Friday, June 7, 2024

Original Michael, Not Plop-And-Run Michael. Allegedly.

Lookie here: French Maquis, holding an intersection with
no US or Allied troops visible, and armed with German
weapons. Must've bought them on Amazon, huh?












Different guy, same Straw Man gas.

Background:

Divemedic recently posted a quote of an "X" take on what The Coming Unpleasantness would look like.

Part of the comment stream follows:

    

joe · June 5, 2024 at 5:41 pm

yes, because once it kicks off, you won’t be able to order any ammo over the internet, they will close down the gun stores, and it won’t be a fun time at all…

    Aesop · June 5, 2024 at 10:59 pm

    Duuuuuuuuuude,

    Ain’t nobody gonna be “buying” ammo.
    They’re going to get it the same way the French resistance got grenades and machineguns: off the bodies of the guys they whacked.

    All that po-po militarization we’ve had since the 1970s?
    That’s your supply points.

    The cops are rapidly going to learn to travel in full fire teams and squads, or there aren’t going to be any of them after the first month.

    Either way, they’re going to be fewer and farther between.
    Which makes score-settling a target-rich environment.

    The military isn’t going to fare too much better, and they’ll be outnumbered by all sides about 99:1.

    Think Beirut, Sarajevo, and Chicongo, simultaneously.

      Michael · June 6, 2024 at 5:13 am

      Aesop, please.. French Resistance? Aside from Hollywood and WW2 Propaganda films the Germans when asked about the French Resistance said, “WHAT French Resistance”.

      Please give dates and links of their “successes” before Allied Troops were already marching through Paris. Most was shooting up “Collaborators” with the Germans, I.E. those that simply did business at the coffee shops and such.

      Odd how the shooters ended up owning the dead folks’ shops.

      Sort of like all the keyboard warriors bragging about long ranged snipers doing this and that. AH, Snipers need INTELLIGENCE of who, what, where and when the target is available. Otherwise, you’re a random shooter.

      IRA DIDN’T have nearly 24-07 Electronic Surveillance. HUMIT was all they had to deal with, and the British over reactions pissed off most Irish enough they did not say anything. WE have “SEE Something, SAY something and get a Reward”.

      It’s not hollywierd Aesop. It’s a far more than 3 way purge situation.

It's DM's house, and his rules, so he chose not to append the reply I delivered to that (and I don't blame him for nipping it the bud at his site), so I'll re-create it to the best of my recollection, from memory [addenda now are added in brackets, but didn't appear in the original reply, AFAIK - none of which ever saw the light of day online in any event]:

"Michael,

In your haste to reply to what I didn't say, you've wet yourself again.

It escaped your notice, but kindly excerpt for me where in my reply I touted any "successes" of the French Resistance. I'll wait over here while you look for what isn't there.

Now go look up the resistance in the rest of Europe [Reinhard Heydrich would be a good source for you to consult], and the Philippines. Then look up where both Mao and the KMT got their weapons in China. Castro in Cuba. And on and on, throughout history.

The fact is that resistance movements quickly shift to taking away the arms of TPTB, because they can, and it's what's readily available.

Policing under such situations devolves rather quickly to large teams, or not at all. 

[BTW, those Germans who can't recollect the French Resistance are the same Germans who couldn't recall what happened to the Jews throughout Europe from 1933-1945 either; and who were so vexxed by the Resistance situation in Occupied Europe they issued the Commandobefehl in 1942, so their historical testimony on anything is rather suspect, and universally self-servingly delusional.Read more widely.

Oh, and snipers don't "need" intelligence, they gather it. You could look it up. They're almost never sent out as guided missiles with a hit list. They go out with a few boxes of ammo and a pair of binoculars, addressed "to whom it may concern", to hit Targets Of Opportunity. And they take a radio so that they can let artillery and air strikes join in the fun. If this is all news to you, you're woefully uninformed.

We saw firsthand in this country what two @$$clown "snipers" could do with just a .22 from a car trunk hide in D.C. [Their longest shot was from 100 yards. People shooting 500 yards? It's Sarajevo, and everyone's on the menu.]

And One Shot Paddy and just a few hundred of his friends tied down an entire  regiment in Northern Ireland for 30 years time, and the Brits were no closer to getting rid of them at the end than they were at the beginning. And all that with a surveillance state that Orwell warned of, and checkpoints every mile on every main road.

They had "See something, Say Something" in Belfast too.

It fell out of favor after the first kneecapping. After that, "nobody saw nothing", for an entire generation.

So if you're going to sharpshoot me, you're going to have to do a lot more boning up."

Or words largely to that effect. 

Michael's unfortunate obsession, as I've told him online times and blogs without number, is his knee-jerk itch to fact-check and "correct" everything I write on any other board. Unfortunately, rarely with the chops to pull it off.

I have literally pleaded with him to explore the course of action wherein he self-restrains, and confines his remarks to the given topic under discussion, ignoring what I write, unless of course I address him directly, which I avoid like the plague on general principles. I'm never hurting for content, so you can take a wild guess how little I wanted to post this, but here we are, yet again, because someone has a decided lack of self-control.

I bring this up again, here, because he'll see it, to a metaphysical certainty, and to underline that kicking him around rhetorically like a red-headed stepchild all over the internet is neither my intent, nor the best use of my time or his, let alone other people's bandwidth.

He refuses to start his own blog, prefering evidently to hijack other people's work to his own ends, but he nonetheless has my sincerest best wishes in blurting out all the things he thinks he knows that aren't so. Yet if only to spare himself further embarrassment at how he always comes off in these exchanges, and to stop hijacking other people's blogs and comment streams for his personal compulsion, I really wish he'd figure out a way to address a given topic on the merits, without involving me in any way, nor taking it upon himself to be nothing but an unlooked-for hemorrhoid in every comment stream in the blogosphere. If only for the sheer novelty of that approach.

It would be a refreshing change from his unfortunate current obsession, and perhaps move a new tenant into his head than myself, because living there rent free 24/7 has to be one of the least appealing things of which I can conceive.

And I can't miss him if he won't go away.

Probably not the kind of attention he was hoping for.


21 comments:

Michael said...

LOL your paid for blog, your rules.

So, you complain about other bloggers also?

LOL

Again, snipers gather intelligence? Really? Your example of the jackasses shooting up DC randomly just backs up MY Ideas that without real intelligence you're just a random shooter.

How much intelligence about a real target could dear Aesop get from his sniper skillset? Shooting up a problem for the troops in action, Yes. Doing a "hit" on so and so who's going to be speaking at this place, surrounded by security and for but a few minutes. THAT Takes INSIDE information. You know HUMIT.

Our internet buddies would tell you how they can "shoot the nuts off a squirrel" and one minute of accuracy at 600 meters for beer bellied good ole boys.

Odd, every time I set up a mere 300 meter range for them with their choice of weapons most cannot do a standard military head shot target. You know that one MARINES shoot at in training.

Let alone adding in a brisk walk let alone a tactical sneak into firing location.

BS's ourselves isn't going to do well in real life.

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

Norman Schwarzkopf

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I wonder what Sun Tzu would say about older beer bellied BS artists going to war against some of the fit and military aged illegals infesting our country. Let alone real gangsters fresh from a South American prison.

Edit this to make yourself look heroically smart Aesop. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Reltney McFee said...

Now, Michael, I'm simply a dumbass never served civilian, but even*I* know, from reading about (for example) Carlos Hathcock, or, say Chris Kyle, that observation is a primary sniper skill.

It's surprising that you think that going to guns is the entirety of a sniper's mission.

Aesop said...

By the numbers:

1) You're a special case. Take that any way you like.

2) Yes, snipers do reconnaissance. It's a sniper's secondary mission for Army snipers, and the primary duty for the Marine Corps, which moved all its snipers under the Recon chain of command some years back. Intel collection has been a secondary sniper duty for Marine snipers since the 1960s. You could look it up:

https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/milmanual-fmfm-1-3b-sniping-u.s.-marine-corps/fmfm_1-3b_sniping_u.s._marine_corps.pdf

Page 1-1, ¶102. That was The Bible on military sniping since before I took my oath, it's little changed from the first edition, and it hasn't change much until five minutes ago either.

It's also the primary and dominant function of law enforcement snipers, since ever.

That this is ALL news to you tells me you need to level up just to get to basic information.
Here's your booster step to get over that wall:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps_Scout_Sniper#Overview

3) "Random shooters" took Sarajevo from Olympic destination to ghost town in a year. Explain to the class how that impact was minimal.

4) If you try to rewrite reality by selecting only a mission that requires what you incorrectly think is a sniper's sole or primary mission, you can win all day. The real world, however, doesn't work like you imagine.

5) How long do I have in a hide?
I could gather absolute numbers, broken down by ranks if they're in uniform, document patterns of movement, locus of activity, suss out the likely function of rooms and buildings, figure out who works in which room, list equipment seen - both temporary and permanent, catalog deliveries, patrol size and frequency, security posts, security schedules, MSRs, routes of ingress and egress, utility service, support services, personal equipment and arms, discipline and morale, SOPs, reaction times, motor pool size, percentage of functional vehicles, and another 100 things you haven't even thought about. Starting 1 minute after getting into position.
Also weather data including prevailing wind strength and direction, temperature, and all the minutiae that go into converting shots into hits at range.
All that is HUMINT.

I can also photograph it, make field sketches, and hand that off or transmit it to others. Part of the basic sniper skillset 50 years ago was shooting camera images through a spotting scope.
I can also figure out the fastest way to get from a shooting hide to an egress route, and already be moving out before the shot lands.

(cont.)

Aesop said...

(cont.)
6) The skill level of the people you hang out with is their problem.
It's only your problem if you extrapolate Beavis and Butthead to being the national average.

I qualified high expert with a basic M-16A2 multiple times out to 500Y, and I've got bolt guns set up comparable to an M40 system that nearly double that reach. I'd be happier if finding a long distance range wasn't an all-day field trip, and I could practice more frequently, but that's the breaks. Anything inside 500Y is a one-shot hit, probably a kill.
200Y or less? FFS man, I've got a Ruger PC in 9mm that I can hit 6" silhouettes on, offhand, all day long until I run out of ammo.
Anybody who can't hit a dinner plate at 300Y with a BZO'ed weapon isn't a shooter, they're a noisemaker.

7) I did "stalks" for five years in high desert mountains in all four seasons from below freezing to 110° against those same fit, military-aged illegals. We caught on average 1000/yr until we got a wall put up in our AO. After that, there were no more to catch, and they started crossing elsewhere. Most days, we did this with 3 or 4 guys out of a rotating group of maybe 8-10 regulars. The youngest of us was 30, the oldest was 68, and all of us as geared and jocked up as guys in the sandbox were in the early 2000s, including plates, and we toted between 40-70# of gear to our hide sites up to several miles away, including telephoto still cams, video and thermal cameras, and the batteries to run them both, along with water, food, and gear to keep warm or shaded. In between that, we built 3 miles of 20' tall fenceline with concertina on top, dropped 15' poles 10' down, cleared about 50 Ac of heavy brush and cactus in everything from July heat to December freezing rain, and filled in about 200 ratholes under the border fence. It's not as hard as you'd like to think once you start doing it 3-4 days/week. I'm not where I was in 2005, but I'm also not over the hill.
If your guys or other people are, bummer.

If you think it's going to be harder for people to do in suburban and urban environments, you're mistaken. The hard part there is blending, not getting there.

8) No edits are necessary. You don't know as much as you think, and worse, you don't even know what you don't even know.
Thus almost everything you're giving an opinion on is, for you, in the zone SecDef Rumsfeld called "unknown unknowns". You're trying to do a weather forecast from inside a closet, in your basement, with your eyes closed.
That's your business, it's a free country.

My annoyance kicks in when you, from that position of near-total ignorance, try to tell me "how it really is".
So for the love of sweet baby Jesus, stop doing that.

Shoot your mouth off about what you think is so to your heart's content.
Just leave your crippled attempts to take a swipe at me in your Minecraft fantasies, okay?
Get a teddy bear to punch if that's what you need to get it out of your system.

Then you won't look so wrong, I won't look so mean for pointing it out, and it won't hijack other people's blogs and bandwidth just for you to get your rocks off.

Michael said...

LOL, typical Aesop.

Again, you deliberately miss the point to look heroic. Look at me Aesop the hero sniper. BTW what have you done in the down and dirty since Bush Jr time as you've been chest thumping about. Did that bit of fence change anything in the past 10 years?

Dude, your exceptional in every way. You tell us daily.

So, to belabor the point of HUMIT, you can observe the AO picking out military targets with your awesome spotting and clearly superior shooting skills. No argument there. Take a bow.

Can you figure out when important person so and so is going to be at such and such a location, learn his-her-(lately its) security and set up for that awesome shoot?

All your examples are from UNIFORMED Military (Or at least known pajama clad) troops.

Civilian shooting is random shooting FROM YOUR OWN WORDS:

3) "Random shooters" took Sarajevo from Olympic destination to ghost town in a year. Explain to the class how that impact was minimal.

What was its impact? Did it change the government's behaviors or what? You shot up mostly unarmed civilians from sniper distances. What mission did that accomplish?

EXPLAIN to the class how that impact means in America? Did you shoot real targets or act out like any "Amish" Chimp out but with maybe better accuracy?

Is your mission to depopulate a city? Cut its power and water. Mission accomplished.

You know if you were more inclined to ask what a person said instead of going off on some mean girl rant, you'd get respect.

You might note I seldom belittle folks. You're so well known on the internet we speak of doing an Aesop (or words less kind) on sites you don't have control of.

So "Original Michael" does defend his opinions, I don't do drop and runs.

Your implied slander in the title of this rant is what, Aesop?



Tucanae Services said...

If a sniper does not know their egress route then they already F'd up before taking position. I don't need a field manual, that's common sense.

Nor does it take a lot of forward intel to know what is coming at you. Bearcats and MRAPs that many PoPo received have a distinctive sound. Toys that many depts like to parade out at any opportunity. Thanks for letting me know you are coming.

Tucanae Services said...

When SHTF hits and death is a common occurrence it would seem to me that faking your own death might be a useful option to drop off the grid.

Aesop said...

Typical Michael.

Offer b.s.
Get called on it. Get your ass handed to you on the merits.
Move goalposts.
Switch to ad hominem.


First, let's review the videotape, shall we?

You made up nonsense about the French Resistance that I never said, and got caught at it. Aesop 1, Michael 0.

You have virtually zero understanding of sniper missions, doctrine, or TTPs. I even gave you two different pdf links, so you could do the homework you've never done in your entire life. Too hard for you. Aesop 2, Michael 0.

You ignore the historical influence of "random shooters", as if it is nil, when in both minor and major instances, recent history shows just the opposite. Aesop 3, Michael 0

You think snipers are going to be delivering by-name "hits" rather than servicing targets of opportunity, contrary to nearly all accounts of sniping back to the Revolutionary War. You aren't even aware how far from reality your misperception lies. Aesop 4, Michael 0.

You think your local Bubbas = everyone, everywhere.
They're simply not.
Aesop 5, Michael 0

You think it requires Olympic athlete levels of fitness.
It doesn't. Overwhelmingly, it takes patience and observational discipline.
Aesop 6, Michael 0

You think snipers can obtain no useful information.
In reality, they're one of the best eyes-on sources on the battlefield, and have been utilized as such for decades.

Before drones, they were virtually all there was, other than deep recon LRPs, who do the same thing snipers do except without the shooty part. This was all news to you.
Aesop 7, Michael 0.

Congrats. You're undefeatless.

Look, I get it. No one told you there'd be math on the quiz. Never, in your wildest imaginings, did you think that any knowledge of insurgency, or sniper TTPs would be information important to you, ever in your life. That's fine. Most people, probably 98% of the country or more, are in that boat. Including you.

I could teach classes on insurgency, or sniping, or a host of things I'm interested in and have studied and read up on for years. That's why I could pull up the exact retort to your nonsense in about 5 seconds from a 40 year-old text I read last...probably 40 years ago.

You, OTOH...can probably spell "sniping", or "insurgency".
And that about covers your entire knowledge base there.

That wouldn't be a problem, if you'd just walk away from offering opinions upon things you know virtually nothing about. (At least, going by your quiz score.)

And that about covers your hapless attempt to school me on things about which you never learned the first thing.

Aesop said...

Now let's move on to your newest whinge.

1) I didn't miss the point. I spiked it into your head.
2) I'm not heroic. I'm bog-average. You've evidently hung around lunkheads so long, you thing that's everyone. FFS man, at least 1/3 of my boot camp platoon scored Expert, with 20-year-old shot out 'Nam bring-back M-16A1s.
3) That bit of fence secured 5% of CA's border for 17 years. Until Poopypants simply threw the gates open from Brownsville to San Ysidro starting in 2021. A ranch owner, and an entire valley of hundreds of American residents along the international border, saw the hordes of illegals walking through their back yards 24/7/365 cut from 100K/yr to 0, as a direct result of what I and a bare few others did, alone out of 35,000,000 people in this state. We pissed off a sitting president and an entire administration so hard we got them to do what we fucking pay them to do: protect America. We put out a dozen videos that ended up on national news to do that, informing untold millions in the process of what was really going on at the Mexican border.
That's all I brought to the table. What've you got to show?
4) Apparently you've played too much Call Of Duty (or is it Dungeons & Dragons?) and keep conflating sniping with targeted assassinations. I give up: I cannot hear the dog whistle in your head, nor fathom why you think one of those things is like the other, but it simply isn't, and you seem unable to grasp that that is so. Major cluebat for ya, genius: crack open the Army FM (that'd be 23-10; or any more recent edition you'd care to name) I gave you a pdf link to, and state to the class the paragraph and page wherein "targeted assassination" is listed as the primary sniping TTP. Either I'm right about it not being there, or you're right about it being a primary sniping function, and all you have to do to finally get on the scoreboard for the first time this week is find the section that explains that as the raison d'etre of having snipers.
Don't chickenshit out on this, it may be the only shot your get. So to speak.
You can use any lifeline, but you have to come up with a quote from Army official training materials showing us why your imagination of how you think it works is backed up by real-world doctrine. Because if it's as important as you think, it has to be in there somewhere in black and white.
This is your Big Chance to prove your point. Or show your ass.
5) Excerpt and quote the line where you imagine I said all civilian shooting must be random shooting. I'll wait. Pack a lunch.
Military or civilian sniping is targeted violence. If one is not an idiot, you go for higher value targets. That doesn't mean presidents or governors. It means you shoot officers and NCOs before snuffies. You shoot machinegunners and radiomen before ordinary riflemen. You shoot leaders before followers. And you shoot people charging before you shoot people fleeing. In what is thus obviously more news to you, these are all based on "target indicators".
The guy with the scoped rifle gets the first round.
Then anybody with a radio antenna.
Then anyone with a pistol and binoculars.
Then anyone pointing and yelling.
Then anyone with automatic weapons.
Then everybody else.
That's not random. That's picking your marks.
But nobody tells you "Pick off Squad A at road junction B at 1415 hours, because Agent XX says they're going to be there."
(Well, except the voices in your head.)
You set up in a given AO, and your violence is targeted at what you can find, and what you can hit.

Anonymous said...

Mikey, it always is "interesting" to those of us who have btdt; to read the words of those of you who haven't; especially as regards to "what snipers do". You haven't a real clue, please stay out of the deep end until you can swim.
And, is "HUMIT" something similar to HUMINT - which is intelligence sourced from people familiar with your mission area, scope, and objectives?
As for Sun Tzu and "beer bellied BS..." - let me share 3 words - "home field advantage". We knew every day in the jungle we were "the visiting team"; and never forgot it.

Toirdhealbheach Beucail said...

A simple comment: there are plenty of people in the city or suburbs through no fault of their own. I am painfully aware of every weakness that living in a city entails, but even we are not a lost cause. Not nearly.

Aesop said...

82% of the country, currently, lives in urban areas. In CA it's 95%, even in the most rural state, VT, it's 65%. Every other state is somewhere in between those numbers.

Telling people to "get out of cities" as serious advice, is on par with telling people "stop being poor".

True, but fairly asinine as any sort of "help". Job had counselors like that too; they are not an example to point to.

Cities are a fact of existence, and have been since before history got written down.
Learn to deal with that reality. Rural is nice if you have the option, but the entire country is not able to "get out of cities". And if they did, the rural folks would lose their collective sh*t, and suddenly Mayberry would look like Manhattan, everywhere. And the rural folks would be outnumbered and outvoted in 0.2 seconds, and it wouldn't be Mayberry anywhere, any more.

C said...


Telling people to "get out of cities" as serious advice, is on par with telling people "stop being poor".

True, but fairly asinine as any sort of "help". Job had counselors like that too; they are not an example to point to.

Cities are a fact of existence, and have been since before history got written down.
Learn to deal with that reality. Rural is nice if you have the option, but the entire country is not able to "get out of cities".


I'm so glad you posted this. It reminds me of when I first got into the survival scene. Every "survivalist" writer was writing the same thing.

"If you don't have 300 acres in BFE, a fleet of 1973 Toyota Land Cruisers, 500k rounds of ammunition, a 4,000sqft cabin with $100,000k in solar panels you're gonna die!"

I did enjoy one odd guy's online scribbling. He suggested buying shit sub $1,000 an acre desert land, hoarding dry goods, and live like you're poor.

Anonymous said...

Oh and about this guns' availability ? I give you this. 81 years ago, no 3D printers, no CNC machines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C5%82yskawica_submachine_gun

Toirdhealbheach Beucail said...

C - Arguably the "You need all the things" has been a great discouragement and detriment to many who might have tried to do their best to optimize their situation in the cities. The best advice really could be summed up as "Do the best you can with what you have where you are and go from there.

Tree Mike said...

Aesop, did you work out of Bob Maupin's place in Live Oak Springs? Sounds like it. He passed away a few years ago, family sold the ranch. A few decades ago, he convinced the Cal. Guard to use his ranch as a logistical site (no charge!) for building the wall. He was the extreme eastern anchor for San Diego county. Various agencies would run "training ops" out of there, snag illegals and hand them off to the B.P. He even built an extra house for teams to have secure storage, showers, kitchen, beds. I miss him so much, he was only 5'6"-5'8"ish, but he was an amazing "little big man". He had a cool half track and maybe other equipment too. I think he had a semi auto Ma Deuce too.
Keep banging away at the Michael's out there, it keeps you on yer toes and it's amusing for us proles. Thanks for maintaining yer blog, I'm sure it's a semi thankless job, so, thanks.

Aesop said...

@Tree Mike,
You nailed it in one: I was one of Bob's Guys. We worked out of his spare house.
The Nasty Guard used his site for logistics because it was the one place they knew their stuff wouldn't get stolen or jacked up. They tried another site, found all their equipment - dozers, graders, etc. - with broken windows and such.
At Maupin's, we'd already built the perimeter fence, so the coyotes never knew which nights they were being watched, and started going around the fence, or trying to cut through it.

All he asked in return for use of the site was a couple of pallets of concertina.
Which we installed to good effect.

One day we showed up, did a perimeter patrol and found a jacket caught at the top of the fence in the concertina we'd installed.
Blood all over: we caught one and he got F**KED UP. Blood trail all the way back to the border fence, and back into Mexico.

Another time, we took 10 gallons of used motor oil, and oiled up the PSP runway planks at an angle where the coyotes liked to cross back to Mexico, based on the footprints up the dust-covered fence.

Next week, we came back, saw a fresh blood streak, and found about 2 bucks in Mexican coins scattered all around at the base of the angle.
Some coyote got partway up, hit the oil, tore himself up or hit his head, and landed so hard he knocked the loose change out of his pockets.
We laughed about that one all week.

And once, when BP had a group crossing and only one guy on the line, he jumped in that halftrack and came flying out of the brush, and he said all they saw after that was assholes and elbows beating feet back to Tecate. He was also part of the group that owned the functional Sherman M4 that appeared in Windtalkers and Flags Of Our Fathers.
He said when they travelled to Iceland (where they duped Iwo Jima's black volcanic beach scenes) Clint Eastwood hung around with the tank crew and the Teamster drivers, not with the movie set crew. Maupin got ahold of a foot-wide BP official vehicle door decal, mounted it on magnetic sign backing, and he'd throw it on the Sherman. Every BP officer from newby up to district managers for 20 years posed in the turret of that tank with a Border patrol decal on the side.

Sadly, I heard about his passing awhile back; he was absolutely an original. The metal sign on his road gate right by the lock chain had the Churchill quote:

"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."

I was happy to have been one of those rough men.

Fortes Fortuna Juvat said...

Michael may be able to spell "sniping" or "insurgency" (no doubt, with the assistance of a spell checker), but it is painfully obvious he has absolutely zero actual knowledge of military terms and abbreviations. Thus, the repeated use of HUMIT as opposed to the actual term HUMINT. See what I did there, Michael?

Aesop, kudos to you and much admiration for your willingness to deal with such a limited intelligence. "You are a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

Tree Mike said...

Hot damn! Thanks for the back story! I met Bob back in '86 to demo a brush chipper I was selling. We hit it off and I basically got a life time membership for the range. I'm 73 now, so I already had "some years" on you guys. I met a bunch of So. Cal. LEO's and Seal Team guy's through a "logistics company" friend, that hired them for general help and security. I introduced them to Bob for a good place to shoot whatever ya brung. They became good friends with Bob and also started "training" out of there. I was just a tree guy, but didn't hang out with tree guy's. We may have crossed paths at some point.
Bill G. was the Sherman M4 owner and the class 3+ guy of the crew, also my "serious" gun smith. We traded tree work for smithing. Met him when I joined the Guard in "84, El Cajon tank support unit, my buddies talked me into joining, got armament.
I never thank vets for their service (to the Satanic, commie, pedo, USA.INC, profit generator), I thank them for not getting killed. I will thank you for your service though, THAT is the PRIME job our forces SHOULD be performing. Small world eh? BTW, I'll bet I'm not the only one out here who enjoys hearing about your combat nursing adventures.
If I still lived in Jamul, I'd cruze up and buy you a beer (and a Mexican meal). I skyed out to Tennessee 9 and a half years ago, to the Free States. Love it here, but it's not home. Hang in there guy!

Aesop said...

I should do a post or three on him.

Here's one:

Having a shooting berm, Bob frequently hosted all sorts of LEOs on the property.
One day when a bunch of three-letter agency guys were doing a self-taught sniper course there mid-week, all ghillied up in the brush, they had formed a loose circle down near the border end of the ranch.

There were about a dozen guys in a loose 100 yd circle practicing slow movement across a large clearing in the oak scrub, all facing inward, with the idea they'd work past each other until they were all facing outward.

It's about midday, and a group of about 20 illegals freshly over the fence come diddy-bopping through Bob's ranch, headed north.

Right through the middle of the circle.

At first the guys thought it was part of the course, but as the conga line of dickheads coming out of the bushes kept growing, they realized what was happening. Once it became obvious the last man had come across, and they were all within the circle, they all acted on autopilot.

Suddenly Juan, Julio, Pedro, and 17 of their friends have a dozen guys dressed like bushes pop up all around them with scoped rifles pointed at them.

As twenty sphincters snapped shut, the group dropped their packs and water, hit the ground in a squat, and put their hands on their heads. All of about 100 yards into their trip north. Even the coyote leading the parade got caught, because it happened too fast for him to bail out, and the group was surrounded 360° before they knew what happened.

The sniper class put them on their faces, zip-cuffed the lot, and called Border Patrol, who got to the ranch within about half an hour and picked them up.

Then the snipers went right back to their class.

Nobody thought to mention it to Bob that day, and BP didn't get details of who the guys on the ranch were, assuming it was just some of "Bob's Guys", and they had 20 illegals to process, so they took the easy win and split pretty quickly after load-up.

All illegals get debriefed before they push them back through the border if they aren't smuggling anything but themselves. So later that week, Bob gets a call from the Campo district supervisor, who wants to know what in hell was going on at the ranch, because they had twenty matching reports of a group who told BP they'd been arrested by "the walking bushes" on the ranch.

After laughing his ass off for a couple of seconds, Bob told the BP senior agent what he'd figured must have happened and how. By the time he finished explaining, the BP guy was laughing too.

Groups coming north bypassed the ranch for a few weeks after that.

Anonymous said...

Picking up weapons and ammo from dead guys is a possibility I suppose. However assuming a your local police station is going to be a supply point? Doubtful IMHO.

I don't know what anyone else's local police station looks like, but the one in my city is a fortress. On the outside it looks like a nice red brick structure with a chain link concertina wire topped enclosure for the officers personal vehicles and for all the patrol cars. There's a doorway for officers to access the building from the parking lot and to bring prisoners inside.

The approaches to the building on all sides are across flat open ground with absolutely no cover or concealment for at least 100 yards in any direction.

The red brick exterior conceals foot thick reinforced concrete walls, so nothing short of a tank or large caliber artillery piece is going to breach the walls.

The entryway is deigned to deter attack. Once thru the exterior door attackers are confronted with another blank wall of presumably similar thickness. Turning left there is a 10 foot long corridor ending in a steel and 1.5" thick bulletproof glass wall. The steel has a couple of cleverly hidden firing ports incorporated to make the flat steel look like a design piece under the glass. Don't know how thick the steel is but I assume it's at least 1" thick small caliber ballistic proof.

All utilities are underground. I assume there must be a generator to provide power in case it's not grid available, but it's not evident from any exterior view. I haven't scoped what the roof looks like, but it's gotta be there on G view. Could be blurred out. That should answer the question on the generator. It's gotta have an exhaust stack hidden behind a parapet wall. All in all, it would be a tough nut to crack to use as a supply point.

Nemo