(Continued from Part 2.)
If you are counting on tax-subsidized experts to save you with a long advance warning, it will probably not materialize. Because of bureaucratic incompetence, turf wars, and other bureaucratic intransigence, it is doubtful that our tax dollars that fund the military and other emergency responses will ever actually do any good for you, on an individual level. Unlike the vast majority of the population which is lulled into complacency, you are reading this blog, trying to figure things out as to how to survive the future.
If you are looking for a sign, here it is: Evaluate, weigh, and make decisions that are best for your individual situation. No one is likely coming to save you. You have an unknown period during this “golden age” to get your house in order, to have or complete your family, and to provide for your family. You likely will never receive an alert: If you wish to survive, then you will have to prepare yourself and proceed accordingly.
In the following days, I will outline a couple of historical warnings to inform your perspective and multiple levels of preparedness. The level will depend on what you can afford as a potential budget using dollar figures. The likelihood of you as an individual ever receiving a “flash” warning is almost non-existent unless you are in some official capacity or a VIP having access to proprietary information. Even then, military intelligence is often an oxymoron. As a student of history, I can describe how often they got it wrong, or provided it too late to be useful.
Pearl Harbor had a warning even on December 7th. If it had been acted on would have resulted in General Quarters for anti-aircraft fire and dozens of interceptor airplanes from Wheeler Field being scrambled. Instead, Pearl Harbor had its last few hours at peace while hundreds of Japanese planes played out a scenario that was already known to both knowledgeable Americans and Japanese. I will not venture into “conspiracy” theories because they can be interesting (and many times reveal themselves to have increasing veracity based on emerging facts), but I try to provide provable, documentable historical information. That fateful morning on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor received a radar warning delivered by two enlisted men and through a series of events that often happen in a command structure organization, they were ignored. The duty officer said to the radar man trying to warn of this unusual radar return which suggested a large number of aircraft: “Don’t worry about it.” The officer was later cleared, retired from the military as an O-5 after many years and he lived a long life. One of the men providing the warning later became an inventor with 35 patents to his name. Pearl Harbor also received another warning that was delivered via Western Union messenger instead of through military channels. It was delivered after the attack was already underway.
For all of those military apologists who say that the attack was unprecedented and that no reasonable person could envision such a possibility, the problem is that they probably do not know that the “attack” was predicted in well-publicized exercises, long before — catching the military establishment each time completely flatfooted. Often, the problem with the military is that generals and admirals prefer well-worn safe paths (anything less is often not career-enhancing) with innovation generally discouraged.
Unfortunately, Pearl Harbor had already been practice “bombed” with bags of flour delivered by aircraft from “enemy” aircraft carriers on Sunday February 7, 1932 during a “fleet problem.” Few people reading this probably currently have heard of “fleet problems” which were a series of wargame exercises trying to uncover vulnerabilities. The readers of this article have an advantage: You are seeking to go beyond the headlines and news (which are mainly propaganda) to discover real facts and the complete unvarnished truth. You can use this knowledge to analyze our current situation and to make plans to mitigate potential problems.
To avoid this becoming an exhaustive analysis of naval warfare doctrine, I will briefly summarize the situation. American naval power in the early 20th Century was concentrated on trying to confront rising tensions on both the world stage and in the Far East, specifically a rising Japan. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 tried to limit capital ship construction among allies of the First World War which included the Japanese as all of these military expenditures were a drain on every nation’s finances with these agreements putting a moratorium on a burgeoning arms race in the 1920s. Instead, the 1920s were filled in many parts of the country with peace, prosperity, and exuberance until that party ended in the Great Depression beginning in 1929. Years later President Eisenhower warned at the beginning of his Presidency in 1953:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Beginning in 1922, naval exercises began to confront possible scenarios in wargames exercises. By Fleet Problem V in 1925, the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor was shown. In this scenario, Schofield Barracks was successfully “invaded” by 30,000 marines (some real, and some on paper) representing an enemy force. The fateful Fleet Problem XIII in 1932 involved the bombing of Pearl Harbor by “enemy” aircraft. This was well covered in the newspapers and did not go unnoticed by the Japanese.
One interesting criticism of these exercises was that the “enemy” team operated using unfair tactics including attacking on a Sunday. Pearl Harbor was again successfully “attacked” in 1938 in Fleet Problem XIX. All of these were warnings, but few paid any attention except the Japanese. Billy Mitchell made his famous prediction in 1924 in a lengthy secret report which was buried. He filed his report after being sent on a year-long fact-finding inspection mission to the Far East, which in many ways could be interpreted as an exile. Billy Mitchell returned and then he wrote his report detailing that the attack would take place at 7:30 AM. The attack began at 7:50 AM, seventeen years after he wrote the report! Pearl Harbor did not need a warning of an attack on the morning of December 7th because they had almost two decades of advanced warning.
The attack at Pearl Harbor brought us fully into the Second World War within days. As of today, the Second World War was the last congressionally-declared war. The great consequence of the Second World War is it ushered in the modern world that was born out of the ashes, including the Cold War. The year 1983 may not be recognizable for many people as an important year, but that year could have been the decisive turning point in the world. By 1983, the United States and the Soviet Union had more than ten thousand nuclear tipped missiles aimed at each other requiring very little effort to create global thermonuclear war. Such a war would make large swaths of the planet uninhabitable.
On March 8, 1983, President Reagan gave a speech declaring that the Soviet Union was an “Evil Empire” declaring eight times during the speech of the evil nature of the Soviet Union directly or indirectly: “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” It does not take a skilled Kremlinologist to understand that the leadership of the Soviet Union was very concerned that a decapitation strike was a possibility on the table, given what many people would see that speech as an escalation in inflammatory rhetoric. In March 1983, the German band “Nena” topped the charts with their song “99 Luftballons” about a general starting an accidental war (with many interpreting as a nuclear war) because someone released balloons and this was eventually a provocation starting a 99-year Earth-destroying war.
In late March to April 1983, a United States Navy fleet exercise “FleetEx 83” occurred which was a show of force and the largest exercise since the Second World War. Between the announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative in a special televised address by President Reagan on March 23rd and the planned deployment of Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, the Soviets could feel the tensions ratcheting on their dying atherosclerotic empire with each increase in spending of the United States putting further strain on already overstretched and atrophied muscles. On June 3, 1983, the summer blockbuster movie “War Games” was released. This film gave an all too common path to war: erroneous intelligence leading to war. The movie almost came to life as a false launch warning almost triggered a war, three months later. Palpable fear existed throughout the world that anything could be the tripwire to World War III.
Few people knew at the time that the Soviet Union had a leader in name only. During the year 1983, the General Secretary of the Communist Party (the name for their leader) Yuri Andropov was a dead man walking. Beginning in August 1983, he was hospitalized for complete kidney failure which started in February 1983. He would die the following year, never leaving the hospital with many periods of unconsciousness prior to his death. The command and control of the Soviet Union was questionable as to who was actually in charge. On September 1, 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007. It was originally going from New York City to Seoul, South Korea. But it strayed into Soviet territory. The Soviet shoot-down killed 269 people including Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald, a true patriot and crusader against communism. This created further tension in an already strained relationship between the United States and Soviet Union.
Sometimes history turns on the actions of one man at one point in time: Enter Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, credited by many as the “Man who Saved the World”, by doing nothing. Petrov was not scheduled to work on September 26, 1983, but another officer called in sick, so he was in charge of monitoring the Soviet Union’s early warning radar and satellite system that night. Due to a malfunction, the system showed one and then five incoming missiles and Petrov decided not to relay this information to his superiors, knowing what would happen. He thought it was a malfunction because it seemed out of character for a full strike. Of course, that could have been the point, something outside of what people expect — causing a non-reaction, then forming the basis using deception of a successful decapitation strike. Likely, if LTC Petrov followed the procedure, life on Earth would have been radically different as thousands of Soviet nuclear ICBMs would have been launched at targets within Europe and the United States.
Given the international situation at the time, it was likely the Soviets would have launched a retaliatory strike, especially since their leadership was in disarray. The United States with just minutes to reply would have likely first seen the launch with various early warning systems alerting of real incoming missiles and then the United States duty officer would have raised the first alarm with notification quickly passing from military to civilian hands. In this situation, a military officer who remains close to the President would have carried in the “football” to President Reagan. Acting in his role as Commander in Chief he would have likely authorized a full retaliatory strike and the world as we know it would have ended that day.
Things continued to deteriorate that year in international relations, especially with the attack on the Marines in Beirut killing 241 United States servicemen in October. But years passed before the whole story of what happened that day in late September 1983 became known.
If another officer had been on duty on that late September day, many people would have been getting back home from work or still at work as the incident was occurring in the early morning hours in the Soviet Union. If you were outside of a direct target area, you would have likely had little time to make a decision. The old “duck and cover” drills much ridiculed in popular culture actually have a scientific basis to protect your eyes (from flash burns) and to protect yourself from falling debris if you can get under a substantial structure.
Again, no one (likely) is coming to save you. Any help that you get is simply to be regarded as a bonus if you could use it. I heard reports of responders in recent hurricanes who came across prepared families and asked if they needed help. Every single person who is prepared is someone less who is draining the limited amount of disaster aid resources. That would have been a very bad evening on September 26, 1983 for most of the world/ But many Cold War survivalists would have survived to hopefully rebuild a better world.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 4.)
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