Quotulatiousness

November 26, 2025

The Korean War Week 75: Insurgency Behind The Lines! – November 25, 1951

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 25 Nov 2025

While there is no battle action this week, there is still a lot of fighting, as the UN forces must constantly watch their backs against the thousands of guerrillas in the hills of South Korea. At the truce talks, the Communist side accepts the UN proposal for a demarcation line — Item 2 on the agenda — but for it to be valid the other three items remaining on the agenda must be dealt with within 30 days, which seems very optimistic to most. There is also the question of post-armistice inspections teams; are they a good idea? Or will they simply provide the other side with much-needed actionable intelligence?

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:45 Recap
01:08 Guerilla Actions
03:19 Hanley’s Numbers
05:37 The Demarcation Line
08:04 Inspection Teams
10:36 Ridgway’s Opinion
12:06 The Agenda
12:48 Summary
13:04 Conclusion
13:57 Call to Action
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November 24, 2025

Algeria: France’s War It Refused to Name – W2W 054

Filed under: Africa, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 23 Nov 2025

This episode tracks how the doctrine “Algeria is France” — departments, settler power, and forced assimilation — breeds dispossession, mass violence, and a new Algerian nationalism: from conquest and the Sétif massacres to the FLN’s launch in 1954 and Philippeville in 1955. As Paris doubles its forces and passes Special Powers, Suez intertwines with the war, bombings in Algiers begin, and Lacoste hands police powers to General Massu — opening the Battle of Algiers and a system of torture.
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November 21, 2025

“You too can be a Tactical Espionage Dollar-Store Hobo for less than $1000”

Filed under: Books, Military, Technology, Tools, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Anarchonomicon, Kulak is at it again … this time it’s a long, long post about how to manage “James Bond tricks” without a “James Bond budget”.

I have now seen 5+ different spy films, In which a CIA or MI6 spy has to breach a chainlink fence. An ordinary chainlink fence.

There’s barb or razor wire up top that prevents our hero from just climbing it … So he or she has to breach it. And on FIVE SEPARATE OCCASIONS … I have seen the goofiest inventions in the world come out. $10,000 super-spy wrist watches with hidden lasers in them, super-secret hairpins with scissors in them made of magic cutting alloys, aerosol sprays that instantly oxidize and rust out a massive section of solid steel fencing (don’t breathe that spray) allowing the spy to just push out a Wile E. Coyote style hole of fencing …

Completely over-designed over-specific insanity that’d cost thousands of dollars, and would basically instantly betray the CIA or MI6 was behind the breach …

Of course no sane human being would ever use those techniques even if they existed. The one semi-plausible breech I’ve seen is in Fight Club Ed Norton and Brad Pitt toss a rug over the razor wire surrounding a medical facility so they can climb the fence … but even this strikes me as profoundly unideal … Would you really want to PLAN on risking nasty lacerations climbing OVER razor wire? That seems more like a desperate break-out trick. Not a Break-in trick.

Of course this is all insane because BREACHING A FENCE is maybe the most SOLVED problem out there, 80% of people reading this already have the tools to do it.

You just use wirecutters or a multitool. Ideally creating a single vertical slit so you can crawl through without the breach being visible unless you look very closely. (be sure to fold the slit back as you crawl so you don’t cut yourself on the jagged edges.

Often the crappiest $15 Chinese Multi-tool is up for the task (although test it out on a random fence on a walk before you gamble on it).

(Note that a “Leatherman” is just a good make of multitool, and outperforms even larger wire-cutters … Your cheepo crappy surplus multi-tool will take more elbow grease (if it works, test it))

Almost everything on the pop-culture side of the tactical world is like this … There’s an obsession with ultra-expensive James Bond scifi inventions that double as a luxury brand to match your tuxedo … When in reality the cheapest rusty junk from your granddad’s tool shed probably gives you vastly more capability.

And even In the world of prepping, tacticool influences, camping, modern combat, and all matters “survival”, “guerilla”, and “outdoors adventure” there’s an intense focus on expensive kit.

All your favorite influencers are sponsored by various product sellers, and half the reason people watch them is for the vicarious or personal thrill of collecting expensive Gucci kit and showing off their rare or designer rifles and Military Artifacts.

Most will assemble load-outs, rigs, and rifles, far less as a preparation for disaster or war, or an exercise in capability expansion, and more as an artistic expression, fashion statement, or historical exercise … Whether they will admit it or not most of the people who buy Yugoslavian combat webbing, or archaic experimental 80s rifles meant for an upcoming war in the scifi future of 2005 have more in common with historical reenactors than they might care to admit … They just chose wars that didn’t happen towards the end of the cold war, instead of The American Revolution, 1812, or the Civil War.

It’s astrology for boys!

As such one could be forgiven for believing that the great wars of the 21st century to come, and the Urban Battlefield that much of the world is quickly becoming, is a “pay to win” combat-zone. And that unless one has close to 100,000 dollars for body Armour, thermal vision, night vision, precision optics, gucci rifles, and all manner of overpriced gadgets and gizmos that they are simply screwed in any 21st century conflict.

This is not the case. Indeed in some cases it is almost the opposite: given how mass surveillance defines the modern battlefield, there’s a lot of kit I wouldn’t want to use just for risk of dropping it and the Glowies tracking down the only 10-20 people who’ve ordered Czechoslovakian Mag-Pouches via NSA copies of online transaction records, or by just calling the 3 sellers who ever had them.

Put simply Skill, knowledge, resourcefulness, and a more than abundant paranoia are more overpowered than almost anytime since the neolithic period … Basic resourcefulness, daring, courage, B-Grade high-school shop-class craftiness, low level chemistry knowledge, basic boy-scout skills, physical fitness (tall order I know), and a nigh primitivist obsession with the pre-computer way of doing things … Is sufficient to achieve a shocking level of capability and inflict an extraordinary level of damage in any near-future conflict, tyrannical regime, or low intensity resistance.

The most important kit in any future conflict isn’t free. But it is near free.

Available at shockingly low prices from dollar-, convenience-, hardware-, surplus-, grocery-stores, and pawn shops … The necessary equipment and capabilities to fight a high impact Guerilla Campaign are available in almost any town of 20,000 almost anywhere in the western world.

Sadly in spite of being largely legal throughout most of the US and not a few odd other countries (assuming one navigates the proper tax stamps and legal statements) I will not be presenting a guide on how to manufacture black-powder, explosives, firearms, or more exotic weaponry … This is all largely trivially covered by Chemistry Youtube in a level of detail I could never hope to match and with a level of responsibility and maturity far beyond my juvenile imagination, and with a level of expertise and experience I cannot pretend to … Seriously! Chemistry/explosive Youtube is really cool, Some of this stuff is should be taught in schools, so historically relevant and useful is it.

If one Navigates to my Earlier “Warlord’s Reading List” you’ll find many listed works (not least published by the US, Canadian, British, and Swiss Governments) that give detailed guides to the manufacture of explosives, chemical weapons, rocket weapons, improvised firearms, homemade flamethrowers, etc … All from other publishers that I can gesture at without exposing me to legal risk and most of them largely available online in PDF form, or from Amazon, and sometimes from the governments themselves.

November 17, 2025

Cyprus on Fire: The 3-Way War That Broke an Empire – W2W 053

Filed under: Britain, Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 16 Nov 2025

Cyprus, 1950s–60s. An island divided between Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, and the British Empire becomes the battleground for one of the Cold War’s most explosive regional crises. What begins as a struggle for independence soon spirals into a three-way conflict of nationalism, colonial strategy, and clashing identities — with Archbishop Makarios III, paramilitary groups, Athens, Ankara, and London all pulling in different directions.

In this episode of War 2 War, we uncover how Cyprus became:

  • A central front in the decline of the British Empire
  • A stage for espionage, guerrilla warfare, and political assassinations
  • A diplomatic nightmare for NATO
  • A struggle where UN peacekeepers become critical to preventing total collapse
  • A conflict whose consequences still shape Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean today

We’ll trace the rise of EOKA, the reaction in the Turkish Cypriot community, the impossible balancing act of Makarios III, and how superpower pressure from the USA and USSR escalated an already volatile situation.

This is the hidden story of how one island’s crisis reshaped the politics of an entire region — and marked the end of Britain as a global imperial power.
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September 14, 2025

“When must we kill them?”

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media platform previously known as Twitter, Tom Kratman provides an excerpt from The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad:

Reposting this seems apropos:

The Care and Feeding of Your Right Wing Death Squad, Chapter 32 Copyright © 2025, Tom Kratman, Harry Kitchener

“When must we kill them?”

That question was asked recently by a leftist student, one Nicholas Decker, from George Mason University. It’s a very interesting question, and one that most, and perhaps all, hard leftists in the United States are contemplating. Indeed, we see now, from an NCRI / Rutgers survey, that something over half of leftists believe that assassinating Trump would be justified, and nearly half think the same thing about Musk.

Note, here, that this was of all people identifying as left of center. I would suggest that this means that almost nobody who is slightly left of center would agree with that and nearly everybody who is far left of center agrees with that. And if we needed any more proof, just contemplate the number of would be groupies moistening their panties over murderer Luigi Mangione, as pointed out by former New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz.

Why do they think so or why are they wondering about it? It’s actually more understandable than most on the right and perhaps even many on the left would understand. They’re wondering about it because, with the destruction of the Deep State, with so many billionaires turning against the left and – horrrors! – no longer letting the left wing narrative control online and legacy media political discourse, with no prospect of the kind of money being shunted from the taxpayer, through the Federal Government, to left wing NGOs to help swing elections, they do not really think there is any serious prospect of the left ever winning a national election again or, at least, not in their lifetimes. And they may be right about that.

With James Carville telling the Democrats to give the boot to the gender and woke ideologues, the identity politics losers, the little boy penis choppers and little girl breast destroyers and vagina removers; they see themselves being marginalized, losing their influence, and losing their dream, forever. And this seems fairly likely. With no possibility, once Trump gets finished deporting all the illegals, of turning just enough of those illegals into client voters to swing elections just enough for control, they think that leftism will be hopeless in the United States. And they’re probably right about that. With the Communist factories of higher education being broken to the will of the right, with Gramsci’s / Rudi Dutschke’s “Long March Through the Institutions” being walked back, and quickly, they’re thinking about it and wondering about it because leftism is dead in the United States, a corpse just awaiting burial.

So, though the point of this entire exercise in the Right Wing Death Squad has been to convince the left to chill out, FFS, it seems that certain key point bear repeating.

1. Urban Guerilla movements invariably succeed in creating the kind of oppressive government that they believe will infuriate the people and lead to a general uprising. Those governments then proceed to exterminate the Urban Guerillas and all their supporters, and do so to general popular applause.

2. The armed forces, barring some political generals and morally cowardly colonels, hate you and everything about you. Posse Comitatus is only a law, not something in the constitution that would require going through the difficult process of amendment. Change the law – and do but note who has control of the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court (so that constitutional grounds could not be manufactured to create an objection to getting rid of the law) – and the military would be very happy to round you all up. And you’re completely, incompetently, incapable of resisting this.

3. Moreover, though you have a few people with some military experience and training, the key word there is “few”. Yes, yes, I know that, since Vietnam, the left has been obsessed with the inner city black cannon fodder meme, but it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. Conversely, the white working class and conservative populations at large – to the limited extent these categories may differ – are replete with people with a lot of military training and experience and they hate you, too. They also have most of the guns. Your side has fairly few, in comparison, and little skill in using what you do have, alone or in groups.

4. You also fundamentally misunderstand the difference between your approach to violence – as a rheostat to be turned up or down, to suit – with the right’s – which is an on-off switch marked “peace and good feelings” on the one hand, and “kill every one of them” on the other.

You know all those terrible things you and your pals like to say about right wing, especially but not always white, Americans? Well, we know you don’t really believe those things because if you did you would be afraid ever to leave your mom’s basement. But you really ought to try to grasp this; sometimes those things are true.

Although our purpose with this project has been to try to get you to save yourselves, still, one cannot help but look forward to the prospect of young Mr. Decker finding this out.

So, if you were to succeed in killing the president, you will get Vance. Vance will have a mandate, in that case, to obliterate you. If he fails to carry out that mandate then genuine Right Wing Death Squads will take up the slack. No trial, no due process at all; they will proceed to obliterate you and every safe harbor and supporter you have, and often in creatively disgusting ways.

Amusingly enough, your only safety, in such a case, would be in being sent to some variant on El Salvador’s CECOT. I could see the population of El Salvador roughly doubling in the course of a few years as millions of American leftists find out just how grim a Latin American prison can be.

But, seriously, why would they or anybody waste the money when you could as easily just become an unfortunate statistic? Were I betting on it, I’d bet that few of you see a flight – or even half a flight – to El Salvador, but that many of you would have a long last moment staring down into a ditch you had just been forced to dig while a man with a pistol walks up behind you.

So the answer to young Mr. Decker’s question, “When must we kill them?” is “When you want to die.”

August 25, 2025

Vietnam 1950: Giáp Crushes France on Route Coloniale 4 – W2W 41

Filed under: Asia, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 24 Aug 2025

Viet Minh forces shift to the offensive, attacking French troops up and down the country. As guerilla war reigns in the southern half of Vietnam, more organised attacks begin in the north up near Hanoi. France cycles through multiple new commanders, trying to stem the tide. But do they truly have a hope of turning this around? Or are they just delaying the inevitable?
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August 10, 2025

QotD: The “generations” of warfare

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Warfare is fundamentally about breaking the enemy’s will to fight. This can be done with violence, or without it – before the fight even starts, through raw intimidation. Working from this understanding, military theorists have divided the history of warfare into five generations.

First Generation Warfare, abbreviated 1GW, was war as it was waged from the dawn of civilization up through roughly the Civil War. This style of conflict involved massed line infantry, equipped with spears, pikes, swords, or line-of-sight ranged weapons such as longbows, crossbows, or muskets. The basic tactic was to draw up two large groups of armed men, bring them into close contact, and have them hack at one another until one side grew demoralized by the slaughter, at which point their line would break and the real slaughter could begin.

Industrial or Second Generation Warfare (2GW) brought rifled firearms, machine-guns, and indirect artillery. Men could now be killed at a great distance, without ever seeing the enemy. Camouflage, concealment, and cover became the keys to victory. Its heyday was roughly from the Civil War to the Great War.

Mechanized warfare or 3GW arrived with the internal combustion engine and powered flight. Tactics now depended on speed and manoeuvrability. It dawned with the Second World War and reached its apogee with the invasion of Iraq.

Mechanized warfare created an overwhelming advantage for large industrial states. Small states and non-state actors responded with 4GW, which can be thought of as televisual warfare – combat via propaganda. This is war as fought with cameras and media distribution networks. It is guerrilla warfare via weaponized morality: using the enemy’s own military actions against it by showing the consequences of war for one’s civilian population to the enemy civilian population. Bait the enemy into killing babies, then ask them how many more babies they’re willing to murder. Think Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

The response to 4GW is 5GW – warfare by psyop, utilizing misinformation and sentiment engineering. Its characteristic weapons platform is the social network. Where 4GW seeks to use the enemy’s own morality against it, 5GW seeks to change that morality, to transform the enemy’s inner nature, getting the enemy to attack themselves for you, to surrender with open arms and smiles on their faces … ideally, without the enemy even realizing that they’re under attack.

John Carter, “Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2024-03-01.

July 25, 2025

The ongoing conflict in Gaza

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On his Substack, John Spencer responds to a New York Times op-ed that claims Israeli forces in Gaza are engaged in genocide:

In his New York Times op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It“, Omer Bartov accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As a professor of genocide studies, he should know better. Genocide is not defined by a few comments taken out of context, by estimates of casualties or destruction, or by how war looks in headlines or on social media. It is defined by specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. That is a high legal bar. Bartov did not meet it. He did not even try.

I am not a lawyer or a political activist. I am a war expert. I have led soldiers in combat. I have trained military units in urban warfare for decades and studied and taught military history, strategy, and the laws of war for years. Since October 7, I have been to Gaza four times embedded with the Israel Defense Forces. I have interviewed the Prime Minister of Israel, the Defense Minister, the IDF Chief of Staff, Southern Command leadership, and dozens of commanders and soldiers on the front lines. I have reviewed their orders, watched their targeting process, and seen soldiers take real risks to avoid harming civilians. Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent.

Bartov claims that five statements by Israeli leaders prove genocidal intent. He begins with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on October 7 that Hamas would “pay a huge price”. That is not a call for genocide. It is what any leader would say after the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history. He also cites Netanyahu’s statements that Hamas would be destroyed and that civilians should evacuate combat zones. That is not evidence of a desire to destroy a people. It is what professional militaries do when fighting an enemy that hides among civilians.

Bartov presents Netanyahu’s reference to “remember Amalek” as a smoking gun. But this is a phrase from Jewish history and tradition. It is engraved at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and also appears on the Holocaust memorial in The Hague. In both places, it serves as a warning to remain vigilant against threats, not as a call for mass killing.

He also highlights Defense Minister Gallant’s use of the term “human animals” to describe Hamas fighters. That is not a war crime. After the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians on October 7, many would understand or even share that reaction.

Unable to find intent among those actually directing the war, Bartov turns to far-right politicians like Bezalel Smotrich and Nissim Vaturi. These individuals do not command troops, issue orders, or shape battlefield decisions. I have studied the actual orders. They focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible. Their rhetoric is irrelevant to the legal case.

Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.

Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime. More than 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid have entered the territory. Israel has supported hospitals, repaired water pipelines, increased access to clean water, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad.

July 22, 2025

Battle for Gaza 1917: The Palestinian Campaign of WW1

The Great War
Published 14 Feb 2025

The ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict has its roots in another war more than a century ago. When the First World War began in 1914, the territory of today’s Israel and Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. But in 1917 the British Empire began a campaign that would change history: there would be bitter fighting in Gaza, wild cavalry charges, even talk of a modern crusade. And it would lay the foundations for a century of violence.
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July 15, 2025

Why France Couldn’t Crush the Viet Minh – W2W 36

Filed under: Asia, China, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 13 Jul 2025

Why couldn’t France crush the Viet Minh after war broke out in Vietnam? In this episode we dive into the brutal opening years of the First Indochina War, from the outbreak of violence in Hanoi in December 1946 to France’s failed military campaigns and the rise of Vietnamese resistance.

Despite having superior weapons, colonial experience, and Foreign Legion reinforcements, France failed to defeat Ho Chi Minh’s forces. We explore why early offensives like Operation Léa and Ceinture fell short, how the Viet Minh’s rural strategy kept them alive, and why French hopes of ending the war quickly vanished.

As Mao Zedong’s Communist China consolidates power just across the border, the Viet Minh gain strength, support, and a long-term advantage that France simply cannot match.

This video is part of War 2 War, our Cold War history series covering the decade after WW2, a time of seismic global transformation.
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July 8, 2025

QotD: Sixty years of intelligence service operations going sideways

Taking a wild-ass guess (because that’s the best I can do), I imagine any Intelligence Service is going to bat below the Mendoza Line, because the Enemy gets a vote, too — when his best and brightest are doing their best to fool your guys, it’s certain your guys are going to get fooled a lot.

There’s also another version of the Historian’s Fallacy in play with Intelligence work:

    The historian’s fallacy is an informal fallacy that occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision. It is not to be confused with presentism, a similar but distinct mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas (such as moral standards) are projected into the past. The idea was first articulated by British literary critic Matthew Arnold in 1880 and later named and defined by American historian David Hackett Fischer in 1970.

Things that seem obvious in retrospect weren’t at the time. That’s the “formal” Historian’s Fallacy, if you like. But there’s another one, that we could call the “Narrative Fallacy” or the “Assumed Rationality Fallacy” or something (I stink at titles). Historians are, or at least should be, acutely sensitive to the danger of seeing patterns that aren’t really there (in a very real sense, “conspiracy theorists” e.g. McGowan are just Historians manqué. Coincidences are coincidental, and without training and practice and — crucially — an experienced hand to smack you upside the head for going farther than the available sources allow, it’s easy to run wild with them. So-and-So knew Joe Blow … yes, but that does not automatically mean that So-and-So conspired with Joe Blow).

Compounding it further: It’s indeed rational to assume rationality on your enemies’ part, so some catastrophic intelligence “failures” have come because analysts were unwilling to acknowledge that the enemy was, in fact, making a mistake. It’s a bit pricey, but I highly recommend James Wirtz’s The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (here’s a preview page of a review at JSTOR, which points to a trade journal, American Intelligence Journal. Wirtz is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School; I bet his book rattled a lot of cages that needed rattling). Breaking it out a bit further, and these categories are mine, not Wirtz’s:

In the case of Tet, there was top-level structural “failure” that hardly deserves the term “failure” — the NVA’s intelligence boys were no fools; they were bright guys doing their damnedest to put one over on the American intelligence crew, and they had some success at it. That’s only “failure” in the sense that in binary system, a win for them is a loss for you — you “failed” to win the game against a highly skilled, highly motivated opponent. The Americans didn’t fail to recognize that The Enemy Gets a Vote; they just didn’t realize how he’d voted.

But there was what I’ll call “Narrative” failure, and that’s all on the Americans. They seem to have decided that the North Vietnamese were not only losing the war, but knew themselves to be losing the war. So what the North Vietnamese saw as merely “the next phase of the plan”, the Americans saw as “increasing desperation”. Which led to other Narrative Failures. I might be misremembering the details, so check me on this, but I believe that the Americans were correct despite themselves about the attack on the big Marine base at Khe Sanh — it was indeed a diversion. But the Americans somehow concluded that it was a diversionary attack, specifically a “spoiling attack”, on something the NVA shouldn’t have known about in the first place — a top secret operation called “Muscle Shoals” (in Wiki under Operation Igloo White).

In reality, the Khe Sanh attack was a diversion against the main Tet operation, and it worked so well that it took a week or more, IIRC, for Westmoreland to come around. He insisted on interpreting the Tet “uprising” as yet a further diversion — a diversion in support of what he assumed was the main NVA operation, the attack on Khe Sanh!

Those are Narrative Failures. Twitter didn’t exist then, but we could nowadays profitably call them “Twitter Failures”. Whatcha gonna believe, your own lying eyes or the blue checkmarks in the Pocket Moloch?

All of which was aided and abetted by the third kind of failure, that “Assumed Rationality” failure. One CIA analyst, Joseph Hovey, not only predicted the Tet Offensive, but got large parts of it exactly right. But Hovey had a hard time believing his own analysis, because its central assumption was that the North Vietnamese were, in fact, making a mistake. The North Vietnamese did not, in fact, have the forces in place to do what they wanted to do. They were suffering a catastrophic Narrative Failure of their own, one endemic (it seems reasonable to say) to Communist regimes — since political officers are highly encouraged to submit exaggerated reports of unit strength and morale (and often lethally discouraged from reporting the opposite), the NVA thought they had far more, and far better prepared, forces than they actually did.

In an Alanis-level irony, US military intelligence had a better idea of the NVA’s strength than the boys in Hanoi did. (They confirmed this, in fact, when they nabbed a high-level NVA defector, who only “rallied” because the formation he was sent south to lead didn’t actually exist!). When faced with the possible conclusion that the Enemy is about to make a big mistake, it’s only rational to assume that something else is going on. Hovey knew that, of course, and that’s one of the main reasons his analysis went nowhere — being a conscientious professional, he noted at the outset that his analysis was premised on the NVA setting up to make a big mistake, which seemed extremely unlikely.

Given all that, if I had to guess, I’d bet that the KGB had a similar record, if the truth is ever known, because they had similar problems. They had a different, more systematic kind of Narrative Failure, I’d imagine — “Marxism-Leninism” vs. “bow-tied Ivy Leaguers running around cosplaying Lawrence of Indochina” — but it probably all washed out in the end. It’d be extremely interesting to hear about the Vietnam War from the KGB’s side …

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-04-15.

April 15, 2025

How the UN Plan Tore Palestine Apart – W2W 20 – 1948 Q2

TimeGhost History
Published 13 Apr 2025

In 1948, the British departure from Palestine plunges the region into chaos. Amid bombings, massacres, and forced displacements, a brutal civil war escalates into the Arab-Israeli conflict, reshaping the Middle East forever. As Israel declares independence, Arab armies invade, and atrocities on both sides deepen hatred and tragedy. Can either side emerge victorious, or has the cycle of violence become unstoppable?
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March 17, 2025

My Big Fat Greek Civil War – W2W 12 – 1947 Q2

Filed under: Britain, Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 16 Mar 2025

As Europe emerges from WWII, Greece plunges into chaos. Political polarization, revenge killings, and failed diplomacy ignite a bitter civil war, turning former allies into deadly foes. From communist partisans regrouping in the mountains, to royalists asserting brutal dominance, the battle lines are drawn. Could Greece become the first major flashpoint in the Cold War, threatening peace across the Balkans and beyond?
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March 10, 2025

Chinese Civil War Part 1 – W2W 11 – Q1 1947

TimeGhost History
Published 9 Mar 2025

After WWII, China is plunged into chaos as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists reignite a decades-old conflict. This episode traces the roots of the Chinese Civil War — from the guerrilla strategies honed in Yan’an to the shifting power dynamics after Japanese occupation. Discover how ideological fervor, battle-hardened tactics, and the struggle for legitimacy set China on a path that would redefine its future.
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March 8, 2025

Murder in the Name of Democracy – War Against Humanity 002

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 7 Mar 2025

The battles on the Korean peninsula started long before 1950. Today Sparty looks back at the uprising and insurgency on Jeju Island in 1948, the threat of Communist revolt, and the harsh reaction of the Korean government. This really was the war before the war.
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