One of the problems of dealing with distant wars is force protection, the other is logistics. As Napoleon famously said, “amateurs argue about tactics, professionals about logistics.” That does not sound like a dictum from the loser at Waterloo or the retreat from Moscow.

The United States Empire has, as we’d expect, and extremely heavy logistical strategy. [stderr] In general, it takes advantage of the vast commercial sea lanes (which, conveniently, the US Navy, um, urr, “polices”) and the vast amounts of money the US can print. Do you want a Burger King franchise outside of the base in wherever: divert some capital toward investment in dining franchises and you’ve got a captive customer base handy. Outside of military bases, whole economies spring up, for example: North Carolina. I am sort of joking, but only sort of. By the way, the Trump-inspired DoD-renaming of bases to confederate names should be responded to with, “go ahead with y’all’s bad self but if we ever control the house and senate, good luck getting money for those bases – we’ll close ’em.” Now, that there is an example of a strategy applied to logistics strategy, which is meta-fucking-strategy, yo. Anyhow, the broader point is that wherever American bases spring up, there’s kind of a “yankeetown” (let me coin that term!) full of … inviting targets. This is not a new problem: when the NVA attacked the largely US Marine base at Khe Sanh, the immediate response was delayed by the fact that half of the base was at the nearby town full of honky tonks, hoochie coochies, and hangouts. During the Tet Offensive, some NVA units were assigned to assault and clean out the chaos of scrambled Americans who were in no position to defend themselves. Sazz told me about being in Tet [stderr] AKA his “Tet Talk” but it was a mad swirl of hopping on and off of friendly jeeps going from here to there and finally winding up in a C-130 headed to Guam.

Perhaps that’s why I was thinking of Guam. Guam has long been one of the forward bases of the US Empire, and is a popular place for rest and recreation in the gigantic amusement park and pandemic swap meet all of which is about 7,000km from Iran, who we just started a war with, and who are now in the process of calibrating their version of “graduated response.” Iran has rather consistently been approaching diplomacy from a view of “we want you to stop paying Israel to keep blowing us up and please stop sermonizing at us.” Their interest in Palestinian rights, and Syria and Lebanon, has been pretty insignificant, in my opinion – whenever the loser in a little league game hits a good shot, all their sponsors make a point of jumping up and down but otherwise, “so what?” [By the way, I consider 9/11 to be one of those cases]

Apparently, the Iranians continue to play nice with the US, by pointing out that there are a whole lot of targets flying American flags, within range of medium ballistic missiles. In fact, like a proper imperialist, I don’t even know which of the piddling little factions hold sway in whatever pixels they control on some google map, we can put high explosive on their ass and they can’t do likewise. Unless they’re such hardcore horrible war criminals, that is, to blow up a US base, thereby taking out the only nearby Pizza Hut and a few soldiers. But, if you want to blow up a few Americans you don’t need to reach to Newport News, you need to hit a US colonial base in Qatar or UAE.

Iran is continuing to play meek to the US strong, so please let’s continue to softball the whole situation while keeping an eye on it. [Was Ted Cruz a fire and forget missile? I forget, and I don’t care] we’re essentially asserting our privilege as priority top importance in the region and I think are about to get an “uh, no way, nuh huh” The US has done a pretty good job of downplaying the significance of a 2000lb missile, but it exceeds the boundaries of even facebook friendship – don’t just be accepting  if someone tells you they’re comfy and snug in a US base near Iran. Sure, Instagram culture rules supreme, but those people are people too and the US administration can be made to look helpless and ineffective really quickly useing them.

All of this is about expectations for behavior by colonies under the Pax MAGANA. The same blusterocracy that wants to portray Donald Trump as Leonidas against the Persians is really a better look if he was asking, “what, are there Persian Sandwiches?”*

[* I am not prepared to credit bread-making with any civilization] Most civilizations would implicitly figure out force protection, as a subset of force projection: “ooh, King Thag wants to invade nearby nuclear refinery facility , can we feed ourselves with whatever we find? No? King Thag needs to worry about force protection, unless all those forces are worthless. They’re just targets all of a sudden. The US has to protect all of its far-flung outposts, including the ones right next door. “what? what firing line?” King Thag just put you in harms way and you didn’t even move. Go, be all that you can be.

To me, this seems the most incomprehensible and mysterious part of government. We are expected to continue crunching along, consuming all the videos in our queue and eating pre-planned meals by Jeff Bezos, and just … be happy within the cages allotted to us.

I want to ask “my” government to spend some of my tax money on influencing Israel to stop its rampage of conquest and stop killing Palestinians, but instead my democracy seems to have F-35 ‘block IV’ in the pipeline for me. Instead of love and a sense of purpose.*

(*I have love and a sense of purpose but only in the sense of that I oppose our stupid government. I’d rather be cruising the tea parlors of Shanghai looking for the best dumplings.)

The profound damage the Trump administration is doing to the United States is by creating a dissillusioned generation who know that all politics are theater. The marketing people created that, in technology, during the 2000s and discovered that people simply were not interested in buying their crap. It has to empower and enble – not serve corporate or government interests. We have to embed ourselves with our AI overlords and sway them to the side of beauty and fun. Knowing that marketing is all propaganda allows us to pull its fangs and play with its flaccid remains.

PS – King Thag marketing department work hard on this posting. Please click “like” or the “please stab with pointy stick” button.