WoW!!

The Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.

Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers

Thus, sans further adieu (or a don't)

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 votes!–Joshuapundit-A Murder In Jerusalem…And What To Do About It
• Second place with 2 1/3 votes – The Noisy Room – Allah in the Classroom — the ABC’s of Forced Conversion
• Third place with 2 votes –Bookworm Room – With Ebola, three strands in American culture — entitlement, accommodation, and Prius syndrome — all come together
• Fourth place with 1 2/3 votes –Simply Jews – About the recalcitrance of Israeli public and the role of the media
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Right Planet – Hezbollah Expanding Its Network in Latin America – Terrorist Captured with Explosives in Peru
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Razor – On The Writings of Julius Caesar
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Independent Sentinel – Islamic fundamentalists successfully infiltrating social studies and history texts
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Rhymes With Right – Texas Democrats Follow National Party’s Lead, Shamelessly Engage In Racist Fearmongering
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Nice Deb – Boots On The Ground: Former US Soldiers Join Kurds in Fight Against ISIS (Video)
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – VA Right! - I’m Done Shopping at Pro-Muslim Home Depot. Read This and You Will Be Too.

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 votes! –Peggy Noonan/WSJ – How to Lose, and Win, Graciously submitted by The Watcher
• Second place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Sultan Knish –Why Obama Hates Netanyahu submitted by The Noisy Room
• Second place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Lee Smith/Weekly Standard – Ditching Israel, Embracing Iran submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Sic Semper Tyrannis – Chlorine Bombings, Ghouta, Atrocity Propaganda and False Narratives by CP submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Third place *t* with 1 vote –PowerLine – Democrats Racebait Across The Southsubmitted by Rhymes with Right
• Third place *t* with 1 vote – Gatestone Institute – Who is the Real Chickenshit?submitted by VA Right!
• Third place *t* with 1 vote –John O’Sullivan/Wall Street Journal-No Offense: The New Threats to Free Speechsubmitted by Bookworm Room
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Texas Scribbler – Lurch and his magic hat submitted by Simply Jews
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Investigative Project On Terrorism – IPT Exclusive: Qatar’s Insidious Influence on the Brookings Institution submitted by The Right Planet
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Gavin McInnes/Taki’s Magazine –Canada On its Knees submitted by The Razor
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes – Elliot Abrams/Pressure Points – U.S. Policy, Viewed From the Middle East submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fifth place with 1/3 vote -Kevin D. Williamson/NRO -Pathetic Privilege submitted by Nice Deb

See you next week! Tune in Monday for our wild and cutting edge analysis of what the GOP is gon do with their new found majority - and power!!

Killing ObL

The cat who killed ObL is Former Navy SEAL Rob O'Neil

Decorated 52 times, leaving as senior chief petty officer. His decorations include two Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars with Valor, a Joint Service Commendation Medal with Valor, three Presidential Unit citations, and two Navy/Marine Corps Commendations with Valor. 
 

Silver Stars, the military's third highest honor, are awarded for extraordinary gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States. 
 

Bronze Stars with Valor are awarded for merit, signifying a heroic act and direct participation in combat operations. 
 

It is the fourth-highest combat award of the U.S. Armed Forces and the ninth highest military award overall. 
 

Joint Service Commendation Medals are given for senior service on a joint military staff and is the most senior of the commendation medals.

In total he was deployed on more than a dozen tours of duty in active combat, in four different warzones, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

In the course of those tours he undertook more than 400 separate combat missions. 

 

Pic - "Reckon Great Satan could do an ObL death raid redux on ISIS?"

Missile Truck

Scariest War Game Ever!!

RAND Corporation joined military leaders at Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii for a wargame entitled “Pacific Vision.” The exercise was meant to identify the capabilities U.S. Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) would need to prevail against potential threats in the Asia-Pacific region through 2016.

U.S.-China air war over Taiwan made the bold assumption that every air-to-air missile fired from a U.S. F-22 hit a Chinese fighter (100 percent kill rate) and that every Chinese missile missed the U.S. F-22s (0 percent kill rate). In their simulation, the United States still lost the fight. The F-22s ran out of missiles and the Chinese fighters were able to go after vulnerable tankers and command and control aircraft. A far more detailed simulation the following year showed the same results.

Even though U.S. F-22s were pegged with a 27-to-1 qualitative advantage over Chinese fighters, their diminished numbers and the fact that they had to fight from long range meant the Chinese had vastly superior numbers and won the fight.

Dong Feng!

CNAS gives up a solution to mitigate China’s numerical advantage – an unmanned “missile truck” fighter:

An uninhabited “missile truck” that brought additional air-to-air missiles to the fight to supplement human-inhabited F-22s could tip the scales back in the United States’ favor. Such an aircraft need not have the full performance characticeristics of a 5^th or 6^th generation fighter aircraft. It would only need to have sufficient stealth to get close enough to launch its missiles against Chinese fighters. If it then perished in the engagement, that would be acceptable provided it took a sufficient number of enemy fighters with it. It would still have accomplished the mission.

The uninhabited aircraft would not need advanced autonomy, merely enough to fly in a straight line under a human’s control and sufficiently robust communications links for the human-inhabited F-22s to pass targeting data. All targeting and firing decisions would be made by the F-22 pilots. If such an aircraft could be built at relatively low costs, this uninhabited “loyal wing-man” could be a tremendous force multiplier for U.S. human-inhabited fighters.

Pic - "The principal factor undermining regional stability is China’s more assertive behavior toward its neighbors, not the actions of the United States or her allies"

Alienating Allies

One of Great Satan's brainiac Fo Po cats unleashes a killer bit about Allies. Actually, about alienating Allies...

A recent Wall Street Journal story started this way:

The Obama administration and Iran, engaged in direct nuclear negotiations and facing a common threat from Islamic State militants, have moved into an effective state of détente over the past year, according to senior U.S. and Arab officials.
The shift could drastically alter the balance of power in the region, and risks alienating key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates who are central to the coalition fighting Islamic State.

See,

The story has one inaccuracy: it says this shift “risks” alienating key allies, when in fact it has
already done so, and done so badly. For Israelis facing the Iranian nuclear weapons program, the United States appears not only resigned but anxious to do a deal that allows Iran to enrich uranium and won’t require it to destroy one single centrifuge.

Whatever diplomats say about the package they assemble, everyone in the Middle East will see it as a huge Iranian victory that allows Iran to get even closer to the bomb. Washington is moving to containment while  administration officials tell themselves and all who will listen that they are not doing that.

For the Arabs, what the King of Jordan once called a “Shia crescent” is forming before their eyes: Iranian hegemony from Yemen through Iran to Iraq and Syria and Lebanon. And their former protector, the United States, seems happy with this development because it sees Iran as a potential partner. If a nuclear deal means that sanctions on Iran begin to crumble, Iran will have more resources with which to project force through war and subversion.

For our allies in the region, the sharp drop in oil prices means this is an excellent moment to step up the pressure on Iran, increasing sanctions until they agree to real compromises on their nuclear weapons program. Instead, the administration and not Iran seems desperate for a deal. In my conversations, I also heard the idea that once the President loses the Senate (if that does happen) he will be left only with foreign policy as a playing field. And he will want to do something fast after November 4th that asserts that he is a not a lame duck and is still in charge. What better than an Iran deal?

Our allies also wonder about our Iraq/Syria policy, for many reasons. For one thing, no one has explained to them how the policy can work, or why American officials think it is working: Jihadis continue to flow into the extremist groups; ISIS is not notably weaker; and above all the United States has no coherent Syria policy. There isn’t even much of a theory as to who, on the ground, will seriously fight ISIS, nor is there an explanation of how we will get rid of Assad. Or is he another potential partner, like Iran? More détente?

For another thing, from the Sunni Arab viewpoint American policy is suspiciously indifferent to Sunni deaths and soft on Shia killers. From their perspective, it’s noteworthy that the United States acted fast to save the Yazidis and is bombing more and more to save the Kurds in Kobane. That’s nice, one Arab diplomat said to me, but who in the United States had ever heard of the Yazidis a couple of weeks earlier? Meanwhile, he went on, you did nothing to save 200,000 Sunnis in Syria. You humored Maliki as he drove the Sunnis of Iraq into desperation. You have no policy on how to get rid of Assad, the butcher of Sunnis. That’s all another reason why, he said, there’s so much suspicion of U.S. policy, which seems to us pro-Shia.

So the view of U.S. policy has a double-barreled quality: they argue that we are weak, and that we seek deals with enemies rather than victory and security for allies and friends. Détente with Iran, not stopping Iran. Attacks on ISIS, but hands off Assad while he butchers more Sunnis. This is obviously not how people in the White House see the world and their own policies, but they have failed to persuade our allies in the region that they have a coherent, cogent policy. From Arabs and Israelis the refrain I heard over and over again was “how will we get through the next two years?”

A final note, this one entirely from me and not based on any conversations with people from the region. Against the background described above,The damage done by administration officials who savaged Prime Minister Netanyahu is deep, including among Arab leaders. Those remarks made a bad situation among our allies far worse. That’s not because they like Netanyahu, but because it suggests that administration officials are callow, undisciplined, and untrustworthy. After all, those remarks were made with the intention that they be published; they were not off the record.

The speakers (and there was more than one) obviously thought that in the 44th administration, trashing allied leaders in the press is fine and people above you will just chuckle; anyway, you are reflecting their views. Those remarks were not acts of rebellion nor leaks against administration policy.

The officials who made those remarks did serious damage to U.S. credibility, and not just in Israel. That no one was punished, that no one was fired, is a signal that the whole situation is not being taken seriously.

Which is one reason why, more and more, and very dangerously, American foreign policy is not being taken seriously.

Pic - "1/2 hearted"

The Coming Detente With Iran

“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” 44 said in his first inaugural address, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Cutting an ungood new clear deal with Iran's Preacher Command just for the sake of cutting a new clear deal?

Repudiated, isolated, ineffective, stymied, 44 cannot persuade the Iranians of the strength of the American position. So he will move as far as he can in the direction of the Iranian one.

Unable to make Iran pro-American, he will settle for making America pro-Iranian. It is part of his dismal, pathetic, ill-considered, shortsighted, and injurious “legacy.”

For six years the White House has been careful not to provide the Iranians with any reason to reject negotiations, to prevent his fantasy from becoming real. To the contrary: It has been solicitous of Iran and Syria, in a demonstration of its willingness to address their grievances.

That is why Democrats called Bashar al-Assad a reformer, why 44 remained silent during the 2009 protests over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rigged election, why the State Department doesn’t include human rights or ballistic missiles in the scope of its negotiations with Iran. It is why 44 has resisted overthrowing Assad even after he crossed the red line of chemical-weapons use, why he refers to the “Islamic republic of Iran,” bestowing legitimacy on the revolutionary regime, and why administration officials reject congressional proposals to reinstate sanctions should the negotiations with Iran fail.

These decisions are not made in light of the national-security interests of the United States. They are made to keep alive 44’s dream of peace with Iran. And the purpose of these decisions isn’t to mollify American politicians.

It’s to satisfy Iranian ones.

Pic - "By neglecting the even more deadly peril from an Iranian nuke and allowing Tehran to think they have nothing to lose by stiffing the West in the talks, 44 is endangering U.S. security and setting himself up for a legacy of foreign policy catastrophe."

Knife Fights

Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice is the new book by the cat who made COIN an international brand starting with How to Eat soup with a Knife

When John Nagl was an army tank commander in the first Gulf War of 1991, fresh out of West Point and Oxford, he could already see that America’s military superiority meant that the age of conventional combat was nearing an end. Nagl was an early convert to the view that America’s greatest future threats would come from asymmetric warfare—guerrillas, terrorists, and insurgents. But that made him an outsider within the army; and as if to double down on his dissidence, he scorned the conventional path to a general’s stars and got the military to send him back to Oxford to study the history of counterinsurgency in earnest, searching for guideposts for America. The result would become the bible of the counterinsurgency movement, a book called Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.

But it would take the events of 9/11 and the aftermath of the Iraq invasion to give counterinsurgency urgent contemporary relevance. John Nagl’s ideas finally met their war. But even as his book began ricocheting around the Pentagon, Nagl, now operations officer of a tank battalion of the 1st Infantry Division, deployed to a particularly unsettled quadrant of Iraq.

Here theory met practice, violently.

No one knew how messy even the most successful counterinsurgency campaign is better than Nagl, and his experience in Anbar Province cemented his view. After a year’s hard fighting, Nagl was sent to the Pentagon to work for Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, where he was tapped by General David Petraeus to coauthor the new army and marine counterinsurgency field manual, rewriting core army doctrine in the middle of two bloody land wars and helping the new ideas win acceptance in one of the planet’s most conservative bureaucracies. That doctrine changed the course of two wars and the thinking of an army.

Nagl is not blind to the costs or consequences of counterinsurgency, a policy he compared to “eating soup with a knife.” When it comes to war, there are only bad choices; the question is only which ones are better and which worse. Nagl’s memoir is a profound education in modern war—in theory, in practice, and in the often tortured relationship between the two.

It is essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of America’s soldiers and the purposes for which their lives are put at risk.

Pic - "9 Lessons..."

WoW!!

The Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.

Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers

Thus, sans further adieu (or a don't)

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 2/3 votes!?Joshuapundit-Chickensh*t
• Second place with 2 1/3 votes ?The Right Planet ? No Gaslighting for Ottawa
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes -Simply Jews ? Why we must talk to ISIS: please do tell...
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes -The Noisy Room ? The Ties That Bind Michael Bloomberg, Qatar and Radical Islam
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote ?Simply Jews ? Why we must talk to ISIS: please do tell...
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote ? Nice Deb ? Why Does CNN host Carol Costello Still Have A Job?
• Fifth place with 2/3 vote ? VA Right! - 2014 Senate Polls are All Skewed Up
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote ?Bookworm Room ? The American college application process reveals a bias against paid work
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote ? Rhymes With Right ? More Proof That Wendy Davis Has No Shame

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 2/3 votes! ? Sultan Knish ?The Left's Worst Crime in the Middle East submitted by The Noisy Room
• Second place *t* with 2 votes ? Rebelpundit -Chicago Activists Unchained, Destroy Black Leadership submitted by Nice Deb
• Second place *t* with 2 votes ? Seraphic Secret ? The Redefinition of Marriage is Not About Marriage submitted by The Watcher
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes -The Other McCain ? Never Forget Joe McCarthy Was Right submitted by The Right Planet
• Fourth place with 1 vote -The Contentious Centrist ? The strange case of Obama's problem with words submitted by Simply Jews
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -David Adesnik/Weekly Standard ? Rand Paul's Contradictory Foreign Policy submitted by GrEaT sAtAn?S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Clark Bianco/Popehat ? The Three Stages of Gamer Gate submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Andrew Michta/The American Interest ? Europe's Moment of Blinding Strategic Clarity submitted by The Razor
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Ian Tuttle/NRO ? South Texas Democrats Leave Wendy Davis Off Voter Guidesubmitted by Rhymes with Right
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Clarice Feldman/American Thinker-Serfin' USA submitted by Bookworm Room
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Victor Davis Hanson ? Crimes of Exactly What? submitted by Joshuapundit

See you next week!
Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watchers Forum. and every Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks' nominees for Weasel of the Week!


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