It Could Happen Here - Does War Change?

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

The gang sit down and have some yuks about the concept of 4th generation warfare and the Kaiser-loving paleocon who invented it. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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how's everybody how's everybody feel about war? Yeah. Now, if you were to guess, based on your knowledge of history, what generation of war we're in right now, what would y'all guess? I feel like war isn't, it's newer in relation to human human beings like the idea of war i'm guessing like there's been like battles but like the idea of like war i feel like isn't super old compared to how long there's been humans walking around so i don't know this is maybe i mean i i know the answer but like it's it's like i don't. Like it's definitely – we definitely passed through like at least a couple of stages. At least a couple. Chris?

Like got to be at least 12. 12. OK. At least 12. You are way ahead of William S. Lynde who, spoilers, is the guy who came up with the concept of fourth generation war, which is what this episode is about, right? One of the things when we talk about things falling apart is the unsettling growth of a number of different hybrid conflicts, Ukraine being the most like blatant modern example, all over the world. You could even think to like what was happening in Bolivia a year or so back and like all those weird accounts that were like based around Langley, Virginia claiming to support the military coup. And you can look at like from the same, this disinformation brought out by like the Russian state that is usually as part of like a conflict either, you know, they have disinfo operations

in Syria, disinfo operations around the conflict in Ukraine that are kind of designed to muddy the issues and detract international support and also to like drum up support within for like in the case of Ukraine. You had like this media blitz against the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state in favor of like a more like traditionally Russian style of government in the east and like that led to this breakaway republic that was supported by the Russian government and like – so these are like hybrid conflicts is kind of how these are referred to. And there was a guy named William S. Lind who in 1989 wrote a book with a couple of US military analysts. Like he was an analyst for the military. He was not serving in the military.

The other guys he wrote this thing with were serving at the time. And they wrote this book kind of trying to – basically what Lind was doing, he was very influenced by our loss in Vietnam. When I say our here, like the loss of the American state in Vietnam. When I say are here, like the loss of the American state in Vietnam. And he was trying to determine like number one kind of like find a way to codify and explain the changes that were happening to warfare in this period. He was also influenced by what was happening in Afghanistan, what the Russians were experiencing, and find a way to like move forward and allow the United States to win wars again, right? Like that was William S. Lind's goal. to win wars again, right?

Like that was William S. Lynn's goal. And so he came up with this concept of, or he and some other guys came up with what they called fourth generation warfare. And first generation warfare is like Napoleonic era warfare. So like as Garrison was saying, you may note that he kind of starts his- That's pretty late.

That's pretty late. We had a lot of wars before the 1600s or the 1800s. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that leads up to, like, if I was going to try to categorize different types of warfare, that would not be the one I'd start with. Well, and, like, the reality, of course, as we'll talk about, like, when you start looking at different kinds of warfare, there's wars that look remarkably like the shit going on in Afghanistan

and Ukraine that are occurring, like, several thousand years ago. I mean, some of those in the same places too. Like, yeah, it just like, if you wanted to, if you wanted to talk about like kind of the modern style of wars that we saw and that we've seen really in the last like 150 years, they're not all that dissimilar in a lot of ways from like the kind of conflict you saw between Rome and Carthage, which are these really like big nation-state style conflicts and have a lot of similarities. But William S. Lynn described the first generation of warfare as beginning after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years' War. And it's the kind of warfare where you have these like big, tightly ordered groups of men marching towards each other and like firing very inaccurate weapons in mass together,

right? and like firing very inaccurate weapons in mass together, right? This is ended by the era of the machine gun and the semi-automatic rifle or the bolt reaction rifle, I should say. And that leads us to second generation warfare, which is linear fire and movement with heavy reliance on indirect fire.

So that's still huge groups of guys charging, but they're not marching in close order. They're not like firing in volleys. And they're supported by heavy artillery, like World War I kind of shit, right? Really, we start to see this in like 1870, and then World War I is kind of the height of this kind of warfare. And over the course of World War I, we merge – and again, this is William S. Lynn's way. We merge from second-generation to third-generation warfare, which is where you've got infiltration tactics to bypass enemy defensive lines and

collapse it, which is kind of the Germans and their Aufragstaktik and stormtrooper tactics are really kind of pioneering that. You've got the idea of defense in depth. And so this need to bypass the enemy and like this leads to blitzkrieg and leads to all sorts of shit. And then that kind of starts to collapse in Lin's estimation around Vietnam, and you get what's called fourth-generation warfare. I'm actually just going to read a quote from a military history wiki that I thought had a pretty good description of all of this. Fourth-generation warfare is normally characterized by a violent non-state actor fighting a state.

This fighting can be physically done, such as by modern examples Hezbollah or the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In this realm, the VNSA, these violent non-state actors, use all three levels of fourth generation warfare. These are the physical, actual combat, which is considered the least important, mental, the will to fight, belief in victory, et cetera, and the moral, which is the most important, Lind says, and includes cultural norms, etc. So obviously, I think that this is kind of nonsense. There's a lot of people. So there's a lot of folks, the people who buy into this, and it's very popular on the right, will look at like what's happening in Ukraine. It's a perfect example of fourth generation warfare, because you have Russia flooding

the zone using Sputnik and a bunch of other kind of media organizations to drum up discord and like anger between East and West in Ukraine and support for potential Russian action at the same time as you have them backing this dictator. And then you have like the West sort of supporting the people protesting against those dictators. And like, so you've got like this digital conflict, this information conflict that eventually leads to fighting on the ground. One of the areas in which I think Lind is really off is talking about like the physical as the least important, especially if you're going to consider Ukraine an example of fourth-generation warfare because if the Russian military had not intervened, there would not still be a conflict in Ukraine.

The separatists would not still hold land. In fact, the separatists were on the edge of getting completely wiped out by the Ukrainian military because they were a bunch of non-state actors with minimal support and minimal weaponry before the Russians moved in brigades of active duty combat troops and armor, including like gigantic fucking missile launchers, which they used to shoot down that Malaysian Airlines flight. Like it's just not, airlines flight. It's just not – I don't think that what Linda is saying is very well describes what's actually going on in the world. But it is important to understand the concept of fourth generation warfare and fifth generation warfare, which we'll talk about in a bit, because it is so useful in the way in which particularly guys like Steve Bannon conceive of conflict because you will

hear the term fourth generation warfare constantly. And it's also something that is used a lot within our military establishment. Now, a lot of people hate it. And within – you can find a lot of papers by dudes writing like analysts who are working for the defense department, for the army actively like shitting on Lind and talking about how he's – at best is kind of like reinvented ideas that have existed in warfare for thousands of years and he's kind of summarized things in a way that that is unneedlessly flattening and like some people will say you basically like ripped up like

added the internet to Clausewitz uh and pretended that you'd invented a new style of conflict or that you defined a new style of conflict anyway that's like an introduction to the idea of fourth generation warfare, right? And there's a lot of things that he gets, again, like if you're a history, a military history wonk, which Lind pretends to be, a lot of shit that he gets wrong. So one of the things that he says, like one of his famous phrases that every military eventually craps in its own mess kit. The idea that like every military that is great eventually like has a gigantic fuck up because they get too used to doing the same thing, which is true. And he describes it as like,

the Prussians did it in 1806, after which they designed and put into service a much more improved model mess kit through the Scharnhorst military reforms. The French did it in 1870, after which they took down from the shelf an old model mesh kit, the mass draft army of the First Republic, and put it back into service. The Japanese did it in 1945, after which they threw their mesh kit away, swearing they would never eat again. And we did it in Korea, in Vietnam, and now in four new wars. So far, we've had the only military that's just kept on eating.

And that's a really dumb statement. That's all really historically inaccurate. So for example, it's true that like the Prussians had a great military, which then got its butt kicked by Napoleon and they had to completely redesign it. And by the time 1870 came around, they were extremely dominant on the battlefield against the French. Number one, he's crediting the military reforms of like tactics and strategy and ignoring things like Krupp inventing an entirely new kind of cannon that was utterly dominant on the battlefield. He's also ignoring the fact that this Prussian army – he's saying like the US is the only army that does the same thing over and over again and fails and keeps on eating. Well, the Prussian army is the army the Germans took into battle in World War I and II.

And spoilers, they didn't learn enough from either of those wars um he also talks about how like the french had their you know crapping in the mess kit moment in 1870 after the franco-prussian war and they changed their army and it was much better it's like well they didn't win world war one like they were on the side that won but if it had been them against germany they would have gotten fucking steamrolled. Like it was not going well for them for quite a while and they lost a whole generation of young men. So maybe – and again, this is like what he's saying is basically we – because we're losing so constantly, the reason that we're losing is not because we are picking bad conflicts. It's not because we're picking to engage in conflicts when we shouldn't at all be engaging in conflicts. in conflicts when we shouldn't at all be engaging in conflicts. It's not because we use military force in like a fundamentally venal and corrupt way in order to benefit a small cabal of military

industrial corporations. It's because we don't have good battle doctrine and that's why we're not winning in these conflicts, which ignores everything about the reality of the conflicts that like he's talking about. Like the problem is not a lack of combat dominance, which is what you were seeing with like the Prussians fighting Napoleon. It's what you were seeing with the French fighting the Germans in 1870, right? Like in those cases, the Prussians had a massive failure of combat dominance against the French and the French had a massive failure in combat against the Germans. Their doctrine was just worse. U.S. soldiers are great at getting into gunfights and great at winning gunfights. The problem is not a lack of combat ability.

The problem is that there's no way to win the conflicts that we're getting into. They are unwinnable wars that were never things that – like no amount of change in doctrine would have made Afghanistan a success because it was a stupid war. Yeah. Like if, like if, if, if that were true, like coin would have worked and coin.

Yeah. No, like a coin counterinsurgency. Yeah. Yeah. Just complete, total and utter failure. Like enormous numbers of people dead,

enormous numbers of like people traumatized for generations. And the U S still just lost both wars. Yeah. It's just, and, and, of people dead enormous numbers of like people traumatized for generations and the u.s still just lost both wars yeah it's just and and and if you really dig into lind and others like him what they're actually saying when they say that like we need to reform like the way the military works with new battle doctors we need to be killing even more people we just didn't kill enough in vietnam like the five million we bombed or so. That wasn't enough people. That's the reform that he's really talking about. Is Lind one of those people who rants about the El Salvadorian option? I'm sure he does. I don't know exactly what he said about El Salvador. He's a fascinating kind of fascist. He is absolutely a fascist he was the director of the center for cultural conservatism

at the free congress foundation um he wrote a or he helped to to popularize a declaration of cultural independence by cultural conservatives um which is like these it there's a lot of the seeds of the shit that we're seeing today right that like american culture institutions are being collapsed because of like liberal decadence and conservatives cultural conservatives should separate themselves and like set up parallel institutions oh so that is where bannon comes in and that's where bannon comes in that's where like fucking andrew torba and gab come and they all advocate this shit yeah because they're all they all adhere to that kind of uh uh yeah like politics as culture uh and there's downstream yeah and there's some weird differences with lind like he's a huge mass transit and urban rail advocate which i guess

i agree with him on like fine every once in a while a bad person does have a good opinion he loves he loves him some fucking city trains and stuff um but he's also he was a major factor he was one of the earliest like prominent conservatives who was like yelling about cultural Marxism in kind of the modern political period. I mean that makes sense because he was real – it sounds like he's real into metapolitics. Yes, he's super into metapolitics. Yeah, so like all of this stuff makes a whole lot of sense if you're – yeah, if you know what metapolitics are. It also kind of explains how he developed the different generations of warfare using it through a framework of metal politics actually really

makes that fit if you believe like breitbart famously stated that like politics is downstream from culture and if you also believe what klaus i think it was klaus witz that said that like war is politics by other means then like you can make cultural changes that can cause wars and like yeah like that's a lot like kind of i think the thought process behind lynn yeah because this this really defines what he means by fourth generation warfare of war being handed out specifically by the culture instead of having it be abstracted to be like people marching towards each other with guns because yeah he's he's he's putting the he's putting the culture kind of back into it yeah and he and he's putting the culture kind of back into it. Yeah, and obviously culture was never not a factor in warfare.

Of course not. Every single war has been a major factor. All of this shit he talks about as being characteristic of fourth generation warfare has been happening in one way or another for thousands of years. It's not that these things are done in temporal succession. It's not that these things are done in, like, temporal succession. It's like, because, like, a lot of the stuff that makes up fourth generation warfare, like, the more, like, guerrilla warfare aspects, come way before people with guns marching towards each other, right? There were fucking Afghans doing that to Alexander the goddamn Great before the birth of Christ. A lot of this fourth gen stuff is actually, like, kind of more similar to what original warfare probably would have been like. Yeah.

Which I think – to his credit, I think he does actually recognize that at some point in his writing. No, and the thing about this is – well, we can pick at it and I think there's a lot that's ridiculous in his attitude. It's close enough to the way that reality works that if you're going – if you're thinking about conflict in this framework, you can be very successful. works, that if you're going – if you're thinking about conflict in this framework, you can be very successful. It's not like an – it's inaccurate in some ways because he is wrongly describing why certain things work I think is a lot of what he's doing. And he's wrong about winning wars. I'll say that.

If the American military were to make – fucking lend the secretary of defense and give him total power, like he would keep on losing wars as hard as we've been losing wars for everyone listening to this his lifetime. But in a cultural sense, the kind of culture jamming, which is a term we'll talk about more in the future, but the kind of like the propaganda arms and stuff in order to – the media warfare in order to either incite or justify real conflict or – and this is one of the areas in which they have been really effective – to alter the – to alter how internationally a conflict is responded to. for liberatory movements in the Middle East, for liberatory movements, or for just like what's happening in Ukraine, this kind of like reflexive,

well, if there's a movement for liberation among the people of a country, it's probably the CIA, like carrying out some sort of op. That's Lyndon, his people, and people influenced by him have been a big part of pushing that um it's why steve bannon is in and fuck is so friendly with like some guys on like chunks of

they call themselves the left and whatnot it's because um there's there's a lot of uh there's a lot of ties there and that is an area in which they've been successful because international support really matters um you know it's it's it's – and I think like the death of internationalism is one of the bigger successes that like these thinkers have kind of had. But yeah, I don't know. That's a chunk of what I had to say. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

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As part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

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You guys want to know more about William S. Lind because he's I certainly want to learn more about William S. So William S. Lind, cultural conservative, right? Big on the the traditional Christian values of America. You want to guess who he considers his ideal leader? JFK? No, the House of Hohenzollern. He's a Prussian monarchist.

Wait, no, is he a Hegel guy? Oh, my. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, no. Okay, everything's clicking into it. If he's into meta-politics, he's certainly into Hegel. And he thinks that the Prussian monarchy was the best government there ever was and was, like, unfairly crushed by the rest of the world and, like, should have won World War I and everything would – and, like, he's – and so he's very much, like, a conservative monarchist.

Weird kind, because like, my God, dude, if you're looking at like monarchs who were like the Hohenzollerns had like in the modern era, like the first Kaiser Wilhelm was broadly competent. But like it went to shit as soon as Wilhelm II. And he blames all of World War I on the fucking czars. Like it's very silly. Like his ideas of history are like very stupid i i have an incredibly silly theory of history based on hegel which is that like every explain hegel briefly for the listeners i know do not this is this is this is the thing okay okay this this is this is my crank theory of history based on hegel which is that every about 40 years someone attempts to apply hegel someone like takes charge of an incredibly large state and tries to use hegel to run it and every single time they don't understand the dialectic and it

doesn't work so this for example like if you take this as a very sort of granular level right you have mao mao has no idea what a dialectic is you can read mao's work he has no clue like he just doesn't he like he doesn't he doesn't get it he thinks that a dialectic is when one person with a bat hits the other hits the other side and then when you destroy the other side the dialectic is resolved right like that that's not what it is right uh mao like because of this the entire Chinese revolution just implodes. Everyone dies. It returns to capitalism. It's a complete failure, right? And a lot of the Nazis are very much into Hegel.

They have, again, incredibly similar failures. The other group of people, like Lind, I think is part of this, is that all of the people who planned the Iraq War were like enormous Segelians, right? But they'd gotten to Hegel through this weird, like this they'd be doing this counterinsurgency stuff and so but their counterinsurgency stuff was they read mao and you know so that so they're they're reading hegel but then they're also reading hegel through mao and mao doesn't understand what's going on either and so when they try to apply the hegelian dialectic and they're like okay well the end of the end of the end of history the end of the hegelian dialectic is the United States. We're just going to impose this on Iraq. And catastrophic failure.

So the moral of the story is do not attempt to apply Hegel. You will completely annihilate your entire political movement. Like everything you love and dream of, everything, like every ideology you've ever had, it will crumble beneath you. And yeah, you will watch your cities and armies burn. That's fine, because when I start my resistance movement, we're just going to be post-canty and object-oriented ontologists to terrorists. You guys are just going through a bunch of names, and I'm going to get like 80% of people are just, why the fuck am I hearing about these dead people the thing i actually wanted to to bring up on this is like how fourth and fifth gen the ideas of fourth and fifth gen get applied onto like more insurrection based um like revolts or groups right you can see like groups like the earth liberation front and animal liberation front kind of pick and choose elements of the fourth and fifth generation warfare to kind of to see how their groups formed or were operated um and even you could argue that like ted kaczynski

was like a fifth generation warfare because he was completely autonomous and the actions okay let's let's introduce the idea of fifth generation because we just talked about fourth generation warfare which was lynn's idea fifth generation warfare is a concept that's come up. I believe Daniel Abbott is his name. And the idea was that like it's a new type of warfare that like characterizes a lot of conflicts in the modern era where almost everything is non-kinetic. But it is still military action. action um so military social engineering misinformation cyber attacks not just like decentralized but like states actually using um organized and often fighting non-state actors who are using kind of the same doing the same thing yeah yeah and this and a lot of this would involve

artificial intelligence fully autonomous system systems not just botnets but like algorithms that can like handle a lot of the quote-unquote fighting um william s lynd hates the idea of fourth generation fifth generation warfare because he's a narcissist and he doesn't like anyone using ideas that his own see he misapprehended the dialectic it keeps going yeah so what i was what i was thinking is like is like a lot of you can apply fifth generation warfare to like these types of groups who are mostly like they they they do some they do some fourth gen tactics in terms of like terrorism right like they they try to make political statements through terrorism and have terrorism be an

influential thing but their demand like you rarely like fifth generation stuff has not been around long enough and no one's really been super successful at it in the past enough time for us to like recognize that right because you can look at a lot of a lot of like instructionary type stuff around like the again I'm just going to use the earth liberation front

as an example of like a group that attempted kind of these types of tactics and they may have succeeded in the physical sense, but they did not succeed in like the cultural sense, really. So trying to like, look at these types of things and how they relate to like specific, you know, if you're gonna use like the Ted Kaczynski example, same thing, except he's not a group, he's just one person, which is kind of more of a fifth gen thing. So he is fully autonomous, whereas I think stuff like the ELF

tried to have that kind of militant group dynamic that is more similar to fourth-generation warfare. So it's like this picking and choosing of trying to do physical action than trying to do cultural action. And it's not like the things that have succeeded. Let's take, for instance, the defend the Cascadian forest thing, who just got – the specific action they were working on to protect a specific chunk of the forest. The judge approved their motion because they were – they actually were successful because they did not form this militant thing right now they were just doing the cultural and it actually really succeeded um as opposed to just you know burning down

buildings and stuff to try to get your action forward so just trying to look at like examples of when when like the goal is kind of the same and certain types succeed certain certain types don't how that may influence like organizing and how to selectively use like insurrection but have it not be like a default mode for like always your group is better if it's insurrectionary yeah and i i one of the things that does characterize that i think is useful for because again i i have my criticisms of of the value of any of these like phrases as kind of discrete concepts. But one of the things that I think is useful about the concept of fifth generation warfare that does talk about something that is legitimately new to conflict that has not

really existed before, before the internet, is omnipresence. That the conflicts are not limited in geographical space or in time and in fact is like a constant factor all around you at all times because of the way the information sphere kind of actually functions. You can look at kind of like the mix of street fights and information warfare, doxing and whatnot between fascists and anti-fascists for the last few years. It's omnipresent. It's always going on. anti-fascist for the last few years. It's omnipresent. It's always going on. And the battle space is kind of potentially everywhere, even though it's fairly rarely kinetic or physical. And I do think that that's an area in which it is really worth having a new term and kind of defining a new term, because that's one of the few things I think that has legitimately changed.

The internet's made all of this stuff that's been happening for thousands of years faster. But the thing that it's really created that was not present before is this omnipresence. So I do think that that's really useful when we're focusing on how conflict is different. I would like to kind of think about January 6th within these frameworks, right? Of how disinformation and information

was used relatively successfully to get a lot of people to actually move towards the more, you know, kind of backed by half the state, backed, you know, not backed by, well, the larger majority. And again, how, like, it's like a synthesis of the fourth generation and fifth generation ideas, which is why, you know, there's a lot of overlap

with these terms specifically. Um, but seeing how like one leads to another and it's not, they're not necessarily a clue exclusionary. Yeah. I mean, it's like the result is whether they win or lose. Right.

Yeah. That's, that's like, that's what makes it a war is, is the, is the, is like you decide afterwards based on the results. Yeah.

I mean, it kind of yeah that's certainly like how more modern wars happen like with afghanistan it wasn't so much like a clear like world war one there's an armistice and like a negotiated end of the war and at a certain date it all ends it was a lot messier we haven't done that since we haven't done that for the state like you know i've never known the states to do that for no because if you don't do that you don't have to admit you lost yeah exactly like right if you just kind of like leave and shit gets real fucked up um you can just be like for one thing you can say like ah if we'd stayed and spent more money on that war we could have we could have pulled it out um which is one of my like there's

a lot of great criticisms of how the biden administration handled things in afghanistan last year a thousand of them. But at the end of the day, it's like, it was never going to be good. Like, it was always, it was this horrible war. We were killing way too many people. We weren't achieving anything. And that fact was made really clear by the fact that as soon as we pulled out our guns, everything collapsed.

And that was always going to happen. And you can needle around the edges of how we could have better taken care of people who we'd made promises to or whatever but at the end of the day it was always going to be fucked because it was a thing we never should have done and that's like this idea that Lind has that like no if we fix our doctrine

we have better tactical doctrine we have better like one of his big ideas is he came up with this concept called movement warfare that's been hugely influential in the way the Marine Corps functions. And the idea behind movement warfare is, like, you should always have a bias towards action. And Lind is very consciously trying to make this basically the evolution of a German tactic called Aufstragstaktik, which is, like, individual unit tactics basically so it like

midway through World War I the Germans start to realize like all these mass wave human charges aren't working great and we should probably like figure out a way to get around these defenses so they start training what are kind of the prototype of special forces these like stormtroopers whose job is to

like sneak in and not be seen and jump into the trenches and like, you know, with fucking axes and clubs and automatic handguns and fight in a way that like soldiers had not really fought in a long time. A lot of it was like melee. It was this really – and there were a lot of technical things, how to get around barbed wire, how to not be seen, how to like deal with machine gun nests. with machine gun nests. And one of the keys to it was like the German started to retrain their soldiers to where like you have to have like these individual units of five and ten men have to have like total autonomy.

And then unit commanders have to have autonomy. And they need to be able to like – we'll tell them we need you to be in this place at this point in time. But it's up to you to figure out how to do that because if you've got this one guy who's three miles back giving the commands, everyone's just going to get mowed down by machine gun fire. It needs to be more nimble. And that's part of why in World War I and in World War II because the rest of the people

fighting the Germans, like even the US, had not caught up to this kind of battle doctrine by the time World War II was over to the extent that the Germans had. And it's part of why there's such a lopsided casualty ratio in favor of the Germans in that war is they had what is very close to – because all modern combat tactics are based on what the Germans started doing at the end of World War I and had really like nailed down to a science in World War II. And Lind is saying that like we need to extend that and like that's the thing we've gotten too far away from and we need to have – you need to have like this bias towards movement and this – like officers need to be super aggressive and like always pursuing these kind of kinetic options. And again, as the Marine Corps' battle record will show, this is very effective when you are getting into gunfights.

But when was the last time the Marine Corps was on the side of a winning war? Like again, it doesn't – we can all needle about how to make our troops better at like killing people but at the end of the day we're losing wars because we're getting into wars that are not winnable and that's not something you're going to fix with battle doctrine and and lee doesn't understand that because he's a fascist i think it's just like this this is the real like weakness of their politics which is that it's like yeah well like it's they're they're trying it's like they can't tell the difference between war and like they don't think there's a difference between war and politics right yeah and that means that they think that there's a military solution to every political problem

and it's like no there's not and like this is this is how this is why they keep destroying themselves right is that they they you know like like this is what happened to the neocons right i mean the neocons are sort of held on in this kind of rump shell but it's like neoconservatism yeah and how they're just linkedin project yeah but it's like you know like they don't they don't have like like even the people who used to be their base like aren't their base anymore no like those those people are all moved on because that shit doesn't work yeah yeah yeah and it's it's like maybe they could have maintained it if they hadn't just like literally blown it apart like trying to conquer Iraq. And it's like they all do this.

They all eventually are like, well, okay, we'll find a military solution to this. And it blows up in their face because it turns out that, no, you can't actually do this. think all this indicates a general progression into the more meta-politics idea and and culture as politics idea is that we're trying to solve all these political problems at least at least like locally within us you know we're trying to try to do them culturally and choose through them and selectively in other countries right because the more kind of my the idea of like let's just keep entering wars which we're also doing at the same time but only for very specific regions. But I mean the trend of like first – like Trump's not necessarily – like Trump's not really a neocon. He preferred the cultural jamming.

Like that was his preferred method, and it got him relatively far in four years. And there's an argument that Lind is a big person who – that he learned a lot from Lind. Even though I don't think he ever read his books, all the people he surrounded him with were fans of Lind. There's a picture of Trump and Lind together and like a copy of – or at least Trump together with a copy of his book, which is titled The Next Conservatism. I'm going to read a quote at this point from The American Conservative, which Lind has written for that describes this book because it's useful. The next conservatism offers a comprehensive agenda of what Lyndon Wayrich, who's his co-author on this, call cultural conservatism. While the book aims higher than mere policy, the specifics mentioned are Trumpian, reductions in legal and illegal immigration, an America-first trade policy, and robust investments in domestic infrastructure, particularly streetcars and trains. In a less Trumpian vein, it also promotes homeschooling and incorporates some ideas from the new urbanism as

part of a broader program called retro culture. Of its connection with Trump, Lind says the book runs parallel to what he has been saying, but he doubts the billionaire's familiarity with its more philosophical ideas. Now, here's the part that is going to be really unsettling, and this I think is what Lind may actually be going for rather than any kind of reform in the military to improve its ability to win foreign wars. Quote, in 1994, an article appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette by Lind and two of the authors of the 1989 piece where he introduced the concept of fourth generation warfare. It ended on a dire note. The point is not merely that America's armed forces will find themselves facing non-nation

state conflicts and forces overseas. The point is that the same conflicts are coming here. The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil. So that's what's going on here. Yep. And that's the thing where bias towards action and increased killing power, if all you're really trying to do is murder everyone who disagrees with you using the military very quickly, well, that might work for you. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip

and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows in America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your

podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money?

I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15 percent. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise.

Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. People should know about this. He has a fucking fiction book called victoria which actually if you go to like tv tropes um the uh there's a tv it's not just tv tropes anymore but like there's a trope page for my book after the revolution and it's directly compared to victoria as like they're the opposites of each other. Because Victoria is like a book about a civil war in the US that these like weird fascist like monarchists win. And like it's pretty fucked up. It's pretty fucked up.

The problem is that all of these, the Northwest is controlled by environmentalist leaders who get eaten by these animals, like wolves that they reintroduce to the society. And California is so feminist that it's illegal to have sex and make babies. Oh my God. And the South fails because it's too multicultural. Oh God.

And yeah, it's all- This is so cringey. So the person who wins the war is like the governor of maine who's uh a retro culture practitioner um and considers himself a subject of the kaiser i may be getting a couple of details wrong but not not that part, I know. It's a fucking nutso. I've only read little bits of it. Maybe one day I'll get through the whole thing. What a sad nerd.

It's bug fuck. That's the thing with all of these cultural jammers. They try to put on war aesthetics, but all of them are the nerdiest fuckers you'll ever meet. He's so stupid. Half of them are the nerdiest fuckers he'll ever he's so stupid and i like he's so stupid to be actual wizards all of these guys are so they're so nerdy all of them yeah and like lind everything about him makes sense when you understand that his primary guiding directive

is anger over the fact that there's no longer a kaiser um's a loon, but also, like, again, he was not lying about, there's a picture of, like, Trump with his fucking book. He's not lying that, like, fucking everybody who was, like, pilled in that White House knew about Lynn's ideas and had been, he's been hugely influential. And not just among, like, the American right. His books have been found in, like, like Al Qaeda hideouts and shit. Like he's- That makes sense though.

Yeah. That like all of that really tracks because yeah, like the barrier between like terrorist action as a part of fourth generation and in some ways fifth generation warfare and then the type of like culture jamming, those things go hand in hand. Like that is the goal of it is to make it work that way.

So that doesn't surprise me that those types of terrorist groups would be reading his books for advice or for like to like figure out how the other side thinks yeah all right well that's probably enough talking about william s lynd for today and cultural and uh the fourth generation we'll talk there's a lot to dig into about how these ideas have influenced chunks of the right and how they're currently still being used for like these omnipresent conflicts that are going on right now and again i do think particularly the idea of omnipresence is really useful for understanding modern conflict i would i would go so far as to say like crucial um so this is necessary background information to people to have for people to have for like some

of the other shit we're going to be continuing to talk about in this series as we talk more about kind of kinetic conflicts or at least building towards kinetic conflicts. But yeah, I think this is a useful kind of grounding. And now I'm going to send Chris and Garrison off to write an episode explaining who Hegel is and everything he believed. Yeah, it's going to be great. You're going to hear – you will watch me go mad in real time. It's going to be great. Yeah, the other option is I can just read the Wikipedia page for Hegel with like a really offensive German accent. That's better than reading Hegel.

Don't read Hegel. That's better. accent that's better than reading hagel it actually sounds better i'm gonna go to i will i promise you one thing which is that i will wind up either russian or australian by the end i can't stop that drift when i whenever i start doing you know oh i am a good german yeah my name is mr hagel you can follow us on the absolute happen here pod and follow at cool zone media Media. We're going to stop that right now. Yeah, we probably should. It Could Happen Here is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Broth. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America.

Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite podcast. brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

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