Sorry for the delay again.

Been working on some stuff for American Partisan and I’ll have some of that stuff posted here soon and over the next couple of weeks. I’ll put up some of the good things our other people are doing.

Also, I am (once again) officially a college student. My wife and I, both. Lord help us.

When the American Began to Hate

We are running out of time for this to come to fruition.

Let’s hope it comes early enough

To Hell with China. And no, I will not be re-educated.

Support the fight of Hong Kong against an oppressive Chinese Communist government. Support ALL peoples’ fights against them.

And never doubt how much control China has over our government, economy, media, academia and entertainment.

Will you be re-educated?

People will always find the time to do what they want to do.

If there is something someone really wants to do, they’ll find the time, they’ll make the time, to do it. If there is something they don’t want to do, something they don’t enjoy or want, they’ll find every reason not to. They’ll allow every small obstacle to impede them, to stop them, and they won’t even attempt to find a way around it, no matter how simple the solution is. On the other hand, any obstacle to doing what they really want to do will be overcome, and if they have to shelve other priorities to do it, then so be it.

This is the way of things for people in the world, in a society, in a home, and the likelihood of it changing is slim to none.

T.E. Lawrence, a master of guerrilla warfare.

There have been many examinations of the life and exploits of Thomas Edward Lawrence, CB, DSO, better known as T.E. Lawrence, or even more so as "Lawrence of Arabia". In this writer's opinion, there can not be enough examinations of such an outstanding existence as the one lived by T.E. Lawrence. Perhaps the readers here will not learn anything new about the man from this short piece, but if all that you take from this piece is a reminder that such a human lived, and lived well, then that is enough. Obviously there are a great many things that we in our community of “Freedomistas” and liberty lovers, or dare I call us guerrilla partisans at the risk of triggering an "ERPO", can learn and apply to our cause going forward.

Born in Wales in 1888, T.E. Lawrence went on to become a British Army intelligence officer during World War I. He was sent to Saudi Arabia in 1916 where he eventually became involved in the Arab Revolt and the Sinai and Palestine Campaign. He used his strategic genius to guide guerrilla activities, counseled factions to work together, planned and executed guerrilla activities and worked up to the level of military advisor for high ranking personnel. Upon his arrival in the theatre, he quickly recognized that the forces he was fighting with were not at the level of the regular Turkish/Ottoman troops, and he therefore convinced and committed the local tribesmen to guerrilla warfare with great success.

In examining Lawrence's writings and writings about him, we see the foundation of what it is to operate as a guerrilla force. Attacking supply lines, communications, striking the enemy at their weak points while avoiding their strengths. Lawrence was able to embed himself with the local Arab populations, blend in well (despite being unmistakably a white Brit) by learning "their language their manners and their mentality", as said by General Allenby, and live amongst them for months at a time with little to no support from higher up any chain of command. If there is to be a "Guerrilla Warfare 101" textbook, let it be the life of T.E. Lawrence, or maybe more so, his autobiography "Revolt in the Desert".

Having read several substantial texts on Lawrence, one takes notice of a favorite tactic, that is the destruction of railroads used by the Ottomans to move troops from one stronghold to another. On at least several occasions, Lawrence himself used explosives to destroy rails and trains, allowing his small band of Bedouin Arabs to outmatch larger numbers of soldiers who were focused on trying to escape the wreckage. This caused the Ottomans to commit larger amounts of resources to defending areas that otherwise had little strategic value. When the Ottomans moved soldiers to a location, Lawrence and his wild band of fighters would simply relocate and attack the next vulnerable target.

Likewise was his strategy against communication wires. It was an easy target that required minimal resources, minimal manpower, short time and just a small risk, while the Ottomans had to once again commit resources to repairing and defending the lines. Resources that were moved by rail. The main objective is to magnify your advantages, mitigate your disadvantages, while neutralizing or avoiding your enemy's strengths and punishing their weaknesses. Only a few small victories by a guerrilla force can effectively demoralize a larger and well equipped enemy. Lawrence used this to great effect.

Another key point to be learned from Lawrence is a lesson in OPSEC. Operating in a guerrilla environment means one needs to be practicing OPSEC at all times, and Lawrence was a master at it, even keeping the details of some of his missions a secret from his own superiors.

Something else we can observe is how adept he was at climbing the hierarchy of whatever local leadership was in place, and getting himself into a position of great influence and trust. I've said before to people who know me that if you want to be famous or well known, get yourself elected to office. But if you want to have some real influence, find who is in charge and become their advisor. Lawrence was a natural at this, at one point gaining enough influence to convince military leadership of how to go about fighting in the theatre during the Arab Revolt.

I highly recommend reading T.E. Lawrence's writings. There has possibly not been a better representation of a true guerrilla warrior in modern times, and it behooves us all to absorb what we can from the greats that came before us if we stand any chance at regaining what our enemies seek to take away.

The Pentagon fired the man in charge of saving money

Shay Assad was in charge of negotiating contracts with defense industry corporations, and a couple of years after Trump came into office saying he would save us billions in defense costs, Assad was fired.

With Boeing, Raytheon and Textron executives occupying some of the top civil service positions at the Pentagon, is it any wonder that we have such a massive defense budget? I don't have any ill will against those companies, as I've ridden in their planes and used some of their gear, but I'm not inclined to believe that those companies should have their people working inside the Pentagon. That is a big conflict of interest.

Seems Shay Assad was (and had been for over a decade) getting in the way of the cash flow to these companies and others. Ellen Lord was hired in the middle of 2017 as the Pentagon's head "weapons buyer", and had been the CEO of Textron Systems. She is the one who eventually pushed Assad out of the Pentagon and into retirement.

I myself have witnessed military wasteful spending on a scale smaller than this, but then again, I'm a nobody. I've seen shipping containers filled with military gear that had little to no chance of ever seeing the light of day outside of the "conex yard", unless you want to count the inventory done by the XO every six months. Those inventories will usually result in "discovering" some minor missing gear that absolutely MUST be replaced with taxpayer money. Those missing pieces would be stored in the conex to be inventoried again later, where inevitably some other piece of gear would be missing.

Rinse and repeat.

The state of Western Civ.

Apparently Western Civilization is at the point where just the discovery of a head of state having attended a costume party in college will shake the country to it’s core.

This is what shakes us up now.

It’s gonna be FUN times when amateurs start dropping thermite bombs on our critical infrastructure using drones only slightly less sophisticated than these.

Thanks to Matt Bracken for passing that video along to us.

Remembering 9/11

I did not make a post this year for the 9/11 anniversary, as I usually do. Despite that, I did want to at least make a note and say that 9/11 is why I joined the Army, even if I waited until I was 24 to do it. I joined specifically to do two things, if nothing else. That was to join the intelligence community, and then go to Afghanistan.

I would have been happy to go to Iraq too, but I mainly joined to go to Afghanistan, and so I did. It may not have been the warzone it was in 2001, but when I went it still kind of the wild west, if you want to put it that way. I guess it always will be though. As of this writing, 17 US servicemen have died in Afghanistan this year, which is apparently the most in a year since 2014. I was in Afghanistan for OEF 13-14.

During the time I was there, during the missions I was on, we lost three men. I didn't know any of them particularly well myself. I was part of an intelligence HUMINT Collection Team (HCT) with 504th BfSB and assigned to 2nd Cavalry Regiment for a while during my deployment, and later was moved to a multi-function team (MFT) and reassigned to a group called "Task Force Black". We were frequently tasked to go out and perform whatever intelligence-related function a particular unit requested in RC South. Through this, we worked alongside Rangers from 3rd Battalion and men from 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), in addition to Navy Corpsmen and Air Force CI.

The three men who were killed on our missions were Specialist Cody Patterson and Sergeant Patrick Hawkins from 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, and Staff Sergeant Richard Vazquez of the 7th SF Group (Airborne).

Never forget.

More soon.

I’m still here and writing will continue. Things have been extremely busy lately with a transition to a new Emergency Room job and wrapping up some household debts once and for all. My content will be back here soon, and will also be at American Partisan.

Thanks for being patient. In the meantime, here are a few of the pieces that are stirring my brain cells this morning:

CEOs write to Congress asking for gun control. No surprises here. But don’t worry, your boycotts aren’t going to work.

We live in an age of Insta-pseudo-profound bullshit. Image is more important than reality.

Viktor Orban is the kind of leader we need. He is who we wanted Trump to be.

Berkey Water Filters. Take your average pond scum and make it drinkable.

NCScout on building the scout team. This is how our fight will be fought.

“Swedish” rapper says blacks should shoot and enslave whites. He’s actually Nigerian though. If a rat is born in a horse stable, it doesn’t make it a horse. It’s still a rat.

Spotting and Assessing Human Sources of Information

 Originally posted by The Gray Man at American Partisan.

In a conflict environment, the guerrilla may still have to continue living and operating within society and conduct himself as a regular civilian at times. This is simply part of being a guerrilla, it's part of what differentiates a guerrilla from your basic battlefield combatant. It's the ability to not just "blend in", but to be a part of that society and environment.

With that said, the guerilla always needs to be thinking ahead, even when, especially when, he is functioning "normally" in his day-to-day civilian living routine. Part of that is always being keen to picking up intelligence and information useful to the guerrilla's cause. People you meet will sometimes have that information, and you'll need to know how to spot those people and further, how to assess whether or not they are useful as a source.

Prior to putting any time into source finding, you're going to need to figure out what you need to know. You need to find out what your "intelligence gaps" are. Go over the information you have about a particular area, decide what questions you'd like to answer and develop some "priority intelligence requirements" (PIRs). Once you have your PIRs, you can start finding ways to collect against those PIRs. The guerrilla is going to need to get good at collecting from human sources.
There is an assessment tool that goes by an acronym that will assist in figuring out the usefulness of potential human source. The word is "PAMSSA", or also "PA-MSSA". I'll go into some detail, as it can be useful to the guerrilla, since it can be a bit different for a soldier in a uniformed military.

The "P" stands for placement. If a potential source has placement, then it means they have a spacial or geographical position to the information you seek. A source can not help you gather information if they never have placement anywhere near the information. To use a simple example, suppose you would like to start gathering medical information about the patients in a local hospital. I don't really know why one would be interested in doing this, but it's a very simple fictional example for my purposes. Would your local garbage collector have placement in this case? The answer is not really. Even collecting the garbage from the hospital, from the loading docks, maybe he even occasionally has to enter the building, but he doesn't really have good placement. What about the housekeepers inside the hospital? Do they have placement? The answer is yes. They are in and out of the rooms and working among the patients on a regular basis. How about the nurses? Yes, of course. They have placement, possibly the best placement of the three.

The next step is "A" for access. Access means direct access to the information you seek. Go back to our hospital example. Now you'll see that the housekeepers who have decent placement do NOT have any sort of access, beyond perhaps remembering the faces of the patients they see. The nurses will have excellent access in this case. Are you starting to see what placement and access mean to finding a potential source of information? This is why the PA is often hyphenated and separated from the MSSA. You can't move forward on the PA-MSSA assessment tool if the person your assessing doesn't have adequate placement and access.

Moving on, we now must look at the potential source's motivation. This usually requires actually meeting and discussing with the source. You'll need to get an idea of what would motivate a source to willingly pass information to you. In Afghanistan, money was a big motivator for human sources, but that is often a major problem. Sources will always be willing to sell you information, and sometimes they're even willing to sell you false information. Other motivating factors that you'd rather see are a belief in whatever your cause is. If a source shares your beliefs and is interested in advancing your cause, that's a positive motivation. Maybe your source has been wronged by your enemy, or they're disgruntled about something and are driven to correct it. This isn't to say that money is always negative, since often a source considers a payment a sort of compensation for the risk they take when speaking with you. However, money as the sole motivating factor can often cause problems down the line. More on that below.

Next assessment step is suitability. When you're getting to know your potential source, you need to see if this person is even suitable to serve in this role. You need to look for some level of intelligence. If the person you're assessing isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, are they suitable? Do they even know anything about the information they're giving you? Are they impulsive? During their daily activities, are they going to do something stupid and get themselves in trouble, or even killed? Are they smart enough to do what I'm trying to get them to do, or to tell me? Or are they going to maintain good placement and access? Do they speak your language? Do they have any physical issues that hinder their ability to assist you? Are they emotionally stable? Mentally stable? You'll have to consider these things.

The next factor is susceptibility. This is consideration for how easily they will agree to work with you, or how easily they will agree to turn against you. A source with great placement and access is of no use if they're not willing to work with you and pass along the information you need, and even more dangerous is a source that will pass along information about you to your enemies. This topic can be greatly discussed once you get into the realm of witting and unwitting sources and the subject of elicitation. I mentioned above that I would say more on motivation. You'll have to keep in mind that having a good understanding of a source's motivation can help you overcome problems with susceptibility.

The final variable is accessibility. This questions the ease of access you have to the source. A source that you're unable to communicate with is useless. You'll need to assess how you will communicate with that source, how often, for how long, etc. This touches a bit on suitability as well. Does the source have the time and opportunity to contact you? Do they have multiple ways to communicate to you? Are they capable of using more complex means, like dead drops without screwing up? Are they too busy to meet with you regularly? One very important factor to look at is time sensitive information. Does your source have the ability to recognize important and/or time sensitive information (if not, they may not be suitable) and do they have the ability to get that information to you quickly and securely?

This source assessment tool is easily practiced in daily life. All you need to do is identify your intelligence requirement and start with placement and access, and work your way down the list. Be sure to reassess sources periodically. Develop communication plans with your contacts. Assess current sources for additional collection capabilities.