Paper Tiger Tough Guys, those Republicans

Filed in National by on November 18, 2015

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  1. Jason330 says:
    November 18, 2015 at 8:39 am

    Good stuff from the Prez. The non-crazy portion of the American populous needs a strong voice.

    Returning to my constant gripe – the GOP blow-hards and bullies should have been punched in the nose years ago.

  2. Prop Joe says:
    November 18, 2015 at 9:11 am

    Muwahahahahahahahaha! Not possible to have said it better. I love it…

    Now, I shall refill my coffee and wait for the local paper tough guys (Rusty, Tom, Anonymous v1, Anonymous v2, Anonymous v3, etc.) to get on to DL and offer their usually stellar and intellectually flawless counters.

  3. mouse says:
    November 18, 2015 at 9:13 am

    They have to wait for the official talk radio response

  4. Anonymous says:
    November 18, 2015 at 10:25 am

    Oh, NOW he’s a tough guy. What a joke!
    Why didn’t they use the intell they had, before the atrocity in Paris.
    Lt. Gen Michael Flynn said the prez was 100% wrong, in his direction on ISIS. I think Flynn has a great deal more experience than the Prez.
    The Administration called ISIS, JV.
    Last Friday he said ISIS was contained……how’s that statement working for you now!
    Now, he comes back, after he walked off stage, because the press was a little tough on him. Had to get advise and then try to come out as a tough guy. Only took 7 years!!!!

  5. Jason330 says:
    November 18, 2015 at 10:31 am

    Get yourself back to the safety of your Fox News foxhole.

    For the record, there are scores of places in the internet to go to find people who think Fox News is a real news operation.

    This is not one of them.

  6. Stat says:
    November 18, 2015 at 6:59 pm

    What a joke. World leaders are coming together to combat evil the world hasn’t seen since Hitler and all he wants to do is lecture people who disagree with him. It never gets old hearing him define who we are as Americans and our traditions. He is right about the world watching and the world is missing our leadership.

  7. Steve Newton says:
    November 18, 2015 at 7:43 pm

    @Stat:

    combat evil the world hasn’t seen since Hitler?

    Are you kidding? Let’s parse this for you:

    1) Magnitude of killing: Stalin in the USSR, Pol Pot in Kampuchea, Mao in the PRC, genocide in Rwanda, … ok, you got nothing, as Daesh is more or less a competitor for Idi Amin at this point.

    2) Magnitude of threat: Hitler controlled the fourth or fifth largest industrial complex in the world, which–through conquest in a single year he expanded to control virtually all of Western Europe, and arguably make Nazi Germany the 2nd or 3rd largest industrial complex in the world and the ability to place over 14,000,000 trained troops under arms supported by 5,000 tanks, 10,000 combat aircraft and a fleet of over 300 attack submarines; Daesh possesses no industrial base, no population base, and has its entire existence dependent on weapons it cannot produce or fix and ammunition it has to purchase. Daesh can’t even hold onto territory against the Kurds while Turkey is bombing them. Daesh is only a serious military threat in the region of two previously destabilized countries that lack even a second-rate industrial base between them. Daesh stole part of Al Qaeda’s franchise operations model, but–and this is the critical part–is not capable of wrecking serious demographic, economic, or military harm on any major power (and here I start the list of major powers with that strong-man country Italy) unless that country is willing to collapse because a few hundred people got killed. Daesh couldn’t even have beaten UNITA in Angola in the late 1970s (because UNITA actually had combat helicopters and the occasional fighter jet).

    Open societies entail risk; always have. But it is literally impossible for any organization like Al Qaeda or Daesh to maintain an operational tempo of attacks in Western Europe or Russia or the Americas because even faux-fundamentalist Muslim fanaticism cannot repeal the laws of logistics and the same techniques cannot be repeated in successive incidents. Moreover, the training wastage in employing suicide attackers is prohibitively high.

    That’s why the US and associated countries initially did so poorly in many parts of Iraq and continue to do poorly in parts of Afghanistan. By “taking the fight to them” we have eliminated 90% of the enemy’s logistical handicaps, provided a local cultural “sea” in which to hide, and dramatically reduced the training requirements for enemy soldiers. In other words: when we fight on the ground over there, we hand organizations like Daesh and Al Qaeda advantages they will never have when trying to project force across continents and oceans.

    Of course this analysis requires that (a) the Pentagon is really interested in American defense and not simply pimping for higher budgets; and (b) that American citizens have not become sniveling cowards.

    If we had been forced to depend on the current crop of political cowards to settle America, everyone would still have been living on the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains.

  8. pandora says:
    November 18, 2015 at 7:47 pm

    Stat gets schooled by Professor Newton.

  9. Liberal Elite says:
    November 18, 2015 at 7:49 pm

    @Stat “What a joke.”
    Yes. I love how Obama uses humor to diminish radical viewpoints in the US.

    “World leaders are coming together to combat evil the world hasn’t seen since Hitler…”
    What world are you part of??? This is ridiculous. There is no “coming together” and there’s lots of evil on par with ISIL (or worse). Do you need a list?

    “…and all he wants to do is lecture people who disagree with him.”
    Every president does this. It’s part of the job. He’s the front man.

    “It never gets old hearing him define who we are as Americans and our traditions.”
    Agreed.

    “He is right about the world watching and the world is missing our leadership.”
    It really does suck having only one reasonable and functioning political party.

  10. Liberal Elite says:
    November 18, 2015 at 7:50 pm

    @p “Stat gets schooled by Professor Newton.”

    Aww… shucks. That’s what I was trying to do, but he clearly did it much better.

  11. pandora says:
    November 18, 2015 at 7:58 pm

    You’ve been doing an awesome job of schooling these guys too, LE!

  12. Steve Newton says:
    November 18, 2015 at 8:40 pm

    @LE I was long-winded, you were succinct.

    It’s just that this is my specific area of professional expertise and I’m sick and tired of catering to idiots and cowards who don’t have a goddamn clue what they are talking about.

    As a general FYI, I participated in discussions in DC for Homeland Security’s Office for Domestic Preparedness in early 2002 in a working group right after 9/11 that was doing “Tiger Team” simulations. Essentially it was our job to figure out realistic ways to attack America. My group drew urban areas. We quickly deduced that what 9/11 taught us was that the equivalent of a small infantry platoon (10-15 trained fighters) could be slowly inserted into a city and over time arm themselves and familiarize themselves with non-hardened objectives. Then we laid out about six basic scenarios of attack, along with the noticeable precursors of each (activities to keep tabs on in expectation of such attacks). I can’t tell you what any of those are, although almost any decent urban warfare tactician could deduce them.

    Point being: one of the reasons we have not seen such attacks in the US is because they are logistically very difficult for Daesh or Al-Qaeda to carry out. They literally take a couple of years to plan, and way too much can go wrong during that time. I helped develop a training simulation that made you an Al Qaeda planner and showed just how difficult it was to plan and direct an attack, and how many ways it could go wrong. We used it to identify organizational and logistical “choke point.”

    We did a study a little later and discovered that it would be literally FIVE TIMES EASIER to launch such an attack in Western Europe than in the US. That’s one.

    Two is that this information (and I guarantee you it has been refined since I stopped doing this work in 2003-2004) was shared with major Federal, State, and metropolitan LEOs, drills have been run, equipment prepositioned, and commanders named. From a civil rights perspective I did not like what happened in Boston immediately after the Marathon bombing, but from an operational perspective the incident revealed that the lessons had been learned.

    Without too much trouble you can Google a surprising number of exercises run in most major metro areas (including Philadelphia, Baltimore, etc.) over the past decade to cover such events. You can also find out that most Western European nations do not have the kind of responsive LEO tactical flexibility that we have here. That’s one of the reasons Paris went so badly.

    I am NOT saying that a Paris-attack could not happen in the US. What I am saying is that we are far better prepared to intercept, short-circuit, and respond to such an attack than Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid, etc. And we are prepared for a bunch of other scenarios that I don’t even want to talk about.

    Final note: i got into trouble at one of these meetings by being a smart-ass and pointing out that in Philly one of these terrorist platoons would have to have been operating for at least a week before the police even noticed the upsurge in the murder rate, and that by the time they did the drug gangs would already have killed the terrorists for trespassing onto their territory. Nobody has a goddamn sense of humor any more.

    (Disclaimer: nothing I have said above has been even remotely classified since 2007.)

  13. pandora says:
    November 18, 2015 at 8:50 pm

    Yeah Steve, but Stat said, “HITLER!”

  14. Liberal Elite says:
    November 18, 2015 at 9:32 pm

    @SN “It’s just that this is my specific area of professional expertise and I’m sick and tired of catering to idiots and cowards who don’t have a goddamn clue what they are talking about.”

    It’s certainly not my are of expertise, but I do have a general awareness of what is happening around me, and I do lots of traveling (e.g. just spent a month in Korea) that provides me a broader perspective than those who sit in one place.

    “Final note: I got into trouble at one of these meetings…”
    Hilarious story!! But it does bring home the importance of local community being active in defending the community.

  15. Stat says:
    November 19, 2015 at 2:39 pm

    Right Professor, so you think we’re still dealing with the JV team. That’s what people said before 911 about Al Qaeda. Any evil that has declared war against us in the name of their religion and seeks to indiscriminately kill as many people as possible should be taken seriously.

  16. Liberal Elite says:
    November 19, 2015 at 3:48 pm

    @Stat “Any evil that has declared war against us in the name of their religion and seeks to indiscriminately kill as many people as possible should be taken seriously.”

    You, on the other hand… not so much.

    “…you think we’re still dealing with the JV team.”

    Yea… That’s all they have. If they had a varsity, we’d be living beside craters.

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