Peter Nealen's Blog, page 22

Setting the Stage Part 5

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Everything that China does in the Maelstrom Rising series is based on patterns already established over the last few decades.

China has been endeavoring to become the world superpower for decades.  To that end, they see the United States as their primary rival.  While many who espouse open trade with China dismiss the 1999 white paper, “Unrestricted Warfare” as little more than a hypothetical exercise, every Chinese move, whether in the military, economic, or cyber realms of late has pointed toward a rising hegemon with the United States as its primary enemy.

The growth of Chinese power projection in the Western Pacific involves an incremental domination of China’s nearest neighbors, while challenging American sea supremacy.  While the Southeast Asian nations have protested the building of artificial islands in the South China Sea, US Navy vessels have passed through those waters, which the United States considers international waters, in “Freedom of Navigation” exercises, which Beijing has protested as provocations and violations of Chinese waters.

The Southeast Asian nations especially see this as a threat, and they are the first in the crosshairs of Chinese hegemony.  The Chinese, much like the Russians, seek to be a regional power, though global superpower status has been believed to be in Beijing’s mindset for some time.  Again, certain apologists in the West insist that none of this makes China an enemy, but the People’s Republic of China remains a Communist country, now with a President for Life in Xi Jinping.

China’s expansion is not purely a matter of power-hunger.  China’s Communist regime, its massive expenditures, to include the building of “Ghost Cities,” entire metropolises built purely to stimulate the economy, that now stand empty, has left the Chinese economy dangerously fragile.  China is not self-sustaining.  And that means that as long as the country is reliant on the outside world, and not always on Beijing’s terms, China remains vulnerable.

Not all of China’s efforts to secure its international power and resources lie in military force, however.  China has been actively trying to secure natural resources around the world for the last couple of decades.  Not only that, as part of the “New Silk Road,” they have been securing control of ports and other infrastructure by various means.  The United States sold the Panama Canal to China in the ’90s, and the effort has only increased as time has gone by.

The infrastructure is only part of the plan, however.  Africa has become a de facto Chinese colony.  Beijing is using debt and infrastructure projects in the Third World to secure assets in Africa.  And with China lacking many natural resources desperately needed, Africa has become the prime treasure house for China.

It’s not just Africa, either.  Chinese companies have taken over the bulk of the resource extraction from Afghanistan, and Chinese companies have done business with Mexican cartels for illegally mined iron, stolen petroleum, and other natural resources which have become a major source of cartel income.

While there have been many scenarios about war with China published, any major war between China and the West will doubtless involve considerable combat in Africa and Latin America, to cut Beijing off from its vassals and the resources they can provide.

On the cyber warfare front, there have been many indicators that have not been corroborated, but the Chinese cyber warfare unit has been active against the United States for some time.  Observe the “Attack Map,” and how many connections are going straight to China.  Given the references in “Unrestricted Warfare,” and the access that many Chinese companies have obtained to US tech, any clash will doubtless be accompanied by crippling cyber attacks.

By the events of Maelstrom Rising, all of these factors have continued to develop and escalate.  The encounters in the South China Sea have devolved into a sporadic shooting war with ASEAN.  Naval standoffs with Japan have become increasingly frequent.  And, while the war remains in the shadows, Beijing has decided that now is the time to deal the death blow to what remains of the Pax Americana.

 

Triple Frontier

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Sigh.

There was potential here.  There really was.  Not that it was a particularly original premise; soldiers taking advantage of a chaotic situation to make off with a lot of shady money has been done in Kelly’s Heroes, Three Kings, Renegades, and Sabotage (though that one was DEA, but same general idea).  But for a good movie, an original premise isn’t an absolute necessity, just that it’s done well, with style.

Triple Frontier tried.  It just didn’t try hard enough.

And that’s where the whole thing broke down.  It wasn’t as glaring as some of the failures that Hollywood’s churned out when it comes to military movies.  There wasn’t a lot that was really cringe-worthy.  The characters weren’t bombastic caricatures.  The action wasn’t so over-the-top that it became unbelievable.  (Mostly.  More on that later.)  But too many of the details didn’t come together.

And I’m not even necessarily talking about the physical details, either.  Having multiple members of the team dressed in wildly different sets of gear, from plate carriers to old woodland Interceptor vests, and carrying a variety of M4s and an AK makes some sense when, in Oscar Isaac’s character’s words, all the weapons, gear, and ammo are “sourced through the local economy.”

But it’s really the characters and their decisions where things fall apart.  Warning: I’ll try to minimize it, but things get slightly spoilery from here on out.

First of all, none of the characters are all that fleshed out, as much as the writers halfheartedly try.  They don’t so much have dialog as they have speeches.  But that’s not the worst part.

Affleck’s character (no, I can’t honestly remember the names of any of the characters, either, which is another bad sign) goes from the reluctant, concerned one to the greedy loose cannon, as quickly as flipping a light switch.  Now, there’s a way that that could be made believable.  It’s entirely likely that once he crossed a certain moral threshold, he just said, “The hell with it.  All in.”  The problem is that we didn’t get to see that.  (The fact that Affleck has one facial expression the entire movie doesn’t help.)  There’s a lot that just happens in this movie, without any preparation, or even clear explanation.  One significant act, without which none of the caper could have gone down, happens offscreen without any mention whatsoever.  You’ve got to figure out that it actually happened from context, leaving you wondering if you missed something.  (You didn’t.  They skipped it.)

That’s not the only gap.  Things are mentioned without being shown.  “Let’s just use our day packs.”  You haven’t seen a day pack on any of them for the last hundred miles.  They make the approach to their target in a pouring-down monsoon, with cammie paint on their faces.  As soon as they make entry, however, they’re dry, and there’s not a trace of camouflage paint anywhere.  The whole movie is rife with these kind of jarring missteps.

While I’ve been mostly negative here, I should say it’s not a terrible movie.  It’s just not a good one.  It’s certainly not as good as I could have hoped it would be.  And the main reason is that the writers (and presumably the director) were just lazy.

The Triarii

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As I’ve written before, writing about mercs or military NGOs provides a certain freedom of action in a storytelling sense that I don’t get with writing about regular military.  Call it a certain degree of wish fulfillment (I’ve characterized some of my fiction as “shooter wish-fulfillment” before), but it helps telling the kinds of stories I want to tell without the pains of dealing with a lot of the red tape and crushing bureaucracy of the actual military.

I knew going into Maelstrom Rising that a small, special-operations-centered PMC like Praetorian Security/Solutions wasn’t quite going to do the trick.  So, The Triarii were born.

Characterized as right-wing militia, right-wing terrorists, vigilantes, and a private army, the organization called the Triarii, named for the third-rank veterans of the old, Pre-Marian Roman Legion, is in a way just what its opponents describe it as (short of the “Terrorist” moniker).

As American society became more and more fragmented and polarized, with unrest, social violence, and crime beginning to spiral out of control, often while local and federal authorities looked the other way, a former Marine Colonel named Joaquin Santiago started an informal network of former military/contractors to start filling in the gaps when politics get in the way of justice.  This seems to happen more often than not in major cities with left-leaning governments.

Over time, Santiago started forming more of a political and financial network, at first to provide top cover for his boys, but as time went on, he started forming what amounted to a parallel governance structure.  It was still oriented entirely toward protecting Americans from extremist violence; Santiago had no ambition to take over.  His focus was on holding the line and defending Constitutional principles as multiple sides seem to be hell-bent on subverting or trampling them.

But as the disintegration at home and abroad got worse, Santiago started to see the writing on the wall.  Entire states were refusing to enforce the law against the “right” people.  Americans were increasingly being targeted overseas, and the divide in the US government was stalling any effort to do anything about it.

So, Santiago started to build a combined arms force capable of securing American lives at home and abroad.  While not capable of going toe-to-toe with full national armies, the Triarii soon had a substantial military capability, to include infantry, light armor, artillery (mostly mortars), extensive drone and cyber capabilities, and air support.  The time might come for heavier stuff, but it is not yet.

The Triarii are not acknowledged by any governmental entity in the US.  They are too much of a threat to the Left, and an embarrassment to the Right.  The name is hardly mentioned in the news, only referred to as “right wing extremists” (except when they go after the Fourth Reich or their equivalents, when the identity of the organization is downplayed as much as possible, if it is even mentioned at all).

Setting the Stage Part 4

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As the 21st Century has matured, the divide in the United States has gotten more and more pronounced.  While in many ways it is tribal (simply look at what either major political faction will scream bloody murder about when they are the opposition, and then look the other way when it is done while their people are in office), there is a fundamental fracture in the fabric of American society.  And that fissure is deepening.

More and more voices call for the utter destruction of anyone who disagrees with them, no matter how petty or nonsensical the disagreement is.  A side with more and more power is demanding that things that are more and more demonstrably false and counter-factual be held up as right, true, and good, and threaten the livelihoods, or the lives, of anyone who refuses.

The fracture appears to be largely along political lines.  But it has become much deeper than that, a cultural divide between people who assume the worst of each other, in some cases simply because of the color of skin.  And the politicians and tech giants who make their millions use that divide more and more, stoking the fires of the mob for their own profit and power.

The United States was founded as a representative republic.  The Federal Government ultimately answered to the states, which were sovereign political entities of their own.  While the House of Representatives was elected by the popular vote in each state, the Senate was appointed by the State legislatures.  This was designed to adhere to the principle of subsidiarity, where problems get solved at the lowest, most local level possible.

But as with all popular government, going back to Athens’ democracy, that wasn’t enough for some.  And so, the safeguards that preserved that principle of subsidiarity were slowly eroded, and in the name of “Democracy,” the mob became the operating political principle.

The problem is that a mob does little on its own.  The mob is a group of men turned into a single, irrational animal.  But as the would-be tyrants of Athens, and the populist tyrants of Rome knew, the mob is easily led.  And so the American politicians stoked the fires of the mob to get themselves elected, with all the financial and social capital that came with being in office.

But a mob is volatile.  And when aided and abetted by the leftovers of a poisonous ideology that killed anywhere from 100 to 200 million people in the 20th Century, the growing chaos could easily tear a nation apart.

As intended.

Many fingers are pointed at foreign actors, and rightly so.  Russian information operations have been constant since 1945 or before.  The Communist Party of China is even more culpable.  Mexico (where the President himself was on the Sinaloa Cartel take) pours millions into influence operations aimed at American elections.

But while real, those threats are only a symptom of the greater disease.

By the opening of the Maelstrom Rising series, this current nightmare we peer over the edge at has come to fruition.  The Cold Civil War has gone hot.  Many on the Right have long expected a prolonged guerrilla war against oppressive government forces (a scenario very similar to the Left’s dreams of revolution, though ideologically switched).  But that’s not what is on the horizon.  Not quite.

Proxy war has been a major strategy for decades.  It worked for the Communists in Africa, East Asia, and South America.  And it is going to work here, too.

Already, if a city or state government decides it doesn’t like the politics of a mob’s target, they do nothing.  The mob is a weapon, either for votes, or to crush the enemies of a regime.

Social violence spreads.  Leftist mobs attack those they deem acceptable targets.  Hard-core rightwingers resolve to “get this over with,” with bombs and rifles.  Leftists, inevitably, adapt and get better training.  Already, they are starting to arm themselves more heavily than before.

As the chaos spreads, the political deadlock in the halls of power gets worse.  No one wants to move–or even be seen to appear to move–against “their” side.  And it gets worse and worse, even as some, insulated from the effects of their rhetoric, continue to stoke the fires, profiting handsomely from it in money and political points.

It is into this environment that an organization called The Triarii is born.

Larry Bond’s Cauldron

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I first read Cauldron in high school, and at the time, I remember that it didn’t make as much of an impact on me that Red Storm Rising, Red Phoenix, or even Vortex did.  A new war in Central Europe seemed somewhat more far-fetched at the time than chaos in Africa or East Asia.  (I was in high school; I didn’t know nearly as much as I might have thought that I did.)

But in prep for Maelstrom Rising, I picked Cauldron back up.  And I’ve got to say, Larry Bond was a lot more prescient than he seemed, back in ’93.

While the general scenario in Cauldron is the French and Germans enforcing their economic hegemony over Eastern and Central Europe by force of arms, effectively forming the European Union at gunpoint (referred to as the European Confederation, or EurCon in the novel), the fault lines that lead to the scenario are even now playing out, only slightly differently.

In Cauldron, Eastern Europe is chafing under France’s thumb.  In the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, they allowed much French industry in (particularly in Hungary), only to find that they got the scraps while the French built factories and staffed them with either Frenchmen, or North Africans when they wanted cheaper labor.  The resulting economic downturn, coupled with a particularly harsh winter that threatens large portions of Europe with starvation, only makes matters worse when the French and Germans turn the screws on countries that want a more equal economic footing.

Of course, France and Germany are feeling the pinch, too, with the regular people getting the short end of the stick when “Arabs,” being the general pejorative for all North Africans and actual Arabs who were brought into France as cheap labor, get more of the jobs because they get paid less.  Riots break out, and soon France and Germany are under martial law, as is Russia, for only slightly different reasons.

Refusing to let a crisis go to waste, the head of the DGSE, Nicholas Desaix, hatches a plan for the European Confederation, a solution to the crisis in Europe via centralized control, centralized, of course, in Paris and Berlin.  Soon, countries that signed on to EurCon are finding their security forces being run by French and German officers, to their countrymen’s detriment.

Hungary revolts, setting the whole thing in motion.  When the French move on Hungary, the Poles come to the Hungarian’s defense.  At French instigation, Russia turns off the oil and natural gas to Poland, right in the middle of winter.  When the Poles beg the US for assistance, the Americans get involved, even as German tanks begin rolling across the Polish frontier.

Sound familiar?

While this book came out in ’93, just before the formal formation of what we now know as the EU, the very fault lines described are currently fracturing the European Union.  Arab and North African immigrants have turned entire sections of Paris into no-go zones, tribal ghettos within France.  Regular Frenchmen are rioting, disgusted by the elites’ disdain for their lives and culture.  And Eastern Europe is increasingly telling the EU to go piss up a rope; Poland and Hungary have both closed their borders to the immigrants that Paris and Berlin are demanding all European nations welcome with open arms.

Being a Larry Bond book, the focus is largely on large unit actions, with a lot of air and naval combat, with hundreds of pages spent on the political and economic machinations that led to the crisis.  It’s still an excellent war story, painting a picture of a land war in Europe that seemed far from even the imagination when it was written.

Now, the next bit potentially involves spoilers (if you can spoil a book that’s been out for 26 years)

 

 

 

 

 

My only real beef is the ending.  Granted, it was a mid-’90s techno-thriller, and there were certain conventions even to the major war subgenre at the time.  Everything had to return essentially to the status quo ante at the end, though with governments taking steps to foster cooperation and make sure that it didn’t happen again.  Cauldron is no different.  What struck me was the plan at the ending involves the President essentially proposing a new League of Nations/United Nations, to “make sure this doesn’t happen again.”  The President has been depicted as generally level-headed the entire book, and yet, at the end, his proposal simply amounts to “Let’s do the same thing that’s been tried after the last two major wars, that didn’t work then.”

Overall, though, Cauldron is very much up to the standard that Larry Bond set with Red Phoenix and Vortex.  And is surprisingly spot-on in its predictions, even if they seemed far-fetched when it was written.

Setting the Stage Part 3

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By the beginning of the Maelstrom Rising series, the global order as it has existed since shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact is disintegrating.

This is happening for reasons cultural, political, and economic.  Culturally, the European Union is already fracturing as this is written.  There is no “European Identity,” no matter how hard the EU Parliament has attempted to enforce it, and the influx of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa has been a source of friction in France for decades, even before the more recent push to accept hundreds of thousands from Syria, which has resulted in an uptick of terror attacks, to include truck attacks on Christmas markets and other crowds in Germany.  An increasingly large segment of the populace of Western Europe is beginning to resent the imposition of the will of the elites, most evident in the Yellow Vest protests in France, which began over gas taxes, but became much wider in scope, including over President Macron’s signing of the UN resolution declaring unfettered migration as a fundamental human right, despite the majority of Frenchmen opposing such a treaty.

The EU leaders are decrying “nationalism” as the new threat, demanding the surrender of sovereignty (in German Prime Minster Angela Merkel’s own words) being a growing demand from Brussels.  But it is one increasingly opposed by Italy and the Eastern European nations.  Hungary and Poland are already leading the way in enforcing their own sovereignty in the face of demands from France and Germany.

Meanwhile, faced with internal unrest, fault lines along the Alps and much of the old NATO/Warsaw Pact divide, President Macron of France has openly called for the formation of an EU Army, ostensibly to defend against Russia…and the United States.  Though the question has also been raised: Will this EU Army also be used to enforce Brussels’ edicts on recalcitrant EU member nations?

Political and economic strain between German and the United States is growing, which may have something to do with the talk of needing to defend Europe against the United States.  A sizeable–and vocal–chunk of the American electorate stands for individual rights that the EU has begun to slowly squeeze out of existence.  And the economic desperation is growing.

Much of the recent protests have been sparked by tax hikes intended to try to bridge the gap as finances are not keeping up with social programs.  And the US’ increasing trade war, closing the trade deficit of the last several decades, is not helping matters domestically.

While China was also identified as a potential adversary, as you can see from the above video, China and Germany might find themselves with a common problem.  And with much of Germany’s energy dependent on Russian sources, for the EU to survive, they may need to look to other sources to fill the gap.

Finally, as matters begin to unravel, the claim keeps being repeated that it is “nationalism” that causes wars.  However, the key to the future may lie in the past, except that the past has become obscured by the globalist voices calling for the elimination of nationalism and national identity in favor of an artificial “European” identity.  The First World War is often pointed to as the grand example of nationalism causing mass bloodshed on a scale never before seen.  But if one really peels back the history, it was not “nationalism” that caused that war.  It was a wide-ranging web of entangling alliances that rendered it harder and harder for nations which had no interest in the conflict to avoid it.

 

Setting the Stage Part 2

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While the first-person narrative of the Maelstrom Rising series will limit each book or phase to a particular theater, the events of the series will have global scope.  The interconnectedness of current global politics and economics mean that when the order breaks down in one place, there will be ripples elsewhere.  And multiple simultaneous such breakdowns lead to the perfect storm that is Maelstrom Rising.

The events in East Asia and the Western Pacific during this series will be rooted in current trends already happening over the last ten years or more.  While most open focus has been on China and North Korea (which will be dealt with in later installments of this article series), this article will look at the near future of Japan.  Specifically, the near future of Japan as a military power.

Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, imposed by the US in 1947, states, “(1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

(2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. ”

To some extent, however, the US has already been instrumental in undermining Article 9, by way of partnering with Japan to counteract North Korea and China.  The Japanese Self Defense Force has deployed overseas in recent years, in support of the US mission in the Middle East, and often trains with the US Marine Corps in Hawaii and California.

This fact has been pointed out by members of the Nippon Kaigi, a resurgent nationalist and traditionalist organization in Japan, of which Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is a member.  Nippon Kaigi not only espouses a stronger military, but has begun pushing back against the national shame from World War II, particularly the Rape of Nanking.  Given that the Japanese have never been nearly as openly or abjectly contrite about the war as Germany has, this definitely signals the beginning of a return to the old ways in Japan, a resurgent Japanese nationalism.

And it is aimed primarily at China.  Which the Chinese well understand.

There’s a lot of history behind the increasing “Hard Hedge” model of the new “proactive pacifism” of Japan’s SDF.  Here’s a bit of a strategic and historical rundown.  (Though it’s about four years old at this point.)  There is also some domestic discomfort about this growing rearmament.  However, if Nippon Kaigi gets its way, and given China’s increasing aggressiveness in the South China Sea and tensions over the Senkaku Islands, there may be no stopping Japan becoming a regional military power, especially as its navy can already challenge the PLAN.

By the time of Maelstrom Rising, this has already occurred.  The Self Defense Force is no more.  Article 9 has been rescinded, and the Japanese Army and Navy have grown to be able to conduct expeditionary warfare throughout the Western Pacific.  While open war has not yet broken out, tensions are high, and shots have already been exchanged.

And even their nominal allies among the Southeast Asian nations are not entirely comfortable with the situation, either.

El Chapo’s Trial and Insight About War

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I’ve delved into Mexico a bit in my fiction.  The deepest was The Devil You Don’t Know, which not only looked at the overall situation in Mexico, but also the consequences of focusing too much on High Value Targets.

We seem to be obsessed with getting the “leaders,” the HVTs.  (Not saying that there aren’t people working on “going up the killchain,” but culturally, our focus is always on getting the guy at the top.  Whether it was the “Thunder Run” to Baghdad, that was supposed to end the war in days, in a repeat of Desert Storm, or the focus on getting Bin Laden, or al Baghdadi, or El Chapo.  The idea seems to be that if you get the guy at the top, then the bad guys will collapse.

Except that it doesn’t work that way.  It never really has.  Capturing and executing Saddam didn’t end the insurgency.  Killing Bin Laden wasn’t the end of Al Qaeda.  And from the trial of El Chapo, it’s evident that he really wasn’t that important to the Sinaloa Cartel, either.

As of this writing, the prosecution and defense have finished their closing statements and we don’t know how it will end. Maybe one of the jurors will have been compromised and Guzmán will be acquitted. Most likely he’ll be convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life.

Whatever the result, in the big picture …

It doesn’t matter.

The Guzmán trial will do nothing to stem the flow of drugs into the United States.

Don’t get me wrong. Guzmán’s conviction for trafficking literally tons of drugs into the United States would be a good thing. He’s not Robin Hood. He’s a killer responsible for untold suffering—surely far more than he’s charged with—and if he spends the rest of his life in prison it will be something like justice.

But his capture has done nothing to ameliorate the American drug problem, and his conviction would be likewise meaningless.

The reason is simple.

By the time of Guzmán’s capture, “escape,” and recapture in the farce that made him a celebrity, he had already lost most of his power.

He was superfluous.

Expendable.

The critical thing to understand is that Guzmán wasn’t—and never would be—the sole “boss” of the Sinaloa cartel. We tend to think of cartels as pyramids, with a single head at the top, but in fact they’re more like wedding cakes with several tiers.

Guzmán was on the top tier, with others, the most important being Juan Esparragoza Moreno, the late Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, and a man named Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who has been prominently featured, albeit in absentia, in this trial.

A time-tested defense-attorney maxim says that if your client is obviously guilty, put someone else on trial. In their opening statement, Guzmán’s lawyers argued that he wasn’t the real boss of the Sinaloa cartel, long the biggest D.T.O. (drug-trafficking organization) in the world. Instead, they claim, that honor belonged to Zambada, and he has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to high-ranking officials in the Mexican government in order to remain, well, in absentia.

Witnesses, including Zambada’s own brother and son, have testified to the same.

But nobody calls Mayo Zambada the “godfather of the drug world,” and that’s the way he likes it. You don’t see Zambada interviewed in Rolling Stone, trying to launch romances with television stars, or working on a biopic about himself, as Guzmán did.

Zambada is a conservative businessman who prefers to stay behind the curtain. (If there is a Don Corleone of Mexican drug lords, it is Ismael Zambada.) And his partner Guzmán was becoming increasingly problematic.

Mob bosses remain in power as long as they’re making other people money. Guzmán had begun to cost people money. At the start of his downfall, he was suffering huge declines in marijuana profits due to legalization in America. Everyone was, and one of the cartel’s responses was to get back into the heroin market for the first time since the 1970s, in order to grab a cut of the American pharmaceutical companies’ booming opioid-addict market. The cartels produced so much heroin that they created a surplus, which, in a reversal of previous policy, they started to sell inside Mexico.

Guzmán got greedy and demanded a cut of the profits from local dealers in Sinaloa, thereby alienating his own power base. Combine that with his increasingly bizarre antics—more about that later—and it’s clear why he had become a liability to his partners, principally Zambada. Sources in Mexico inform me that Zambada—aging and ailing—has been wanting to take his billions and retire quietly.

But he had another problem besides Guzmán: two sons who were facing long sentences in the United States.

Read the whole thing, over at Borderland Beat.

Warfare is never about just one man.  It is about tribes, nations, networks, and organizations.  I think (and this is just a personal theory) that the obsession with HVTs being the keys to ending conflicts (some of which are decades, if not centuries, in the making) comes from the end of World War II.  Hitler shot himself, and Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally.  This simple narrative, of course, ignores the fact that it took over a year of grinding warfare on one front, and more like four on the other, that systematically crushed the German war machine and, to a degree, the German people, before that happened.  Germany would have lost by then whether Hitler killed himself or not.

Wars are not simple.  Enemy organizations, especially those that are more tribal in nature, are more like the Hydra; cut off one head, two grow in its place.  In the case of El Chapo, he seems to have already been superfluous to the operation of the Sinaloa Cartel long before his capture and extradition.

And setting simple victory conditions, like capturing a particular HVT, does not mean that the war has been won, or is over.  Wars are matters of mutual agreement; as long as one side still thinks the war is on, the war is still on.

I’ll be continuing to keep an eye on Mexico and Latin America.  They will feature in the upcoming Maelstrom Rising series at some point.  You don’t ignore the most vicious irregular war on the planet when you’re developing a scenario for the breakdown of the global order.

Setting the Stage, Part 1

The idea for my current work in progress came a couple years back.  It involved a complete breakdown in what we have come to consider the “global world order” since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the paradigm shift represented by Operation Desert Storm (though the whirlwind victory and subsequent return to the status quo represented by that short-lived war turned out to be more of a fluke than a lasting reality, despite it forming the basis for most of Tom Clancy’s post-Cold-War fiction).  While the American Praetorian series had already represented some of a similar model of breakdown, it was largely focused on the continuing war against jihadism, and that war’s unintended consequences.

This is something different.

Anyone who knows me knows that I consider history to be the key to understanding the future.  While it is not, precisely, cyclic, there are certain consistencies that can be picked out in the rise and fall of nations, powers, and civilizations.  This was a fact that really hit home for me while reading Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in 29 Palms.  While the names were different, the tools different, many of the speeches that Thucydides recorded could very easily have been delivered today.  Human nature is not, as the socialists wish it were, infinitely malleable.  It is, ultimately, immutable.  Which is why we can, to some extent, predict success or failure, based on history.

Here’s a bit of a secret: Everything, every bright new idea to reshape society for the future, has been tried.  And, ultimately, failed.

Naturally, there are those who reject the study of history because they believe they are smarter and better.  Guess how that tends to work out?

In putting together the state of the world for this new project, I’ve cast a rather wide net.  Much of what I’m writing about, and will continue to write about, is a potential road that we are already on.  The following video is relatively short, but it is only one piece in the puzzle.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings, with terror and slaughter return!

-Rudyard Kipling

My First Box Set

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What started as a rescue mission turns into a bloody shadow war!

The primary US base on the Horn of Africa has fallen.  America’s overseas assets have been allowed to slip.  Now the survivors’ only hope is a group of hard-bitten, veteran contractors, who are willing to go into the hell of East Africa on a rescue mission.

It is Praetorian Security’s baptism of fire.  And the first steps they take in a shadow fight against jihadists, pirates, terrorists…and worse.

With little more than grit, determination, and sheer, unadulterated ruthlessness, they wade into the growing conflagration that is the Middle East, hell-bent on taking the fight to enemies that their own country often won’t even acknowledge.

And along the way, they start to draw the curtain back on even darker forces at work…

Task Force Desperate, Hunting in the Shadows, and Alone and Unafraid are now collected into a single set, for a price only about two-thirds of the collected cover prices.

No, I’m afraid that it’s not a physical box set.  The production cost would be too high, at this point in time.  If the ebook bundle sells enough, maybe it can be looked into.  Maybe.  I’m not even sure how that would work with KDP Print; there’s no option for making boxes.  It would probably have to be a special production sold through the americanpraetorians.com website.

If your first introduction to my work was Brannigan’s Blackhearts, and you haven’t read American Praetorians yet, there’s no better time to get started.

You can get it here.