America's Guerilla Army

July 4^th is coming up soon, and remarkably I have a revolutionary topic to discuss.  How convenient…

This is yet another salvo of mine in the gun control war, currently being waged on Facebook as well as in the country at large, and those sitting down in Congress types who know what’s best for everyone else.  Regrettably, the “hand control” advocates on the Interweb or Book of Faces can’t resist starting off with benign patronizing, followed by outright insults when you don’t agree with their wisdom (?) and logic, such as it is.  So much of this will be preaching to the choir.  So be it.  If any of my readers are actually undecided on this issue, by all means listen up. 

AR15.  The sad joke about this is that as military weapons go, the AR15 would be almost at the bottom – just above bolt-action rifles and muzzle loaders.  It can’t even fire full auto, or even 3 round bursts.  The Army uses the select-fire M16A2 (semi-auto/3 round burst) which replaced the M16 and M16A1, which could fire full auto.  It has full auto .308 machine guns and the beloved M2 .50 caliber machine gun.  Add to this: grenades, grenade launchers, mortars, light artillery, heavy artillery, APVs, tanks, and also ground attack by helicopters and the US Air Force, both F16s and the big B52s.  Plus strategic nuclear weapons – so far only employed against Japanese civilians.

Oh, by the way:  this business of “The Founding Fathers never imagined the AR15.”  Are you assuming that the Founding Fathers believed that military technology in the late 1700s would NEVER progress?  That black powder, muzzle-loading muskets were as far as any army could ever go?  Highly presumptuous.  Of course, there is no evidence for that position.  I’d say the Founding Fathers could better imagine better versions of firearms – which they had then – than they could the Internet, but you don’t hear liberals admitting that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to the Internet. 

“We, the Militia”.  Thank God the First Amendment protects the right of free speech, religion, and assembly – of the militia.  That the Fourth Amendment protects…the militia…from unreasonable searches and seizures.  That the Fifth Amendment prevents the Militia from testifying against itself.  Thanks to the Sixth Amendment, the Militia has a right to a speedy and fair trial.  The Militia merits a jury trial – by a peer of militias (Seventh) – and no excessive bail will keep the militia locked up or subject to cruel or unusual punishments (Eighth).  The Founding Fathers – including NRA Founder James Madison – didn’t really mean “people” when they said “people” could bear arms.  They meant that the armed forces had the right to bear arms.  What a radical idea!  That’s why it’s sandwiched between the first and third amendments (no militia quartered among the militia, without the consent of the militia).  In the Militia’s Bill of Rights.  If it comes to a toss between Chief Justice Warren Burger and James Madison as to what the Founding Fathers intended, I’ll pick Madison.  Not only was he there, he was one of them.

Anyhow.  SO then the liberals sneer that civilians armed with AR15s would be no match for SEAL Team Six.   “Black Hawk Down”, people.  Mobs of angry, well-armed Somalis made life very difficult for us in Mogadishu.   Mobs of angry, well-armed Americans can make life very difficult for regular US soldiers, just like the Viet Cong made life difficult for US soldiers in Vietnam, the Taliban did so – and continues to do so – in Afghanistan, and Iraqi rebels did in Iraq.  This despite all the horrendous damage that our advanced military technology could inflict on our opponents.  Funny how the liberals who laugh about the VC or Taliban giving our much-vaunted high tech military a hard time conveniently change their tune when the roles are reversed.

And that’s US soldiers fighting against foreign guerillas.   You really cannot assume the reliability of ordinary soldiers sent to fight against their own people.  All bets are off.  Sure, there will be some hardcore nuts who “love the smell of napalm in the morning” – and who are as likely to be shot from behind as from the front. 

During our own War of Independence, we did raise conventional forces, trained by Baron von Steuben, but we never had enough to avoid relying upon irregulars.  Von Lettow-Vorbeck, arguably the best guerilla warfare leader Germany ever produced (yes, I know that’s a very small group), knew that guerillas do not necessarily have to overcome conventional forces on the battlefield to be strategically effective: they can tie down such forces and spread them out.  Every Commonwealth unit wasting its time chasing VLV and his Askaris around Tanzania and Mozambique was a unit that wasn’t fighting at the Somme.  And every now and then – early 1800s Haiti, Dien Bien Phu in 1954 – a guerilla army will defeat a conventional army.  In our case it would simply be enough to make a constant nuisance to the conventional forces.  If we ran out of patience in Vietnam and Iraq, we’ll certainly run out of patience fighting ourselves. 

Che Guevara.  Here’s another funny thing.  Liberals love Che Guevara.  Wasn’t he brave?  He fought against Batista (who ran away quickly); he fought in the Congo; and then he fought in Bolivia, until taken down by the Bolivian Army assisted by Felix Rodriguez and the CIA.  You would think that liberals would be cradling their semi-auto AK47s and training in the backwoods like Che and the VC: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!”  But they didn’t do that when Reagan was president.  They didn’t even do that when George W. Bush was President AND we had the Patriot Act, which might have inspired some to prepare against a right-wing dictatorship.  Should we be surprised?  If liberals think the AR15 – a civilian, semi-auto version of a full-auto military rifle - is the pinnacle of military technology and get PTSD simply firing one, no wonder they lack the courage to emulate their hero.  

American Revolution

July 4^th again!  Last year I discussed the Grateful Dead.  This time I’ll discuss the American Revolution and other topics in a random fashion.

 When it comes to Cuba, for example, Che Guevara seems to get more credit than Fidel Castro.  At least with our own revolution, America gets it right.  George Washington, the man who led our forces to victory and by far the most important figure in our revolution, gets the top billing he deserves:  our capital city named after him, with an obelisk in his name; the state containing Seattle is named after him; two colleges; the $1 bill; the quarter; and lots more. 

 Viewed in perspective, the American Revolution is remarkable:

1.         A ragtag army managed to defeat, in conventional warfare, the redcoated armies of the world’s largest and most powerful country at the time Great Britain.  A colony defeating its mother country in battle?  Amazing. Granted, we had some help from France, but the French alone could not have done it, and would not have intervened had we not been a winning proposition.

2.         After finishing up the war, the Founding Fathers established a Constitution AND a stable democracy.  As history shows, it’s fairly easy to get rid of a dictator; imposing something close to order and stability afterwards is quite another story (we have some VERY recent history to show us that...).  Let’s compare two other major revolutions:

            A.         French Revolution (1789).  After some lip service to “liberty, equality, fraternity”, they set up a guillotine in what is now Place de la Concorde and began lopping off heads.  Not only the royal family (King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette) but each other’s!  The Terror ended up devouring its own – Danton and Robespierre themselves became victims.  Eventually the French ended up with an emperor, Napoleon, and after some proud victories, with a comeback tour by Napoleon, they wound up with defeat; then Louis Phillippe and  Louis Napoleon (aka Napoleon III).  In other words, they had to wait until 1872 or so to finally get a stable republic.

            B.         Russian Revolution (1917).  The first one, led by Kerensky, only served to depose the Tsar but keep the war going on.  In November the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, took over in St Petersburg; a civil war lasted until 1922; and from 1922 to 1989 the Russians had to endure under a totalitarian dictatorship, induding those particularly nasty years under Stalin.  Like the French, the Bolsheviks couldn’t resist brutally murdering not only the Romanovs but each other. 

 Celebrate July 4^th?  Some argue that the blacks in this country have little reason to celebrate July 4^th, because the American Revolution – and the establishment of democracy thereafter – did not immediately abolish slavery.  This sounds a little harsh.  Never mind that they had to construct an entire democratic government out of thin air, including a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and set the whole thing up so it would (A) have enough power to do anything and protect itself from anarchy and tyranny, of the minority AND the majority; (B) not be so powerful that we’d wind up with a dictator; and (C) have an amendment system so it could be peacefully changed without a violent, bloody revolution.  Never mind t hat they had to sell this whole package deal to all 13 colonies and satisfy slaveowners down south as well as bankers in Philadelphia, New York and Boston.  Never mind that at that point, America was still an agricultural country which had yet to experience its own Industrial Revolution.  Never mind that even England had to wait until 1833 to abolish slavery.  Never mind that it took us a Civil War from 1861-65 to achieve this goal years later.  Slamming the Founding Fathers for not abolishing slavery in 1787 sounds about as logical as slamming Wilbur and Orville Wright for not launching a jet aircraft and breaking the sound barrier at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.

 American Wars.  I did some number crunching and came to a remarkable conclusion.   If you add up the days of prolonged hostilities (notwithstanding when a peace treaty formally ended the war) of each of the wars the US has been in, and divide the number of total deaths by that, we end up with not only some idea of how bloody these conflicts were, but you can also divide them into three categories of intensity of conflict:

A.  Low level.  The Revolutionary War (1775-81), War of 1812 (1812-1815), Gulf War (1990-91), and current Iraqi War (2003-2007): 2 deaths per day.

B.  Mid-level.  Mexican War (1846-48), Spanish-American War (1898), Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1965-72): a range from 20-33 deaths per day.

C.  High-level.  the big three: WWI (1917-18): 200/day; WWII (1941-45): 300/day; and the biggest by far, the Civil War (1861-65): 427/day.  Civil War casualties (well over 600,000) practically equal all the rest combined, with the next two being WWII (407,316) and WWI (116,708).  

            This should put it in perspective when the “body count” comes back from Iraq.  We aren’t even CLOSE to Vietnam – in total deaths OR intensity.  IF the situation can be stabilized and a strong, non-Islamic sickwad regime emerges, YES it will have been worthwhile.