\nThoughts on a 10\/7 style attack on America<\/p>\n
So I just finished Kurt Schlichter\u2019s new novel,\u00a0The Attack<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0 It\u2019s a fictionalized account of an October 7 style attack that takes place on a large scale in the United States.\u00a0 It\u2019s also a warning.<\/p>\n In essence, Iranian terror experts use America\u2019s open southern border to slip in thousands of Islamist fanatics, sleeper cells who are primed to attack specified targets on command.\u00a0 The terrorists don\u2019t know their targets until the last minute, when they get guns, ammunition, and directions.\u00a0 They also don\u2019t know that they\u2019re part of a massive effort.\u00a0 This means that if they turn, or are caught, as a few do or are, they can\u2019t give anything away.\u00a0 They have minimal training, basically how to lay low, and to shoot guns and throw grenades.\u00a0 They\u2019re also equipped with web-linked cameras to stream their attacks, and the atrocities \u2013 rape, torture, etc. \u2013 that they perpetrate on their victims.\u00a0 Also meth to pump them up for the attacks.<\/p>\n When the day comes, they attack public places, schools, the Atlanta Zoo, and so on.\u00a0 \u00a0The next day, with the overstretched police trying to protect public places and ordering people to shelter in their homes, they go after suburban neighborhoods, again placing torture, rape, and dismemberment videos online.\u00a0 On the third day, the remaining terrorists attack infrastructure targets \u2013 substation transformers, oil refineries, etc.<\/p>\n The result is a six-figure civilian casualty list, massive economic disruption, and political turmoil.\u00a0 The terrorists\u2019 goal of cowing the United States into isolationism fails, however, in dramatic fashion.\u00a0 \u00a0The entire novel is written as an oral history from numerous viewpoints, including the terrorists and their leftist American sympathizers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a gripping story, and an unfortunately plausible cautionary tale.\u00a0 How likely is it to happen?<\/p>\n Probably the biggest impediment to something like this happening in America is the aftermath of the 10\/7 attacks on Israel.\u00a0 Atrocities didn\u2019t cow the Israelis, but angered them. Other nations, even many of those that the Palestinians of Hamas generally looked to for support, turned against them.\u00a0 Hamas leaders are being targeted and killed, Hamas backers know they aren\u2019t safe, and the Israelis simply continue to grind away, four months after the attacks happened.<\/p>\n And everyone knows that the consequences of an attack on the United States would likely be worse.<\/p>\n Or maybe not.\u00a0 Our current president is senile and inept, our vice president is just inept \u2013 though neither Kamala nor Biden is named in the book, Schlichter\u2019s version of Harris\u2019s response to the attacks is picture perfect, an incomprehensible word salad that causes Americans to lose faith in her entirely.\u00a0 The President and VP wind up being replaced by the unnamed Speaker of the House, who brings the hammer down.\u00a0 (I was at a luncheon Friday with Speaker Mike Johnson and didn\u2019t get to speak to him \u2013 we had to leave early \u2013 but I was going to tell him that his role in the line of succession is probably more important for the remainder of this year than it usually would be.\u00a0 I did notice that there was a lot more security than I had seen at similar events in the past).<\/p>\n Okay, I said it was a cautionary tale, but once cautioned, what should we do?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Obviously, getting control of the border is important.\u00a0 You can\u2019t control a border so tightly that some people won\u2019t slip through \u2013 even the North Korean border is slightly permeable.\u00a0 But you can put a stop to thousands of military-age young men passing through every day, which is what is happening now.<\/p>\n You could do better with intelligence, but I confess I mostly despair at that.\u00a0 Our intelligence agencies seem highly inept at preventing such things (and that includes domestic intelligence agencies like the FBI, whose field agents trying to run down Moussaoui before 9\/11 speculated that Osama bin Laden must have had a\u00a0mole inside FBI headquarters<\/a>).\u00a0 Leaking things (often false) to the press to affect domestic politics seems to be their true forte.<\/p>\n Hardening targets would help.\u00a0 As I\u2019ve written before, the only people who are always on the scene at an accident or mass shooting or whatever are the people who are already there when it happens.\u00a0 Schlichter\u2019s book includes a number of times where armed civilians blunt an attack, both in public and in homes.\u00a0 A civilian or two with handguns can\u2019t stop a group of men armed with long guns, but they can slow, distract, and inflict enough casualties to mess things up.\u00a0 (Jeff Cooper said that one man with a handgun can wreck a rifle squad; certainly if the man is Jeff Cooper!)\u00a0 But it\u2019s math:\u00a0 If you go house to house and one of you gets shot every time, you\u2019ll run out of terrorists long before you run out of houses.<\/p>\n And, of course, some neighborhoods are better armed than that.\u00a0 My neighbor\u2019s gun safe makes mine look tiny, and we\u2019re pretty well equipped here at Stately InstaPundit Manor.\u00a0 I can have a handgun anywhere in my house in under seconds, and an AR-15 type rifle with a full mag in under a minute.\u00a0 If a bunch of terrorists started breaking my door down I\u2019d probably die, but they\u2019d know they\u2019d been in a fight.\u00a0 And there are a lot of people like that in my neighborhood.\u00a0 We saw in Israel that places where people\u00a0fought back<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 like Kibbutz Kerem Shalom \u2013 did much better: \u00a0\u00a0\u2018Although most of the Kibbutzim in the western Negev were woefully unprepared for a mass Hamas attack and paid a heavy price in civilian casualties, there was one Kibbutz where Hamas did not succeed in conquering the Kibbutz, did not take captives and did not cause any civilian casualties.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s even though the army took six hours to show up.<\/p>\n And of course, we need to harden infrastructure.\u00a0 There\u2019s been\u00a0some<\/em>\u00a0realization of that, but you can kill a substation transformer with a bullet, and most of them aren\u2019t protected at all.\u00a0 (I notice that they\u2019ve put up brick walls around some of them in Knoxville that are close to the Interstate, though I\u2019m not sure if that\u2019s for security or for aesthetics.)\u00a0 Refineries and pipelines and communications facilities and fiber optic cables are all vulnerable.\u00a0 You can do something about that, and also do things to ensure redundancy and quicker recovery.\u00a0 And drone defense is something that really needs to be put into place, given the rise of cheap hardware-store level attack drones in Ukraine and the Mideast.<\/p>\n Finally, of course, the main way to harden against attacks is with deterrence.\u00a0 Terrorists may be willing or even eager to die, but the people who back them usually aren\u2019t.\u00a0 An administration that looks ready to retaliate brutally and disproportionately is likely to be much more of a deterrent.\u00a0 Osama bin Laden\u2019s comments about the \u201cstrong horse\u201d remain apt, even if he\u2019s now fish food.<\/p>\n Well, we don\u2019t have that today!\u00a0 Maybe we will next time, maybe we won\u2019t.\u00a0 But on this, at least, the voters have a choice.\u00a0 We\u2019ll see what they do with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" to reemphasize from earlier this year……….. Attack and Defense Thoughts on a 10\/7 style attack on America So I just finished Kurt Schlichter\u2019s new novel,\u00a0The Attack.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fictionalized account of an October 7 style attack that takes place on a large scale in the United States.\u00a0 It\u2019s also a warning. In essence, Iranian terror … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,34,29,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-moslems-jihadis","category-safety","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99987"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101918,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99987\/revisions\/101918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8f295616-0c1a-4d4b-8f94-ea13f10b1edc_488x782.png "\\"A")
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