"Bag Trick"

Greg Ellifritz at Active Response Training shares a neat trick--something you should consider whether or not you ever use it yourself. It is to carry a weapon (a knife or a handgun) in your hand, concealed in a plastic shopping bag, making it look like you are simply carrying the bag in your hand. Obviously, this is for the limited situation where you suspect you may need the weapon, but also need to keep it concealed. Mr. Ellifritz relates that he first learned this technique from talking to a criminal, so it should be something that you watch for. Anyway, he has tips and advice concerning the technique, including photographs, at his article. Read the whole thing.

Survival Life Collects Some Video Reviews of the Mini-14

The Mini-14 was my first exposure to semi-auto rifles in .223/5.56, and so I've always had a certain fondness for it. Plus, there are certain advantages to having a bland or benign appearing rifle that doesn't garner unwanted attention.

In any event, here is the link to the Survival Life post.

And Now For Something Completely Different....

Tim Hawkins performing "The Government Can":

5 Existential Threats to Humanity

Article at The Conversation.

Bedbug Epidemic Spreads Across Spain

From the Telegraph:

Housing authorities in Madrid are complaining of “a plague of bedbugs” and called for extra measures to tackle the troublesome parasites. 

According to pest control experts, the reports of bedbug infestations across Spain have risen by 70 per cent within five years and is now bordering on an “epidemic”. 

A residents’ association in the Lavapies district of central Madrid is demanding city authorities provide temporary housing for those affected while their homes are fumigated. 

Residents are blaming the proliferation of the insects, which bury themselves deep inside mattresses, on the rise in the number of buildings being squatted in the neighbourhood.

... Bedbugs, which bite humans and suck their blood, were considered virtually extinct in western Europe for at least fifty years. Their reappearance across Spain over the last ten years has been blamed on the increase in mass tourism.

The United States has seen its own bed-bug epidemic over the past several years (see, e.g., this 2011 article) and it seems to be getting worse. (See also here). The resurgence may be related to the banning of effective pesticides.

Bedbugs are not believed to spread disease. However, that seems to me to be of little comfort--flees probably didn't spread pathogens prior to y. pestis and the plague.

More on China vs. Vietnam

This is to follow up on my post earlier this week concerning China's confrontation with Vietnam over an oil platform placed in Vietnamese waters. VOA News reports:

Two experts spoke to VOA about the Chinese decision to place the oil rig in contested waters at this time, knowing it would provoke outrage from Vietnam.

“I think it’s part of a long-term pattern of testing the responses of states around the region, ranging along the spectrum of much weaker states like the Philippines up to Japan and the United States,” said Michael Auslin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“There are moments of opportunity and this seemed to be one where they could get away with really trying to stake their claim in waters that by almost any definition are Vietnam’s,” Auslin said.

John Tkacik, the director of the Future Asia Project at the International Strategy and Assessment Center in Alexandria, Virginia, agrees with the perception that this was a calculated move by Beijing.

... The dispute is complicated by China’s preference to deal with the countries involved individually, instead of through an organization like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. That has made the other members of ASEAN concerned about China’s growing might.

Tkacik indicates that international law on the law of the sea favors Vietnam's claims. The story also states that Vietnam is considering legal action against China.

China's strategy to cut off and isolate the weaker members of the herd, so to speak, is a timeless strategy, but has the disadvantage that it alarms the rest of the herd which become more protective. Instead of weakening international alliances, China is more apt to strengthen the alliances. Chinese leaders probably assume that the nations will seek to align themselves with the U.S., and, therefore, not act without permission from the U.S. That is, they are counting on the U.S. to forestall any rash actions by these smaller nations--to act as a referee rather than the leader of a military alliance. China knows that the United States will not risk war with a nuclear power to protect the territorial integrity of any of the Southeast Asian nations. The strategy fails, however, if the United States is cut out of the decision making loop, or is able to carry out military action through a proxy.

As noted in my post earlier this week, Vietnam is considering a strategy whereby they would initiate hostilities with China, and then hope the United States would be forced to step in and stop the fight. It is a big gamble, but if sufficiently threatened, might be carried out.

There is also the issue of the Southeast Asian nations simply creating their own alliances that are independent of the United States. I could certainly see India taking a leading role in such an alliance as its military power increases.

Lost Genes May Have Created Black Plague

Article at Ars Technica.

(H/t Instapundit)

Ukraine Launches Air Strike Against Separatists

The Daily Mail reports:

Ukraine launched an air strike on pro-Russian rebels and sent in paratroopers today after the separatists seized Donetsk airport in violent scenes. 

Government jets and a helicopter struck against the militants, who arrived at the airport in the eastern city and demanded the withdrawal of government patrols. 

As darkness fell tonight, it was unclear who controlled the airport. Hundreds of fighters were in the area, armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles. 

Civilians and journalists were caught in the crossfire, which came a day after billionaire chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko was elected as Ukraine's new President - and warned he would not negotiate with 'terrorists' and 'bandits'.

The Three Nephites and a Sign of the Times

In our family scripture reading, we have been reading Third Nephi from The Book of Mormon and I came across a sign of the times of which I was unaware. I'm sure many of the you (speaking of the LDS readers) probably were aware of this, but for some reason, it had not come to my attention. Anyway, in 3 Nephi, Chapter 28, it states concerning the three Nephites:

27 And behold they will be among the Gentiles, and the Gentiles shall know them not.

28 They will also be among the Jews, and the Jews shall know them not.

29 And it shall come to pass, when the Lord seeth fit in his wisdom that they shall minister unto all the scattered tribes of Israel, and unto all nations, kindreds, tongues and people, and shall bring out of them unto Jesus many souls, that their desire may be fulfilled, and also because of the convincing power of God which is in them.

30 And they are as the angels of God, and if they shall pray unto the Father in the name of Jesus they can show themselves unto whatsoever man it seemeth them good.

31 Therefore, great and marvelous works shall be wrought by them, before the great and coming day when all people must surely stand before the judgment-seat of Christ;

32 Yea even among the Gentiles shall there be a great and marvelous work wrought by them, before that judgment day.

"Everything is Broken"

An essay on why cybersecurity is a nightmare.

Review of Shotgun Inserts

Wood Trekker has a review and evaluation of shotgun inserts to shoot different caliber rounds out of a 12 gauge shotgun.

(H/t The Firearm Blog)

What Would You Do?

"Ol' Remus" at the Woodpile Report asks some hard questions about our psychological and moral preparations. He writes:

Assume the worst doomsday scenario: grid down, distribution systems down, lawlessness and predation, mass privation, disease and death. Assume it's many months into an on-going calamity. You're skilled enough in useful crafts and were well situated at the start.

But the growing season was as bad as it was short. Now your supplies are low. Scary low. You're laboring long hours but you and your family are hard pressed. You'll probably make it, but there's no cushion. A family with small children approaches your door; exhausted, ragged and so famished it's all they can do to walk. You know legitimate charity is provided from surplus, that giving away needed sustenance is an unwarranted sacrifice. The weather's turned nasty and it's getting dark. There's a soft knock at the door.

Or, the local Committee of Emergency declares all stockpiled food to be common property. 'Hoarders' were given three days to turn in their 'excess' provisions. With so many improvident people—the ones who chose to live high on easy credit and harass preppers as a sort of hobby—it's obvious this won't make a real difference. You don't comply. The Community Action Committee is at your door, they're your neighbors, they know what you have, they're armed and they're not backing down.

He offers some other scenarios to consider as well.

I would hope that even in dire conditions we would keep our moral compass and charity. For the first scenario, I know what my wife and I would do because we've discussed it--we would share what we could. But we are not alone, being part of a larger ward/congregation in our Church who also have food stored away.

The second scenario is more problematic. From the wording, I'm assuming that the mob is at my door, but has not forced its way in; and I'm outnumbered and out-gunned. If an armed mob has learned of my food storage and are parked at my door to confiscate it, I've already made mistakes. It's easy to say that they aren't getting the food except by stepping over my dead body. But my goal is to ensure the survival of my family, not prove I'm the braver warrior. If faced with a choice between handing over the food or having my family killed (and the food taken anyway), I'll turn over the food and see what opportunities present themselves afterward.

Anyway, read all the scenarios and see what you think.

TTAG: Thoughts on a Self-Defense Weapon

In an article titled "P320 Entry: The Perfect Self Defense Firearm," Dan Zimmerman discusses the selection of a firearm for home defense.

"Russian Spetznaz Disarming Techniques"

The Firearms Blog has posted a video showing some Russian techniques for disarming an opponent.

Chicago Boyz Discuss Survivalism (Updated)

      Chicago Boyz is a political and legal blog, so it was interesting to me to see them take up the subject of survivalism recently. It kicked off with Jay Manifold's review of Bill Quick's Lightening Fall. Because of various comments, Manifold posted a follow up post. T. Greer then posted an article he had originally written in 2011 for The Scholar's Stage.

      Both Manifold and Greer address the issue of rural retreat versus town/urban locations (or bug-in versus bug-out). Manifold, because he is reviewing Quick's book which posits an EMP disaster, begins by noting that the effects of EMP will vary quite a bit from location to location--some places may have the electrical grid crippled, while other communities near by may be largely untouched. Moving beyond physical differences, he also comments on social differences:

... In the metro area I live in, there are entire square miles in the inner city with less aggregate wealth than single households in the tonier areas. I lack progressive credentials; I strongly believe these inequities to be an emergent property of the overall system, an artifact of culture and especially generational temperament rather than anything readily meliorated by the proper legislation. The Silent Generation (birth years 1925-42) was deeply concerned with equality. The first wave of the baby boomers (’43-’51) was somewhat less so, the last-wave boomers (’52-’60, which includes me) much less so, and the Gen Xers (’61-’81) scarcely at all. [All dates from Strauss and Howe, and note that these are cultural, not demographic, generations, thus the departure from the usual ’46-’64 definition for the boomers.]

So, to bring this home, and I encourage readers to plug analogous neighborhoods in their own cities into this paragraph, the east side of KC – which as I commented recently, has a homicide rate around 80 per 100,000 per year, so high as to be characteristic of failed states elsewhere in the world – might very well experience a population crash from starvation and disease, while southern Johnson County on the Kansas side lost 1% or less of its people. And that is likely to be true even if the physical infrastructure of both areas is equally affected. Relative wealth connotes many other kinds of preparedness and resiliency, including the psychological.

He turns to the real world example of Haiti:

Now to veer sharply in a nonobvious but, if I may say so, rather insightful direction: suppose there were an existing society in which the electrical grid chronically malfunctions, there is no regular supply of potable water, availability of motorized transport is scant, malnutrition is a constant backdrop, and a variety of illnesses (often vector-borne) are at pandemic levels.

According to the survivalist/prepper model, the inhabitants of that society should be dying in heaps, not least from slaughtering one another. Furthermore, the safest people in that society should be the most remote, studiously avoiding human contact and devoting their energies to becoming, and remaining, entirely self-reliant.

But that society does exist, and in it, other than a tiny elite, the largest number of people living in some (admittedly by North American standards rather slight) comfort are those with the greatest degree of interaction with others. The worst off, at imminent risk of death, are the rural isolates – and the wealthiest elites are not found in the deep countryside, but on the very outskirts of the largest city in the nation. Also, there’s no slaughtering going on.

Well, that’s Haïti, and my time there over the past three years has convinced me that the oft-extolled strategy of holing up somewhere as far away from other people as you can get, with everything you think you’re going to need, is nothing more than elaborate and painful suicide. In a decade or two, someone will find your bones in your hideout and wonder what the hell you could possibly have been thinking.

[The best course of action is] the exact opposite of isolation and self-reliance: trade and specialization. As Julian Simon masterfully documented, people are the ultimate resource. In anticipation of a significant disruptive event, therefore, we would do well to look toward (to borrow a term) community organizing. How well do you know your neighbors, and what can you offer them, whether material or informational, in trade?

       Greer's article more broadly addresses the traditional "jack-of-trades," isolated retreat versus the cooperative community models. Greer begins by addressing a fundamental tenet of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations--that specialization and division of labor leads to vastly increased efficiency. However, he observes that it also brings with it a certain fragility because the parts are dependent on the whole system working. A failure, for instance, in one part of a manufacturing plant can shut down the whole plant.  Greer writes:

For the survivalist this is a problem pervading not only the pin factories, but all of modern society. Over the last century two trends have decidedly shifted society’s balance away from robustness and towards efficiency. Modern dependence on technology and the specialized knowledge needed to maintain it is the first of these trends; the second is the fusion of local communities with the global economy and larger political units. The day is past where a man is expected to know how to repair all that is on his property, grow his own food, or make and use his own fuel. In some cases this is simply the fruits of geographic isolation and economic specialization - the knowledge needed to raise livestock and plant crops is quite useless to the city dweller. Other cases reflect the ‘division of knowledge’ that inevitably comes with man’s growing understanding of and ability to manipulate the universe in which he dwells (e.g. few Americans know how to build a hard drive, much less a nuclear power plant). The rise of multinational conglomerates and global supply networks ensure that most of what we need is made far away; the eclipse of local civic and political institutions by national agencies erodes our communities’ capacity to solve problems without outside help. What we are left with is a culture of dependency, so ingrained as to be seen in our aesthetics. ...

      Greer postulates three levels of disasters: Type 1 are major disasters, sudden, but short term and geographically limited (e.g., earthquakes and floods); Type 2 are long term, but not sudden and of greater geographic impact (e.g., a depression, hyperinflation, perhaps a political collapse); and Type 3 are disasters national on scale with an impact lasting for a long period of time (e.g., nuclear war, an epidemic on the scale of the black death, political collapse). However, he suggests that while probabilities favor preparing for Types 1 and 2, the cost of preparing for a Type 3 disaster outweighs the risk:

That is the difficulty with type-3 disasters: the probability of their occurrence does not square with the measures that must be taken to truly prepare for them. The cost of these preparatory measures (such as relocating one’s family far away from urban centers, as Mr. Rawl’s advises) is very high - too high to recommend their adoption. If moving to a backwoods Idaho cabin is the only sure-fire way to survive a nuclear war, I would rather live my life as I will and meet, if it comes, my fiery death with a grin. I assume that I am not the only person who holds this view. Moreover, if preparations are made for type-1 and type-2 disasters, those of the third type will be much easier to survive. The extreme measures advocated by many survivalists are simply not necessary. 

I say this not because I find fault with the preparation ethic of the survivalists, but because I find fault with what the survivalists prepare for. Survivalist literature is dominated by images of chaos and disorder, social disintegration à la Mad Max, full of riots, robbers, bandits, and desperate men willing to do anything – and kill anyone – to survive. This vision of bellum omnium contra omnes in the suburbs of America betrays a profound unfamiliarity with disaster psychology and sociology. The literature on this topic is extensive (this, this, and this are a few good introductory articles; this and this are popular books on the subject) and it lends no support to the notion that disasters produce panic stricken mobs or roving bandits prone to avarice and violence. It is the opposite that occurs: those who survive sudden disasters respond to their plight not with riots and terror, but with spontaneous acts of altruism and amazing feats of self-organization. Remember the 11th of September, when more than 500,000 denizens of Manhattan Island were evacuated by boat, bridge, and ferry without any centralized planning or direction. Consider the state of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina raged, levies broke, and hundreds of thousands of people fled the region for safer climes. The Hurricane and its aftermath are widely seen as an unparalleled disaster. The centralized response to the Hurricane was just that; everything from the army-built levees to FEMA’s delayed relief efforts were marked by failure and mismanagement. The same cannot be of the said of the main populace’s uncoordinated response to the disaster. Though millions of people were evacuating the region and police forces temporarily lost control of New Orleans and its immediate environs, crime levels in New Orleans were no higher than normal. Reports of looting and violence were creations of an easily excited media machine, bearing no resemblance to reality. 

This suggests that, contrary to the expectations of most survivalists, the greatest danger will not come from the other disaster survivors, but from outside elites trying to reassert authority over a disaster ravaged area. These elites are susceptible to what has been called the “Myth of Panic“: being the largest beneficiaries of the traditional order, they cannot see anything but chaos, violence, and carnage in its absence. The government response to Hurricane Katrina is a testament to the perilous effects of such misperception. Fear of violence and crime led to the misallocation of relief resources, and in a few shocking cases, refusal to offer relief at all. Eager to restore “peace and order”, government officials stripped Louisianans of their rights, confiscating all weapons in the city of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina is small fare compared to most of the scenarios survivalists prepare for; in the event that such a disaster occurs, we cannot expect the authorities’ scramble for control to pose any less of a danger to the lives and liberties of disaster survivors.

 Accordingly, like Manifold, he suggests that the key to survival is to be part of an organized community rather than an isolated family or small group of retreaters:

It is unlikely that we will face any disaster so bad that we will be forced to eat from our larders for a year or more’s time. However, preparing for that year as if it were a certainty is quite sensible: those with supplies otherwise unavailable will undoubtedly be providing for the needs of more than just their immediate family. When friends and neighbors are sick or starving and asking you to help them survive, the wisdom in such extensive preparations will be more than evident.

This focus on supplies should not mislead us into thinking that survival is simply a matter of gear or supplies. Herein lies one of my main complaints with the survivalist movement: too many survivalists seem to think that survival comes down to equipment. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The key to survival does not lie with supplies, but people.

I mean this in two senses. On the one hand, an individual’s skill set is incalculably more valuable than anything they might own. (E.g. if you are not trained in basic first aid then all of the medical supplies in the world will do you no good). Yet even this is not enough. As with most things, what we know is less important than who we know. The notion of a lone survivalist tramping off into the wilderness to make it through doomsday is utter nonsense. These figures are great for Hollywood, but they stand little chance of surviving in the event of a real world disaster. The well supplied lone wolf is even less resilient than the masses of modern society he so abhors. One accident is all it takes to bring the best laid plans of the single survivalist to nought. Their survival will be dependent on a margin or error that simply does not exist. 

Mr. Rawls and a few other survivalists recognize this. They recommend ”forting” with a small group of several families or close friends. I submit that even this will prove unsatisfactory. The most successful survivors will be those who belong to a much larger community. We’ve already discussed how networks of mutual aid spontaneously arise in the wake of disaster; those formed around existing social groups with a strong sense of collective identity, social cohesion, and a regularly exercised ability to care for their own will be by far the most successful of these communities. Being independent of national infrastructure and existing political structures these groups will have little trouble organizing and mobilizing after a major disaster. Minority immigrant groups, Mormon congregations, military bases, rural towns, and their like will become the loci of the new commonwealths forged by disaster. The organizational capacity of these communities will far outstrip what any family commune is capable of providing. 

Becoming a part of one of these communities before disaster strikes is the best way to ensure your survival in its aftermath.

(Emphasis in original).

Updated (5/22/2014): In the comments, a reader points out the potential for civil war, citing to a couple articles by Matthew Bracken (here and here). (I mentioned these articles in a post from a couple years back). He (the reader) comments: "For every 'good' outcome the Chicago Boyz cite for why large cities and their suburbs will not descend into a dystopian hell, I can cite contrary first hand accounts."

My response is two-fold. First, as long-term readers of this blog know, I subscribe to what I've called a baby footsteps approach for prepping--that is, don't try to do everything at once, but begin by preparing for the more common or statistically likely threats (such as short-term power outages, snow storms, household accidents, burglaries) then increase your preps, both in quantity and sophistication, over time as you are able. Thus, you could begin by preparing to have a few days or a week's worth of food and water, first aid kit, fire extinguisher, defensive weapon(s) (a firearm suitable for home protection and something non- or less-lethal), emergency lights or candles, etc. Once you reach a basic level, then you can start adding more food and water and fuel for cooking to get you to a month's worth of backup, and adding other preps (a garden, generator, additional weapons and defensive preps, etc.), working ideally to having several months or even a year's worth of food stored away and otherwise prepared to weather an economic downturn (personal or national) or other major disruption. In this regard, I agree with what Greer says that if you prepare for the more likely disasters, you will be better prepared for the statistically unlikely, but major, disasters (his Type 3).

I recognize that we are headed for major social upheaval. The elements are in place or coalescing. But I don't know when, how, or what will spark it.

Second, the urban vs. rural debate is (or should be) more nuanced than it generally is. I can't claim to know exactly what the Chicago Boyz authors were thinking when they wrote their articles. I don't read what they wrote as suggesting that cities or towns would necessarily be safer, but that cities and towns would recover quicker from a disaster, and being part of a cohesive group of people is better than being a loner.

For what they are worth, here are my thoughts on the matter. There are a lot of survivalist literature that advise a rural retreat in an Intermountain or Western state such as Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, etc. I've read enough of the older literature that I know the original reasoning for this, which had to do with fall-out patterns in the event of a full-out nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. These locations were desirable because they were (a) not in large cities (i.e., targets) and (b) not downwind of major targets (i.e., not in fall-out zones). However, along the way, these locations also became associated with a place of retreat from the "inevitable" hordes that would abandon the cities in the event of a nuclear war or economic collapse. I think this was about the time that the government decided that "civil defense" would simply be warning people to evacuate large cities in the case of an attack.

Nuclear war is one thing, and other forms of disaster are another, and the two shouldn't be confused. As someone that has lived in Idaho for a long time, I can tell you that there are reasons that the early settlers simply passed through on the way to Oregon. First, with the exception of a few river valleys in the southern part of the state, and the Palouse in the north, there is not a lot of good arable land, and most of what there is must be irrigated because there simply is not enough rainfall (and because of the method of water appropriation, don't think that you can simply take water from the nearest stream or river--assuming there is one, which is also unlikely in many areas of the state--and use it). Although much of the state is forested, even the forest soils are pretty poor--hardly more than sand in many areas. Second, the summers are hot, and, in most places in the state, the winters are cold and harsh. Growing seasons can be short. I would also add that wages are relatively low and many of the more isolated rural communities are economically depressed. So, in reality, the remote cabin in the mountains of Idaho is actually one of the worst places you could go to survive a long term disaster such as an economic collapse.

What applies to Idaho, does not necessarily apply to other states. I would expect that arable land and the necessary water for a garden or crop is more common in the mid-west and Mississippi/Ohio river valley. Thus, a rural location may make more sense in other areas of the country than in the "American Redoubt."

That being said, living in the rough part of town in a large urban center is not a good strategy either. But, from what I've read from various sources on the events in Argentina, South Africa, the Balkans, and post-WWII Europe, living in a village or remote farm didn't prevent disfavored minority groups from being killed or driven out in WWII and post-WWII Europe; and Argentina, South Africa, and other examples show that in a slow-collapse, rural locations are no better off when it comes to crime or access to food, and may actually be worse off in some ways. Your best security is to be among people that are like you--socially, ethnically, and religiously.

Ruins of the Detroit Silverdome

More photos and article at the Daily Mail.

Another Moisture Farming Device

I had posted not too long ago about the Warka Water towers, used to condense potable water out of the air. MIT researchers have been working on developing a mesh that can do the same. From the Daily Mail:

MIT researchers have developed a special mesh that can extract the water from morning fog, channeling it into reservoirs. 

They have already trialled the system in Chile, and say it could have a dramatic impact on the lives of remote communities. 

Researchers at MIT's School of Engineering, working with colleagues at the Pontificial University of Chile in Santiago, are harvesting potable water from the coastal fog that forms on the edge of one of the driest regions on earth.  

Using a simple system of suspended mesh structures, placed on hilltops in areas with persistent fog and prevailing westerly winds, local Chilean communities collect fog water for drinking and agricultural use.  

'This water has been naturally desalinated by the sun, we are trying to build meshes to capture it straight out of the air,' said Gareth McKinley of MIT, who is leading the project. 

Fog collecting technology is still in its infancy but laboratory experiments have shown that variations in the mesh spacing as well as the size and the wettability of the fibers in the mesh all affect the volume of water that can be collected each day.

FM 3-24 Insurgencies and Countering Insurgencies (Updated)

PDF download here. A critique by Bing West at the Small Wars Journal is here.

Update (5/18/2014): A reader asks in the comments what is the value of downloading the manual if, as West writes, the doctrine is flawed. This is a good question, but unfortunately one I probably cannot answer at this time as I have not yet had an opportunity to read the new manual. I included the link to the article by Mr. West because it provided some insight (and a counterpoint) to the contents of the new manual. My response at this point would have to be that the manual may prove of interest to those that follow military matters, and represents the "play-book" that will likely be followed by the military in any future counterinsurgency campaigns.

That said, the issue of whether the United States' COIN strategy is flawed is hotly debated. I've read articles and books from senior military officers and advisors touting the fundamentals of current COIN as a success. It is notable that in 2007, Mr. West wrote:

The COIN manual [speaking of the predecessor to the one linked above] has set the proper strategic tone in Iraq. It has also provided foreign policy elites with an intellectual rationale for grudging acceptance of the fact that the US military is prevailing in Iraq.

In fact, after the successful surge in Iraq, most everyone of any influence over COIN operations seemed to largely favor Petraeus' basic COIN strategy, and the then new FM 3-24 he had co-authored.

It is now, after the fact, that we see criticism of COIN--the "winning hearts and minds" and "nation building" emphasized by Petraeus. (Although, I would note that modern COIN theory has its roots in post-Vietnam evaluations and critiques of that counter-insurgency). For instance,  in 2013, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry (Ret.) wrote an article published by the Council on Foreign Relations entitled "The Limits of Counterinsurgency Doctrine in Afghanistan" that was critical of Gen. Petraeus' COIN doctrine as applied in Afghanistan.  He observed that:

The apparent validation of this doctrine during the 2007 troop surge in Iraq increased its standing. When the Obama administration conducted a comprehensive Afghanistan strategy review in 2009, some military leaders, reinforced by some civilian analysts in influential think tanks, confidently pointed to Field Manual 3-24 as the authoritative playbook for success. When the president ordered the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan at the end of that year, the military was successful in ensuring that the major tenets of COIN doctrine were also incorporated into the revised operational plan. The stated aim was to secure the Afghan people by employing the method of “clear, hold, and build” -- in other words, push the insurgents out, keep them out, and use the resulting space and time to establish a legitimate government, build capable security forces, and improve the Afghan economy. With persistent outside efforts, advocates of the COIN doctrine asserted, the capacity of the Afghan government would steadily grow, the levels of U.S. and international assistance would decline, and the insurgency would eventually be defeated.

The general thrust of Eikenberry's argument was not, as I understood it, that COIN doctrine was inherently defective, but that it was too vague to implement.Col. Gian P. Gentile published an article entitled "A Strategy of Tactics: Population-centric COIN and the Army" (PDF), that, although critical of COIN, actually takes the diametrically different viewpoint from Eikenberry. Instead of being too vague, Gentile argues that the problem with COIN doctrine is that it describes one or a small number of tactics out of many for defeating an insurgency, and elevates that tactic to strategy. He writes:

...The Army is so tactically oriented toward population-centric counterinsurgency that it cannot think of doing anything else. General Stanley McChrystal’s recently released command guidance to forces in Afghanistan employs all of the dictums of population-centric counterinsurgency and confirms this strategy of tactics. His statement that success in Autumn 2009 Afghanistan will not be determined by the number of enemy killed but by the “shielding” of the civilian population could have easily come out of the pages of FM 3-24, or commander’s talking points during the Iraq Surge. 

These population-centric COIN principles have been turned into immutable rules that are dictating strategy in Afghanistan and having a powerful shaping effect on reorganizing the American Army. A few months ago, when asked about the way ahead for the American military in Afghanistan and how Iraq was comparable to Afghanistan, General David Petraeus acknowledged that the two were very different. But the thing to remember, according to General Petraeus, was that the principles of COIN that the Army has learned in Iraq over the past couple of years are applicable to Afghanistan. 

Those principles belong to the population-centric COIN methodology. If we accept that the principles are applicable, then we have already chosen the way ahead in Afghanistan, which is population-centric nation-building requiring large numbers of American ground combat forces, dispersed into the local population in an effort to win their hearts and minds away from the insurgent enemy, and to eventually build a nation.

(Footnotes omitted). Gentile argues that the military also needs to consider the use of actual, well, military force, to accomplish its objectives (and warns that the current COIN is undermining the military's basic ability to engage in military operations as opposed to social work). But see Oleg Svet's critique at the National Interest, which, does not question the theoretical underpinnings of the "winning hearts and minds," but argues that its implementation failed because too much military force was utilized.

Conversely, Gen. Eikenberry's criticism has, itself, been criticized, and Gen. Petraeus penned a defense of his COIN strategy--at least as implemented in Iraq--published in October 2013 in Foreign Policy. Petraeus argues that if Iraqi forces implemented many of the strategies followed by coalition forces during "the Surge," the Iraqis would succeed against Al Qaeda. R. Scott Moore's paper, "The Basics of Counterinsurgency," (PDF), suggests that the basics of COIN is ... more nation building and hearts and minds tactics.

My feelings on the matter, which I believe I have expressed before, is that the entire strategy in Afghanistan has been a mistake. Afghanistan should have been a punitive campaign with the sole and limited goal to destroy Al Qaeda and inflict as much damage on its supporters as possible, followed by a withdrawal. Repeated as necessary. If the "nation-building" nonsense had not been followed, the battle at Tora-Bora would have been carried out to its end by American troops, and Bin Laden would have died there, instead of sneaking out with the assistance of corrupt Afghan troops.

Moore notes in his paper: "The Department of Defense inadequately defines insurgency as 'an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict.'” He suggests a broader definition:

An insurgency is a protracted violent conflict in which one or more groups seek to overthrow or fundamentally change the political or social order in a state or region through the use of sustained violence, subversion, social disruption, and political action.

Similarly, he believes the definition of "counterinsurgency"--“Those military, paramilitary, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.”--is too narrow, and advances his own definition:

Counterinsurgency is an integrated set of political, economic, social, and security measures intended to end and prevent the recurrence of armed violence, create and maintain stable political, economic, and social structures, and resolve the underlying causes of an insurgency in order to establish and sustain the conditions necessary for lasting stability.

What is notable is that under current DOD definitions, or Moore's expanded definitions, both post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan were not insurgencies. In Iraq, the United States had overthrown the existing government and/or social order. In Afghanistan, the Taliban represented the government (such as it was) at the time of the invasion. In both cases, COIN was not being used to protect the political or social order, but to change the social order. That is, to impose a "democratic" Western-style government on what (especially in Afghanistan) were tribal societies and, in the case of Afghanistan, a theocratic based government. (Notably, post-invasion Iraq also lacks religious tolerance).

Semantics aside, Gentile's basic thesis--that current COIN doctrine is too limited--is correct. To step back a bit, Napoleon is reputed to have said that amateurs discuss tactics while professionals discuss logistics. If we look at examples of successful counterinsurgencies--the Indian Wars in the United States, the Second Boer War, and the Malayan Crises--we see that successful counterinsurgency operations are wars of logistics: denying materials and support to the guerrilla fighters that they needed to survive, while exploiting the logistical advantages of the United States or British forces, respectively. Interestingly, all three of the examples above relied on forced relocation of the populations that supported the insurgency, thus removing sources of food, shelter, intelligence, and moral support. Those supporters that were not removed were destroyed when found. That is, villages friendly to the guerillas, and their crops and herds, were destroyed. Conversely, the United States and British troops enjoyed logistical advantages as to weapons, ammunition, etc., giving them additional freedom in pursuing operations year-round.

Obviously, forcible relocation, while one tactic, is not the only one. Turning the population against the insurgents can be almost as effective as forced relocation. It is no coincidence that, in Iraq, the success of "the Surge" coincided with the Al Qaeda forces having alienated local populations through their extremism and heavy-handed tactics. Both in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was also important that local leaders saw the United States as the most powerful war lord. They respected the sheer power of the United States military. To that extent, "winning hearts and minds" can be a viable strategy under certain circumstances. In Iraq, it was and remains a viable tactic because the country, as a whole, is modern enough to appreciate the benefits of rule of law and social stability. Afghanistan, I would contend, is not.

So why adopt broken strategies? As Svet's article suggests, the most significant reason is that the modern COIN doctrine is palatable to our governing elites. Building health clinics and schools is warm and fuzzy, and does not generate negative publicity. Relocating whole villages to internment camps, while simultaneously destroying the buildings, crops, and livestock left behind, and killing anyone in the area after the relocation, would probably not be received with much enthusiasm in the Western world.

The other reason, I suspect, is that the decision makers are so isolated and removed from the realities on the ground, and what information they receive has to pass through so many sycophantic filters, that decision makers do not have accurate information. I am reminded of the following:

In the beginning was The Plan

and then came the assumptions, 

and the assumptions were without form,

and The Plan was completely without substance,

and the darkness was upon the face of the employees,

and they spoke amongst themselves, saying

"It is a crock of sh** and it stinks."

And the employees went unto their Supervisors, saying:

"It is a pail of dung and none may abide the odor thereof."

And the Supervisors went unto their Division Managers, saying:

"It is a vessel of fertilizer and none may abide it's strength."

And the Division Managers went unto their Systems Managers, saying:

"It contains that which aids plant growth and it is very strong."

And the Systems Managers went unto the General Manager, saying:

"It promotes growth and is very powerful."

And the General Manager went unto the Board, saying:

"This new plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of this organization."

And the Board looked upon The Plan and saw that it was good,

and The Plan became policy.

THIS IS HOW SH** HAPPENS

            --author unknown

Pulling Back the Curtains

"Woman at her Window"

Initially, I feel I must offer some explanation to certain readers. I know that a lot of people interested in survival, disaster preparation, or self-defense/security, don't want to read a political screed. I understand. If I'm looking for information on how to build a fire, or a firearm review, etc., I don't want to read rantings and ravings about politician X or political party Y. But in order to understand the hows and whys of an economic collapse, you also have to dig into politics and figure out who are the real players and factions. And not just the dumbed-down version for mass consumption of "left versus right" or "Democrats and Republicans", but try to figure out what is going on behind the scenes. So, I'm going to venture a little more deeply into the politics today and, likely, in future posts.

In my recent discussion of Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (Part 1 is here), much of the discussion revolved around declining marginal returns as the complexity of a society increased. As the example of Rome provides, there is a strong correlation between "complexity" and the taxing/spending to support it. And when the money starts to run out, so does social cohesion. To counteract that, the government must invest more in legitimacy. In Rome, this meant building public works, and "bread and circuses." It also means cracking down on dissension.

In Part 6 of the series, I gave some examples of what I deemed to be negative marginal return of government spending. Now, let us look at what is happening to the pool of people that pay for the spending. Charles Hugh Smith has been exploring the decline of the "middle-class." In this regard, he recently commented on why the middle-class lifestyle has become unaffordable. He observes, in part:

The State has two core mandates: enforce quasi-monopolies and cartels for private capital, and satisfy enough of the citizenry's demands for more benefits to maintain social stability.

If the State fails to maintain monopolistic cartels, profit margins plummet and capital is unable to maintain its spending on investment and labor. Simply put, the economy tanks as profits, investment and growth all stagnate.

If the State fails to satisfy enough of the citizenry's demands, it risks social instability.

That is the nation-state's quandary everywhere. With growth slowing and parasitic cartels increasingly difficult to maintain and justify, the State has less tax income to fund its ever-expanding social spending.

In response, the State raises taxes and borrows the difference between its spending and its revenues. This further squeezes spending as the cost of servicing debt rises along with the debt. The rising cost of debt service is an ever-tightening noose that cannot be escaped.

So far, this is an accurate description of Tainter's thesis that once a culture gets stuck in the cycle of declining marginal return on complexity, more and more must be spent on legitimizing the government--whether through force or welfare.

But Smith focuses on some of the consequences. He goes on to note that although productivity has steadily increased, rather than workers/employees receiving an increased portion of that productivity through increased wages, wages have stagnated, with the difference going to support benefits (e.g., healthcare and pensions) and corporate profits. This introduces its own problems for a government:

And this leads us straight to financialization, the parasitic extraction of profits from the real economy by finance and the state. Remember Wallerstein's key insight: the state depends on cartel pricing to sustain high labor costs, investment and the taxes that flow from high wages and profits. As the real economy stagnated, the state (which includes the Federal Reserve) incentivized financialization and speculative credit bubbles to keep the money flowing to feed its own spending.

In other words, the state isn't just a passive patsy in financialization--it is a willing partner, because financialization funds the state. Just look at the enormous expansion of property taxes and income taxes that flowed from the housing and stock market bubbles.

... If the state stops financialization, the state's enormously expensive programs and its debt machine all die, too.

In essence, the state has no choice: to save itself, the middle class must be sacrificed. 

From the point of view of global capital, the ideal partner is a powerful central state that imposes cartel pricing on the economy: $200 million a piece F-35 fighter jets, $100,000 college diplomas, $200,000 medical procedures, $1,000 a pill medications, etc.

From the point of view of the state, it's more important to protect corporate profits and preserve the ability to borrow another trillion dollars at near-zero interest rates than it is to restore a vibrant middle class.

Debt-serfdom works just fine for the financial sector and the central state that enforces the serfdom. Food stamps (bread) and distracting entertainment (circuses) are cheap. What's not to like about debt-serfdom to those in power? Not only is it an ideal arrangement, it's the only one left to the state and its partner, global capital.

In other words, when the middle-class is mostly bled dry, the state must rely on borrowing and/or printing money.

But there is more than just bread and circuses to keeping the population complacent. The state must also prevent the formation of any organized resistance--one of the reasons why the Tea Party is so feared right now. It is an irony of the current situation that, to counteract dissension against the state, the state must foster dissension within the pool of potential dissenters. In other words, to prevent social breakdown, the state must strengthen social fault lines.

One method is to emphasize tribalism--that is, identity politics and "othering." Luke Ford recently interviewed Paul Gottfried about tribalism in America. I'll warn you that it is not an easy read because it is a frank and open discussion about race in America and, for that reason, not safe for reading at work. But because they are both Jewish, they have an outsider view which may be helpful. There are a couple specific points that I want to bring out of the interview.

First, Gottfried notes that for most minorities, ethnicity outweighs all other political considerations. He gives, as an example: "I’ve known black people who were devout Christians, who were against abortion, who prayed over food when they ate it, and they loved Obama and they thought George W. Bush wanted to re-enslave every black in America because being a Democrat was black ethnic identity." The basic point being the lack of loyalty to the greater society.

Second, he predicts what is going to happen to America:

It will muddle through for a while because it is so rich. I think the whites will become so decadent that they will allow the minorities to do whatever they want. There will be no core loyalty except to social programs. The government will give out victimological credits. Tribal divisions will become so severe that it will convulse the country. At some point, the saints [presumably, he means Christians] will rise up and try to preserve what there is left of white society.

Again, this is consistent with Tainter's analysis. Social breakdown follows once people realize that the costs of maintaining social complexity substantially outweigh the benefits of splitting from the central authority.

It is not apparent from the limited quotes I have above, but when you read the whole interview, you realize that when Ford or Gottfried speak of "whites" or "white Christians" or "WASPs," actually they are describing the group that largely comprises the American middle-class--the very group that Smith describes as failing economically under current policies.

(H/t The Woodpile Report)

Reminder of the Impact of an EMP Attack

Investors Business Daily reminds us:

Expert testimony before Congress on Thursday warned that an electromagnetic pulse attack on our power grid and electronic infrastructure could leave most Americans dead and the U.S. in another century. 

That dire warning came from Peter Vincent Pry, a member of the Congressional EMP Commission and executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security.
He testified in front of the House Homeland Security Committee's Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) event could wipe out 90% of America's population. 

... As we reported early last year, Pry, a former CIA nuclear weapons analyst, believes that North Korea's recent seemingly low-yield nuclear tests and launch of a low-orbit satellite may in fact be preparations for a future electromagnetic pulse attack. 

A copy of a report prepared by the Department of Homeland Security for the Defense Department, obtained by Pry from sources within DHS, finds North Korea could use its Unha-3 space launch vehicle to deliver a nuclear warhead as a satellite over the South Pole to attack America from the south. 

As the Heritage Foundation has reported, an EMP attack with a warhead detonated 25 to 300 miles above the U.S. mainland "would fundamentally change the world:" 

"Airplanes would fall from the sky; most cars would be inoperable; electrical devices would fail. Water, sewer and electrical networks would fail simultaneously. Systems of banking, energy, transportation, food production and delivery, water, emergency services and even cyberspace would collapse."

Two points here. First is that the lower the yield of the device, the lower altitude it must be detonated at to produce the desired effect, and, therefore, the more limited the range. Second, with its back against the wall, North Korea cannot be expected to act rationally.

(H/t Instapundit).

Fighting Stance vs. Isosceles Stance (Updated 3/17/2015)

Caleb at Gun Nuts Media posted a very pointedly negative opinion of the Front Site training school last month. His first, and presumably primary, reason he gave as to why he would never attend their school was that they still taught the Weaver stance. He wrote:

Let us be honest for a moment: Weaver is obsolete. Modern Isosceles, as used by every top tier shooter on the planet, is better. Yes, you can absolutely prevail in a self-defense situation using Weaver, and a well trained Weaver shooter is very capable. However, Front Sight teaches Weaver as The Only Way, and still teaches it as close to the original Modern Technique as possible. Even Gunsite, the fountain of Weaver has adapted their stance over the years. That’s why I always tell people, if you want to learn how to shoot Weaver properly, go to Gunsite. They started it.

I'm not trying to defend Front Sight--I've never taken one of their classes. If you want to read some different points of view on Front Sight, look through the comments to the article. Rather, my issue is with the suggestion that the Weaver stance is obsolete.

The Isosceles stance, as you probably know, describes a stance where your feet are placed parallel to one another, at shoulder distance or slightly further apart. With a handgun, the firearm is held in a two-handed grip straight in front of you so that if, looking down at that shooter from overhead, you were to draw a line from the weapon to your shoulder, then to the other shoulder, and, finally, back out to the gun, it describe an isosceles triangle. The isosceles stance has been almost universally adopted for use by police because it is a natural stance for quickly drawing, aiming and shooting a firearm at a close target. One of its early proponents was Mas Ayoob. It has also been adapted to shooting tactical rifles (although I don't see how it could be used with rifles exhibiting any significant recoil).

The advantages touted for the stance is that it is more natural by way of using body mechanics when under stress because it is simple and doesn't depend on pulling with one arm, while pushing with the other such as in the Weaver stance. It also allows you to engage multiple targets rapidly because you can pivot your torso without having to shift your feet. Finally, if you are wearing body armor, it presents the armor straight on to the target, maximizing the effectiveness of the armor.

However, like many simple tactics or tips, it appears to have advanced into the realm of dogma. Mas Ayood, as I mentioned, was one of earliest proponents of the Isosceles stance. He recognized, though, that you would not be able to maintain the stance at all times and situations--for instance, that as you twisted further right or left from the front, you would naturally transition into a Weaver stance, or its mirror image.

I was never taught one particular "perfect" stance for a handgun. Probably because my father was adamant about the correct way to hold a rifle for off-hand shooting, I naturally reverted to a similar stance when shooting a handgun. This was merely reinforced by later training and practice in unarmed fighting which is based around a fundamental "fighting stance" where (if right handed) your torso is turned slightly so your right foot is placed further back than your left foot. My thought on the subject, influenced by some tips on shooting a shotgun, is to worry about what your torso and arms are doing, and your feet will find the right place to support your body.

Anyway, getting to the point of this post, the Firearms Blog has a link to a nice video from Kyle Defoor at TriggerTimeTV explaining why the Isosceles stance doesn't work so well with rifles, as well as an interesting pointer for holding the forestock of your AR.

Update (3/17/2015): Caleb has changed his mind and decided it doesn't really matter which you use.

"The Second Amendment as Ordinary Constitutional Law"

Glenn Reynolds has published a paper that is intended as an introduction to a symposium on Second Amendment law being sponsored by the Tennessee Law Review. As such, it offers a fairly concise history of Second Amendment jurisprudence. You can download a pdf from here.

Outdoor Life's 25 Most Incredible Survival Stories

The article (actually, slide show) is from 2011. It is just a quick overview of the stories, but it does list the title of books for most of the events.

Unappreciated Advantages to a Revolver

Grant Cunningham, writing at Personal Defense Network, discusses some of the unappreciated or less obvious advantages to a revolver. This is in addition to the general reliability and ease of use that is often cited. A couple points he makes:

Many people will tell you that a revolver is hard to carry concealed. The cylinder, they say, is darn near impossible to hide. I’ve found that it’s just the opposite: the revolver is actually easier to conceal, despite the cylinder!

With an auto, the part that sticks out is the squared-off butt of the frame. No matter how thin the gun is, you still have that bottom corner poking through your cover garment. It’s hard to hide because it’s not organic; we don’t normally see right angles protruding from beneath clothing.

The grip of the revolver, on the other hand, is rounded. It doesn’t protrude as far because it’s typically shorter, and the smooth profile doesn’t catch clothing and scream “GUN!” The cylinder, likewise, is a round shape that easily disappears under clothing.

And...

During an actual encounter, you’ll find that the revolver has some definite tactical advantages as well. A revolver isn’t dependent on having just the right grip in order to run, and “limp wristing” malfunctions simply don’t exist. This means that shooting from awkward positions or while injured won’t result in a jammed gun, as can happen with an autoloader. Strong side or weak side, pulling the trigger will fire the revolver every time.

He notes some other advantages as well, including that you don't have the expense of purchasing and replacing magazines. As someone that reloads, I also appreciate that I don't have to hunt through the dirt to find my ejected shell casings! Anyway, read the whole thing.

"Attacked on a Bicycle"

Active Response Training has an article about carrying a weapon and defending yourself against attack when commuting on a bicycle. It was of some small comfort that the author, Greg Ellifritz, came to the same conclusion that I did when riding--the best (least bad?) way to carry was in a fanny pack, with the pack turned so its behind you. I tried other carry methods--even in a pannier. Carrying in a pannier is a mistake, I quickly learned, because (a) it wasn't easy to access and, more importantly (b) if you had an accident or were knocked off your bike, you would be separated from your weapon.

Anyway, good article with good information. Check it out.

Severe Weather Warning for Mid-West/Mississippi River Valley

The Daily Mail reports:

A large swath of the U.S. is on storm alert as downpours, strong winds and hail hammer several states from Illinois to Texas.

With predictions of flooding on roads and hail the size of golf balls, motorists have been warned to be careful and, if possible, to just leave their cars in a garage.

Texas has already experienced part of the deluge, when winds and rain damaged buildings and roads in Dallas on Thursday.

Book Review: "Contact!" by Max Velocity

(Source: Amazon)

Book: Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival by Max Velocity (2nd edition) (586 pages for the Kindle edition).

Overview: A manual of small unit tactics intended for a post-collapse, loss of rule of law and/or a resistance movement.

Impression: To understand what is this book, it is helpful to know what this book is not. It is not a book on self-defense or personal security. Although there are some ideas concerning fortifications and "bugging" in place,  it is not a book about defending or hardening your home. It does not discuss how to make or use improvised weapons or booby-traps. It is not a manual of arms, or a guide to shooting. It does not teach field craft or basic military skills. It does not teach individual tactics.

So what is this book about? I think the best description is that it is an intermediate level book on small unit tactics (i.e., a couple fire teams up to company level) that is tailored, to a certain extent anyway, to a survivalist or resistance fighter.

By intermediate level, I mean that it seems to be intended on someone with at least some background or training in small unit tactics, such as military basic training or boot camp, or perhaps attending a basic course in small units training. That is, it does not discuss or only has minimal discussion of individual skills. For instance, there is no description of hand signals and only a cursory overview of tactical movement. It does not teach land navigation, and only lightly touches on basic communications issues. It doesn't have the number or detail of diagrams for many topics that would be desirable for a beginning text. Although it has tips on using weapons, it is not intended to be a primmer on shooting, and does not cover weapons retention techniques. It discusses some aspects of camouflage, but does not address the basics of applying camouflage on the person (such as face or hands). For someone without some background knowledge in small unit tactics, I would recommend at least reading through some of the basic military manuals or a book such as Light Infantry Tactics by Christopher Larsen to get a better handle on the fundamentals, and perhaps a book on the use of a tactical carbine (such as Green Eyes and Black Rifles by Kyle Lamb or one of Gabe Suarez's books on tactics) before trying to delve into this book.

On the other hand, Contact! has too broad of an overview to be considered advanced. There is almost no mention, let alone discussion, of movement or tactics for mountainous terrain, and not much more about urban combat. If you want to learn about air assault or insertion from a small boat, this book is not for you. It is, as I stated, intermediate.

Don't let this fool you, though. There is a lot of information here. It is not a "quick read". For instance, it has taken me several months to work through it--albeit, I have also been reading other books at the same time (such as The Collapse of Complex Societies). You will probably want to read the book straight through first, and then revisit the sections--at least that is what I plan to do.

What makes this book useful is that it presents its subject matter with an eye toward the survivalist or resistance fighter. As the author notes:

Something has been pointed out about the mindset of many prepper[s]; the whole barricading yourselves in the homestead, growing tomatoes, and beating off marauders with precision rifle fire at long range, while leaving the actual fighting to 'others.' It is that aspect that I am picking up on and hoping to help with.

(p. 444). And so, the book focuses on teaching concepts of fire and movement, including the principles of patrolling, setting ambushes, reaction drills (thus, the title), and some escape and evasion tactics. For those who are bugging out, there is a discussion of vehicle movement and roadblocks. It covers the use of vehicles in tactical movement, caring for or dealing with casualties. The author has also included blog posts that answer or discuss specific questions or topics that readers of his blog has raised. Most importantly, the author includes a lot of little details and pointers that only come through combat experience.

Some of the strengths of the book are also its weaknesses. Although there is useful information provided in the posts from the author's blogs, a lot of the information is redundant or repetitive. I would have preferred for those discussion to better integrated into the main text. The focus on tactics and operations using units also means that there is little information on operating alone or in a pair. That is, this book is not intended for the individual or family. However, even in that situation, it provides information on how units will act (or react), and thus may be useful to the individual prepper or family.

The military focus is beneficial if you think you may be facing military or paramilitary units. However, the author also assumes access to military or military style equipment--automatic weapons, grenades and explosives, and so on--as well as a large supply of ammunition and fuel for vehicles. (This is where the book's roots in the author's other book, Rapid Fire, shows up most clearly). There is no discussion of constructing or using improvised munitions, methods of substituting civilian weapons or compensating for a lack of military equipment, or low tech booby traps. It doesn't discuss movement using bicycles, horses, or other modes of transportation once the gasoline runs out. It also will take a lot of practice to become proficient at the skills discussed in the book--something that may not be possible unless you can attend the classes offered by the author or similar teachers and/or are part of a large group of people similarly dedicated to learning the skills.

I also have my doubts as to whether practicing the principles outlined in the book on your own, or even taking the classes, is going to get you accepted by a community as a skilled fighter. I suspect that in most situations, a person that has a military background--even if it was limited to working in a mess or similar support position--will be looked to for advice or assistance before someone without, even if the latter has more actual knowledge and skills.

In short, this is not an introductory or first book on combat, but is one for after you understand the basics. Unless you are part of a large group of preppers, this book may not fit into your preps. Obviously, the small unit tactics discussed are not going to have a great deal of application prior to a collapse, and cannot be implemented unless you have a relatively large number of people to work with. Its value for the individual or family group is to inform you of what an enemy will do. The exception is the information on vehicle movement and escape and evasion techniques--those can be applied even by a family group. However, it has a lot of information and tips on actual combat. So, even if you can't field the 16+ troops needed to implement most of the tactics, the "tips and tricks" are worth the read.

The Weapon Blog Has An Updated Gun Contest List

Link here.

1957 Article on the AR10

GUNS Magazine from March 1957 (pdf) has an article on the AR-10, posing the question of whether it would replace the M1 Garand. From the article:

Top brass in the Pentagon were as startled as the California hunters when they first saw Sullivan and his guns. This time, it was not the color which shocked them, since Sullivan knew better than to show camouflage-conscious military specialists bright colors and highly polished surfaces. Instead, it was the story Sullivan had to tell. He spoke of a new rifle that weighed about 6 3/4 pounds, and could fire full automatic, handling the standard service .30 NATO cartridge with as much accuracy as the present M l rifle. He showed them a 20-round magazine of waffle-creased sheet aluminum that weighed four ounces. An infantryman's load of 100 rounds in these pre-loaded expendable magazines would weigh no more than an equal amount of ammunition involving the regular BAR box that required reloading, plus the ammunition stripper clips.

(p. 15).

Objectionable kick was nonexistent in these truly lightweight automatic rifles. The highly efficient tin-can muzzle brake and flash suppressor fitted to one AR-10 kept things to a comfortable bounce in full auto, with none of the uncontrollable climb associated with some weapons when gripped too tightly. In semi-auto fire, the kick-in spite of the fact that the gun weighs hardly more than an Ml-carbine~is far less than any other gun of comparable caliber. Measured energy of recoil is a scientific figure, but "kick" is something else~nobody knows what. My impression was that the 308 AR-10 kicked less than a Model 70 Winchester bolt action rifle wing the same cartridge.

(p. 48).

 A little different from the standard history of the AR rifles suddenly coming from nowhere to be adopted in lieu of the M14.

Photos of Tomioka, Japan.

Abandoned since the Fukushima incident. From the Daily Mail.

Sprained or Broken?

Death Valley Magazine published an article recently on a field expedient method (the Ottawa Ankle Rules) for determining whether you have a sprained ankle or a fracture. Instructions and photos at the link. As the article notes:

In a wilderness survival or tactical environment how can you tell if you’ve sprained or broken an ankle? The distinction may seem minor, but the implications are dramatic.

In a wilderness environment it means the difference between wrapping the ankle and the patient can walk out, or immobilizing the limb and carrying the patient out.

Tactically, the distinction is the same, but instead of having another shooter, you have a casualty.

Check it out.

The Route Home (or out of Dodge)

Modern Survival Blog has some suggestions on preparing a route to get home in the event of a disaster. Basically, this involves making note of back routes that allow you to get home while avoiding choke points. The post focuses on choke points caused by highway exit and entrance ramps as people try to get on or off the highway, and major streets and roads.

However, be aware of other considerations. I would love to be able to plan a alternate route like that suggested in the Modern Survival Blog article, but I have a major problem if I'm trying to get back via a car--I have to cross a river to get to my home from where I work. I can plan all of the secondary and back street routes I want, but at some point I have to travel across a bridge. Bridges are a natural choke point.

Other geographic features (natural or man-made) may similarly limit access. For instance, bluffs or hills may may create a natural roadblock, limiting the number of access points up or through the bluffs or hills. An interstate highway will similarly only have a limited number of overpasses. If you have to cross through or over these obstacles you may have no choice but to go through a choke point.

In some locations, you may also have to plot a route that avoids certain neighborhoods because of the threat of crime.

If you map your route, become familiar with it. Try taking the route at different times of the day and night, or during the week. Some routes that have little or no traffic on a weekend, may be congested during the week. Or streets that have lots of commercial traffic during the daytime, may be largely abandoned in the evening.

Check the route(s) periodically for changes. New development or other changes may attract or force more traffic through a particular street or road, or close down the road you had planned on using.

You may also want to consider foot or bicycle routes to and from work. For instance, in my case, in addition to bridges for vehicles, I'm aware of several additional pedestrian-only bridges that allow access over the river I mentioned above. Thus, foot travel allows me additional options that are not available if I stick with my vehicle.

DIY Solar Shed Project

Stealth Survival has instructions on building a shed set up with solar power.

22 Garden "Hacks"

Dirt Time blog has a list of 22 tricks and tips to make gardening easier and more enjoyable.

Islamic "Trojan Horse" Plot to Subvert UK Schools

From the Daily Mail:

Headteachers are warning that schools across Britain have been targeted in an alleged Islamist plot to take over classrooms.

The National Association of Head Teachers said it had ‘serious concerns’ about attempts to ‘alter the character’ of at least six schools.

It also warned that efforts to infiltrate classrooms were not limited to Birmingham and were likely to be affecting other major towns and cities. 

The union said ‘concerted efforts’ had been made to infiltrate state schools and run them according to strict Islamic principles. 

While the body did not name the additional areas affected, there are concerns over schools in Bradford, Manchester and parts of East London, according to the Daily Telegraph.

Russell Hobby, NAHT general secretary, said some teachers were being appointed because of their Muslim faith rather than their skills.

There was also evidence of ‘pressure’ being brought to bear on heads to adopt ‘certain philosophies and approaches’.

Speaking ahead of the union’s annual conference in Birmingham, he said: ‘We ourselves have concerns about what has been going on in and around half a dozen of those schools. 

‘There have been things going on inside our schools which would make some of us feel uncomfortable.’

Meanwhile, it has been claimed that dozens of teachers pushed out of schools by an alleged Islamist takeover plot are too afraid to speak out because of gagging orders.
Birmingham MP Khalid Mahmood said at least ten teachers told him they were made to sign agreements offering cash in return for their silence.

The latest allegation of the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ plot – whereby Muslim extremists infiltrate state schools and run them according to Islamic principles – was made last night as Ofsted announced inspections at a further three schools, bringing the total to 21. 

Birmingham City Council is also investigating 25 schools.

Welcome to the Collapse--California Style

All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray.

I've been for a walk on a winter's day.

I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A.;

California dreamin' on such a winter's day.

               --The Mamas and the Pappas

Joel Kotkin writes at the Orange Country Register:

The most important news to hit Southern California last week did not involve the heinous Donald Sterling, but Toyota’s decision to pull its U.S. headquarters out of the Los Angeles region in favor of greater Dallas. This is part of an ongoing process of disinvestment in the L.A. region, particularly among industrially related companies, that could presage a further weakening of the state’s middle class economy. 

The Toyota decision also reflects the continued erosion of California’s historic economic diversity, which provided both stability and a wide variety of jobs to the state’s workers. We have seen this in the collapse of our once-burgeoning fossil-fuel energy industry, capped this year by the announced departure from Los Angeles of the headquarters of Occidental Petroleum. Blessed with huge fossil fuel reserves, California once stood as one of the global centers of the energy industry. Now, with the exception of Chevron, which is shifting more operations out of state, all the major oil companies are gone, converting California from a state of energy producers to energy consumers, and, in the process, sending billions of dollars to Texas, Canada and elsewhere for natural gas and oil that could have been produced here.

... Since 2010, California has managed to miss out on a considerable industrial boom that has boosted economies from the Rust Belt states to the Great Plains and the Southeast. Los Angeles and Orange counties, the epicenter of the state’s industrial economy, have actually lost jobs. Since 2000, one-third of the state’s industrial employment base, 600,000 jobs, has disappeared, a rate of loss 13 percent worse than the rest of the country.

Kotkin relates the various factors that drew industry to California in the first instance, but that these factors have either reversed or are no longer important. According to Kotkin, the biggest reason, however, for moving the corporate and engineering out of California is the deindustrialization of the state. Basically, with manufacturing having left to locations in Texas and the Mid-West, the engineering and technical jobs, management, and corporate jobs to support the manufacturing are tagging along. To add insult to injury, at least in the case of Toyota, Texas did not even have to lobby Toyota to move its North American headquarters.

Kotkin concludes: "[O]ur region is devolving toward marginality, largely as a tourist and celebrity haven." Rich liberals at the top, and the welfare dependent masses at the bottom. The liberal dream writ large.

Blogging "The Collapse of Complex Societies" -- Part 6.

Tulum, Yucatan, Mexico

      This is the conclusion of my review and commentary of Joseph A. Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge Press, 1988). Here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. 

      In Chapter 6 of his book, Tainter provides a comprehensive summary, ties together some loose ends, briefly discusses his theory's application to past collapses other than the three examples he detailed earlier, and, perhaps most significant for our interests, takes a look at contemporary (i.e., late 1980's) conditions. I do not intend to discuss his summary, etc., since it would be a repeat of my prior posts. I also do not intend to discuss his application to other ancient societies. My preference is to focus, instead, on his comments concerning contemporary conditions and add a few of my own thoughts. However, there are a couple points that he brings up as he ties the loose strands of his theory together that have significant implications for our futures.

      First, he observes:

Complex societies, it must be emphasized again, are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity. The notion that collapse is uniformly a catastrophe is contradicted, moreover, by the present theory. To the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is an economizing process. It occurs when it becomes necessary to restore the marginal return on organizational investment to a more favorable level. To a population that is receiving little return on the cost of supporting complexity, the loss of that complexity brings economic, and perhaps administrative, gains .  ....

* * *

What may be a catastrophe to administrators (and later observers) need not be to the bulk of the population (as discussed, for example, by Pfeiffer [ 1977 : 469-7 1]). It may only be among those members of a society who have neither the opportunity nor the ability to produce primary food resources that the collapse of administrative hierarchies is a clear disaster. Among those less specialized, severing the ties that link local groups to a regional entity is often attractive. Collapse then is not intrinsically a catastrophe. It is a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.

(p. 198, underline mine).

      Second, Tainter maintains that a complex society can only collapse in a "vacuum"--that is, only if the surrounding societies are less complex; or, if it is one of several peers (peer polities), all of the peers collapse as well. He writes:

... Peer polities are those like the Mycenaean states, the later small city-states of the Aegean and the Cyclades, or the centers of the Maya Lowlands, that interact on an approximately equal level. As Renfrew and Price make clear, the evolution of such clusters of peer polities is conditioned not by some dominant neighbor, but more usually by their own mutual interaction, which may include both exchange and conflict.

In competitive, or potentially competitive, peer polity situations the option to collapse to a lower level of complexity is an invitation to be dominated by some other member of the cluster. To the extent that such domination is to be avoided, investment in organizational complexity must be maintained at a level comparable to one's competitors, even if marginal returns become unfavorable. Complexity must be maintained regardless of cost. Such a situation seems to have characterized the Maya, whose individual states developed as peer polities for centuries, and then collapsed within a few decades of each other (Sabloff 1986).

The post-Roman states of Europe have experienced an analogous situation, espe­cially since the demise of the Carolingian Empire. European history of the past 1 500 years is quintessentially one of peer polities interacting and competing, endlessly jockeying for advantage, and striving to either expand at a neighbor's expense or avoid having the neighbor do likewise. Collapse is simply not possible in such a situation unless all members of the cluster collapse at once. Barring this, any failure of a single polity will simply lead to expansion of another, so that no loss of complexity results. ....

(p. 201, emphasis in original).

      I'm not so sure that Tainter's second observation holds true in all cases. Obviously the Western Roman Empire was beset by Barbarians along its northeastern borders, with no other states along its western and southern periphery. But it still abutted the Eastern Roman Empire, which did not collapse. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire collapsed, and as Tainter suggests would occur among peers, the Eastern Empire made some attempts to retake the Western Empire--i.e., the expansion of the East to fill the power vacuum. However, it was beyond the resources and capabilities of the Eastern Empire. Similarly, today, we have seen examples of "failed states," where, again, local powers do not seem to have the ability to expand into those states, and the larger, wealthier states lack the desire, so that the failed states are simply isolated. Thus, while I'm not suggesting that Tainter's second observation is false, I am suggesting that there may be some caveats.

      Of course, the real concern is where our own society stands. Tainter, writing in 1988, took note of the burgeoning survivalist and self-sufficiency movement, Rather than dismissing it, he observed that "[t]he whole concern with collapse and self-sufficiency may itself be a significant social indicator, the expectable scanning behavior of a social system under stress, in which there is advantage to seeking lower-cost solutions." (p. 210). I would note that in the mid- to late-1980s, when Tainter was writing his book, survivalism and self-sufficiency was still very much a fringe movement--perhaps an extreme fringe movement. Although still not "mainstream," it certainly is no longer at the fringe either.

       So, where are we. Tainter had noted that "[i]t is clear that at least some industrial societies are not experiencing declining marginal returns in several crucial and costly spheres of investment." (p. 211). Earlier in his book, he had explored this topic in depth, citing statistical evidence in education, research and development, medicine, and so on. He considers the economic principle of infinite substitutability--that as one resource becomes depleted or too expensive, another resource will be used to replace it--and dismisses it as to social complexity. "One problem with the principle of infinite substitutability is that it does not apply, in any simple fashion, to investments in organizational complexity." (p. 212). He also observes that in order to develop alternatives will take an increasing amount of R&D investment--that it will require significant reallocation of resources from other endeavors and, probably, a reduction in living standards. (pp. 212-213).

      But here is the crucial point that Tainter makes:

In fact, there are major differences between the current and the ancient worlds that have important implications for collapse. One of these is that the world today is full. That is to say, it is filled by complex societies ; these occupy every sector of the globe, except the most desolate. This is a new factor in human history. Complex societies as a whole are a recent and unusual aspect of human life. The current situation, where all societies are so oddly constituted, is unique. It was shown earlier in this chapter that ancient collapses occurred , and could only occur, in a power vacuum, where a complex society (or cluster of peer polities) was surrounded by less complex neigh­bors. There are no power vacuums left today. Every nation is linked to, and influ­enced by, the major powers, and most are strongly linked with one power bloc or the other . Combine this with instant global travel, and as Paul Valery noted, ' . . . nothing can ever happen again without the whole world's taking a hand' (1962: 1 1 5 [emphasis in original]).

Collapse today is neither an option nor an immediate threat. Any nation vulnerable to collapse will have to pursue one of three options: ( 1 ) absorption by a neighbor or some larger state; (2) economic support by a dominant power, or by an international financing agency; or (3) payment by the support population of whatever costs are needed to continue complexity, however detrimental the marginal return. A nation today can no longer unilaterally collapse, for if any national government disintegrates its population and territory will be absorbed by some other.

(p. 213). 

Peer polity systems tend to evolve toward greater complexity in a lockstep fashion as, driven by competition, each partner imitates new organizational, technological, and military features developed by its competitor(s) . The marginal return on such developments declines, as each new military breakthrough is met by some counter­ measure, and so brings no increased advantage or security on a lasting basis. A society trapped in a competitive peer polity system must invest more and more for no increased return, and is thereby economically weakened. And yet the option of withdrawal or collapse does not exist. So it is that collapse (from declining marginal returns) is not in the immediate future for any contemporary nation. This is not, however, due so much to anything we have accomplished as it is to the competitive spiral in which we have allowed ourselves to become trapped.  

Here is the reason why proposals for economic undevelopment, for living in balance on a small planet, will not work. Given the close link between economic and military power, unilateral economic deceleration would be equivalent to, and as foolhardy as, unilateral disarmament. We simply do not have the option to return to a lower economic level, at least not a rational option . Peer polity competition drives increased complexity and resource consumption regardless of costs, human or ecological .

(p. 214, emphasis in original). Thus, "[i]n the world today they will not be allowed to collapse, but will be bailed out either by a dominant partner or by an international financing agency." Id. That collapse is not imminent is not necessarily a reprieve. "As marginal returns decline (a process ongoing even now), up to the point where a new energy subsidy is in place, the standard of living that industrial societies have enjoyed will not grow so rapidly, and for some groups and nations may remain static or decline." (p. 215).

      This is not to suggest that collapse is impossible. Only more catastrophic. Tainter continues:

Peer polities then tend to undergo long periods of upwardly-spiraling competitive costs, and downward marginal returns. This is terminated finally by domination of one and acquisition of a new energy subsidy (as in Republican Rome and Warring States China), or by mutual collapse (as among the Mycenaeans and the Maya). Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse . World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.

(p. 214, emphasis in original).

      We are now 2 and 1/2 decades beyond when Tainter wrote his book--at the cusp, if not beyond, what was the immediate future. Certainly, the 1980's and 1990's saw various third-world nations bailed out to prevent collapse; the recent few years have seen first-world European nations bailed out to prevent collapse and several third-world nations simply isolated. Even the Russian involvement in the Ukraine can be seen as the natural expansion into a collapsing state. But the capability to further bail out countries appears to be reaching an end.

      One of the significant factors that Tainter focused on was declining marginal returns in education. We are now at the point that we are seeing, not declining marginal returns, but negative marginal returns. Andrew J. Coulson, writing at The Washington Examiner, noted on April 28, 2014:

Since the early 1970s, the federal government has tracked the academic achievement of American 17-year-olds.

The results have been essentially flat despite the fact that per-pupil spending has more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation.

... State-level academic trends can be estimated all the way back to 1972, and the results aren’t pretty. (See the charts that accompany this post).

The average state has seen a three-percent decline in math and verbal test scores, and a 120-percent increase in real spending per pupil.

The few states that improved their scores substantially tended to be those that were well below average to begin with.

Overall, the correlation between spending and achievement is among the lowest I have ever seen in social-science research: 0.08 on a scale from 0 to 1.

But what's the trick to measuring state academic trends when no ready-made test results exist? Back in 1993, a pair of clever education statisticians developed a method for adjusting SAT scores to account for differences in the test-taking population between states.

By extending and enhancing their technique, I was able to draw meaningful trends for all 50 states reaching back 40 years.

What those trends suggest is that every state in America has suffered an education productivity collapse.

Outcomes are generally stagnant or declining despite massive increases in expenditures. In the best cases, verbal and math skills have improved modestly, but those improvements have been outstripped by much more dramatic increases in real spending.

Perhaps even more telling, state achievement trends have proven to be just as unaffected by the rare multi-year periods of declining spending as they have been by periods of rising spending.

This report published in 2008 at the Heritage Foundation similarly concludes:

Many people believe that lack of funding is a problem in public education,[10] but historical trends show that American spending on public education is at an all-time high. Between 1994 and 2004, average per-pupil expenditures in American public schools have increased by 23.5 percent (adjusted for inflation). Between 1984 and 2004, real expenditures per pupil increased by 49 percent.[11] These increases follow the historical trend of ever-increasing real per-student expenditures in the nation's public schools. In fact, the per-pupil expenditures in 1970-1971 ($4,060) were less than half of per-pupil expenditures in 2005-2006 ($9,266) after adjusting for inflation.[12]

Federal spending on Education has also increased dramatically, as shown in Chart 2. Combined federal support and estimated federal tax expenditures for elementary and secondary education has increased by 138 percent (adjusted for inflation) since 1985. On a per-pupil basis, real federal spending on K-12 education has also increased significantly over time. (See Chart 3.) In 2005, the federal government spent $971 per pupil, more than three times its level of spending in 1970 ($311) after adjusting for inflation.

... A basic comparison of long-term spending trends with long-term measures of student academic achievement challenges the belief that spending is correlated with achievement. Chart 4 compares real per-pupil expenditures with American students test scores on the long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading examination from 1970 to 2004. While spending per pupil has more than doubled, reading scores have remained relatively flat.

High school graduation rates provide another historical barometer of American educational performance. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average freshman graduation rate for American public schools has remained relatively flat over time. In 1990-1991, the average graduation rate was 73.7 percent. By 2004-2005, the rate had increased modestly to 74.7.[13] However, the most recent estimate for the 2005-2006 school year shows that the national freshman graduation rate has dipped to 73.4 percent.[14]

This is not only limited to primary and secondary education. The cost of college tuition has increased nearly 1000% (adjusted for inflation) since 1960, even as students learn less. Factoring in student fees, the cost of a college education has increased 1,120% since 1978.

     Or, how about the huge amounts spent on health care and assistance payments? Robert Rector recently wrote at the Wall Street Journal:

On Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson used his State of the Union address to announce an ambitious government undertaking. "This administration today, here and now," he thundered, "declares unconditional war on poverty in America." 

Fifty years later, we're losing that war. Fifteen percent of Americans still live in poverty, according to the official census poverty report for 2012, unchanged since the mid-1960s. Liberals argue that we aren't spending enough money on poverty-fighting programs, but that's not the problem. In reality, we're losing the war on poverty because we have forgotten the original goal, as LBJ stated it half a century ago: "to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities."

The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Government spent $916 billion on these programs in 2012 alone, and roughly 100 million Americans received aid from at least one of them, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. (That figure doesn't include Social Security or Medicare benefits.) Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is 16 times greater than it was in 1964. If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S.

LBJ promised that the war on poverty would be an "investment" that would "return its cost manifold to the entire economy." But the country has invested $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars over the past 50 years. What does America have to show for its investment? Apparently, almost nothing: The official poverty rate persists with little improvement. ....

Louis Woodhill also similarly wrote at Forbes:

Has the War on Poverty been a failure?  Well, of course it has.  If you devote 50 years and $21.5 trillion (in 4Q2013 dollars) to anything, and people are arguing about whether it was a success or a failure, then you can be sure that it was a failure. 

... The stated goal of the War on Poverty, as enunciated by Lyndon Johnson on January 8, 1964, was, “…not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”  Measured against this objective, the War on Poverty has not just been a failure, it has been a catastrophe.  It was supposed to help America’s poor become self-sufficient, and it has made them dependent and dysfunctional. 

This is fact is illustrated most vividly by the “Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure Before Taxes and Transfers*” (ASPMBTAT).  This metric was devised to assess the ability of people to earn enough, not counting taxes and subsidies, to keep themselves and their dependent children out of poverty.  The income required to do this varies by family size and composition, but, for a family comprising two adults and two children, it is $25,500/year (in 4Q2013 dollars). 

The ASPMBTAT is the ultimate quantitative test of the success (or failure) of the War on Poverty, at least in terms of its stated objective.  Shortly after the War on Poverty got rolling (1967), about 27% of Americans lived in poverty.  In 2012, the last year for which data is available, the number was about 29%.

This result would be shocking, even if we had not spent $21.5 trillion “fighting poverty” over the past 50 years.  Here’s why. 

Between 1967 and 2012, U.S. real GDP (RGDP) per capita (in 4Q2013 dollars) increased by 127.3%, from $23,706 to $52,809.  In other words, to stay out of poverty in 1967, the two adults in a typical family of four had to capture 26.9% of their family’s proportionate share of RGDP (i.e., average RGDP per capita, times four).  To accomplish the same thing in 2012, they only had to pull in 12.1% of their family’s share of RGDP.  And yet, fewer people were able to manage this in 2012 than in 1967. 

Rather than eradicate poverty, the various government programs have actually exacerbated the primary causes of poverty, such as the number of children born out of wedlock and raised in single-parent households, and disincentivised people from working. In addition, as Woodhill writes:

As Social Security and Medicare benefits were made more generous, people reduced their savings.  The Personal Savings Rate (which is calculated as a percent of disposable income) has fallen by more than half since 1967 (from 12.2% to 5.6%).  In other words, when people found that they didn’t need to save as much to avoid being poor in old age, they didn’t save as much.  Also, because of higher payroll taxes, workers had less money to save.

He observes that the reduced savings rates led to less economic development, which in turn made social security and medicare a greater burden on workers than it otherwise would have been.

      Stephen Green recently wrote that the median income for full-time working men peaked in 1973, when adjusting for inflation. He opines:

If I had to guess, the drop in private sector unionization hurt. Unions held monopoly power over labor in several important industries, which jacked up wages to unsustainable levels. That’s been “corrected” by automation and foreign competition. Also, industrial manufacturing just isn’t the big wealth creator it once was. It used to take a special kind of Western country to host a manufacturing base, but now almost anybody can do it.

But I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess taxes and regulation might be mostly to blame. Everything we make, buy, and sell is taxed multiple times from farm or factory to home. But before we can pay those taxes, we have to pay our income taxes. Regulation has made everything more expensive, while also nullifying the take-home pay gains of increased productivity. Our high capital tax rates have turned trillions of dollars effectively into dead capital. Or maybe “undead capital” might be a better term, if I may coin it. It sits in banks, it’s parked in bonds, it’s “trapped” overseas — doing not much for anybody, and certainly not trickling down to the middle class.

Bill Clinton’s Community Reinvestment Act diverted hundreds of billions — trillions? — of dollars of productive capital into houses, which are not a productive asset. The inevitable collapse wiped out a decade or more of wealth gains for the middle class, and virtually wiped out the first and second generation American black middle class. The Fed’s ZIRP and QE have compounded the damage, taking what should have been modest savings increases from the middle class and giving them to Wall Street and to Washington. It’s no coincidence that the Street has reached dizzying new heights just as Washington, our new imperial capital, is the centerpiece of the nation’s wealthiest newly-rich nation. Washington of course doesn’t actually produce anything — no software, no shipping, no mineral wealth, no energy, not even clever financial tools. What Washington mostly does is to make the job more difficult for those who do produce those things.

In February 2013, Glenn Reynolds wrote at USA Today:

There's also the fact that the sheer size of the government makes it hard to do anything well. Often two different parts of the government pull in different directions -- subsidizing cheese, say, while simultaneously telling us to eat less fat. The bigger the government, the more likely we are to see these kinds of problems. 

Nobel-prize-winning economist Ronald Coase made that point in a 1998 interview:
"When I was editor of The Journal of Law and Economics, we published a whole series of studies of regulation and its effects. Almost all the studies -- perhaps all the studies -- suggested that the results of regulation had been bad, that the prices were higher, that the product was worse adapted to the needs of consumers, than it otherwise would have been. I was not willing to accept the view that all regulation was bound to produce these results. Therefore, what was my explanation for the results we had? I argued that the most probable explanation was that the government now operates on such a massive scale that it had reached the stage of what economists call negative marginal returns. Anything additional it does, it messes up. But that doesn't mean that if we reduce the size of government considerably, we wouldn't find then that there were some activities it did well." 

A government limited to relatively few things -- visible things, obviously relevant to the common good -- can probably do those things well. As a consequence, it is likely to be trusted and admired. A government that tries to do a lot of things, on the other hand, will probably do them badly and be less highly regarded. 

The problem, of course, is that a government that does a lot of things badly is more appealing to the political class: more opportunity for graft, and for exercising the inflated self-importance that probably drives politicians even more than graft. The question is whether the government exists for the country's benefit, or for the benefit of the political class. At present, the answer to that question is depressingly clear.

This Washington Examiner article notes a study that shows that Americans spend more on complying with government regulations than they do on healthcare, food or transportation-- a $14,974 "hidden tax" every year for the average U.S. household, representing 23 percent of the $65,596 annual average household income in America.(More on this at Investors Business Daily). The Washington Post recently carried the story of a former Congressman--David Bonior--who discovered that all those regulations he had at one time championed are actually undermining new businesses, such as the restaurants he has opened.

Bonior said if he had the power, he would lighten up on pesky regulations.

“It took us a ridiculous amount of time to get our permits. I understand regulations and . . . the necessity for it. But we lost six months of business because of that. It’s very frustrating.”

 Of course, Bonior had the money to survive those 6 months--most would be entrepreneurs do not.

      Reduced marginal return shows up on military expenditures as well. For instance, in 2000, it was observed that over the prior 12 years, the officer/enlisted ratio in the US military has slipped from one officer for every six enlisted; to almost one officer for five enlisted.  It was 1:10 during World War II. Costs of procuring military equipment also continues to increase, while the the marginal effectiveness has stagnated. In 2010, the Economist published an article on the phenomena:

Mr Gates is grappling with the conundrum faced by many of his predecessors: the rising costs of military manpower and equipment, which strain even America's gargantuan $700 billion defence budget (almost as much as the defence spending of the rest of the world put together). Just to keep up America's existing combat units, he notes, costs 2-3% more each year. But the annual budget is rising by only 1-2%. 

Mr Gates wants the Pentagon to save 1-2% a year in overheads. A study of defence bureaucracies by McKinsey, a global management consultancy, suggests that American forces, though the most potent in the world, are among the least efficient, at least in terms of the “tooth-to-tail” ratio, the proportion of fighting forces to support personnel (the best were Norway, Kuwait and the Netherlands). American forces deploy and fight globally, so need more support than those only defending national borders. Nevertheless, the study suggests there is flab to be trimmed.

Manpower in all-volunteer armies, as most Western ones are these days, is expensive. Pay has to be competitive. In America, moreover, a big burden is the cost of health-care programmes for current and former servicemen, and their families. “Health-care costs are eating the defence department alive,” complains Mr Gates. Yet he has a hard time restraining Congress's generosity to soldiers and veterans. 

One response to high manpower costs is to rely on technology. But that does not come cheap. Study after study shows that the price of combat aircraft has been rising substantially faster than inflation, often faster than GDP. The same is true of warships. 

In a book published in 1983, Norman Augustine, a luminary of the aerospace industry, drafted a series of lighthearted “laws”. In one aphorism, he plotted the exponential growth of unit cost for fighter aircraft since 1910 (see chart 2), and extrapolated it to its absurd conclusion: 

“In the year 2054, the entire defence budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3½ days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.” 

Nearly three decades on, Mr Augustine says, “we are right on target. Unfortunately nothing has changed.” These days Raptors go for $160m apiece ($350m including the cost of developing the jet), compared with $50m-60m for the venerable F-16. In the long run, high unit costs must limit numbers. Since 1970 America's fleets of combat aircraft and major warships have shrunk, even as defence spending rose (see chart 3).

* * *

Such are the ingredients for a spiral of cost and delay: technological stumbles hold up development; delay raises costs; governments postpone work further to avoid busting yearly budgets, incurring greater long-term costs. With time, technology becomes outdated, so weapons must be redesigned, giving the top brass a chance to tinker endlessly with requirements. In the end, governments cut the size of the purchase, so driving up unit costs further. There were supposed to be 132 stealthy B-2 bombers but only 20 were built. They cost $2 billion each.

Repeated reforms have failed to break this dire cycle. According to the last full report by America's Government Accountability Office (GAO), the cost of 96 of America's biggest weapons programmes in 2008 had risen on average by 25%, incurring an average delay of 22 months.

The article goes on to claim that the problem is even more acute in Europe. An LA Times article from 2013 noted that the cost of a single MRAP--a vehicle having the humble role of moving troops from point A to B on a road--cost a $1,000,000 each. Moreover, thousands of the vehicles are being cut up into scrap because it is cheaper to scrap the vehicles than to spend $250,000 to $450,000 to refurbish them. To further put things into perspective, Military Education has an infographic showing how much a single item of military equipment costs versus other things that could have been bought for the same amount.

      The TSA is a clear example of negative marginal return. Chris Edwards observed in this November 2013 article:

... TSA’s performance has been underwhelming. In the early years after 9/11, federal auditors found that the ability of TSA screeners to stop prohibited items from getting through security was no better than that of the previous private screeners.

In recent years, there have been head-to-head comparisons between federal and private screening because 16 U.S. airports are now allowed to use private contractors.

Studies have found that TSA’s screening results have been no better, and possibly worse, than that of the private screeners. And a House report in 2011 found that private screeners at San Francisco International Airport were far more efficient than the federal screeners at the Los Angeles International Airport.

The government has an important oversight role to play in aviation security, but the TSA’s near-monopoly on screening has resulted in it getting “bogged down in managing its bloated federal workforce,” as one congressional report concluded.

Another congressional report blasted TSA for having an “enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy,” and even former TSA chief Kip Hawley noted last year that the agency is “hopelessly bureaucratic.”

The article specifically notes a Government Accounting Office (GAO) report on a particular TSA program--the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program--had no “scientifically validated evidence” and provided no benefit. On that note, USA Today further reported:

TSA's program, Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT), which now has 2,800 workers, began in 2007 and has so far cost $878 million. The program's goal is to spot potential terrorists through behavioral clues, but it has been criticized for possible racial profiling.

The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general said in a 41-page report released Wednesday that the TSA doesn't effectively assess the program or have a comprehensive training program.

"As a result, TSA cannot ensure that passengers at United States airports are screened objectively, show that the program is cost-effective or reasonably justify the program's expansion," according to the report from Anne Richards, assistant inspector general for audits.

      The vaunted stimulus also reveals negative marginal return. This article from 2012 indicates that the job stimulus cost as much as $4.1 million per job created or saved. This article from the 2012 Washington Free Beacon specifically noted that in Pennsylvania, the cost was $247,000 per job created or saved.

      Perhaps one area where we are really seeing negative return is ObamaCare. The Review Journal recently observed:

The sad truth about Obamacare: It largely has resulted in a churning of the insured. The law forced the cancellation of coverage for millions of people, who were then forced to buy a new, more expensive, Obamacare-compliant policy. An extensive study released Tuesday by Rand Corp. backs that up, estimating that only about one-third of exchange sign-ups were previously uninsured.

The Rand study also estimates that, through March 28, 3.9 million people were covered through the federal and state Obamacare exchanges. That’s not exactly 7.1 million. Granted, the study doesn’t include a deadline surge of enrollees, but if it took from Oct. 1 until March 28 to get 3.9 million sign-ups, it stands to reason that there is no way an additional 3.2 million signed up between March 28 and March 31.

As for paid enrollees, Forbes.com’s Avik Roy used the Rand study and a report last month from management consulting firm McKinsey to determine that 76 percent of those who have paid their first month’s premium were previously insured, while just 24 percent were previously uninsured. A separate Forbes report estimates that 15 to 20 percent of enrollees haven’t paid. It’s safe to assume that many Americans who visited an exchange and selected a plan left it in their online shopping cart with no intention of ever purchasing it because the premiums, deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs were astronomical.

This was not what was promised. As Mr. Roy rightly notes, the Congressional Budget Office, in its original estimates, predicted that the vast majority of those eligible for subsidies on the exchanges would be previously uninsured individuals. Instead, the vast majority are previously insured people. The only notable achievement of Obamacare thus far is the expansion of Medicaid (5.9 million added, per Rand), which could have been accomplished without the law.

It is having other side-effects. Due to increasing regulations and costs, it is driving the single-physician practice into extinction. Although this article from Politico tries to explain it away, it is debatable whether more people have lost insurance than have gained insurance under ObamaCare. As the Washington Times recently observed, ObamaCare was supposedly for the purpose of extending insurance to 46 million people, but appears to have only enrolled 4.2 million. The Daily Caller has pointed out that ObamaCare will cost taxpayers $53,000 per newly insured. Of course, none of this includes the amounts already spent on the various federal and state exchanges, some of which, like Oregon's, have been dismal failures.

      My intent is not to argue the worthiness of some of the programs and expenditures mentioned above, but to show that not only are we currently well into the death spiral of declining marginal return, but have passed into the negative marginal return territory--it is costing us more than that benefit received. I would have picked other examples (such as solar or wind energy) to further illustrate this point. But, if collapse was a mathematical certainty when Tainter wrote his book, that certainly is more fixed today. And for those who think that they can avoid the collapse by fleeing to another country...well, as Tainter points out, this time the collapse will be the whole world. It may take years to work out, but it will involve everywhere.