[My comments will be in brackets. Richard, I would like permission to have WC use this article and perhaps a follow-up thread as a reference in the end notes for Hounds of Arуas.]
Hi James,
Thank you so much for responding to my line of questioning in your post "A Fellow Traveler Down Dark Ways: James Discusses War With Richard Barrett". Your response on "Confrontational", "Predation", and "Confrontational Predation" gave me the avenues I needed to continue crystallizing my own ideas on warfare.
First of all, I got me to recognize a rookie mistake I had made...one of definitions. The "Warfighting" is used in most cases to refer to Operations (my main bread and butter in past writings), while the term "Combat Culture" is the best term I can think of to refer to Tactics (something I have become increasingly interested in after starting BJJ this last year).
[I recall that the Ancient Greeks had three tiers of warfare, Arete and the many personal war arts such as running, shield and spear fighting, boxing, etc., being their warrior culture. Above that was tactics which are dependent on the substance and presence of Arete. Above tactics was strategy, which was dependent on the tactical ability of files, half files and larger units to execute tactics. In boxing terms I would equate Arete with punching, guarding and enduring, tactics with footwork and upper body and head movement, and strategy with “ring generalship.” Perhaps examining BJJ for a similar tiering might be useful.]
It seems to me, the Ancient Indo-European/Aryan/Nordic/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Western method of waging war is as you say "Confrontational Predation"...with the Confrontation part being in the Tactical arena, and the Predatory part being in the Operational arena. This seems in line with your original response to my question:
"Here, the herdsmen, still a hunter and still of predatory mind, uses his hunting knowledge to herd, to predict the fear response of herbivores and put them in an operational noose—like the Blitzkrieg would later do with tanks and planes...Chambers in his book The Devil’s Horseman, and Keegan in his History of Warfare, point out that the Mongol method of victory was only confrontational in appearance and used the cunning of the hunter to herd the enemy into killing zones."
[To sort for unique cultural manifestations I am using non-Aryan control groups, like the Crow and Comanche Indians, the Mongols and the Japanese. One thing to look at is the fact that Eurasian Megafauna was wiped out by human predation, as was Australian megafauna. However, North American megafauna was wiped out by the Younger Dryas event which affected that region much more severely than Eurasia. I suggest looking into the following possible influences that Arуans might have picked up from those groups they absorbed genetically; Neanderthal: see Minoan bull rituals; Cromagnon: see cave paintings and Beowulf—specifically my examination of this; Agrarian: I like Pre-Columbian American Civilizations as first stage agrarian models with minimal livestock influence, but take your pick of Pre-Akkadian Sumer, Pre-Hyksos Egypt or Pre-Aryan India. My look at Gilgamesh in He attempts to sort agrarian, hunter-gatherer and pastoral cultural overlays.]
This realization led me further into research, reading Ricardo Duchesne's exceptional survey The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, where he discusses the berserker fighting style of the Ancient Indo-Europeans. This is as Confrontational as it gets, and lines up with the interesting Ancient Roman observation from the Strategikon reproduced on pages 30 and 24 respectively of Simon MacDowall's book Germanic Warrior: 236-568 AD by the eminent Osprey Publishing Company:
"The light-haired races place great value on freedom. They are bold and undaunted in battle, Daring and impetus as they are, they consider any timidity and even a short retreat as a disgrace. They calmly despise death as they fight violently in hand to hand combat, either on foot or on horse...They are not interested in anything that is at all complicated and pay little attention to external security and their own advantage...Above all, therefore, in waging war against them one must avoid engaging in pitched battles, especially in the early stages. Instead, make use of well planned ambushes, sneak attacks and stratagems. Delay things and ruin their opportunities. Pretend to come to agreements with them. Aim at reducing their boldness and zeal by shortage of provisions or the discomforts of heat and cold."
[Nothing screams this ethos more than Beowulf’s decision to fight the monster Grendel—which, I think, in part, represents a poetic tradition preserving a memory of a Cromagnon insurgency against the Arуans. The monster that comes by night and murders and then skulks back into the wilds is brought to battle by the hero casting off his technological advantages, which reminded me of the LRRP strategy in Vietnam depicted in the book Six Silent Men. Beowulf reads like America in Vietnam or the U.S. Army in a frontier stockade falling prey to something like the Fetterman massacre.]
This seems to me to be a description of a love of the Confrontation in the Tactical arena. It reminds me of a quote I read long ago in C.E. Caldwell's 1906 book Small Wars Their Principles and Practices. I can't remember exactly where the quote was, or exact wording, but it said that Tactics favor the Western armies and Strategy favors the Non-Western armies in "Savage Wars". That seems to line up with a very Indo-European mindset, and it seems to also perfectly summarize the many problems we've experienced overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan in defeating insurgencies there.
[Note that the agrarian cultures, with their heavy hand weapons and forts in Europe failed to impose their will on the Cromagnons for some 1,500 years of coexistence and the Arуans came in and essentially annihilated both human types and that all three human types had a deep history of wiping out Neanderthals after a long history in which Neanderthal males raped modern human women and enough of these children were permitted to live to account for 2-6% Neanderthal patrilineal DNA. The agrarian cultures in Europe were warlike and had brutal battles near rivers and their forts were sometimes annihilated by attacks with many arrow heads used, possibly indicating Cromagnon attacks or auxillaries. For a look at the Cromagnon view of war, see my book The First Boxers in which a painting from Spain from 20,000 B.P. shows purely predatory archery-based warfare. You can also find this illustration in O’Connell’s Of Arms and Men.]
Of course, on the Operational side, the Predatory nature seems to reveal itself to me in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. The fact that the Germanic Arius knew the Roman playbook is a perfect example of the hunter hunting human prey..."hunting knowledge to herd, to predict the fear response of herbivores and put them in an operational noose" as you have said.
This led me to look deeper into the existing volumes I have of your writings, and your discussion on the Ancient Indo-European environment of Ice Age Europe caused them to hunt Mega-Fauna. This led me to get further in depth to build the skeleton of the book, based upon the 2011 Marine Corps textbook Operational Culture for the Warfighter: Principles and Applications by Barak A. Salmoni and Paula Holmes-Ebert, published by Marine Corps University. A close mentor of mine was military faculty there, and another friend of mine actually wrote for the Operational Culture textbook series. It's a great look at how Anthropology affects the landscape of Warfighting and Combat...a James Lafond kind of observation to make.
The book has 5 Check Points of Operational Culture from a variety of disciplines. The lettered sub-headings are my own, I think you will find them interesting:
1.) The Physical Environment
A.) Are there a Lot of Resources, a Medium amount of Resources, or very Little Resources?
B.) Are these resources Hard to get, Medium to get, or Easy to get?
2.) The Environment of Ideals (Who are the Warrior Heroes and Villains of a Group? To me, this encompasses the "Combat Code" or ethos of a culture's warriors):
A.) How do a culture's Warriors view their enemy?
B.) How do a culture's Warriors view their fellow Warriors on their own culture?
C). How do a Culture's Warriors view their leaders?
D.) How do a Culture's Warriors view the classes under them?
E.) How do a Culture's Warriors view their women?
[A-D is explicitly rampant in Beowulf, with the night-fighter and ambusher the ultimate villain. I like the Odyssey, Iliad and Aeneid for E.]
3.) The Social Environment (Classes...the ones below you will probably recognize from Evola's Metaphysics of War)
A.) The Priestly Class
B.) The Warrior Class
C.) The Merchant Class
[Beginning with the 30 Years War, the intrusion of the merchant mindset into western warfare made it less decisive and progressively ineffective against aboriginal warfare, with the Crusader-Minded—this mentality being an Arуan hold over within Christianity—Spaniards with medieval weapons doing better against aboriginal warriors than their slave armies would do later or the mercantile and slave armies of the English and French would fare against aboriginals. This continues to this day, with failure to achieve decision in Vietnam and Afghanistan. As a prize-fighter and coach, I will never separate lack of will to win with lack of ability as our merchant-minded nation has with the Vietnam defeat and the American inability to do in 18 years what Alexander did in 3 years! The culture that can say, “We did not lose the war effort, but simply lacked the will to win,” is no longer an Arуan warrior culture, but the lich of a once great race. Saying that quitting is not defeat, is to deny arête and extinguish the ideal of heroism forever. This nation died as an Arуan entity in 1975.]
D.) The Peasant Class (Blue Collar, Working Class, Slave Class, Gatherer Class, Farmer class...whatever your particular style and period of time)
[The ascent of the slave soldier, first under the merchant ethos of the enlightened despots of the mercantile empires of the Early Modern Era and then under industrial warfare of the Full Modern Age, ensured the actual genetic cleansing of the Arуan warrior in the wars of annihilation in the first half of the 20th Century, as well as a committed inability to win a decisive war against inferior opposition. I count the decision not to continue the first Iraq war along with Shia and Kurdish allies as part of this crippling merchant ethos effect on the war-waging mind as it descends from war-fighting to war-management, with Vietnam and now Afghanistan standing as the classic nadirs of war-management over war-fighting. We now have the merchant mind running the war, the slave mind supporting it and manning most of its ranks, the warrior mind in a tiny frustrated minority at the tip of the spear as the machine that uses that tip hopes to destroy it in the process so that world slavery to the merchant elite might become perpetual, and the priesthood entirely absent as an authentic adjunct to war-fighting, having been replaced by the media mind-shaping machine.]
4.) The Political Environment
A.) Which of the above classes rules in a society?
5.) The Economic Environment
A.) How are resources distributed, dependent upon the Political Environment above? It seems to me that the Ancient Indo-European/Arayan/Nordic/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Western Warrior culture came about in a:
1.) Physical Environment where there are...
A.) Lots of Resources but...
B.) They are hard to get (i.e. Megafauna)
2.) An Ideal Environment
A.) The tougher the Enemy beaten, the greater the Glory for the Winner, leading to a Confrontational outlook in Tactics and a Predation outlook in Operations
B.) Fellow combatants in the tribe are respected as equals with a pathway too...
[This is most easily studied amongst Native Americans, due to chronological proximity.]
C.) Leadership being respected as first among equals, leading to greater tolerance for subordinate initiative (if he's the best, why worry about the guys under you improving? It keeps your own knife sharp...)
[Nathan Bedford Forest is the best individual sample of the Arуan warrior.]
D.) Classes underneath the Warriors are viewed with a basic modicum of rights with a pathway to becoming a Warrior if they show an aptitude
[The ability of a slave class person to rise to the warrior ranks is not unique to Arуan war culture, but it is more strongly present than in other less confrontational war cultures. Only Native American warrior cultures share a similar level of slave to warrior social tolerance, and this Arуan ethos failed to preserve itself on contact with the indigenous races of India.]
E.) Women are worshiped and viewed positively (i.e. Warriors are so tough they do not feel threatened by women)
[Yes, men—including warriors, prize-fighters, gangsters and soldiers—who permit women to make decisions at home and permit those women to hold opinions about the quality of men, almost always beat the shit out of those obsessed with micro-managing the bitch-continuum. This is essentially an alley fight between Tyson Fury and Stefan Molyneux. The bitch-made male always loses to the man who earns the loyalty of his women through actions in a contest of WILL.]
3.) Social Environment
A.) Roughly described above, with the fortunes of the Warrior culture waxing and waning over Western Civilization's lifespan
4.) Political Environment
A.) See last entry
5.) Economic Environment
A.) See last entry
As I was writing this, I went onto your site to see if you had written anything new, and I found this observation by you in your post entitled "In the Shadow of Perversion: WR and JL Discuss the Nature of the Race that Developed the Duel and the War Dog":
“Also, as O’Connell pointed out in Of Arms and Men, the distinguishing characteristic of the Arуan warrior is a willingness to fight hand to hand, which is much more pronounced in European Arуans and goes against normal nomadic warrior inclinations. He posited that this would stem from the combat against megafauna in close European Forests, which is exactly how Neanderthals hunted, fighting Aurochs [51% of their diet] with hand held weapons largely on river banks. This I find of interest when looking for a non-Aryan control group, a fanatic warrior society dedicated to hand-to-hand combat.”
[Of Arms and Men is a crucial read for me. I read it twice.]
It seems to me from surveying your writings and my own independent research that Megafauna, Beserkers, and Gunsmoke-esque Showdowns are the heart-and-soul of Western Warrior Culture, memorialized in the legends of the Ancient Germanics, the Medieval Knights, and the Cowboys and the G.I.s and the Redcoats and the Foreign Legionaries of Pulp Fiction (and historical!) fame. They're the guys I look up to, and the guys I measure myself up against every day.
[I have read three histories of the French Foreign Legion. I suggest you take a look at the cult of Armand’s Hand that is centered at Marseilles and began with the battle of a platoon of the Legion guarding a gold shipment against a brigade of Mexicans in the turmoil of Maximillian Mexico in the late 1860s. I suspect that such a battle, in the dawn of the Arуan Age, which is now at dusk, against another type of human—something like a Thermopyle—stands as central to the development of Arуan War Band psychology and that a useful tool for your purpose might be a survey of famous Last Stands of military units. The Anabasis of Xenophon might also be a late occurring event similar to an origins event that might have originally propelled the Arуans on their 4,000 year journey]
What do you think?
[I think you are looking at the same subject I and WC are, but that you are using a methodology that is going to be far more useful for military thinkers, and that ours is basically serving the mind-set of the atomized Arуan survivor who has been written out of the remaining military paradigm by the primacy of Merchant Mindset.]
Am I on the right track?
[I see your thinking and exposition as clean and uncluttered and this dialogue has helped me focus my own inquiry a little better. My suggestions are dashed below.]
-A study of Arete, specifically. There is a late 1990s book by that title, the author of whom I cannot recall.
-Read O’Connell and Chambers
-A survey of last stands and their effect on military cultures
-A comparison of late western military contingencies, such as the Special Forces, LRRPs and SEALs, with earlier military adjustments such as: “fighting in Indian file” see Ernst Junger Storm of Steel, the French Foreign Legion, English rifleman in the Napoleonic wars and of course the source of most these things which is ultimately the Indian Wars of the Eastern Woodlands from 1585-1814 and the development of the ranger from the 1670s through 1750s.
-I suggest following my tags on this site A Warrior Be as well as Destiny’s Exile, both tagged above as active investigations of Arуan warrior culture. The Sardonyx Stone and Off Stand the Wolves are currently idle and I hope to finish them next year.
This is your bread and butter, and in a way that may sound kinda weird, I think of you as a dissertation adviser for this purely personal project.
[Thanks, Richard, and good luck to you on this.]
I could go on and on, I love talking about this stuff! But I'll leave you here with this for now.
Thank you so much for your help so far. I really appreciate it.
Keep on keeping on!
Sincerely,
Richard Barrett
