The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads 'Coup D'état' by Edward N. Luttwak - Part 4 w/ John Fieldhouse

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

59 MinutesPG-13Pete continues his reading of Edward N. Luttwak's "Coup D'état." In this episode he welcomes back John Fieldhous to comment on the first part of chapter 3.Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Coup d'ÉtatPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Doing well today, sir. Cool. well, no introduction needed. I'm just going to jump right in. Start reading and stop me whenever you want to. Sounds good. All right. Chapter 3, the strategy of the coup d'etat.

Dean Atchison used to tell a story about Chief Justice Taff relating a conversation he had just had with an eminent man about the machinery of government. And you know, Taff said with wonder in his voice, he really did believe. that it is machinery. So quote, Roger Hilsman from the book to move a nation. Under totalitarian conditions, knowledge of the labyrinth

of transmission belts of the machinery of government equal supreme power. Hannah Arendt, and in quotations, Mr. Lutweck, wrote, wrong as usual in the origins of totalitarianism. It's a nice little piece of humor there. The first one's definitely good. I mean, there's a, you know,

it's sort of like the Supreme boomer on insult that it's true of most people in general, is that we seem to confuse the way things are supposed to work with how they do in practice. Yep, 100%. All right. Start reading the, start reading the text. Overthrowing governments is not easy. The government will not only be protected by the professional defenses of the state, the armed forces, the police, and the security services, but it will also be. be supported by a whole range of political forces. In a sophisticated and democratic society, these forces will include political parties, sectional interests, and regional, ethnic, and religious groupings. Their interaction and mutual opposition results in a particular balance of forces that

the government in some way represents. In less sophisticated societies, there may be a narrower range of such forces, but there will almost always be some political groups that support the status quo, and therefore, the government. If those who carry out the coup appear to shatter such a powerful structure merely by seizing a few buildings and arresting some political figures, it is because their crucial achievement passes unnoticed. This is the dangerous and elaborate process by which the armed forces and the other means of coercion are neutralized before the coup, and the political forces are temporarily forced into passivity. If we were revolutionary seeking to change a structure of society, our aim would be to destroy the power of some of the political forces. The long and often

bloody process of revolutionary attrition can achieve this. Our purpose, however, is quite different. We want to seize power within the present system, and we shall only stay in power if we embody some new status quo supported by those very forces that a revolution may seek to destroy. Should we want to achieve fundamental social change, we can do so after we have become the government. This is perhaps a more efficient method, and certainly a less painful one, than that of classic revolution. Though we will try to avoid all conflict with the political forces, some of them will almost certainly oppose a coup. But this opposition will largely subside when we have substituted our new status quo for the old one and can enforce it by our control of the

state bureaucracy and security forces. A period of transition such as this, which comes after we have emerged into the open, and before we are vested with the authority of the state, is the most critical phase of the coup. We shall then be carrying out the dual task of imposing our control in the machinery of the state, while simultaneously using it to impose our control on the country at large. Any resistance to the coup in the one will simulate further resistance in the other. If a chain reaction develops, the coup could be defeated. I was going to go and said that, yeah, I just didn't want it because we're on a roll there. Yeah, that's probably the most relevant thing, I think, for any student of just what a coup looks like in practice and historically.

We tend to think that the goal is to go and destroy all those forces immediately in the process of taking the palace or whatever. that's the actual symbol of power and he's making it real clear it's like no don't confuse what has to happen later with what has to be done in order to gain the power it's uh it's very easy for layman to always think that you know wars are always about fighting and we're not talking about war we're talking about a related thing and to think that no the uh the goal like sun suicide is the actually impose your will there with the least amount of fighting since uh you know violence involves costs so i i just found that to be a very insightful couple of paragraphs.

Moving on. Our strategy, therefore, must be guided by two principal considerations, the need for maximum speed in the transitional phase, and the need to fully neutralize the opposition both before and immediately after the coup. If in the operation phase of the coup, we are at any stage delayed, then our essential weakness will emerge. We will likely acquire a political coloration, and this, in turn,

will lead to a concentration of those forces that oppose the tendency we represent, or our thought to represent. As long as the execution of the coup is rapid, and we are cloaked in anonymity, no particular political faction will have a motive or an opportunity to oppose us. After all, we could be their potential allies. In any case, a delay will cost us our principal advantage, the voluntary neutrality of the wait-and-see elements, and the involuntary neutrality of those forces that require time to concentrate and deploy for action.

Surprise is your friend. The need for maximum speed means that the many separate operations of the coup must be carried out almost simultaneously, necessarily requiring the efforts of a large number of people. Therefore, assuming that we start the planning of the coup with only a small group of political associates, most of the personnel we will need must be recruited. Furthermore, our recruits must have the training and equipment that will enable them to take swift and determined action. There will usually be only one source of such recruits, the armed forces of the state itself. Would you say also retired military?

Yeah. Especially in our scenario, if something like that were happening, something like this would have to be. Yeah, well, it's people who can actually be that the security force, the force of the state. So, so retirees hypothetically can be very useful. The question is, can you arm them, organize them, and put them in the right places quickly enough without it becoming obvious what you're doing? Right. Understood. Because ethnic minorities are often both anti-government and warlike, some may believe they are the ideal recruits for a coup. That has been true of the Alawites and Jury.

in Syria, the Kurds of Iraq, and the Shans in Burma. But in most cases, a coup identified with minorities is likely to arouse nationalist reactions on the part of the majority peoples. Since the centers of government are usually located in the majority areas, their opposition would be a further important obstacle for us. Another possible substitute... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to call it. But yeah, one of the best parts this next chapter. is when he actually talks about the concept of martial minorities, which is something that you won't see in any real politic discussion anymore, which is horribly politically incorrect and it's great.

It's just a really good understanding of which groups can be loyal and which groups are irrelevant. There's so much rugby on Sports Exeter from Sky, they've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end. Here goes. This winter sports extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live,

plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place. Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra. Jam packed with rugby. Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months. Search Sports Extra. New Sports Extra customers only.

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While stocks last, Kimberly and Party Box offer available until November 30th. Another possible substitute for the subversion of the forces of the state is the organization of a party militia. When there is a combination of political freedom with an ineffectual maintenance of law and order, such militias are sometimes formed in order to protect party activities. In Weimar Germany, for example, apart from the Nazi Stumab, I can never pronounce this name, Sturmobteilung, Sturmonturn, Sturmobterlung, assault detachments, or brown shirts,

there were party militias of the Social Democrats, Communists, and the Right Wing Nationalist Party. Similar organizations, black shirts, green shirts, red shirts, and in the Middle East, silver shirts, spread in many countries in the wake of fascists and Nazi successes. In spite of their military, bearing, uniforms, and often extensive weaponry, in almost every instance of confrontation between such militias and the forces of the state, the former, were defeated. Thus, when the Nazis tried to use the embryonic brown shirts in the 1923 Munich coup attempt, they were easily overpowered by the police, and Hitler was himself arrested.

his subsequent rise to power was achieved by political means, not by the efforts of the brown shirts. He does a good job of pointing out that, again, we tend to ignore the fact that during Weimar, Germany, just about every political party that mattered had militias, to include guys who were basically moderate liberals, had their own party militias. So when people talk about the brown shirts as if that was the only armed or only political militia there, it's like, no, everybody had a militia in the Weimar era. Oh, yeah. I mean, the KPD, they would face off in the streets. The red front fighters.

In any case, in order to organize and equip a party militia, two scarce resources are needed, money and the freedom to do so. Recruiting forces from those maintained by the state requires neither. Therefore, while a whole range of forces will need to be neutralized, a distinctive approach must be used with the means of coercion, of the state. In dealing with the armed forces to police and the security services, we will have to subvert some forces while neutralizing the rest. By contrast, in the case of the political forces, the objective will be limited to their neutralization. Because of their capacity for direct intervention,

the armed forces and the other means of coercion of the state must be fully neutralized before the actual coup starts. The political forces usually can be dealt with immediately after the coup. In some situations, however, the political forces may have an immediate impact on the course of events and must, therefore, be dealt with prior to the... This is an interesting paragraph because the attempted coup in the Soviet Union against Gorbachev, what was that, 89 or whatever. In the republished version of Jerry Pornell's, there will be war. He actually has a good preference before the old preference. And he points out that that coup failed fundamentally because they hadn't fully subverted all the military forces that were needed to suppress things inside Moscow proper.

And Jerry Pornel talks about explicitly that the battalion that was sent to go in arrest, Boris Yeltsin, that battalion, excuse me, a bunch of the officers. We're talking lieutenants and captains got together with the colonel and tell him, you know, sir, we are going to do this job, but you really owe it to this man to go in there, talk to him face to face before we take him out in handcuffs, which that colonel did. In any ways, you know, the colonel goes in there, comes out like an hour and half later, and he just, he orders his troops to turn around. He goes, no, we're with Yeltsin now.

And Portneill points out that that was probably the most, I don't know, It's a world-changing example of just initiative by small, you know, junior officers in the last 30 years or whatever. Because literally a coup, which, you know, its failure brought down the Soviet Union. It happened just because a bunch of lieutenants and captains told a lieutenant colonel, this is how we need to do things. And that colonel allowed himself to be convinced. So, yeah, that's a good example of the military not being properly subverted and a neutral political movement, because Yeltsin was no longer a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. the fact that he hadn't been neutralized meant that the coup failed.

In Russia, during the period of instability that followed the first bourgeois February 1917 revolution, the railway men's union emerged as a major source of direct power. Vichgah, the all-Russian executive committee of the union of railroad employees, played a decisive role in the defeat of General Kornilov's Putsch by simply refuel. fusing to work the railroads that were that were to carry the soldiers to Petrograd. Later, when Alexander Corensky, the Russian provisional government's minister chairman, fled the city following Lenin's October coup and took refuge with Commander Pieter Krasnoff's army contingent, Vichchel, threatened to call a general strike, i.e. to leave Krasnov's

troops stranded, unless Kerenzky negotiated peacefully with the Bolshev. Since the Bolsheviks had no intention of negotiating seriously, this amounted to a request for unconditional surrender. In the peculiar conditions of Russia in 1917, the railways and those who controlled them were of crucial importance to the military and to the planners of any coup, unless their forces were already in Petrograd, still then Russia's capital city. Elsewhere, other political forces have the power to exert similar pressures. In poor countries, where the majority of cities,

dwellers can only buy food on a day-to-day basis, well-organized shopkeepers can bring great pressure to bear on the government by refusing to open their shops. Where there is a strong trade union movement, strikes can impede the vital process of establishing the authority of the new government immediately after the coup. Religious and ethnic leaders, for their part, can use the structures of their communities to organize mass demonstrations against a new regime. Therefore, we must identify and evaluate such political forces, and if necessary, their leading personalities and coordinating bodies must be neutralized before the coup. Other political forces lacking such direct power will also have to be dealt with, but this will be part of the process of conciliation and accommodation that follows

the coup. This is, I mean, it's just one long paragraph, but I think he really does explain more to anywhere, all the complexity that would go into doing it. Just because it's one of those things when you war game it out, all the things that are essential, you know, political actors and the capital, there's a lot of there, and it's not something that the average military officer is going to know off their top their head, and it's not necessarily something that, you know, one staff can tell you immediately. So it just planning for this becomes a very detailed process,

like any other kind of military operation, if it's done properly. which is also the Achilles heel. The process of preparing for this, also every step of the way means there's opportunities for things to be leaked. There's so much rugby on Sports Extra from Sky, they've asked me to read the whole lad at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end.

Here goes. This winter sports extra is jam-packed with rugby. For the first time we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live, plus action from the URC, the Challenge Cup, and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European Rugby all in the same place. Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra.

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The dream team. They're back in Disney's Zootropolis 2. Funny books. This is a make or break assignment. In cinemas November 28th. No snake has set foot in Zutropolis in forever. Don't miss the wildest adventure of the year. There's a snake!

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November 30th. Neutralizing the defenses of the state. One of the outstanding features of modern states is their extensive and diversified security system. This is a consequence of the general breakdown and external security and internal stability experienced in many areas of the world in the last two or three generations. Every state maintains armed forces, a police force, and some kind of intelligence organization at the very least. Many states find it necessary to have paramilitary gendarmes in addition to several police forces, duplicate security services, and other variations on the theme.

Yeah, I'll just take a second, because this is part of what I was saying. This section, you could tell that Lutvac, it's not particularly well updated. it would um yeah so it's not the most updated section so yeah when i talk about gendarme jondermorees or jondarm is just the name for the individuals um he calls a paramilitary a gendarme is actually fully militarized police force that's part of the armed forces that actually enforces law in the civilian populace we don't really have many examples of those in the english speaking world um because again these are fully militarized same personnel system as the military um that does And it's not like just internal military policing, it's policing on the population.

In the American context, the only real example of the Jean-Dermarie we have is the U.S. Coast Guard, right? And that's just the fact that both military and law enforcement. But again, they only do things on, you know, within 12 miles of the U.S. coastline and certain navigable waterways. The English-speaking world never really had Jean-Dermarise because inherited from the British tradition, we don't like the idea of armies of occupation, especially against ourselves, which is part of why the British Army wasn't allowed to use red or green, or excuse me, British police originally weren't allowed to use red or green for their own police uniform. That's originally where the blue police uniforms came from, except for Ireland, where the Royal Irish Constabulary was

almost a border-like constabulary. Like I said, the French André Marie, the Italians have the carabinary, the Spanish have the Guardia Civil and in all those countries these are fully militarized I like I keep stressing these are military personnel who enforce law in the population usually in addition to the regular population that does things in civil areas and a lot of places like France and yeah Spain in like extremely rural areas the Jean-Dur Marie's actually have responsibility just because there's not really anybody to nobody wants to be a cop in the middle of nowhere so nobody's to sign up for that so the military the militarized police do that um in the former soviet or former soviet spear they usually call those internal troops and the uh the minors was the ministry of interior

the mbd had separate militarized units the kgb also had separate militarized units who's again their jobs are primarily to enforce things internally as opposed to externally um he'll talk about these being run by the ministry of defense that was the way it was originally up until like the 80s most of the countries that had a gendarmeries their commissioned officers were actually trained at the same academies as army officers um there was actually a move away from that like in the late 90s early 2000s where again they deploy overseas as part of the the militaries of these respected countries um like i i dealt a little bit with caribornery in iraq but again their primary when they're in the host countries doing things internally they've actually in the last few decades largely been taken over by the ministry of interior um and again

Ministry of Interior, everywhere except for the United States, the Interior Ministry, Interior Department actually is responsible for internal security. So they have the police, they have immigrations and customs, they have domestic counterintelligence. The British called that the Home Secretary of the Home Office and the United States. Homeland Security kind of sort of functions like that. The other thing I was going to say before we get into it is he talks about like municipal police departments. basically everywhere in the EU except for Britain in a couple rare, which is in the EU anymore, obviously, in a couple rare exceptions, they don't really have municipal police departments anywhere. One of the things that came out of the EU attempts to harmonize laws is basically the last

the municipal departments were either absorbed into the national police or in the case of federal states like Germany. the individual was a Bundes or what they go a Bundeslander the federal states actually own the police so yeah

that's just something to understand just because like I said he did not do the best job updating the partner security forces there's so much rugby on sports extra from Sky

they've asked me to read the whole lot at the same speed I usually use for the legal bit at the end here goes this winter sports extra is jampacked with rugby for the first time

we've got every Champions Cup match exclusively live bus action from the URC the Challenge Cup and much more. Thus the URC and all the best European rugby all in the same place. Get more exclusively live tournaments than ever before on Sports Extra.

Jam packed with rugby. Phew, that is a lot of rugby. Get Sports Extra on Sky for 15 euro a month for 12 months. Search Sports Extra. New Sports Extra customers only. Standard Pressing applies after 12 months for the terms apply.

Hops and Wild. Wild and hops. The dream team. They're back in Disney's Zootropolis too. Funny books. This is a make or break assignment. In cinemas, November 28th. A wild snake has set foot in Zootropolis in forever.

Don't miss the wildest adventure of the year. Who's the snake? I want the fuck. Send that rabbit. All right, carrots. Any idea where you want to start? Disney Zootropolis 2 in Cinema's November 28th. Good luck.

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In the pre-1914 world, states were not noticeably less aggressive than they are in the present-day international society, but the lack of off-rail transport and resistance. individual attachment to diplomatic convention resulted in a certain span of time between hostility and hostilities. The modern pattern of military operations, a surprise attack on undeclared war, has as natural consequence the military peace. Instead of small professional armies acting as cadres for wartime expansion, many states attempt to maintain permanent armies capable of immediate defense, and therefore offense. In countries of Muslim population, local or immigrant, the rise of Islamist insurgent and terrorist movements has led to an expansion of internal security forces.

Paramilitary and undercover police outfits have become common in many states, including democratic ones. In the 1930s, the United States had fewer than 300,000 troops in its armed forces. The only significant intelligence operation was a small and supremely efficient U.S. Navy code-breaking outfit, while internal security forces were limited to the Treasury's secret service that was mostly active against currency foragers, though it supplied the presidential bodyguard and the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose high ambitions were constrained by small budgets. In 2015, the U.S. Marine Corps alone had some 184,000 men and women in uniform, while the entire uniform military establishment has a population of some 1.4 million,

even after many large reductions, thereby still outnumbering the total population of some 70 UN member states. Moreover, while the armed forces have greatly diminished in numbers since the end of the Cold War, notwithstanding all subsequent intervention wars, the intelligence community has grown enormously

into a many-headed bureaucratic monster, largely because each intelligence failure caused by gross errors and uses Congress to give even more money, to those who fail, instead of the opposite. I am old enough to have heard Secretary of State Dean Atchison deplore the State Department's failure to retain the intelligence function within its purview in the formative years of 1945 to 1947, when the abolition of the wartime standalone Office of Strategic Services OSS was followed by the formation of the very small and improvised Central Intelligence Agency with some OSS people as a temporary expedient. At that time, the State Department could have easily absorbed that orphan entity, but the career foreign service officers of those days disliked its ex-O-S-Semigre,

read Jewish, intellectuals, and assorted tough guys, and therefore allowed the rise of the Central Intelligence Agency as an entirely independent agency, which over the years has gained ever greater funding, regardless of its abysmal performance, and has become a powerful competitor in the policymaking process. Look at fact lays out the part that it's not so much that they were Jewish intellectuals as the fact that their immigrants were communists. Right. Yeah.

I mean, that's pretty well known. I mean, all you have to do is look at who is being targeted by organizations like Hueck. Yeah, one of the easiest examples, too, is the international brigades, the Spanish communist international brigades, which you talked about. in the last book. A number of people from Americans from those brigades actually involved in the OSS, involved in early intelligence operations. So it's, yeah, that was one of the weirdest things about the early CIA is, yeah,

you had a lot of guys from skull and bones, you know, old wasps. But like I said, you also had outright commies, which maybe they needed their skill sets, but that should tell you everything about who was there in the beginning. Worse still, the CIA itself failed to live up to its name from the start because the Army, Navy, and the Air Force retained their own separate intelligence organizations. The subsequent merging of those organizations beginning in the mid-1960s did not ensure centralization either because its instrument, the Defense Intelligence Agency, did not include the codebreakers, a handful of talents pre-1941, in the thousands by 1945, and later embodied into the immense national security. agency NSA, whose ambition to intercept any and every electromagnetic transmission, including the idle chatter of infants with cell phones, was merely dented by the revelations of Edward Snowden, the most patriotic of traitors. But the Hydra has many more heads,

19 of them at the last count, though there may be more. We're going to say something? No, the, well, yeah, I guess. One of the things that's pointed out, the Central Intelligence Agency, The head of the CIA, traditionally was not called the head of the CIA. He was called the director of central intelligence. When they created the Office of National Intelligence, it was changed to the director of the central intelligence agency. But the point is, originally the CIA, again, there was the turf battle whether or not the different militaries and the State Department are going to continue to have intelligence capacities, which all of them do to some degree. But it was sort of understood that the CIA was going to serve as, through the intelligence community, basically a

collector but an aggregator that would you know aggregate all the different material into one place and before it was disseminated to the president or the rest of the executive branch and as lefax said that basically never happened and um which basically again it created number one it begs the question why exactly we had the CIA if it doesn't do what we said it was going to do but every time we allow the the expansion of the intelligence community as he says agencies and counting. We haven't, you know, or haven't provided a better way of aggregating and disseminating this information.

So yeah, we've got all these people collecting. But if you can't make sense of it and you can't get to the source or the people who need that information, why are you doing that? And that's the, the professional issue with American intelligence. Is it just so many special interest groups controlling and having a say that it's just competition? I mean, well, that's part of it. of it um i think part of it is we have this this allergy that we're not willing to disband and eliminate federal agencies even when we want to replace it with something new very often we'll

aggregate things like you know immigration and customs returned into ice but we aren't willing to just destroy something and start over because unless you do that you're just perpetuating the uh the legacy problems and whatever organization so um yeah most armies that are militaries that had like severe setbacks and then bounce back it's usually because they did massive reorganizations in which they just completely disassembled intelligence and security agencies that weren't working starting over um germany being a great example but even canada right canada's got like its third intelligence agency because the military did it then the rcmp the mounies did it then they said no we need our own intelligence agency so they prove that you can you know a first

world, democratic, liberal, state can take apart something and rebuild it. And we're just not willing to do that. All right. Number one, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, ODI&I, an additional bureaucratic and would-be analytical echelon established after the 9-11 intelligence debacle and given the impossible task of coordinating the work of the remaining 18 entities and the even more impossible task of fusing their intelligence into a coherent whole. Two, the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, whose thousands of employees include very few people who know any foreign languages other than in Spanish, perhaps, even fewer people who know any useful language, and very few undercover operators, the so-called Knox non-official cover,

as opposed to general-purpose analysts and an infinity of managers, very few of whom have any field experience other than service and foreign stations, i.e. offices within U.S. embassies abroad. The overall result is to CIA operatives do not emulate their British and Israeli counterparts by infiltrating terrorist organizations. Indeed, they have so little field experience of any kind that most of the CIA employees killed overseas were the victims of their own an experience or those of their managers safely at home. the frequency of its drastic reorganizations, the 2015 version is labeled from the ground up, shows that the CIA leaders are aware of its incompetence,

but to gain quality by cutting it down to a small number of truly expert experts and truly operational operatives goes against a bureaucratic logic of unceasing growth. Managerialism. Yeah. Like I said, you have to be willing to take something apart and replace it. And the American Way has largely been, it's performative. We're pretending to transfer something, and we just relabel what already existed before, and the same shit happens over and over again.

Three, the very much larger NSA with the world's largest gathering of computers and an ever-growing number of linguists who can translate an ever-shinking proportion of all communications intercepted. It also intercepts and analyzes missile telemetry, radar emissions, etc. 4. The Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence OICI of the U.S. Department of Energy, responsible for all nuclear-related information, with a major role in monitoring the nuclear activities of Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. This role, however, is impeded by the CIA's inability to insert its own agents, even in the proximity of installations, let alone inside them, very understandably in the case of fully closed North Korea, not so in the other cases.

5, 6, and 7. The separate intelligence organizations under the colossal U.S. Department of Homeland Security hurriedly established after the 9-11 attacks by merging very diverse agencies which included the U.S. Secret Service to repress counterfeiting as well as for presidential protection, the intelligence units of the border and custom services, the U.S. Coast Guard intelligence, the Office of Homeland Security Investigations, and so on. 8. The Bureau of Intelligence and Research, INR, of the U.S. Department of State,

the smallest, cheapest, and most useful of the lot. The Office of Terror, 9. The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence of the U.S. Treasury Department. 10, the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA of the U.S. Department of Defense. 11, the national... I was going to say about 10, the DIA. I have still never had anybody explain to me what they actually do as distinct from every other intelligence.

I mean, I've had special forces, yeah, special operations officers. I've had military intelligence officers. I've had people who worked in the various intelligence agencies, and none of them can really explain what the DIA does and how it's distinct from every other agency. Because again, the DIA doesn't necessarily involve the tactical level, meaning the actual intelligence that is part of various military units. So, again, I'm not really sure what they do and nobody's been able to explain to me. 11. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, NGA.

12. The National Reconnaissance Office NRO, which operates satellites. 13, the U.S. military cyber command, a specified command. 14, the U.S. Air Force Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, ISR. 15, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, NASIC, NACN.SIC. 16, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, INSCOM. 17, the National Ground Intelligence Center, NGIC, part of the U.S. Army yet national. 18, the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, MCIA. And then 19, the U.S. Navy Department's Office of Naval Intelligence, ONI.

That's probably one of the older ones, isn't it? Yeah, like you said earlier, Naval Intelligence with the Code Breakers, is the oldest intelligence. agency of the U.S. military and it's like the only real intelligence assets that the United States military had other than the FBI going into World War II. So again, not to talk about any conspiracy theories or all the things that happened around the Pearl Harbor attacks, but it it, I've always thought that the fact that the U.S. never bothered with intelligence probably had a huge contributor to that problem. Of course, now we have a bunch of these things to do less. Say that again.

I'm sorry to step on you. Yeah, I was saying, but now we have 22-something agencies, but they seem to be doing even worse off, so maybe I'm wrong there. Finally, under the Department of Defense, 20, the FBI's National Security Branch, and 21, the Office of National Security Intelligence, ONSI, of the Drug Enforcement Agency, DEA.

The nominally highest-ranking ODNI was established under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 in the futile hope of coordinating all these separate intelligence organizations and fusing the knowledge scattered in a huge number of separate brains sitting in separate buildings. The much more economical alternative of unifying them instead was not even considered because to cut down and consolidate when against the post-disaster mood of doing more rather than less. That more is less when it comes to intelligence will no doubt be recognized one day.

One peculiarity... I was saying, always be careful the guy who wants to help all the time. One peculiarity is that the U.S. Congress specifically legislated a strong suggestion that director should be an off-duty military officer. It is desirable that either the director or the principal deputy director of national intelligence, not both, should be an active duty commissioned officer in the armed forces. That, no doubt, was meant to stop presidents from appointing their unqualified friends and campaign contributors to the job, regardless of qualifications, as they do with ambassadors. Or, like, FEMA, if you remember, when Hurricane Katrina happened.

I think the guy who was running FEMA had, like, formerly been a caterer. Yeah, I mean, that's always the issues, right? I mean, we have senior executive service in the various agencies. We've got people who come up from the civil service and we have people who are appointed. And yeah, there's always that problem with the appointees. Of course, the civil service is there's so many problems with the civil service. To begin with the fact, we're effectively using the same portal that we recruit people for the post office in order to do intelligence collections. And FBI agents, so it's as bad as the appointees are, I'm not sure the civil servants are that much better.

Hey, let's not knock people who work at the post office. I mean, the president of Somalia used to work there. Is he still the president of Somalia? Well, one of the warlords used to be a U.S. Marine. Muhammad Faria ID's son. Involved in the invasion at that time. And ID took over his clans, militia. But, yeah.

Yeah, I forget what his name was. Something ID. President of Somalia worked at the, yeah, he worked. It's a post office in Buffalo, New York. Yeah, so. That made them qualify. I don't like to knock people at the post office, but, again, the demands that go into that are a lot different than running national security, and we effectively use these

same personal system to recruit everybody. Yeah. Now, we'll have the post office around here, good people. All right. Another peculiarity is that the DNI may not serve concurrently as director of the CIA of position theoretically greatly diminished by the very existence of the DNI. So far, however, it is the CIA director who continues to visit the White House most often, even though the president's daily brief has been produced by a joint group and not just a CIA since February 15, 2014.

In any case, the greatest limitation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is the Defense Department's continuing control of the three intelligence organizations that have by far the largest budgets, the NSA, the NRO, and the NGA, and of all military intelligence activities, except for U.S. Coast Guard intelligence, which comes under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. An American John Armoury. It said it's an American John Donnery, just like I said earlier. Ah, okay. All right.

New section. Nothing can remedy the confusions, gaps, and disjunctions caused by the fragmentation. of information flows into so many different organizations, certainly not the ever-growing new bureaucracy of the Director of National Intelligence. Indeed, at six centers and 15 offices so far are further fragmenting knowledge so that more data equals less intelligence, i.e. knowledge both useful and timely. That's pretty much the issue everywhere with intelligence.

It's the issue in the private sector, too, is, yeah, you can have an ever-growing amount of data, but knowing what the data means in a timely manner is forever the issue. And like I said, it's just a perpetual issue that I don't know there's a perfect solution to. Contrary to popular legend, and contrary to the 2015 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Torture report, the CIA has never been an excessively independent, let alone a rogue entity, an excessive independent, and excessive independence is not the problem of any other U.S. intelligence organization either. The problem, rather, is their persistent failure to perform effectively because their people will not go where the vital information might be found, not even these days, to join the Islamic State,

which takes in all comers as volunteers with no way in investigating them. Well, why would you want to join an Israeli? Never mind. Of course, how do we know that they don't? I mean, again, undercover operations are by definition secret. Clearly, the attempt to obtain all knowledge from overhead images and electronic intercepts alone is less and less successful, as adversaries design their activities around their limitations. Even fledgling terrorists now understand the needs to stay away from cell phones and to use the internet without being caught,

while Chinese and Russians who cannot hide their aircraft and submarines can nevertheless, less operate them evasively. No state has been able to emulate such a luxuriant growth, not even the Soviet Union in the 1970s, when its military expenditures were growing without limit and wrecking the economy, and not even today's China, which gets by with military intelligence services and the Ministry of State Security, Zhongwa, Remnin, I'm... I don't speak. No. Cantonese. Yeah, I'm not doing that. Ministry of State Security is what the Soviets called the KGB originally or

committee against state security. So they copied that acronym into Cantonese, which I don't speak. Okay. Albeit abundantly manned and well funded, its sin is an over-reliance on ethnic Chinese agents in place, which exposes all overseas Chinese insensitive positions to inevitable suspicion. without being able to keep up with the United States, most states have done their very best. Even a medium...

No, I was just going to say. Daryl has talked about it on his show several times that there's been several intelligence breaches in the U.S. military and U.S. government by Chinese intelligence, and every time it's involved somebody was ethnic Chinese. They may not have been from the PRC, but they were ethnic Chinese.

And in any other country in the world, like he said, it's kind of obvious where their spies come from, except for the United States where, you know, it may be illegal to point that out. So we keep getting caught by that. Yeah, I can think two groups right off the bat. It's just like, oh, well. Yeah, that's the other group.

And you can't say it either time. Yep. Even a medium-sized country like Italy with no hostile neighbors of any military consequence found it necessary to maintain substantial internal security and foreign intelligence services, even before the advent of post-9-11 Islamic terrorism, which also occupies the attention

of the national police, publica secueira Reza. Public security, whatever, in trends. Yeah, yeah. And the paramilitary carabinet.

That's their gendarmer. Yeah. Uniquely an independent service in Italy on par within Navy, etc. More embattled states, enroll large parts of the entire population and various kinds of defense and security forces. Israel used to be surrounded by declared enemies that now has allies on two sides.

With no natural defenses, very little strategic depth, and no protection from any military alliance, it's an extreme case. Even in 1967, when it only had the population of a medium-sized city, it has almost tripled since. Israel was able to field more than 250,000 men and women in the June, 1967. graph is really dated. Yeah, I mean, who are the allies on two sides? Tell me these allies you speak of. From the point of view of the coup planners, the size and power of the armed forces, police,

and security agencies is both a great obstacle and a great help. On the one hand, as Leon Trotsky pointed out long ago, the technological improvement of weapons, means of transport, and communications has widened the capability gap between organized military forces and civilians equipped with improvised weapons. Trotsky noted that, while the French mobs of 1789 could rush positions defended by infantry soldiers with their one-shot muzzleloaders, in 1917, a Russian mob, however large and determined, would be cut down by modern automatic weapons. By modern, he meant the clumsy, very heavy, water-cooled Maxim machine gun on his tripod. Today, every single single

soldier on mob control can be armed with an automatic weapon with a similar rate of fire or a greater rate of fire. Yeah. We also train people not to use automatic weapons, their individual weapon. But yeah, that's a great example, right? Historically, when you had to reload weapons to include cannons, you know, it was always the danger you could be out, you know, rushed by a larger mob. But if you can keep shooting, it becomes a lot harder to rush them.

Yeah. England did a good job of that in India. On the other hand, the increase in the size of uninformed forces and their technological evolution have improved the characteristics of the state security apparatus as a recruitment ground for the coup. The modern army or security force is usually too large to be a coherent social unit bound by traditional loyalties. The need for technically minded personnel has broken the barriers that often limited recruitment to particular social groups within each country. tribesmen and Bedouin may be politically reliable as well as picturesque, but they are often

technically inadequate as pilots, tank crews, or even to staff a modern police force. That's also one of the reasons why successful multicultural societies, you know, Singapore being the great example, a lot of times don't have volunteers' armies and volunteer militaries and actively work against that because in the case of Singapore, only certain people in certain ethnic groups, and it wasn't the Chinese plurality, and it definitely wasn't the majority of them who are a hawka Chinese. So the big risk is anytime you have a post-colonial multicultural society, is an all-voluntary army can usually become an ethnic mafia.

So as they said, you know, that's one of the reasons why many states, even have they have very little immediate security concerns. There's not an immediate enemy on their border that they keep a draft to keep a large army is because they want that diversity in order to make it harder to Plotico, which is also essentially the same strategy that, fuck, Amazon is used to prevent, what do you call it, unionization, it's in the shops. If there's a different culture, even if you speak the same language, it becomes a lot harder to organize. Sorry for my swear. No, that's fine.

I think he says tribesmen and Bedouins here often technically inadequate as I mean, even Saudis. I mean, when they started bombing, when they started bombing Yemen, they had to be guided by Americans in the jumps. They have huge problems because even as late as, God, I knew people would say early 2000, late 90s who had been embedded with the Saudi army. So you have, was it the Royal Guard, the National Guard, who were supposed to protect the royal family, and they're mostly from a certain, a couple of different tribes and ethnic groups.

But the military at the whole, they had huge problems into the 2000s with illiteracy. And again, you can only train somebody so much if they're illiterate. You know, you actually have to read instructions on bomb sites and things like that, especially since you're not going to keep all that in your head all the time. So, yeah, many of these armies, that yeah they have a group from politically reliable ethnic groups but that doesn't mean that they're selecting you know for you know meritocratic skill and uh the big problem is again people in the hills do not necessarily have the best education in the world and i say that somebody's families from

appalach yeah biolanianism is just another form of it just more tribal the fact that the personnel of the state security system are both numerous and diverse means that we, the planners of the coup, will be able to infiltrate the system. In doing so, we will have the dual task of turning a few of its component units into active participants of the coup while neutralizing the others. This does not mean that we have to fight them, but merely that we have to prevent their possible intervention against us for the limited span of the coup. whether the purpose of our infiltration. Yeah, sorry, but I was just going to say that that last point is probably the most important thing to understand, right? Possible intervention doesn't mean we got to fight them. We have to take them out of action hypothetically when you're planning this.

So what can you do to take a force out of action? Hopefully without fighting them, because that way you don't damage them and you don't create internal animosity. You also don't, you know, damage your own infrastructure, your own armed forces, which you're going to need in the future. Whether the purpose of our infiltration and subversion of the defenses of the state is to turn the unit concerned into an active participant of the coup, or whether it is merely defensive, the methods to be followed will depend on the character of each particular organization. The raw material for our efforts is the whole spectrum of the coercive forces of the state, and as these vary substantially in their equipment, deployment, and psychological outlook, we shall examine them separately. I think this is probably a good place to stop. Yeah. We're at like 50 minutes. Yeah.

Yeah, and I can come back next time unless you got somebody lined up. But yeah, like I said, the big thing that can't. Go ahead. I was saying I don't have anybody lined up. Yeah, and like I said, one of the big things that just popped out is some of this is really dated. Like the Israel, having friends on all sides. But yeah, there's very much the, again, when he talks about, you know, military police know the actual gendarms are actually genre Marie are actually

militarized and they're usually a dual force which is make some so unique and something we don't generally have in the Coast Guard in the American context but it also it illustrates the point he made in earlier chapters of how to prevent a coup mila many countries have dual purpose security forces you know different organizations do the same functions under separate commands in order to make it harder to infiltrate them and have a coup So that's like I said, that is, you know, something we see in a lot of places. Also the fact that, like he said, the issue about force diversity in a military,

and again, to make it less of a, you know, a loyalist faction of one specific group in the country. But, yeah, it makes it easier to infiltrate it. It also potentially makes it harder to subvert meaning, yeah, you can get guys in there, but it doesn't mean you necessarily can have them take control of an organization or subvert an organization. Cool. Well, I mean, I appreciate everything. And yeah, let's do this. Let's pick this up again later in the week if that's okay. Let me just do a quick plug. Thomas and I watched the 1979 Mel Gibson Mad Max. And we commented on it and I put it up on Gumroad if you want to check it out. Free Man Me On The Wall.com forward slash movies. All the movies that Thomas and I have reviewed are there. you can see the other ones as well. Taxi driver seems to be the one that right now,

everybody has, anybody who's watch it, you know, it's like that's the one that most people have went and got. Yeah, I still need to go see the one you did on Red Dawn, the guy you requested. All right, John, I appreciate it.

Talk to you later.