Tag: Guerillas

Those Asymmetric Wars

The battlefield no longer looks like it did in the 18th century or even the mid-20th century….the wars today are fought in irregular units….or as it is now called “asymmetric” warfare.

My day it was called guerilla warfare….but times change and terms get moved around to suit those with letters after their name.

To start let us define “asymmetric warfare”……

Asymmetrical warfare, unconventional strategies and tactics adopted by a force when the military capabilities of belligerent powers are not simply unequal but are so significantly different that they cannot make the same sorts of attacks on each other.

Guerrilla warfare, occurring between lightly armed partisans and a conventional army, is an example of asymmetrical warfare. Terrorist tactics, such as hijackings and suicide bombings, are also considered to be asymmetrical, both because they tend to involve a smaller, weaker group attacking a stronger one and also because attacks on civilians are by definition one-way warfare. War between a country that is both able and willing to use nuclear weapons and a country that is not would be another example of asymmetrical warfare.

(Britannica)

If this is the true future of warfare then high is the Army shutting down its Asymmetrical Warfare Group?

For nearly 15 years a little known but highly influential Army group has been in the middle of how the Army learns immediate lessons from combat, adapts to the evolving battlefield and saves soldiers’ lives.

It’s called Asymmetric Warfare Group, and the Army is shutting it down next year.

The Army made its official announcement today that by mid-2021, AWG will be discontinued.

An Army statement to Army Times:

“The functions of AWG, including the solutions to current and emerging threats, will transition to other Army organizations. Also, to ensure the utility of the organization’s work over the past 14 years is not lost, all lessons learned will be maintained by the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (CAC), via the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), Centers of Excellence (COEs), and other TRADOC enterprise stakeholders.”

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2020/10/02/the-army-is-shutting-down-its-much-lauded-asymmetric-warfare-group/

The Defense News has reported that the military is moving past special forces in dealing with irregular conflicts…..

The Pentagon has begun to shift the focus on irregular warfare away from the specific counterterrorism missions of the last two decades and toward a broader effort that includes information warfare and gray zone operations, a top special operations official said Friday.

Joe Francescon, deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism, told reporters that the shift is needed to counter China, Russia and Iran.

Francescon was speaking as part of a rollout of an unclassified version of the Irregular Warfare annex of the National Defense Strategy. The strategy was rolled out Jan. 19, 2018, under then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, but the annex was not completed until early 2019 and took “a long time” to declassify to the point where even the 12-page summary could be shared with the public, Francescon said.

https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2020/10/02/irregular-warfare-strategies-must-move-beyond-special-forces-pentagon-says/

If the US will be fighting small groups in the future…why close down the “Group” that will perfect the tactics?

Or is the fear of China in the future driving all this re-organizations?

Just Asking.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The Death Of Che

Today in history….1781 the American forces started shelling British forces at Yorktown signalling the war is near a close.

Speaking of revolutionary fighters…….

On this day in history the revolutionary guerilla fighter Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed in Bolivia……09 October 1967.

On October 9, 1967, socialist revolutionary and guerilla leader Che Guevara, age 39, is killed by the Bolivian army. The U.S.-military-backed Bolivian forces captured Guevara on October 8 while battling his band of guerillas in Bolivia and executed him the following day. His hands were cut off as proof of death and his body was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1997, Guevara’s remains were found and sent back to Cuba, where they were reburied in a ceremony attended by President Fidel Castro and thousands of Cubans.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/che-guevara-is-executed

What about his life as a fighter and later a statesman…..

Guevara became part of Fidel Castro’s efforts to overthrow the Batista government in Cuba. He served as a military advisor to Castro and led guerrilla troops in battles against Batista forces. When Castro took power in 1959, Guevara became in charge of La Cabaña Fortress prison. It is estimated that at least 144 people were executed on Guevara’s extra-judicial orders during this time.

Later, he became president of the Cuban national bank and helped to shift the country’s trade relations from the United States to the Soviet Union. Guevara addressed the United Nations General Assembly on December 11, 1964, where he also expressed support for the people of Puerto Rico. One year later, he was appointed minister of industry. Guevara left this post in 1965 to export the ideas of Cuba’s revolution to other parts of the world. In 1966, he began to try to incite the people of Bolivia to rebel against their government, but had little success. With only a small guerrilla force to support his efforts, Guevara was captured and killed on October 9, 1967 in La Higuera by the Bolivian army, which had been aided by CIA advisers.

https://www.history.com/topics/south-america/che-guevara

I have read his book on guerilla warfare…..very informative and should be required reading by the people that lead us to war whenever it is needed (needed in their tiny minds)…..

For those that would like to know more then may I suggest the book…..you can find the books…”Guerilla Warfare and “Che Guevara: a Revolutionary Life” on Amazon and both are well worth reading for a better look into the life of this complex individual.

Be Smart!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Werewolves To The Right

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Note:  My schedule has tightened up…actually it has become a bit hectic…..between teaching and contract work I am at a loss for time…..I am having a difficult time running on 38 hour days……I regret that after today I will lighten up on the blog posts….instead of 5-6 posts a day…I will cut back to 2 or 3…..this is only temporary….I will still answer replies when I have a few minutes to myself……..please bear with me on this…..thanx for understanding……chuq

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I admit it…I watch the History Channel and its other identity, the AHC, but only when they have something historic airing….I will NOT watch the mindlessness of their reality shows about idiot stump jumpers chasing alligators or the modern day dumpster divers……and  as usual I find holes in their propaganda…they give only a very limited and nearsighted account of some of the situations.  At best it is propaganda rather than fact.

These days many people are looking for reasons why such barbaric groups as ISIS and AQ could come into being….the problem is that they are looking at simple excuses and not the root cause.

I was watching one such episode entitled, “Nazi Jihad”…..it was lame attempt to connect AQ and ISIS to a program of the Nazis late in WW2…the “werewolves”….a very simplistic attempt to tie jihadists to Nazi Germany…..

But first…the Nazi werewolves?

Werner Naumann, Goebbels’s top aide at the end of the war, sent out this interesting message by teletype to the Nazi Party’s regional propaganda offices in early April 1945. It calls on the remaining propagandists throughout Germany to devote their full efforts to building an underground resistance movement that would make Allied occupation unbearably costly. The Allies were in fact worried about the possibility of the Werewolf movement, but in the end Germans were more than ready to have the war over and not much came of this last-ditch effort.

Source: The Nazi Werewolf Movement

The history of this organization is colorful……but it is not the organization that gave rise to AQ or ISIS……some tactics may be similar but so are some of those used by the Great Khan….

The Werewolves were originally organised by the SS and the Hitler Youth as a diversionary operation on the fringes of the Third Reich, which were occupied by the Western Allies and the Soviets in the autumn of 1944. Some 5,000 — 6,000 recruits were raised by the winter of 1944-45, but numbers rose considerably in the following spring when the Nazi Party and the Propaganda Ministry launched a popular call to arms, beseeching everybody in the occupied areas — even women and children — to launch themselves upon the enemy. In typical Nazi fashion, this expansion was not co-ordinated by the relevant bodies, which were instead involved in a bureaucratic war among themselves over control of the project. The result was that the movement functioned on two largely unrelated levels: the first as a real force of specially trained SS, Hitler Youth and Nazi Party guerrillas; the second as an outlet for casual violence by fanatics

Source: Minutemen of the Third Reich (“Werewolf” guerilla movement – postwar sabotage & terror not new)

The tactics used by ISIS or AQ are just updated versions of “Art of War” and tactics used by the great Khan…..to mention only a few….

Yes a connection can be made…..like a connection can be made that the US waqs the originator of ISIS and AQ……,but that does not make it so….this was fake news and even worse…fake history.