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Let's Play [Total War: US vs Islam] - WTF Is This Shit
Zephiran
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18030105
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/total-war-islam/?pid=1196
So I didn't see a thread about this, and since it's a subject that has been stabbing me in the guts recently I decided I'd make one.
Feel free to lock if redundant.
Something fucked up has been afoot in the halls of the Joint Chiefs of Staff College. For about a year, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew A. Dooley taught a rather messed up course about US military tactics in response to terrorism - or, as Dooley would call it, US military tactics against Islam itself.
Pour up a stiff one (you're gonna need it) and read some of this shit.
And there's a whole lot more where that came from in the Wired article.
What makes it so disturbing is that this wasn't just some lone nutter going off on a tirade in a community college in some redneck backwoods town in bumfuck-nowhere, no, this was an official course taught in a prestigious US organisation and as far as we know none of the attendees thought it was pertinent to alert any of their superiors that this kind of shit was going on. What Dooley was essentially doing was to feed into the very same false dichotomy terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda use to justify their own actions and existence: that the US is or should be at war with the religion of Islam, and that severe and devastating US military operations should be considered to "win the war". Replace "US military operations" with "Jihad" and you'd basically end up with the Al-Qaeda version.
Good on General Dempsey to shut the shitshow down for now, but the entire thing still irks me, particularly how it could undermine the credibility of the US military corps of officers. If they ate this shit up without objecting for a year, then it sort of throws into question these officers suitability for any kind of military duty - be it good old tour duty, peacekeeping or "crisis response", particularly in the middle east.
Do we really want a bunch of Officer "Nuke 'Ems" in charge of their own squads in Irak or Afghanistan?
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/total-war-islam/?pid=1196
So I didn't see a thread about this, and since it's a subject that has been stabbing me in the guts recently I decided I'd make one.
Feel free to lock if redundant.
Something fucked up has been afoot in the halls of the Joint Chiefs of Staff College. For about a year, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew A. Dooley taught a rather messed up course about US military tactics in response to terrorism - or, as Dooley would call it, US military tactics against Islam itself.
Pour up a stiff one (you're gonna need it) and read some of this shit.
And there's a whole lot more where that came from in the Wired article.
What makes it so disturbing is that this wasn't just some lone nutter going off on a tirade in a community college in some redneck backwoods town in bumfuck-nowhere, no, this was an official course taught in a prestigious US organisation and as far as we know none of the attendees thought it was pertinent to alert any of their superiors that this kind of shit was going on. What Dooley was essentially doing was to feed into the very same false dichotomy terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda use to justify their own actions and existence: that the US is or should be at war with the religion of Islam, and that severe and devastating US military operations should be considered to "win the war". Replace "US military operations" with "Jihad" and you'd basically end up with the Al-Qaeda version.
Good on General Dempsey to shut the shitshow down for now, but the entire thing still irks me, particularly how it could undermine the credibility of the US military corps of officers. If they ate this shit up without objecting for a year, then it sort of throws into question these officers suitability for any kind of military duty - be it good old tour duty, peacekeeping or "crisis response", particularly in the middle east.
Do we really want a bunch of Officer "Nuke 'Ems" in charge of their own squads in Irak or Afghanistan?
Alright and in this next scene all the animals have AIDS.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
Zephiran on
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Although I can only relay my personal anecdotes, I can tell you that this is NOT what we are taught in the rest of the military.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Hopefully none of the course attendants were actually accepting this crap...
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
but yeah, this kind of stuff is pretty screwed up. There's been stories of it floating around since the early 2000s.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
At the same time, it's also not at all surprising given my experience with those at higher levels in the military, such as senior NCOs and mid-grade and senior officers. Which would also explain why this wasn't squashed earlier.
None? Yeah, hope in hope in one hand...
But hopefully a majority weren't buying.
I am not well-acquainted with the United States military. I was drafted into the armed forces of an entirely different country, and they didn't have much to say about it either. But given the last decade of warfare, the understood history of the United States armed forces, and the periodic rhetoric coming of the political base that counts among its loyal adherents the officer corps, I'd be shocked if colonels teaching classes didn't talk like this.
Plus, I assumed they had the bare minimum interest in something as distant as the "Geneva convention" or any lofty ideals there within. I'd say that about practically any active-duty military officer, in my own experience, after ten years of war. Hell, the company-level officers I remember, I imagine after ten years of warfare would have gone head-on-pants insane in pretty high numbers.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
Then I came in here and got disappointed.
As someone who does this thing for a living, I can affirm that this is not the case. I wouldn't be surprised if certain morons in certain agencies simply lumped groups together that didn't belong, but the US did not "make up" the Al-Qaeda name, nor does it not exist now. Plenty of terrorists claim to be a part of it, the Taliban directly refer to the network, and there are definite links between AQ and its various franchises (AQAP, AQI, AQIM, etc). Al-Qaeda is most certainly not something who's name only pops up in Western literature.
Can you define it as an actual organization (with its own structure) that has actual members, an actual philosophy and is entirely separate from other groups rather than merely an anomalous name used to merely label certain operations?
Because I have to say, there are plenty of people that claim to be part of some vast revolutionary network even here in the USA. Just because a bunch of guys throw a label around doesn't however necessarily mean that label actually refers to a real organization that exists and runs its own operations.
Yes, actually. Though something to understand is that part of what makes the thing effective is the slightly decentralized nature: there's a central authority with stated goals, members, positions, and policies, but as you go further down the chain it gets far more chaotic. This is the "cell" network you keep hearing about, where a group may only have 1 contact to a higher authority. Further complicating matters is the more recent "crowd sourcing" (what AQAP called "Open Source Jihad" when Inspire was still running) that starts to look almost like a bizarro Anonymous situation- any asshat on the stress can blow himself up in the name of AQ.
That being said, understand that the situation is indeed very complex. Occasionally, it CAN sometimes be difficult to determine where one group ends and another begins (it was this way sometimes in Iraq). However, when it comes to whether or not Al-Qaeda has a definite structure and isn't just a phenomena or a modus operandi, it's as certain as these things get.
The military has been careful to keep the madness out of official doctrine and strategy (especially since the publication of Petraeus's counter insurgency manual), and you always get the nice photo ops of the local CPT leading his company in helping out the locals, but you still get a lot of the crazies who would've been right at home in Vietnam.
What is this book? Who is reading this still?
The people who flock to career posts aren't exactly guaranteed to all be of mellow temper, are they? Barnett touches upon it in his book: when he argued his point of the US as a world Leviathan, he did step on some top brass toes in the process. His approach would require a highly mobile force of conventional ground troopers; coming out of the Cold War MAD doctrine, nobody took him seriously at first. Every single officer was so entrenched into the thought pattern of The Nuke as the US' insurance that they couldn't imagine a world where it wouldn't be used as a deterrent.
My point being: you're going to get a lot of people who are attracted to all kinds of military grandstanding and fetishism, and sometimes some of them are gonna open their big dumb mouths and hurl a metric fuckton of shit for the rest of us to clean up.
Maybe the best officer material for the very unconventional operations the new century has come to demand isn't to be found in the willing and brazen, but in the kind of people who shun and despise military duty? If so, that'd be one hell of a paradox.
EDIT:
Also, I wasn't going to post this at first, since I figured the OP was crammed enough already, but what the heck. Rith does a great job of plucking out the absolutely juiciest bits of shitwankery on display.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
At the risk of sounding daft, could you please put the contents of this video in context then?
The same book that has Jews sacrificing young Christian children.
You know the "made from whole cloth book," subtitled "see we have to kill them they're monsters."
"I think I can comment on this because I used to live above the Baby Doll Lounge, a topless bar that was once frequented by bikers in lower Manhattan."
There's some good stuff there, some silly stuff. I'm not at all surprised at the concept that AQ was blown up into something more than it actually was, it was just the political landscape of the time. However, when he goes on to talk about "well, we didn't find roves of Al Qaeda fighters, anywhere, and the cell structure is just a myth," he's just silly. There was no need for bands of trained baddies, AQ was living in a friendly nation where planning and strategy could be composed in peace. Of course you're not gonna find a "cell" there, that's not where cells stay! Sounds to me like the results of incompetent leadership that didn't actually know what they were really looking for.
I should probably mention that we're rapidly entering a period where AQ itself doesn't matter. So much of their effective leadership has been killed, and their name doesn't actually have much credibility in the region that it once did (OBL lamented in his last months that AQI had tarnished the name of Al Qaeda, and the organization had paid the price. A complete name change was being considered, though by this point he was also complaining about how the constant need for secrecy and security had effectively nullified his own position).
Half the idiots with guns who took up arms in Afghanistan called themselves Al Qaeda. 60 minutes I think did a thing where they went behind enemy lines and the bomb maker in the camp he stayed at claimed he was Al Qaeda, he didn't have an ID, he just showed up and "oh I'm al qaeda"
Wherever we go new Al Qaeda springs up all on its own. The original group that was behind 9/11 was pretty small, and I don't think anyone is seriously contesting that.
To get back to the OP, you've just highlighted a symptom of a bigger problem with the US military, which is that the place is, for several reasons, filled with fundies. Which, as you can imagine, has been a major problem for us in conducting operations in majority-Muslim nations.
Now another friend of a friend in.... army? talked about how they had a bunch of MRE's confiscated because leaders found out they were saving the pork MRE's to hand out to kids, and how he was in a bunch of situations he wasn't trained/ready for dealing with the local population.
I think it all just differs based on unit/branch.
I really need to learn to read all of a thread title.
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Sometimes you hear about the group proudly proclaiming "Yeah it was we who dunnit", but not long after someone else who claims to be an AQ spokesperson may very well appear to deny responsibility. I'm pretty certain that sometimes this happens because they honestly think they can raise their profile by taking the blame for some other nutters' carbomb, and sometimes it might simply be that one hand doesn't see what the other hand does.
On the point of the US military being full of dipshits... Being a Scandinavian myself, I've often gotten to hear that the coalition of forces from the Nordic countries operating under the ISAF in Afghanistan are supposedly generally well liked and appreciated by the local populace. Now, without any further exploration of the accuracy of that claim, I'm gonna go on a bit of speculation here and wonder if it could have anything to do with the fact that quite a few of the Nordic forces come from countries with mandatory conscription. They still have to voluntarily sign up for international military duty as part of NATO, but perhaps you're more likely to get a more "mild mannered" selection of recruits by drafting from the populace as a whole? It would appear as if though this has to some extent served to limit the saturation of nutjobs in active military duty.
Though, I suspect that an even larger part of my supposed absence of triggerhappies in Scandinavian/ European NATO intervention forces is due to the fact that these countries for the most part never really bought into the "War on Terror" to begin with.
I got a little excited when I saw your ship.
But al Queda as some sort of super international terrorist organization is absurd. There are franchises that pop up everywhere, and there is no way to confirm from the outside who is and who is not a member of this supposed group. Bin Laden and his pals are in such deep cover its not like they're just talking to every random group in Iraq or the Maghreb or wherever that wants to be an affiliate. Instead when something blows up, some group claims responsibility. The name became popular, so people started to use it. It looks nice in the "war on terrorism" rhetoric, so the US or other nations certainly aren't going to disagree very often when a group says they're and AQ affiliate; being an affiliate makes it easy to get the political go-ahead to bomb the shit out of them.
That's probably go to be one of the upsides to the military draw down that Obama is currently doing. It means that they can start forcing out both the crazy people and people who are still stuck in the mentality that we don't have to change how we fight wars because all the branches can afford to be a little more picky.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
It is not very healthy.
TylerJ on League of Legends (it's free and fun!)
al Qaeda exists; it's just largely a ramshackle operation. Some leadership was provided by old Mujahideen veterans like Bin Laden, but most of the vets are dead now. "Terrorist Cell" is one of those infinitely flexible, ultimately meaningless, terms that sounds scary so the U.S. military trots it out to justify their taste in mass murder.
But, whatever. These documents always speak for themselves.
The apologetics in this thread so far are pretty fun.
"HEY NOW ITS NOT REALLY LIKE THAT IN MY UNIT!"
That is a hell of a goosey statement. I mean, we get it by now, you hate anglo-saxon military. Your adventures in the Argentina thread made that pretty clear. Different branches coming in here and identifying the kind of training they got does not make them apologists.
Then stuff like this comes out and there's always a wall of apologists, mostly from within the military, who strive to dismiss it.
You're engaged in a racist, religious crusade against the people of the Persian Gulf. Not the old Mujahideen fighters whom you built & have now mostly already killed, not the dictator you fully funded and then executed in cold blood - everyone who believes in a different superstition than you. It says so right there, in plain black & white, and presumably this document has been in fondly-accepted circulation for quite some time.
It's also fair to assume it's not a rare species.
The three comments I saw in this thread directly relating to the military. Not a single one of them is saying they have the moral high ground, and all expressed negativity at the idea of this going around. Stop chasing ghosts with Western Militaries being chock full of insane war criminals just waiting to rape and pillage every dark skinned person they come across.
It's not fair to assume anything. In fact, you might say it's quite unfair to those that dedicate their lives to trying to uphold peace and do so for the right reasons (which is a massive majority of the U.S. Armed Forces). But that would require you looking past your massive hate boner for service men for a moment to evaluate the entire situation.
Fun question though: How would you describe extremist terrorist groups actions if not trying to exert a moral superiority on their targets?
Yeah, 'dedicating their lives to uphold peace'. Because the insurgents in the Persian Gulf really have the means to mount an invasion or fight a war, right?
Extremist terrorist groups are often not trying to exert moral superiority. You'd know that if you decided to grab a book instead of a gun and march off to go play hero (Bin Laden, for example was explicit: he was engaging in murder in exchange for the bombing of Lebanon & the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia. Other groups - the Tamil Tigers, say, or the IRA - do it out of a desire for political power).
They don't need to be 'chock full' of them for it to undermine the effort. They're certainly 'full enough' of them, as the images for U.S. concentration camps attest (the ones that haven't been censored by your government, anyway. How about that free press & transparent democracy, eh?)
also bin laden's stated goal wasn't just revenge killing, it was to get western influence out of saudia arabia / the larger middle east
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
As to the topic, this is a really dumb class to have held and it sounds like it's been taken care of. I can also say, though again from anecdotal experience, this is really not indicative of the Army as a whole.
I dare say that the reason so many so called apologists are saying "my unit isn't like that" is the simple fact that their units probably aren't.
Then he should have sabotaged Saudi Arabia's oil production. Without oil, the West would lose interest in the region real quick.
In any case, America would not lose interest in Saudi Arabia if all of the hydrocarbons disappeared tomorrow; it's a strategically important springboard & logistics keystone.
No, I live in a world where everyone considers a war crime to be a war crime unless it's conducted by their own country, and where targeting & killing civilians is a reprehensible act of terrorism unless it's done by their own country.
If it weren't for oil, what would people be muscling around the Middle East for? The sunny beaches?