Nom de guerre: Rivrdog

When we're nuked by Iran

...this is how it will happen, of course. I don't care if the Mad Mullahs build Shahab 429 and all the marks in between, they won't ever get a missile which will have an Iran-US capability. Iran-Europe, maybe.

No, to attack the US, they will use something far easier: an ordinary seagoing cargo container (or multiple containers). I'm no electronics whiz, but I bet I could put together the package to set off the container-bomb during it's travels.

If you consider thousands of containers per week, arriving at dozens of US ports, and very little in the way of inspection, you begin to see the enormity of our vulnerability.

Very shortly in this Nation, we are going to be in a Depression (at the least). We will hardly be able to afford to keep soldiers in foreign lands while we are so strapped for cash. My suggestion will be to militarize ALL the ports, and inspect EVERY cargo container which comes through those ports. That will employ a LOT of troops, and the command structure of the military makes little difficulties with unions, etc, a moot point.

We CAN protect ourselves here.

Do we have the will to protect ourselves?

Are you ready for Militia duty?

How fast we are heading for a severe breakdown in civil order in this nation is debatable. The fact that we ARE headed in that direction is NOT debatable.

The Founders were smart enough to figure out that such a breakdown was possible, and they examined all the angles it might come from, and they created the Second Amendment as a civil right so that citizens of their new Nation might be better prepared to handle the troubles ahead.

The Founders looked at three threats. They were, in ascending order of importance, civil riot, Indian fighting (on the frontiers) and a Federal Government gone awry.

The Founders' solution to all three was Militia. The CURRENT solution to the two remaining threats (Indians fighting is a thing of the past, even if some like Russell Means want to keep it alive) is Militia.

Let's see how you might prepare yourself for Militia duty. I will probably write several posts on this subject, and they will be cross-linked. They will also be linked to posts which ran from July 7, 2005 to July 22, 2005 which I wrote in my dormant, but still available blog Paratus. To read them, go to the blog, drill down on the right side to "Archives", click on the word "Archives", and then highlight July 2005 and scroll through that month until you get to July 7, then scroll upwards to see the rest of the series.

Some of the following material is already covered over in those Paratus posts, but the only things which have changed in the last three years are ammo and gun prices (both have gone up, but ammo has almost doubled in that time).

I'm going to discuss weapons first, because they are the most likely thing to be embargoed by a government gone bad (there are constant attempts to do that, if you just landed from the off-Earth and have tapped into our rudimentary communications network, the Internet). Weapons are also the most expensive of the Militia equipment to acquire and train in the use of, and the most time-consuming. They are 80% of the total concept of citizen responsibility for preservation of the Nation and it's Constitution.

To look at weapons, we have to look at how they are used, so as to get an idea of what weapons a Militia needs.

Weapons are used according to their capabilities to effectively bridge the distance between the shooter and the target. Note the emphasis on the word "effectively". It's there for a reason, because firearms for individual use come in three effectiveness levels: handguns, carbines and battle rifles. Shotguns fits somewhere in between handguns and carbines, as to range.

Those three ranges are: handguns, 0-5 yards/meters; carbines, 0-100 yards/meters; battle rifles, 0-700 yards/meters. A militia fire team should have all three levels of firearms available, in military calibers, in some combination. A fire team of, say, five members might have 3 with handguns (most useful in house searches/clearings and roadblock work), 3 carbines or shotguns and 2 battle rifles. In the field, the militia member must carry one battle-day's supply of ammunition. for the pistol, that is assumed to be about 30 rounds, for the carbine, 100-120 and for the battle rifle, 100-120. Practically, more can be carried, but since the handguns is only going to be used as a desperation weapon in brief encounters at close range, 3 magazines full of ammo is all that's practical for one day. The carbine might be used for suppressive/harassing firing, so a minimum of 100 rounds is required, and ditto the battle rifle.

The shotgun has very heavy ammo, and 100 rounds is a heavy load, and it is used in desperation, close-quarter fighting, so that 50 rounds is probably OK.

The carbines and battle rifles may be semi-automatic or they may be manual loading. It doesn't matter, for when the leader calls for harassing fire, the objective is to get a lot of rounds on the target quickly. If a manual loading rifle is carried, the rifle operator must be able to load and fire quickly.

Pistol-caliber carbines. I have several combinations of pistols, and the same caliber of carbine. This allows the militia member to carry only one caliber of ammunition while being armed with weapons suitable for close-in work and for medium-distance work, and in a pinch, the member may arm an unarmed person who comes into the fight on the militia's side.

An excellent combination would be a .357 Magnum caliber revolver with a 4 or 6 inch barrel and a Marlin Model 1894 carbine of the same caliber. A bit beefier would be a .44 Magnum revolver and a Marlin carbine of the same caliber. This caliber in a carbine is lethal out to 500 yards/meters, but the bullet drop is such that nothing much past 300 yards/meters is effective. You might hit something holding over 5 feet (300 yard bullet drop), but your sights aren't made for holding over 18 feet (500 yard bullet drop).

There are semi-automatic pistols which have companion carbines also. You can pair Glock, Smith and Wesson, 1911A1 and some others with various carbines. The Kel-Tec Sub-Rifle 2000 is a carbine that takes the pistol's magazines. The most effective caliber is .40 S&W, but this carbine ranges only to 100 yards/meters, and anything over that will require excessive hold-over. The upside of these weapons is their weight, only 4#. That means you can carry much more ammo.

The battle-rifle is not meant to be light weight, most weighing 9# and up. They are generally some caliber of 7.62mm, such as 7.62 NATO (highly recommended, since it is the NATO heavy-rifle caliber), or 7.62X54 Russian (the WW2 Soviet blot-action rifles or the more modern RPK semi-auto), and the .303 British (the variants of the Enfield WW1 and WW2 rifles). The 8X57 is the old Nazi caliber, and there are plenty of those old Mausers around, and for the time being, plenty of the ammo, as the former East Bloc nations dump their supplies on the market (and while the Federal Government still allows imports of it).

The semi-auto battle rifles are the best. In 7.62 NATO, the CETME (Spanish) Model B (as imported and modified by Century Arms) is plentiful and reliable, and the H&K 91 and clones (PTR-91) are similar in function and better-built (but twice as expensive). The King of these pre-Stoner 7.62 autoloaders is the M14 and clones (Springfield M1A, Taiwan Type 57). There is an AR-type which shoots the 7.62 NATO, the AR-180, and it is a fine rifle, but well over $1,000. Finally, there is the FN-FAL, still in service in many armies. Having one of the above battle rifles means that you are the fire team's long-range member, and you need to be in shape to haul your 13-15# rifle (yes, it will weigh that much with bipod and scope), and 20-25# of ammo in 20-round magazines.

The militia member might show up for muster with a hunting rifle. Those who do will probably be relegated to duty not likely to involve volume-firing, because they probably won't have much ammo (most hunters don't have more than 40 to 60 rounds of ammo for their rifles), and by law, the weapons can't hold more than 5 rounds, and can't be loaded with stripper-clips, meaning reloading another 5 rounds takes a half-minute as opposed to 2-3 seconds for a magazine change. As a militia member, if you don't have a military weapon to muster with, bring a repeating shotgun, which will be more useful anyway than a scoped bolt-action rifle meant to kill elk at long range. If you are really proficient with such a hunting rifle, you might be pressed into sniper duty, but you'd better know military sniping doctrine, and most hunters don't. If you only have one long gun, bring it (except no .22 rimfire rifles).

In following posts, we will look at how the Militia will fight, what types of missions it will have, and what might become of it politically.

Stay tuned!

Sunday Drive in Iraq

Ever wonder how the troops in Iraq cut down the odds of being hit by an IED or RPG ambush while driving in the urban battle scene?

This little movie should give you an idea. Wouldn't it be nice to use this driving style when you have to motor through your local favela?

What if....

What if...

We are only a couple of phone calls away from winning this war with Islam.

Those phone calls would be from the President to the Pentagon.

It would happen on a Friday night, all over the Middle East. On Friday evenings, all the Main Mad Mullahs sit at their ornately carved desks in their ornate mosques, and spew their hatred for the faithful.

We can do time-on-target strikes with cruise missiles, have been able to for 20 years. We fire a barrage of three missiles each at the ornate desk in each of the Main Mad Mullahs' mosques. Those AGMs and SLCMs can hit those desks…..

At exactly that calculated time, the White House interrupts TV with the following statement by the POTUS:

"Fellow Americans, the forces of the US Military have just completed a retaliatory air strike aimed at eliminating the leadership of our enemy. Since this leadership was scattered, our air strike has hit in several nations with which we previously had no direct hostilities, such as Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. We have also hit enemy leadership in Iraq.

Citizens, our enemy, all along, has been radical and extreme Islamic leadership and it's immediate followers. Today we have struck a hard blow to that leadership and those followers, but it is not the final blow. The weapons used today were all conventional, but, as other leadership targets present opportunities for their use, we may use heavier weapons on them.

Additionally, the FBI, aided by military police, have made several high-profile war-related arrests here in the US, and friendly coalition partners have done the same thing in other nations. These arrested persons, all leaders of radical Islam, are charged with the military equivalent of Treason, a capital crime, and are being held in undisclosed military locations to await military tribunals.

Fellow Americans, I blame myself for picking as advisors people who previously told me that we could only react to the atrocities of Islam, we did not and could not wage total war, including waging that war at the seat of the enemy as I have just done. I have corrected that error and will win the war on Islamic Terror in my term of office.

I have asked certain, more realistic Islamic leaders to call an immediate conference for the purpose of taking back their religion and way of life that has been so obviously hijacked by these extremists, taking it back so that we all may live in peace as brothers and sisters, and not at war as believers and infidels.

Those enemies that we didn’t kill today are going to be hunted until they are killed. We will continue killing off the leadership of Radical Islam until that snake has no head left to direct it's mortal body, then we will cut that mortal body in pieces so small that the puniest jackal would not choke on them.

Today, the world is measurably safer as a result of our action. When the world comes to realize that, those various peoples may thank us and they may not. That does not matter to me, as the prize all along has been the advancement of human civilization, which would have been impossible had the enemy prevailed, but is again achievable.

We shall prevail.

Thank you."

You see, it's really that easy. It's really that necessary. It's really the only thing left to do.

EMP - A call for studies

Most of the savvy thinkers in the field of counter-terrorism agree that as time goes on, the threat of nuclear Islamist terror only rises. There are several "rogue" states working on having nuclear weapons, but ALL of the ones working on them will have them in the next five years or so.

What can we expect from a terrorist nuclear attack? It varies, but the worst possible scenario is NOT the one where we lose a whole city or two.

It's the one where we lose our entire modern civilization, and must revert to the Steam Age for a while, perhaps as long as 10-20 years.

That reversion could be caused by the detonation of two or three nuclear devices high above the atmosphere, but close enough to create an EMP, or Electro-Magnetic Pulse. When an EMP is created, it induces a large, momentary current in any wiring, a current which travels through that wiring and causes a failure of most electronic components in the circuit. Small "chips" (integrated circuits) are particularily prone to being destroyed by EMP. This is basically what happens when lightning strikes nearby and fries your electronic gear and most motor-driven gear in your house - the lightning (a pure EMP) induces current directly and indirectly into all wiring within a certain distance.

Scenario: The Iranians finish making their nukes, and they perfect their Shahab-3 missile. The missile doesn't have to have a good guidance system, it just has to get to a roughly 50-mile wide place in the upper atmosphere over the USA. They launch a spread of these missiles from ships at sea, all of which detonate as planned, and fry our power grid, all our communications, and all of the data-transfer and most all the computers in the USA. Bingo! We are back in the Steam age. Some areas will escape total electronic destruction depending on some variables, but by and large, most of the commerce in this country will be killed. Think: no records of current equities trading, no money transfer data flowing, no business records left for 95% of businesses, nothing.

Now think: that every automobile built since 1978 stops running (computer chips fried in them), every airliner, most rail locomotives and every diesel truck built in the last 15 years (almost all of the truck fleet).

Now think: that every robot-controlled process of manufacturing stops, every CNC machine shop stops working. Think of no bills of lading being generated for any transportation which is left. Think of all that fancy electronic health care equipment, all dead, so health care reverts to "physick" and herbs. No radio communications, except for the antique radio freaks, maybe a few hundred of them nationally, who have preserved operating examples of vacuum-tube equipment (vacuum tube circuits are immune to EMP, except at it's very hightest levels).

Think: 300 million hungry mouths to feed, and hand tool farming able to feed no more than a few percent of that. Think famine, starvation on a national scale, think a depopulated country, weakened, indefensible and with famine and disease rampant.

Now, do you agree that we need to study the issue and start to get ready for it?

I call for bloggers in the survival blog community and in the preparation for disaster community and the gunblogging community to put their heads and blogs together to come up with either the data to prove that this threat isn't real (all the data I've read says that it IS real), or come up with the preparations necessary to harden the country's basic services so that they COULD survive an EMP attack.

Some preparations have been made. Some businesses store backup data on hardened servers and pay for the service of doing so. Some people, my good buddy Phil of the Random Nuclear Strikes blog included, have vehicles that are so old that they will run even after an EMP attack (so do I for now, an old '68 VW Bug). But that takes care of only the short run, maybe the first 30 days post-Armageddon, because when the fuel runs out because it isn't being refined or transported or pumped, you're out of business even if your vehicle still runs.

The problem is that most of our modern layers of civilization will be peeled away after such an attack that we will become just another overpopulated third-world country. We will actually be worse off, though. At least the present overpopulated, third-world countries know how to live without these trappings of civilization, and we don't.

Oh, and Mr. Completely, THIS is why you have weapons with good iron sights or NON-ELECTRONIC optical sights on them. There won't be a red-dot working after the EMP, unless you have your weapons stored several floors underground, in heavy vaults (without electronic locks on them).

Anyway, we need a storehouse of knowledge on what is already hardened against EMP, what can be hardened and what can't be hardened. We need home workarounds, we need to look at the whole Armageddon thing, because if we don't, and it happens, the only thing left to us will be to surrender to some other nation that can come in here and feed those among us who might be useful tools for their ambitions.

If we do get hardened, then we take away this weapon from the terrorists, and anyone else, such as a China or a resurgent Communist Russia, who might be eyeing us as a pigeon.

Or, we could size up all those who would likely pull this shit on us, spin up some missiles, and end their ambitions NOW.

Hardening is the middle ground, because we ain't Israel, and we aren't going to do nuke first strikes on the Norks or Iranians or Paks or anybody. Doing nothing is the inertia position, but if we do nothing about either hardening OR premption of the baddies, we may have ten years left unmolested, tops. We might have as little as three, more likely 5-6.

There is going to be a backlash of leftard indignation against all things military and we will quickly back out of the War on Terror after '08, so all we really have is hardening if Bush launches no missiles before he leaves office.

Let's think hardening, and this will be the great achievement of righty bloggers: we nagged the nation into protecting itself.

Who whistled up this handbasket?

Today seems to be one of those days that saw major reverses for freedom:

1. Hugo Chavez was just voted dictatorial powers to Communize all industry in Venezuala. I haven't read the proclamation, just heard ABOUT it on the BBC, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has other dictatorial powers in it. If this asshole is so thick he can't read the history books about such foolishness with his neighbor, Argentina, then he's also dumb enough to involve himself and his country in war with the USA. Maybe he wants to be the second Peron, but at least Col. Peron didn't attack us.

2. The Chinese Communists just successfully tested a modern ASAT (anti-satellite missile) and shot down one of their old weather satellites, creating a large cloud of space junk in the process. Very bad news, this development, because our ASAT is ancient, 1970's technology, based on 1960's SRAM rocket engines (SAC's old solid fuel Short Range Attack Missile, carried on the B-52 to allow it to shoot it's way into it's target. The SRAM has been superseded by cruise missiles). Strangely enough, during this test, one of our spy satellites quit communicating. NSA disn't say why (it might have been our fault, as we tried to re-orient it to observe the ChiCom test). Consider the fact that if we got into it with the ChiComs, and we probably will someday, when they try to invade Taiwan and/or South Korea, or Thailand, or anywhere, we will absolutely need all the satellite info we can get. All they have to do is shoot down a half-dozen or less of our birds, and we are blind and deaf regarding their operations. We have a lot more satellites, but they can't be moved far enough to do us any good there. The ChiComs also have an excellent space-launch capability, and could blanket our operations with THEIR satellites, and all we can do is piss and moan, because we are stupidly sticking to a 20-year old treaty that we signed to try to keep the Russkies from building an ASAT.

3. Our own Congress has just caved in to the Ayatollahs in Iran, and whipped up a resolution that would forbid any war with that nest of vipers without prior consultation and debate in the Congress. Taking away the element of surprise that the Comnander In Chief would need to accomplish ANY military objective there. Of course, it's symbolic, because for the resolution to have the effect of law, Bush has to sign it, and I don't think he quite that stupid. The bad thing is the message it sends to Iran: "Go ahead and build your nukes, we aren't going to stop you. Keep sending your terrorists into Iraq, keep funding Tater and the Mahdi Army, we aren't going to do anything about it." The politics of appeasement. I thought we decided that was a bad idea on September 1, 1939

This country is going to hell in a handbasket, and is busily building more handbaskets all the time.

I would write "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization", but I believe about 10,000 better writers already have a manuscript, and unless someone granted me the power to hand the book to the Democrat Party and force them to read it, then take a test on it to make sure they knew the material, it isn't going to do any good. It's too late. We are on that slippery slope, have gone past the tipping point, whatever you call it, we're done, stick a fork in us.

All I can hope for is that the world holds together long enough for me to die of natural causes. I wouldn't bet that it will, and I probably have no more than 10 years left.

Here you are, my children, a fucked-up world. I didn't screw it up, but without any guidance, I don't believe you will be able to fix it.

Turn up that I-Pod and drown out the sound of onrushing doom, but I'd do some limbering up exercises RIGHT AWAY.

That's so you won't pull any muscles when you bend over to kiss your sweet asses goodbye.

The "New York Stink"

By now, you've probably heard of the "New York Stink", a foul odor that covered a good part of Manhattan this morning. Analysis seems to suggest that it was centered on a corridor of Sixth Avenue, and ran for 30 blocks.

Much is being said about Bloomberg's office's nonchalance about this problem, but I heard a caller on the Michael Savage talk show suggest a sinister scenario:

What if you were a terrorist, and wanted to test how a vapor cloud would disperse through the city under calm conditions? You would do just what happened today.

You would take a cannister of Ethyl Mercaptan, the very intense odor compound added to odorless natural gas and propane to make them detectable by the human nose, and you would crack the valve on said cannister and drive up a main road, then wait for the media to report on the extent of the penetration of the smell into buildings and side streets.

This is an easy attack, because the traffic lights on these main streets are set so that if you drive a certain speed on a certain computer-controlled section, you get a constant string of green lights. Ask any Pakistani cab driver, they all know, heh.

The terrorists, if any, now have their information.

Second scenario: what if you were the Department of Homeland Security and wanted to know how a vapor cloud from a chemical, bio or radiation attack would affect the city? You might do the same thing, then claim you know nothing.

The Homeland Security Dep't now has THEIR information, also.

Is a Sarin attack to follow? Are New Yorkers better prepared if one does?

Stay tuned.

That's some flying!

The Army Guard aviation unit out of Pendleton, OR, flying a CH-47, flew a mission in the rescue attempt series on Mt. Hood today. CBS News cut away from the Miami-Buffalo football game long enough to show the landing of a large rescue party, on a 55-degree slope, just below the summit of Mt. Hood. Those chopper pilots were good!

Of course, they had just come back from Afganistan, where they seldom flew as low as the summit of Mt. Hood, and their bird is modified for that altitude, which normally is marginal for combat helos (an Apache crashed on a rescue attempt up there couple of years ago).

The PJ's were good, descending on the hoist and clinging to the slope while the rotor wash was trying to send them down the mountain.

The KOIN (CBS) Chopper pilot shooting the video was VERY good, as his bird was at it's limit of altitude. No such thing as auto-rotation in an emergency up there!

The missing climbers are probably NOT good. This major attempt is being mounted because previous flights found an ice piton and a coil of rope, then a "Y" stamped in the snow (universal indication of climber in snow cave). The bad sign is that with a Chinook overhead, whoever is in that snow cave is not showing themselves, and they didn't show up with the very best IR imaging available on the RC-130 out of the NV Air Guard that spent most of yesterday and most of the night circling the peak tying to find ANY infrared signature.

We'll know in a few minutes. It would be great if these adrenaline junkies survived, but I'm not betting a stale beer on the possibility.

Gotta see this

This isn't a true submarine, in that it probably couldn't completely submerge. What it IS though, is a small, "low observable" cargo carrier. The danger isn't so much in the drugs it smuggles, but the fact that it could carry a crew of four and three tons of cargo below the surface. According to the report, it was detected only by visual observation, making this a lucky bust.

I'd be VERY interested to see this craft's navigation suite. If it had precision navigation capability, ALL our seaports are in grave danger. Think small nuke and/or dirty bomb.  If the US Navy has to provide ASW assets over our entire coastlines, it will take some time to gin up the assets to do that. The good news is that these plastic "subs" aren't hard to spot. Very low-tech sonar and hydrotelephony are all that are needed, since they must operate within a few feet of the surface for their snorkeling to work. It's possible that a small patrol boat in the 80-120 foot class would be all that was necessary.

Very, very interesting.

China lowers the Boom on Kimmy

Told ya so. The ChiComs put the Word on Kim Jong Il, and within 48 hours he completely reversed his position on: Nuclear tests (no more now, one's enough and we're SO sorry we shot that one off) and talks (sure, we'll talk with all six players now).

Right after Condi visited the power boyz in Beijing. Hmmm...coincidence?

Or not.

Hmmm. S'pose the Chinese might have told Kimmy next time it would be a bullet?