THE WEAPONS WILL BE USED: Sweden’s Most Wanted. Background and praise for Sweden’s Carl Gustaf “portable and reloadable recoilless rifle.” Sweden is sending 5,000 Carl Gustafs to Ukraine. Jim Dunnigan’s detailed post also discusses other weapons Sweden is sending to Ukraine.

From June 2021: Paratroopers fire a Carl Gustaf during an exercise in Alaska.

BEIJING KEEPS PUSHING THE NARRATIVE: Will China Soon Claim The Western Pacific? Hear Beijing’s words, observe Beijing’s deeds.

RELATED: China’s global plan relies on so-called Private Security Companies. In my opinion they’ve become forward deployed Chinese military forces.

ON THE RUNWAY AT MISAWA AIR BASE, JAPAN: USAF, USN and Japan Air Self-Defense Force aircraft “perform a wing capabilities demonstration” at the end of a week-long readiness exercise in Japan.

PUTIN ENLARGES NATO: The latest StrategyTalk. Jim Dunnigan and I discuss NATO’s reinvention and re-invigoration — courtesy of Vlad Putin. During the podcast we cover Sweden’s and Finland’s decision to quit pretending they are neutral.

FORWARD DEPLOYED: The USS Higgins launches a torpedo in the Philippine Sea.

REMEMBERING, THEN AND NOW: Thoughts For Memorial Day 2022

Four days a year a special American flag flew from a tall loblolly pine in my family’s front yard.

Every Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day and every Veterans Day, my father would get up early then wake me, my sisters and younger brother.

We would traipse into the front yard, yawning in Houston’s early morning humidity, in summer standing barefoot on St. Augustine grass, on Veterans Day wearing shoes in November’s cooler weather.

Then Dad would tie the flag to the rope, one of us would give the rope a pull, and the huge wall of red, white and blue cloth would rise and billow as it rose, the only sound a pulley 35 feet up the pine creaking with each tug…

…I didn’t realize it at the time, but my father’s flag-raising pageants were my first taste of veterans memorials. Our short front-yard ceremony was a very local Arlington.

Check it out.

BEYOND ESCAPE VELOCITY: A Soldier Dies in the Biden Border War and China’s Strategic Drug War

RTWDT. Read the whole damned thing.

POWERLINE PODCAST ON UKRAINE: Steve Hayward of Powerline and I discuss the war and Putin’s obsession.

Two columns are particularly useful background and both come up during the podcast. The first was published November 30, 2004. Right, over 17 years ago. The title connects to immediate events: Ukraine and the Russian Wish to Return to Super-Power Status. The second is this week’s Creators Syndicate column which discusses weaponized narratives, oligarch money and nine millimeter solutions to Putin’s obsession.

Finally, the Instapundit link to my book Cocktails From Hell: Five Complex Wars Shaping The 21st Century. The Russian-Ukraine chapter has the background to Putin’s Dirty War. It is a bitter cocktail from Hell scarring our era. The book’s deep subject is the use and abuse of the elements of power.

RELATED: StrategyPage has three or four podcasts discussing Russia, with a focus on Ukraine. Here’s one from early February 2022, What’s brewing in the Baltic. The webmaster’s take on the podcast: “Ukraine is not the only nation worried about the Russians, the Baltic states are on pins and needles too.” One from November 30, 2016 is dated but the title makes a point: Putin: Strongman Living In Potemkin Village. Jim Dunnigan’s analysis of Russian corruption and Putin’s decision to revive the Cold War is relevant. That starts about eight minutes in. He also touches on China’s claims to Siberia/Eastern Russia (around 12 minutes). (MP3 only in the archives, not on YouTube.)

A WEAPONIZED NARRATIVE: Russian Oligarchs Must Choose Between Their Money And Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin — he’s crazy and delusional…

…It’s an insistent topic, one with characteristics of a weaponized narrative employed in “narrative warfare.” A weaponized narrative can create psychological vulnerabilities in an adversary’s population. We’ve seen Putin weaponize narratives.

But can a weaponized narrative create vulnerabilities in a specific adversary?

Cheeky? I write and link, you read and decide. FWIW, I wrote this yesterday morning but it just now hit the web.

COMMISSAR VLAD’S WAR: Last night Glenn linked to two columns I’ve written this month focusing on Ukraine. I’m bumping them and adding a third column — from November 2004.

From February 23: Putin Escalates His Creeping War In Ukraine

From February 16: The Strategic Costs of Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian Corruption. If you haven’t read the 2016 State Dept emails John Solomon uncovered earlier this year, check it out.

Finally, from November 30, 2004: Ukraine and the Russian Wish to Return to Super-Power Status

StrategyPage’s motto is “the news as history.” Is this a case of the news as prehistory?

JANUARY 1945, THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE ISN’T OVER: Here’s a photo snapped on January 13, 1945: A German panzer out of the fight. A color photo snapped sometime in January 1945: Mortar Emplacement, St. Vith 1945.

CHINESE COMMUNISTS LIED AND HONG KONG DIED: A terse, accurate title.

In late December, the Voice of America reported that Hong Kong’s Dec. 19, 2021, election had “almost completely eliminated pro-democracy voices from the former British colony’s Legislative Council” — colloquially called the Legco.

VOA’s evidence: pro-Beijing candidates and their local allies took 89 of the council’s 90 seats.

I prefer the word “took,” for in this faux election “won” is a propaganda deceit.

In March 2021, the process of choosing Legco members changed. Chinese Communist Party selection replaced election. Seventy seats were “reserved for candidates picked by influential members of industry groups and by a committee of Beijing loyalists.” That’s VOA’s careful description.

Translation: the CCP installed cronies and operatives in the Legco. They are puppets and propagandists for the CCP dictatorship, not democratically elected representatives of Hong Kong’s now dispossessed citizens.

Check it out.

RELATED: A belated post. 2022’s Four Strategic Challenges. There are more than four, but these are big ones.

Challenge No. 1: Imperialist powers hellbent on recovering lost empires (and fulfilling the grandiose dreams of their current leaders.)

Very related to Hong Kong. Check out the other three.

THANKFULNESS SHOULD PRECEDE TAKEFULNESS: Aunt Lillian’s Timely Grace. My Christmas column — with a little thrust at the end.

GAMING THE BULGE: The Battle of the Bulge began December 16, 1944. The latest StrategyTalk features a discussion of Jim Dunnigan’s classic operational simulation of the battle. “Bulge.” Jim and I also discuss the background to the German attack and lessons learned.

RELATED: A few photos from the Bulge archive. 1: An M-36 Jackson heads for the front. 2: Americans improvise snow camouflage. 3: Snow covered Shermans at St. Vith. 4: Exhausted engineers in the woods near Wiltz. 5: American soldiers in the snow — without winter camouflage. 6: German grenadiers in woods in Luxembourg. This last photo was taken December 22, 1944.

COOL PHOTO: A very wet USAF pararescueman climbs into a helicopter during a combat search and rescue mission exercise in the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s a photo of two HH-60W Jolly Green II “Whiskey” rescue helicopters. The HH-60W is an advanced variant of the UH-60M Black Hawk.

CHINA AND RUSSIA: The Authoritarian-Imperialist Threat To World Peace

What we are witnessing in December 2021 are Russian and Chinese “power cocktails” mixing diplomacy with economic and military power. The cocktail goals: seeding moral weaknesses in democratic nations, exploiting sensational U.S. media, and manipulating the Biden administration.

The wages of weakness: the Afghanistan bugout and debacle exposed the Biden administration as pompous, militarily ignorant and inept.

Beyond December 2021? We will have to confront the troubling, deep history.

Read the entire essay.

A DATE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY: Pearl Harbor 80 years on.

…Pearl Harbor was more of a culmination than a surprise.

In the late summer of 1945, historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager reflected on the WWII’s origins. In a short article published in November 1945, they wrote, “The explanation (for WWII) was to be found in the breakdown in the system of collective security and the growth of international anarchy, moral and political, in the post-war years.” Post-war meant post-WWI, the war to end all wars.

Collective insecurity sounds so academic, and so I’ll translate: The more sober and more good failed to stand up to the fanatics.

Did Pearl Harbor start WWII? No. Let’s go to Mukden (Shenyang), China, Sept. 19, 1931, when Japanese soldiers attacked the Chinese Mukden garrison and invaded Manchuria.

There’s a very good case Mukden is the surprise attack that started WWII.

The Mukden attack was what current observers call “an emerging threat.” Emerging? It was a threat that Washington could ignore. So was the Nanking Massacre, commonly called the Rape of Nanking, an imperial Japanese mass atrocity committed against the Chinese in 1937.

Dead history? No, instructive history. In 2021 America and its allies — including a democratic Japan — face emerging threats that are, frankly, deadly threats thrust in our collective face.

Check it out.

THE LATEST STRATEGYTALK: Spooky Stuff On The Horizon. Jim Dunnigan and I discuss and speculate upon bad stuff happening on and around Planet Earth. Jim has a couple of surprises. If you like it, subscribe.

PART TWO: Consequences of America Losing a War to China

In July Japan’s Vice Defense Minister Yasuhide Nakayama told the Hudson Institute that China and Russia could launch a surprise “Pearl Harbor-style attack” in the Pacific. The Washington Examiner and Reuters quoted Nakayama as insisting the U.S. and Japan must demonstrate the will to deter both China and Russia because “they are doing their (military) exercises together.” They conduct exercises from “Honolulu to Japan,” which means America’s “protection line is going … backwards …”

Nakayama said China would likely target Taiwan. But that threatens Okinawa (a Japanese island with U.S. bases). Mid-Pacific exercises demonstrate targeting Hawaii and the West Coast, so he couldn’t rule out an attack on Hawaii reprising 1941 but employing 21st-century weaponry.

Read the entire essay.

RELATED: Part One (from last week).

TRACERS AT NIGHT: U.S. Marines let their M240B machine guns rock and roll during a night firing exercise. Photo taken at Camp Rodriguez, Pocheon, Republic of Korea, on Oct. 16, 2021. T

TIME TO GET READY: Part One: Consequences of America Losing a War to China

In July The National Interest published an essay entitled “Can America Lose to China?” written by Kishore Mahbubani, a fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute and a former Singapore UN Ambassador.

The essay focuses on the China-U.S. political, economic and social competition. Mahbubani begins with an observation: Americans believe “an open society like America has many natural advantages” over China’s autocracy. By assuming inherent advantage, “Americans cannot even conceive of the possibility of losing out to China.”

That may well be true, though not quite in the way he frames the problem.

More:

It is foolish to believe an intense war involving China and the U.S. would be confined to the Taiwan Strait and end with Taiwan’s loss. In the scenario, missiles hit regional U.S. bases –meaning Japan, South Korea, Guam, perhaps Australia, Singapore and Hawaii.

Go a step farther. What keeps this western Pacific war from escalating to a war for national survival?

Part Two (next week) will examine several very uncomfortable consequences of America losing a war to China. Stay tuned.

BEIJING SEES A STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITY:China Tests Taiwan After Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle.

The withdrawal was a self-inflicted disaster. The world knows it, even if the Washington Beltway media refuses to admit it.

Power abhors a vacuum, and autocratic states and tyrannies like Communist China rush to fill power vacuums.

Read the entire essay.

COMBATANT CRAFT MEDIUM: A CCM “maneuvers in the waters off the coast of Guam.” Photo taken Sept. 8, 2021. Here’s a CCM participating in a 2019 exercise in the Black Sea. The CCM is a little over 60 feet long. Small special operations warfare craft require support. This Special Operations update from 2018 discusses a Maritime Support Vessel (MSV) the Navy acquired to support SOCOM. It mentions the Combat Craft Assault (CCA) which can be used to insert SEAL teams. The CCA is about 41 feet long. This Special Ops update from 2014 provides the strategic context: preparing for a war in the Pacific. The update also mentions the MSV acquisition.

OVERDUE: Mark Milley’s Perception Warfare Deserves a Leavenworth Long Course

Overdue for several reasons. The column was published Wednesday. But Milley’s overdue for a wake-up from woke.

The Beltway is a vicious high school of a sort, but unfortunately its viciousness isn’t Mean Girls wrestling with fantasy crises. In Milley’s case, we’re confronting the abrogation of the constitutional order of the military under civilian control and ultimately the U.S. military’s duty to defend America regardless of the party or personality of the president.

Fact for Milley: Senior Chinese military officers are members of the Chinese Communist Party. Tiananmen Square. Hong Kong absorption. Uighur genocide. The Chinese military is a Party tool, Mark, a violent tool.

Milley’s short-sighted and, I argue, savvily self-serving action weakened U.S. national security and put the U.S. constitutional system at risk.

Milley’s actions are another example of the destructive perception warfare waged against the American people by powerful Beltway elites — and the worst examples of this war are perpetrated by power elites in the Democratic Party, to include President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

The Leavenworth “short course” is the Command and General Staff School. The Long Course used to involve a stint in the Disciplinary Barracks breaking rocks.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE MR. BLINKEN?: Biden Administration Strategic Errors Led to Afghan Debacle.

Excerpt:

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Blinken that if he were just reading Blinken’s prepared testimony, then he would think the withdrawal “was a smashing success. But I do read the news, as most Americans do, and we realize this is a complete debacle … what concerns me the most … is the detachment from reality … ”

In the Biden administration, political “optics” overrule reality. Blinken repeats, with premeditation, the Biden administration’s most grievous strategic error: focusing on managing political perception instead of executing policy actions that address on-the-ground facts.

And there’s more:

The debacle’s principal component was a Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO). By U.S. doctrine the State Department serves as the lead agency in a NEO. However, withdrawal from a combat zone requires military forces to maintain security, which means the State and Defense Departments must constantly coordinate with allies in planning the evacuation and in all phases of its execution. Moreover, in a complex situation like Afghanistan, the U.S. president must be willing to send military reinforcements to respond to surprises — like unanticipated enemy attacks.

An experienced planner can sketch a basic NEO plan in 10 minutes, one designed to set conditions favorable to a successful evacuation.

So the column includes one. It draws on a sketch plan I made in mid-July after a couple of friends asked me how I’d conduct a withdrawal from Afghanistan. No secret sauce at all. It’s common sense and standard NEO planning guidance. See Joint Publication 3-68 for very detailed guidance. Did Antony Blinken read it? I doubt it.