One of the peak guerrilla fountainheads in the early twentieth century, TE Lawrence has been in both the popular imagination and a large part of the engine in the Middle East that signed the death knell for foreign colonial powers to leave the region, Eccentric and brilliant, one of the few successful insurgency leaders during WWI.

References:

Scott Anderson Lawrence of Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

James J. Schneider Guerrilla Leader: TE Lawrence and the Arab Revolt

TE Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Desmond Stewart TE Lawrence: A New Biography

Jeremy Wilson Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of TE Lawrence

Ranulph Fiennes Lawrence of Arabia: My Journey in Search of T. E. Lawrence

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].

The brilliant John Milius helmed this production in the thick of the cold war waning with the USSR. This will be the first episode where we examine the collision between irregular warfare and popular culture.

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].

Government, for a variety of reasons, is manifestly incompetent in everything it does and this lends parts of the explanatory framework in why systemic failure is the feature not a bug in Western martial efforts.

The critiques of the government supremacist mindset are legion and one can find many rational and elegant theses if you start at the Mises Institute and listen to the podcasts of Scott Horton at Antiwar.com. Scott and I recently did a deep dive together in Episode 5850 "Bill Buppert: A Deep Dive into Irregular Warfare" on 17 February 2023.

References:

Ludwig von Mises Bureaucracy

Colin Gray Modern Strategy

Thomas Sowell Knowledge and Decision

Daniel P. Bolger How We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].

As a former Appleseed instructor and Shoot Boss in AZ, I had the opportunity to teach a marksmanship/history project that had me master the origins and details of the first month of the First American Revolution. I cover the "Three Strikes of the Match" that we used as an organization to educate folks about the marriage between marksmanship and liberty that initiated the divorce from London in 1775.

References:

David Hackett Fischer Paul Revere's Ride

J. L. Bell The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War

Robert A. Gross The Minutemen and Their World

John R. Galvin The Minute Men: The First Fight: Myths and Realities of the American Revolution

Kevin Phillips The Cousins War: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America

John F. Ross War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America's First Frontier

Stephen Brumwell White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery And Vengeance in Colonial America

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].

I review and discuss Sean McMeekin's brilliant tome on Stalin being the ascendant and most successful antagonist in WWII.

References:

Sean McMeekin Stalin's War: A New History of World War II

John Koster Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR's White House Triggered Pearl Harbor

Herbert Romerstein, Eric Breindel The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors

M. Stanton Evans, Herbert Romerstein Stalin's Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].

I discuss the French experience in north Africa and the devastating consequences of the double blow of losing Indochina in the same time-frame in Algeria in north Africa.

References:

Martin Windrow Our Friends Beneath the Sands: The Foreign Legion in France's Colonial Conquests 1870-1935

Douglas Porch The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force

Douglas Porch Counterinsurgency

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].

In this first episode, I discuss the fundamentals of French irregular warfare doctrine with a concentration on COIN, French martial history in a thumbnail and the tragedy of French arms in post-WWII Indochina.

References:

Martin Windrow The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam

Bernard Fall Hell in a Very Small Place

Bernard Fall Street Without Joy

Ted Morgan Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].

A short but effective tome that is a sound introduction to why the western COIN complex is so wrong-headed and intellectually bankrupt.

References:

Colonel Gian Gentile Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].

I discuss the combat framework from the tactical to the operational to the strategic level and mission command for both regular and irregular warfare (IW). A deep knowledge of conventional warfare is very useful to fully grokking how IW works hence the inclusion of that perspective.

References:

ADP 6-0 Mission Command

Grant Tedrick Hammond The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security

Stephen Robinson Blind Strategist: John Boyd and the American Art of War

Colin Gray Modern Strategy

Carl von Clausewitz On War

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email at [email protected].

In this episode, I sketch the lives and exploits of three guerrilla luminaries: TE Lawrence, GEN Paul Emil von Letter-Vorbeck and Michael Collins. I want to use them to illustrate what I consider the next step in guerrilla evolution employing age-old techniques and strategies harnessed to modern technology and employment within the new age of mechanized warfare.

References:

Tim Pat Coogan Michael Collins

James Gleeson Bloody Sunday

Tom Barry Guerrilla Days in Ireland

Peter Hart Michael Collins

Edwin P. Hoyt Guerrilla: COL Lettow-Vorbeck and Germany’s East African Empire

Scott Anderson Lawrence of Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

James J. Schneider Guerrilla Leader: TE Lawrence and the Arab Revolt

My Substack:

https://t.co/7a8jn2Mmnx

Email me at [email protected].