Once More, With Feeling

This is war. It's talking to you in its Outside Voice.

That scares some people. Fear makes their brains not work so well.

That happens in war a lot too, by all accounts.

So if you can't grasp this reality easily in times of quiet contemplation, you're really going to get your ass kicked by it when shit's blowing up all around you and other people's body parts (and random pieces of same), along with bullets and shell fragments are flying all about hither and yon, alternately whizzing, or screaming.

People who think there are rules in a contest like war amuse people who know there aren't.

Just movies, but both illustrative of the greater point. Rules do not exist. There are certainly tactics. Tactics are but the grease that makes things move more smoothly. Tactics change, and are subject to time and place.

At other times and places, they're pointless.

Replace Sesue Hayakawa's Col. Saito with a Roman centurion from the 1st century , and Alec Guiness' Col. Nicholson is nailed to a cross in about the time it takes to whistle up some stout timbers and a few nails.

If Gandhi had tried non-violence as a tactic against the Nazi occupation, Stalin, Mao, or Tojo, instead of the upper-crust pinkie-extended British Empire, they would have made short work of him, and slaughtered millions if necessary, and still gotten their way.

You pick your tactics, certainly.

But imagining that war - any war, anywhere - is governed by rules is among the quickest ways to lose one.

There are certainly tactics  that will be more successful, and ones that will be less successful.

The same is true for strategies.

History is replete with examples of either type, for both strategies and tactics.

But it contains exactly zero "Rules Of War", as such.

Rules are for games.

War isn't a game.

If you told Vince Lombardi to get the football into the end zone of the other team, he'd have used both ground and air attacks, within the rules of football, and accomplished that mission. Touchdown.

If you told George Patton the same thing, in a war, he'd have also used ground and air attacks, and gotten the football into the end zone as well. After killing or capturing the entire enemy team. If they'd lined up against him like it was a football game, they'd all have been killed in the first burst of machinegun fire. There would have only been one side left afterwards.

War Is Not A Game.

Some people who want to think otherwise should probably write that last sentence on their hand with a Sharpie, so they don't forget it.

There may very well be things you can do that will ease the progress of such an enterprise. Those are not rules, they're tactics.

We tried to aid wounded enemy soldiers after the battle. Even in the Solomon Campaign in 1942. Until enemy wounded kept trying to kill our troops unto their dying breath. For them, the battle was never over. Okay, noted.

We didn't take a helluva lot of Japanese prisoners after that, and no one questioned that behavior, nor cited it as a violation of the imaginary Rules Of War. Not because the rules had changed, but because that tactic was foolish, self-injurious, and suicidal.

This leaves people who insist rules exist dumbfounded, and attempting gymnastics to explain the obvious reality:

You use the tactics that work.

When they don't work, you don't use them any more.

That's why nobody court-martialed Dudley "Mush" Morton for machinegunning Japanese survivors in the Pacific. Because the little bastards hadn't surrendered, and never would, even if captured. That hand got played out long before. The Japanese played by bushido, which prohibited surrender, and demanded fighting to the death, even if captured, on penalty of ultimate dishonor.

They lost the war, for a host of reasons, but not because of that tactic. (In fact, we think of that level of total commitment as pretty bad-ass when we discuss Leonidas and the Spartans, or the folks at the Alamo, don't we? We could cite further examples as late as Vietnam or even more modern times. So much for "rules".)

Victory neither proves nor disproves one side's self-imposed rules as superior. One may fight "honorably" as their own side sees it, and still lose. Armies may fight "dishonorably", and be ultimately victorious.

Santa Anna didn't lose because he was dishonorable; he gave the occupants of the Alamo every chance to surrender and depart. He didn't ultimately lose because he killed them without quarter when they refused, no matter what Texans then or now think. He lost because he wasn't as good a general as he needed to be, and because Texas wanted independence more than Mexico wanted to keep it. Imaginary "Rules of War" had Jack and Shit to do with that.

In fact, seeing that Mexico could be bested in Texas led directly to peeling off most of the Southwest a couple of years later, because we could take it. We stole California, and most of Arizona and New Mexico in 1848, fair and square because we could. Not because of manifest destiny, the divine right of kings, or the designated hitter rule. It sure as hell wasn't because we followed a better code of conduct in war. We simply killed enough of them to induce them to concede the point.

QED

That's Curtis LeMay's Theorem, not St. Augustine's, in action.

So yet again, I remind people cluelessly lost in delusion, there are no "rules" in war.

There are things you won't do. You decide that.

There may be some things a given enemy won't do.

And then again, there may not be.

When you don't get this, you wake up Sunday morning, and half your battleships are sitting on the bottom in the mud of their harbor, without warning.

Your tallest buildings may lie in a heap of rubble, intermingled with the molecules of the bodies of the former occupants.

Hundreds of your citizens may have been raped, slaughtered, mutilated, and kidnapped by an enemy that doesn't see you, and reality, the way you see it, concerning the proper conduct of warfare.

True on the American frontier any number of times from 1600-1900; true on Israel's border with Gaza last October.

The question, every single time, isn't "Why did this happen?" 

And it sure as Hell isn't "How could anyone break the "Rules Of War" and do this to us?"

The only question is "How could you be so effing stupid as to let this happen, because you were so blindly and stupidly unprepared for it?!?"

People bleating about "rules" are generally the reason a given group gets caught with their pants around their ankles, and bent over, when Trouble comes calling.

Because comforting delusions are no substitute for using every tactic that works, and being ready for your enemies to do the exact same thing to you.

When you aren't ready, you pay for that lapse. In blood.

As we've happily shown our enemies a time or three ourselves:

Don't be delusional.

I repeat this lesson, because we're on the cusp of a real honest-to-God war. You're living through a slow-rolled communist takeover of this republic. There may  be some things your enemies won't do.

Imagining that your pretend "rules" are any part of that, or are somehow magically binding on your enemies is delusionary twaddle. It's going to get you killed, enslaved, or worse.

"Victory Or Death" isn't just a cute slogan. It's been the way of the world since about Ever.

You're not voting your way out of what's to come. At best, that might be another brief reprieve in the continuing onslaught.

And if (let's be serious, when) this gets ugly and kinetic, like every other time in world history to date, comforting delusions will be an anchor around your neck in the middle of a flood.

I know that, no matter how many times I say this, some people will continue digging in their pile of delusional horsesh*t, absolutely convinced against all evidence to the contrary that they're still going to find a pony underneath it all, somehow.

This is like Christians in the arena, as the lions are released, with no other defense or recourse than resolving to taste very bad.

 "But there must be rules!"

Tell that to the cartels just before they put your head in a duffel bag; or to the jihadi getting ready to saw your head off with a dull knife.

 "But we'll still be playing by the rules, so we'll be Right! Because no rules would be just icky!"

As if no one had ever come to that conclusion long before you did:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains

And the women come out to cut up what remains

just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains 

an' go to your Gawd like a soldier. 

- Rudyard Kipling, Barracks Room Ballads

In other words, there's absolutely nothing I'm revealing now that Kipling hadn't figured out and set to verse by 1890.

So I beseech you, as kindly as possible:

Wake. The Fuck. Up.