The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads 'Coup D'état' by Edward N. Luttwak - Part 5 w/ John Fieldhouse

Episode Date: August 17, 2024

64 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 middle 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.

Those people who love going out shopping for Black Friday deals, they're mad, aren't they? Like, proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it, if you ask me. It's the fastest way to a meltdown. Me, I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff, and it doesn't get faster than Appliancesdelivered.e. Top brand appliances, top brand electricals, and if it's online, it's in stock. With next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances delivered.e, part of expert electrical.

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Two hours free parking, just off the M50, exit 13. It's a Black Friday secret. Keep it to yourself. If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and ad free, head on over to freemam Beyond the Wall.com forward slash support. There's a few ways you can support me there. One, there's a direct link to my website. Two, there's subscribe star.

Three, there's Patreon. Four, there's substack. And now I've introduced Gumroad, because I know, know that a lot of our guys are on Gumroad and they are against censorship. So if you head over to Gumroad and you subscribe through there, you'll get the episodes early and ad free, and you'll get an invite into the Telegram group. So I really appreciate all the support everyone's giving me, and I hope to expand the show even more than it already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to part five of my reading of kudai ta by edward lutwak john's back how you doing john

good good sir and hopefully i'm coming in clear now sound good uh just want to remind everybody that thomas and i do movie reviews the latest one is the 1979 mel gibson movie mad max if you go over to freeman beyond the wall dot com forward slash movies there are links to There are links there where you can pick them up. All right, that's it. So let's get going. Did you want to clear a couple things up from the last episode before we even get started? Yeah, the first off was I gave the wrong date for the coup against Gorbachev,

which was in reality in 91 as opposed to 89. And the other comment I made about local law enforcement, basically being a municipal-sized law enforcement being a thing in the past in the eve, apparently the last couple of years it's actually started to come back because France actually authorized laws in like 22 to allow local police again and they've actually had some of the first cities townships actually established some of the first local police departments in at least 30 something years do you know if they're just basically arms of the larger regime or are they more localized or you

didn't look into it well in the case of France they have the same uniform same rank structure, same pay structure, everywhere for all local police departments, and probably same training. So, yeah, essentially they're the central state. So essentially, it lets whoever the manager or mayor is of the local township to have his own security force in their very limited situations under his own control. Okay. All right, we're going to pick up right where we left off. Stop me anytime. New heading.

Neutralizing the armed forces. In June 1967, the Israelis, having defeated the other Arab armies, were turning to deal with Syria. The head of Syria's ruling junta, National Revolutionary Council, Salad Jadid, kept the two best brigades of the Syrian army in the barracks at Ahams and Damascus. Syria's war minister and the country's future leader, Hafez al-Assad, praised be his name, begged Yadid to allow him to send the fifth and 70th brigades to the front. But Hadid, after physically assaulting him, pointed out that, though the brigades might save a few square miles of territory, to send them to the front, would jeopardize the survival of the regime. The leftist Ba'ath government was not popular with any important section of the population, and the two brigades were the main supports of the regime.

Though hardly patriotic, Hadid or Jadid was at least realistic. When he had taken power in February 1966, he had done so by means of the two crucial brigades whose officers were politically and ethnically allied to him, and which displaced a previous strongman, Hafez, from power when his brigades happened to be away from Damascus or were infiltrated by Jadid's men. everywhere in the world, while the number of doctors, teachers, and engineers was only increasing slowly, was only increasing slowly, the numerical strength of armies expanded rapidly after 1950, and only declined again when the Cold War ended in 1990, give or take a year. It is interesting to note that while technical improvements in, say, agriculture, have allowed a diminishing number of farmers to produce ever-larger amounts of food, armies needed an ever larger labor force during the 40-year period,

even though their productivity, or rather destructivity, per head, also increased very rapidly. A modern platoon of 30 men has several times the effective firepower of its 1945 counterpart. It is doubtful whether farming techniques have improved to the same extent. The effectiveness of modern soldiers with their rapid transport, reliable communications, and efficient weapons mean that even one single formation loyal to the regime could intervene and defeat the coup. If, as is likely, our forces are small and the mass of the people and the rest of the state's forces are neutral. Our investigation of the armed forces of the proposed target state must, therefore, be a complete one. We cannot leave at any force capable of intervention, however,

small this um i mean these for a few chapter or few paragraphs rather um it's an interesting case i don't disagree with look back so much as uh i wonder if you would still take away the uh the same conclusions since uh yeah we've got more fire power in smaller units and there's still the potential for you know small units to radically change things because you know the soviet coup is a good example that battalion effectively ended the entire coup against gorbachev but i wonder if that, or I wonder in light of all the things we know in the last few decades, he would have the same conclusions, rather.

You would think if he did, he may have updated them in 2016. Interesting. All right. Though most states have naval and air forces as well as armies, we shall concentrate our attention on the latter

because the procedures to be followed are usually the same for all three services and because, with some exceptions, Only land forces will be important from the point of view of the coup. It is, of course, possible to use fighter bombers to take out a presidential palace instead of sending a team to arrest the occupant. This was done in the 1963 Iraqi coup, but it is a rather extreme way of playing the game.

Although the ratio of firepower achieve per person subverted is very high indeed, tactical bombing of one's future capital city and prospective post-cue residents is not calculated to inspire confidence, in the new government. It doesn't make any sense to break the thing you're fighting over. In certain geographical settings, however, the transport element of naval and air forces make them even more important than the Army, as, for example, in the case of Indonesia. With major population centers scattered over two large islands and hundreds of small ones,

and with the very limited road facilities on the lesser islands, a unit of naval Marines or paratroopers, will be more effective than some much larger Army unit located, in the wrong place. When the communist attempted Ku-Kum Revolution unfolded in Indonesia on September 30th, 1965, the military commanders

were able to use their control of air transport to great advantage. Though communist infiltrated army units were very powerful, they were in the wrong place. While many sat in the Borneo jungles, the anti-communist paratroopers and Marines took over Jakarta

and eventually the country. Yeah, that's, you know, one of the perpetual issues of modern wars. Firepower is great, mass is great. Being able to put it where you need it is not always the same thing as having a lot of it. Armies are divided into certain traditional formations that vary from country to country, such as divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, companies, and platoons. Beyond this formal structure, however, the focus of decision-making is usually concentrated at one or two particular levels. It is very important for us to identify which level of command is the important one, and then concentrate our efforts on it.

Table 3.1 illustrates several possible alternatives that we may face, though in order to achieve infiltration in depth, we may, in fact, have to operate on many levels below the real center. Operating above it would be pointless. I'm going to finish reading before we look at the table. Yeah, I would just summarize the table. We'll be here all day. Yeah, there we go. in A, in table 3.1, the operational echelon is the battalion.

If there are persons holding the rank of divisional commanders, they will probably be officers who have been eliminated from the real chain of command and giving gaudy uniforms and exalted ranks as a sweetener. If in this case we were to subvert a brigade or divisional commander, and he would then issue orders on our behalf to the battalion, the latter used to receiving its orders from the G.H. would probably query or report the order. Thus, apart from mere ineffectiveness, there could also be a further risk in operating at the wrong echelon. In B, where almost every echelon is

operational, we can subvert the control mechanism at almost any level, and orders given on our behalf will be obeyed at each lower level. In C, again, we can operate at all levels, except those of division and battalion. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar.

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proper mad. Brenda wants a television and she's prepared to fight for it, if you ask me. It's the fastest way to a meltdown. Me, I just prepare the fastest way to get stuff and it doesn't get faster than Appliances Delivered.com. Top brand appliances, top brand electricals, and if it's online, it's in stock. With next day delivery in Greater Dublin. Appliances delivered.aE, part of expert electrical. See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. Or you know, fight Brenda. Did you know, those Black Friday deals everyone's talking about?

They're right here at Beacon South Quarter. That designer's sofa you've been wanting. It's in Seoul, Boe Concept and Rocheburoix. The Dream Kitchen, check out at Cube Citchens. Beacon South Quarter Dublin, where the smart shoppers go. two hours free parking just off the m50 exit 13 it's a black friday secret keep it to yourself yeah um i know this can come across is very confusing to those who are outside the military but again like any other organization in the world we have we have defined chain of command and most armies you have a

semi fractal structure where you repeat usually base three or base five from platoons the company battalions on up so depending on you may have one sort of you may have one sort of structure that, you know, is how you organize, which primarily exists for accountability in garrison and training. But some of those echelons may largely be bypassed depending on how you fight. And again, that a lot of times depends on the individual military in question. So I don't, the principle matters in his relevant universally, but I couldn't tell you which countries necessarily follow one versus the other model according to how he's defining them. Though it may seem that the location of the main focus of control and communication is an arbitrary one,

in reality it depends on very firm psychological and technical factors. Unless the standard of training and motivation is high enough, soldiers have to be welded into great uniform blocks under the firm control of their superiors because they have neither the discipline nor the capability to fight as individuals. Even highly motivated soldiers cannot be allowed to operate far from the concentration of troops, unless they are linked by an efficient system of communications, that enables them to receive new orders and to report on their situations. In general, the easier the terrain, the lower the degree of discipline and efficiency, the larger

the size of the unit that will be allowed to operate independently. Conversely, the more sophisticated the troops and equipment, and the closer the terrain, as in jungles or swamps, the smaller the unit operating on its own. The two extremes came face to face in the Sinai in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when the Egyptian army was organized into three large blocks under rigid HQ control and incapable of independent action. The Israelis, on the other hand, operated in many small brigade-sized groups, which concentrated for mass and separated to infiltrate in a fluid and flexible manner.

In the 1973 war, Egyptian forces were much better trained, and their leadership was much more determined, but their command system was still very rigid, and they were again outmaneuvered. For the coup, it means that if orders are properly issued, they will be obeyed uncritically, and that is how General Abdul Fattah Saeed, Hussein Khalil al-Sisi, became Egypt's ruler in 2013. That last sentence is the key part. It's important that the orders are delivered in a manner that's organic, because if they're artificial,

everybody's going to immediately stop and ask why, to include people who are maybe on your side. When we have determined, which is a true operational echelon in the various formations of the country concerned, we can go on to the next stage, namely identifying which formations have the capability to intervene for or against the coup. We shall follow two main criteria,

the nature of the unit concerned, and the location of the particular unit. were explored in a case study of the Portuguese armed forces, chosen because they are representative of many others. New heading, the Portuguese armed forces in 1967. The Salazar regime in Portugal was based on a partnership between the landowners and classes, the newer industrial and business elite, and the bureaucratic middle class, which staffed the civil service and the officer level of the armed forces. As in Spain, Air Force and Navy officers tended to be rather less conservative than Army officers.

Also, as in Spain, the two services were deliberately kept thin in number and resources. Army. The total strength was about 120,000 men distributed as follows, excluding administrative personnel. Infantry division with some medium tanks, partially used as a training formation, added about one half of its theoretical establishment. Of the total number of soldiers in the unit, only about 2,000 had any motor transport, apart from the small number equipment armored vehicles. At any one time, any of the troops were new conscripts

with little training or discipline. Location Central Portugal. That issue about organic motor transportation is a huge issue. Keep in mind, maneuver units, combat units don't necessarily own their own transportation assets. So putting them somewhere requires significantly more coordination than just giving an order to those units. and, you know, every time you give an order, it's the opportunity for something to be leaked. 2. Infantry Division. This formation was usually much below strength, with perhaps 3,000 soldiers with some degree of training. Transport, however, was sufficient for perhaps half this number. Location, northern Portugal.

Rest of the Army. The largest number of troops around 100,000 with the highest degree of training, and with the best equipment, were then spread over Portugal's African territories, Angola, Mozambuels. Zambique and Portuguese Guinea. Navy. Though the Portuguese had a great naval tradition, and though the overseas provinces would justify a larger Navy for which the U.S. military assistance program could have partially paid, for the reason suggested above it has been kept relatively weak, one destroyer, 14 smaller combat ships, three submarines, and 36 other vessels. Of greater interest to us, 12 support ships, four landing craft, and half a and half a battalion of Marines of the Corpo de Fusolieros,

because of the distance of the African provinces, even if the Navy were particularly loyal to the regime, it could not have brought over many troops from Africa. The Fusilieros themselves were then mostly in distant waters, and in any case, their number was hardly significant. Yeah, for comparison to the U.S., we're talking about colonies that are basically equivalent to, the distance between Argentina and Georgia or Tennessee and the United States.

All right. Air Force. About 14,000 troops. It was then equipped with a variety of old American and Italian aircraft. It's 3,000 paratroopers were then stationed in the African provinces, now the independent states of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau-Bissau. While the transport wing could carry back to Portugal only about a thousand men every 24 hours. And it's not just the ability to carry, but, you know, the rate that you can carry. And that's a good point because an effective coup, generally, you want to do it in about a day. It's important that you get in there, establish control. And you basically, in the course of two days, you know, it becomes a new status quo. Well, if it takes you so many days to go and transport that many people, and it's going to become

really obvious removing that many people fairly quickly, you know, the whole element of surprise is taken away. In the case of Portugal, therefore, although the armed forces numbered about 150,000, only a small fraction of this total could be relevant in the event of a coup. Most of them would be prevented from intervening physically in the Lisbon area because of their location and their lack of suitable transport. Others would only be able to intervene ineffectually since their training and equipment was unsuitable, thus out of the entire arboration. armed forces, only three or four battalions, perhaps four thousand individuals, had an effective intervention capability. The small size of this force reduced the possibility that the coup would

be defeated, but it would also have limited out potential area of recruitment. If the Air Force or Navy did bring back to Portugal some of the troop station in Africa, we would be the government by the time of their arrival. Therefore, they would be under our orders. If we should fail to impose our authority by then, the coup would have failed anyway, and their arrival would not change matters. Unless, that is, we had first subverted the troops in Africa, which would be a rather tortuous way of going about things. This suggests the principal criteria by which we separate out the forces relevant to the coup whether military or not.

The forces relevant to a coup are those whose locations and or equipment enables them to intervene in its locale, usually the capital city, within the 12 to 24-hour block of time that precedes the establishment of its control over the machinery of government. Infiltrating the armed forces. Our initial survey of the armed forces of the target country will have isolated two items of information crucial to the planning of the coup. A, the nature and composition of the units that have an intervention capability. B, the real operational echelon within them. These data are illustrated in table 3.2.

Up to this point, we have been thinking in terms of formal military units, but we must now carry our analysis further in order to identify the key individuals within each particular unit. If we were dealing with a primitive military organization, we could readily isolate those who effectively lead the unit concerned. In the tribal war ban, for example, there will be a few obvious leader types, distinguished by their appearance and less obviously by their dissent or personal repute. The other warriors will only be functionally different from each other because of their individual strength or dexterity. In modern military organizations, it is otherwise.

The efficiency of the organization depends on the use of many different types of weapons and other facilities handled by specialized personnel. In each situation, there will be an appropriate mix of these, and the system therefore depends on two kinds of individuals, the technicians and those who coordinate them, the leaders. 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.

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I want the fox and that rabbit. All right, carrots. Any idea where you want to start? Disney Zoo. Metropolis 2 in Cinema's November 28. Good luck! I love you! This is, I would say, one of the places I have issues will look back just because I don't think he ever effectively defines what he means as a technician or gives an example.

I mean, leaders we understand as commissioned officers, probably not commission officers in a British American or German type structure. And the U.S. military has a concept called technicians, which are Warren officers, which is something American-style warrant officers are different than what the rest of that will cause a warrant officer. But I don't think he ever defines what a technician is. Our next problem, therefore, is to identify the key individuals within those units of the armed forces that are capable of intervening for or against us during the coup. As we have already determined the operational echelon within each particular formation and thus implicitly

identified the leaders, we can now turn to identification of the technicians. Who they are will depend on the nature of the organization and the tasks to be carried out. If, for example, during the course of the coup, the government calls on the help of force. See, in our notational table 3.2, its arrival in the capital could be prevented with the cooperation of just one of these groups. The force operating the communication system between the political leadership and force. The pilot's and their ground staff or the air transport squadron, the guard force at the airport or airports, the control tower personnel at either airport, especially in difficult flying conditions. In general, the more...

Sorry, yeah, I think, I'm assuming those are what he means by technicians in this case. But yeah, that's always the great example. And again, every military will have a doctrine about how it's supposed to fight, which is not necessarily the same as how things work in reality. And especially in staff functions, it's always really important to know because, again, we tend to define clearly all the manager roles within the staff, but it doesn't necessarily mean it works that way in practice. So that requires a lot more specific knowledge of a very specific type of organization. In general, the more sophisticated the organization, the greater its efficiency, but also its vulnerability, either force, force A or force B in table 3.2 could, for example, operate successfully even if quite a few of

its personnel were not cooperating with the leadership. For these forces, losing the cooperation of 10% of their personnel would mean losing approximately 10% of their effectiveness. In the case of force C, however, the loss of perhaps 1% of its men could lead to a total loss of effectiveness for some particular tasks, such as intervening in the capital city. This indicates that when we are trying to neutralize a formation of the armed forces, we should do so through the cooperation of technicians rather than leaders, because the former are both more effective individually and easier and safer to recruit. The second rule, other things being equal,

is that we should choose for neutralization those units with the most complex organization, while choosing the simplest ones for incorporation. This will both reduce our vulnerability from a sudden, affection and minimize the total number of people who must ultimately be recruited. Before we go on to approach and persuade the key individuals to join us, thus giving us effective control of their units, we must have collected sufficient information on the armed forces to know. A, which of the military units could intervene at the time and place of the coup? B, the real command structure within the relevant units and who the leaders are.

C, the technical structure of the units and who the technicians are. That C is probably the most important because, again, if you could knock out transportation, with, again, you know, in 3.2, the C being an example that relies on air traffic, or excuse me, entry as a first air transport to move them, you know, conceivably taking away fuel or taking away air traffic control could keep them from getting off the ground. So that's just a simple example of how you can neutralize a unit. To incorporate a unit, we will need the active cooperation of a number of its leaders, and in the case of a technically simple unit, the defection of some

technicians will not matter greatly. If in otherwise well-infiltrated units, some of the leaders should remain loyal to the pro-coup regime, this should not prove to be a major obstacle. Whether we concentrate on leaders or on technicians will depend on the particular structure of the effective forces of intervention and on the particular political climate. If there is a sharp political division between the troops and their officers, we may be able to incorporate units without the cooperation of any formal leaders at all. The problem of identifying the unofficial leaders will, however, be a very difficult one. In any case, there is no reason to believe that we are planning the coup at a time when such a division has hardened. The technical structures, however, are more

stable, and one of our principal considerations will be to avoid being dependent on too many links in the technical chain. Table 3.3 shows our optimum strategy in infiltrating a typical set of potential intervention forces. Of course, in countries prone to coups, those who order these things are aware of their vulnerability to the defection of parts or their armed forces. It is quite likely, therefore, that the easy battalion, number one, has been carefully chosen for its relationship. liability and its commanders or trusted associates of the ruling group. If this is the case, we may have to work on battalion number three. What we must not do is to rely on battalion number two, because of defection from our cause or even a few of its technicians will have dramatic consequences.

Until we actually start to collect information about the individuals and make the first approaches, we may not know which units are politically tied to the regime. More generally, we will not know what our ultimate recruitment prospects look like in each unit. Though we will have a rough classification in mind, when dividing the units into potential allies and potential neutrals, we should keep the distinction flexible. As we build up a picture of the recruitment potential in each unit, we will concentrate our efforts on the units to be incorporated. The reliability of a unit allied to the coup will be increased if we infiltrate it in depth, but there is little point in over-infiltration a unit that will eventually be neutralized. Every approach to an individual will involve an element

of risk. Every increase in the number of those who know that something is up will reduce our overall security level. We must therefore avoid over-recruitment. If we go to an Army officer and ask him to join in a projected coup, he will be faced, unless he is total loyalist, with a set of options that offer both dangers and opportunities. The proposition could be a plant of the security authorities to determine one's loyalty to the regime. Alternately, the proposition could be genuine but part of an insecure and inefficient plot. Finally, the proposition could come from a team that has every chance of success. Should the proposal be a plant, accepting it could lead to an officer's loss of job and much more.

On the other hand, reporting it might gain the officer the rewards of loyalty. Should it be a genuine proposal, the officer has... the uncertain prospect of benefiting after a coup as against the certain prospect of benefiting immediately from reporting it. The natural thing for someone in this position to do, therefore, is to report it. The whole technique of the approach is designed to defeat this logic. Apart from the rewards of being part of the successful coup, which can be portrayed as being significantly greater than the rewards of loyalty, there is another factor operating in our favor. This is that the person to whom an approach is reported may actually be a supporter of the coup.

We must emphasize, therefore, these two points as much as possible, while underplaying the risk element. But hopefully our potential recruits will be motivated by some considerations beyond greed and fear, with other interests and affiliations entering their choice. Links of friendship with the planners of the coup and a shared political outlook will be important, but usually the crucial considerations will be family, clan, and ethnic links with those planning the coup. In most economically backward countries, different ethnic groups retain their identity, and mass education and mass communications have not broken down traditional rivalries and suspicions among them. In any case, the first steps toward economic progress usually reinforces these conflicts,

and we may often find that the ethnic links are far more important than more recent political affiliation. On that note, I was going to say there's a tendency for Americans to think that tribal affiliation and minor ethnic group, or we think it as minor ethnic group, and religious denomination, there's tendency as Americans to think they're irrelevant or just superficial details, and most of the rest of the world still cares, and in many cases, these are things they will kill and die for. For example, when no factories were being built, there could be no regional conflicts on where to build them. When civil service jobs were all given to citizens of the imperial power, there could be little conflict between ethnic groups on the fair allocation of jobs. Conflicts over jobs or the location of factories are necessarily more intense than the old conflicts over land. While before, only the geographical fringes of the tribe were in contact with the rival. now each tribe fights the other on the national stage. Although a conflict over land can reach a compromise with some middle line,

a factory has to be located either in area A or in area B. The alternative, of course, is to put it on the border of the two provinces, even though this location is usually far from roads and other facilities. It is sometimes done. This is an important paragraph because I think it essentially explains why mass immigration is occurring today because again, it's if you have a distinction between citizens and non-citizens or at least some vestigial difference, you know, suddenly loyalty to one political party or another depends on which one's going to treat you as a member of the in-group or the out-group.

Yeah, agreed. As old conflicts widened in scope and intensity, the instinctual solidarity of the ethnic groups hardens. African tribalism is merely an extreme case of a very general phenomenon. for example, sophisticated and utterly unreligious Jews will happen to marry other Jews, though they may regard themselves as thoroughly assimilated. When there was still a Czechoslovakia and communists to boot, despite Czech and Slovak protestations of national unity, capital investments had to be assigned carefully to each area on an exact percentage basis,

and conflict over this was one of the factors that brought down the government of Anitin Novotny, the Great Survivalist in 1968. In fact, all over the communist eastern Europe of those days, the old rivalries and enmities were just below the surface and the new socialist national policies of the later 1960s and 1970s vigorously revived them. So for people who think that a lot of communism was just, you know, we're so ideological that we hate this person. No, that's an opportunity for one, one group to attack another. Yeah. And like I said, many, many parts of the Middle East politics are essentially that, yeah, these ideologies exist,

but it's no accident that ideological lines are also tribal lines of one sort of another. For instance, you know, Bathism, both Iraq and Syria, was very popular among Arab-speaking Christians. In Romania, almost half a million Germans and a million and a half Hungarians felt that they were not getting a fair deal. Meanwhile, in Yugoslavia, the Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, and Slovenians were all involved in a complex balancing act that ultimately broke down in a bloody civil war. In many places, ethnic divisions are complicated by superimposed religious conflicts. The Igbo nation in Nigeria, for example, has been an endemic conflict with the Muslim northerners for a very long time. But the introduction of Christianity among them has meant that the old Igbo-Hausa conflict has been intensified by a newer Muslim Christian one. I thought Christians weren't violent.

I thought those. Yeah, well, most people outside of the modern West will find. fight when they're violated. Yeah. We will try to make the fullest use of the ethnic matrix without aligning our coup with any particular ethnic faction. In terms of petty tactics, we will match each potential recruit with a recruiter who shares the same affiliation and, if necessary, the image of the coup will be presented

in a similar vein. But we must also take account of a special factor that can be considered a post-colonial phenomenon. Colonial regimes develop the habit of recruiting army personnel from among minority ethnic groups. Groups that were reputed to be more warlike or even more important could be trusted to join in the repression of the majority group with enthusiasm. Yeah, I was going to say before you go, and that was my whole point about a post-colonial multicultural society. There's the danger of a volunteer army becoming an ethnic mafia, which is why places like Singapore insists on ruthlessly enforcing universal manhood and military conscription, you know, no matter how much people don't want it.

After independence, these minorities naturally regressed in terms of political power and social position, but they still staffed much of the armed forces. This has led to the strange spectacle of minorities acting as the official protectors of the very regime that is exerting the pressure on them. Much like America. Yeah, I was just going to say, I was waiting for you to say, Yeah, I mean, a huge amount of American history has been about a Scots-Irish minority, along with, you know, other people from the South and Midwest, being the bulk of the military forces. While we increasingly have a changing ruling class, it sees us as the enemy. The Alawites and Druze of Syria were in the position once the French departed in 1945, and it is hardly surprising that disaffected officers of the two Greeks. groups played a prominent role in most of the many coups that followed independence.

In many parts of Africa, the majority peoples are the reputedly soft coastal tribes, who have captured the political leadership because of superior numbers in education, while much of the army is made up of members of smaller tribes of the interior. Originally, this resulted from the superficial ethnographic theory that the British learned in India and the French learned in Algeria, but which, in African conditions, was little less than absurd. As soon as the officers of the colonial country landed in a new territory, they set about finding the hills, or at least the bush, the more primitive interior. Once there, they tried to recreate their semi-homosexualizing relationship with the Wiley Pathan or Lafier-Kabal,

by recruiting the supposedly tough hill men into the army. The parthons are the post-tons of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Kabil are the burbers of North Africa, and I have no idea why he's arguing this is a sexualized relationship. It seems like he's using it as a metaphor for something, but I don't get it. Yeah, I'm not even sure what. Without setting the stage for an intertribal civil war, there is every incentive to make use of this factor. To the extent that there is an effective political life, however, the ideological outlook of the potential recruit will also be important. important. As far as we are concerned, combining all ranges of the political spectrum against a

right or left extreme will give the most suitable political cover to our coup. The regime of Abda al-Karim Qasim in Iraq, which lasted for five years as a pure balancing act, was finally brought down in 1963 when the moderate nationalist Abda al-Salem Arif persuaded all political factions from left-wing bath to right-wing conservatives to combine against the supposed communist penetration in the government. If there is no extreme faction available, where you say something? No, I was just going to say the table 3 to point four, and there's no reason for us to read it verbatim, but it's just some really interesting cases, specifically in the Levant of the Druze and Alloites. And just as an aside, it's interesting because he's talked primarily about Syria, but both

those ethnic groups expand into Lebanon and even into Israel. And one of the weird aspects of the Israeli military is Druze, especially, I don't know so much about the Hallowaits actually make up a disproportionate compared to their size portion of the regular army, to the point that the Israeli army actually disbanded their Drew's unit and integrated those men into Jewish units just because a huge number of them

actually becoming officers and regular army infantry units and they thought it made more sense to actually train them in Jewish units to begin with. If there is no extreme faction available, we will have to be content with the petty tactics of claiming political kinship with potential recruits. But apart from the virtues of honesty, there is a need for consistency. A systematic presentation of the coup in terms of divergent political lines may eventually lead to our undoing. The film spy games, there's a line that says anytime you tell the target a lie, you have to treat that as the truth from then on out. So one of the points that, like, case officers, people running spies make is you should, the version of the truth you're going with should be as close to what's actually true as possible just because it becomes much easier to keep the story correct when you're telling the truth. Yeah, just simply it's easier to remember the truth than it is a lot.

Exactly. Finding out the ethnic group to which a particular officer belongs is relatively easy. Finding out about his political outlook is more difficult. But the hardest thing of all will be the determining whether he is personally alienated from the higher military leadership. Only the family and the closest friends of an officer will know whether he feels that his superiors are treating him unfairly or running things badly, to the extent that he would welcome a radical change in the whole regime. Unless we have a direct line to the individual concerned, we will have to use outside information to undermine his inner feelings. A standard intelligence procedure is to follow the career pattern of officers in order to find out which ones have been passed over for promotions, assuming all things being equal, that they will make good prospects for recruitment. In many countries, promotions within the armed forces are announced in official Gazettes, and starting from a particular class at the military academy,

one can follow the career of each officer from their graduations of the present. In some countries where promotions are not published for security reasons, one can carry out the exercise by using back copies of the telephone directory if they still exist, where their names will be printed along with their changing ranks. In places where neither telephone directories nor official gazettes are good sources of information, we could use more desperate expedients, getting an old boy from the relevant years to circulate proposals for a reunion, or building up many biographies from personal acquaintances, by whatever means,

our aim would be to trace a reasonably accurate career history for each graduating class from the Military Academy. The competitive position of each officer will be established, as of the others of his year, rather than the other officers of the formation in which he serves. Table 3.5 presents the information in the appropriate framework. The seven lieutenants will probably make eager recruits for anything that will disturb and rearrange the order, but their low rank may be a correct assessment of their abilities, in which case their help may be a liability.

More generally and more usefully, we know that the captains and majors in our table may well be less enthusiastic about the regime than the colonels, while the two brigadiers, if not actually appointed for their political reliability, have probably become staunch supporters of whoever gave them their exalted jobs. So the table just shows the number of lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels, brigadiers. Yeah, from a single hypothetical military academy class, which is one reason where the U.S. military usually has an, or with few exceptions, has an up and out system where if you're passed over twice for promotion, you're forced out of the military. Ethnic affiliation, political outlook and career patterns will all serve as guides to the

likely reaction of the potential recruit when the approach is made. There are, however, two points that we have to bear in mind, the first not only organizational, but deeply human. While alienated personnel will make good recruits, we must remember that we need people who will not only cooperate personally, as in the case of the technicians, but also bring the units they command over to the coup. Thus, while the leaders we recruit could and should be estranged from the superior hierarchy, they must not be outsider figures who are not trusted by their fellow officers and men. There will often be a danger of attracting the inefficient, the unpopular, and corrupt when trying to recruit the disaffected. If we allow our coup to be assisted by such individuals, we will be endangering the security of the coup and discouraging the recruitment of the better elements and most important of all. We may find that our leader recruits will fail to bring their units with them. I have a friend who was a headhunter.

and for, you know, just find people to plug into corporate positions. He became my friend because he actually recruited me. And what he told me was the reason he liked me is because the first time he approached me, I blew him off. That's all I told him go to hell. You know, I'm like, who are you? You weirdo. Yeah.

He said the people who are too eager, like, oh, I need to hear what you, you know, what you're going to say is either they're totally sick of, of their. job and you have to ask why, or the people in their job are sick of them, and they want to get out of there. Yeah. It's, yeah. I agree. All right. Nor can we ever lose sight of the basic unpredictability of human behavior. We have so far been trying to establish which links could override the loyalty of army personnel to their superiors, and of these affiliations. The strongest may be expected to be a family link. We should not, however, replace total reliance on this factor. Despite the Arab proverb that states, I and my brother against my cousin, I and my cousin against the world, we should remember the Adaf family history in Iraq between 1958 and 1966. There's a table here. I'll just read the first part of it.

President Abdel Raman Rahman-Araf was chosen in April, 1966, as a compromised candidate by the army after the accidental death of his brother, Abda al-Salem, previous dictator of Iraq. The career pattern of the two brothers shows that while both were prominent army leaders, one did not always cooperate with the other. Yeah, very much so. And just because somebody is good at their job does not necessarily mean they're going to get promoted in any. the organization so confidence like go there's someone like me who would repeatedly turn down promotions exactly which doesn't happen in the u.s military but yeah it lots of organizations and exactly and in a you know people who get promoted too fast and lots of organizations are just that that people are willing to leave their environment because if you're in a really good

environment really good circumstance even if they're going to promote you why would you take it because you're giving up what you enjoy for something that may or may not happen. The relationship between the brothers illustrates the difficulty of predicting human behavior. Between 1958 and 1962, one brother was in prison under a suspended death sentence, while the other was in charge of a force that could probably have moved on the capital at any time. The bath leader, mindful of this precedent, allowed Abd al-Abd al-Abd al-Abdhaqman to remain in charge of the important armored units near Baghdad, and this was their undoing. there was a period of that

no I was just going to say it's that's really important because in it was the three to X six the point is the guy who was the original leader who was seen as the important one is the guy who was you know sentenced to death for treason awaiting execution whereas the other guy

abdel Rachman looks on paper he is by every estimate to be the more successful person because he's you know successful and kept getting promoted but the this is a good example right some organizations, if you're the actual innovative person, you will be the person who's marginalized. So that's something you have to be aware of.

There was a period immediately after the first coup in 1963 when the position of the presidential brother was weak, and the Ba'ath Party militia, totally untrained but heavily armed, could have been used to remove the military brother from his command. The Ba'ath leaders, however, assumed that Abdel Rahman would not cooperate with his brother and would behave as he did in 1958 to 1962. but this time he behaved differently, in spite of the fact that he was helping a brother who needed help,

who needed help much less badly than in 1958 to 1962 when he was captive and under a death sentence, or perhaps because of this. Despite such instances of human unpredictability and bearing in mind the individuality of our prospective recruits, we can nevertheless use the information we have collected to rank the leaders in terms of their probable response. having established a career histories in ethnic and political affiliations of possible recruits,

we can proceed to away our prospects, as illustrated in Table 3.7. In evaluating the information, we must, of course, bear in mind that the importance to be attached to each factor will differ from one environment to another. In Latin America, for example, the social racial background would also have to be added, while in Western Europe and North America, political allegiance would be paramount. ethnic affiliation, if any, would be less important. Rather dated paragraph. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Even if he, I can't believe he would do that in the revised version, considering what 2015 rock. Yeah, so, yeah, well, he kept in mind the 2016 edition was probably finished editing or writing it in 2015 or so. Right. It's probably dated information even by 205. 16 election. Thus out of 15% for recruits, we see that number three is the only totally good prospect

from the point of view of the factors here take it into consideration. Number five is a totally bad one and probably dangerous to approach at all. The others, however, will be somewhere in the middle. And he's just laid out of a battalion here and possible officers with numbers, their political views, ethnic affiliations, career pattern, whether they would approach yes, no, or doubtful. Yeah. Once we have repeated the procedure followed in the case of battalion number one,

covering all the other formations of the armed forces with an effective intervention capability, we will know the overall recruitment prospects of each unit and within them of each individual. We will never be able to achieve 100% coverage. in some cases where the armed forces are very large in relation to our resources or frequently redeployed, our coverage may be very incomplete. This will not matter greatly if the unknown units can be neutralized technically.

If, however, their intervention capability does not depend on elaborate and vulnerable facilities, then the coup may be jeopardized. We will not, however, depend on incorporation and neutralization procedures alone, and we will also be able to isolate physically those units. that appear on the scene unexpectedly, as well as those we have not been able to infiltrate at all. Before looking at the problems involved in the third and least desirable of our methods of dealing with armed depression,

we must turn our attention to the subversion of individuals in the units where we do have the requisite information. That's just going to say that's a really long paragraph that basically says if we don't know whether something is reliable or not, or not we treat it as unreliable. Which is a smart, which is the smart thing to do at that point. Yeah, when in doubt don't touch it. Yep.

Just checking one thing real quick. Trying to see where our next break is. Okay, a few more pages. All right. As soon as we emerge from the close scrutiny of the planning and information stage, the danger factor in our activities will increase very sharply. As we have pointed out earlier, each single individual we approach will be a potential informer who, by telling the authorities about our efforts, could lead to the collapse of the coup.

The most dangerous person to approach will be the first in each particular formation, because until we have that person's cooperation, we will not have a really intimate source of information about the unit and its members. Our first recruit must, therefore, be a longstanding member of that particular formation, and, if at all possible, a senior officer or even the commander, Once we have chosen our first recruit, the initial step will be to arrange a meeting and sound him out in vague and generalized terms about the possibilities of achieving political reform. These soundings must be conducted by someone who fulfills certain exacting qualifications. He or she must be a trusted associate of high caliber, but not in the inner group planning the coup. In other words, the person must be valuable and expendable.

Must be both valuable and expendable. This is an ideal that we can only try to approximate, but it could be fatal to expose a member of the inner group to the possibility of being portrayed by the authorities. In the coup country par excellence, Syria, political leaders used to go around the barracks canvassing for armed support, but the special conditions of Syrian political life were not likely to be reproduced elsewhere. Once a potential recruit has been brought to the state, when the possibility of a coup has been openly discussed, should be told three things about the coup. A. The ostensible, if not actual political aim. B, that we have already recruited other individuals than units. And C, the nature of the task that he will be asked to perform. Everything we say or arranged to be said to the potential recruit

will have to be studied carefully and we will work on the assumption that every recruit may be a double who is working for the security services. We will not, of course, identify our a coup with any particular party whose policies would be known, nor with any particular political faction whose leading personalities will be known. We will instead state the aim of the coup in terms of political attitude rather than in terms of policies or personalities, because the latter are necessarily more specific and therefore liable to evoke specific opposition. The attitude we project must be calculated carefully. It should reflect current preoccupations in the target country, imply a solution to the problems.

felt to exist and mirror the general political beliefs of the majority of its people. Yeah, I was going to say the only, obviously we don't have coups in the American tradition, but this idea of approach of being all things, all people, or at least to a broad swath of people, the only person politically that is anything that resembles that in American politics is probably Trump. And I obviously don't think he's part of a coup and obviously has a position and a political party, but that goes to some lengths, I think, to understand why the establishment sees them as such a hostile outsider. In Latin America, the attitude presents it may, for example, imply that the sacred trust of the armed forces requires interventions to clear the mess made by the politicians in order to achieve social national progress while respecting property rights, individual rights. if the pre-cue government is itself the product of a seizure of power,

then the aims of the coup can be presented purely in terms of restoring normal political life, or if we are, was that Utre, Utre, leftist? I suppose. I don't speak much French. We can speak about the need to restore democracy. Interesting. Yeah. That's it.

Yeah. making up slogans may seem to be an easy game. Is he given a lot of way there by saying that? Well, again, I wasn't, I've never heard him talk about Trump at all, but my previous comment about how he kind of resembles that, you know, or at least sort of sets off the spidey sense as a word, you know, kind of explains why the talk about our democracy has become universal. Making up slogans may seem to be an easy game,

but in fact our slogans will have to be calculated carefully to satisfy a political optimum. We must, for example, avoid being specific. At the same time, though, if the attitude we present is too general, it will stimulate the suspicions of the shrewder of our listeners while failing to fire the enthusiasm of the more idealistic ones. We must also remember that the armed forces of many countries are often politically and psychologically at a tune with civilian society, and that they could have distinct and perhaps antagonistic preoccupations and beliefs.

As citizens, army officers may share beliefs that there ought to be economies in government expenditure, but simultaneously feel that the armed forces are being starved of funds. Where the social status of military personnel has suffered a decline because of defeat in battle, or just a long peace, we will always emphasize the need to restore the defendant, of the society to their proper place within it. In presenting the aims of the coup to potential recruits, we should exercise a measure of flexibility in order to reach a good fit with what we know to be their beliefs.

We cannot, however, run the risk of being exposed as being grossly inconsistent. Whether we hold the views that will make up our image does not matter at all as long as the other conditions are satisfied. It is, incidentally, polite to indicate, that the coup is only being carried out with extreme reluctance and that we appreciate that this reluctance is shared by our recruit. Once the idea of the coup has gained a measure of acceptance in the mind of our potential recruit, we should define the coup in terms of his role within it.

This will not only, this will not imply that we will reveal any of the operational details, but we should make it quite clear that, A, his role will not be limited to a few specific actions. his role will be limited to a few specific actions. B, almost everybody in his unit is already with us, and C, therefore, his role will be a safe one. When and only when the recruit becomes actual rather than potential, we can reveal to him the nature of his actual task. This will be described in the greatest possible detail, but not so as to enable the recruit to work out the implications of the task he is asked to perform. If, for example, the recruit in question is destined to use his unit to provide muscle for a roadblock team, he will be told what equipment his men should have, how many will be required, and how he will receive the go-ahead signal.

He will not be told the date of the coup, the place where the roadblock will be, or what the other teams will be doing. Information is the greatest asset we have, and much of our advantage in the planning stage will derive from the fact that, while we know a great deal about the defenses of the state, those who control them know very little about us. We must make every effort to avoid giving any information beyond what is actually required. In any case, while a recruit may feel that he ought to know more about the coup because he agrees to participate in it, he will also feel more secure if we show concretely that the operation is being run with great caution and therefore is secure. After successfully recruiting the first few people in each unit, the others will be much easier to persuade. There will also be more people to do the persuading because this is the purpose to which we will put our first recruits in the interval between their initial recruitment and the actual coup.

Also, a snowball or hopefully an avalanche effect will be generated by the first recruits who will gradually create a climate in which it will be easy to recruit further. After the approach and persuasion of the key individuals has begun to give its results, we will be able to identify the units that will eventually be used as active participants in the coup. These will be a small part of the armed forces as a whole, but hopefully the only part that will be able to play an active role of time and place of the coup. We will concentrate our further efforts on them because their infiltration in depth will be of value to us, whereas the over-neutralization of the other forces will merely involve further risk. Ideally, we will have neutralized all those formations that we have not incorporated,

but this is not likely to be the case. The methods that we will follow to isolate those formations that we have not been able to penetrate will be discussed in Chapter 4. The degree of success required of our infiltration program before we can proceed to the operational phase will depend on the military, political, and geographical factors involved, The same degree of penetration may ensure success in one country while being inadequate in another. In our 1967 Portuguese example, because of the extensive deployment of the active troops in the remote African provinces, along with the lack of training and mechanization of the troop station in Portugal,

we could have gone ahead with minimal penetration. It's going to skip over that table. Yeah, I mean the big takeaway is he only needed 3,000 active participants. and to neutralize another 12,000 people, and that's out of an army of 150,000. So, you know, distance matters. This was an extreme example of a small and poor country trying against all Oz streets and its African empire to the bitter end,

and therefore leaving only a very small force in its own metropolitan territory. The degree of incorporation achieved here is only about 2%, yet the coup would not find any military officer. opposition in its way unless it failed to impose its authority within the time required to bring the troops station in the African provinces into Lisbon. If, however, we take the case of a developed country with good transport links and with no overseas commitments for its troops, the same percentage of incorporation and active neutralization that in the Portuguese case would guarantee success would lead to a certain failure, as illustrated in Table 3.9.

because there is nothing that we can do to prevent the large forces capable of intervention from doing so, we would almost certainly fail unless we were the higher leadership of the armed forces. Most situations will be between the two extremes, with a small percentage of the armed forces incorporated, a larger percentage neutralized by our efforts, and a very small percentage to be isolated by severing communication and transport facilities from the outside. apart from the military forces the government will also be defended by police forces and their paramilitary extensions and we now turn to the problem of their neutralization that's the end of the section table three nine is infiltration of armed forces in germany and um what is this is this bundus republic yeah it says notional so it would have been the bundus republic at some point yeah which keep in mind there's a huge difference

between you know the 70s and 80s when they still had universal mainhood conscription and today where they don't yeah keep in mind today the buns there has fewer tanks in the Swiss Army wow yeah I mean it's one of the things is the amount of equipment they've transferred to Ukraine and haven't maintained and again keep in mind that Switzerland is a mountainous country where tanks only have so much utility well that's it for this section. Still got more of this chapter to go. Yeah, we got another, let me look how many we got. 20 pages.

Yeah, like you said, this chapter is painful. And that's with us skipping over huge portions of it and summarizing. Yeah. Yeah, there's still, uh, yeah, for 20 pages left in this chapter. Yeah, the big takeaway being that coups are incredibly complicated, and that's why most of them fail. Yeah. Yeah. All right, well, I appreciate you.

dropping in and hopefully you can come yeah hopefully you can come back for another section real soon. Definitely. So probably have to write a few days before we do more in this chapter. Yeah, believe me, I'm taking the weekend.

All right, John. Thank you. Yes, sir.