We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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One of the current controversies around the war on terror is how to treat the prisoners. Dale Franks at the excellent Questions and Observations blog gets it pretty much right, I think.
My preferred method of dealing with these terror prisoners would be to get two captains and a major together as a tribunal, declare them to be unlawful combatants, and put them in front of a firing squad. Now, maybe, because we’re nice guys, we could let them know that if any of them give us verifiable, useful information, then we’ll commute their sentences, and won’t shoot them. Otherwise, however, it’s a blindfold and a last cigarette for the lot of ’em.
The difference of course, is that doing so would be legal. It would be part of the accepted customs of warfare that have been generally agreed upon for over a century. Torturing or beating them to death, without even the convenient fiction of legality, is not.
I found very little to quibble with in his excellent essay on the subject.
This story does not inspire a lot of confidence in the current Coalition effectiveness of dealing with islamists and sundry Baathist dead-enders in Iraq.
Some 22 people have been killed and many more wounded after a rocket attack on a U.S. military base in the northern town of Mosul. A grim day. Now, call me a pajama strategist, but I wonder whether it ought to be possible to make some use of the tremendous technological advantages of America’s modern army in defending soldiers against such attacks on their own military encampments. No, I am not going to make the mistake of supposing that we can create the ‘perfect’ military. I am aware that all organisations, even relatively well-run ones, have their weak spots, and that includes the armed forces of the West. But it does stick in the craw that a group of servicemen having a meal can end up being killed by a bunch of insurgents running around with a few rocket launchers a few thousand yards off.
I have been looking around a few websites for possible enlightenment on what can be done. DefenceTech blog gives some insight into how ordinary servicemen and women are improvising their own techniques, including piecemeal bits of engineering, to make their vehicles and equipment less vulnerable to attack. It goes to show that crushing the insurgents is not just about the fancy stuff like flying an Apache helicopter. Improvisation has its part to play.
As an aside, it makes me wonder how those critics beating up Donald Rumsfeld at the moment would have written about the calibre of F. D. Roosevelt’s defence chiefs 50 years ago, during the Battle of the Ardennes, better known as the Battle of the Bulge. Andrew Sullivan might have been calling for Eishenhower’s head on a stick by now.
December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbour attack.
The image says it all.
I hear the term “Anglosphere” as meaning that there is some community of the English-speaking nations on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. But when I come across this site, I feel like I am living in a foreign country to Americans.
Trying to list all the reasons why Adopt a Sniper is definitely not an English website would take hours. And that is a shame.
[via Instapundit]
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row by row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If yea break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
– John McCrae
In my office today in the City, at 11 o’clock, on the 11th of November, hundreds of us switched off our phones, stilled our keyboards, took our eyes off our spreadsheets, and marked two minutes’ silence for the men and women killed in defence of this country.
A lot is written about what Poppy Day ought to mean, but for me, the son of a former RAF aircraft navigator, cousin-in-law of a fine member of the US Air Force and descendant of two Royal Navy commanders, the meaning is very clear. I would not now be able to blog my inconsequential libertarian thoughts without the sacrifices made by others. It is as simple as that.
The long delayed assault on Fallujah is underway. Our troops have spent many months supplying the enemy with a target rich environment and it is about time we ended it.
There is some silver lining to the cloud. The months gave the new Iraqi government a chance to build its image within Iraq. It bought time for civilians in the town to get out or hunker down. It gave loads of time for every fruitcake from the Atlantic to the Pacific to make their way to Iraq and infiltrate Fallujah. They think they can win a great battle there, and I hope they keep believing it all the way until their very last breath.
You know these people are insane: noone but the terminally mentally deficient would want to be a part of an amateur effort to hold ground against the Marines.
I wonder if there might be a bit of Darwinian selection at work here.
PS: If we have any of the troops from that part of the world dropping by… good luck and good hunting.
Today is the 150th anniversary of that glorious cock-up known as The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The charge, which was part of the Battle of Balaklava, was one of those iconic moments in British military history due more to the works of Alfred Tennyson than the actual importance of the incident itself, which was really little more than a footnote in the overall conduct of the Crimean War. Yet at the time many newspapers accorded the charge of the Light Brigade far more significance than it was really due (and they also tended to gloss over the rather more successful actions of both the Heavy Brigade under Lord Lucan and the magnificent Chasseurs D’Afrique under General D’Allonville).
The charge was regarded as a great military blunder, and certainly it was not what Lord Raglan actually intended to happen when he issued the orders, nor what Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade’s commander, wanted to execute (he is alleged to have quipped “Here goes the last of the Brudenells”, his family name, upon receiving the order), but in point of fact, the charge largely disrupted the astonished Russian forces at the end of the valley. As military blunders go, it was a fairly effective one and the overall battle was more or less a draw (though Russian attempts to take Balaklava failed, so it could be argued that it was a net allied victory).
Also in the news is the redeployment of the Black Watch mechanised battlegroup into the American zone of operations in Iraq. The fact this unremarkable operational movement of forces within Iraq has caused apoplexy in media and political circles shows that 150 years on, the pundits back home are just as clueless about military affairs as they ever were.
I was paging through the new issue of American Rifleman, the monthly magazine of the National Rifle Association, when I came across an interview with General Tommy Franks, who led the brilliant assault on Baghdad last year. (Sorry, no link available).
In the interview, the retired General is asked a couple of questions about his preferences in guns, and I found his answers surprising.
First, he said he prefers the current Beretta 9mm handgun to the .45 he carried in Vietnam. He couldn’t really point to anything concrete, just a generalized (so to speak) preference. He did note that it had to be shooting the right loads to be an adequate combat weapon, but that was the only concession he made.
Second, he said he considered the M-16 to be a superior battlefield weapon to the AK-47 in every way. Period. Based on his comments about the M-16 earlier (he was in basic training when they were first issued), I think there is an unspoken assumption here that that it is a better weapon in the hands of well-trained troops who know how to maintain it.
…about my manhood have just been reinforced. And how:
Perez, 21, lost his leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq more than a year ago, but despite the phantom pains that haunt him, he says he is determined to prove to the Army that he is no less of a man – and no less of a soldier.
“I’m not ready to get out yet,” he says. “I’m not going to let this little injury stop me from what I want to do.”
Perez is one of at least four amputees from the 82nd Airborne Division to re-enlist. With a new carbon-fiber prosthetic leg, Perez intends to show a medical board he can run an eight-minute mile, jump out of airplanes and pass all the other paratrooper tests that will allow him to go with his regiment to Afghanistan next year
When he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for his rehabilitation, Perez asked a pair of generals who visited his bedside if it was possible for him to stay in the Army.
“They told me, ‘It’s all up to you, how much you want it’,” he says. “If I could do everything like a regular soldier, I could stay in.”
He wasted little time getting started. At one point, a visitor found him doing push-ups in bed. He trained himself to walk normally with his new leg, and then run with it.
Perez has to rise at least an hour earlier than his fellow soldiers to allow swelling from the previous day’s training to subside enough for his stump to fit into the prosthetic.
I am glad he is on my side.
A British muslim in the Royal Air Force has been successfully prosecuted for going AWOL after claiming he did not want to help kill fellow muslims in Iraq.
It seems to me that an excellent reason for refusing to join a nation’s military is the simple desire to not shoot at, or facilitate shooting at, people that you might not feel should not be shot at. If you have a goodly distrust for the wisdom of the state to begin with, taking the view that you are not going to kill someone just because the government wants you to is a very reasonable default position to adopt.
Now of course all states and their militaries are not the same. If you voluntarily contract to do the bidding of the government of Sweden or the Vatican or Switzerland or Costa Rica or Swaziland or Belize or Luxembourg… nations who are certainly not ‘military extroverts’… then the range of things you could reasonably expect to be asked to do will generally not include going to far off places you had never previously heard of and dropping bombs on the locals.
However…
If you do elect to join a military in circumstances other than fighting off the clear and present danger of an invasion, it seems to me that you are offering to allow the state make the decision for you of when it is appropriate to shoot and at which particular people. Moreover, if you join a military of some place like Britain, France or the USA, i.e. states who frequently sent their soldiers off to kill folks in far off lands for all manner of reasons other than the direct self-defence of the homeland, then it seems a bit rich to take the state’s pay checks for several years but then act surprised if you get asked to, well, help kill folks in far off lands.
Read the damn job description before you take the shilling.
Austin Bay is right up there with Wretchard when it comes to good analysis, hard common sense, and good info on the current war. He’s back from the front in Iraq with a column on how the current war really is a fight for freedom.
If there is one mistake I think we’ve made in fighting this war, it’s been the way we’ve soft-pedaled the ideological dimensions. This really is a fight for the future, between our free, open political system and the unholy alliance of despots and Islamo-fascists whose very existence depends on denying liberty.
Our enemies are the enemies of freedom within their spheres of influence. In the modern world of jumbo jets and international networks of all kinds, they have already succeeded in reducing our freedom, and seek to do so even more. Because they have chosen to attack us with violence, we are in a war of self-defense with the enemies of freedom. Fighting this war is, in my view, entirely consistent with a libertarian world-view.
There were two articles on the Rittenhouse Review which rather interested me:
Firstly the blog’s author, James Capozzola, displays what I can only describe as a very healthy disdain for democracy (which I certainly share) by applauding the fact that people in Pennsylvania will not be allowed to vote for Ralph Nader for President of the USA. I have commented on this subject before on Samizdata.net.
Now if only Kerry and Bush could also be disqualified…
Secondly, there is an article which mentions that the 427th Transportation Company (based in Pennsylvania, hence being of particular interest to Philadelphia based Rittenhouse Review) was deployed to Iraq with insufficient body armour and GPS sets. He approvingly notes that after he reported on this, one of his readers privately purchased a GPS set and intends to mail it out to Iraq for the unit to use. I too heartily approve of this and would love to see a significant proportion of the military’s funding gradually replaced with voluntary subscriptions, something I would happily contribute to myself. However I must take issue with the phrase:
Imagine it: The U.S. military, notably reservists, relying on family, friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers to fill gaping holes in the Pentagon supply chain.
I would prefer to think of it as ‘members of society with a vested interest in survival and an affinity for the people defending them’, rather than the more pejorative ‘perfect strangers’, filling the spaces left in the Pentagon’s supply chain which are theirs to rightly fill.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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