Yesterday there was snow in my area, and we don't normally get much snow on a regular basis, so the commute was terrible in the morning as folks struggled to keep their cars from sliding off the highway or into each other. I myself was somewhat less prepared than I could have been, but I have decent tires and am not a bad driver, but upon reflection of today's commute, it's just a sign of the times that we are in.
Namely, that on the day when snow was falling, less people should have been trying to brave it, because neither their skills or vehicles were suitable to be out in such weather, and this phenomenon isn't restricted to a specific category of vehicle either.
There were pickups, jeeps, and other 4WD/AWD vehicles who were slipping around considerably more than they should have. It became easy to guess which vehicles had automatic transmissions, because the purpose of a torque converter is to act as a torque multiplier at low RPM, so they with even the smallest amount of depressing the accelerator generated wheelspin and sliding.
Folks were also trying to change lanes as if getting to work a minute or two faster made any difference, making steering and throttle inputs much too crude to make such a movement safely and carefully.
The contrast is that today, since we had no new snow, and the temperatures got above freezing yesterday afternoon, the roads were mostly clear. But the damage was done, and many folks in FWD commuter cars were still so frightened by the prior day's experience that they could barely get within 10 miles an hour of the posted speed limits, which means that even more traffic is in store for the area as folks who are driving too slow try to merge.
This phenomenon is an example of what I've lazily categorized under "volatility" in my conversations. It's not that there are accidents all the time per se, there were many of those, but that the odds of an accident happening are much higher than people realize. The variation in outcomes when things are left to fate is wild, with some folks getting by without a scratch, and others apparently not able to catch any breaks at all, and there doesn't appear to be any real difference between their circumstances other than one had "bad luck" and the other didn't.
The problem with this mentality is that luck is made in the same way that dental hygiene is sustained. No one act makes or breaks your future, but it is the aggregate of the smaller choices and habits you make over time that determine your "luck", and a lot of folks have presumed that because they've not run out of luck so far, that they may never at this rate.
What folks like that don't realize is that odds can shift without you being prepared. While I can't do much to avert the consequences of an asteroid strike on the planet, if I were to end up like Flint, without potable water for years, there are steps I can take to ensure that, should the circumstances go bad, I've not got "good luck" by random chance, but because I planned ahead.
The struggle with planning ahead is that means short-term sacrifices in fun and entertainment. Instead of an ultra-performance summer tire, for example, I chose an ultra-performance all-season tire, which sacrifices dry and wet weather traction at high speeds for the ability to retain traction in snow and ice. I also ordered a set of chains instead of putting money towards something fun or exciting, just so that when such a snow does fall again, I am even better prepared.
But that's a roll of the dice as well. I have increased my odds of success contingent on there being snow again.
This is the heart of the struggle with preparation, and given that most folks haven't even started to try and address it in their own lives, what we see is "volatility". Accidents which weren't necessary, damage and chaos which could have been avoided, all simply because people didn't want to make the necessary sacrifices now in order to facilitate a higher chance of success later. There is no growth, no maturing, no learning, only experiencing.
So what happens if the snow doesn't melt away in a day, or for a week? What happens if the tap water is contaminated? Your grocery store shelves are empty because the trucks that restock them aren't on the roads? Have you made a choice not to prepare for events that are probable?
OR do you just leave it up to chance, tempting fate to "do its worst", certain that you'll accept any outcome that is thrown your way?
Choose better now, because folks who have made such sacrifices won't have pity, remorse, or resources to share with folks who neglected the warning signs when times were good.
Showing posts with label Preparation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Preparation. Show all posts
10.1.19
You can't take it with you
I recently had a conversation with a co-worker who owns a lot more firearms than me. When asked whether I'd gotten any "new toys" over the break, I said no, I "have enough already." This was met with a mildly derisive chuckle and the declaration that "no you don't."
I retorted with "I already own more than I can carry."
The response I got from him was "I don't plan on walking anywhere."
Now, I quickly realized how stupid I had been and adjusted my responses in the conversation going forward, because you can tell where this would have ended up had I continued as I started. Too quickly I forget that other people aren't interested in a practical discussion, but are more often than not just seeking validation in some form or another.
When it comes to emergency or disaster preparedness, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is investing considerable time and energy into only one possible outcome. It's easy to do, because most folks don't talk about the presumptions going into their assertions, they just take a stance and then challenge anyone to take them on.
For example, preparing for a flood is different than preparing for war.
Preparing for a nuclear blast is different than preparing for an economic collapse.
In every "End Of The World As We Know It" scenario, there are going to be different skills, tools, and mindsets required in order to increase your odds of surviving, let alone thriving.
The simplest example of this is in how people try to decide whether they'll "bug out" or stay put in a time or crisis. Why you would do one or the other will be based on a large number of variables, yet folks want to ignore such subtlety to instead claim that there is a single correct answer, instead of addressing the fact that all they're doing is changing how the odds look for them under a given set of circumstances.
If there is nuclear fallout in the air, traveling is probably not going to be a good idea, likewise if there are foreign armies on the march.
If your house has just been washed down the river, or been burned by rioters, your only choice is to travel.
If you are only prepared for one, you'll be screwed if the other occurs.
If you are relying on a huge arsenal, you'll be screwed if you lose it.
If you are relying on not having a huge arsenal, you'll be screwed by anyone who has held onto one.
The frustration with the conversation, and how many of these conversations end up going, is that folks presume they can predict the future, and have then planned for that future, and have pride in how well they've planned for that future. It's not a scientific thing, it's an emotional thing, because nobody can really predict the future with any great degree of reliability.
If your plan is to be the neighborhood warlord, do you keep yourself armed enough to fight back into your neighborhood? Unless you work from home, or carry around said arsenal with you at all times, you're going to be in scenarios where you don't have the tools and resources you expected to have, and you still need to act. You can't just tell everyone to wait while you get ready.
It can be entertaining to discuss things as if all of our plans will be successful, but nowhere in life is anyone so. In FOREX, for example, one is a great success if 51% of the trades done are profitable. Listen to stories of entrepreneurs about their success rate with inventions and start-ups.
Most plans fail miserably, or are thrown away quickly, so instead of investing yourself into a single plan, develop the skills to create new plans. Don't get really good at implementing one plan, but get good at the "OODA" loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
Then, invest in tools, devices, and skills that support such circumstantial flexibility. People and circumstances can take away what you have, but neither of those can change what you know, or what you can do.
Don't brag about how well you've prepared for what you think will happen, but in how well you can react to the unexpected and still come out on top.
I retorted with "I already own more than I can carry."
The response I got from him was "I don't plan on walking anywhere."
Now, I quickly realized how stupid I had been and adjusted my responses in the conversation going forward, because you can tell where this would have ended up had I continued as I started. Too quickly I forget that other people aren't interested in a practical discussion, but are more often than not just seeking validation in some form or another.
When it comes to emergency or disaster preparedness, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is investing considerable time and energy into only one possible outcome. It's easy to do, because most folks don't talk about the presumptions going into their assertions, they just take a stance and then challenge anyone to take them on.
For example, preparing for a flood is different than preparing for war.
Preparing for a nuclear blast is different than preparing for an economic collapse.
In every "End Of The World As We Know It" scenario, there are going to be different skills, tools, and mindsets required in order to increase your odds of surviving, let alone thriving.
The simplest example of this is in how people try to decide whether they'll "bug out" or stay put in a time or crisis. Why you would do one or the other will be based on a large number of variables, yet folks want to ignore such subtlety to instead claim that there is a single correct answer, instead of addressing the fact that all they're doing is changing how the odds look for them under a given set of circumstances.
If there is nuclear fallout in the air, traveling is probably not going to be a good idea, likewise if there are foreign armies on the march.
If your house has just been washed down the river, or been burned by rioters, your only choice is to travel.
If you are only prepared for one, you'll be screwed if the other occurs.
If you are relying on a huge arsenal, you'll be screwed if you lose it.
If you are relying on not having a huge arsenal, you'll be screwed by anyone who has held onto one.
The frustration with the conversation, and how many of these conversations end up going, is that folks presume they can predict the future, and have then planned for that future, and have pride in how well they've planned for that future. It's not a scientific thing, it's an emotional thing, because nobody can really predict the future with any great degree of reliability.
If your plan is to be the neighborhood warlord, do you keep yourself armed enough to fight back into your neighborhood? Unless you work from home, or carry around said arsenal with you at all times, you're going to be in scenarios where you don't have the tools and resources you expected to have, and you still need to act. You can't just tell everyone to wait while you get ready.
It can be entertaining to discuss things as if all of our plans will be successful, but nowhere in life is anyone so. In FOREX, for example, one is a great success if 51% of the trades done are profitable. Listen to stories of entrepreneurs about their success rate with inventions and start-ups.
Most plans fail miserably, or are thrown away quickly, so instead of investing yourself into a single plan, develop the skills to create new plans. Don't get really good at implementing one plan, but get good at the "OODA" loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
Then, invest in tools, devices, and skills that support such circumstantial flexibility. People and circumstances can take away what you have, but neither of those can change what you know, or what you can do.
Don't brag about how well you've prepared for what you think will happen, but in how well you can react to the unexpected and still come out on top.
20.12.18
Shewts gewd, raht?
In SHTF, you won't be able to replace barrels on your rifles very easily, because folks will be struggling just to find their next meal.
Many of the "old" cartridges that have fallen out of favor in the modern shooting world have done so because marketing is more powerful than physics.
For folks who aren't "gun people", bullets fly in an arc when you shoot them. The easier it is for a bullet to hit your target without needing to account for how wind will move the bullet left or right, or accounting for drop due to distance, the "better" a cartridge is determined to be, for largely the same reasons that people think buying a Ferrari means they're a better driver.
Now, this isn't done with just marketing magic, but through tuning the velocity of the bullet and by choosing bullets with different dimensions. This is something you can already do if you hand load ammunition, but what currently drives the gun market is not capability, but ease.
You can build a car that has a better 0-60 or skidpad rating that a Ferrari for a fraction of the cost, but if someone can just buy something off-the-shelf and "shoot better" than someone else, it won't matter if they could have done the same thing less expensively. Status, not function.
So, the first part of the "not-magic" is that when shooting a lighter bullet, the felt recoil will also be smaller, because the physics of accelerating the bullet to a certain speed require less force. F=MA, so at the same acceleration, you'll need less force if you have less mass. This is a big part of how modern rounds of a smaller caliber "reduce recoil", and do so off-the-shelf, because they're shooting a lighter bullet.
The thing is, though, that shooting a lighter bullet to the same velocity requires more powder charge, due to how inertia works. A lighter bullet is going to start moving down the barrel faster than a heavier one because of inertia. Heavier bullets will resist accelerating longer than a lighter bullet, so in order to keep generating pressure behind the lighter bullet, more powder has to be burned so that the drop in pressure as the bullet travels down the barrel doesn't occur fast enough to prevent the bullet from reaching the desired speed.
Think of it like how, the better you can keep your lips pressed together, the more pressure you can hold in your mouth.
Now, given F=MA above, it's not only easier to accelerate the bullet when it's lighter, but if you've got the same barrel length and force being applied, the final velocity of the bullet will be higher as well. Higher velocities make a "flatter" bullet arc, because the faster a bullet is the less time gravity has to work on the bullet before it finds its target.
You can also do things like use a smaller diameter bullet, because the smaller the diameter, the less that wind resistance will come into play.
The modern "hot rounds" all thus tend to be smaller in diameter than "old" rounds, lighter weight bullets than "old" rounds, and are universally praised in marketing as being "better".
Except that, you remember how you need more powder for these lighter rounds?
Each time you fire a gun, you do a very small, but still real, amount of damage to the barrel and chamber. Most firearms are capable of making many thousands of shots before that damage becomes a problem.
These new rounds shorten that lifespan considerably before a replacement barrel is required.
If you live in the 1st world, and shoot for fun, then this isn't really an issue. Just go online, order a replacement barrel, and then install it. Most new firearms are also designed to be easily serviced by the user, so you often don't even need a gunsmith or gunsmithing skills.
If SHTF though, you no longer live in the 1st world.
Instead of a controlled shooting environment like a range, you're most likely going to be dealing with suburban distances which are frequently much shorter. It won't matter if you could reliably hit a stationary gong at a thousand meters if the hostile you need to kill is moving quickly and at only 50 meters away.
Further, to be very accurate you must also deal with issues in poor reliability, because accuracy requires consistency down to very small minutia, every component needs to be doing the same exact thing the same exact way every time you shoot. Variation means things don't work exactly the way they're expected, and you won't know by how much until after you've already pulled the trigger.
Like putting the wrong gas in your Ferrari. Might still run, or it might not at all.
In evaluating your firearm choice in preparing for SHTF, you thus cannot rely on what is currently popular. The AR-15 platform is fine for its intended purpose, but as I've written before, people have deceived themselves as to what that intended purpose is, and a lot of folks think their tacticool AR-15 will give them any sort of edge in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The reality is that they've got a weapon which wasn't designed based on raw lethality, on efficiency of materials across the entire lifespan of the weapon, but on how well the weapon would sell in a particular market.
1st world military and SHTF are not the same market.
Prepare based on what you will encounter, not on what you currently experience.
There's a reason certain cartridges and firearm layouts were popular in the past, when technology and materials science weren't what they are today. We'll be entering such a "dark era" again, when we can't rely on modernity to be our savior, and if we can thus learn from the past, why things did or didn't work and why, then we'll actually be ready to deal with what is to come.
Many of the "old" cartridges that have fallen out of favor in the modern shooting world have done so because marketing is more powerful than physics.
For folks who aren't "gun people", bullets fly in an arc when you shoot them. The easier it is for a bullet to hit your target without needing to account for how wind will move the bullet left or right, or accounting for drop due to distance, the "better" a cartridge is determined to be, for largely the same reasons that people think buying a Ferrari means they're a better driver.
Now, this isn't done with just marketing magic, but through tuning the velocity of the bullet and by choosing bullets with different dimensions. This is something you can already do if you hand load ammunition, but what currently drives the gun market is not capability, but ease.
You can build a car that has a better 0-60 or skidpad rating that a Ferrari for a fraction of the cost, but if someone can just buy something off-the-shelf and "shoot better" than someone else, it won't matter if they could have done the same thing less expensively. Status, not function.
So, the first part of the "not-magic" is that when shooting a lighter bullet, the felt recoil will also be smaller, because the physics of accelerating the bullet to a certain speed require less force. F=MA, so at the same acceleration, you'll need less force if you have less mass. This is a big part of how modern rounds of a smaller caliber "reduce recoil", and do so off-the-shelf, because they're shooting a lighter bullet.
The thing is, though, that shooting a lighter bullet to the same velocity requires more powder charge, due to how inertia works. A lighter bullet is going to start moving down the barrel faster than a heavier one because of inertia. Heavier bullets will resist accelerating longer than a lighter bullet, so in order to keep generating pressure behind the lighter bullet, more powder has to be burned so that the drop in pressure as the bullet travels down the barrel doesn't occur fast enough to prevent the bullet from reaching the desired speed.
Think of it like how, the better you can keep your lips pressed together, the more pressure you can hold in your mouth.
Now, given F=MA above, it's not only easier to accelerate the bullet when it's lighter, but if you've got the same barrel length and force being applied, the final velocity of the bullet will be higher as well. Higher velocities make a "flatter" bullet arc, because the faster a bullet is the less time gravity has to work on the bullet before it finds its target.
You can also do things like use a smaller diameter bullet, because the smaller the diameter, the less that wind resistance will come into play.
The modern "hot rounds" all thus tend to be smaller in diameter than "old" rounds, lighter weight bullets than "old" rounds, and are universally praised in marketing as being "better".
Except that, you remember how you need more powder for these lighter rounds?
Each time you fire a gun, you do a very small, but still real, amount of damage to the barrel and chamber. Most firearms are capable of making many thousands of shots before that damage becomes a problem.
These new rounds shorten that lifespan considerably before a replacement barrel is required.
If you live in the 1st world, and shoot for fun, then this isn't really an issue. Just go online, order a replacement barrel, and then install it. Most new firearms are also designed to be easily serviced by the user, so you often don't even need a gunsmith or gunsmithing skills.
If SHTF though, you no longer live in the 1st world.
Instead of a controlled shooting environment like a range, you're most likely going to be dealing with suburban distances which are frequently much shorter. It won't matter if you could reliably hit a stationary gong at a thousand meters if the hostile you need to kill is moving quickly and at only 50 meters away.
Further, to be very accurate you must also deal with issues in poor reliability, because accuracy requires consistency down to very small minutia, every component needs to be doing the same exact thing the same exact way every time you shoot. Variation means things don't work exactly the way they're expected, and you won't know by how much until after you've already pulled the trigger.
Like putting the wrong gas in your Ferrari. Might still run, or it might not at all.
In evaluating your firearm choice in preparing for SHTF, you thus cannot rely on what is currently popular. The AR-15 platform is fine for its intended purpose, but as I've written before, people have deceived themselves as to what that intended purpose is, and a lot of folks think their tacticool AR-15 will give them any sort of edge in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The reality is that they've got a weapon which wasn't designed based on raw lethality, on efficiency of materials across the entire lifespan of the weapon, but on how well the weapon would sell in a particular market.
1st world military and SHTF are not the same market.
Prepare based on what you will encounter, not on what you currently experience.
There's a reason certain cartridges and firearm layouts were popular in the past, when technology and materials science weren't what they are today. We'll be entering such a "dark era" again, when we can't rely on modernity to be our savior, and if we can thus learn from the past, why things did or didn't work and why, then we'll actually be ready to deal with what is to come.
15.11.18
Why I dislike 5.56 NATO
To follow up in light of the prior post, I want to share my tangible dislike for 5.56 NATO, and offer why I think that there is such an effort underway to replace it without admitting that, for too many decades, the NATO countries have been fielding an inferior round, whether in a civilian or military context.
Let's start with some quick history on the "Generations" of war.
1st Generation - people line up in formation and directly attack each other. Think phalanx.
2nd Generation - people use indirect means to attack each other and then move. Think artillery and guns.
3rd Generation - people move quicker than indirect means can react to directly collapse fighting ability. Think supply lines.
4th Generation - people move quicker than direct and indirect means to indirectly collapse fighting ability. Think troop morale.
The 5.56 NATO round was developed for participation in 2nd Generation warfare. As of the end of World War II, the Allies still had not yet adopted 3rd Generation warfare, instead largely overwhelming the Axis 3rd Generation forces with raw production capacity. The Allies sat on more resources, so even if what they made was of lower quality, they could make more of it and bring it to bear to a sufficient degree to find success.
And yes, these are gross oversimplifications of complicated topics, but for the sake of this conversation it doesn't really need to be more complicated than this for now.
After World War II, the fixation with controlled automatic fire really took hold. It had started in World War I with trench warfare, where instead of a fighting force being arrayed on a battlefield and "fighting" according to "rules", a lot of the conflict from the perspective of the average foot soldier was considerably more intimate and less organized.
Running across an open field between trenches was often suicide, either because it was dark, you might step on a mine, or perhaps most commonly because automatic weapons were able to provide a relatively small number of forces the ability to provide suppressive fire over a very large area. Presuming you did make it into an enemy trench, you weren't taking shots from long range either, but instead were in very close quarters, and without a lot of time available to react to stumbling upon an enemy in the same trench.
World War II didn't have quite the same amount of trench activity, but many of the dynamics were instead replicated in urban environments. Instead of a trench, it was a building, and again the engagement range for the average solder wasn't going to be nearly as far away as past conflicts where likely apocryphal advice such as "don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes" may have ever made sense, let alone be considered good advice.
With the average foot soldier not being the primary means by which force is applied, the requirements for the firearms that such a solder would wield also changed. While in the entry to World War II the rifles were rather similar in power to hunting rifles, this was "overkill" in the tight constraints of urban or trench warfare. The rounds used were very effective well out to a thousand yards, but nobody was lining up at a thousand yards or more and marching towards each other anymore either.
The need was for something lightweight, able to deal with basic body armor, able to fire rapidly, and able to carry the quantities of ammunition required to provide suppressive fire. This is where the AR-15 is a genuinely good rifle in concept, except that even in World War II, trying to operate on a 2nd Generation warfare mindset was still detrimental and cost the Allies many more lives than was necessary.
This disparity is seen in that, not much more than a decade prior, the 7.62 NATO round had been developed and adopted. Criticized for recoil and the inability to easily control automatic fire, the 7.62 NATO was maligned because it was, in essence, a round meant for 1st Generation warfare, and so while it offered better portability than the rounds it sought to replace, it was not a universal solution.
The 5.56 NATO was the tacit admission that the solder, the individual, was no longer the most important resource on the battlefield. Their judgment, their lethal capacity, was now secondary. The failure of the round in Vietnam is largely due to the fact that, without clearly defined "fronts", you cannot wage 2nd Generation warfare.
If you and the enemy are in the same jungle, fighting over inch by inch, then it won't matter if you've got access to napalm and artillery, because there's no clear "their territory" for you to soften up with indirect fire so that your soldiers can then sweep in to mop up whatever is left and occupy the newly claimed territory. Vietnam showed the folly of the desire for controlled automatic fire, in that while there are certainly circumstances where it is beneficial, it is not a universal solution either.
Oh, there were certainly efforts to save face. There was a study which apparently showed that more smaller caliber bullets put into roughly the same area as a single larger bullet would do more damage than the single larger bullet. This is what drove the need for controlled automatic fire, the idea being that a soldier could do more damage. Except that there is always a trade-off. If it takes 2-3 smaller bullets to surpass the damage from a single larger bullet, then a magazine of 30 smaller rounds does not necessarily have "more firepower" than a magazine of just 10 larger rounds.
The next attempt to save face was in trying to address 3rd Generation warfare dynamics. If, instead of outright killing, you only severely maim an enemy, then they'll have resources caught up in trying to help their fallen but not yet dead comrade. That, if instead of killing, you can overburden your enemy such that their supply chain falls apart and they can no longer fight effectively against you, then you "win". Instead of indirect, this was a direct statement towards reducing the lethal capacity of the individual soldier, while at the same time trying to pretend that we weren't literally weakening our soldier's ability to do their job of being the best at killing people and breaking things.
By the time these types of discussions wore thin and it became clear there wasn't much to them, one of my all-time favorite excuses shows up:
"It would be too costly to change now."
You know, because prior bad decisions mature like wine, and show themselves to be better over time, right?
Because the USA and NATO countries can rely on mass production power to deal with hostiles, right?
How many rabbits would it take, outside your door right now, before you started worrying about your safety?
Large quantities of relative impotence does not make that which is relatively impotent less so, but the popular theory is that if it's popular, and it's common, then it must be good.
Now, the 5.56 NATO is not something I'd want to be shot by. I do say relative impotence, because I don't ever want to get shot at all. But if I am in a hot civil war, I'd much rather be shot by the modern 5.56 NATO from an AR-15 than a bolt action .30-06, or old lever action .45-70 Govt.
You see, because while the theory behind controlled automatic fire seems solid, if you're in an urban or trench conflict, you don't want to announce your presence any more than is necessary, and if you're doing automatic fire that's a huge giveaway of your position and location if you're doing anything other than really short bursts for very short periods of time.
A single shot is hard to trace because you can't be quite sure if what you heard was reflected off a surface or not. Our positional location system for hearing requires more than a single data point to operate effectively. That's why, when even simple animals hear a noise, they turn to face it and keep listening. Sure, there are some animals that are sufficiently skittish that at certain sounds they'll just run, but those ones tend to be survivors of when they heard that noise and didn't run before, and learned shortly thereafter to just run whenever they heard that sound again.
On top of that, if you are under suppressive fire, the idea that you don't have time to take an aimed shot would also mean you don't have time to jump out and spray-and-pray either. The weapon being automatic doesn't change that you have to expose certain important parts of your body to take even a quick and poorly aimed burst of shots.
So the 5.56 NATO was really only ever "good" for a war that ended before it was developed, and yet is still being touted as effective today. 3rd Generation warfare may be thought of a "Guerilla Warfare", but the 4th Generation is most easily associated with "terrorism". No longer do you even have a formal fighting force, let alone supply lines to be disrupted, and you're fighting in an asymmetrical war where deescalating at the physical level helps to win the conflicts at the moral, exactly where does the need for controlled automatic fire find its place?
If the only acceptable uses of force must be quick and decisive and infrequent, exactly what benefit is there to carrying around the capacity to provide suppressive fire?
What we're seeing is a breakdown of those higher tiers of hardware and a return to the value of the individual soldier. It won't matter if you've got air superiority if the people who would man the aircraft carrier are demoralized and don't want to fight. It won't matter if you've got thousands of rounds of ammunition stored away if it's no more effective than what everyone else is carrying and the best you can do is equal someone else. It won't matter if you've got the latest technology if you don't have the hearts of the people you're supposedly fighting for.
What we're seeing is a shift back to a prior dynamic, as seen in the "Wild West" mythos. The Sheriff has a band of bandits that are causing problems, but there is hesitance because if the Sheriff is "just as bad" as the bandits, then the townspeople are as likely to evict him as support him in driving out the bandits. The different generations of warfare address a scope of conflict that requires "a state" in order to act for or against. A nation, a people, some sort of formal group that can be clearly identified.
We're already seeing how modern conflict looks more like the Sheriff maintaining order in a frontier town than the soldier in a trench trying to claim control of more dirt. There aren't clearly defined "sides", nobody is wearing a uniform, and there is no "front line". People can attain a position of power through both legitimate and illegitimate means, and the difference between a "good" or a "bad" Sheriff may only be down to perspective and whether their actions benefited you or not.
I ultimately dislike the 5.56 NATO because it represents a solution to a single problem which was then used on every other problem whether it made sense or not, and this was sustained for so long not because of superior performance but because of a lack of viable competition. It's not a "bad" round, it has a role and a purpose, but from the standpoint of a civilian in a country on the brink of a hot civil war, it's only popular because it's popular, not because it is the best solution to any of the problems we'll face.
The United States government has started looking to replace the round because the possibility of armed conflict, whether national or international, is looming, and the methods and equipment we've got are all rather old, optimized for philosophies which are no longer viable, let alone whether they were a "good" solution in the first place. The 5.56 NATO round owes its current status due to inertia more than its actual performance capability.
Certainly, 5.56 NATO will be plentiful for a long time, but trees are also not in short supply either and I don't hear of many folks bragging about their stockpiles of arrows. A weapon, absent any competition, can certainly be competitive, but for tacticool folks relying on 5.56 NATO, they're quickly going to find themselves outclassed by even just their local hunting community.
History has many examples of those who can make the most being ruled over by those who can make the most of what they have.
Don't blindly buy into hype. Maybe the 5.56NATO would work in your situation, and if so, use it. Make that determination honestly by evaluating the performance of the round, not just on whether you can sufficiently accessorize the gun that shoots it, or find replacement parts for keeping it maintained properly when you've shot a few thousand rounds through it.
Wrapping up, if everybody has the same tools, then there is no longer any advantage. Stack the odds in your favor now, while everybody else is busy trying to conform to what is "popular". Think ahead and don't just go with what "worked before".
Let's start with some quick history on the "Generations" of war.
1st Generation - people line up in formation and directly attack each other. Think phalanx.
2nd Generation - people use indirect means to attack each other and then move. Think artillery and guns.
3rd Generation - people move quicker than indirect means can react to directly collapse fighting ability. Think supply lines.
4th Generation - people move quicker than direct and indirect means to indirectly collapse fighting ability. Think troop morale.
The 5.56 NATO round was developed for participation in 2nd Generation warfare. As of the end of World War II, the Allies still had not yet adopted 3rd Generation warfare, instead largely overwhelming the Axis 3rd Generation forces with raw production capacity. The Allies sat on more resources, so even if what they made was of lower quality, they could make more of it and bring it to bear to a sufficient degree to find success.
And yes, these are gross oversimplifications of complicated topics, but for the sake of this conversation it doesn't really need to be more complicated than this for now.
After World War II, the fixation with controlled automatic fire really took hold. It had started in World War I with trench warfare, where instead of a fighting force being arrayed on a battlefield and "fighting" according to "rules", a lot of the conflict from the perspective of the average foot soldier was considerably more intimate and less organized.
Running across an open field between trenches was often suicide, either because it was dark, you might step on a mine, or perhaps most commonly because automatic weapons were able to provide a relatively small number of forces the ability to provide suppressive fire over a very large area. Presuming you did make it into an enemy trench, you weren't taking shots from long range either, but instead were in very close quarters, and without a lot of time available to react to stumbling upon an enemy in the same trench.
World War II didn't have quite the same amount of trench activity, but many of the dynamics were instead replicated in urban environments. Instead of a trench, it was a building, and again the engagement range for the average solder wasn't going to be nearly as far away as past conflicts where likely apocryphal advice such as "don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes" may have ever made sense, let alone be considered good advice.
With the average foot soldier not being the primary means by which force is applied, the requirements for the firearms that such a solder would wield also changed. While in the entry to World War II the rifles were rather similar in power to hunting rifles, this was "overkill" in the tight constraints of urban or trench warfare. The rounds used were very effective well out to a thousand yards, but nobody was lining up at a thousand yards or more and marching towards each other anymore either.
The need was for something lightweight, able to deal with basic body armor, able to fire rapidly, and able to carry the quantities of ammunition required to provide suppressive fire. This is where the AR-15 is a genuinely good rifle in concept, except that even in World War II, trying to operate on a 2nd Generation warfare mindset was still detrimental and cost the Allies many more lives than was necessary.
This disparity is seen in that, not much more than a decade prior, the 7.62 NATO round had been developed and adopted. Criticized for recoil and the inability to easily control automatic fire, the 7.62 NATO was maligned because it was, in essence, a round meant for 1st Generation warfare, and so while it offered better portability than the rounds it sought to replace, it was not a universal solution.
The 5.56 NATO was the tacit admission that the solder, the individual, was no longer the most important resource on the battlefield. Their judgment, their lethal capacity, was now secondary. The failure of the round in Vietnam is largely due to the fact that, without clearly defined "fronts", you cannot wage 2nd Generation warfare.
If you and the enemy are in the same jungle, fighting over inch by inch, then it won't matter if you've got access to napalm and artillery, because there's no clear "their territory" for you to soften up with indirect fire so that your soldiers can then sweep in to mop up whatever is left and occupy the newly claimed territory. Vietnam showed the folly of the desire for controlled automatic fire, in that while there are certainly circumstances where it is beneficial, it is not a universal solution either.
Oh, there were certainly efforts to save face. There was a study which apparently showed that more smaller caliber bullets put into roughly the same area as a single larger bullet would do more damage than the single larger bullet. This is what drove the need for controlled automatic fire, the idea being that a soldier could do more damage. Except that there is always a trade-off. If it takes 2-3 smaller bullets to surpass the damage from a single larger bullet, then a magazine of 30 smaller rounds does not necessarily have "more firepower" than a magazine of just 10 larger rounds.
The next attempt to save face was in trying to address 3rd Generation warfare dynamics. If, instead of outright killing, you only severely maim an enemy, then they'll have resources caught up in trying to help their fallen but not yet dead comrade. That, if instead of killing, you can overburden your enemy such that their supply chain falls apart and they can no longer fight effectively against you, then you "win". Instead of indirect, this was a direct statement towards reducing the lethal capacity of the individual soldier, while at the same time trying to pretend that we weren't literally weakening our soldier's ability to do their job of being the best at killing people and breaking things.
By the time these types of discussions wore thin and it became clear there wasn't much to them, one of my all-time favorite excuses shows up:
"It would be too costly to change now."
You know, because prior bad decisions mature like wine, and show themselves to be better over time, right?
Because the USA and NATO countries can rely on mass production power to deal with hostiles, right?
How many rabbits would it take, outside your door right now, before you started worrying about your safety?
Large quantities of relative impotence does not make that which is relatively impotent less so, but the popular theory is that if it's popular, and it's common, then it must be good.
Now, the 5.56 NATO is not something I'd want to be shot by. I do say relative impotence, because I don't ever want to get shot at all. But if I am in a hot civil war, I'd much rather be shot by the modern 5.56 NATO from an AR-15 than a bolt action .30-06, or old lever action .45-70 Govt.
You see, because while the theory behind controlled automatic fire seems solid, if you're in an urban or trench conflict, you don't want to announce your presence any more than is necessary, and if you're doing automatic fire that's a huge giveaway of your position and location if you're doing anything other than really short bursts for very short periods of time.
A single shot is hard to trace because you can't be quite sure if what you heard was reflected off a surface or not. Our positional location system for hearing requires more than a single data point to operate effectively. That's why, when even simple animals hear a noise, they turn to face it and keep listening. Sure, there are some animals that are sufficiently skittish that at certain sounds they'll just run, but those ones tend to be survivors of when they heard that noise and didn't run before, and learned shortly thereafter to just run whenever they heard that sound again.
On top of that, if you are under suppressive fire, the idea that you don't have time to take an aimed shot would also mean you don't have time to jump out and spray-and-pray either. The weapon being automatic doesn't change that you have to expose certain important parts of your body to take even a quick and poorly aimed burst of shots.
So the 5.56 NATO was really only ever "good" for a war that ended before it was developed, and yet is still being touted as effective today. 3rd Generation warfare may be thought of a "Guerilla Warfare", but the 4th Generation is most easily associated with "terrorism". No longer do you even have a formal fighting force, let alone supply lines to be disrupted, and you're fighting in an asymmetrical war where deescalating at the physical level helps to win the conflicts at the moral, exactly where does the need for controlled automatic fire find its place?
If the only acceptable uses of force must be quick and decisive and infrequent, exactly what benefit is there to carrying around the capacity to provide suppressive fire?
What we're seeing is a breakdown of those higher tiers of hardware and a return to the value of the individual soldier. It won't matter if you've got air superiority if the people who would man the aircraft carrier are demoralized and don't want to fight. It won't matter if you've got thousands of rounds of ammunition stored away if it's no more effective than what everyone else is carrying and the best you can do is equal someone else. It won't matter if you've got the latest technology if you don't have the hearts of the people you're supposedly fighting for.
What we're seeing is a shift back to a prior dynamic, as seen in the "Wild West" mythos. The Sheriff has a band of bandits that are causing problems, but there is hesitance because if the Sheriff is "just as bad" as the bandits, then the townspeople are as likely to evict him as support him in driving out the bandits. The different generations of warfare address a scope of conflict that requires "a state" in order to act for or against. A nation, a people, some sort of formal group that can be clearly identified.
We're already seeing how modern conflict looks more like the Sheriff maintaining order in a frontier town than the soldier in a trench trying to claim control of more dirt. There aren't clearly defined "sides", nobody is wearing a uniform, and there is no "front line". People can attain a position of power through both legitimate and illegitimate means, and the difference between a "good" or a "bad" Sheriff may only be down to perspective and whether their actions benefited you or not.
I ultimately dislike the 5.56 NATO because it represents a solution to a single problem which was then used on every other problem whether it made sense or not, and this was sustained for so long not because of superior performance but because of a lack of viable competition. It's not a "bad" round, it has a role and a purpose, but from the standpoint of a civilian in a country on the brink of a hot civil war, it's only popular because it's popular, not because it is the best solution to any of the problems we'll face.
The United States government has started looking to replace the round because the possibility of armed conflict, whether national or international, is looming, and the methods and equipment we've got are all rather old, optimized for philosophies which are no longer viable, let alone whether they were a "good" solution in the first place. The 5.56 NATO round owes its current status due to inertia more than its actual performance capability.
Certainly, 5.56 NATO will be plentiful for a long time, but trees are also not in short supply either and I don't hear of many folks bragging about their stockpiles of arrows. A weapon, absent any competition, can certainly be competitive, but for tacticool folks relying on 5.56 NATO, they're quickly going to find themselves outclassed by even just their local hunting community.
History has many examples of those who can make the most being ruled over by those who can make the most of what they have.
Don't blindly buy into hype. Maybe the 5.56NATO would work in your situation, and if so, use it. Make that determination honestly by evaluating the performance of the round, not just on whether you can sufficiently accessorize the gun that shoots it, or find replacement parts for keeping it maintained properly when you've shot a few thousand rounds through it.
Wrapping up, if everybody has the same tools, then there is no longer any advantage. Stack the odds in your favor now, while everybody else is busy trying to conform to what is "popular". Think ahead and don't just go with what "worked before".
29.10.18
When war has been declared, act like it.
Last week there were fake bombs used in a false flag to drum up support for Democrats just prior to the mid-term elections.
These devices were identified as fake rather quickly because they were illogically constructed, folks took pictures for social media before calling in the bomb squads, and these devices could not actually harmed the "intended targets" because those people never actually open their own mail. This is the equivalent of a gun whose only function is to extend a flag with the word "boom" on it. Even so, the event was touted as further evidence that the current President needs to do things differently.
So what happens when the scare isn't fake?
Most false flags aren't fakes at all.
Here's a list of 42 known false flag operations.
Look at the list. People died. Governments, both "good" and "bad" guys in the historical narratives, are present and accounted for.
In almost every case, the acts were done to provide a "moral high ground" for an aggressor to have their subsequent actions justified. If you've just been attacked by someone, then who is going to interfere with your actions to defend yourself? They'd be allying themselves with those who just attacked you!
Look at how frequently a simplistic mindset shows up in the justifications. Look at how frequently personal reasons are used as the cover for political ones.
"We did something we knew was wrong and then were going to blame someone else for it because we couldn't otherwise justify doing what we wanted to in the first place."
Even scripture has a fairly well known story about this, when Joseph accused his brothers of stealing and imprisoned the youngest, who was found with "stolen goods", when Joseph had actually planted the "stolen" goods.
The reason these types of manipulation work is because we are not primarily rational creatures, so when an offense has occurred, our instinct is not to investigate and discern what needs to be done, but to react. Our instinct is to right the wrongs and settle things, and the "false flag" hopes to evoke such an emotional response that nobody takes a closer look at the circumstance to determine what the correct course of action should be.
The name itself is a literal one, from the time when ships on the sea would run the wrong flags to confuse and disorient other ships.
After the fake bomb scare, someone shot up a Jewish synagogue, and there are 8 dead and more injured.
Now, why am I framing that shooting alongside false flags?
Look at one of the responses to the shooting.
Does this sound personally motivated or politically motivated? Put differently, were they specifically targeted, or were political groups they belong to, or are aligned with, targeted?
As before, how often did known false flags have predominantly political implications?
Is their goal to get justice for a specific incident, or to affect a more sweeping change that goes beyond the incident?
Let's divert the train of thought for a bit. I've shared this video before. If you have not watched this video, you need to before you can understand what is going on in this country. You need to understand all the possibilities before you can be sure and take any action, because if you think that how a person behaves in their day-to-day describes the entirety of their capacity, you are woefully ignorant.
Also, in case you didn't read it, Israel showed up on that list.
In a population of an estimated 325.98 million, or 325,980,000 let's presume that, based on Derren Brown's experiment, only a very small portion of a percentage of the population is susceptible to such programming, but those that are will do nearly anything you've programmed them to do, including kill people when your "normal" personality is quite the antithesis of violent or aggressive.
If it's .0001% of the population, that still puts us at about 325 people, 6 per state, if you spread them out. If it's .001% of the population, that is 3250 people, 60 per state, and so on and so forth.
Even seemingly tiny odds amidst a big enough population exposes that we are living in a rather volatile time where peace and civility are more of a coincidence than a result of any intentional effort.
So, how many people are usually involved in a "mass shooting" in the USA? Is it more or less than 6? More or less than 60? Are there enough people that an entire "movement" could be faked to support their own narratives?
When the fake bomb scare apparently failed to move the needle, in that even within 24 hours it was apparent that the reaction desired did not occur, what do you think would happen next if folks believe that the political changes they desire are so important to start running false flags? To try to go beyond merely making new policies available to choose and moving to the extent of trying to persuade and manipulate the mob in order to achieve their goals?
They would escalate. Just look at what happened with women's suffrage in the UK over a hundred years ago:
When any political group ever desires more power, they will follow a very specific path of escalation when they don't get what they want, until the cost of continuing is beyond what they can afford to pay. This is why parents will often start taking away existing toys of a child throwing a tantrum because they can't get a new one, because they are increasing the cost of continuing behavior on the child to then change the motivations of the child.
Does anyone still wonder why positive reinforcement alone fails to raise children into mature adults?
As Clausewitz said "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means."
Realize that if it's important enough to escalate at all, and they can "afford it", then they will, and they have hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the country on tap who could commit terrible acts that are completely outside their normal character, and that presumes the need for those folks in the first place because they cannot draw from within their own political groups to achieve a goal.
Folks will presume that their victory will surely be just around the next corner. And then the next. And then the next. They just need to try a little bit harder and then everything will fall into place, and just as their efforts grow, so will the animosity for those who, even by appearance alone, stand against them. They've put in so much work so far, it's not that much more. They've put in so much work so far, it would be such a tragedy to see it all go to waste!
A false flag is a means to try and justify further actions being taken which would otherwise be completely inappropriate without the context of "responding to a hostile aggressor". It's for when folks want to take action but don't want the optics of it to be against them.
It's something people do when they've already contemplated doing more but cannot yet justify it.
Yet.
So immediately following the fake bomb scare, a Jewish synagogue gets shot up, and various political groups immediately start making political demands of the President?
We're supposed to believe that an apparently maligned and victimized political group can now make these demands because of this shooting, and past events, and these demands are made before all the details of the investigation have taken place?
We're in a cold civil war, which is only being recognized and acted on at all by one "side" of the conflict. And that "side" doesn't have much power in our current administration.
So how far are they willing to go to change that? They're the only ones that truly know, and the administration has done everything they can to try and defuse the situation.
They'll only end up making it worse. Like Icarus on wings of wax, the higher we fly the farther we fall as a consequence of our hubris.
I'd prefer a negotiated split over no negotiations and "to the victor goes the spoils".
These devices were identified as fake rather quickly because they were illogically constructed, folks took pictures for social media before calling in the bomb squads, and these devices could not actually harmed the "intended targets" because those people never actually open their own mail. This is the equivalent of a gun whose only function is to extend a flag with the word "boom" on it. Even so, the event was touted as further evidence that the current President needs to do things differently.
So what happens when the scare isn't fake?
Most false flags aren't fakes at all.
Here's a list of 42 known false flag operations.
Look at the list. People died. Governments, both "good" and "bad" guys in the historical narratives, are present and accounted for.
In almost every case, the acts were done to provide a "moral high ground" for an aggressor to have their subsequent actions justified. If you've just been attacked by someone, then who is going to interfere with your actions to defend yourself? They'd be allying themselves with those who just attacked you!
Look at how frequently a simplistic mindset shows up in the justifications. Look at how frequently personal reasons are used as the cover for political ones.
"We did something we knew was wrong and then were going to blame someone else for it because we couldn't otherwise justify doing what we wanted to in the first place."
Even scripture has a fairly well known story about this, when Joseph accused his brothers of stealing and imprisoned the youngest, who was found with "stolen goods", when Joseph had actually planted the "stolen" goods.
The reason these types of manipulation work is because we are not primarily rational creatures, so when an offense has occurred, our instinct is not to investigate and discern what needs to be done, but to react. Our instinct is to right the wrongs and settle things, and the "false flag" hopes to evoke such an emotional response that nobody takes a closer look at the circumstance to determine what the correct course of action should be.
The name itself is a literal one, from the time when ships on the sea would run the wrong flags to confuse and disorient other ships.
After the fake bomb scare, someone shot up a Jewish synagogue, and there are 8 dead and more injured.
Now, why am I framing that shooting alongside false flags?
Look at one of the responses to the shooting.
“Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted,” the group wrote. “You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country.”
Trump was fiercely criticized after he failed to condemn white supremacy and asserted that there is “blame on both sides” after last year’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
The group said Trump is not welcome in the city until he also stops targeting minorities, immigrants and refugees.
Does this sound personally motivated or politically motivated? Put differently, were they specifically targeted, or were political groups they belong to, or are aligned with, targeted?
As before, how often did known false flags have predominantly political implications?
Is their goal to get justice for a specific incident, or to affect a more sweeping change that goes beyond the incident?
Let's divert the train of thought for a bit. I've shared this video before. If you have not watched this video, you need to before you can understand what is going on in this country. You need to understand all the possibilities before you can be sure and take any action, because if you think that how a person behaves in their day-to-day describes the entirety of their capacity, you are woefully ignorant.
Also, in case you didn't read it, Israel showed up on that list.
So, let's do some simple math.
Israel was at war with Egypt when it hatched a plan in 1954 to ruin its rapprochement with the United States and Britain by firebombing sites frequented by foreigners in Cairo and Alexandria.
But Israeli hopes the attacks, which caused no casualties, would be blamed on local insurgents collapsed when the young Zionist bombers were caught and confessed at public trials. Two were hanged. The rest served jail terms and emigrated to Israel.
In a population of an estimated 325.98 million, or 325,980,000 let's presume that, based on Derren Brown's experiment, only a very small portion of a percentage of the population is susceptible to such programming, but those that are will do nearly anything you've programmed them to do, including kill people when your "normal" personality is quite the antithesis of violent or aggressive.
If it's .0001% of the population, that still puts us at about 325 people, 6 per state, if you spread them out. If it's .001% of the population, that is 3250 people, 60 per state, and so on and so forth.
Even seemingly tiny odds amidst a big enough population exposes that we are living in a rather volatile time where peace and civility are more of a coincidence than a result of any intentional effort.
So, how many people are usually involved in a "mass shooting" in the USA? Is it more or less than 6? More or less than 60? Are there enough people that an entire "movement" could be faked to support their own narratives?
When the fake bomb scare apparently failed to move the needle, in that even within 24 hours it was apparent that the reaction desired did not occur, what do you think would happen next if folks believe that the political changes they desire are so important to start running false flags? To try to go beyond merely making new policies available to choose and moving to the extent of trying to persuade and manipulate the mob in order to achieve their goals?
They would escalate. Just look at what happened with women's suffrage in the UK over a hundred years ago:
In 1913 some Suffragettes began to resort to the tactic of small bombs. In February 1913 Lloyd George's week-end cottage which was in the process of being built, was target of a small explosion, and in June 1914 a bomb was placed beside the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. It exploded causing slight damage to the chair and the 'Stone of Destiny' below it. Several other bombs planted including one in St Paul's Cathedral, and near the Bank of England.
When any political group ever desires more power, they will follow a very specific path of escalation when they don't get what they want, until the cost of continuing is beyond what they can afford to pay. This is why parents will often start taking away existing toys of a child throwing a tantrum because they can't get a new one, because they are increasing the cost of continuing behavior on the child to then change the motivations of the child.
Does anyone still wonder why positive reinforcement alone fails to raise children into mature adults?
As Clausewitz said "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means."
Realize that if it's important enough to escalate at all, and they can "afford it", then they will, and they have hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the country on tap who could commit terrible acts that are completely outside their normal character, and that presumes the need for those folks in the first place because they cannot draw from within their own political groups to achieve a goal.
Folks will presume that their victory will surely be just around the next corner. And then the next. And then the next. They just need to try a little bit harder and then everything will fall into place, and just as their efforts grow, so will the animosity for those who, even by appearance alone, stand against them. They've put in so much work so far, it's not that much more. They've put in so much work so far, it would be such a tragedy to see it all go to waste!
A false flag is a means to try and justify further actions being taken which would otherwise be completely inappropriate without the context of "responding to a hostile aggressor". It's for when folks want to take action but don't want the optics of it to be against them.
It's something people do when they've already contemplated doing more but cannot yet justify it.
Yet.
So immediately following the fake bomb scare, a Jewish synagogue gets shot up, and various political groups immediately start making political demands of the President?
We're supposed to believe that an apparently maligned and victimized political group can now make these demands because of this shooting, and past events, and these demands are made before all the details of the investigation have taken place?
We're in a cold civil war, which is only being recognized and acted on at all by one "side" of the conflict. And that "side" doesn't have much power in our current administration.
So how far are they willing to go to change that? They're the only ones that truly know, and the administration has done everything they can to try and defuse the situation.
They'll only end up making it worse. Like Icarus on wings of wax, the higher we fly the farther we fall as a consequence of our hubris.
I'd prefer a negotiated split over no negotiations and "to the victor goes the spoils".
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