic insurgency is so terrifying. But it’s hard – humans, especially in conflict, are going to tend to want to connect and support eachother. That’s what’ll get them killed. The “lone wolf” stochastic killer ought to terrify anyone with a brain – someone who doesn’t plan, doesn’t communicate, just takes the chance when they see it, then relocate. The psychological profile is not “warrior” it’s “serial killer”
Remember all the various postings I did about the HUGE degree to which the KKK was penetrated by FBI agents. 25% of the KKK was FBI agents. With the kind of money the bad guys already have, thanks to congress, agent provocateurs and snoops will be everywhere.
Marcus
Have you ever read Assassin Trilogy by Robert Ferrigno?
@16 Marcus
Retracting my ableist insult. Let’s try that again, shall we?
@7 bluerizzler
You must have me confused for someone else. Well, either that or you’re flat out lying. In either case, your smug attitude comes across as uninformed and maliciously ignorant.
@11 Marcus
Indeed they do. I can’t imagine a hypothetical civil war with either of them being anything besides a civilian bloodbath. Especially if the military starts by occupying and destroying hospitals.
@17 chigau
Here, have some of mine.
Because it’s a well-established principle in activist circles that anybody advocating such measures is almost certainly a plant. The state wants violence, because (a) they’re really good at it, and (b) it legitimises their violence. There are undoubtedly many FBI / ICE stooges making such arguments to local activists right now, and I expect that all of them are being told to get lost and having their names and faces added to lists of suspected informants. Even starting to plan anything like what you propose is really, really good way to get yourself and all your mates arrested.
There may come a time for such measures, but it is absolutely a last resort, and it requires a level of organisation well beyond what is currently available. Right now, it would almost certainly be actively counterproductive.
@13: ” it’s not quite that bad for most people yet” – most people appear to be more patient than I think I’d be in that situation. Fair enough.
” most of the proposed plans need several people, with resources, to plan and coordinate” – the beltway shootings were accomplished by two men with one stolen rifle and a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice. One shooter, one driver. Hard for the authorities to penetrate a cell that size with a plant. Hard to stop a cell that size resourcing itself to that level in modern America. They don’t need a support network, don’t need anyone to tell them what to do or how or when, and don’t need to report to anyone. They don’t need to coordinate, or plan – ICE are not operating from concealment, they’re out in public, every day, and there are large crowds of people making sure everyone knows where they are operating.
” the chances of not getting caught are pretty much zero.” – well, yes. That didn’t stop the French Resistance. Lots of the IRA were caught. Lots of people who weren’t IRA were caught. This is neither easy, nor clean, and anyone getting into it will know there’s no happy end for them. At the risk of sounding trivial: the most important lesson of the movie “Rogue One” was this: every single character of importance in that movie was dead by the end of it, and when the Death Star and the Emperor went down, not a single person knew their names. But they WON.
@mjr, 15:
“Think recoil control not sound abatement.” – but as I said, the sensible plan is ONE SHOT, from over 300m away, then move. Muzzle flash is irrelevant, because everyone will be looking at the target, and recoil is irrelevant, because you’re not going to be making a second shot. Americans love semiautomatics, but they encourage the wrong kind of thinking. Bolt action would encourage getting the first and only shot on target.
“The situation hasn’t gotten that bad, yet” – how bad does it have to get? Asking for a friend.
“from where we are to roaming snipers is a ways off” – what I’m hearing is that USAians are patiently waiting for their own Bloody Sunday – one or two unarmed civilians gunned down in broad daylight, you’re going to need a couple of DOZEN killed before you start doing something. Fair enough.
“the cleverer camp guards melted away and tried to hide their identity. Pictures will prevent that. ” Sure they will. And you’ll be able to tell me, right now, the names of the two people who shot Alex Pretti, and show me pictures of their faces.
Won’t you?
” If the fascists manage to take over the government, they’re probably going to lose it within 20-30 years because the population will be starving and very, very angry.” Wow, you sound very, VERY patient.
@21: “Because it’s a well-established principle in activist circles that anybody advocating such measures is almost certainly a plant. ” A plant needs to have some connection to the people being provacteur’d, so they’re identifiable, trackable, whatever by the provocateur’s handlers. I can’t see ANYONE reading this. And anyone reading this is welcome to do… well, something. ANYTHING. Something more effective than taking Bigfoot-film-level footage of masked men 50 yards away committing atrocities. As I said above – it takes no support and little resources to be effective at responding with appropriate violence, as long as you understand and accept the likely consequence to yourself.
“starting to plan anything like what you propose is really, really good way to get yourself and all your mates arrested” – sure, just like all the people stockpiling weapons ammo and food for revolt against Democrats were arrested. That’s the ideal cover – wear a “don’t tread on me” cap and be anti-Obama or whatever. There are probably a million of those fucks out there, probably a non-zero number actually working for ICE. Make yourself look like them, you’re safe as houses until after you’ve started work. Just saying…
Good grief, I wasn’t suggesting you are a plant, you ninny.
I second jimf’s concerns about your mental health.
Well this thread got dark real quick, mirroring the situation. Some random observations:
1) it seems there’s some infighting between the shittiest shits (Miller at al.), as they try to save face in front of this disaster. We’ll see how it goes, hoping nobody else has to die to stir the pot some more.
2) some voices rolling around about the Slovak premier (Mr Fico, another far-right peesashit) seeing Trump and being terrified at his wretched physical and mental state. He’s busy denying that for now, obvs.
3) for now, Americans are indeed behaving in a civilized, calm way. With all the weapons floating around it would be real easy to make substantial numbers of those Gestapos simply evaporate. Think “an ICE squad enters a street, they never come out – heap of air-conditioned bodies found some blocks away”. They seem to like marching bunched up in the middle of the road…
4) and yes, real military rifles are really long range. I never did that kind of training of course, but during my year in the army we sometimes used M1 Garands (I got one stamped “Springfield armoury 1946, this during 1987). Even so, according to one of the sergeants, put a scope on one and you can drop your target from 600 metres, with one of those fat 7.62 NATOs. I myself, not at all gun competent, was bloody impressed at the power of those things – almost no recoil and lots of reach. But loud!