That Answers That

 h/t Irish

Tell me again why you think re-opening
public schools is a good idea.

Doubleplus Ungood Badthink

For John Wilder

Hold Your Horses: Crawl, Walk, Run

Great flick. But don't be Col. Pitts

Wes at NC Renegade has some thoughts. That's today's lesson topic.

Go read it. I'll be here when you come back.

At his site, I replied:

Thanks for recapping Why.
At this point:
1) Stand up to Whom?
2) With What and Who?
3) Where, When, and How?
Most people reading this couldn’t write a 5 Paragraph Order, let alone grasp one, and about 90% of them would have to google it to even know what I’m talking about.
They have, on avg., 1/2 a weapon apiece, little ammunition, no time, funds, support, friendly forces, and for 90+% of them, zero training in any meaningful way.
We didn’t invade Normandy on December 8th, 1941.
And we didn’t get here in a day, so we won’t be getting out of it in one either.
I absolutely share your frustration, but one cannot grow a crop faster by pulling on the green shoots.
Now is a time for gathering and preparing, not taking any direct action, and making the most of temporal and financial opportunity while we have it.
“Boy, I wish we’d spent less time in training, and been less prepared and supplied” said no one ever in world history, least of all those entering a battle or embarking upon an entire war.
The first thinning of the herd will be those willing to invest the time and money to get ready for the conflict. That’ll probably move the decimal point of available forces one place to the left, automagically.
One’s time should be spent in
a) being that guy
b) doing the work
c) finding other guys doing the same
d) figuring out what to do, to whom, and when to do it
Unless you’re already a former JSOC ninja with a file cabinet full of CARVER-rated objectives, and a tight-knit vetted cadre of like-minded and capable folks, with an existing support matrix, doing anything more than that is simply a recipe for a short, interesting, and ultimately futile life.
Change my mind.

I've posted links to military manuals any half-dozen times for a reason, dammit, and it isn't nostalgia.

Most of you (95%, by all polling data, though the blog stats here may skew a wee bit higher) never got any closer to a military formation than lining up outside for phys ed classes in school. And that was great in a free country but not so much for a burgeoning banana republic, with all the trimmings, which is what we are, right this minute.

So let's talk turkey:

There are three undeniable truths operating right now in America.

I. Elections are pointless, worthless, and futile.

If you didn't get that memo despite what happened in November, and again in GA in January, sorry to break it to you, but it's nevertheless gospel truth.

Anyone yakking about "We'll get 'em next time!", "Vote Harder!", or any variation on "MOAR Elections!" is an unredeemed delusional jackass suffering a psychotic break from reality. They should be placed in a room in a quiet glen, featuring soft music, soft lighting, soft food, and soft walls. They're fucking nuts. Don't waste any further breath on them until they wake up, if ever.

TINVOWOOT: There Is No Voting Our Way Out Of This. 

Learn it, Live it, Love it.

Should you still pull a lever ever again? Hell yes. Enjoy whatever simulacrum of freedom you can, and maximize the time and minimize the gradient of the decline, if such be within your power. Primary out RINOs. Use it as a weed-out for whom to ever listen to, and whom to discount, forever. And a platform to shitpost, meme, rabblerouse, and generally send raspberries at TPTB, while you can. But minimize the time, energy, and funds you spend waste on electoral activities going forward, knowing the entire process is as fake as TV News and pro wrestling.

II. We're at war, within this country, with those who hate fundamental America.

Not a debate. Not an argument. Not a fight. A W-A-R.

They want you dead. They want you rounded up and obliterated, and they want to kill your unborn babies, kidnap your living children, and poison their minds against you. In the interim, they want you unemployed, broke, dispossessed of your goods, lands, and chattels, and treated like sub-human scum, which is what they think of you, to their marrow. And they'll stop at nothing to do exactly that. When your enemy tells you his true feelings, believe it. Mein Kampf was a blueprint for the Holocaust. Das Kapital was the blueprint and excuse for the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, and the Killing Fields.

Scapegoats and counter-revolutionaries will not be tolerated. You are both.

If you're reading this, that means YOU, to a metaphysical certainty.

But there is a difference between being AT war, and warfare.

Your fight, at this point, is theoretical, philosophical, and moral.

III. You aren't ready to fight any other kind of actual war. Yet.

As I noted to Wes, above, I share his frustration that this is so. Some of us have been trying to edumacate folks about this for years. As you might have noticed, to date, it hasn't helped much, other than as a pressure relief valve for those of us watching the trainwreck, transfixed, aghast, and infuriated.

Which brings us to the Teachable moment, and the Action/Implementation Phase.

AIP: Get yourself ready for a war.

A) It's going to be a shooting war, so you'd better have something to shoot with, and something to load into it. And you'd better get damned good with it. The good news is, even for GED-holding high school dropouts, that only takes a few hours a day for a couple-three weeks, even for Army Rangers and Marines. And a grand total of 260 rounds. Folks, that's nothing, in the grand scheme. Competence is not mastery, but start with bare competence. If you're looking for recommendations, there are plenty of good options, but the AR platform is where to start. You'll do just fine if you pick up a Smith and Wesson MP-15, which is just a civvie M4gery. YMMV, but it'll get anyone over the age of 12 off on the right foot. Pistol? Learn how to run a Glock. You can upgrade from all of this, (and I hope you do) but that's the floor.

B) Once you've scratched the itch of your inner Gear Whore with that rifle and/or pistol, get your (overwhelming majority of Americans) fat @$$ in shape. PT. 3-5 times/week. Upper body, lower body, aerobic endurance exercise, strength-building. The shorthand for that is push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and running 2-3 miles. Running. Not walking, pedalling, driving, slow jogging, or anything else. Start with less distance, and slower, sure. But get to where you can run 8-minute or less miles, for at least 3 of them. That's the standard. Two minutes of sit-ups. Max effort, and increase over time. Max push-ups and pull-ups. Lather, rinse, repeat.

C) Get healthy. Stop eating sh*t. Balanced meals, wipe out the sugar, fat, and junk food. Get your teeth fixed. Get anything else you need to taken care of. Get your booster shots for tetanus, etc. Cut back on the alcohol, and junk the nicotine habit. Spend the money you save from those vices on more important supplies. Like stored food, medical supplies, ammo, tools. You can party when you're using the skulls of your enemies for cups. Until then, self-discipline. Medical care may not be around much longer, and healthy people fight harder, and they're harder to kill. I repeat, get healthy.

D) Learn what an unconventional warrior needs to know. I don't know you, or your area, or what you're up against. You should. Then learn what you'll need to deal with that. At a minimum, you should be focusing on what the ground forces (Army, Marines) teach their basic recruits. We may have pounded that home with a 2x4 a time or twelve on this very blog. Repetition is a teaching technique. Even if you're too old/brokedick to participate, you should still have the knowledge in your brainpan. And if that's the case, learn tradecraft skills: scouting, spying, information-gathering, recording, encryption/decryption, transmission, collection, and analysis. Too scared? Focus on supporting activities: caching, sheltering, running a safe house, supply, small-scale manufacturing, finance, medical support, feeding, transportation (all means: truck/rail/waterborne/pack animal), repair, communications, construction, field engineering (anything from shovels to heavy equipment), and so on. If the Army has an occ field that you could do, you can be useful. On average, it takes 10 people to put one insurgent, supplied, fed, and equipped, into the field. And you're going to need some of that tradecraft I mentioned above to not be scooped up for aiding and abetting, and winding up dead, or in prison.

E) Find (and VET!!!) other people doing A-D, above. {Hint: Over 50% of those in the @$$clown show that was Malheur were federal CIs. If you get to where your main strategy to avoid prison is jury nullification because you were a jackass about vetting, you've screwed the pooch beyond repair, and you deserve to die in prison. Whether or not you do is up to a merciful Deity, because TPTB will have no sense of humor, and Fate is set to Zero Fucks Given when you're stupid.} Take your time. Sniff around. Check them out, overtly and covertly. Due diligence or die. No one will tell your story alongside that of Patrick Henry. You'll just be the next Timothy McVeigh. Remember, you're picking people into whose hands you're entrusting your own life, and the fate of your family. So are they.

F) As Sam Culper has said, and taught, and teaches (take his classes!) do an Area Study. Look the term up online, find an example, and then wipe out the info paragraphs and pages for the sample you select, and refill the info with the same thing for your town/city, and county at a minimum. If it's small enough, do your entire state, and push outward if neighboring states are closer to you, for example, than your own state capitol. E.g., New Mexico (and Mexico!) info is going to be a helluva lot more relevant in El Paso than info about Dallas, Houston, and/or Austin. Just saying. If you're in Rhode Island, you should be looking at all of New England. For a good guideline, stick a pin in a map where you are. Scribe a circle to the limit of a tank of gas - say, 400-500 miles - and look hardest at that. That's your "area of interest". Same pin, then a circle of the 20 miles in any direction you could walk in a day: that's your "area of concern". You should know both intimately, for all topics in your sample Area Study. This is what Sun Tzu meant when he said "know your enemy" and "know the ground".

That's already five more things than most people out there have done, and it's enough to get you started.

Provided you start getting started.

Whatever you haven't done, above, is where you are. Get busy with that, FIRST. Leviathan isn't going to wait all day before taking an interest in you.

Medical Tip: Tourniquets Work!

One of the local constabularies recently encountered Nameless Crazy Person with butcher knife in hand, agitated and in a stabby mood. Despite repeated commands, NCP refused to drop knife, and/or broke the containment bubble, whereupon officer plugged NCP. Unknown number of rounds fired, but two connected. 

One to each arm. (-25 points for lousy marksmanship at knifefighting - which is knifefight dying - distance. Bonus points for unintended humanitarian efforts.)

One nicked the right outer bicep. Literally, a flesh wound. Rub some dirt on it (or, in this case, a wad of 4x4s) and walk it off. No harm, no foul.

Other round: in the stabby knife-wielding arm, 9mm or 40SW pellet entered the upraised left arm proximal to the inner elbow, and travelled along the near-horizontal upper arm, and exited just below the left armpit (axilla for medical types).

Neither round close to anything obviously vital, except...

Round #2, during its journey through the meaty bicep area, must obviously have punctured/torn/lacerated the L brachial artery, i.e. the one what all the blood from Mr. Heart travels in to arrive in the rest of Mr. Arm.

Result: a steady blurp-blurp-blurp of bright red blood, all over the ground.

To his everlasting credit, Constable quickly applied first an Israeli Battle Dressing to the arm of the now knifeless suspect, to whom the application of lead had reduced his crazy efforts noticeably. Which IBD application slowed the blurp-blurp nary a whit.

So, reverting to academy-standard (nowadays) training, he whipped out his CAT Tourniquet, and lashed that sucker down just like in training videos, and turned off the blurp-blurp in about 6 twists of the windlass, despite the pained response from NCP.

Medics brought NCP to our world, where our trauma nurse and trauma doc were certain that applying a TQ was waaaaaay overkill, but "Bless their hearts for doing too much instead of too little". So, they untwisted that TQ, and were immediately rewarded with blurp-blurp-blurp of bright red arterial blood, again.

I twisted the TQ back on and tightened it, and we sent NCP directly to trauma surgery for vascular repair, so that he could continue to be crazy with two functioning arms.

And I told the paramedics and the PD officer responsible for the TQ that they'd saved an actual life with that thing, because NCP would have died at the scene in about two minutes if they hadn't tourniquetted off the flow of arterial blood from a "mere" arm wound. Which not only saved his life, it prevented about two trees-worth of resultant officer-involved homicide paperwork.

TL;DR:

Put the effing TQ on if the bleeding doesn't stop with pressure, and make it holy by cranking the hell out of it.

You needn't carry four TQs on your body, but you have four limbs, so if you like them, and you enjoy living, you'd be well-advised to have four TQs somewhere close by, like kit/pack/bag, etc.

Not at home in your medicine cabinet 20 miles away.

When you need one (or, God forbid, more than one) it will be Right Effing NOW, and not "in twenty minutes or so".

If you'd rather ignore that advice: Suture self.

FTR, trauma literature based on medical trauma data from Sandbox I and Sandbox II have documented applications of as long as 4 hours before removal in surgery with no residual harm of any kind to extremities as a result of the TQ application, in young, otherwise-healthy, military-aged troops. YMMV, but they are not in any way "sacrificing a limb to save a life", anytime in the last 20 years. If you're within that time span for arrival at definitive medical care, and it's medically justified, it's better to slap one on than watch your patient exsanguinate and die.

And now, refresher training for those who wish it:

"This sh*t works!" - everyone who's ever needed one.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Bloglist Update

We've followed TPopp on his YouTube Redonkulas channel for literal years. Apparently he's added a blogsite version/link.

Added.

Retired SF MSG/Team Daddy. Good Popp is informative. Bad Popp is funny as f**k. He's also right about 95% of the time about anything in his wheelhouse. And it's a biiiiig wheelhouse.

Go. Watch. Learn. Obligatory Beverage Alert: Not responsible for coffee or carbonated beverage burn to your nostrils if you disregard this warning.

And if you want to enter a timehole, go back to his earliest videos on YouTube, and work your way forward through the ones that interest you.

FYI: It doesn't update. Drop in from time to time, and see what he's added.

SCOTUS Sends...

 

¡Viva Chiquitastan!

 

You live in a full-fledged banana republic.

Your would-be overlords will brook neither examination nor discussion of that fact, and they will decide for you who you wanted elected. Your input is entirely superfluous, and the idea that you can or even should have any input at all is frankly annoying and vexatious to TPTB.

There can be but one proper answer to that, and it must needs be delivered at between 900 and 3200fps. Nothing less will suffice.

Range Cards - Re-Post

By request from DTG.  Original was posted 6/25/2018.

Entire Basic Training masterlink list and then some.

So, when we left off, you'd gotten yourself into a nice fighting position, but that's just the beginning.

Once you've dug in and improved your position somewhat, you need to begin a Range Card. It's basically a mini-map of your sector of responsibility (and sector of fire, should it come to that) with particular emphasis on obvious landmarks, dead space, and ranges from you to everything you can see.

It's your team leader's job to tell you three things when you're digging in:

1) Principle Direction Of Fire
The PDF is where you should be looking, alerting anyone else of anything notable that happens into view, and shooting at it if anything worth shooting at appears, consistent with your team's ROE (Rules Of Engagement). Your hole should be sited to cover that.

2) Your Sector Limits
How far to the left and right of your PDF you should be paying attention to, and/or shooting at, with suitable landmarks or compass bearings for both.

3) Your Final Protective Fire line
The bearing along which, if everything goes to hell, you should be shooting to put a curtain of screaming lead to prevent your team's position being overrun.

Your responsibility is to put in limit stakes (or rocks) at your end, so that you can point your weapon alongside them to the limits of your sector to either side, along with similar arrangements for your PDF and FPF, so that, even in the dark and absent NODs, you could fire a line along either and hit anything from 0-72 inches above the ground along that bearing.

Then to walk your sector, or have someone else do it, to see if there are any spots where a person could successfully hide from your fire. This is called dead space, not because they'll be dead outside it, but because you can't put any live fire into it.

If any of that is within hand grenade-throwing range (25m or so), you'll want to find ways to put something there to make it less attractive to occupy, whether that something is just noisy (to alert you), or actually painful or hazardous (to penalize attempts to occupy it without you shooting at it). Ideally, both, and in such a way that it's not obvious that whatever is put there has been deliberately placed, but rather appears natural to casual observation. Jumbled piles of sharp rocks and old brush, with jagged points and edges, are better for this than obvious human-constructed spikes, and accomplish roughly the same effect.

But mainly, you want to visually identify obvious landmarks and your sector lines, and range the distance from you to them, out to the limit of your own weapon's effectiveness or the limit of your vision, so that you know at what range any target(s) at those landmarks are at, or what ranges they're between, to use all that rifle marksmanship you learned, and deliver accurate fire on them if necessary.

Assuming your rifle is BZO'ed, everything from 0-300m will be hit on a man-sized target with the same sight setting for you, so your primary concern is the 300-600m range, where correct range settings are more important to hit accurately.

You can pace it off, or have your battle buddy do that while walking the area looking for dead space, but a modern expedient that's probably easier and more accurate would be a simple laser rangefinder available from dozens of websites, hunting suppliers, etc. If someone has a dedicated rifle for marksmanship beyond 500m, get a rangefinder that will accommodate all such possibilities.

Otherwise, one that'll handle 600m or less will suffice for 7.62mm and 5.56mm modern battle rifles at all probable ranges.

In heavier cover, 100m may be all the distance you've got, but ideally, you're somewhere inside the edge of that heavy cover, looking out at open ground. Second choice, everything's open, but your position is camouflaged and has sufficient cover.

In any event, once your hole is basically prepared, learn the ground outwards from where you are, unless you want your fighting hole to become your burial hole.

Sunday Music: American Pie

 

After I posted this in conjunction with news of Rush Limbaugh's death last Monday, I couldn't believe I hadn't already put it up for Sunday Music. It's like seeing Zulu on TV: if you hear this on the radio, you have to listen to the entirety until it's over. It's one of a very small number of the quinetessential American modern ballads, and it deserves to go up now. Partly because Rush's departure isn't a quick loss, and even more so because this song is so American, being able to sing along with this entire eight and a half minutes of musical iconography should be part of the mandatory US citizenship exam.

Sing it with me one more time.