Be sure to Click LIKE at the bottom of this article, and share it everywhere!! By Craig Andresen – The National Patriot and Right Side Patriots – Commentary

The nice thing about the future is that it provides plenty of time to reassess our history, and I suspect that the future will not be kind to our most recent history. The problem with history is that if we fail to learn from it, we will repeat it and God knows we can, and had better learn from what we’ve just been through.

History however, isn’t the only thing we need to pay attention to moving forward, and unfortunately, recent history has failed to make much of an impression on those who clearly lack the situational awareness we’re going to need in the very near future.

Have we learned nothing at all?

Throughout our nation’s history there have been certain aspects of war that have always been a constant. From the Revolutionary War, to the War of 1812, to the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and Korea along with all the other military efforts in which we’ve been engaged, we have always been able to identify the enemy at a glance. If we should have learned anything over the past 20 years, it’s that our enemies in the theaters of war are not wearing recognizable uniforms.

We are. We continue to wear the uniform of our country and that makes our men and women easily identifiable to those who want them dead. We wear camouflage so as to blend into the surrounding landscape but our enemies are simply blending into the local culture. We can’t tell an average goat herder from a local farmer or from a terrorist.

20 years ago, 19 terrorists with their sights set on killing as many Americans as possible simply blended in, as student pilots, and they learned just enough to steer some passenger jets into buildings. We never noticed them but history, our own history tells us that we should have noticed them because we used that same tactic ourselves once.

Remember the Minute Men from the Revolutionary War? They didn’t wear a uniform. They blended into the local culture, and our enemy in that war never noticed them until it was too late.

The regular North Vietnamese Army was reasonably easy to identify, but not so much the Viet Cong because, as a guerilla force, they simply blended into the culture, and while our history is replete with such examples, examples we seem to have forgotten, uniforms aren’t the only lesson we have recently ignored.

There has been a real shift in mindset and it’s not helpful in any theater of war.

It started in Korea, and grew like a cancer in Vietnam. But we never worried much about it in previous military operations. Collateral damage. Let’s take the World Wars as our example here. We won those wars because the prospect of collateral damage was expected. From the air and from the ground we pounded our enemies relentlessly, and we leveled one town after the next. There were two basic ideas in play. Overwhelm our enemies, and win.

In overwhelming our enemies we made it preferable to civilians to engage on our side and on our behalf rather than to work on behalf of our enemies. At the very least, such overwhelming might left little room for the notion of standing in our way. We won both of those World Wars and nations whose towns and cities we left in rubble are now among our strongest allies. That’s what winning looks like, but beginning in Korea, spreading like a cancer in Viet Nam and now in our most recent theaters of war, we have become more concerned with not doing damage to neighborhoods or neighbors than we are concerned with winning.

Our enemies will either lay their weapons down and surrender, or they won’t but the notion of winning the “hearts and minds” of a bunch of 7^th century barbarians whose ideology masquerades as a religion and is hell-bent on murdering any and all who will not submit to their will is nonsense. Our military exists overpower the enemy. Our military should never be in the business of trying not to upset or offend our enemies.

We have THE best weapons on earth. From our ships to our tanks, from our air superiority to our ability to vaporize the enemy by remote control, our weapons in the theater of war are, by the very military definition of the word…offensive…and when we go on the offensive by God we should have every intention of OFFENDING our enemies to DEATH.

In the two World Wars, had our military Generals been as “woke” as some of them are today, we would speaking German east of the Missouri river, and Japanese west of it.

We didn’t trust the Germans to provide security for our allies in 1944, and we sure as hell didn’t give the Japanese a list of Americans or our allies living on Pacific islands in 1942. When MacArthur left the Philippines he told the people, “I shall return,” and he did return. In September of 1776, General George Washington was getting his butt kicked on Long Island, and he needed to get the hell out of there. He didn’t tell his enemies when he would be leaving, his timeline was dictated by events on the ground, and when the time was right, as a thick fog rolled in, Washington got all 9,000 colonists AND all of our weapons off the island before the British knew what was happening.

These are just basic things. I’m not even sure these things rise to the level of Military 101. We need to have a basic understanding of the nature of the enemy before we engage them in a war. Do they or do they not wear easily identifiable uniforms, and if not, how DO we identify them?

What’s in it for us? If we’re going to war, there had better be something in it for us or at the very least, for our allies because if there’s not, we shouldn’t be there.

What is the goal? If there’s no defined goal, we do not need to engage.

What defines victory? If we’re going to war, we need to have a clear understanding of what victory looks like before we fire our first shot and once we have achieved that victory, we need to be prepared for what comes next rather than making it up as we go.

If we engage in a war, and we know how to identify the enemy, have a clear goal, there’s something in it for us or our allies and we have clearly defined what a victory would look like then we need to have a plan for the future of that region and our place in it. We have troops all over Europe, in Japan and in South Korea and from those places, we are able to move with purpose to anywhere else while keeping the peace in those regions. If we don’t intend to stay, we shouldn’t go there to begin with, but we do need a plan for staying, or for getting out should it come to that.

If we do have to leave, there is a checklist that needs to be followed. Get people out of harm’s way…locals and our people. That’s the first priority. After that, make damned sure that anything that might aid and abet the enemy isn’t left behind and that includes everything from documents, computers, hardware, software, guns, bullets, aircraft, vehicles and everything else right down to the last roll of toilet paper.

The last to go should always be our intel assets and our military personnel.

It’s simple, or at least it should be. George Washington got it in 1776 but given the events of a week or so ago, there’s a rather pressing question that needs to be asked…how butt stupid does one have to be to completely FUBAR a retreat?

As it turns out, as far as threats go, “systemic racism” in our military (which doesn’t actually exist) has nothing on an bunch of 7^th century barbarians (which actually DO exist) and while General Milley was trying to convince congress that he’s “woke” and reading books on “white rage” those barbarians were plotting our demise.

By leaving Afghanistan, and by leaving as we did, we gave an entire country and its people to the terrorists from which they will launch attacks against other nations, and against us. If the lessons of history weren’t enough to prevent the disaster in Afghanistan, common sense should have been but one thing is clear, we will either have to return to Afghanistan to once again go to war against terrorists and terrorism, or we will have clearly surrendered to them last week.

Remember, the nice thing about the future is that it provides plenty of time to reassess our history, and I suspect that the future will not be kind to our most recent history. The problem with history is that if we fail to learn from it, we will repeat it and God knows we can, and had better learn from what we’ve just been through.

Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up, and the next time around, the price might just be too high to pay.

Copyright © 2021 Craig Andresen / thenationalpatriot.com all rights reserved

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For more political commentary please visit my RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS partner Diane Sori’s blog The Patriot Factor to read her latest op-ed, “The Unprotected Truth.”

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