Under logistics, for long term extended seige I would recommend the work of David the Good, it's all free and has the best I've found instructions and concepts for maximum output plant and forget agriculture. His guide on tobacco growing is also an idea for possible revenue generation.
Oh hell, I forgot my favorite one kill or be killed by rex applegate, it's still the USMC's close combat manual and it's excellent all the same knife fighting theory as put em down and close combat shooting with rifle and pistol along with the best diagram of how to kill a Japanese with a chair ever produced.
I'm always nervous about combatives and stuff from the Applegate era, because so much of it you'll have a mixed martial artist come along and explain in detail why it doesn't work with force on force demonstrations... part of why I like "Put Em down take em out" is because it's simple and provably defeats even expert mix martial artists.
I'm running an apprenticeship + vendor development program for veterans. The program teaches them how to manage farms and feedlots, and at the end of it, they'll be our contract farmers. When the time comes, the daily operations will be handled by the company when they're reassigned to take care of "security matters"
Damn you. Damn you! I'm 3 years into a 10 volume novel on a modern warlord and you're breaking my back. Now I've got to read at least half your list and incorporate it into 500+ pages of almost finished drafts. JH Christ! But kudos for this brilliant stack. I'm gobsmacked. And will soon become a paid subscriber in gratitude and awe..
Many thanks for posting this. I'm sharing this reading list with my "lieutenants" (or at least a few of them who understands English). Looks like the entirety of next year will be spent on translating these books to my native tongue 😅
P/s: If you're a civilian business owner, employ the jobless (and homeless) veterans. They'll be very grateful to be your mentor for this kind of shit. Heck! If you're lucky, you can form your own private "company"!
A lot of the notes alone are fascinating, I can't wait to start on some of the actual books. Especially in the Morale and Personnel Management section along with the Micro and Macro-Diplomacy section. Lots of value in general, those just happened to particularly catch my eye.
35 out of 40 of the men who landed on D-Day as part of an infantry platoon didn't make it a month and a half, killed, wounded, and desertion is THAT high if you employ the old high intensity ww2 tactics against a peer level foe.
I’m not even sure they teach things like map reading anymore. Isn’t it ironic that taking away technology at this point would set us back further than before we had the technology? If you can follow that thought. Not sure I articulated that well.
Map reading is done... but my impression is its gotten way worse, like a good military should just fail and kick out people on the basis of their ability to read a map (spatial intelligence is life or death, and it quickly becomes the lives of others)...
But that is heavily G loaded and to do that would be discriminatory... And so you get militaries in the west that are increasingly entirely GPS dependent.
I could tell you some recent stories. Not 6 years ago I asked a new Lieutenant to turn off the GPS in a Blackhawk at night and find the airport from Macdill AFB to Brooksville. Which a private pilot could do in a Cessna without a map. Couldn’t do it.
I did spend time in the 80s and early 90s as an infantryman though. So at least I had some map reading skills and training. New guys have none. Seriously excellent research in that article. Sent it to a few SF buddies who already commented positively.
Another irony for technology. Poor people in third world countries will probably have an exponentially higher survival rate in any prolonged crisis.
While my attention span is too short to read this entire article, I found something so good near the begnning: "Many times it is much better to act early when you don’t quite know what you’re doing than wait til you’re sure and have already lost.
"Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the just barely good enough. "
I did read the section on Hawala and don't grasp it entirely, but did find the second part of it understandable.
Hawala is a network of money changers (based on mutual trust) that functions like a bank capable of cross-border remittances without going through the cumbersome BIS channel, faster than the SWIFT system and, most importantly, away from the prying eyes of the US Federal Reserve, albeit at a significantly higher fee. Almost all countries have banned the practice of hawala which carries the penalties ranging from revoking the money changer's license (for illegal deposit taking) to decades of imprisonment and assets confiscation (for money laundering). What's worse though is that all assets (besides cash on person) are frozen from mere suspicion alone! Central banks don't give a fuck about "innocent until proven guilty" principle. When it comes to money (currency, for those of you who loves to split hairs on technicality), their words are the law which all governments are obliged to enforce lest the latter can kiss goodbye to their deficit spendings and welcome the eventual economic ruination!
Kulak, have you checked out "The Invisible Hook"? If you liked "The Social Order of the Underworld" it may be interesting to you. The name is a worplay between Adam Smith's invisible hand and the fact that the book deals with the social organization of pirates.
Great list. May I say #72 could be used in business and for counter covert stuff along with morale. It's piqued my interest.
"Mathers spent close to 20 years in Royal Canadian Mounted Police undercover (Canadian equivalent of FBI) running high level money laundering operations as an intelligence front to nab senior international traffickers and large organized crime rings… Which is a vastly more complex and sophisticated police sting than I’ve really heard of elsewhere."- next level Marty Byrd stuff. There's always a trail though. Look into local politicians or charities.
One in St. Pete FL is now caught but what the guy did was unreal. 100 million gone from vax injured and special needs cases to various businesses which naturally filed bankruptcy. A mess and huge laundering operation. You're right these guys do not get investigated like they should be if your government didn't want you dead especially when so much of their money is laundered through it really puts it in perspective as to how much of a money laundering opp DC is. It's a house of cards if people were to actually look. Charaties are pretty much laundering orgs after they get so big and are a huge tool with social engineering, at least this is what I have observed in my work and life and various reading through the years.
"These are his counter-moves, all part of a cold economic game of constantly asking everyone in the society: “Which government do you feel you can disobey? The secret police or the terrorist assassins?”"- we're here.
… how the heck am I going to fit all this in my bookshelves!!
As far as further reading goes, I recommend Tom Kratman. Retired US Army Colonel, author of several fiction series AND a series of essays called Training for War… as well as “The Care and Feeding of YOUR Right Wing Death Squad”, here on Substack.
Back in the '70s the CIA noticed that people analyzed intel with their biases more than their brain, so they hired a Big Brain of cognitive psychology to teach their analysts tricks to overcome their biases. It includes a lot of research and studies in the relevant fields of academia. This work has been very helpful for me in understanding things, especially once I realized that the CIA most likely reverse-engineered it to do the things that tend to trigger peoples' biases.
For example, there is a part where research shows that people's brains hamster-wheel to try to form patterns even when there aren't any. So it is important to blank your mind while still gathering data in order to not predispose towards the wrong answer (research showing this included.) Which would suggest that revealing the wrong or partially wrong answer [limited hangout] ahead of time that would suggest a certain story which would tend to fix that story in peoples' minds, even if later data contradicted it. Which explains why so many early accounts of Happenings are completely wrong, debunked by later data that no one disputes... yet years later most people still believe the initial false story.
Another book I remembered, but which somehow got erased from my computer so I had to resort to using AI to find it on the internet:
"Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change" by Andrew Korybko
from the intro-
"Direct warfare in the past may have been marked by bombers and tanks, but if
the pattern that the US has presently applied in Syria and Ukraine is any
indication, then indirect warfare in the future will be marked by “protesters” and
insurgents. Fifth columns will be formed less by secret agents and covert
saboteurs and more by non-state actors that publicly behave as civilians. Social
media and similar technologies will come to replace precision-guided munitions
as the “surgical strike” capability of the aggressive party, and chat rooms and
Facebook pages will become the new “militants’ den”. "
This book analyzes how the US wages war in the modern era, noting that the type of warfare used often depends on the conflicts position on the core/ periphery of both the US and the real enemy. The closer to a nations' core, the more likely that nation would be to use direct violence and the farther into the periphery the less likely a nation would be to use violence.
For example, when color revolutions failed in Libya we went kinetic because it was far away from Russia's core, meaning it was less valuable to them as well as being harder to project power. An example from after the book was published was the Kazahkstan color revolution. It was closer to Russia's core and more into the US' periphery, so Russia sent in troops while we didn't.
The relevance of this to a North American Warlord is that this same analysis will likely be used by the regime. Sportiness 10 miles from DC will receive a far different response than sportiness in Nebraska, for example. Perhaps NE will cause the regime to use drones to spray defoliants on crops, or online activists to rile up the local injun tribes. A warlord in Baltimore would likely get SF sent in to kill, and if that didn't work an armored division to go door to door. The last might sound implausible, but remember they did exactly that for the Boston Bomber.
Many people in Our Thing will pound their chest and confidently state that the military would never fire on innocent citizens. Forgetting the Bonus Army incident, they believe that the military would never follow orders to fire on innocent citizens. Which is actually true; they'd be ordered to fire on evil nazi White Supremacist communist oligarch-supporters who hate democracy and a rising GDP. Even the Bonus Army was accused of being communists ahead of time, in order to excuse the later police and military violence.
===
I'm agnostic, but I think the Old Testament is a great resource for IRL fed-posters. In many ways, it is a battle manual for small tribes going up against other small tribes and sometimes large nations. I remember a guy talking about how the tale of Moses made no sense to him, until after he'd served as an infantry captain in Vietnam and got a PhD in history. Suddenly all the weird stuff made perfect sense.
Three cheers for Kulak! What a gift to our guys!
Under logistics, for long term extended seige I would recommend the work of David the Good, it's all free and has the best I've found instructions and concepts for maximum output plant and forget agriculture. His guide on tobacco growing is also an idea for possible revenue generation.
Oh hell, I forgot my favorite one kill or be killed by rex applegate, it's still the USMC's close combat manual and it's excellent all the same knife fighting theory as put em down and close combat shooting with rifle and pistol along with the best diagram of how to kill a Japanese with a chair ever produced.
I'm always nervous about combatives and stuff from the Applegate era, because so much of it you'll have a mixed martial artist come along and explain in detail why it doesn't work with force on force demonstrations... part of why I like "Put Em down take em out" is because it's simple and provably defeats even expert mix martial artists.
5 essentials to survive under siege:
Process your own water
Grow your own food
Generate your own energy
Synthesize your own meds
Arm yourselves to defend all of the above
Any surplus from 2 & 3 can generate revenue
Yep hence the gardening stuff if you have a remotely successful militia you will certainly have someone you can force to grow you crops,
I'm running an apprenticeship + vendor development program for veterans. The program teaches them how to manage farms and feedlots, and at the end of it, they'll be our contract farmers. When the time comes, the daily operations will be handled by the company when they're reassigned to take care of "security matters"
Damn you. Damn you! I'm 3 years into a 10 volume novel on a modern warlord and you're breaking my back. Now I've got to read at least half your list and incorporate it into 500+ pages of almost finished drafts. JH Christ! But kudos for this brilliant stack. I'm gobsmacked. And will soon become a paid subscriber in gratitude and awe..
Many thanks for posting this. I'm sharing this reading list with my "lieutenants" (or at least a few of them who understands English). Looks like the entirety of next year will be spent on translating these books to my native tongue 😅
P/s: If you're a civilian business owner, employ the jobless (and homeless) veterans. They'll be very grateful to be your mentor for this kind of shit. Heck! If you're lucky, you can form your own private "company"!
A lot of the notes alone are fascinating, I can't wait to start on some of the actual books. Especially in the Morale and Personnel Management section along with the Micro and Macro-Diplomacy section. Lots of value in general, those just happened to particularly catch my eye.
Wow man. That was comprehensive! Love the Bangalore torpedo comment. I’m old enough to have trained in that!
Damn!
Ya read entry 109. "If you Survive".
35 out of 40 of the men who landed on D-Day as part of an infantry platoon didn't make it a month and a half, killed, wounded, and desertion is THAT high if you employ the old high intensity ww2 tactics against a peer level foe.
I’m not even sure they teach things like map reading anymore. Isn’t it ironic that taking away technology at this point would set us back further than before we had the technology? If you can follow that thought. Not sure I articulated that well.
Map reading is done... but my impression is its gotten way worse, like a good military should just fail and kick out people on the basis of their ability to read a map (spatial intelligence is life or death, and it quickly becomes the lives of others)...
But that is heavily G loaded and to do that would be discriminatory... And so you get militaries in the west that are increasingly entirely GPS dependent.
I could tell you some recent stories. Not 6 years ago I asked a new Lieutenant to turn off the GPS in a Blackhawk at night and find the airport from Macdill AFB to Brooksville. Which a private pilot could do in a Cessna without a map. Couldn’t do it.
I did spend time in the 80s and early 90s as an infantryman though. So at least I had some map reading skills and training. New guys have none. Seriously excellent research in that article. Sent it to a few SF buddies who already commented positively.
Another irony for technology. Poor people in third world countries will probably have an exponentially higher survival rate in any prolonged crisis.
THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS!
While my attention span is too short to read this entire article, I found something so good near the begnning: "Many times it is much better to act early when you don’t quite know what you’re doing than wait til you’re sure and have already lost.
"Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the just barely good enough. "
I did read the section on Hawala and don't grasp it entirely, but did find the second part of it understandable.
Hawala is a network of money changers (based on mutual trust) that functions like a bank capable of cross-border remittances without going through the cumbersome BIS channel, faster than the SWIFT system and, most importantly, away from the prying eyes of the US Federal Reserve, albeit at a significantly higher fee. Almost all countries have banned the practice of hawala which carries the penalties ranging from revoking the money changer's license (for illegal deposit taking) to decades of imprisonment and assets confiscation (for money laundering). What's worse though is that all assets (besides cash on person) are frozen from mere suspicion alone! Central banks don't give a fuck about "innocent until proven guilty" principle. When it comes to money (currency, for those of you who loves to split hairs on technicality), their words are the law which all governments are obliged to enforce lest the latter can kiss goodbye to their deficit spendings and welcome the eventual economic ruination!
> The 1757 Articles of War [~3 Pages]
> Declaration of Independence [1776, 3 pages]
> IRA: Green Book [19 Pages]
Im shocked the foundational documents are so short, sure ill skim read these things in a few hours
Maybe people should make 10 page summaries of some of the more verbose books here
edit:
> Another important thing volunteers must realise and understand is the danger in drinking
alcohol and the very real danger of over-drinking -ira
*gasp* but I thought the irish were known for only one thing
Kulak, have you checked out "The Invisible Hook"? If you liked "The Social Order of the Underworld" it may be interesting to you. The name is a worplay between Adam Smith's invisible hand and the fact that the book deals with the social organization of pirates.
Great list. May I say #72 could be used in business and for counter covert stuff along with morale. It's piqued my interest.
"Mathers spent close to 20 years in Royal Canadian Mounted Police undercover (Canadian equivalent of FBI) running high level money laundering operations as an intelligence front to nab senior international traffickers and large organized crime rings… Which is a vastly more complex and sophisticated police sting than I’ve really heard of elsewhere."- next level Marty Byrd stuff. There's always a trail though. Look into local politicians or charities.
One in St. Pete FL is now caught but what the guy did was unreal. 100 million gone from vax injured and special needs cases to various businesses which naturally filed bankruptcy. A mess and huge laundering operation. You're right these guys do not get investigated like they should be if your government didn't want you dead especially when so much of their money is laundered through it really puts it in perspective as to how much of a money laundering opp DC is. It's a house of cards if people were to actually look. Charaties are pretty much laundering orgs after they get so big and are a huge tool with social engineering, at least this is what I have observed in my work and life and various reading through the years.
"These are his counter-moves, all part of a cold economic game of constantly asking everyone in the society: “Which government do you feel you can disobey? The secret police or the terrorist assassins?”"- we're here.
Awesome stuff! I need to order my Top 10 and jump in!
Power Play 1978 with an awesome cast based on Luttwak book is terrific.
https://youtu.be/tQM8FY53pKw?si=KhwQjqy9gxBao9RG
The two newest Antal books are on Audible and "7 Seconds To Die" is free to new and existing users FYI.
… how the heck am I going to fit all this in my bookshelves!!
As far as further reading goes, I recommend Tom Kratman. Retired US Army Colonel, author of several fiction series AND a series of essays called Training for War… as well as “The Care and Feeding of YOUR Right Wing Death Squad”, here on Substack.
https://open.substack.com/pub/yourrightwingdeathsquad/p/introduction-the-care-and-feeding?r=1azse9&utm_medium=ios
Wundabar! Great article. Lots and lots of very good reads suggested here.
I have a million books I'd like to suggest, but I'll just leave it to this. Click the link, scroll to the bottom, have fun!
https://open.substack.com/pub/libertyuncensored/p/law-in-the-united-states-of-america-c23?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=25izle
Bookmarked. Brilliant stuff.
One area that seems to be lacking is intel analysis. I recommend this-
https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Intelligence-Analysis-Richards-Heuer/dp/B0016OST3O
There is a pdf available for free off the CIA website, but some might balk at clicking on it...
The author:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0032P1Y7I/about
Short synopsis:
Back in the '70s the CIA noticed that people analyzed intel with their biases more than their brain, so they hired a Big Brain of cognitive psychology to teach their analysts tricks to overcome their biases. It includes a lot of research and studies in the relevant fields of academia. This work has been very helpful for me in understanding things, especially once I realized that the CIA most likely reverse-engineered it to do the things that tend to trigger peoples' biases.
For example, there is a part where research shows that people's brains hamster-wheel to try to form patterns even when there aren't any. So it is important to blank your mind while still gathering data in order to not predispose towards the wrong answer (research showing this included.) Which would suggest that revealing the wrong or partially wrong answer [limited hangout] ahead of time that would suggest a certain story which would tend to fix that story in peoples' minds, even if later data contradicted it. Which explains why so many early accounts of Happenings are completely wrong, debunked by later data that no one disputes... yet years later most people still believe the initial false story.
addendum:
Another book I remembered, but which somehow got erased from my computer so I had to resort to using AI to find it on the internet:
"Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change" by Andrew Korybko
from the intro-
"Direct warfare in the past may have been marked by bombers and tanks, but if
the pattern that the US has presently applied in Syria and Ukraine is any
indication, then indirect warfare in the future will be marked by “protesters” and
insurgents. Fifth columns will be formed less by secret agents and covert
saboteurs and more by non-state actors that publicly behave as civilians. Social
media and similar technologies will come to replace precision-guided munitions
as the “surgical strike” capability of the aggressive party, and chat rooms and
Facebook pages will become the new “militants’ den”. "
This book analyzes how the US wages war in the modern era, noting that the type of warfare used often depends on the conflicts position on the core/ periphery of both the US and the real enemy. The closer to a nations' core, the more likely that nation would be to use direct violence and the farther into the periphery the less likely a nation would be to use violence.
For example, when color revolutions failed in Libya we went kinetic because it was far away from Russia's core, meaning it was less valuable to them as well as being harder to project power. An example from after the book was published was the Kazahkstan color revolution. It was closer to Russia's core and more into the US' periphery, so Russia sent in troops while we didn't.
The relevance of this to a North American Warlord is that this same analysis will likely be used by the regime. Sportiness 10 miles from DC will receive a far different response than sportiness in Nebraska, for example. Perhaps NE will cause the regime to use drones to spray defoliants on crops, or online activists to rile up the local injun tribes. A warlord in Baltimore would likely get SF sent in to kill, and if that didn't work an armored division to go door to door. The last might sound implausible, but remember they did exactly that for the Boston Bomber.
https://www.ibtimes.com/watertown-photos-inside-boston-bombing-suspect-manhunt-zone-1205519
Many people in Our Thing will pound their chest and confidently state that the military would never fire on innocent citizens. Forgetting the Bonus Army incident, they believe that the military would never follow orders to fire on innocent citizens. Which is actually true; they'd be ordered to fire on evil nazi White Supremacist communist oligarch-supporters who hate democracy and a rising GDP. Even the Bonus Army was accused of being communists ahead of time, in order to excuse the later police and military violence.
===
I'm agnostic, but I think the Old Testament is a great resource for IRL fed-posters. In many ways, it is a battle manual for small tribes going up against other small tribes and sometimes large nations. I remember a guy talking about how the tale of Moses made no sense to him, until after he'd served as an infantry captain in Vietnam and got a PhD in history. Suddenly all the weird stuff made perfect sense.
https://archive.org/details/SSWerwolfWinkeFuerJagdeinheitenCombatInstructionManual
This should be added just for the cover alone