Asymmetrical Warfare (for Fun and Profit)

 

The term “asymmetrical warfare” is used to describe a situation where the military capabilities and options of the two sides are wildly different.  While the underpowered side would normally be squashed, it could also be super creative and exploit the “Achilles Heel” of the more powerful side.

In Star Wars, the Rebel Alliance took down The Empire. I always dismissed that plot because the Rebel Alliance was just so pathetic.  But then again, we were hit with the 9/11 attacks.

Guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers) has a second career. He studied missile defense on his own, published some original ideas, and has since become a consultant to the US military.  And one of the things he specializes in is creative out-of-the-box thinking applied to asymmetrical warfare.  Musicians are adept at improvisation and creativity, so there is a connection here.

This talk of his is wonderful (starts at 08:00):

Traditional war is difficult and messy. You have to pick some major cities to attack, transport an army over, set up bombing runs, there are complicated logistics involving personel, equipment, provisions, medical, expenses, and so forth. And assembling all that surely won’t go unnoticed. And the battle might not be successful. And lives will be lost. And even if it is successful, the other side will likely retaliate. Then things can get really bad.

So if you really wanted to successfully attack a nation, it would make sense to consider something more subtle.  Asymmetrical warfare strategies are starting to make a lot of sense.

First off, you’d want to do as much of it as silently as possible.  Having the preparation go undetected would certainly be a huge advantage. Catch ’em off guard. But if the actual attack could be undetected, then they won’t know what is going on.  And retaliation would be difficult because they won’t know who did it.

Sort of like a thief stealing one item each day from a victim’s home, it would take them a while to even notice that they’d been robbed.

So the goal might be to attack the nation in such a way that they wouldn’t notice, but it would leave the nation roughly as crippled as if they had lost a war.

One way would be bribe government officials to make really bad decisions.

Here’s how that might work:

  1. Take a problem and hype it as being existentially important.  Examples might include global warming, pollution, poverty, inequality, health care costs, a bad economy, a variation of the flu, bad K-12 education, expensive college costs, the cost of homes, racism, whatever.
  2. Write legislation to fund a massive project to address this problem. It’s important that it costs a lot, as draining the treasury is a goal.
  3. Bribe people to pass this legislation. Cash, laundered cash, crazy speaking fees, high-paying no-show consulting jobs for family members, non-profit deals, book advance, real estate transactions, “hookers & blow”, whatever.
  4. In practice, the project’s implementation doesn’t really address the problem.  It actually makes it worse.  And has additional negative side effects.  Because the real goal is to make the situation worse.
  5. Repeat.

Similarly:

  • You can raise crime to an intolerable level by funding local district attorneys to not arrest criminals.
  • You can take control over the voting machine business, and select the outcome of elections.
  • You can create massive public unrest with campaigns to actively divide people by race, by ethnicity, by sex, by wealth, by political position, by anything.
  • You can get a lot of help on this from the target nation itself. One political party might be much more amenable to this sort of thing than another, and would be happy to assist.
  • And academics will pitch in. Recall the infamous Cloward-Piven Strategy.

So yeah, I believe it’s entirely possible to destroy a nation from within with a form of asymmetric warfare where you just bribe specific government positions to make terrible decisions.

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  1. namlliT noD Member
    namlliT noD
    @DonTillman

    There are a number of well known musicians with unexpected second careers.

    Off the top of my head:

    • Steel player Sneaky Pete Kleinow (Flying Burrito Brothers) is a
      stop-motion animator (Gumby, Davey and Goliath, The Empire Strikes Back).
    • Guitarist Steve Morse (Dixie Dregs, Deep Purple) is a commercial airline pilot.
    • Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull) owned several salmon farms.
    • Dave Cousins (The Strawbs) is a radio licensing consultant.
    • David Lowery (Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker) is a professor at the University of Georgia.
    • Brian May (Queen) is an astrophysicist.
    • Scott Miller (Game Theory, The Loud Family) was a software engineer.
    • Tom Lehrer was a math professor at UC Santa Cruz.
    • Roger Powell (Todd Rundren’s Utopia) is a software engineer.
    • #1
  2. Dotorimuk Coolidge
    Dotorimuk
    @Dotorimuk

    Great post!

    I think Phil Alvin of the Blasters was a university math prof.

    Karl Precoda of The Dream Syndicate also was a professor.

    • #2
  3. Addiction Is A Choice Member
    Addiction Is A Choice
    @AddictionIsAChoice

    Dotorimuk (View Comment):

    Great post!

    I think Phil Alvin of the Blasters was a university math prof.

    Karl Precoda of The Dream Syndicate also was a professor.

    Speaking of Phil Alvin of The Blasters, he was hospitalized yesterday:

    https://www.dailynews.com/2023/01/25/the-blasters-phil-alvin-has-been-hospitalized-with-an-unknown-illness/

     

    • #3
  4. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    Putin & Xi are way ahead of you on all that ..

    Great post. 

    • #4
  5. DonG (CAGW is a Scam) Coolidge
    DonG (CAGW is a Scam)
    @DonG

    namlliT noD: In Star Wars, the Rebel Alliance took down The Empire.

    Did they?   Or did they just destroy some death stars?      Did the USA really defeat England?  Or, did the USA just become the military arm of London? 

    • #5
  6. JoelB Member
    JoelB
    @JoelB

    I didn’t mean to spend an hour watching the Jeff Baxter video, but I couldn’t help myself once I started. Music, sports, analysis, synthesis, the OODA loop, vibrations, and national security – lots to think about. This is well worth setting aside the time.

    • #6
  7. Red Herring Coolidge
    Red Herring
    @EHerring

    Almost all those tactics are part of the Marxist cultural revolution, as pushed by the Frankfurt School through critical theory. The tactics have worked well for them in the US.

    • #7
  8. Mad Gerald Coolidge
    Mad Gerald
    @Jose

    The worst thing about this is that we probably have multiple adversaries, not necessarily working in concert, trying to undermine our culture and country. 

    • #8
  9. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    Although bribes in the form of cash to campaign coffers is as old a story as recorded history, there is no  need to bribe anyone  as long as the profit from some on going war or a vaccine program is going to trundle off to Halliburton, BlackRock, or to those who hold patents on the various inner workings of both the actual COV virus and the vaccine as well.

    LBJ sure was not going to curtail the war in Vietnam once he understood how easy it was to glean a quarter million dollars from his seeing to it that his buddies at KBR received the contract for dredging Cam Rahn Bay over in that country.

    These days a pay-off of a quarter million bucks is a rather quaint concept.

    As vaccine injuries and deaths continue to pile up, the only battle regarding the program is being waged between those at Big Pharma who want their cut, and those  agency employees  inside NIH, NAIDS, and CDC who were promised X amount for their royalties on their patents for various components necessary for COV, or the COV vaccines.

    We useless eaters can sit and fear what is coming down the pipe, or try and affect things. But right now that is one overwhelming task.

    • #9
  10. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    This is a description of 5G warfare.  It’s not particularly asymmetric, but about information and perception and “unrestricted warfare”.

    A bit here.

    10:43 what we are referring to is the function of warfare so again this hints at the fifth generation of warfare not simply being a new sequential progression of war this is also noted in a very short paper published by the think tank 360 isr which mentions that we are no longer fighting a defined adversary in a defined battle space for a defined period of time instead the 5th generation mission space is a continuous global battle of narratives that will play out over both virtual and physical space and encompass a range of violent and non-violent actions and effects.  That’s a pretty solid definition of fifth generation warfare…

    12:06 though the two topics are heavily linked by the very nature of fifth generation warfare itself we here are more concerned with the civilian implications of this changing style of warfare, especially considering that it is in the civilian space that this war is being fought. And here the elephant begins to appear in the room.  This paper literally just stated that in a fifth generation war we will not be able to define our adversaries and by default the other side of that coin is that we will not know who our allies are either.  And so we begin to plant the seed of what very few academics want to talk about us marine corps lieutenant colonel Stanton Kohr got a little closer to what we’re trying to get at.

    In the marine corps gazette from january 2009 he takes a more boots on ground approach to describing the symptoms of a fifth generation warfare he writes that the battlefield will be something strange cyberspace or the cleveland water supply or wall street’s banking systems or youtube the mission will be instilling fear and it will succeed.  Lieutenant colonel core’s idea is a common one among fifth generation warfare theorists and one that you often see online by various websites claiming that fifth generation warfare is simply a war of propaganda or a war for your mind or something like that.  And i think that that simple definition is quite accurate but not totally.

    Remember the tactics used in warfare sometimes do not reflect and are oftentimes counterintuitive to the end goal.  For instance psychological warfare uses various means to get a person to think a certain way about something.  But is that the final goal?  No, the final goal is to get a person to act a certain way.  Actions are more devastating than thoughts in warfare but since thoughts lead to actions we see a lot of tactics being used to affect thoughts.  So all of this considered we can cobble together a rough list of some characteristics of fifth generation warfare as it applies to civilian and military communities alike.

    • #10
  11. CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill Coolidge
    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill
    @CarolJoy

    Flicker (View Comment):

    This is a description of 5G warfare. It’s not particularly asymmetric, but about information and perception and “unrestricted warfare”.

    A bit here.

    10:43 what we are referring to is the function of warfare so again this hints at the fifth generation of warfare not simply being a new sequential progression of war this is also noted in a very short paper published by the think tank 360 isr which mentions that we are no longer fighting a defined adversary in a defined battle space for a defined period of time instead the 5th generation mission space is a continuous global battle of narratives that will play out over both virtual and physical space and encompass a range of violent and non-violent actions and effects. That’s a pretty solid definition of fifth generation warfare…

    12:06 SNIPAnd here the elephant begins to appear in the room. This paper literally just stated that in a fifth generation war we will not be able to define our adversaries and by default the other side of that coin is that we will not know who our allies are either. And so we begin to plant the seed of what very few academics want to talk about us marine corps lieutenant colonel Stanton Kohr got a little closer to what we’re trying to get at.

    In the marine corps gazette from january 2009 he takes a more boots on ground approach to describing the symptoms of a fifth generation warfare he writes that the battlefield will be something strange cyberspace or the cleveland water supply or wall street’s banking systems or youtube the mission will be instilling fear and it will succeed. Lieutenant colonel core’s idea is a common one among fifth generation warfare theorists and one that you often see online by various websites claiming that fifth generation warfare is simply a war of propaganda or a war for your mind or something like that. And i think that that simple definition is quite accurate but not totally.

    Remember the tactics used in warfare sometimes do not reflect and are oftentimes counterintuitive to the end goal. For instance psychological warfare uses various means to get a person to think a certain way about something. But is that the final goal? No, the final goal is to get a person to act a certain way. Actions are more devastating than thoughts in warfare but since thoughts lead to actions we see a lot of tactics being used to affect thoughts. So all of this considered we can cobble together a rough list of some characteristics of fifth generation warfare as it applies to civilian and military communities alike.

    My favorite comment from the youtube page offering the above video is this one:

    @MathewRenfro

    @MathewRenfro

    9 months ago

    Fun trivia question: What is the first nation tyrants invade?

    Answer: Their own.#################

     

    • #11
  12. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    CarolJoy, Not So Easy To Kill (View Comment):

    Flicker (View Comment):

    This is a description of 5G warfare. It’s not particularly asymmetric, but about information and perception and “unrestricted warfare”.

    A bit here.

    12:06 SNIPAnd here the elephant begins to appear in the room. This paper literally just stated that in a fifth generation war we will not be able to define our adversaries and by default the other side of that coin is that we will not know who our allies are either. And so we begin to plant the seed of what very few academics want to talk about us marine corps lieutenant colonel Stanton Kohr got a little closer to what we’re trying to get at…

    Remember the tactics used in warfare sometimes do not reflect and are oftentimes counterintuitive to the end goal. For instance psychological warfare uses various means to get a person to think a certain way about something. But is that the final goal? No, the final goal is to get a person to act a certain way. Actions are more devastating than thoughts in warfare but since thoughts lead to actions we see a lot of tactics being used to affect thoughts. So all of this considered we can cobble together a rough list of some characteristics of fifth generation warfare as it applies to civilian and military communities alike.

    My favorite comment from the youtube page offering the above video is this one:

    @ MathewRenfro

    @ MathewRenfro

    9 months ago

    Fun trivia question: What is the first nation tyrants invade?

    Answer: Their own.#################

    Yes.  The interesting (and scary) thing about 5GW is that it doesn’t have to be waged by nation-states with borders, but just as formidably by NGOs and international corporations.

    • #12
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