Once again, I have folks asking me not to go to the Arms Expo out of concern for my safety. What they don't realize is that Yakima will be the safest place in the world for me to be. Just ask Sun Tzu.

Sun Tzu.

Those skilled in war bring the enemy to the field of battle. They are not brought by him. -- Sun Tzu.

What does the enemy fear? They have been very careful to craft a cone of silence around the armed civil disobedience movement these past two and a half years, to the point where they are willing to risk looking foolish and impotent rather than draw attention to us. These are not people to whom that comes naturally. We know from our intelligence assets within the citizen disarmament groups that this failure to enforce these laws that they have long sought is driving them to frustrated distraction with the policymakers in the various states. Michael Bloomberg is said to be particularly pissed off that the millions spent over the past two plus years have bought him exactly dick. What, they are demanding of their collectivist politicos that they gave so much money and support to, is the point of passing laws if we get to flout them with impunity?

Yet the raid parties have not been launched, the laws remain unenforced. Why? Because they are afraid of what will happen if they do. Not just afraid of the One Hundred Heads Life and Casualty Company, although there are still folks in the Connecticut political establishment who remain nervous about being on someone else's list. No, the principal reason is that they realize that if they do anything, anything at all, they will draw attention to us and they cannot afford to see our movement grow. For resistance is contagious, courage is contagious, and the example of nullification of all their best efforts by armed civil disobedience is not something they want folks to hear about. This is what they fear. That we may actually actually be as numerous and strong as they fear we are.

Let me remind you of another Sun Tzu maxim:

To move your enemy, entice him with something he is certain to take.

On the face of it, the state of Washington and their big federal brothers certainly have enough military strength to surround and arrest us all in Yakima if they so choose. If the people giving the orders are willing enough, or stupid enough, to kick off massive armed resistance of the 4th Generation Warfare type all over the country. Viewed from one perspective, then, what we are doing is enticing our collectivist enemies with something they are certain to take. But will they be stupid enough to do so?

Thanks to a timely thrift store purchase, I have been studying relevant portions of Capital "W" War: A Case For Strategic Principles of War. The subtitle is important: "Because Wars Are Conflicts of Societies, NOT Tactical Exercises Writ Large." Precisely. And as I have written and said many times before, we are two nations now, two societies, we and the domestic enemies of the Constitution, sharing a common language and a national border and not much else. Again Sun Tzu is appropriate: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” And it is certain that we understand our self-declared collectivist enemy far better than they understand us.

This work by Dr. Joe Strange, which came out in 1998 and was published as part of the Marine Corps War College's Perspectives on Warfighting series develops the central principle of 4th Generation Warfare -- that the war is won by a perfect understanding of your enemy's (and yours) strengths and weaknesses and attacking the will of your enemy to make war upon you. The critical terrain in this "Big 'W' War" that we face is the few inches between the ears of the warmakers and decision takers on the other side. In this we are superior to the forces of tyranny, because they require orders from the tyrants, whereas we are merely "a people numerous and armed" as one British officer complained in 1775. Decapitation strategies don't work on us, because there is no head to our snake, not even like the hydra of targets that the wannabe tyrants present to us. (And I guarantee you, if you cut off enough heads of 21st Century hydra, it will lose interest in the exchange.) We on the other hand are motivated by an idea, the Three Percent Catechism, and you cannot kill an idea, even a weaponized idea.

Legitimacy is everything in this kind of fight, and as Napoleon observed, in war "the moral is to the physical as ten is to one." And in their insatiable appetite for tyrannical power our collectivist opponents, these domestic enemies of the Constitution that they swore an oath to uphold, have been burning up their own legitimacy, throwing away their "Mandate of Heaven," as fast as they possibly could these past few years.

Strange quotes Sir Michael Howard from an article in Parameters in 1981:

Wars are not tactical exercises writ large. They are conflicts of societies, and they can be fully understood only if one understands the nature of the society fighting them. The roots of victory or defeat often have to be sought far from the battlefield, in political, social, and economic factors.

Japanese Marshal Admiral and commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet Isoroku Yamamoto. He should have read his Sun Tzu.

For example, Strange devotes much space to the huge tactical victory and the disastrous strategic blunder of the attack on Pearl Harbor by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who, because of his long contact with Americans and American society should have known better. He should have understood up front that ceding the moral high ground by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would unite Americans like no other single action. He obviously could not know that at the end of that road lay atomic ruin, but he should have grasped that the Americans would do everything they could to destroy his country in retribution.

To prove his point, strange does some very well footnoted alternate history about various strategies that Yamamoto could have adopted that didn't involve attacking the Americans first -- courses of action that would put Roosevelt in political hot water and exploited the divisions within American society. These make fascinating reading. If anyone could have restrained the warhawks in the Japanese cabinet it was Yamamoto and it says much that he was the only Japanese military leader that we bothered to assassinate during the war.

I will have more to say about this subject in my 4th Generation Warfare blocks of instruction at Yakima on Saturday and Sunday, but let me be cautious and pay our enemies this one compliment. It is always dangerous to assume that your enemy is as stupid as you hope he is. I am betting that in this case, since an attack on the Yakima show would be an absolute strategic disaster for the domestic enemies of the Constitution that they will not play into our hands and do it. Once again, this is a case of if they attack us, we win. And if they don't, we win. It may be that they are stupid enough to oblige us by attacking us, but that's not the way to bet. Thus, I believe that the enemy, at least some of them being well familiar with Sun Tzu, will ensure that the Yakima Arms Expo will be the safest place on the planet this weekend. In any case, that's where you'll find me.