Yes. Individual IQ Matters in War. It is Maybe the Single Most Important Factor.

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I talk about the prospect of civil war and many immediately say "Well they're bringing infinite migrants, they have their army to conquer us. It's more over than it's ever been"

So i point out that the marginal non-western migrant has a an IQ hovering between 60 and 80, and that the average western white male is almost 2 standard deviations above them...

To which I receive the response "Ya but that doesn't matter in war! Don't you see brute force makes us equal to them."

What are you talking about!? Do you know anything about war?

War is the one field where individual intelligence DOES matter and DOES override mere bureaucratic unreality or whatever can move the most braindead voting demographic.

War is the ONE AND ONLY field where you CAN'T paper over differences in intelligence with lies and tax dollars.

This is part of what makes war so beautiful and terrible. "Sublime" in the Aristotelian sense of the word.

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The minimum to induct a soldier in the US... in any position (cook, logistical labour, etc.) is 83. Below that even the least intensive, lowest stress, bare unskilled labour task is beyond the capability of said person and they become an absolute liability. 10% of the all-races US population is under this (average IQ 98), and about 40% of the African American population (average IQ 85).

The Minimum IQ to induct a soldier into the Infantry however is MUCH higher. at 98.

50% of the American population is considered incapable of serving a frontline dismounted combat role, on the basis of intelligence alone (forget physical capability)

Haiti, to talk about the recent influx, has an average IQ of 67. this means only about 16% of haitians (about 1 standard deviation) could be inducted to do the lowest simplest task in the US military like manual labour loading and unloading crates, and Haitians 2 standard deviations above the Haitian average, 2% of all Haitians, would still not all have the intelligence to be inducted as infantry soldiers.

To which I've received the reply:

"Ya but that's the US military just maintaining high standards. You don't actually need to be smart to fight as a grunt in a war. You just give the idiots guns and put them in a trench! Their officers make all the decisions, grunts don't need to understand what's happening."

Ok first of all, When have you ever seen US soldiers in a trench in the past 100 years?

For various factors related to geography, geopolitics, Russian internal politics, and the local balance of Air-power to Air-defense to artillery, we've seen trench warfare reemerge in the Russo-Ukraine war... But you notice you haven't seen trenches on any other battlefields in the past 80-100 years? Did you see Trenches in Iraq? Afghanistan? Do you see them in Gaza? How about the Cartel Wars? Do you see them there?

You can read my piece on Ukraine’s Uniqueness if you’d like to know more:

Short Take: There Might Never be Another War like Ukraine

It takes VERY specific conditions (maybe 1-2% of all wars at this point) to produce a war as seemingly "simple" as trench warfare, and Trench wars aren't simple.

Modern weaponry is almost universally "beyond visual range". cruise missiles can strike hundreds of miles, artillery dozens of miles, Vehicle mounted guns, grenade launchers, and missile systems regularly reach 3000-5000 meters (2-3 miles), and man portable machine guns, precision rifles, missiles and mortar systems can often reach 1 mile or more.

And this is before we get into spotter, dropper, and suicide drones.

The lowest level standard issue rifles with optics, your ar-15 derived rifle, can reach 500-800 meters (half a mile) in skilled hands or with follow on shots at the squad level from several sets of unskilled hands.

The most basic weapon on the modern battlefield stretches to a range where the unmagnified vision of someone with middling eyesight often struggles to even pick out an individual person given ANY concealment or visual difficulty, let alone the concealment and cover offered by terrain, buildings, foliage, etc.

This is how most people die on the modern battlefield. They are identified at extreme distance without being aware they've been identified, and then are killed with either extreme precision or extreme volumes of fire without ever knowing how they were spotted, or often even where the fire is coming from.

Indeed this is often the case even if they manage to find cover because often they are then STUCK in that cover unable to escape, still with no idea how they were spotted, often never figuring out where the fire is coming from... Often just waiting for the volume of indirect fire to finally kill them or some advancing unit (or dropper drone) to finally finish them off by shooting them in the back even as they cling to the ground and beg for their mother.

This can take tens of minutes from total defeat to actually being killed. Tens of minutes of just weeping and panicking and clinging to the ground knowing they're already dead. And the fatal decision that doomed the soldier to this fate often occurrs a half an hour to DAYS before they are caught out and killed without a clue as to how it happened.

There is nothing easier or lower risk on the modern battlefield than killing someone who has no idea what they're doing.

The way you survive on the modern battlefield is to expend massive amounts of thought. And yes that thought is happening even at the level of the individual private. Those videos you see of engagements in Ukraine, where some lone soldier or team of 4 is picked off... maybe miles away from their units by drones, artillery, or enemy fire, are often happening miles from their officers on scouting, message delivery, observation, garrisoning or other missions that involve low level teams being the only friendly units screening or managing what might be a few square miles of territory and having to stay aware of THE ENTIRE THREAT ENVIRONMENT from possible enemy air assets to drones to artillery to ground forces.

This takes significant processing power.

If you cannot read a map, create a low res mental replica of the map, then process and add information to that physical and mental map, creating contingency plans, observing oddities and changes in the environment, exploiting enemy information leak, and managing your own information leak....

Then you are very likely to die.

Corporals and Privates are regularly employed in very small teams where their individual choices and awareness or lack of awareness can be instantly fatal to them and their comrades. For scouting, observation, message delivery, screening, and a dozen other types of missions, they are often doing this MILES from their officers or other friendly units.

And if you cannot trust them to do this competently because of raw lack of intelligence, then the effectiveness of modern militaries quickly collapses back to the kind of performance you get out of Arab or third world armies for which it is a reoccurring piece of received wisdom that a US Sergeant is the Equivalent of an Arab Lieutenant-Colonel in terms of discretion and independence of action.

And the US military has often been criticized that it UNDER-emphasizes the lowest level of decision making and that several historical militaries (notably the British expeditionary force, Imperial German Army, and Wehrmacht) often placed even MORE emphasis on individual initiative.

Beyond this modern weapon systems are complex, often delicate, technological wonders that require precise calibration, maintenance, and tactically clever implementation. Your ability to zero a simple rifle, maintain that zero, and employ mental and emotional discipline when shooting (all discipline is an intelligence test, it's the ability of your conscious mind to override and talk itself out of poor bodily, mental or emotional responses)... your ability to do that under fire, determines whether your effective range at the moment of crisis is 500 meters or less than 50 feet.

Unaimed shots are inaccurate across a room, and will not hit at even 50 meters. A friend of mine shared as story of basic training from his country that among the first thing they did with new recruits on the range was give them a full 30 round mag and let them go off full-auto from the hip. None of them could hit a target at 30 meters.

When you see soldiers panicking or blind firing, or doing all kinds of strange things you see in videos of African civil wars, know that there is exactly Zero chance of them hitting anything but friendlies.

Indeed in every instance where we can observe intelligent western trained forces going up against 3rd or 4th world fighters it is a bloodbath. The Battle of Mogadishu, the "Blackhawk Down" incident, has a casualty ratio of 10 to 1... IN FAVOUR of the US rangers who'd screwed and wound up pinned down with wounded in an effective ambush outnumbered 10 if not 20 to 1.

Now you might say: "Ah but they had airsupport and the technological wonders of the US military, not an apples to oranges comparison"

Well the Rhodesian light infantry, under sanctions, barely supplied, and possibly poorer in terms of funding than their communist African rivals, to the point they were forced to employ barely functioning pre-ww2 logistical planes for their parachute operations without any air to air or air to ground assets... they achieved casualty ratios of 25 to 1 and never lost an engagement.

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But you may think. Surely this is an artifact of leadership, and organizational support. Surely if you plugged low intelligence troops into a hyper functional military like the US army where an entire intelligence apparatus, series of command HQs, radio coordination, and institutional knowledge is there to direct the low IQ soldiers around and pull their triggers... Then surely you could fight a war with the low intelligence dregs of migrants or America!?

This was tried.

In the 1960s at the height of Blank-slatist IQ denialism and high modernist egalitarian government conceits "Project 100,000" was put forward by defense secretary Robert McNamara. To avoid drafting the college bound kids of the US upper and middle classes to Vietnam, this project sought to draft 100,000 American boys who would have otherwise been excluded from the draft for reasons of mental deficiency. Things did not go well.

All sane concern was cast aside with protestations that mere additional training and wonderous advances in classroom education (videos, they were talking about videos) would allow these mentally deficient teenagers and young 20 somethings... often suffering from mental retardation, down syndrome, and other extreme mental impairment… to go to Vietnam.

"McNamara's Morons" produced stories that would be of an almost Looney Tunes slapstick quality, if they were not so horrifying tragic, and they quickly became hated and dangerous hazards on the battlefield. Some more earnest and humble ones were able to be shunted away and protected by superiors, but others, through a combination of major behavioral problems, their own inability to survive on the battlefield, and inability to integrate with their other soldiers met horrifying ends.

Countless ones got themselves killed or maimed by booby traps other hazards they couldn't perceive or understand, others self harmed with their own weapons, and yet others became extreme hazards to their comrades. One story recounted a recruit who found it hilarious to pull the pins of grenades and toss them at random people or animals... other recruits developed major behavioral problems and resentments (often at real or perceived mistreatment) and in fits of rage killed or injured their comrades or commanders, and yet others were perceived as such liabilities that their platoon mates killed them.

Not only were they NOT effective or even marginal soldiers, but they were such liabilities their comrades were willing to betray them and risk murder charges to avoid dealing with them.

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These are heartbreaking tales, and one of the examples of the cruelest things ever done in the pursuit of disingenuous claims of "equality".

And I cannot emphasize enough: The marginal illegal Migrant being brought into the West now has a LOWER average IQ than the boys drafted into Project 100,000.

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All of modern warfare, from the American revolution to today is a long story of increasing emphasis on individual initiative, motivation, and intelligence.

American Militias and Napoleonic citizen-soldiers were able to defeat vastly better disciplined and trained convict soldiers of old-school European powers because they could be trusted with higher effort and higher discretion deployments (specifically Napoleon won his first campaign in Italy because he could make his soldiers march at night instead of fearing they'd desert without a cavalry guard), and every development in warfare since has unlocked and emphasized vastly more of the intelligence, initiative, will and morale of the lowest level soldier.

"the moral is to the physical as three is to one."
-Napoleon Bonaparte

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If you start compromising, if you start conscripting or employing increasingly low intelligence and low morale troops... well there isn't a bottom in modern warfare to how badly bad troops can perform.

Ending a life on the modern battlefield involves dialing in coordinates or pulling the trigger on a long range precision rifle. Both are incredibly low effort and low risk if done from a dominant position.

There is no upwards limit on how many times a smart competent aware fighter can find and kill dumb incompetent unaware fighters. The best snipers, air aces, tank aces, and platoon commanders in history have hundreds of confirmed kills. Indeed there have been many cases in history where the limiting factor on a force racking up kills has not been anything the enemy has done but the physical limits of the human body and the logistics necessary to maintain the tempo of operations. Running low on sleep and ammo.

At many points individual platoons have wiped out entire companies. And with each new technology or factor unveiled on the modern battlespace the MORE important individual though and calculation becomes.

For this reason I'm vastly more worried about the moral decay of the west, the death of the fighting spirit, than the specific number of migrants being imported.

I have no doubt in my mind that Intelligent young western men able to visualize a space and keep track of the hazards of various weapons systems and information leak... Young men who at the moment would probably identify as Gamers... I have no doubt that they could very easily win that war. their innate moral and intellectual character lends itself to the modern battlefield.

And I have no doubt that the invading army of third world refuse, even with state backing, would not be almost immediately routed in such a conflict...

But I seriously doubt that, like Siegfried, their traitorous religious leaders, political figures, families, and countryfolk wouldn't stab them in the back if they tried.

"He who saves his country violates no law."
- Napoleon Bonaparte

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak