Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
The U.S. Navy says it has seized a weapons shipment in the Arabian Sea from Iran likely heading to war-torn Yemen.
The Navy said in a statement Monday that the USS Sirocco on March 28 intercepted and seized the shipment of weapons hidden aboard a small dhow, a type of ship commonly used in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
The Navy said the shipment included 1,500 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 200 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 21 .50-caliber machine guns. It said those aboard the dhow were released after sailors confiscated the arms.
I'm old enough to remember when we wanted to get rid of all these PC to the USCG ... is it too soon to discuss a proper ... and I mean proper ... follow on to this bit of kit? Yes, too soon. Let's just show the wee crew's good work to start the week off right.
Since its ascendency to the premier maritime power, the US Navy - especially in the area of undersea warfare - has been at the leading edge of using technology to get a military edge. During the Cold War, significant and steady progress in the first two steps of the kill chain against submarines, location and tracking, made the prospect of engaging superior numbers of Soviet submarine forces manageable. We continue that tradition today, but to keep ahead of growing challenges, we have test. Build a little, test a little, learn a lot will stop dead in its tracks without testing in the real world. Computer simulation is only so good. When it comes to submarines especially, you have to get in the water with them. Knowing our technological track record an operating a generation or two ahead of some potential adversaries - are there ways they can negate our edge - or at least buy time while they catch up? Are we vulnerable to potential challengers using national and international law against us? Undersea Lawfare? Our guests for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern to discuss will be Rear Admiral J. Michael "Carlos" Johnson, USN (Ret.) and Captain Michael T. Palmer, USN. As a stepping off point, we will be using their article in the latest Naval War College Review; UNDERSEA LAWFARE - Can the US Navy Fall Victim to This Asymmetrical Warfare Threat? RADM Johnson retired after 33 years of service as a naval aviator that included combat in Vietnam, Libya, the Balkans, and the Persian Gulf. He commanded the John F. Kennedy Battle Group, CVW-8, and VFA-86. Ashore he served on the staffs of the CNO as Director of Aviation Plans and Requirements) and the J3 of EUCOM. Captain Palmer is an active-duty JAG and an adjunct assistant professor at ODU. He served as environmental counsel to the CNO; U.S. Fleet Forces Command; and Commander, Navy Region Mid-Atlantic.
Join us live if you can with the usual suspects in the chat room and offer up your questions for our guest, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at blogtalkradio or Stitcher. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here.
As the vast majority of the Diversity Industry's intellectual foundation is based upon projected self-loathing - a large part of their efforts have been attacking the foundation and bindings of our nation; the ideas that came from The Enlightenment and the cornerstones of Western Civilization. Diversity bullies and their ilk hate themselves, and in their self-loathing hate that which defines them. Defense of the ideals of The Enlightenment and Western Civilization is not simply an academic exercise. The USA is a republic of ideas. We are not bound by race, ethnicity, religious sect, and for a large part geography. As outlined in our Constitution, we have a structure to be bound by ideas and principals. These must always be the controlling factor in our civil existence, if not, the lower brain functions and worst parts of human nature will come to the front; race, ethnicity, religion, and regionalism. Those four horsemen of disintegration and bloodshed are what rise when multi-culturalism gains. Want to see the end result? Just look to the Balkans and Rwanda. The war against what binds us together is trans-generational. The kids of the Progressive Era used the children of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, as their foot soldiers. Gen X saw the fruits up close when they were in college in the 80s and 90s. Though advancing in some areas, the Diversity Industry has seen a few setbacks as the Boomers approach their dotage and Gen Y gets a footing - good news for all of us. In a battle that was thought lost in the 1980s, there may be some fresh action that will work in favor of those of us who strive to preserved our republic of ideas from the agents of disunity who seek nothing more than to break us in to warring factions based on race, creed, color, or national origin. Seeing this front opening up again should have all of us smile a bit today. Let's head on over to Ashley Thorne at NYPost;
In 1964, 15 of the 50 premier universities in America — including Stanford — required students to take a survey of Western civilization. All 50 offered the course, and nearly all of them (41) offered it as a way to satisfy some requirement.
But in the 1980s, minority students and faculty at Stanford asserted that requiring students to take the Western civ survey was implicitly racist. Jesse Jackson marched with an army of protesters chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go.”
In 1988, away it went. Stanford then began requiring a course on a non-Western culture. By 2010, none of the 50 top universities required Western civilization, and 34 didn’t even offer the course.
Stanford students want it back. And they don’t simply want to dust off a shelved syllabus.
The Review writers, led by editor-in-chief Harry Elliott, seek a new way to study old ideas. Students want to know the good — the legacies of reason, freedom and innovation. But they also want to know the bad — the skeletons of wars, slavery and the Holocaust.
They also recognize that we seek equal rights and individual choice because we have inherited Western ideas about freedom and human dignity.
Why study Western civilization? As these students argue in their manifesto, by knowing the West we can understand how knowledge has grown over time; how dictatorships rise and fall; how ideas we now presuppose took many years and much struggle to gain traction; and why these ideas matter. Without such knowledge, students will take the heritage of their civilization for granted and be unable, or unwilling, to defend it.
Of course, if forced, some would take a Western Civ course as an opportunity to attack it and ride their hobby horse around - that is OK; smart people will welcome and win that fight if it is in the open and fair. Like courses in critical thinking, understanding Western Civ will make our republic stronger;
The history of the West lays a foundation on which to build more specialized knowledge of art, literature, science, politics, philosophy and economics.
No matter what field students enter, they are well-served throughout their lives if they know how we got here. They can understand Donald Trump more clearly if they’ve read Machiavelli. They can see why it matters that Bernie Sanders is an intellectual descendent of Karl Marx.
They can recognize old arguments, learn from the mistakes of the past and apply what they’ve learned from this wider universe to our current age.
There is a long but important article over at WaPo by Greg Jaffee that you need to read. It is mostly about the pending retirement of General Campbell, USA - but there is a lot more there, especially for those who spent the balance of their active duty time involved in this conflict;
Campbell had first come to Afghanistan in 2002 as a colonel when the mission was hunting down Osama bin Laden and Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader. Soon his son, who was in elementary school during that first Afghanistan tour, will return for his third deployment in the country.
A lone, mud-walled compound clinging to the side of a mountain below caught Campbell’s eye.
“You wonder how they can live like that,” he said.
Sherman often had similar thoughts about the country where he had spent most of the past six years. “I always wish I could have a sense of perspective,” he said. “I wish I could have visited Kabul or Kandahar during the Taliban regime just to have a sense of what it was like.” He wanted to see Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s reign or Afghanistan during the brutal civil war of the 1990s.
He wished he could go back to Baraki Barak and try to piece together exactly what had happened. Why had a place that seemed so promising and received so much American attention and aid faltered? What had he missed?
“The war doesn’t end, and that’s why I am conflicted leaving,” Sherman said. “There’s still so much to do, and there’s still so much more that I don’t know. I don’t know a smidgen of this country. Do I know a lot of Afghans? Absolutely. But in my mind what I don’t know is the same as when I first got here.”
I was a mid-range LCDR deployed to the 5th Fleet AOR when 911 went down, and had a bit part in the initial invasion of Afghanistan through the end of the year. I had a child just a few months old. Eight years later, I ended the last year of my active duty career on the deck in that sad nation. I've been off active duty for over half a decade, and that child is now driving me around with her learner's permit. The war goes on. I'm still trying to figure out this corner of it. Read the whole thing to get a feeling of where Matt Sherman is as well. I think he's got it right; simplicity.
There is a nuance to the attack on Brussels last week that is already well understood by long-time readers of CDRSalamander. Yes, on the whole the most recent attack in Europe was a well-executed tactical operation by the enemy in the course of The Long War. Brussels, as the HQ of the EU and NATO is the premier target in Europe along with Paris and London, closely followed by Rome and Berlin. The backstory to the attack in question; this was an inside job. That is the nuance. The attackers were not part of wave of million+ military aged males from radicalized Islamic nations that crashed over the borders of Europe in the last two years. No, these were native born Belgians, the end result of decades of wrongheaded national policies that had no historical record of success. Just the opposite, all of written history showed where polities being supported in Belgium would lead, but history was ignored in the arrogance of the now. Over at TheNewYorkPost, Amir Teheri does an outstanding job filling in the caps of why this latest attack was very much part of The Long War, with some distinct local characteristics;
What happened in Brussels was a co-production by adepts of two sick ideologies.
The first one is Islamism in its many versions, including Khomeinism in Iran, Talibanism in Afghanistan, Salafism in Arab countries, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and ISIS and its offshoots across the globe. It will remain firmly in place until it implodes under the weight of its savage contradictions, as did the old Soviet Union, or is defeated in a war as was the case with Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan.
The other co-producer, the mushy and politically correct “liberal” ideology that has seduced segments of opinion in Western democracies, can and must be combated by all those who wish to protect the democratic system in an increasingly dangerous world.
Since most factories were located in the Walloons’ area, the owners were careful to import workers from French-speaking lands which, at the time, made French-controlled North Africa an attractive source of labor. The Walloons also had a low birth rate, while the Flemish had large families. One source of concern for French speakers was the capital Brussels, with its 19 districts divided across linguistic lines. The Walloons feared that their depopulated districts would be repopulated by Dutch-speakers. They offered rent-free or subsidized housing to immigrants from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia who knew no Flemish but could plod along in kitchen French.
By the 1990s, most of the factories had disappeared, but the immigrants remained. By then Islam was Belgium’s second-largest religion, now accounting for over 700,000 people or 6.2% of the population. Of these, almost half live in Brussels, counting for 28% of the total population of the city, and guarding the demographically declining districts from “falling” to the Flemish.
...
The Belgian multiculturalist elites, making a fetish of the concept of “otherness” corrected that lacuna by financing courses in Islam, encouraging the building of mosques and Koranic schools and even subsidizing pilgrimages to Mecca. The welfare industry also had an interest in protecting the “otherness” of the immigrant community where unemployment was rising, reaching over 40% by the end of the 1990s. In some cases, four generations of a family could be found on the welfare register in the context of their cherished “otherness.”
Radical Islamists of all ilks were welcomed to market their ideological wares.
In 1993 when France and most other Western nations banned the Algerian terrorist groups, Belgium welcomed them with open arms. For example, the so-called Islamic Armed Group (GIA), responsible for tens of thousands of killings in Algeria, maintained an office and published a magazine in Molenbeek, while the Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb al-Tahrir) which campaigns for the revival of the caliphate, transferred its leadership to Belgium.
...
The Belgian multiculturalist elite, helped by political allies in France and Germany, also secured European Union subsidies for Islamist propaganda in the shape of seminars and conferences and, ultimately, the creation of a European Fatwa Council headed by the Muslim Brotherhood televangelist Sheikh Yussef al-Qaradawi.
...
After the 9/11 al Qaeda attacks against the United States, Belgium, though member of the North Atlantic Treaty organization (NATO) and host to its headquarters, kept a low profile when the allies acted against the Taliban to dismantle terrorists bases in Afghanistan. In the US-led liberation of Iraq that followed in 2003, Belgium joined France’s President Jacques Chirac in denouncing “George W Bush’s illegal war.”
So open, so accommodating, not unlike the evil US or Britain. Belgium was sure it wasn’t a target for jihadists.
...
They even wrote to the king of Belgium inviting him and his family to convert to Islam as soon as possible.
Petty domestic identity based political concerns by a small but active political party, throw in some fluffy useful idiots from the multiculturalism cult, and there you go.
... the European Union’s foreign policy representative, the Italian Federica Mogherini, happened to be on an official visit to Amman, the Jordanian capital.
Fighting back tears, she cut short a news conference saying: “It’s a very sad day for Europe, as Europe and its capital are suffering the same pain that the Middle East has known and knows every single day, be it in Syria, be it elsewhere.”
She then mused about the role that Islam may have played in the tragedy, dismissing “the idea of a clash between Islam and the West.”
“Islam,” she said, “holds a place in our Western societies. Islam belongs to Europe…I am not afraid to say that political Islam should be part of the picture.”
Mogherini’s statement offers an insight into the mentality that has helped produce the situation in Western European societies, where fear is woven into the fabric of daily life. It is a world of illusions and false identities.
...
Brussels is the result of this thinking. It’s what happens when immigrants are allowed to construct their own state within a state, not pushed to become part of a nation.
In a sense, Mogherini is right. Islam in its most violent form is already part of Europe just as much as a cancer belongs to the body it attacks.
Mogherini’s crocodile tears remind one of the German Nazi anthropologists Sigrid Hunke, another grand lady of misguided European Islamophilia. In her book “Allah’s Sun Shines Over the West,” Hunke claims that Islam, not Judeo-Christianism, created modern Europe by shaping the Andalusian model and must at some point return to resume its work. Well, may be the prodigal son has returned, invited back by Europe’s multiculturalist elites.
Mogherini and the Belgian left, specifically the Walloon Parti Socialiste, are almost cartoonish weak-horse representations of may be a terminal illness of the EuroLeft - and even significant portions of the American Left; a personal self-loathing projected to a national cultural scale. Like a pretty girl who doesn't believe that she is pretty and deserving of being respected who makes herself unattractive, hurts herself, and then partners with lovers who abuse and debase her because she thinks she is somehow deserving of it. Yes, it is a mental disorder. The next question is; will the Belgian people hold their government accountable? Can they? As we outlined during the 2007 Belgian crisis, the entire nation can be held up by less than 25% of the nation's voters - specifically in this area by the Walloon Parti Socialiste. This sub-plot in the general European disaggregation in the face of waxing Islamism will only get worse. Watch this space.
