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59: How to Fight the West
1.9k Plays4 months ago
In this episode, we review David Kilcullen’s latest book, The Dragons and the Snakes, which addresses how the empire’s enemies have learned to fight it and win.
In the first section, Kilcullen identifies the evolutionary process that has produced the surviving configuration of America’s enemies after 20 years of the GWOT. He discusses how these actors have been shaped by the present technological and cultural terrain — and especially how they have learned to draw power from global-scale economic and cultural power flows without making themselves a global-scale military threat that justifies American intervention.
In the second section, he describes the process of vertical escalation, in which a weaker actor can calibrate its aggressive action to stay below a stronger enemy’s threshold of detection, attribution, or response — especially as practiced by Putin’s Russia.
The Russians’ conventional military has been gutted by the shock therapy and corruption of the post-Soviet collapse, but they still have nuclear weapons and a very effective intelligence service — so they have learned to calibrate their conflict with the West to make best use of their peer capabilities, while avoiding a conventional war.
He also describes how both the Russians and Americans use deniable methods (“election interference”, color revolutions, migrant warfare, etc.) to sow confusion and exploit internal divisions in their enemies’ political systems.
Next, Kilcullen outlines the Chinese adoption of horizontal escalation as described in Unrestricted Warfare — in which a weaker actor fights in domains that their stronger opponent does not recognize as military, and may not even perceive as hostile.
This method of warfare is also described as a “conceptual envelopment”, because the weaker opponent holds the stronger enemy to a standoff in the conventional military domain (in China’s case, building credible radars, AA systems, hypersonics, etc. in the South China Sea), but they conduct their real advance on the conceptual “flank” — in this case, buying strategically significant real estate and politicians, replacing Western manufacturing, encouraging mass third-world migration, and dumping fentanyl in the American heartland.
As with a conventional flanking maneuver, the goal is to roll the enemy up from the rear, and only push through the front when the battle is effectively over.
Kilcullen then suggests some possible ways that the empire might arrest or reverse its decline — but a radical renegotiation of American hegemony looks all but inevitable. We discuss what that might mean for us as ordinary citizens, and as targets of the regime’s hostility.
The good news is that the most important preparation for what is coming is having useful friends you can trust — and making them is 100% legal. Join us at exitgroup.us.
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Transcript
Riots and the Second Amendment: A Comparative Analysis
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast. This is Dr. Bennett. England appears to be popping off this week. There's riots all over the country and I saw several American posters online talking about, wouldn't it be good if England had the Second Amendment right now? And that got me thinking, like, definitely it would be different.
00:00:34
Speaker
There's 400 million civilian guns on American soil. And you would maybe think that that would deter a rational actor like there's that famous apocryphal quote from the Japanese that they couldn't invade because there'd be a rifle behind every blade of grass. Like if you were a war planner trying to comprehend the whole situation, that might be something you'd have to factor in.
Bureaucratic Conflicts with Global Powers
00:00:53
Speaker
But what we're up against and what the English are up against is a decentralized bureaucratic actor.
00:00:59
Speaker
It's sort of shambled into war with Russia and now possibly Iran and China, despite the fact that you like you would think nuclear weapons would be a deterrent. You would think the fact that our entire military supply chain comes from China would be a deterrent. But it just isn't, because these decisions are made without a clear chain of responsibility. It's not obvious who gets fired or arrested or beheaded if it all goes to hell.
00:01:25
Speaker
Which is not to say that the bureaucracy is totally insensible to deterrent, but it doesn't work the same way. Like probably the way that the Second Amendment influences policing decisions in the United States is just by raising the stakes of every enforcement interaction.
Police Encounters and the Second Amendment
00:01:41
Speaker
Like surely it has a psychological impact to know that any time you go to serve a warrant or even write a traffic ticket, there might be a gun in the glove box.
00:01:50
Speaker
But actually it looks like even hardened criminals don't use firearms against police that often. If you extend the rate of firearm assaults on police officers in the US across the average 25 year career, the average American police officer has about a 1.9% chance of being assaulted with a firearm at some point in that career. Which you as a citizen across the same 25 year span have about a 1.2% chance of being involved in a firearm assault.
00:02:16
Speaker
So it's like this very modest, incremental increase across hundreds of thousands of interactions. And like that doesn't mean that they and their families don't think about it, have anxiety about it. like Walking into a dangerous situation on purpose on a regular basis is a very different thing than just sort of living in a dangerous country. But also, it seems to be the case that people are actually really good at subconsciously calibrating their risk tolerance, especially when it's about life and death.
Behavior Adjustment Amidst Safety Improvements
00:02:48
Speaker
Like all the evidence from research on crumple zones and airbags and seat belt laws indicates that people have a really strong baseline of risk of dying in a car crash that they want to maintain. And when you make cars safer, they just drive a little bit more recklessly until motor vehicle fatalities get back where we all subconsciously want them.
00:03:11
Speaker
Same thing seems to be true of Narcan for opioid overdose. Heroin addicts in the aggregate seem to know exactly how they value the high versus the relative risk of mortality. And of course this phenomenon is like really dramatic in the development of HIV drugs.
US vs UK: Law Enforcement Fatality Rates
00:03:30
Speaker
And it does seem to be the case that law enforcement officers and law enforcement involved persons in the US s and the UK do respond to this relative risk of mortality from regular police work in a country where everybody's armed. About one in six police officers is physically assaulted in the UK. In the US it's about one in seven, one in eight. But what's interesting is both
00:03:54
Speaker
law enforcement fatalities and officer involved fatalities, meaning people killing police officers, police officers killing people, is actually pretty close to the same in the US versus the UK. So it's like in the aggregate, both police and criminals seem to know how far to take it given the relative risk created by all these civilian guns in the States.
00:04:17
Speaker
And that's sort of the only natural experiment you have to tell you what America's guns do for the relationship between the citizen and the state. It appears to modestly discourage escalation on both sides.
Kilcullen's Insights on Asymmetric Warfare
00:04:33
Speaker
But you can see how In the short run, tactically, the party that wants and needs to shake things up, the party that wants to see these power hierarchies inverted, would actually benefit from having more room to maneuver along that axis of escalation. And I happen to have just finished another great book by David Kilcullen that deals with this exact problem. It's called The Dragons and the Snakes, How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, and it's basically about exactly this problem.
00:05:03
Speaker
When you're hopelessly outclassed in a direct military confrontation, on what axes can you adjust the terms of the engagement so that you have, if not an advantage, at least a fighting chance? And his analysis is at the level of large states and non-state actors, but the principles seem to generalize.
00:05:23
Speaker
And his basic thesis, which he applies to a bunch of different geopolitical situations, is that if you're a little guy, like in the sense that Hezbollah and Russia and China are little guys relative to the United States, and you can't face down a carrier strike group, you can't risk losing the sea lanes, etc.,
00:05:42
Speaker
but the Americans are kind of falling apart and everybody knows it. You've got to figure out how to operate, how to expand into the space that they're leaving behind without provoking a direct confrontation.
Chinese Strategies in Unrestricted Warfare
00:05:54
Speaker
And Kilkullen offers two basic axes, two dimensions on which you can adjust the slider of the conflict, so to speak, to get what you want without getting Gaddafi or getting Wayco'd.
00:06:10
Speaker
And the first axis is to adjust the intensity of the conflict vertically. For example, if you're the Russians and your conventional military has been gutted, but you've still got a really robust intelligence service, then you want to calibrate your conflict with the United States in such a way that it stays at that level of intensity.
00:06:28
Speaker
and you get as much as you can possibly get using that set of tools without triggering a conventional war. And the other way you can adjust the intensity of a conflict is horizontally, meaning into domains that your opponent, even if they're very rich and very strong, just isn't equipped to fight a war in, or maybe they're not even equipped to perceive what you're doing as aggressive, which is the main idea of a book called Unrestricted Warfare, which was written by two colonels in the PLA, the Chinese army,
00:06:57
Speaker
in which they basically lay out all these domains of legal and propaganda and cyber and economic and you know maybe they don't want to talk about it, but biological and drug war that a weaker nation like China could hypothetically use against a stronger nation like the United States.
00:07:18
Speaker
And this book basically turned these two guys into CCP royalty. And as far as we know, this book basically seems to be the manual for China's interactions with the United States for the last 20 years or so. And Kilcolan calls this conceptual envelopment, which envelopment in military terms just means getting around to the enemy's rear or their flank to sort of swallow them up, cut them off. And the reason he uses that term is because this conceptual envelopment just like a battlefield envelopment, requires both an enveloping force, a flanking force, that that's what actually attacks the rear of the flank, and it requires a fixing force, which keeps the main body of the enemy's forces engaged so that they can't pivot to guard their flank.
00:08:01
Speaker
which suggests something really interesting about what the Chinese are doing. Like, yes, they're stealing our fifth-generation fighter designs, and they're building hypersonic missiles, and they're working on advanced radars and surface-to-air batteries, and politically, they're banging the drum on Taiwan. But if they're performing a conceptual envelopment, which it seems like they are,
00:08:21
Speaker
Then the main objective of everything they're doing in the South China Sea is just to keep us shoveling money into this suite of high-tech, high-cost, delicately networked precision strike weapons that we built 50 years ago for a radically different technological environment while they do stuff like pump fentanyl into our cities, buy up real estate, deepen their stranglehold on our manufacturing infrastructure. Like the point of an envelopment is by the time the front actually breaks,
00:08:51
Speaker
The battle's over, it's a mop-up operation. And both of these methods of adjusting the intensity of the conflict, vertical escalation and horizontal escalation, are especially effective when you're dealing with a big, fat, bureaucratized, procedural enemy. Because in ah in a human conflict, a personal conflict, the stronger party can just perceive the general aggressive orientation and take steps to counteract it or guard against it or deter it or whatever.
00:09:19
Speaker
But in a formalized bureaucracy like ours, there are established chains of escalation. There are procedural tripwires that the monitors inside the bureaucracy are incentivized specifically to respond to. And within those channels, they've got all sorts of surveillance resources, all sorts of enforcement resources. They can take really powerful steps.
Bureaucratic Adaptation Challenges
00:09:40
Speaker
But if there's a domain of aggressive action that is not in someone's specific ambit to collect intelligence and package it into a format that can actually be interpreted by the overall system as like a threat signal at scale,
00:09:56
Speaker
then like individual analysts can see pretty clearly what you're doing and maybe that like turns into a white paper or a task force or you know if it's really egregious maybe it becomes a news story but that's like miles away from the state figuring out exactly what you're doing and deploying force with the same overwhelming intensity that it can bring to these channels that it's familiar with Now there are circumstances in which a big fat bureaucracy can learn faster than that, but only if there's an intensity at which losers and failures are actually getting killed or at least fired. And I would submit that we're at a stage of decline at which the state really can't ask people to go get themselves killed at that kind of scale anymore. The level of shock to the system that would be required to reintroduce
00:10:43
Speaker
Darwinian selection pressure, even at the level of tactics or doctrine, would probably shake Western militaries apart at this point. Like the military institutions that withdrew the United States from Afghanistan in 2021, it's not just that they're not learning, they're not capable of learning anymore. The mechanisms of accountability that generate learning no longer exist. Kilcullen spends some time talking about the ways in which institutions metabolize and digest failure.
00:11:09
Speaker
In peacetime, bureaucracy like the US military or the Chinese government can maybe actually learn faster or more effectively than a non-state armed group like a drug cartel or the Taliban because they have access to resources to like run experiments and do some theory selling. Famously, part of the problem with that type of development is that it's often performed in the context of the previous war and developing capabilities that maybe won't matter in the technological environment of the next war.
00:11:36
Speaker
But in wartime, he says, these non-state armed groups have the same evolutionary advantage that, like, microbes have, in that there's lots and lots of little high-variance mimetic packets.
Insurgent Adaptation in Warfare
00:11:47
Speaker
They're more diverse in their approaches. they They don't know that they're not supposed to do X, Y, and Z, so they try a lot of things. Losers really are culled off by failure in terms of they either get killed or they get humiliated and nobody listens to them anymore. And there's constantly room opening up at the top, so you don't have to wait 15 years for your turn.
00:12:05
Speaker
If you're smart enough and you win hard enough, your approach and your leadership can very quickly become the defining approach and leadership of the entire system. The individuals in these non-state armed groups are also exposed to more combat for longer. They're not rotated out. Their units aren't broken up to prevent the formation of power structures. In fact, the formation of those power structures becomes a life or death thing. The units that can do that are the ones that survive.
00:12:30
Speaker
And he offers a really interesting explanation for why decapitation strikes really don't work on non-state armed groups like this. He says, guerrillas themselves are just the tip of an insurgent iceberg the tiny minority two to three percent at most of the people engaged in an uprising who actually carry weapons openly and operate above the detection threshold at which an adversary becomes aware of them So if even in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq during the war, you could imagine the US military wiping the board of every insurgent carrying a gun every single year, and literally just by natural increase, just by having babies, the insurgency would continue to grow.
Public Sentiment and Anti-Refugee Violence
00:13:09
Speaker
And if instead you do what the US did, which is just kill a small percentage of the people carrying guns, literally all you're doing is breeding a better class of insurgent.
00:13:18
Speaker
And there's maybe a white pill in there if you think that the anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain has any juice left in it at all. Because yeah, they're rounding up everybody who sticks their neck out. But these concerns don't just go unaddressed. A poll came out about a week ago in the UK where 32% of respondents said hostility against refugees is sometimes justified even if it ends up in violence. 34% said attacks against refugee homes are sometimes necessary to make it clear to politicians that we have a refugee problem.
00:13:46
Speaker
36% said xenophobic acts of violence are defensible if they result in fewer refugees being settled in your town. And 39% said, when it comes to the refugee problem, violence is sometimes the only means that citizens have to get the attention of British politicians. Now, among the many differences between native Britons and Afghans and Iraqis, the British aren't supplying a steady stream of fighting-age males to wage this conflict. So unlike the insurgents in those cases, time is not on their side.
00:14:16
Speaker
But there is still this reservoir of people who are involved or who would like to be involved, who aren't out in the street throwing bottles at police vans and who are watching and learning. And so if you want to think about whether these people really have reason to hope, the question to answer is, can they build capacity under the nose of these authorities?
00:14:34
Speaker
Are there any doors to power that the British intelligence services and British police aren't guarding? The next section of Kilcullen's book talks about the environment to which these insurgents have had to adapt, which is more or less the same environment that we're having to adapt to if you take into account the whole scope of a potential conflict from the psychological, the informational, the economic and political and the kinetic. So what does
Air Supremacy and Insurgent Tactics
00:15:00
Speaker
that look like? Well, like Joe Biden says, you need an F-15 to fight the US government.
00:15:04
Speaker
and that's stupid of course, but air supremacy does matter. It punishes size, overtness, anything that generates a sustained contrast against the human or physical background, large troop concentrations, active communications, and hierarchical organizations. Basically, anything that can be seen from the air will be seen from the air, and anything that is susceptible to a decapitation strike will be subject to decapitation strikes.
00:15:28
Speaker
Kilcullen says this favors actors who combine stealth, dispersion, and modularity, especially semi-autonomous bands that present fewer and smaller targets for attack. It also rewards autonomy, the ability to operate without orders and therefore avoid communications that might be detected by enemy sensors. In urban environments, it rewards the ability to infest urban terrain, disappearing into and maneuvering wholly inside buildings and underground or internal passages.
00:15:56
Speaker
You saw this in Gaza with Hamas tunneling underneath the cities and knocking down walls in between buildings so that they could walk directly through an entire city block without ever being exposed to the air. These insurgent groups also evolved to route around self-imposed legal and political constraints that Western governments had applied to themselves in these war zones. The fact that Western governments had specific no-strike lists, categories of buildings, particular population centers, etc. that they weren't going to target,
00:16:24
Speaker
meant that insurgents had strong incentives to hug those protected sites, those protected population centers. And of course, Western media portrayed this as very vicious and cowardly behavior. But in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, when they found out that Tim McVeigh was horror-stricken by the fact that he had essentially blown up a daycare on the ground floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building,
00:16:47
Speaker
they started mandating that you put the childcare center on the first floor of these buildings, for that reason. Part of the purpose of this hugging approach is is to deter attack, right? If you live in a cave in Afghanistan, they can just blow you up with a tomahawk. But if you're in the middle of the third floor of a seven-story apartment building in some... urban housing development, they actually have to send a team in after you. And that team will have to put themselves at substantial risk in order to avoid civilian casualties inside that environment, which creates an opportunity for the insurgent either to get the drop on one of them, kill one of them, which is a propaganda victory in itself, or to get them to make a mistake, to goad them into some kind of overreaction, get them to break their own rules, catch them throwing their weight around, make them the enemies of the community.
00:17:30
Speaker
Now one thing the UK government seems to have figured out is the need to suppress private video recording of the riots, of the enforcement actions against them, for exactly this reason. The extent to which they'll succeed in doing that remains to be seen. But it illustrates another problem that our kind of people, basically any critique of this totalizing liberal security state from the inside has to contend with, which is that people finding out that the government is the bad guys doesn't actually solve the problem.
00:17:58
Speaker
Like the Gen X dream of the internet was that you can't stop the signal that when powerful people do bad things, you could show the world and it can't be censored or suppressed and that would somehow inevitably lead to the victory of the good guys. And thanks to Elon Musk, thanks to this independent distribution channel on Twitter, these protests have generated global support, global outrage, but ultimately there's no way for the network to impose its will on the ground in the UK. There's only so much you can do with media if all you have is the media.
00:18:29
Speaker
Elon Musk isn't afraid of Keir Starmer, but Keir Starmer isn't afraid of Elon Musk either. There's no infrastructure to turn this network power, this media power, into physical muscle on the ground. There's no provision for people who support the protesters to to arm them, or to bail them out of jail, or pay their legal fees, or even to like fundraise against labor in the elections. So these self-imposed legal and political constraints that would ordinarily provide an advantage to an insurgent and currently do provide advantages to, like, organized Muslim violence in the UK, aren't really accessible to this native British movement because there's neither an internal political constituency nor an external political constituency that can respond to these abuses of power and actually arrest police, fire politicians, etc.
Technology in Insurgency Tactics
00:19:16
Speaker
And so the UK government has succeeded in making recording these altercations pretty much all downside for the protesters.
00:19:23
Speaker
because there's a very clear targeting apparatus for the protester in the video, but there's no targeting apparatus whatsoever for the police. And that's another feature of the conflict environment that these non-state armed groups have had to learn to contend with, which is ubiquitous data collection and surveillance.
00:19:39
Speaker
Anybody who's in any position of hostility toward the Five Eyes has to deal with just absolutely dirt cheap automated surveillance. You have to assume that your comms are being monitored absolutely all the time. But the bottleneck isn't data collection, it's data analysis. And so the trick isn't so much to get away from being surveilled as it is to avoid these programmatic triggers that gets your data actually looked at by a human being. And probably anybody who's come forward as a public figure that's hostile to this regime, if they rise to the level of being politically relevant, pretty much anything they do will probably be parsed by a human at some point. And so you can imagine a situation in which like a mob family might set some people aside and say, you know, we're going to keep you out of the family business.
00:20:23
Speaker
so that you can work within the legitimate power structure and build capacity over there, we're likely to see a situation where highly monitored public figures get a lot of things done through proxies with whom they have no direct communication, or specific tasks that the state might have an interest in monitoring or disrupting, get chopped up as finely as possible and distributed to a huge number of people, and then the state can't afford to surveil and target every one of them.
00:20:48
Speaker
which is exactly the kind of distributed coordination that you might be able to work out with like a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization on a blockchain. There's all sorts of off-the-rack consumer tech, like crypto, like drones, like Skype, Google Earth, GPS, that insurgents in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, are all using to execute these sophisticated military objectives, mostly around precision strike and battlefield awareness. And it's another way of hugging the infrastructure that your enemy depends upon to survive.
00:21:20
Speaker
Like at this point, the only way the US government could deny insurgents access to precision strike capability would be to turn off GPS. And with drones, they may actually have to use like an electromagnetic pulse to get it done. Which would of course be devastating to their whole suite of highly networked, highly digitized weapon systems. So that's just not gonna happen. Insurgents have precision strike now. Likewise with Bitcoin, if you move money on the blockchain, obviously everybody's gonna be able to see it. That's kind of the point.
00:21:49
Speaker
but they can't actually interdict that transaction the way they could if it was cash or gems or gold or drugs. The main analog method of terrorist money laundering is called Hawala. And while crypto is famously supposed to be trustless, Hawala is 100% trust-based.
00:22:06
Speaker
The way it works is, suppose I'm your cousin and I live in the United States and you live in Pakistan and you want to send me $10,000. You'll go to your hawala dar, your hawala broker there in Pakistan and you'll say, I want to send my cousin $10,000 in America. He takes your 10,000, sticks it under his mattress or whatever. Then he calls the hawala broker in the United States and he says,
00:22:28
Speaker
this guy's sending $10,000. The Hualadar in the United States just gives me the $10,000, and now the two brokers have an imbalance on their ledger. Pakistan guy is up 10k, US guy is down 10k, and they process dozens or hundreds of transactions just like this. And sometimes they do the math in their heads. Sometimes they just write it on scraps of paper. It's deliberately very poorly documented. And then eventually on some deliberately irregular interval, they settle accounts. And the way that generally works is through some transmission of gold, gems, drugs, sometimes big bills, or sometimes it'll be favors. You know, maybe the US Hualadar has some connection in the Pakistani government.
00:23:14
Speaker
and he gets the Pakistani Hualadar's nephew a job or something, and that's how they settle up. But the point is that when the store of value actually changes hands, it does so in a big lump that isn't explicitly traceable to any particular transaction.
00:23:29
Speaker
And for Muslims, at least, it has the advantage of being connected to this concept of Islamic finance, which means US and UK authorities are really, really squirrely about going after it. But obviously there's this big choke point, which is that somebody has to actually travel across the planet with a briefcase full of cash or gold or gems or whatever.
00:23:50
Speaker
And that's really the only point at which the abstract concept of value has to leave these people's brains and actually go into the real world where Western law enforcement can intercept it. And so you can imagine a situation in which instead of putting your cousin on a plane with a briefcase of cash and trying to get it through security, you could put your cousin on a plane with just a memorized passphrase. And if you were nervous about your cousin, you could send three of your cousins or four of your cousins, each with a separate memorized passphrase.
00:24:19
Speaker
And if you did it that way, you could afford to true up your accounts a lot more frequently and a lot less regularly so that there aren't big spikes and big intervals for someone who's monitoring the blockchain to detect. And again, to get back to this concept of hugging, this is another system that Western authorities really can't shut down without shutting down massive, massive stores of value in, you know, corporations on the S and P 500 and major universities.
00:24:49
Speaker
And even you know the government has a ah pretty substantial stake in Bitcoin. And so there's a kind of meta aggressive behavior that you can engage in, which isn't really targetable or prosecutable by the state, which is to develop and encourage mass adoption of these technologies that have multiple purposes like this. And I think that may be one of the things that Eric Prince is driving at with his unplugged phone.
00:25:12
Speaker
Like, it's probably not the case that his median consumer is saying or doing anything that the state is particularly interested in. But that's kind of the point. You want to create mass adoption of this technology that substantially raises the sort of unit cost of investigating someone's digital footprint. Because the more expensive you can make it, the more you increase the gap between the human analyst and this massive and growing body of data that's being collected. All right, so let's pan back for a second and look at all the adaptive traits that have been favored and selected for in this current conflict environment. Number one is stealth, especially what Kilcolan calls adaptive coloration, which is the ability to blend into the background to look normal.
00:25:58
Speaker
In other words, to make yourself a politically and bureaucratically risky target. Because what if you're just a regular guy? What if you're minding your own business? What if you're not the droids they're looking for? And then they have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and they might have to go to court and they might have to talk to journalists about what they did. And so by deploying this adaptive coloration, you put the individual bureaucrat, the individual analyst, the individual police officer into a situation where it's just not worth the trouble. All right. So second characteristic is dispersion.
00:26:28
Speaker
It's the ability to move and fight dispersed, meaning that you stay scattered and hard to target when you're on defense, and then you come together briefly to overwhelm a weak point, and then you immediately disperse again, hopefully before the enemy has had time to orient and target and respond.
00:26:45
Speaker
Or in the ideal case, you can imagine a situation where connectivity and remote warfare tools make it so that you don't have to concentrate on that weak point at all. You can exert a decisive level of force while staying dispersed. Third characteristic is modularity, the ability to operate in small bands without complex command and control hierarchies with single points of failure. So while industrial warfare pushed the optimum size of military organization to really huge masked formations with really labor intensive and capital intensive machinery behind them. Now the environment is selecting for almost like a kamitatasa warrior band. It looks like all throughout the war in Afghanistan, the average size of a Taliban fighting group was seven to 12 guys. And occasionally they would cooperate to come together in, you know, groups of a couple hundred maybe. But that took a lot of planning and a lot of diplomacy and a lot of exposure. And sometimes those co-ordinations could get disrupted. So they didn't do it very often.
00:27:42
Speaker
And it seems to be the case that this surveillance and targeting environment is selecting for maximum trust, maximum cohesion, maximum alignment. The people that you can operate with and a lot can go unsaid because if you do have to say it, you expose vulnerabilities.
00:27:59
Speaker
And at the same time, and in some cases for the same reason, that big, loud, leaky formations are vulnerable, small groups of highly aligned, highly competent men have way more capacity to surveil their environment, to project force, certainly than they would have had 50 years ago, but even 10 years ago. And Kilcullen notes that these comitatus warband type groups appear to organize themselves at the same scale as like mobile hunter-gatherer bands.
00:28:29
Speaker
It's like 7-12 fighters supporting a group of 15-50 all together, and they interact regularly with 6-10 nearby bands of roughly the same size. That brings us to the fourth characteristic, which is autonomy, the ability to operate without orders for long periods so as to generate minimal electronic signature.
00:28:48
Speaker
There's also the ability to hide in plain sight electromagnetically, adopting low-profile behaviors to avoid analysts' attention or trigger an operational response. Like we said, there's hugging critical infrastructure, media manipulation to goat or provoke or trick an adversary into inflicting disproportionate civilian casualties or property damage. And obviously, this works in concert with the idea of adaptive coloration because it forces the enemy to think very carefully about their targeting parameters.
00:29:16
Speaker
The environment also selects for political warfare in which you manipulate and mobilize supporters through social networks, weaponize diasporas, use protest movements and agents of influence to undermine an opponent's operations unity and legitimacy. We'll talk a little bit about Russian collusion here in a minute.
00:29:33
Speaker
Another aspect of the conflict environment is that it looks like states no longer attract the best technical talent, which like you know people used to say that the US military, you know DARPA, probably had access to technology that was 10 or 15 years ahead of anything you could see off the shelf. That's no longer the case, at least in most domains of software and hardware.
00:29:52
Speaker
And so the environment selects for groups that are technically skilled enough to rapidly repurpose consumer systems and use civilian devices in combat settings. Basically people with enough engineering skill to get creative in integrating these civilian off-the-shelf technologies.
00:30:07
Speaker
And again, it's all about getting as powerful as you can get while pulling as little aggro as possible. Kilcullen tells the story of Al Qaeda's evolution in the 1990s, how they built this big, complex hierarchy and financial structure to sponsor a tax on US interests all over the world.
Al-Qaeda's Decentralization Post-9/11
00:30:23
Speaker
And they became this rally point for funds and propaganda talent and training facilities and materials and advisors. They would send advisors to sort of franchise operatives all over the world.
00:30:34
Speaker
But then 9-11 was the biggest aggro poll in the history of aggro polls. Al-Qaeda lost its complex command and control. They lost their home base in Afghanistan. And they actually lost the loyalty of big swathes of the organization because there were sort of players on the inside who had predicted that exactly this would happen. And then when it did, they said, hey, you know, I told you so. You shouldn't be in charge. And so post 9-11, with their headquarters decapitated,
00:31:01
Speaker
Al-Qaeda decentralizes and they become this actual like franchise operation. where the actual Al-Qaeda organization reorients toward ideological propaganda, intelligence products that are way easier to distribute and smuggle than like guns or money. But simultaneously, as much as 9-11 pulled this massive response from the United States, it also gave Al-Qaeda tons of clout with other terrorist groups. And so they had this opportunity to lead attacks
00:31:32
Speaker
without transmitting any material resources just on the basis of like there were a lot of people all over the world who just wanted to run an al-Qaeda operation like an al-Qaeda branded terrorist attack and so the al-Qaeda brass would say you know like here's the targets we think are important here's how you're gonna do it but like you're gonna sell guns or drugs or kids or women locally to raise the funds you're gonna go get the material the guns etc yourself And so Al Qaeda during this period operates a lot like the governments in exile of European countries under Nazi occupation in World War II. They're no longer able to project force behind enemy lines, except as this source of political coordination and legitimacy for resistance groups on the inside. They're sort of inspiring to the occupied peoples. They're this source of information and intel and operational resources for
00:32:28
Speaker
undergrounds that are operating in the occupied territory. But most of this is provided at like a broadcast level. It's not direct one-on-one communication.
ISIS and Its Evolution
00:32:36
Speaker
And so in a lot of these terrorist attacks of the 2000s and 2010s, there's actually not a lot of connection between the people who claim to be an Al-Qaeda affiliate and the actual central organization of Al-Qaeda. Like in one sense, they're they're kind of just fans.
00:32:52
Speaker
But they're also, in another sense, sort of the only eyes and ears and hands that Al-Qaeda has in these areas. So for a while they're the biggest game in town, but then ISIS comes along and they grab a bunch of mindshare among the terrorist community by actually saying, no, we're going to try to hold cities. We're going to conduct conventional warfare against the West. And it's kind of the next iteration of what Al-Qaeda was doing, which is sort of like real Islamism has never been tried.
00:33:18
Speaker
Like if we really do Sharia right, then it won't matter that the Americans are stronger because God will just give us the victory. And so, you know, we should be building tanks and planes and getting ready to wage the sort of final apocalyptic battle against the West. And of course, they immediately get their asses paddled and Al Qaeda survives.
00:33:41
Speaker
But interestingly, there's this ISIS break-off organization, which is called Hayyat Tarir Hashem, created by this internal critic of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who you'll remember died like a dog. ah Trump had him assassinated. And so it makes room at the top. This new guy comes and he starts building alliances. He starts actually working with less ideologically pure partners in the region.
00:34:06
Speaker
And importantly, he keeps his ambitions limited to his local sphere. He's not interested in global jihad. He starts actually having like debates with people, public debates. And so now you've got an insurgent group that has actually a lot of the same military capability that ISIS had. They weren't actually destroyed in terms of their force projection and material, but now they have a lot more local friends and their enemies in the region are struggling to get Western militaries interested.
00:34:36
Speaker
Because it's like, you know, number one, didn't we already beat these people? And number two, like, they're sort of minding their own business from our perspective. They're messing with people that we don't really care about. They're enemies like the Assad's, people we don't like anyway. And so over and over, you see this pattern of catastrophic success.
00:34:54
Speaker
where terror groups achieve some great exploit, they bring together all these resources, and then they pull aggro and they're destroyed or nearly destroyed, and whatever comes after whoever's left to pick up the pieces gets a little bit more sophisticated.
Hezbollah's Strategic Resilience
00:35:08
Speaker
But the sense you get from this book, and I don't know if it was k Cullen's intention, but the sense you get is that Hezbollah is like the gold standard insurgency. Like they're the guys who really did it right.
00:35:20
Speaker
And in his telling, they start with this basically peacetime community organization and political mobilization called the the movement of the dispossessed or the movement of the unfortunate ones. And they're like promoting like Shia self-help. And they're building these schools and clinics, and they're advocating for greater Shia representation in the Lebanese government. And it's sort of like the saying, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. They had learned how to meet these basic needs of their community.
00:35:49
Speaker
And then by the time the 1975 civil war rolled around, security was just one more thing to sort of add to the pile of things that this group provided for the Shia community in Lebanon. And obviously from essentially the beginning they've had benefactors in Syria and Iran, but it's significant that this was the group that rose to the attention and became the credible partner for those outside benefactors. There's an endless conversation on the right about like, where are the right wing billionaires? And it sort of rhymes with what's going on in the UK right now. There's a lot of people who have money who sort of rhetorically support what's going on in the UK. But as far as any of us knows, there's no legitimate or even like organized that you could support and that could credibly advance some policy objective.
00:36:35
Speaker
So during the war Hezbollah evolves into a guerrilla force, but they maintain all these social and political programs. They maintain the clinics and the schools. They support people who you know have their farms destroyed or lose their jobs in the war. They give out food aid. And again, some of those resources are coming from inside the community. Some are coming from outside. But the fact that Hezbollah is there and they're organized and competent and credible means that they're the ones who get to hand out those resources. And, you know, partly the the money and the aid is from state actors, but there's also this large Lebanese diaspora. And Hezbollah treats that community as what Kilcullen calls a virtual strategic hinterland. So in the same way that the United States was the arsenal of democracy during the World Wars, it's this place that the store of resources and productive capacity that their enemies couldn't touch,
00:37:25
Speaker
The Lebanese Shia diaspora becomes this similar reserve for the Shias in Lebanon that their regional enemies can't threaten, can't bomb, can't interdict. And in the last podcast on Kilcullen's book, Out of the Mountains, how did the Taliban win?
00:37:42
Speaker
We covered the Kingston gangs in Jamaica, how they were able to scale way beyond the capacity of any local government in the area. A transnational gang can have legitimate and illegitimate businesses hosted in much more functional, much more productive countries.
00:37:58
Speaker
that actually give them more scalability than any state that's bound to a particular geography. And there's kind of a software analogy here, like the same phenomenon that allows Google to extract $30 from 5 billion people every year allows groups like Hezbollah to get way bigger than their local industrial or population base. So they have this global network of friends and this very limited local scope of enemies. And with a few exceptions early on, they work pretty hard to keep it that way. They would occasionally attack Western targets.
00:38:32
Speaker
But unlike Al Qaeda or ISIS or the Basque separatists or any of these other terrorist organizations, they actually deliberately kept their authorship of the attacks deniable, which made decisive retaliation sort more complicated, harder for Western media-managed democracies to strike back at.
00:38:53
Speaker
And that's basically across the board for terrorist groups, militias, drug cartels. The win condition is basically don't let the Five Eyes get involved. Five Eyes, that's the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. Basically, ah it's it's an Anglophone intelligence conspiracy that allows all these countries to route around prohibitions on spying on their own citizens, but it also does make them a lot more effective in counter-terrorism. But if you're a non-state armed group, like a terrorist group or a drug cartel, as long as the world police are off your back, you're free to leverage this infinite scale capacity of global drug trade, global media, global funding networks, etc. And you can become just ipso facto the dominant player in your neighborhood.
00:39:39
Speaker
And this is basically the justification for this global intelligence cooperation, they call it, but this this conspiracy against Western populations. They justified it by saying, look, if we don't figure out how to transcend these borders, then these rising transnational networked power structures are going to eat our lunch. They're just going to skip across jurisdictions. They're going to build things we can't build. And they're going to overwhelm us with, you know, with drugs, with terror, with crime.
00:40:06
Speaker
And so they're saying, yeah, we need international law enforcement cooperation. And then you they're kind of right. But because the Western tradition of limited government and rule of law doesn't really account for this scaling problem, a lot of things are going to have to be renegotiated. So anyway, Hezbollah stays off the radar for the most part. And to some extent, that's possible for Hezbollah in a way that it isn't possible for a group like Al Qaeda or ISIS.
00:40:29
Speaker
Because Al-Qaeda and ISIS, i mean their main stock in trade is terrorism, is violence. They don't have this other quasi-state infrastructure that gives them legitimacy with their population. They have to try to kill Americans, or or what the hell are they doing? And so these groups have this strong incentive to continually demonstrate their capacity.
00:40:49
Speaker
It looks like actually a couple of terrorist attacks in recent history, especially the Lashkari Taiba raid in Mumbai in 2008, was conducted explicitly to advertise capacity and raise funds. Like it doesn't look like there was a particular Indian national they were mad at or anything that was like strategically relevant about that location.
00:41:10
Speaker
It was basically like look at the special forces type capacity that we've developed to penetrate a more or less modern nation's defenses and inflict damage. So like we're the clear best value for your terrorism dollar.
00:41:27
Speaker
And like obviously none of us wants to explicitly emulate any of these people, but it's worth pointing out that like there are organizations that build legitimate services that provide legitimate value to their communities on top of some ugly things that they do.
00:41:43
Speaker
And there are other groups that are just drawn into this, like, psychotic, nihilistic spiral of violence for its own sake. So the civil war ends, and most of the ethnic militias in Lebanon disarm. But Hezbollah, with their position on the southern border with Israel, uses Israel's military intervention as a pretext to hang on to its weapons. And, like, Israel isn't particularly well-liked in Lebanon.
00:42:10
Speaker
So that pretext plays more or less just fine. And it's another example of crafting this dual-purpose, deniable capacity. The Second Amendment's like this. No state is ever going to explicitly sanction a right to revolution. But by saying that the citizens have a right to bear arms you know for the security of a free state, the Founders endowed their descendants with this dual-purpose capacity.
00:42:35
Speaker
Owning a gun is a very culturally normal thing to do. There are half a dozen more or less legitimate pretexts for you to own a gun, but everybody on both sides of that issue understands that in the event of active, hot conflict between citizens and government,
00:42:51
Speaker
Those guns are going to become relevant. And so the Second Amendment is, I think, less important as a matter of law and much more important as a matter of culture. Because again, owning a gun doesn't automatically flag you as someone who's a legitimate target for state action the way that it would in no Europe or the UK.
Western Policy Loopholes Exploited by China and Russia
00:43:08
Speaker
It makes gun ownership a deniable capacity.
00:43:11
Speaker
just like crypto is a deniable capacity, just like the ability to get half a dozen to a dozen guys together to play paintball or airsoft is a deniable capacity. Same thing with knowing a lot about your neighborhood's electrical infrastructure or communications infrastructure. The way groups like Hezbollah built power was by getting people together under circumstances that the state couldn't really find fault with and that they couldn't interfere with without disrupting or alienating their own clients.
00:43:39
Speaker
So again, that brings us back to this question of vertical and horizontal escalation. And he primarily uses the Russians to illustrate this concept of vertical escalation, which like we said is maintaining hostilities below the threshold at which adversaries can justify a violent engagement.
00:43:55
Speaker
He discusses the distinction between clandestine and covert action, which I kind of thought they were synonyms, but apparently there's a difference. So there's three relevant thresholds to cross before an enemy is going to engage in retaliatory violence. There's the threshold of detection.
00:44:11
Speaker
the threshold of attribution, and the threshold of retaliation. So do we know something happened? Do we know who did it? And do we know what we're going to do about it? So a covert operation is one in which detection can't be avoided. The enemy is definitely going to find out something happened, but either they have no idea who did it, or they have a couple of suspects, but they can't be sure who did it.
00:44:34
Speaker
So that's covert action. But clandestine action doesn't even clear the threshold of detection. So they either don't know that anything happened, or they don't know that any human agency was responsible for it. So for instance, if the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse was the result of hostile action, it would be clandestine action, because it was interpreted by the target as an accident. And of course, it's possible that the US infrastructure security authorities don't actually think it was an accident, but that's what they're telling us.
00:45:04
Speaker
And if it was enemy action, it would have to be pretty sophisticated because in our technological environment, detection is very, very cheap. We can afford to monitor essentially everything that matters all the time, at least forensically, meaning after the fact. So there probably wasn't a human intelligence analyst constantly watching the Francis Scott Key Bridge, but there was CCTV from a bunch of angles, and there was you know the ship's recorder in the boat. And so while it's not really any easier to prevent these attacks,
00:45:31
Speaker
When something bad happens, we can at least figure out what happened and have some idea of who did it. But beyond the threshold of detection and attribution, there's the threshold of retaliation. And Russia in particular is putting a lot of work in not only to engage in hostile action below the threshold of retaliation, but also to expand the zone between the thresholds of detection and attribution and retaliation. So what does that mean? Well, for one example, Kilcullen talks about the Russians organizing and funding migrant caravans that got into Europe through Norway, through Poland, through the Baltics, explicitly for the purpose of surge testing Europe's border response.
00:46:13
Speaker
They wanted to see how Europe's frontier defenses would respond. They wanted to weaken their enemies economically and tie up a lot of internal security resources just just on migrant crime alone, in addition to counterterrorism, counterintelligence. But this flood of young fighting-age migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan also created perfect top cover for illegal Russian intelligence assets to get into the continent. And the beauty of this plan is that the European security authorities can't even admit that this is a problem, let alone attribute it to the Russians or retaliate. So from the Russian perspective, it's just it's a freebie.
00:46:52
Speaker
And it actually further opens up that aperture, that threshold of hostile action without retaliation, because it serves as part of the information warfare that paralyzes the American and European media managed response. So part of the benefit of these limited, deniable covert operations is that they impose this reality distortion field.
00:47:16
Speaker
You can see this with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can see it with Russia, Ukraine. You can even to some extent see it with China and Taiwan. Basically, all of our major adversaries have succeeded in politicizing and internalizing all of our foreign policy conflicts.
00:47:32
Speaker
So whether you're allowed to detect the Russians or the Chinese or the Israelis or the Palestinians as a threat, whether you're able to interpret any particular action of theirs as hostile, and whose fault you think it is that America can't respond, these are all now political issues. And so I'm quoting now, he says, fostering a fragmented, polarized political and media environment can become a military objective in its own right, since it increases the scope of maneuver by widening the zone of ambiguity. And so like, is Russia interfering with the United States election system? The answer is yes, obviously. They are definitely unambiguously trying to undermine the legitimacy of America's political and social institutions. Absolutely. But that doesn't remotely answer the question of what ought to be done about it.
00:48:23
Speaker
Because while it may be true that a foreign power is undermining Americans' faith in their institutions, the real question is whether those institutions deserve to have their faith in the first place. And so like we can agree that the Russians are disseminating this information with hostile intent, but is the information true? And who's their hostile intent directed toward? Is it directed toward me, or is it directed toward my internal enemies in the American political system?
00:48:46
Speaker
And it wasn't that long ago that the Russians were engaged in information war on the opposite side. The Red Scare was good for the Russians in that it discredited the efforts by the American security establishment to get communist operatives out of the government. From then on, if you wanted to come forward with evidence that you found a Russian spy inside your organization, you had to worry about being labeled McCarthyist.
00:49:08
Speaker
The Russians were clearly unambiguously involved in the civil rights movement. But at the time, progressives would say, well, what's wrong with supporting the civil rights movement? These these power structures are oppressive and they do deserve to be delegitimized. And so the attribution actually becomes part of the operation itself. The fact that it was, at least in some quarters, sincerely believed that Donald Trump was a Russian intelligence asset,
00:49:33
Speaker
weakened America's security posture whether it was true or not, which is to the Russians' advantage. And you could argue that the anarcho-tyranny that we're up against here in the States and also in places like the UK is of a piece with this same category of dirty tricks. Like, I think British bobbies, the cops,
00:49:50
Speaker
I think they actually like the perception that they're kind of soft and feminized and harmless and useless because it means when they selectively don't do their job, it's not surprising to anyone. Similarly with the assassination attempt on the president, the introduction of DEI means that it's no longer totally ludicrous, totally impossible that the Secret Service just like stepped on their dicks and almost got Trump killed. We're all ready to believe that.
00:50:16
Speaker
which means that if it were a covert operation, the people responsible would have substantially more room to maneuver and a substantially higher threshold to clear before the rest of us could get our act together and formulate a response.
00:50:32
Speaker
Besides which, anarchotirony creates conditions in which liminal maneuver or playing with the escalation slider is a lot harder for a dissident or an insurgent to engage in precisely because the regime is lawless and so you don't have this clear sense of what's against the rules and what isn't. It's really good for the regime that you don't know what you might be arrested for.
00:50:54
Speaker
The reason your HR department at your job has to hire the craziest ideologues they can find is precisely because the restrictions on freedom of expression aren't clear. They don't want clear rules because if there's clear rules, then they'll have citizens walking right up to the line and not crossing it. They want you to be thinking about what you say in private, online, at work. They want you to be wondering, is this going to get me in trouble? So this vertical escalation is more than just avoiding blame or not becoming a big enough problem to deal with. It's also this game of exploiting internal conflicts so that your enemies attack each other on your behalf. Like there was a guy going around ah this like migrant rights activist who's got just like the worst high mutational load congenital criminal physiognomy you've ever seen in your life.
00:51:46
Speaker
and he's got this like horrible sneer on his face and he's like screaming with rage about like we're gonna cross the border and we're gonna squat in your houses and steal your shit and like rape your women or whatever and it came out that this guy was a Venezuelan intelligence asset.
00:52:04
Speaker
And it's like, well, you know what do they stand to gain from just like inspiring this kind of hatred? And there's a case to be made that this guy was intended to strengthen the American right because a lot of forces outside the United States regard the American right as sort of the insurgent, the agent of chaos inside the American political system, that we weaken the American political system. And the funny thing is the fact that he's a Venezuelan intelligence asset and he got into the United States and he could make these videos with impunity
00:52:38
Speaker
doesn't break the op, it actually strengthens the op. It makes him better rage bait. It makes the case all the more vividly that our government has forfeited its legitimacy on like the most basic level. And like if you're a patriotic American, what are you supposed to do about that?
00:52:55
Speaker
Like as long as you're gumming up the works and not winning, you really are a destabilizing agent. And people who want the American empire to withdraw and collapse, which would make you and your family and everybody you care about dramatically poorer, all those foreign enemies are interested in keeping you loud and obnoxious. They love that American politics is now completely on both sides swamped with conspiratorial thinking.
00:53:22
Speaker
because it really does make the American security state weaker and slower to react. But that doesn't mean the conspiratorial thinking is wrong. These weaknesses are sort of operator agnostic. Anything that weakens the regime's ability to target you and me also weakens their ability to fight foreign enemies. And so if you're a patriotic American and you don't want to see America decline for its own sake,
00:53:43
Speaker
then the thing to do is just to win hard and win fast. Get back in power as quickly as we possibly can. And if you don't think that's feasible, or if you want deeper decline, deeper collapse, then you've got to accept the fact that your state, your city, your town are going to become the playground for foreign enemies that have their act together.
00:54:01
Speaker
And so this is a good place to talk about China. Kilcolan uses China to illustrate this concept of conceptual envelopment, which is the horizontal escalation of hostilities, meaning escalating hostilities into domains that the enemy isn't prepared to even perceive as hostile. He talks about how basically every naval choke point where Australia or America or the UK launches nuclear missile submarines There just happens to be some Chinese shell company that's owned by some Communist Party princeling that owns a hotel like on a cliff overlooking that naval base. And it's like really obvious what the Chinese are doing, but because foreign nationals are allowed to own property in the United States,
00:54:45
Speaker
and these are privately held legitimate businesses, the US government would have to unwind billions of dollars of real estate transactions to make this kind of thing illegal. And of course they could just target these particular transactions in a kind of unprincipled way, but that'd be worse, right? Because then you're not just specifically threatening these foreign nationals, you're like changing the rules on like every property owner in the country. And so like the Russians, the Chinese get this freebie. They get a listening post to monitor our nuclear deterrent,
00:55:15
Speaker
And it's like also presumably a profitable business in a desirable area. These are like Southern California and Darwin, Australia, beautiful seaside real estate. And it's a legitimately profit generating business. So it's essentially completely cost neutral. And the fact that these shell companies tree up to the Chinese Communist Party doesn't mean anything.
00:55:35
Speaker
Because basically all Chinese companies tree up to the Chinese Communist Party. And so it's like, if you want to do business with the Chinese at all, you have to involve the Chinese Communist Party. And if you wanted to exclude Chinese people, which would have to include lots and lots of Americans of Chinese descent, you'd be scrambling America's entire self-conception. Certainly the present government's self-conception anyway. And there's no real upper bound on this. There's no limit to how much of the country they can just buy out from under us.
00:56:05
Speaker
especially if the dollar were to collapse and US assets were to go on sale. And especially when you consider that like the Chinese do not care about anti-discrimination law basically at all, you can see what the Chinese are doing in the United States as basically blockbusting on a national scale. So blockbusting historically was the practice of moving in black people to a historically white neighborhood or sometimes even just like paying black actors to push a stroller down the street or get in a fight in the street and then basically have a real estate agent go to some of these white families and say look the neighborhood's going down the tubes you need to sell out as quickly as possible. So you buy the houses at a fire sale price and then you actually do turn around and sell them
00:56:46
Speaker
two black families who want to move in at a substantial markup, and you just sort of rake in the money as the neighborhood slowly burns down. Jordan Peterson recently interviewed Brett Weinstein, who took a trip to the Darien Gap, which is basically the section of Panama connecting North and South America where there's no transit infrastructure, no roads, no rails. So anything that has to travel through there either has to go on foot or over the water.
00:57:10
Speaker
And it's apparently been this massive staging area for migrants from not just South America, but all over the world. And Brett describes, you know, migrants from the places you'd expect to see them from, but then also this substantial cohort of military-aged Chinese males who kept completely to themselves.
00:57:26
Speaker
And like those guys in particular, they may have been intelligence assets. They may have been just trying to sneak into the country. They may have been actually organizing some of this migrant activity, but like they probably weren't coming to America to pick fruit, right? And so like imagine you're the Chinese and you have no scruples about hurting Americans. You're still smarting from the Opium Wars.
00:57:47
Speaker
And you know you're free to buy real estate, and you know that there are colossal, colossal areas of the United States that are wildly underpriced, wildly undervalued, because people move away from them to escape the consequences of the Civil Rights Act. Like you think San Francisco real estate is valuable, just imagine if there like weren't shit on the streets, and homeless people, and needles, and crime, and and imagine if all the people in America who think San Francisco is gorgeous and would love to live there, could actually raise families and run businesses there. As valuable as that real estate is, it's not even it doesn't even touch what it could be. And furthermore, you know that there's essentially a limitless number of people who would like to cross the border into the United States for hostile reasons, friendly reasons, straightforward economic reasons. you know
00:58:36
Speaker
Some of them I assume are good people, but it's infinite. You could absolutely swamp the boat. And you could absolutely crush the young, native population with drugs. Fentanyl alone kills more Americans in one year than the entire death toll from the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam wars combined. And they know we're in no position to stop the drugs. They know we're in no position to stop the immigration. But a Chinese proxy government would be. Because they don't care about property rights. They don't care about individual freedoms. So what they can do is swamp the boat, overwhelm the US s with migrants and drugs, buy off a handful of strategically placed politicians like Newsom, like Biden, buy up the whole neighborhood for a song, and then they deport the migrants. They execute the drug dealers. And you can almost imagine a version of that story where the native population ends up frankly greeting them as liberators. And at least the high points of this approach are all described in that book, Unrestricted Warfare. One of the authors of the book sums it up in an interview with the Communist Party newspaper. He says,
00:59:33
Speaker
Strong countries make the rules while rising ones break them and exploit loopholes, but the United States has to observe its own rules or the whole world will not trust it. And so the Chinese have essentially made it policy to exploit all the loopholes in America's sort of cooperative equilibrium, both between the citizen and the state and between the state and other foreign actors.
00:59:54
Speaker
They describe environmental warfare as one of the domains of warfare that they've entered into. And obviously what that means is, get the United States to unilaterally dismantle their warfighting capacity and industrial capacity in order to save the planet. And there you've got another form of escalation that becomes a political football. American and European environmentalists absolutely will go to bat for the Chinese if it means they get to stick it to their domestic enemies.
01:00:17
Speaker
Likewise, the Chinese love the American defense industry because they can try a little test run over Taiwan. They can do a little provocative drive by of a American naval vessel in South China Sea. And then Lockheed and Raytheon get to bang the war drums. And then their stock goes up and they go buy their raw materials and their industrial precursors from China. They keep the United States spending. They keep the United States focused on this conventional conflict, basically indefinitely while the Chinese are fighting the real war in like Des Moines, Iowa.
Byzantine Strategy for US Resilience
01:00:48
Speaker
So at the end of the book, Kilcolan offers what I took to be essentially, here's what America could do and should do, and here's what America's actually likely to do. His proposal is something he calls going Byzantine, which is basically optimizing for longevity rather than raw force projection.
01:01:05
Speaker
So this would mean, I'm quoting here, developing new military models in part by selectively copying our enemies, broadening the conception of successful strategy beyond battlefield dominance, consciously optimizing for long duration sustainability, focusing on financial and societal resilience, maintaining a selective edge in certain key technologies, keeping enemies distracted with internal challenges, and turning adversaries against each other.
01:01:29
Speaker
He talks about how the Byzantines maintain an edge in key technologies, often with a defensive bent, such as fortifications, siege warfare, and the fearsome incendiary weapon known as Greek fire. They created relatively efficient taxation systems and civil service structures to support mobile, highly trained professional forces that almost never fought alone, instead serving as the hardcore for a swarm of auxiliaries, allies, mercenaries, surrogates, and partners. And they maintain small but capable expeditionary strike forces as quick reaction reserves.
01:01:59
Speaker
Which that to me sounds a lot like Erik Prince's model of privatizing a return to colonialism. The US needs to get a whole lot leaner and more mobile and less bureaucratic, and that probably just can't be done by big army. The industrial structure of the US armed forces will probably have to be dramatically restructured or just go bust.
01:02:17
Speaker
He talks about how the Byzantine Empire empowered locals and engaged in sort of defensive guerrilla warfare in depth, where they would sort of let enemies penetrate in and then make it very expensive to stay. But frankly, I don't think the US government, as presently constituted, will ever be comfortable giving that kind of power to its own citizens. He talks about using the connectivity and remote engagement capabilities that allow terrorists to radicalize individuals in our societies to reach out and mobilize friendly individuals and groups ourselves.
01:02:46
Speaker
And he's got a lot of good ideas like that, which would just require a different state with a different ideology. But you can maybe imagine a successor regime, maybe not Trump, but maybe some of Trump's people who could implement some of the reforms that might make a pivot like this possible. And you know, if that happens, that's great.
01:03:02
Speaker
We can all go get normal jobs and not worry about politics so much. But if that doesn't happen, and we're looking at something more like Lebanon in the 70s or Russia in the 90s, then basically we need to be building as much capacity as we possibly can in our local areas. And there's two pieces of good news about that. The first piece of good news is that our domestic enemies really are exhausted.
01:03:21
Speaker
Part of the reason they're restricting their enforcement action to law-abiding citizens is because they really don't have the stomach for an actual confrontation. And this is true both foreign and domestic. They go after law-abiding citizens domestically for the same reason that they're so committed to this like zero casualties, extreme precision, extreme high-cost method of warfare. It's because they've completely lost the ability to inspire sacrifice, but they still need to project power. You saw this with the early days of that enforcement action against the Houthis, which By the way, it remains a complete failure. You had these shots of like Zoomer sailors on the aircraft carrier getting their like sugary fruity Starbucks and it was clearly intended as a flex. It was like, look, you know, the sea lanes are totally fine. This doesn't even rise to the level of like an on the job emergency.
01:04:08
Speaker
all of our people are basically stand-down mode and we're still totally handling it. That's the message they were trying to send.
US Navy's Strategic Dilemmas
01:04:15
Speaker
But like, there's a very obvious reason that that carrier strike group hasn't moved in closer and just handled the problem. Like they obviously have the technical capability to do that.
01:04:25
Speaker
The question is what would happen to like the current day jobs program US Navy if American sailors actually started getting killed? What would be the narrative that the American media would use or even could use to to literally keep the zoomers in the boat? And I actually bet that the US Navy probably could clear out the Houthis maybe with no casualties. The technological and industrial advantage is is still enormous. I think it's totally possible. But the fact that the US Navy is so afraid to test that hypothesis that they're willing to de facto abandon the busiest sea lane on the planet suggests that whatever internal data they're looking at is super dicey. And that's now when they've got no problem paying everybody salaries, covering the GI Bill, covering the pensions, and they've got like a decade max before that starts to be a real problem. So all of that to say, maybe don't worry about these people. Maybe worry about who comes after these
Community Building in Crisis
01:05:19
Speaker
people. So that's good news number one.
01:05:21
Speaker
Good news number two is all of the hard stuff, the important stuff, the stuff that absolutely has to get done before things get crazy is 100% nonviolent, respectable, legitimate. And you know, that's partly because in our present security and technological environment, you just can't get away with anything else. But also one of the biggest lessons learned in the last 20 years is that in the present technological situation, like illiterate goat herders with flip-flops,
01:05:48
Speaker
really can present credible resistance to the most advanced militaries on the planet. And it's not because they're in better physical condition. It's not because they're taller or stronger or shoot straighter. None of that's true. It's because they have cohesion. They know who their friends are. Your friends, in the Schmidian sense, are the set of people that you would kill and die for. And so pretty much all Westerners have no idea who their friends are and maybe don't have any friends.
01:06:10
Speaker
And finding that out is an organic process of discovery that no one can really synthesize. You actually have to be in the situation before you really know for sure. But you can surround yourself with excellent and useful and admirable people. People who are likely to be your friends. And you can figure out what those people want and try to make yourself useful to them and try to build things together. And then together, you could try to be useful to your community.
01:06:32
Speaker
And then it gets to a point where people need you around and in a time of crisis, you bring people together. And yeah, maybe one of the problems that you solve together is security. But again, you can learn that together as you need to in ways that don't pull aggro here and now. Anyway, that's what I'm trying to do. Just make friends on the Internet.
01:06:50
Speaker
We get together 12 times a week and once a month in person. And it's basically just a vetted group of values aligned guys and we build stuff together. We also sometimes have guests come and do private Q and A's and teach us about something. We've had Charles Haywood come and tell us how to build a shampoo empire. We had Clay Martin come and teach us about preparedness. And next Tuesday, the 20th, we're going to have Auron McIntyre come and talk to us about his book, The Total State. So if you want to get involved, check us out at exitgroup.us or you can reach out to me on Twitter at extradeadjcb. Thanks for listening.
01:07:20
Speaker
you