Category: Some Red Hot Gospel there!
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Darwin would of approved of this! Fieldcraft Funny Pictures & Memes Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad Manly Stuff Paint me surprised by this Real men Some Red Hot Gospel there! This looks like a lot of fun to me! Well I thought it was funny! Well I thought it was neat! You have to be kidding, right!?!
Talk about getting into your opponents mind before the fun starts!
Firepower reminds that, in the end, almost every state gets access to the newest killing technology. Further, the state that gets it first doesn’t always come out on top.
Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 2021), pp. 624. $35.00
Death and destruction are part of war. That will not change anytime soon. Suffering and annihilation are curses humanity imparts to itself. Sadly, there will always be those willing to bathe their policies in blood.
Even the good guys, those who would seek peace and the protection of innocents, will find that justice sometimes demands the heaviest of hands. No issue merits more hard thinking than warfare, and thinking about war requires, first and foremost, thinking about killing.
A discussion of war without talking about lethality is about as helpful as a discourse on the Grand Old Opry without mentioning country music. Enter, Paul Douglas Lockhart’s Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare—an erudite, accessible, and comprehensive overview of the development of lethal weapons technology in early modern and modern history.
Lockhart, a professor of history at Wright State, traces the development of killing technologies from the introduction of gunpowder in Western warfare though modern times. Firepower gives equal weight to war on land and seas, also introducing the advent of airpower in the twentieth century.
Firepower is not just about the changes in weapons, such as when marching armies moved from matchlock muskets to flintlocks. Lockhart also covers the dynamic relationship between the use of lethal technology and changes in the organization and tactics employed by military forces.
The book emphasizes the relationship between the development of military forces and governance, political economy, and industrial development. Lockhart restates how the rise of the nation-state, powerful militaries, and the dominance of states in conventional warfare go hand-in-hand. In many ways, his book is a useful update of William H. McNeill’s The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (1984).
There is much to appreciate in Firepower including the simple, explicit, and practical explanations of technical military innovations and how they were employed in battle as well as how they interplayed with political and economic change.
What is most refreshing about this new military history is that, in contrast what is trendy in academia, Firepower does not shy away from the main activity of warfare—humans killing other humans.
The distinguished war historian Max Hasting recently wrote a piece getting a lot of attention decrying the reluctance of academia to teach the blood and guts of military history. It is a great failing of colleges and universities that they don’t teach military history that’s particularly useful for understanding how militaries fight wars. Lockhart totally goes against the grain. Good for him.
If anything, Firepower, doesn’t go far enough (though at over 600 pages, the book is long enough). War is all about killing. There is, however, a lot more to killing in war than just lethal technologies. The history in Firepower is a necessary, but not sufficient, background to understand the dynamics of competition and conflict. A sound military history education requires delving into all the operational aspects of warfare from logistics to medical practices, as well as the breadth of how the tactical level of war interweaves with campaigns and strategy and the larger issues of geopolitics.
Perhaps the most important aspect of a sound military history education is learning how to learn from military history. There is not much value in winning trivial pursuit by knowing the names and dates of battles or the muzzle velocity of a smoothbore musket. Nor does knowledge come from tapping into experts like Lockhart. The great value of military history lies not in the greatness of the historians, but in the rigorous critique of the sources and methods behind their histories and the sharp assessment of their analyses. Military history is a laboratory for hard thinking about the hardness of war.
There has never been a more important time for hard thinking about war. The monopoly of conventional conflict by powerful states is likely to continue and accelerate in the age of great power competition. This trend is fueled by a global, private-sector industrial and services base that includes not just defense industries but also advanced manufacturing companies; software and services platforms; the space industry; and commercial sources of new products, services and innovations. We can also expect more of the ancillary forms of conflict, from insurgencies and terrorists to sabotage and disinformation. Buckle up. Some of the bloodiest military history has yet to be written.
The next age of warfare will introduce new capabilities as groundbreaking as gunpowder. They will, however, not make war any less messy, unmanageable, deadly, or destructive. Further, none of these technologies, not even artificial intelligence, will take the human out of the human aspects of warfare. Technology is a factor in war, not the deterministic force dictating the outcome.
Firepower reminds that, in the end, almost every state gets access to the newest killing technology. Further, the state that gets it first doesn’t always come out on top. Military history is not just an arms race. History is, however, shaped by what big powerful players do with killing technology. Not remembering that and figuring out how it applies to keeping nations free, safe, and prosperous in the modern world is a sure way to fail to prevent the next war…and maybe lose it.
A Heritage Foundation vice president, James Jay Carafano directs the think tank’s research on matters of national security and foreign relations.
“There are instruments so dangerous to the rights of the nation and which place them so totally at the mercy of their governors that those governors, whether legislative or executive, should be restrained from keeping such instruments on foot but in well-defined cases. Such an instrument is a standing army.”—Thomas Jefferson, 1789
What does it say about the state of our freedoms that there are now more pencil-pushing, bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with weapons than U.S. Marines?
Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the IRS, Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities.
Add in the Biden Administration’s plans to swell the ranks of the IRS by 87,000 new employees (some of whom will be authorized to use deadly force) and grow the nation’s police forces by 100,000 more cops, and you’ve got a nation in the throes of martial law.
We’re being frog-marched into tyranny at the end of a loaded gun.
Make that hundreds of thousands of loaded guns.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of federal agents armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorized to make arrests, and trained in military tactics has nearly tripled over the past several decades.
As Adam Andrzejewski writes for Forbes, “the federal government has become one never-ending gun show.”
While Americans have to jump through an increasing number of hoops in order to own a gun, federal agencies have been placing orders for hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow point bullets and military gear.
For example, the IRS has stockpiled 4,500 guns and five million rounds of ammunition in recent years, including 621 shotguns, 539 long-barrel rifles and 15 submachine guns.
The Veterans Administration purchased 11 million rounds of ammunition (equivalent to 2,800 rounds for each of their officers), along with camouflage uniforms, riot helmets and shields, specialized image enhancement devices and tactical lighting.
The Department of Health and Human Services acquired 4 million rounds of ammunition, in addition to 1,300 guns, including five submachine guns and 189 automatic firearms for its Office of Inspector General.
According to an in-depth report on “The Militarization of the U.S. Executive Agencies,” the Social Security Administration secured 800,000 rounds of ammunition for their special agents, as well as armor and guns.
The Environmental Protection Agency owns 600 guns. The Smithsonian now employs 620-armed “special agents.”
Even agencies such as Amtrak and NASA have their own SWAT teams.
Ask yourselves: why are government agencies being turned into military outposts?
What’s with the buildup of SWAT teams within non-security-related federal agencies? Even the Department of Agriculture, the Railroad Retirement Board, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Office of Personnel Management, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Education Department have their own SWAT teams. Most of those officers are under the command of either the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Justice.
Why does the Department of Agriculture need .40 caliber semiautomatic submachine guns and hollow point bullets? For that matter, why do its agents need ballistic vests and body armor?
For that matter, why do IRS agents need AR-15 rifles?
Why do local police need armored personnel carriers with gun ports, compact submachine guns with 30-round magazines, precision battlefield sniper rifles, and military-grade assault-style rifles and carbines?
Why is the federal government distributing obscene amounts of military equipment, weapons and ammunition to police departments around the country?
Why is the military partnering with local police to conduct training drills around the country? And what exactly are they training for? The public has been disallowed from obtaining any information about the purpose of these realistic urban training drills, other than that they might be loud and to not be alarmed.
We should be alarmed.
As James Madison warned, “We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”
Unfortunately, we’re long past the first experiment on our freedoms, and merely taking alarm over this build-up of military might will no longer suffice.
Nothing about this de facto army of bureaucratic, administrative, non-military, paper-pushing, non-traditional law enforcement agencies is necessary for national security.
Moreover, while these weaponized, militarized, civilian forces which are armed with military-style guns, ammunition and equipment; trained in military tactics; and authorized to make arrests and use deadly force—may look and act like the military, they are not the military.
Rather, they are foot soldiers of the police state’s standing army, and they are growing in number at an alarming rate.
This standing army—a.k.a. a national police force—vested with the power to completely disregard the Constitution and rule by force is exactly what America’s founders feared, and its danger cannot be overstated or ignored.
This is exactly what martial law looks like—when a government disregards constitutional freedoms and imposes its will through military force, only this is martial law without any government body having to declare it: Battlefield tactics. Militarized police. Riot and camouflage gear. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Drones. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Concussion grenades. Intimidation tactics. Brute force. Laws conveniently discarded when it suits the government’s purpose.
The militarization of America’s police forces in recent decades, which has gone hand in hand with the militarization of America’s bureaucratic agencies, has merely sped up the timeline by which the nation is transformed into an authoritarian regime.
Now we find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of administrative, police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military with little to no regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.
This quasi-state of martial law has been helped along by government policies and court rulings that have made it easier for the police to shoot unarmed citizens, for law enforcement agencies to seize cash and other valuable private property under the guise of asset forfeiture, for military weapons and tactics to be deployed on American soil, for government agencies to carry out round-the-clock surveillance, for legislatures to render otherwise lawful activities as extremist if they appear to be anti-government, for profit-driven private prisons to lock up greater numbers of Americans, for homes to be raided and searched under the pretext of national security, for American citizens to be labeled terrorists and stripped of their rights merely on the say-so of a government bureaucrat, and for pre-crime tactics to be adopted nationwide that strip Americans of the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty and creates a suspect society in which we are all guilty until proven otherwise.
Don’t delude yourself into believing that this thinly-veiled exercise in martial law is anything other than an attempt to bulldoze what remains of the Constitution and reinforce the iron-fisted rule of the police state.
This is no longer about partisan politics or civil unrest or even authoritarian impulses.
This is a turning point.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America.
If we are to have any hope of salvaging what’s left of our battered freedoms, we’d do well to start by disarming the IRS and the rest of the federal and state bureaucratic agencies, de-militarizing domestic police forces, and dismantling the police state’s standing army.
WC: 1308
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
—————————————————————————————-Its a nice dream but I am not holding my breath on this one! Grumpy
By the way that horse belongs to the British Life Guards Regiment. Who have been around now for over 300 years in the British Army!
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been splashing out millions stocking up on guns, ammunition, and combat gear since 2020, according to the findings of Open The Books, a watchdog group that tracks government spending.
A report by the watchdog, published on April 27, found that the agency has spent a total of $10 million on weaponry and gear since the COVID-19 pandemic began, including $2.3 million on duty ammunition, $1.2 million on ballistic shields, and another $1.3 million on “various other gear for criminal investigation agents.”
Additionally, the agency has spent $474,000 on Smith & Wesson rifles, $463,000 on Beretta 1301 tactical shotguns, and $243,000 on body armor vests since 2020.
Another $467,000 was reportedly spent on duty tactical lighting, $354,000 on tactical gear bags, and $267,000 on ballistic helmets in the same time.
The report, called “The Militarization of Federal Bureaucracy,” contains updated data through the end of March 2023.
Since 2006, the IRS has splashed out $35.2 million (adjusted for inflation) on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment. The report found that 2020 and 2021 saw them spend increased amounts.
Billions in IRS Funding
An IRS Criminal Investigation spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement, “IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) special agents are sworn federal law enforcement officers who conduct criminal investigations into tax violations, money laundering, cybercrimes, as well as organized crime involving drugs and gangs.”
“The agency’s approximately 2,100 IRS-CI special agents use firearms as part of their official law enforcement duties and must participate in annual firearms training, briefings, and practical exercises to demonstrate they are proficient to carry firearms,” the spokesperson continued. “The agency purchases the required amount of ammunition and firearms to conduct its official duties.”
The latest report comes as Republican lawmakers have raised concerns regarding the nearly $80 billion in IRS funding, including $45.6 billion for “enforcement” that the IRS is set to receive through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
While the IRS employed 80,006 full-time staffers as of the 2022 budget year, according to the agency’s strategic operating plan (pdf) released on April 6, the Treasury Department has claimed that the agency could hire 86,852 new employees over the next decade in order to bolster operations if it were to receive the nearly $80 billion in funding.
Republicans, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), are concerned that the additional funding could be used to target everyday American. However, the Biden administration has vowed that the money will lead to more audits for wealthy millionaires, billionaires, and large corporations.
IRS Denies Targeting Middle-Income Americans
Separately, then-IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig stated in a letter to members of the Senate in August last year that the additional funding will “absolutely not” be used to increase audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans and will instead help the agency in “challenging” areas such as audits of large corporate and global high-net-worth taxpayers.
The Open The Books report also comes after current IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel told lawmakers last month that the agency plans to hire an estimated 360 additional staff who are authorized to carry guns over the next five years.
“Our CI division or Criminal Investigation Division, they do not conduct audits,” Werfel said during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing. “What they do is, they are investigating acute issues of fraud and tax evasion. And typically, they’re armed when they’re putting themselves in danger.”
The IRS Careers website for criminal investigation special agents states that applicants must be willing to “carry a firearm, must be prepared to protect him/herself or others from physical attacks at any time and without warning and use firearms in life-threatening situations; must be willing to use force up to and including the use of deadly force.”
Open The Books’ report also found that since 2006, 103 “rank-and-file” agencies outside of the Department of Defense spent $3.7 billion (adjusted for inflation) on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment, 27 of which are traditional law enforcement under the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.
Open The Books founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a statement that “a culture of militarization has permeated across the federal bureaucracy.”
“In many cases, these agencies are stockpiling the very weapons some politicians seek to ban citizens from owning,” Andrzejewski added.
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