April 24, 2019 • 42 mins
Here's how an American insurgency could defeat the American military.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to It could happen here a production of iHeart Radio.
The decision to send American soldiers into an American city
to restore order would be a momentous one, but it
would not be unprecedented. In nineteen fifty seven, President Eisenhower
sent the one hundred and first Airborne into Arkansas to
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oppose that state's National Guard, who had been ordered by
the governor to not let black students into Little Rocks
Central High School. In nineteen sixty seven, members of Detroit's
all white police force arrested several black men at a
drinking club, which sparked riots that left forty three people dead.
The violence so overwhelmed the city's police that several thousand
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Army troops and National guardsmen were brought in. In nineteen
sixty eight, after Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated, riots
broke out in the city of Chicago. The police tried
and failed to suppress the violence. Nine people died the
first night. The Army was again sent in to store order.
More than thirteen thousand soldiers were called into Washington, d c.
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To protect the capital from spreading unrest and violence. Six
people died in rioting in Baltimore. The National Guard was
deployed there as well. I don't know about you, but
I never heard much about all that when I was
in school. I think I remember a vague mention of
rioting people protesting and such, but certainly no more detail
than that. But what happened in the wake of Martin
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Luther King Jr's murder was not simple rioting. It was
a goddamn uprising. The Holy Week Uprising is actually the
name given to the ten days of violence that followed
doctor King's assassination. Almost two hundred American cities experienced simultaneous rioting, arson,
sniper attacks, and massive property damage. Peter Levy, author of
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The Great Uprising, writes that during this week quote, the
United States experienced its greatest wave of social unrest since
the Civil War. The uprisings injured thirty five hundred, killed
forty three, and to twenty seven thousand arrests. It took
a total of fifty eight thousand National guardsmen and Army
soldiers to contain the violence. Many of those involved on
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the side of the protesters absolutely saw the uprisings as
the prelude to a revolution. When h Rap Brown, an
organizer with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee was arrested
by the FBI. He told them, quote, we stand on
the eve of the Black Revolution with eye for eye
and life. The current rebellions were just a dress rehearsal
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for the real revolution. Now, the Holy Week uprisings did not,
of course lead to a revolution, but they certainly provide
a blueprint of how we could expect the federal government
and the military to respond to a series of uprisings
in multiple major American cities. Once the police failed to
contain the unrest, as we talked about in the last episode,
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the army and the National Guard would inevitably move in.
In the decades since nineteen sixty eight, American military thinkers
have grown more comfortable and adept at thinking of American
cities as just another battle space, as cities under siege
notes quote Lessons learned. Reports drawn up after military deployments
whose goal was to contain the Los Angeles riots of
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nineteen two credit the success of the mission to the
fact that the enemy the local population, was easy to
out maneuver given their simple battle tactics and strategies. Now
I've referred back to cities under siege by Stephen Graham
several times in this podcast. I think it's developed a
vaguely prophetic feel to me. I first read through parts
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of it in two thousand sixteen, after David Colcolan recommended
I read it. But it was published back in two
thousand ten, and it had its genesis in a conference
the author attended shortly after nine eleven. Here's Stephen Graham
telling that story. In two thousand and two, I was
invited with Simon Lawn course of the Spinfing Evanism book
to a conference in Israel title War in the City
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in the twenty one Century. We were I meing and
eying a little bit about how whether to go, and
we ended up going. It was in Haifa University, and
we turned up expecting a sort of academic debate. We
were surrounded for a few days by guys wearing camouflage
and carrying machine guns and talking about the city as
the new battle ground, as the new frontier, as the
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new space of of struggle for for militaries and for
security forces. And we were quite shocked and astonished to
discover this enormous world of sort of urban research that
was going on in a sort of parallel universe to
the more familiar worlds to us anyway of social science
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discussions about cities. So we're back in the day before
the invasion of Iraq. Military planners in the United States
were already taking it for granted that the wars of
the future would be fought in cities. The last eighteen
years have proven that prediction accurate. For Luja, RockA, Marawi,
and Mosl are just the most spectacular EXAs amples. On
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my second trip out to Mosel, we billeted with some
soldiers from Iraq's Golden Division, the US Train and Equipped
Special Forces Unit, and what had once been a wealthy
family's house in western Mosle. The man who had previously
lived there had risen high in Isis his ranks not
because he was a great warrior or a devious terrorist mastermind,
but because he did a fantastic job of managing a
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factory that produced metal tubing. These tubes had been used
for a variety of tube based commercial purposes back in peacetime,
but now that Mosell was at war, Isis had repurposed
the tubes to produce giant custom mortars. My videographer, my fixers,
and I all shared one of the most bizarre dinners
of my life with an Iraqi colonel and what had
once been that tube making man's daughter's bedroom. The walls
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were brightly painted with reasonable facsimiles of Disney princesses. Since
isis was Isis, their eyes had been blotted out with great,
big blotches of red. The purpose of that was to
sort of disrupt the drawings features enough that it didn't
violate fundamentalist Muslin prohibitions against depicting the human form. It
had the effect of making Ariel snow white and Pocahontas
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look red eyed and vaguely demonic. As I sat there,
my eyes flitting from the paintings on the wall, to
the bullet holes in the ceiling, to the old colonel
happily eating lamb, I remembered a quote by Sultan Barakat,
a professor at the University of York. Today wars are
fought not in trenches and fields, but in living rooms, schools,
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and supermarkets. The First American Civil War had battles with
names like bull Run, Gettysburg, and the Battle of the Wilderness.
The battles of the Second American Civil War will more
likely have names like the Battle of Boyle Heights, the
Battle of Manhattan, and the Battle of Portland. As doctor
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Graham noted, this is not particularly controversial thinking among military planners.
It's been well accepted doctrine for decades that future war
fighting will take place in cities. Mega cities, urban areas
with a popular lation of more than ten million are
particular areas of concern for military planners. The United States
has four mega cities. I found a Military Times article
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published in two thousand eighteen that interviewed Army Chief of
Staff General Mark Milly about this quote. Milly has said
that the Army is not ready to fight in mega cities.
He has characterized recent and current urban operations, including fighting
and Aleppo in Syria and Fellujah and Mosle in Iraq,
as previews of future conflict. Those fights, while bloody, costly,
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and destructive, hardly reached the scale of a mega city.
Mosle is not equal to a neighborhood and soul, Milly
has said. Now, two of America's mega cities, Los Angeles
and New York, also hosted huge occupy contingents back in
two thousand eleven. If we're looking at potential hotspots, cities
that might declare themselves autonomous zones. These both fit the bill. Now,
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if your experience in the City of Angels is limitted
to walking the Santa Monica Peer or catching a movie
at Man's Chinese Theater, the idea of l A as
a center of violent resistance to the state probably seems absurd.
It's felt that way to me more than a few
times as I walk around my lovely palm lined neighborhood
on the West Side, enjoying cool breezes and watching smiling
couples walk their ridiculous tiny dogs. And when I start
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to convince myself that my experiences in this pleasant chunk
of the city mean more than they do, I think
back to the Nineto riots. Those riots were kicked off,
of course by the brutal police beating of Rodney King
and the fact that the officers responsible were acquitted, But
those riots did not arise in a vacuum. Unrest had
been growing in the city and among black urban populations
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in the United States for quite some time. A tremendous
amount of rap and hip hop from the late eighties
and pre riot nineties referenced the widespread feeling that something
was about to go down. I actually found a fun
Rolling Stone article that picks out fifteen of these songs.
It's an interesting read. Quote on ghetto Boys City under Siege,
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bushwick Bill plays tribute to Ida Delaney, a black woman
who was shot to death by a drunken off duty
police officer in nineteen eighty nine. Unlike the four cops
received not guilty verdicts for assaulting Rodney King, Alex Gonzalez
was initially convicted of manslaughter, but the decision was overturned
on appeal. Meanwhile, Scarface and Willie D. Mock then President
George H. W. Bush's nineteen ninety invasion of Panama to
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capture former CIA stooge Manuel Noriega and corrupt government officials
who hypocritically enabled drug pushers while publicly lambasting them. Their
final analysis, Everything's corrupt, fux school, fuck curfew, fuck homework,
and mother fuck a damn cop rails Bushwick Bill with
the kind of nihilism fervor that occasionally sets cities in flames. Now,
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I find it interesting that bushwick Bill's City under Siege
has almost the exact same title as a seminal work
of military theory published twenty years later. Anyway, if the
l a police in ninety two were overwhelmed by a
group of largely unarmed and inexperienced, disobedient citizens. Well, that
can happen again. Individual states have been forced to use
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the army to pacify cities in recent memory. What hasn't
happened ever, in this nation's history is the army being
overwhelmed by a civilian uprising. That would be unprecedented, and
it seems particularly unlikely in light of the fact that
our military has spent much of the last twenty years
fighting in cities and planning to fight in more cities.
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But I have come to believe that it is in
fact possible for American insurgents to defeat, or at least
hold their own against the American military. The explanation for
why I feel this way also starts back in that
little girl's bedroom, and mosle I mentioned her father, the
home's former owner, had a job making tubes for ISIS mortars.
Much was said about the American weapons ISIS captured in
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Syria and Iraq. Less has been said about the open source, modular,
and easyly replicable weapon factories they created in mosl ISIS
was infamous for using a weird bespoke one hundred and
nineteen point five millimeter mortar round These were very big shells,
and I can say from terrifying experience that they made
much larger booms than the standard eighty one millimeter mortars
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used by American soldiers. These machines of war, like many
of ICE's deadliest armaments, were crafted entirely from things you
can find in any city on Earth. The average mechanic
in any American city can build one of Dasha's mortars.
There's mortar rounds and all ices. Explosive devices were built
with modularity in mind. ISIS had schematics for a standard
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detonator which could be slotted into rockets or grenades or
suicide belts or gigantic vehicle based I e. D s
and then used to blast holes in Iraqi Army and
Kurdish defensive lines. In other words, ISIS invented a plug
and play arsenal. With the open source designs, Isis dreamed
up any moderately intelligent engine near could throw together basically
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any purpose built device he wanted to build. There's a
fantastic Wired article about this, the Terror Industrial Complex. Its
author follows a European investigator named Splitters as he travels
around i Rack to recently liberated IIS factories, trying to
figure out how they kept arming themselves once the entire
city of Mozle had been cut off from the rest
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of the caliphate. Quote. Iraq's oil fields provided the industrial
base tool and dye sets, high end saws, injection molding machines,
and skilled workers who knew how to quickly fashion intricate
parts to spec Raw materials came from cannibalizing steel pipe
and melting down scrap. ISIS engineers forged new fuses, new
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rockets and launchers, and new bomblets to be dropped by drones,
all assembled using instruction plans drawn up by ISIS officials.
The aluminum paste in the bucket, for example, which ISIS
craftsmen mixed with ammonium nitrate to make a potent main
charge from mortars and rocket warheads. Splitters discovered the same
buckets from the same manufacturers and chemical distributors in Fallujah,
to Crete and Mosle. I like to see the same
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stuff in different cities, he tells me, since these repeat
sightings allow him to identify and describe different steps in
isis's supply chain. It confirms my theory that this is
the industrial revolution of terrorism, and for that they need
raw material and industrial quantities. If Iraq was the site
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of terrorisms industrial revolution, American cities might wind up being
its proving ground. For one thing, there are already millions
of civilians in this country with access to many of
the basic tools and ingredients needed to manufacture similar armaments.
You can buy gunpowder in every state that deliver it
to your door. In many parts of this fair land
they deliver tannerite to ammonium nitrate, which provided the charge
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for isis as. Explosives can also be derived from tannerite.
Back when I lived in Texas, I'd ordered twenty pounds
of the stuff At a time it cost around two
hundred dollars. It actually seems to be a little cheaper nowadays.
If you're on a budget, five pounds is just forty
two dollars. This might be news to urban liberals, but
trust me, every left and right wing gun nut in
America already knows about this stuff. They sell it in
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sporting goods stores. In my mind, a city life Portland
is one of the easiest places to imagine a serious
revolutionary movement kicking off. It's got the right mix of
seriously dedicated, experienced left wing activists and politically active far
right extremists. It also has a prevalent gun culture, including
numerous left wing gun clubs. But even cities like New
York and Los Angeles, which restrict explosives, gunpowder, and firearms
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much more rigorously, are large and porous enough that it
would be easy to imagine weaponry flowing there from other
parts of the country. In two thousand fifteen, a South
Carolina man's home was busted with five thousand illegal firearms.
Investigators suspect this home was a nexus point in what's
known as the Iron Pipeline, a network of gun smugglers
who ensure cities with strict gun control still enjoy access
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to the same deadly weapons as people in Fuck Off Texas.
And this brings me to the Automaidon in keV. During
the Maidan Uprising, it became necessary to smuggle weaponry, fireworks, sticks, shields,
et cetera into the protest camp. As the fighting escalated
from the standard shoving matches between police and protesters to
something more akin to urban warfare. Members of the Automaidon
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arranged distraction cars to draw police attention away, while other
volunteers drove their supplies into occupied sections of town. Much
of what was smuggled in was food or medical supplies,
but as the fighting wore on, rifles and ammunition and
armor became increasingly common. I imagine the same thing happening
in America as activists and occupied chunks of cities use
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encrypted communication apps to coordinate with their friends and government
controlled territory. As the fighting grows more serious, the equipment
smuggled in will change from milk of magnesia for tear
gas helmets, shields, and sticks to kevlar vests, a R fifteens,
bullets and explosives. The same sort of thing, with a
different cast of characters will occur in separatist chunks of
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rural America. Some of these smugglers will be enterprising young
mercenaries just looking for a way to make a buck.
Others will be true believers, and many may actually be
leftist separatists willing to make a deal with right wing separatists,
handing over tools and raw materials derived from the industrial
base of the cities in exchange for food and firearms.
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Civil wars make strange bedfellows. Just ask any Syrian and
I imagine one of the things those right wing separatists
will most once smuggled out from the cities are over
the counter civilian drones. And this brings me back to
Isis and Mosel See Dash wasn't just making mortar rounds
in their homebrew factories. They also made bomblets with injection
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molded plastic bodies and handmade tail kits. Some of these
literally looked like grenades with shuttlecocks attached. They'd take little
servo motors, simple remote controlled claus and attach those two
perfectly legal drones. The most popular model seemed to be
the d j I Phantom, which currently retails for between
five hundred and fifteen hundred dollars depending on options. You
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can pick one up at your local best Buy today.
Outfitting a drone in this manner requires very little. You
can order all the necessary parts off of Amazon dot com.
Given enough time, anyone listening to this podcast could figure
it all out. The only thing Amazon won't provide are
the bomblets themselves. I'm not going to go into detail
about how exactly those are constructed, but if you know
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someone who built their own computer. You probably know someone
who could figure it out. Bomb science is not rocket science.
With twenty or thirty thousand dollars in funding, a group
of insurgents could have everything they would need to start
putting together a small air force. And in case you're wondering, yes,
weaponized commercial drones are effective terrifyingly so. On my second
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trip in the Moosle, I talked to Major Mezer Sadoun.
Mezer had been the captain of the Mosel swat team
before Isis invaded. He was famous for being the last
cop in town as Isis took over the city, and
when the Iraqi army invaded Mosele to oust Isis, he
formed an elite unit of men who had all lost
family to Islamic terrorists and one revenge. They spent months
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at the front of the advance. Mezer survived multiple car
bombings and suicide belt detonations. He's probably the most frightening
man I will ever meet. I only saw him express
anything close to fear once, and it's when I asked
him about fighting Isis's drones. I remember the way he
shook his head as he explained to me how nearly
impossible it was to hit one of those little fuckers,
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even for experienced veterans with machine guns. There were a
lot of drones over Mosle, and many of them were
d j I phantoms. The Iraqi army, taking a leaf
out of Isis's book, built their own drone fleet along
almost identical lines. I have a video on my hard
drive of one of these drones killing US sniper. I've
also seen videos online of ISIS using these little drones
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to blow up armored hum vies. Nick Waters, a journalist
with the investigative platform Belling Cat, analyzed hundreds of ISIS
drone strikes and found that twenty two point two percent
of them hit hum vs, But tanks and other armored
vehicles like cougars and self propelled cannons were also attacked
and destroyed by weaponized civilian drones. Vehicle armor is not
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as thick at the top, because why would it be.
I've even seen at least one video where ISIS dropped
a grenade inside an armored vehicle through an opened top hatch.
It and the soldiers inside were basically atomized. Nothing scared
the Iraqi soldiers I was embedded with more than the
distinctive hum of tiny drones, and it really was terrifying
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to know that out there and the sky around you,
this little robotic gnat might be about to drop a
bomb on your head. These drones are like two feet across.
Most of them are white. When they move fast, they're
damn near invisible in the sky. Once you heard that buzz,
you knew that a bomb could land in a second,
or a mortar, because ISIS also used unarmed drones as
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spotters for their pocket artillery. I like to quote from
that Wired article again at a place where the author
makes the point that isis's defeat and Mosele did not
mean that all their knowledge and capability died out. Quote
their intellectual capital, their weapon designs, the engineering challenges they've solved,
their industrial processes, blueprints and schematics still constitute a major threat.
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That's the really scary part. To the extent that the
ISIS model proliferates, says Matt Schrader, a senior researcher at
the Small Arms Survey, the Geneva Base think tank. Much
of the international structure that prevents weapons trafficking is rendered
useless if ISIS can simply upload and share their designs
and manufacturing processes with affiliates in Africa and Europe who
also have access to money and machinery. Joshua Pierce, an
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engineering professor in Michigan Tech University, is an expert in
open source hardware. He descried ribes ISIS manufacturing as a
very twisted maker culture. In this future, weapons schematics can
be downloaded from the dark Web or simply shared via
popular encrypted social media services like WhatsApp. In the previous episode,
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I talked about Adam Often and their obsessive love of
ISIS propaganda and tactics. Most Americans haven't heard of isis's
open source munition factories. The people who have are probably
an even mix of military veterans, journalists, and budding terrorists.
Those files will spread, and they will wind up in
the hands of domestic extremists, not just ISIS. And because
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technology works the way it does, the weapons made will
only get more efficient and deadlier as different groups produce them,
work out kinks, and upload their improved designs to the Internet.
This is not a cat that can be put back
in its bag. So let's think back to our hypothetical
civil war. We've got rural uprisings and cities that have
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Barrick Hated themselves away from federal control. After many, many
deaths and injuries, it's become clear that the police have failed.
The point at which army and marine infantry start moving
in to say, put down the state of Jefferson uprising
in northern California and liberate Wall Street from the leftist
mob occupying it. At that point, many people would expect
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this to be where things end rather quickly, but I
believe it would be the point in which Fukau's boomerang
hits our nation square in the face. One of the
things that really struck me about that Wired article was
the comparison between ISIS weapon shops and maker culture. I
have a lot of friends who are into that sort
of stuff. One Guyane builds motorcycles out of scrap metal
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and garbage. People with those skills, the kind of people
every city has thousands of, are perfectly capable of constructing
these kinds of arsenals where they motivated and angry enough
to want to do so. Now, what I've been talking
about so far is how a hypothetical American insurgency could
arm as Elf with the kind of weapons that would
allow it to compete with the U. S. Military, not
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in an open field, obviously, but in an urban battleground.
At this point, you may be asking yourselves, what good
are a bunch of mortars in tiny drones against tanks
and artillery. Well, I have a couple of responses to that. First,
it took the coalition nine months of brutal door to
door fighting to kick Isis out of Mosele. And second,
the federal government would never get away with deploying the
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same kind of force against an American city that they
did against Mosle, at least not at first. Well, the
official death toll in Mosele, according to the US government,
is only around a thousand civilians or so. Literally, no
one who's fought there, reported there, or lives there believes
that they will be digging corpses out of collapsed buildings
in that city for the next twenty years. Some estimates
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put the real death toll at well over twenty five thousand.
It could even be several times that. Try and imagine
the political reaction to watching a section of Chicago or
Dallas just turned in to powder. It's one thing for
the U. S. Air Force to murder a bunch of
foreigners five thousand miles away. It's another thing entirely to
do it in America. We're not going to be dropping
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bombs and launching missiles in American cities. U S troops
will be sent in mounted in light armored vehicles. Mortars
and bomblets can do a lot of damage to those
The urban insurgents will have a couple of choices once
the soldiers move in. Their first option would be to
seed the protest camp to the military and disperse into
the crowd. This would carry a huge number of tactical benefits,
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but it would also mean losing hold on territory, which
for any kind of rebel movement would be a huge blow.
It's one thing to say we're occupying Wall Street until
these changes are made, and another to go from defending
your barricades into a dispersed, violent insurgency. I don't think
American leftists would take that tack. I can see them
trying to defend their autonomous zone, and I can see
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it the American military hard pressed to dislodge them without
committing war crimes. It would be a slow grinding fight.
The work of snipers, drones, vehicle based i e. D s,
and home brewed heavy weapons. Things would be different in
rural America. Let's go back to our hypothetical state of
Jefferson doing its damnedest to strangle California's water supply. I
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think the military would get involved pretty quickly there, and
I think a rural insurgency would absolutely melt into the
trees at the first sight of any significant American military presence.
There would certainly be Afghan war veterans among the insurgents,
and they would know exactly how to bleed and occupying army.
I'd like to quote now from War, a fantastic book
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by famed conflict journalist Sebastian Younger. He spent months embedded
with an army platoon in the Corengall Valley, by far
the most dangerous posting in all of Afghanistan. Most of
what these soldiers experienced on a day to day basis
was not the kind of face to face gunfight Hollywood
loves to depict. Most nights, some young Afghan kid would
crawl up a mountain in the darkness with an old,
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cheap bolt action rifle and fire a few rounds towards
the American outpost or cop. Here's Younger quote. Once I
was at the operations center when single shots started coming
in and first Sergeant called Well headed for the door
to deal with it. On his way out, I asked
him what was going on, some jackass waste in our time?
He said that jackass was probably a local teenager who
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was paid by one of the insurgent groups to fire
off a magazine's worth of AMMO at the cop The
going rate was five dollars a day. He could fire
at the base until mortars started coming back at him,
and then he could drop off the backside of the
ridge and be home in twenty minutes. Mobility has always
been the default choice of guerilla fighters because they don't
have access to the kinds of heavy weapons that would
slow them down. The fact that networks of highly mobile
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amateurs can confound even defeat a professional army is the
only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the
course of history. Whether that is a good thing or
not depends on what amateurs you're talking about or what empires,
but it does mean that you can't predict the outcome
of a war simply by looking at the numbers. For
every technological advances held by the Americans. The Taliban seem
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to have an equivalent or a countermeasure. Apache helicopters have
thermal imaging that reveals body heat on the mountain side,
so Taliban fighters disappear by covering themselves in a blanket
on a warm rock. The Americans use unmanned drones to
pinpoint the enemy, but the Taliban can do the same
thing by watching the flocks of crows that circle American
soldiers looking for scraps of food. The Americans have virtually
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unlimited firepower, so the Taliban send only one guy to
take on an entire fire base. Whether or not he
gets killed, he will have succeeded in coming up the
machine for yet one more day. Everything in war is simple,
but the simplest thing is difficult. The military theorist Carl
von Klauswitz wrote in the twenties, the difficulties accumulate an
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end by producing a sort of friction. We now friction
coming up the sheen That is exactly the root any
group of smart insurgents would need to take in order
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to defeat the United States military. We've all seen the
posers who love to flex with their air fifteens on
social media and talk about how they need their assault
rifles to fight tyranny. I'm not going to make a
pro or anti gun argument here, but I do want
to point out that from the point of view of
a rebel group, an old, rusty bolt action rifle can
be just as effective at gumming up the machine as
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a thirty dollar tactical black rifle with lasers and rails
and ship. In fact, you don't even need the rifle
or the human volunteer. Armed drones can accomplish a similar
goal without risking a life. The reality, of course, is
that a variety of tactics would be used, some groups
sending out lone snipers, others fielding drones with occasional raids
and assaults by combat units. But I suspect in terms
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of their sheer ability to produce friction, no current product
has as much promise as drones. On the eighth of
January two thousand eighteen, the Russian Ministry of Defense released
a statement that the Cammingam Air Base and Syria had
been attacked by sudden mortar fire, killing two servicemen. Had
this been true, the attack would have been hardly newsworthy,
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But the reality which came out weeks later after intensive
open source investigation by journalists is that the Cammingam air
Base was assaulted on at least three separate occasions by
successive waves of handmade attack drones. These drones killed at
least two Russian soldiers, but also damaged and grounded an
unknown number of jets. We have pictures of at least
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one of them. While the drones were all destroyed by
Russian defenses, many of them were able to effectively loose
their payloads, and the attacks effectively grounded the entire air
base for the better part of a week. There are
pictures of these drones. I'll have a few uploaded to
the site. But to describe them, if you ever built
one of those styrofoam model planes, the giant ones with
like a four foot wingspan that you tossed into the sky, well,
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these looked a lot like that, but with a motor
and an engine and pylons on the bottom that you
can attack bombs too. So these drones didn't even require
someone have the cash to afford a d j I Phantom.
Handmade drones crafted from literally balsa wood and styrofoam grounded
a Russian air base filled with multimillion dollar fighter jets.
The bombs, in case you're wondering, are basically big plastic
(30:18):
tubes filled with gunpowder and babies. That's all you need.
It turns out to kill people and puncture airplane gas tanks.
I encourage you to take a look at the picture
I'll post and see just how rudimentary these weapons are.
Most people listening to this podcast could probably build one
with minor guidance given the right equipment. At least eighteen
drones were used in three successive attack waves. It's hard
(30:40):
to say exactly how much these costs to prepare, but
just looking at them, I wouldn't be surprised if the
whole attack cost twenty dollars or less. That's a pretty
good rate of return when it comes to silencing an
entire modern air base for a week. Air power is
traditionally one of, if not the biggest advantages the United
States takes to war. Think of the disastrous morale impact
(31:02):
of knowing your helicopters and jets were grounded, knowing your
air support had been reduced or even knocked out because
some hillbilly redneck rigged together an air force for the
cost of a Masdamiata and everything we've talked about so far,
all these potential tactics and weapons has mostly ignored the
fact that the United States is filled with three D printers.
(31:23):
I know individual people who own those things, and they
get more common and more effective every year. You've probably
read a few hysterical articles over the years about the
terrible threat of three D printed guns. Let me tell
you those things are the very least of your worries.
A shitty pistol that explodes in your hand half the
time is not nearly as scary as the suicide drones
that terrorist groups have already made using machines that cost
(31:45):
a few thousand dollars. In November of two seventeen, one
such group in Syria bombed the Kaffer Home refugee camp
with a device that looked like a tiny bomb with
an engine, and that is essentially what it was. That
picture will be up on the site as well. Eagle
Lie investigators quickly realized that the drone was constructed using
the telltale honeycomb pattern of a low end three D printer.
(32:06):
According to all three D p quote, these homemade drones
and guided bombs offer terrorist organizations a number of advantages
over missile strikes. These drones can evade missile warning receivers,
can't be decoyed away from their target, and can be
launched from anywhere. In other words, because mass produced drones
like the d g I Phantom are legal products and stuff,
there are ways to disable them, backdoors and known weaknesses
(32:28):
governments can exploit. A home built drone is much more
difficult to counter, and drones are not the only thing
you can build with a three D printer. I'd like
to quote now from an article in National Interest. Army
researchers have devised a method to produce ceramic body armor
lightweight but strong from a three D printer, except that
three D printers are meant to print out knickknacks, not
flak jackets, which means that engineers had to hack the
(32:50):
printer to get the job done. Lionel Vargus Gonzalez, a
researcher at the Army Research Laboratory, sees three D printer
ceramics as the next avenue for armor because we're going
to be able to in theory, design armor in a
way that we can attach multiple materials together to a
single armor plate and be able to provide ways for
the armory to perform better than it can be just
based on material alone. The Industrial Revolution forever put an
(33:14):
end to the era in which settled, so called civilized
people's had to worry about invasions from nomadic warrior people
throughout all of recorded history up until that point, every
few centuries, some new tribe of horse mounted warriors would
trot down from the Asian steps and funk up an
empire or three. Now we're crossing into a new era
where any group of sufficiently motivated people can produce military
(33:35):
grade weaponry via infrastructure small enough to fit into the
average house. And maybe now understanding that, it's easier to
understand how even the mighty US military could be overwhelmed
by an insurgency or, as I'm theorizing several insurgencies, the
most U S troops ever deployed to a Rack during
the occupation was a hundred and sixty six thousand men.
(33:56):
These soldiers will tell you they were nearly always under manned.
In fact, the only thing that made the occupation possible
was an equal number of contractors, many from Bangladesh and
other poor countries, doing dangerous jobs like driving supply trucks
down booby trapped roads in lieu of U S servicemen
and women. Less than forty million people live in Iraq.
The country is a hundred and sixty eight thousand, seven
(34:18):
hundred and fifty four square miles. There are more than
three hundred and twenty million Americans spread out over more
than three point seven million square miles. If one American
city rose up against the federal government, ten or twenty
thousand soldiers could suppress the rebellion without mass destruction. If
one rural chunk of one state, like northern California, broke
out in a bloody insurgency, it might take longer to suppress,
(34:40):
but our armed forces would certainly have the manpower. But
what about four or five cities and counties in a
dozen American states? What if it spread even more widely
than that. For most of the occupation in Iraq, US
forces were chronically short of manpower. In two thousand seven,
the army was desperate enough to massively reduce their recruitment standards.
This had predictable consequences. From a CBS article at the time, quote,
(35:05):
the number of incoming soldiers with prior felony arrests or
convictions has more than tripled in the past five years.
This year alone, the army accepted and estimated eight thousand
recruits with rap sheets, reports CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier.
Most are guilty of misdemeanors, but around a hundred in
the past year had felony convictions. Burglaries and narcotics are
probably are two top categories, according to Colonel Sheila Hickman. Now,
(35:28):
I'd like to read an excerpt from a Politico article
written by a Vet named John Spencer. He's one of
the officers who had to deal with the consequences of
this major manpower shortage. In two thousand and eight, when
I was an infantry company commander in charge of over
a hundred and forty soldiers in Baghdad, I saw firsthand
how the declining number of volunteers is hurting the military.
Thirty six of my men were forced to deploy, even
(35:49):
though their terms of service were up, a controversial military
policy known as stop loss or at the back door draft.
To meet the bare minimum number of soldiers in a unit,
my unit took men who were medically unfit to fight.
I had soldiers that could not leave our compound because
they were medically prohibited from wearing body armor or classified
as mentally unfit. I had soldiers taking antidepression, sleeping anxiety,
(36:10):
and other drugs. I had a mentally unstable private viciously
attacked as sergeant, causing lifelong damage, and multiple other problem
soldiers that detracted from the combat performance of my unit.
This was symptomatic throughout the Army. I found an even
more damning account in the U. S. Army War College's
report on the Iraq War, which you can all download
and read for free right now if you'd like. This
(36:31):
section concerns a National Guard unit from California sent into
Iraq in a desperate attempt to deal with the crippling
manpower shortage. Quote by summer, accusation surface that the battalion's
leaders had condoned illegal activities with prisoners, and US officers
found a video of unit non commissioned officers abusing seven
prisoners by kicking them in their genitals and shocking them
(36:53):
with a taser. The initial investigation into detaining abuse uncovered
systematic problems with the battalion, leading to at least ten
other investigations that revealed a negative command climate. The battalion
commander Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Frey was an eccentric officer who
had first fought in Vietnam before fighting as a mercenary
in Rhodesia. In Iraq, he carried a tomahawk that he
(37:14):
cleared at clearing barrels and used to night soldiers during
promotion ceremonies. Frey tolerated other similar eccentric behavior and his subordinates,
such as allowing soldiers to carry samurai swords on patrol.
As the investigations expanded, investigators discovered that Frey had almost
been relieved to command during the battalion's pre deployment training,
and one of the generals responsible for training the unit
(37:34):
had predicted Frey would get soldiers killed. Frey had also
been accused of mistreating his own troops during mobilization training,
placing some of them in a survival school style isolation
to toughen them and causing a near mutiny that came
to the attention of the Los Angeles Times. The pattern
of abuses and poor leadership had continued in Iraq. Battalian
leaders had interpreted rules of engagement aggressively, leading one investigator
(37:55):
to describe Frey and his men as trying to fight
World War three. It was them, it's the world. Lower
standards mean we're soldiers, soldiers who might be more willing
to loot or rape, or lose their temper after a
sniper attack and take it out on civilians. That, of course,
would fuel the insurgency and make the task of the
soldiers even harder. Our military has been in this situation
(38:18):
constantly for almost twenty years, and we still don't have
a great handle on the problem. The manpower needs and
emotional stressors of fighting a war on American soil would
be even greater. Our military right now is facing a
major manpower shortage. It's not quite a crisis, but it's
an issue for our forces at their current state of activity.
(38:38):
The day before we recorded this episode, the news dropped
that Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Robert Neller, had
just allowed some of his own emails to leak to
the press. He did this because he was deeply worried
about the impact President Trump's deployment of the military to
the border has had on the readiness of his troops.
Quote the combat readiness of second Marine Expeditionary Force, one
(38:58):
third of the combat power of the Marine Corps is
degraded and will continue to degrade. Given current conditions, a
series of widespread and violent insurgencies could very, very quickly
overtax the U. S. Military. If it happens, it will
occur so much quicker than most Americans, who view our
military as all but omnipotent, would ever expect. That's the
(39:18):
consequence of two decades of incessant warfare. Now, this does
not mean an insurgency would be able to defeat our
military on the battlefield. I'm not imagining U. S. Soldiers
in full flight, waving white flags and surrendering to some
army of gun toting Bubba's or Antifa. That's not how
this kind of war works. Instead, I'm imagining a situation
that looks a lot more like Afghanistan now or a
(39:40):
Rack before the surge, where the U. S. Military control
certain areas islands of stability, but are forced to pull
back and at least temporarily seed control of chunks of
the country to separatists and insurgents. The amount of America
that can be controlled and governed will be dictated by
the military's manpower. It will ebb a little more each
day soldiers die, an operational capath city is degraded more
(40:01):
and more. The United States military is ready from many
different situations, but it is not prepared to fight in
American cities, nor is it prepared for the scale of
conflict a second American Civil War would bring. It can
handle foreign militaries, It can sort of handle insurgeons in Afghanistan,
but I don't think it can handle Whoko's boomerang to me?
(40:25):
Can you care me home? Can you mention material, soul
and holding, be a friend? Baron load, ferry me off flush,
looking for and the posedly you know if you're very
to a pick in defense, perhaps I've heards that is
pretty intense, and I won. Because the want of future
king is waning. We all need song as a song
and hosters and rocks, saw dust and socks. Who makes
clocks at its close? Chellows time, here's a thief gladness
and grief cling to the leaf as a yellows yellow
(40:46):
hand of every least as the sang sweet before this
invented the fellows go make your piece and gotch hard
beats before the whole earth gets swallow. So most sick
and sort of stuck under something slick the sea and
salty breeze no quipped the ship watch him slip. What
kind of candle has a wick? Hum? Both fens anyway
any day, but this one is ending me every morning.
(41:09):
See tended The's itchy for life, trying to get into
some tennas c t trying to get into some capits
of tea, tryn to make a couple of memories, slid away, bitter,
Miss Withers and crazy let him fade Tay, Okay, friends,
(41:39):
we can't. Can you give me home? Can you can
show the table? So pick de fence, perhaps the burch.
That is pretty intensive because I want to picture. I'm
Robert Evans and I'm just exhausted from reading all of that.
You can find me on Twitter. I right, okay. You
(42:01):
can find this show on Twitter at happen Here pod,
and you can find the show online at it could
Happen here pod dot com. Our music, as always is
from four Fists. It could Happen Here is a production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
listen to the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or
ever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to It could happen here a production of iHeart Radio.
The decision to send American soldiers into an American city
to restore order would be a momentous one, but it
would not be unprecedented. In nineteen fifty seven, President Eisenhower
sent the one hundred and first Airborne into Arkansas to
(00:22):
oppose that state's National Guard, who had been ordered by
the governor to not let black students into Little Rocks
Central High School. In nineteen sixty seven, members of Detroit's
all white police force arrested several black men at a
drinking club, which sparked riots that left forty three people dead.
The violence so overwhelmed the city's police that several thousand
(00:42):
Army troops and National guardsmen were brought in. In nineteen
sixty eight, after Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated, riots
broke out in the city of Chicago. The police tried
and failed to suppress the violence. Nine people died the
first night. The Army was again sent in to store order.
More than thirteen thousand soldiers were called into Washington, d c.
(01:04):
To protect the capital from spreading unrest and violence. Six
people died in rioting in Baltimore. The National Guard was
deployed there as well. I don't know about you, but
I never heard much about all that when I was
in school. I think I remember a vague mention of
rioting people protesting and such, but certainly no more detail
than that. But what happened in the wake of Martin
(01:25):
Luther King Jr's murder was not simple rioting. It was
a goddamn uprising. The Holy Week Uprising is actually the
name given to the ten days of violence that followed
doctor King's assassination. Almost two hundred American cities experienced simultaneous rioting, arson,
sniper attacks, and massive property damage. Peter Levy, author of
(01:46):
The Great Uprising, writes that during this week quote, the
United States experienced its greatest wave of social unrest since
the Civil War. The uprisings injured thirty five hundred, killed
forty three, and to twenty seven thousand arrests. It took
a total of fifty eight thousand National guardsmen and Army
soldiers to contain the violence. Many of those involved on
(02:09):
the side of the protesters absolutely saw the uprisings as
the prelude to a revolution. When h Rap Brown, an
organizer with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee was arrested
by the FBI. He told them, quote, we stand on
the eve of the Black Revolution with eye for eye
and life. The current rebellions were just a dress rehearsal
(02:31):
for the real revolution. Now, the Holy Week uprisings did not,
of course lead to a revolution, but they certainly provide
a blueprint of how we could expect the federal government
and the military to respond to a series of uprisings
in multiple major American cities. Once the police failed to
contain the unrest, as we talked about in the last episode,
(02:52):
the army and the National Guard would inevitably move in.
In the decades since nineteen sixty eight, American military thinkers
have grown more comfortable and adept at thinking of American
cities as just another battle space, as cities under siege
notes quote Lessons learned. Reports drawn up after military deployments
whose goal was to contain the Los Angeles riots of
(03:14):
nineteen two credit the success of the mission to the
fact that the enemy the local population, was easy to
out maneuver given their simple battle tactics and strategies. Now
I've referred back to cities under siege by Stephen Graham
several times in this podcast. I think it's developed a
vaguely prophetic feel to me. I first read through parts
(03:34):
of it in two thousand sixteen, after David Colcolan recommended
I read it. But it was published back in two
thousand ten, and it had its genesis in a conference
the author attended shortly after nine eleven. Here's Stephen Graham
telling that story. In two thousand and two, I was
invited with Simon Lawn course of the Spinfing Evanism book
to a conference in Israel title War in the City
(03:58):
in the twenty one Century. We were I meing and
eying a little bit about how whether to go, and
we ended up going. It was in Haifa University, and
we turned up expecting a sort of academic debate. We
were surrounded for a few days by guys wearing camouflage
and carrying machine guns and talking about the city as
the new battle ground, as the new frontier, as the
(04:21):
new space of of struggle for for militaries and for
security forces. And we were quite shocked and astonished to
discover this enormous world of sort of urban research that
was going on in a sort of parallel universe to
the more familiar worlds to us anyway of social science
(04:41):
discussions about cities. So we're back in the day before
the invasion of Iraq. Military planners in the United States
were already taking it for granted that the wars of
the future would be fought in cities. The last eighteen
years have proven that prediction accurate. For Luja, RockA, Marawi,
and Mosl are just the most spectacular EXAs amples. On
(05:01):
my second trip out to Mosel, we billeted with some
soldiers from Iraq's Golden Division, the US Train and Equipped
Special Forces Unit, and what had once been a wealthy
family's house in western Mosle. The man who had previously
lived there had risen high in Isis his ranks not
because he was a great warrior or a devious terrorist mastermind,
but because he did a fantastic job of managing a
(05:21):
factory that produced metal tubing. These tubes had been used
for a variety of tube based commercial purposes back in peacetime,
but now that Mosell was at war, Isis had repurposed
the tubes to produce giant custom mortars. My videographer, my fixers,
and I all shared one of the most bizarre dinners
of my life with an Iraqi colonel and what had
once been that tube making man's daughter's bedroom. The walls
(05:45):
were brightly painted with reasonable facsimiles of Disney princesses. Since
isis was Isis, their eyes had been blotted out with great,
big blotches of red. The purpose of that was to
sort of disrupt the drawings features enough that it didn't
violate fundamentalist Muslin prohibitions against depicting the human form. It
had the effect of making Ariel snow white and Pocahontas
(06:06):
look red eyed and vaguely demonic. As I sat there,
my eyes flitting from the paintings on the wall, to
the bullet holes in the ceiling, to the old colonel
happily eating lamb, I remembered a quote by Sultan Barakat,
a professor at the University of York. Today wars are
fought not in trenches and fields, but in living rooms, schools,
(06:26):
and supermarkets. The First American Civil War had battles with
names like bull Run, Gettysburg, and the Battle of the Wilderness.
The battles of the Second American Civil War will more
likely have names like the Battle of Boyle Heights, the
Battle of Manhattan, and the Battle of Portland. As doctor
(06:46):
Graham noted, this is not particularly controversial thinking among military planners.
It's been well accepted doctrine for decades that future war
fighting will take place in cities. Mega cities, urban areas
with a popular lation of more than ten million are
particular areas of concern for military planners. The United States
has four mega cities. I found a Military Times article
(07:10):
published in two thousand eighteen that interviewed Army Chief of
Staff General Mark Milly about this quote. Milly has said
that the Army is not ready to fight in mega cities.
He has characterized recent and current urban operations, including fighting
and Aleppo in Syria and Fellujah and Mosle in Iraq,
as previews of future conflict. Those fights, while bloody, costly,
(07:33):
and destructive, hardly reached the scale of a mega city.
Mosle is not equal to a neighborhood and soul, Milly
has said. Now, two of America's mega cities, Los Angeles
and New York, also hosted huge occupy contingents back in
two thousand eleven. If we're looking at potential hotspots, cities
that might declare themselves autonomous zones. These both fit the bill. Now,
(07:57):
if your experience in the City of Angels is limitted
to walking the Santa Monica Peer or catching a movie
at Man's Chinese Theater, the idea of l A as
a center of violent resistance to the state probably seems absurd.
It's felt that way to me more than a few
times as I walk around my lovely palm lined neighborhood
on the West Side, enjoying cool breezes and watching smiling
couples walk their ridiculous tiny dogs. And when I start
(08:20):
to convince myself that my experiences in this pleasant chunk
of the city mean more than they do, I think
back to the Nineto riots. Those riots were kicked off,
of course by the brutal police beating of Rodney King
and the fact that the officers responsible were acquitted, But
those riots did not arise in a vacuum. Unrest had
been growing in the city and among black urban populations
(08:42):
in the United States for quite some time. A tremendous
amount of rap and hip hop from the late eighties
and pre riot nineties referenced the widespread feeling that something
was about to go down. I actually found a fun
Rolling Stone article that picks out fifteen of these songs.
It's an interesting read. Quote on ghetto Boys City under Siege,
(09:04):
bushwick Bill plays tribute to Ida Delaney, a black woman
who was shot to death by a drunken off duty
police officer in nineteen eighty nine. Unlike the four cops
received not guilty verdicts for assaulting Rodney King, Alex Gonzalez
was initially convicted of manslaughter, but the decision was overturned
on appeal. Meanwhile, Scarface and Willie D. Mock then President
George H. W. Bush's nineteen ninety invasion of Panama to
(09:28):
capture former CIA stooge Manuel Noriega and corrupt government officials
who hypocritically enabled drug pushers while publicly lambasting them. Their
final analysis, Everything's corrupt, fux school, fuck curfew, fuck homework,
and mother fuck a damn cop rails Bushwick Bill with
the kind of nihilism fervor that occasionally sets cities in flames. Now,
(09:50):
I find it interesting that bushwick Bill's City under Siege
has almost the exact same title as a seminal work
of military theory published twenty years later. Anyway, if the
l a police in ninety two were overwhelmed by a
group of largely unarmed and inexperienced, disobedient citizens. Well, that
can happen again. Individual states have been forced to use
(10:10):
the army to pacify cities in recent memory. What hasn't
happened ever, in this nation's history is the army being
overwhelmed by a civilian uprising. That would be unprecedented, and
it seems particularly unlikely in light of the fact that
our military has spent much of the last twenty years
fighting in cities and planning to fight in more cities.
(10:32):
But I have come to believe that it is in
fact possible for American insurgents to defeat, or at least
hold their own against the American military. The explanation for
why I feel this way also starts back in that
little girl's bedroom, and mosle I mentioned her father, the
home's former owner, had a job making tubes for ISIS mortars.
Much was said about the American weapons ISIS captured in
(10:55):
Syria and Iraq. Less has been said about the open source, modular,
and easyly replicable weapon factories they created in mosl ISIS
was infamous for using a weird bespoke one hundred and
nineteen point five millimeter mortar round These were very big shells,
and I can say from terrifying experience that they made
much larger booms than the standard eighty one millimeter mortars
(11:18):
used by American soldiers. These machines of war, like many
of ICE's deadliest armaments, were crafted entirely from things you
can find in any city on Earth. The average mechanic
in any American city can build one of Dasha's mortars.
There's mortar rounds and all ices. Explosive devices were built
with modularity in mind. ISIS had schematics for a standard
(11:40):
detonator which could be slotted into rockets or grenades or
suicide belts or gigantic vehicle based I e. D s
and then used to blast holes in Iraqi Army and
Kurdish defensive lines. In other words, ISIS invented a plug
and play arsenal. With the open source designs, Isis dreamed
up any moderately intelligent engine near could throw together basically
(12:01):
any purpose built device he wanted to build. There's a
fantastic Wired article about this, the Terror Industrial Complex. Its
author follows a European investigator named Splitters as he travels
around i Rack to recently liberated IIS factories, trying to
figure out how they kept arming themselves once the entire
city of Mozle had been cut off from the rest
(12:23):
of the caliphate. Quote. Iraq's oil fields provided the industrial
base tool and dye sets, high end saws, injection molding machines,
and skilled workers who knew how to quickly fashion intricate
parts to spec Raw materials came from cannibalizing steel pipe
and melting down scrap. ISIS engineers forged new fuses, new
(12:43):
rockets and launchers, and new bomblets to be dropped by drones,
all assembled using instruction plans drawn up by ISIS officials.
The aluminum paste in the bucket, for example, which ISIS
craftsmen mixed with ammonium nitrate to make a potent main
charge from mortars and rocket warheads. Splitters discovered the same
buckets from the same manufacturers and chemical distributors in Fallujah,
to Crete and Mosle. I like to see the same
(13:06):
stuff in different cities, he tells me, since these repeat
sightings allow him to identify and describe different steps in
isis's supply chain. It confirms my theory that this is
the industrial revolution of terrorism, and for that they need
raw material and industrial quantities. If Iraq was the site
(13:35):
of terrorisms industrial revolution, American cities might wind up being
its proving ground. For one thing, there are already millions
of civilians in this country with access to many of
the basic tools and ingredients needed to manufacture similar armaments.
You can buy gunpowder in every state that deliver it
to your door. In many parts of this fair land
they deliver tannerite to ammonium nitrate, which provided the charge
(13:58):
for isis as. Explosives can also be derived from tannerite.
Back when I lived in Texas, I'd ordered twenty pounds
of the stuff At a time it cost around two
hundred dollars. It actually seems to be a little cheaper nowadays.
If you're on a budget, five pounds is just forty
two dollars. This might be news to urban liberals, but
trust me, every left and right wing gun nut in
America already knows about this stuff. They sell it in
(14:21):
sporting goods stores. In my mind, a city life Portland
is one of the easiest places to imagine a serious
revolutionary movement kicking off. It's got the right mix of
seriously dedicated, experienced left wing activists and politically active far
right extremists. It also has a prevalent gun culture, including
numerous left wing gun clubs. But even cities like New
York and Los Angeles, which restrict explosives, gunpowder, and firearms
(14:43):
much more rigorously, are large and porous enough that it
would be easy to imagine weaponry flowing there from other
parts of the country. In two thousand fifteen, a South
Carolina man's home was busted with five thousand illegal firearms.
Investigators suspect this home was a nexus point in what's
known as the Iron Pipeline, a network of gun smugglers
who ensure cities with strict gun control still enjoy access
(15:06):
to the same deadly weapons as people in Fuck Off Texas.
And this brings me to the Automaidon in keV. During
the Maidan Uprising, it became necessary to smuggle weaponry, fireworks, sticks, shields,
et cetera into the protest camp. As the fighting escalated
from the standard shoving matches between police and protesters to
something more akin to urban warfare. Members of the Automaidon
(15:29):
arranged distraction cars to draw police attention away, while other
volunteers drove their supplies into occupied sections of town. Much
of what was smuggled in was food or medical supplies,
but as the fighting wore on, rifles and ammunition and
armor became increasingly common. I imagine the same thing happening
in America as activists and occupied chunks of cities use
(15:49):
encrypted communication apps to coordinate with their friends and government
controlled territory. As the fighting grows more serious, the equipment
smuggled in will change from milk of magnesia for tear
gas helmets, shields, and sticks to kevlar vests, a R fifteens,
bullets and explosives. The same sort of thing, with a
different cast of characters will occur in separatist chunks of
(16:10):
rural America. Some of these smugglers will be enterprising young
mercenaries just looking for a way to make a buck.
Others will be true believers, and many may actually be
leftist separatists willing to make a deal with right wing separatists,
handing over tools and raw materials derived from the industrial
base of the cities in exchange for food and firearms.
(16:31):
Civil wars make strange bedfellows. Just ask any Syrian and
I imagine one of the things those right wing separatists
will most once smuggled out from the cities are over
the counter civilian drones. And this brings me back to
Isis and Mosel See Dash wasn't just making mortar rounds
in their homebrew factories. They also made bomblets with injection
(16:52):
molded plastic bodies and handmade tail kits. Some of these
literally looked like grenades with shuttlecocks attached. They'd take little
servo motors, simple remote controlled claus and attach those two
perfectly legal drones. The most popular model seemed to be
the d j I Phantom, which currently retails for between
five hundred and fifteen hundred dollars depending on options. You
(17:13):
can pick one up at your local best Buy today.
Outfitting a drone in this manner requires very little. You
can order all the necessary parts off of Amazon dot com.
Given enough time, anyone listening to this podcast could figure
it all out. The only thing Amazon won't provide are
the bomblets themselves. I'm not going to go into detail
about how exactly those are constructed, but if you know
(17:36):
someone who built their own computer. You probably know someone
who could figure it out. Bomb science is not rocket science.
With twenty or thirty thousand dollars in funding, a group
of insurgents could have everything they would need to start
putting together a small air force. And in case you're wondering, yes,
weaponized commercial drones are effective terrifyingly so. On my second
(17:59):
trip in the Moosle, I talked to Major Mezer Sadoun.
Mezer had been the captain of the Mosel swat team
before Isis invaded. He was famous for being the last
cop in town as Isis took over the city, and
when the Iraqi army invaded Mosele to oust Isis, he
formed an elite unit of men who had all lost
family to Islamic terrorists and one revenge. They spent months
(18:20):
at the front of the advance. Mezer survived multiple car
bombings and suicide belt detonations. He's probably the most frightening
man I will ever meet. I only saw him express
anything close to fear once, and it's when I asked
him about fighting Isis's drones. I remember the way he
shook his head as he explained to me how nearly
impossible it was to hit one of those little fuckers,
(18:42):
even for experienced veterans with machine guns. There were a
lot of drones over Mosle, and many of them were
d j I phantoms. The Iraqi army, taking a leaf
out of Isis's book, built their own drone fleet along
almost identical lines. I have a video on my hard
drive of one of these drones killing US sniper. I've
also seen videos online of ISIS using these little drones
(19:04):
to blow up armored hum vies. Nick Waters, a journalist
with the investigative platform Belling Cat, analyzed hundreds of ISIS
drone strikes and found that twenty two point two percent
of them hit hum vs, But tanks and other armored
vehicles like cougars and self propelled cannons were also attacked
and destroyed by weaponized civilian drones. Vehicle armor is not
(19:26):
as thick at the top, because why would it be.
I've even seen at least one video where ISIS dropped
a grenade inside an armored vehicle through an opened top hatch.
It and the soldiers inside were basically atomized. Nothing scared
the Iraqi soldiers I was embedded with more than the
distinctive hum of tiny drones, and it really was terrifying
(19:46):
to know that out there and the sky around you,
this little robotic gnat might be about to drop a
bomb on your head. These drones are like two feet across.
Most of them are white. When they move fast, they're
damn near invisible in the sky. Once you heard that buzz,
you knew that a bomb could land in a second,
or a mortar, because ISIS also used unarmed drones as
(20:07):
spotters for their pocket artillery. I like to quote from
that Wired article again at a place where the author
makes the point that isis's defeat and Mosele did not
mean that all their knowledge and capability died out. Quote
their intellectual capital, their weapon designs, the engineering challenges they've solved,
their industrial processes, blueprints and schematics still constitute a major threat.
(20:31):
That's the really scary part. To the extent that the
ISIS model proliferates, says Matt Schrader, a senior researcher at
the Small Arms Survey, the Geneva Base think tank. Much
of the international structure that prevents weapons trafficking is rendered
useless if ISIS can simply upload and share their designs
and manufacturing processes with affiliates in Africa and Europe who
also have access to money and machinery. Joshua Pierce, an
(20:54):
engineering professor in Michigan Tech University, is an expert in
open source hardware. He descried ribes ISIS manufacturing as a
very twisted maker culture. In this future, weapons schematics can
be downloaded from the dark Web or simply shared via
popular encrypted social media services like WhatsApp. In the previous episode,
(21:15):
I talked about Adam Often and their obsessive love of
ISIS propaganda and tactics. Most Americans haven't heard of isis's
open source munition factories. The people who have are probably
an even mix of military veterans, journalists, and budding terrorists.
Those files will spread, and they will wind up in
the hands of domestic extremists, not just ISIS. And because
(21:38):
technology works the way it does, the weapons made will
only get more efficient and deadlier as different groups produce them,
work out kinks, and upload their improved designs to the Internet.
This is not a cat that can be put back
in its bag. So let's think back to our hypothetical
civil war. We've got rural uprisings and cities that have
(21:59):
Barrick Hated themselves away from federal control. After many, many
deaths and injuries, it's become clear that the police have failed.
The point at which army and marine infantry start moving
in to say, put down the state of Jefferson uprising
in northern California and liberate Wall Street from the leftist
mob occupying it. At that point, many people would expect
(22:20):
this to be where things end rather quickly, but I
believe it would be the point in which Fukau's boomerang
hits our nation square in the face. One of the
things that really struck me about that Wired article was
the comparison between ISIS weapon shops and maker culture. I
have a lot of friends who are into that sort
of stuff. One Guyane builds motorcycles out of scrap metal
(22:41):
and garbage. People with those skills, the kind of people
every city has thousands of, are perfectly capable of constructing
these kinds of arsenals where they motivated and angry enough
to want to do so. Now, what I've been talking
about so far is how a hypothetical American insurgency could
arm as Elf with the kind of weapons that would
allow it to compete with the U. S. Military, not
(23:04):
in an open field, obviously, but in an urban battleground.
At this point, you may be asking yourselves, what good
are a bunch of mortars in tiny drones against tanks
and artillery. Well, I have a couple of responses to that. First,
it took the coalition nine months of brutal door to
door fighting to kick Isis out of Mosele. And second,
the federal government would never get away with deploying the
(23:26):
same kind of force against an American city that they
did against Mosle, at least not at first. Well, the
official death toll in Mosele, according to the US government,
is only around a thousand civilians or so. Literally, no
one who's fought there, reported there, or lives there believes
that they will be digging corpses out of collapsed buildings
in that city for the next twenty years. Some estimates
(23:48):
put the real death toll at well over twenty five thousand.
It could even be several times that. Try and imagine
the political reaction to watching a section of Chicago or
Dallas just turned in to powder. It's one thing for
the U. S. Air Force to murder a bunch of
foreigners five thousand miles away. It's another thing entirely to
do it in America. We're not going to be dropping
(24:10):
bombs and launching missiles in American cities. U S troops
will be sent in mounted in light armored vehicles. Mortars
and bomblets can do a lot of damage to those
The urban insurgents will have a couple of choices once
the soldiers move in. Their first option would be to
seed the protest camp to the military and disperse into
the crowd. This would carry a huge number of tactical benefits,
(24:32):
but it would also mean losing hold on territory, which
for any kind of rebel movement would be a huge blow.
It's one thing to say we're occupying Wall Street until
these changes are made, and another to go from defending
your barricades into a dispersed, violent insurgency. I don't think
American leftists would take that tack. I can see them
trying to defend their autonomous zone, and I can see
(24:54):
it the American military hard pressed to dislodge them without
committing war crimes. It would be a slow grinding fight.
The work of snipers, drones, vehicle based i e. D s,
and home brewed heavy weapons. Things would be different in
rural America. Let's go back to our hypothetical state of
Jefferson doing its damnedest to strangle California's water supply. I
(25:15):
think the military would get involved pretty quickly there, and
I think a rural insurgency would absolutely melt into the
trees at the first sight of any significant American military presence.
There would certainly be Afghan war veterans among the insurgents,
and they would know exactly how to bleed and occupying army.
I'd like to quote now from War, a fantastic book
(25:36):
by famed conflict journalist Sebastian Younger. He spent months embedded
with an army platoon in the Corengall Valley, by far
the most dangerous posting in all of Afghanistan. Most of
what these soldiers experienced on a day to day basis
was not the kind of face to face gunfight Hollywood
loves to depict. Most nights, some young Afghan kid would
crawl up a mountain in the darkness with an old,
(25:57):
cheap bolt action rifle and fire a few rounds towards
the American outpost or cop. Here's Younger quote. Once I
was at the operations center when single shots started coming
in and first Sergeant called Well headed for the door
to deal with it. On his way out, I asked
him what was going on, some jackass waste in our time?
He said that jackass was probably a local teenager who
(26:19):
was paid by one of the insurgent groups to fire
off a magazine's worth of AMMO at the cop The
going rate was five dollars a day. He could fire
at the base until mortars started coming back at him,
and then he could drop off the backside of the
ridge and be home in twenty minutes. Mobility has always
been the default choice of guerilla fighters because they don't
have access to the kinds of heavy weapons that would
slow them down. The fact that networks of highly mobile
(26:41):
amateurs can confound even defeat a professional army is the
only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the
course of history. Whether that is a good thing or
not depends on what amateurs you're talking about or what empires,
but it does mean that you can't predict the outcome
of a war simply by looking at the numbers. For
every technological advances held by the Americans. The Taliban seem
(27:02):
to have an equivalent or a countermeasure. Apache helicopters have
thermal imaging that reveals body heat on the mountain side,
so Taliban fighters disappear by covering themselves in a blanket
on a warm rock. The Americans use unmanned drones to
pinpoint the enemy, but the Taliban can do the same
thing by watching the flocks of crows that circle American
soldiers looking for scraps of food. The Americans have virtually
(27:23):
unlimited firepower, so the Taliban send only one guy to
take on an entire fire base. Whether or not he
gets killed, he will have succeeded in coming up the
machine for yet one more day. Everything in war is simple,
but the simplest thing is difficult. The military theorist Carl
von Klauswitz wrote in the twenties, the difficulties accumulate an
(27:43):
end by producing a sort of friction. We now friction
coming up the sheen That is exactly the root any
group of smart insurgents would need to take in order
(28:05):
to defeat the United States military. We've all seen the
posers who love to flex with their air fifteens on
social media and talk about how they need their assault
rifles to fight tyranny. I'm not going to make a
pro or anti gun argument here, but I do want
to point out that from the point of view of
a rebel group, an old, rusty bolt action rifle can
be just as effective at gumming up the machine as
(28:28):
a thirty dollar tactical black rifle with lasers and rails
and ship. In fact, you don't even need the rifle
or the human volunteer. Armed drones can accomplish a similar
goal without risking a life. The reality, of course, is
that a variety of tactics would be used, some groups
sending out lone snipers, others fielding drones with occasional raids
and assaults by combat units. But I suspect in terms
(28:51):
of their sheer ability to produce friction, no current product
has as much promise as drones. On the eighth of
January two thousand eighteen, the Russian Ministry of Defense released
a statement that the Cammingam Air Base and Syria had
been attacked by sudden mortar fire, killing two servicemen. Had
this been true, the attack would have been hardly newsworthy,
(29:12):
But the reality which came out weeks later after intensive
open source investigation by journalists is that the Cammingam air
Base was assaulted on at least three separate occasions by
successive waves of handmade attack drones. These drones killed at
least two Russian soldiers, but also damaged and grounded an
unknown number of jets. We have pictures of at least
(29:32):
one of them. While the drones were all destroyed by
Russian defenses, many of them were able to effectively loose
their payloads, and the attacks effectively grounded the entire air
base for the better part of a week. There are
pictures of these drones. I'll have a few uploaded to
the site. But to describe them, if you ever built
one of those styrofoam model planes, the giant ones with
like a four foot wingspan that you tossed into the sky, well,
(29:55):
these looked a lot like that, but with a motor
and an engine and pylons on the bottom that you
can attack bombs too. So these drones didn't even require
someone have the cash to afford a d j I Phantom.
Handmade drones crafted from literally balsa wood and styrofoam grounded
a Russian air base filled with multimillion dollar fighter jets.
The bombs, in case you're wondering, are basically big plastic
(30:18):
tubes filled with gunpowder and babies. That's all you need.
It turns out to kill people and puncture airplane gas tanks.
I encourage you to take a look at the picture
I'll post and see just how rudimentary these weapons are.
Most people listening to this podcast could probably build one
with minor guidance given the right equipment. At least eighteen
drones were used in three successive attack waves. It's hard
(30:40):
to say exactly how much these costs to prepare, but
just looking at them, I wouldn't be surprised if the
whole attack cost twenty dollars or less. That's a pretty
good rate of return when it comes to silencing an
entire modern air base for a week. Air power is
traditionally one of, if not the biggest advantages the United
States takes to war. Think of the disastrous morale impact
(31:02):
of knowing your helicopters and jets were grounded, knowing your
air support had been reduced or even knocked out because
some hillbilly redneck rigged together an air force for the
cost of a Masdamiata and everything we've talked about so far,
all these potential tactics and weapons has mostly ignored the
fact that the United States is filled with three D printers.
(31:23):
I know individual people who own those things, and they
get more common and more effective every year. You've probably
read a few hysterical articles over the years about the
terrible threat of three D printed guns. Let me tell
you those things are the very least of your worries.
A shitty pistol that explodes in your hand half the
time is not nearly as scary as the suicide drones
that terrorist groups have already made using machines that cost
(31:45):
a few thousand dollars. In November of two seventeen, one
such group in Syria bombed the Kaffer Home refugee camp
with a device that looked like a tiny bomb with
an engine, and that is essentially what it was. That
picture will be up on the site as well. Eagle
Lie investigators quickly realized that the drone was constructed using
the telltale honeycomb pattern of a low end three D printer.
(32:06):
According to all three D p quote, these homemade drones
and guided bombs offer terrorist organizations a number of advantages
over missile strikes. These drones can evade missile warning receivers,
can't be decoyed away from their target, and can be
launched from anywhere. In other words, because mass produced drones
like the d g I Phantom are legal products and stuff,
there are ways to disable them, backdoors and known weaknesses
(32:28):
governments can exploit. A home built drone is much more
difficult to counter, and drones are not the only thing
you can build with a three D printer. I'd like
to quote now from an article in National Interest. Army
researchers have devised a method to produce ceramic body armor
lightweight but strong from a three D printer, except that
three D printers are meant to print out knickknacks, not
flak jackets, which means that engineers had to hack the
(32:50):
printer to get the job done. Lionel Vargus Gonzalez, a
researcher at the Army Research Laboratory, sees three D printer
ceramics as the next avenue for armor because we're going
to be able to in theory, design armor in a
way that we can attach multiple materials together to a
single armor plate and be able to provide ways for
the armory to perform better than it can be just
based on material alone. The Industrial Revolution forever put an
(33:14):
end to the era in which settled, so called civilized
people's had to worry about invasions from nomadic warrior people
throughout all of recorded history up until that point, every
few centuries, some new tribe of horse mounted warriors would
trot down from the Asian steps and funk up an
empire or three. Now we're crossing into a new era
where any group of sufficiently motivated people can produce military
(33:35):
grade weaponry via infrastructure small enough to fit into the
average house. And maybe now understanding that, it's easier to
understand how even the mighty US military could be overwhelmed
by an insurgency or, as I'm theorizing several insurgencies, the
most U S troops ever deployed to a Rack during
the occupation was a hundred and sixty six thousand men.
(33:56):
These soldiers will tell you they were nearly always under manned.
In fact, the only thing that made the occupation possible
was an equal number of contractors, many from Bangladesh and
other poor countries, doing dangerous jobs like driving supply trucks
down booby trapped roads in lieu of U S servicemen
and women. Less than forty million people live in Iraq.
The country is a hundred and sixty eight thousand, seven
(34:18):
hundred and fifty four square miles. There are more than
three hundred and twenty million Americans spread out over more
than three point seven million square miles. If one American
city rose up against the federal government, ten or twenty
thousand soldiers could suppress the rebellion without mass destruction. If
one rural chunk of one state, like northern California, broke
out in a bloody insurgency, it might take longer to suppress,
(34:40):
but our armed forces would certainly have the manpower. But
what about four or five cities and counties in a
dozen American states? What if it spread even more widely
than that. For most of the occupation in Iraq, US
forces were chronically short of manpower. In two thousand seven,
the army was desperate enough to massively reduce their recruitment standards.
This had predictable consequences. From a CBS article at the time, quote,
(35:05):
the number of incoming soldiers with prior felony arrests or
convictions has more than tripled in the past five years.
This year alone, the army accepted and estimated eight thousand
recruits with rap sheets, reports CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier.
Most are guilty of misdemeanors, but around a hundred in
the past year had felony convictions. Burglaries and narcotics are
probably are two top categories, according to Colonel Sheila Hickman. Now,
(35:28):
I'd like to read an excerpt from a Politico article
written by a Vet named John Spencer. He's one of
the officers who had to deal with the consequences of
this major manpower shortage. In two thousand and eight, when
I was an infantry company commander in charge of over
a hundred and forty soldiers in Baghdad, I saw firsthand
how the declining number of volunteers is hurting the military.
Thirty six of my men were forced to deploy, even
(35:49):
though their terms of service were up, a controversial military
policy known as stop loss or at the back door draft.
To meet the bare minimum number of soldiers in a unit,
my unit took men who were medically unfit to fight.
I had soldiers that could not leave our compound because
they were medically prohibited from wearing body armor or classified
as mentally unfit. I had soldiers taking antidepression, sleeping anxiety,
(36:10):
and other drugs. I had a mentally unstable private viciously
attacked as sergeant, causing lifelong damage, and multiple other problem
soldiers that detracted from the combat performance of my unit.
This was symptomatic throughout the Army. I found an even
more damning account in the U. S. Army War College's
report on the Iraq War, which you can all download
and read for free right now if you'd like. This
(36:31):
section concerns a National Guard unit from California sent into
Iraq in a desperate attempt to deal with the crippling
manpower shortage. Quote by summer, accusation surface that the battalion's
leaders had condoned illegal activities with prisoners, and US officers
found a video of unit non commissioned officers abusing seven
prisoners by kicking them in their genitals and shocking them
(36:53):
with a taser. The initial investigation into detaining abuse uncovered
systematic problems with the battalion, leading to at least ten
other investigations that revealed a negative command climate. The battalion
commander Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Frey was an eccentric officer who
had first fought in Vietnam before fighting as a mercenary
in Rhodesia. In Iraq, he carried a tomahawk that he
(37:14):
cleared at clearing barrels and used to night soldiers during
promotion ceremonies. Frey tolerated other similar eccentric behavior and his subordinates,
such as allowing soldiers to carry samurai swords on patrol.
As the investigations expanded, investigators discovered that Frey had almost
been relieved to command during the battalion's pre deployment training,
and one of the generals responsible for training the unit
(37:34):
had predicted Frey would get soldiers killed. Frey had also
been accused of mistreating his own troops during mobilization training,
placing some of them in a survival school style isolation
to toughen them and causing a near mutiny that came
to the attention of the Los Angeles Times. The pattern
of abuses and poor leadership had continued in Iraq. Battalian
leaders had interpreted rules of engagement aggressively, leading one investigator
(37:55):
to describe Frey and his men as trying to fight
World War three. It was them, it's the world. Lower
standards mean we're soldiers, soldiers who might be more willing
to loot or rape, or lose their temper after a
sniper attack and take it out on civilians. That, of course,
would fuel the insurgency and make the task of the
soldiers even harder. Our military has been in this situation
(38:18):
constantly for almost twenty years, and we still don't have
a great handle on the problem. The manpower needs and
emotional stressors of fighting a war on American soil would
be even greater. Our military right now is facing a
major manpower shortage. It's not quite a crisis, but it's
an issue for our forces at their current state of activity.
(38:38):
The day before we recorded this episode, the news dropped
that Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Robert Neller, had
just allowed some of his own emails to leak to
the press. He did this because he was deeply worried
about the impact President Trump's deployment of the military to
the border has had on the readiness of his troops.
Quote the combat readiness of second Marine Expeditionary Force, one
(38:58):
third of the combat power of the Marine Corps is
degraded and will continue to degrade. Given current conditions, a
series of widespread and violent insurgencies could very, very quickly
overtax the U. S. Military. If it happens, it will
occur so much quicker than most Americans, who view our
military as all but omnipotent, would ever expect. That's the
(39:18):
consequence of two decades of incessant warfare. Now, this does
not mean an insurgency would be able to defeat our
military on the battlefield. I'm not imagining U. S. Soldiers
in full flight, waving white flags and surrendering to some
army of gun toting Bubba's or Antifa. That's not how
this kind of war works. Instead, I'm imagining a situation
that looks a lot more like Afghanistan now or a
(39:40):
Rack before the surge, where the U. S. Military control
certain areas islands of stability, but are forced to pull
back and at least temporarily seed control of chunks of
the country to separatists and insurgents. The amount of America
that can be controlled and governed will be dictated by
the military's manpower. It will ebb a little more each
day soldiers die, an operational capath city is degraded more
(40:01):
and more. The United States military is ready from many
different situations, but it is not prepared to fight in
American cities, nor is it prepared for the scale of
conflict a second American Civil War would bring. It can
handle foreign militaries, It can sort of handle insurgeons in Afghanistan,
but I don't think it can handle Whoko's boomerang to me?
(40:25):
Can you care me home? Can you mention material, soul
and holding, be a friend? Baron load, ferry me off flush,
looking for and the posedly you know if you're very
to a pick in defense, perhaps I've heards that is
pretty intense, and I won. Because the want of future
king is waning. We all need song as a song
and hosters and rocks, saw dust and socks. Who makes
clocks at its close? Chellows time, here's a thief gladness
and grief cling to the leaf as a yellows yellow
(40:46):
hand of every least as the sang sweet before this
invented the fellows go make your piece and gotch hard
beats before the whole earth gets swallow. So most sick
and sort of stuck under something slick the sea and
salty breeze no quipped the ship watch him slip. What
kind of candle has a wick? Hum? Both fens anyway
any day, but this one is ending me every morning.
(41:09):
See tended The's itchy for life, trying to get into
some tennas c t trying to get into some capits
of tea, tryn to make a couple of memories, slid away, bitter,
Miss Withers and crazy let him fade Tay, Okay, friends,
(41:39):
we can't. Can you give me home? Can you can
show the table? So pick de fence, perhaps the burch.
That is pretty intensive because I want to picture. I'm
Robert Evans and I'm just exhausted from reading all of that.
You can find me on Twitter. I right, okay. You
(42:01):
can find this show on Twitter at happen Here pod,
and you can find the show online at it could
Happen here pod dot com. Our music, as always is
from four Fists. It could Happen Here is a production
of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
listen to the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or
ever you listen to your favorite shows.
It Could Happen Here News
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Robert Evans
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