(Note: This is a companion piece to the article I re-posted titled IED Awareness for First Responders and Civilians.) In this companion piece to my previous article, IED Awareness for First Responders, I cover the basics of what every first responder should know about the area around a bomb which is affected by the blast….
Category: Guerilla Warfare
ISIS and The “Law of Lawless Places”
Read this article slowly and consider the ancient and modern historical background information. If you understand the fundamentals of Counter-Insurgency Warfare, this is basically a re-cap on the basics… it is too bad the U.S. Govt. has yet to grasp this simple fact. -SF The Latin phrase hic sunt dracones translates roughly to “here be dragons,”…
Where Has All The Hatred Gone?
By Mark Stout Carl von Clausewitz offered his “paradoxical trinity” as a tool for thinking about wars and their various manifestations. His trinity was: Composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free…
Can the Counter-Insurgency Doctrine Be Saved?
After failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s time for a new understanding of counterinsurgency. With the apparent lack of progress and success in Afghanistan and Iraq, counterinsurgency (COIN) has fallen out of favor within the political and military establishments in the U.S. and elsewhere. Regardless of whether these failures were due to erroneous implementation or…
Understanding Counter-Insurgency Warfare in under 3 minutes
This clip was edited out of the final movie We Were Soldiers for some reason, but I have to agree with Tom Ricks’ Article, they should have left it in. “You Won’t Run the little Bastards back home sir, They Are Home….” As I Said, that sums up COIN.
Colombian Mercs in Yemen?
The Arabian Dream: Colombians Taking Part in Yemen War Some 800 former Colombian military troops will enter the city port of Aden in Yemen, switching the jungle terrain of their home country for the deserts of Arabia. The former Colombian army troops will join a coalition of allied international troops fighting Shiite rebels. They will operate under…
Knowing Your Enemy: Mujahideen, The Strategic Tradition of Sunni Jihadism
By Brett A. Friedman The world is in the grips of the group known as ISIS. Unable to look away but equally unable to fathom the group’s extreme violence, the civilized world marvels at a terrorist threat that is seemingly al Qaeda cranked up to eleven. Its media blitzkrieg has recently been described by Jessica…
Psychological Warfare Files: Ghost Tape #10 and Operation Wandering Soul
“Vietnamese legends held that on the anniversary of a person’s death, a spiritual channel between our world and the afterlife can open making communication possible. Was this just such a phenomenon?” JUST AFTER dusk on the night of Feb. 10, 1970, the jungles near the U.S. Army’s Fire Support Base Chamberlain in Hau Niga Province, South Vietnam…
Cartel Corner #1
I have decided to start an ongoing series called Cartel Corner that will seek to educate the everyday citizen on the complex problem that is the drug war as a whole and also study the actual TACTICS and STRATEGIES that both the Drug Cartels, Law Enforcement and Armed Civilians are using in the ongoing Fight….
“Homebrew Guns” & the Cartel Guerilla Gunsmiths that Make Them
It was usually evening when the three men arrived at the shop. They would roll up in a Volkswagen Beetle, and come to a halt at a nondescript, garage-sized warehouse in a strip of shops in a residential neighborhood in Guadalajara, in Southwestern Mexico’s Jalisco state. They would park the Bug, and proceed to drink…