Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
In recent weeks, talk of a “Double Tap” attack on a Venezuelan drug boat has revealed something disturbing about our contemporary military leadership. This, in conjunction with the seditious Democrat call for troops to disobey unspecified “unlawful orders,” show the effects of an unfettered legalism. Military lawyers can no longer be permitted to control our military.
Ward Caroll, a former naval aviator who usually does a very respectable job of explaining the military on his YouTube page, went into extreme detail to criticize Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. In “Hegseth Throwing SEAL Admiral under the Bus for ‘Double Tap,’” Caroll cites expert combat veterans who criticize Hegseth’s alleged order to, “Kill them all”. Subsequent evidence indicates that they are reacting to a false narrative. Still, their objections clarify a flawed mindset.
The heart of their complaint is that a couple of survivors seemed to still live after the first strike that destroyed their drug smuggling fast boat. Instead of sending in a second missile, which we actually did, these veteran experts would have had us employ restraint. They even might have preferred it if we had rescued these survivors and given them their day in a US court.
These veterans have earned real legitimacy in opining about how battle should be conducted by their repeated willing service in combat. I cannot deny that any expert brought in by Caroll, as well as Caroll himself, understands more about such matters than my civilian self can ever hope to learn. If anyone has earned the right to offer opinions about such matters, it is men such as this.
However, they all seem prey to a mindset which guides everything that they assert. The mindset prioritizes that laws of war must be observed as a first principle, and that a top priority of every commander should be to avoid committing “war crimes”.
On first blush, this adherence to lawful restraint seems reasonable. We would not want a repetition of the My Lai massacre. We would certainly not wish to transform wholesome American volunteer citizen-soldiers into some latter-day Schutzstaffel.
Our forces, they assert, must be seen to be scrupulous adherents to the socalled “Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War”, as described in a book by Gary D. Solis. No one must be permitted to question our adherence to this theoretical standard of restraint, they say.
Much of the hypersensitivity held by these combat veterans to the so-called laws of war may be rooted in a sense that the crews of these narco-terrorist boats are fellow soldiers. When soldiers are beaten, they should be able to surrender and be taken prisoner. This might even be true of the Chinese. Communists soldiers, and those of other traditional militaries.
However, these narco-terrorists are not merely doing their patriotic duty. They are not just doing a job. They are as unlike traditional soldiers as the Islamists whom we have been fighting since 9/11/01. They are in the fight against us for personal reasons. Narco-terrorists are the moral equivalent of Slavers; predators among other men. The Islamists were and are members of one of the world’s oldest death cults.
Narco-terrorists and Islamist terrorists are not standard fighters. They do not make typical prisoners of war. They do not hunger to return to their civilian lives in peace. Instead, they will go back to fighting to destroy us as quickly as they can. Such enemies cannot be fought humanely. They can only be killed, until even other predators and fanatics will no longer rise to take their places.
Caroll and the combat veterans then go on to describe a functional military command center staffed to the brim with lawyers; lawyers tasked with ensuring US compliance with these laws of war. Before orders are sent, they must vetted by these legal experts to ensure their compliance to these laws.
This is madness! It comes from us not having faced a peer adversary since around 1990. It has become unquestioned policy because we haven’t had to fight for our very existence in a General War since 1945.
Such adherence to the notions of international (largely Western European) theorists has crept into our decision-making like gangrene through what had once been healthy flesh.
Western European Social Democracy, as well as its pretensions to establish a “rules-based international order,” was born under the shield that the US provided against Soviet aggression. Many Europeans actually have come to believe that such an international order is both natural and inevitable.
They judge American warfare harshly, even as they shelter behind American forces in the NATO alliance. They have become like teenagers who possess no real life experience, who are utterly dependent upon their parents, and who find fault with everything that their parents do. They do not have valid points-of-view.
I have seen this same legalism in newer generations of police officers and correction officers. They have been indoctrinated to believe that the laws that govern their profession are a higher priority than their profession’s actual purpose.
For generations, increasing proportions of our protectors have had their instinctive vocation twisted to conform to the dreams of theorists as interpreted in courts of law. The detailed rules-mongering hamstrings the efforts of all these protectors to save society from enemies both foreign and domestic.
It is not the primary job of gendarmes and soldiers to embody some theoretical standard of humanitarian perfection. It is certainly not their job to kowtow before international bodies that arrogate unto themselves the right to judge all others.
The job of our protectors is to triumph over enemies, both from outside and from within American society. For our military in particular, this involves aggression, creativity, spontaneity, and a willingness to escalate to achieve success. None of this can happen when lawyers interfere, scolding line officers to conduct themselves as if they were in a court of law.
Battle is self-evidently messy, un-ideal, and pragmatic. It involves breaking the enemy’s will to fight as much as it does killing their men and destroying their combat power. In war, we are up against the enemy’s best and brightest, and they mean us harm.
In war, we do not face an implacable force of nature which we can outsmart. We are not engaged in some limited arena defined by rules of engagement. Most of all, we are not trying to win the approval of a legal class which has taken control over our society’s great institutions.
In war, especially in a war for survival against an enemy that can really defeat or destroy us, we must fight to defeat this existential threat. We must do whatever it takes to win. Victory is the only standard that matters, because only victory can give us a future where we survive in freedom.
If, or more likely when, the Chinese Communists launch a Pacific War, we will be taught this lesson anew. They will not hold back, will not be restrained, nor will they limit their actions to anything even remotely humane. They will likely employ nuclear weapons at the outset, as would the Soviets had they come through the Fulda Gap in the 1980s. They will likely attack far beyond Taiwan, targeting Japan, Guam, Hawaii, and the continental United States.
China’s People’s Liberation Army serves the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese national government. It is a Party Militia with atomic assets. They abided the worst mass murders in human history, Mao Tse-Tung’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution”. Thanks to foolish Western investments, they have been enriched to the point where they are ready to wage a General War to unseat the USA as global hegemon.
Their allies in Russia, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Cuba, South Africa, and Venezuela will certainly join in at their first opportunity. Communists, Islamists, and other anti-Western elements will certainly act as a Fifth Colum in support of their fight. Countless military agents let into the USA by the Biden Administration will appear everywhere, destroying our power grid and infrastructure, and sowing despair and distrust.
If this nightmare manifests, the last thing that we want is a military brainwashed into the delusion of humanitarian laws of war. We will need leaders such as George S. Patton, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Robert E. Lee. We will need warriors capable of employing real darkness in order to serve the light.
No United States forces should ever enter into armed conflict under any rules of engagement that vary from those used in Europe and the Pacific in 1945. Fully unrestrained, our military has a fighting chance to win the next war. Only this will bring us ongoing survival. And, only the fear of such a terrible thing can deter China’s aggression.
