The Left as the New Enemy Within: Domestic Wargaming Exercise Includes “Progressive” AntiGlobalist Baddies, Um, Terrorists

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Yves here. America has airbrushed out most of the history of savage violence against early labor leaders, but a reminder of the intensity of the sentiment came via McCarthy’s success in fanning fears of the Red Menace. Now that Marxism is no longer a dirty word and young voters on the whole are more sympathetic to socialism than capitalism, it should come as no surprise that a radical leftist group features prominently in a recent domestic wargaming exercise. As author Nick Turse points out, the record shows that radical right wing groups have been far more active and violent.










PALing Around with Terrorists






Tomorrow’s Terror Today





















The Age of Terrorism


This is not to say terrorism isn’t a major threat to others around the world or that terror groups are not proliferating. Since 9/11, the number of terrorist organizations recognized by the U.S. State Department and battled by the Pentagon — from Africa to the Middle East to Asia — has grown markedly.






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  1. John Zelnicker

    Yves – Thank you for cross-posting this. I read it a few hours ago at another web site and almost sent it in for Links. This is better, it needs to be widely circulated.

    The scenarios used in the JLASS-SP 2016 are an incredibly scary look at the thinking of the military as to what the future holds. It looks like an attempt to scare the populace so they will accept, without question or protest, martial law and the further elimination of constitutional rights. (Not withstanding the elimination of habeus corpus and other rights since 9/11.)

    I’ve been thinking for a a couple of years, now that I’m in my late 60’s, I don’t have a long time left in this life (15 yrs at most), especially since I am a lifetime heavy smoker and drinker. And yet, I’m glad I will not be around (if I’m lucky) to see how this all collapses into chaos and violent anarchy.

    I grieve for my daughters and granddaughter who will have to live through whatever dystopia the future holds.

    1. cocomaan

      I agree that it’s kind of scary, but I wouldn’t overly despair about it. If you read right wing conspiracy theorists, Jade Helm in 2015 was going to be an attempt to take over Texas.

      The map that spawned the conspiracy theory calls Texas and Utah “hostile”. I mean, would it have been that hard for the military to write “SIMULATION” at the top of their stupid map?

      The New York Times called it “political paranoia” at the time.

      But paranoia implies that there’s no reason for fear.

      1. blennylips


        If you read right wing conspiracy theorists,

        Future, conspiracies?

        Look at the past and the present: Operation Condor had lists of leftists ready to go as soon as the Chicago boys parachuted in. Assassins dispatched post-haste. In a great irony, IIRC, climate change recently uncovered the burial grounds in the Atacama desert. I’d bet willing to bet this was an off-the-shelf operation from the School of the Americas.

        Everyone loves to punch left, some harder than others. They know who the real enemies are.

        1. blennylips

          This is really a continuation of this thread:

          May 7, 2018 at 3:28 pm
          “AI will spell the end of capitalism”

          In which Lambert adds:

          See also Allende’s CyberSyn. No wonder the Chicago Boys acquiesced so happily to his murder.

          “Central Planning” was anathema and had to go – existential threat to cowboy capitalism. If only they’d realized where computer networks were actually heading…really they had no idea what they had found.

      2. Oregoncharles

        What bothered me about Jade Helm was that they were training for urban, counter-insurrection warfare, IN THE US. The silly panic attack from the Right (why would the government take over Texas? It already has it.) served mostly to conceal the real problem, in my opinion.

    2. D

      While it was and is scary, i doubt they gave any thought since they never expected to ever to see any of their testing materials. but i am surprised that the orange didnt use them, since the goal seems to be terrify us, of things that happen so infrequently, that we are much more at risk death by dog, and we have never thought of it,or the threat of death in a car accident!

  2. JBird

    Just about every negative social metric, mass shootings, suicides, all the homeless encampments, the increasing protests, and so on is due to the increasing poverty and state violence. The solution is being afraid, so very afraid of the commies. Okay. I’m a socialist, so I guess I am a threat, perhaps (to them) an actual terrorist? How nice. I also believe in the rule of law, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (All the rights. They are meant to protect us from the government after all.) That might make them really angry. Too many in positions of authority seem to think that the law only applies to the little people and not to their august selves.

    At least things are following the past’s patterns. I can’t wait for this time’s version of the Palmer Raids.

  3. The Rev Kev

    Those aren’t proper military scenarios. It’s just a grab-bag of stuff taken from newspapers over the past year or two. A high school student could do better. Also, lots of that stuff sounds like it was chosen to appease Trump’s ideas of what threats there are. Last I heard the Pentagon was also considering its chances of sending battalions of US soldiers in some of the world’s mega cities and winning. Maybe they should practice that one in a small city first, say, Mogadishu.
    They want a proper military scenario? OK, I have one. In the years to come the top 1% steal for themselves the last 7% or so of financial assets owned by 80% of Americans. They then make a move on the financial assets owned by the other 19% – America’s remaining middle class. Under threat of being pushed into poverty like the rest of America, the middle class allies themselves with the other 80% of Americans who have absolutely nothing left to lose anymore. The US military is tasked to defend Martha’s Vineyard, the Hamptons and Manhattan Island. Game on!

    1. Procopius

      Reminds me of Mark Blyth’s remark, “The Hamptons are not a defensible position.”

      1. The Rev Kev

        To be honest, it was something that came out of Clinton’s secret emails that made me put that bit in there. Someone looked for all mentions of place names in them to see which was most important to Hillary.
        Considering that Hillary was Secretary of State you would expect to see places like Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, China, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. but no, the place names that came up the most often were places like Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons. Whaaat!
        As for the Hamptons, Mark Blyth was right but if you look at a map, it gets even better. The Hamptons are on a peninsular so if any force come up from New York, there is literally nowhere to run to except at the end of the peninsular.

      2. Hepativore

        Actually, the remaining middle-class would probably try to ally themselves with the 1% to try and secure a better position for themselves, thanks to decades worth of neoliberalism indoctrination and Horatio Alger fantasies. After crushing the uprising of the 80% (Like a few militia groups with shotguns and assault weapons would stand a chance against being carpet-bombed by missiles and raids by armored vehicles?) the 1% would probably then finish off the remaining 19% as thanks to putting down the uprisings of the peasants. Jack London was probably spot on in the Iron Heel.

        1. Knute Rife

          Remember, there are no poor people in the US, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

    2. funemployed

      The docs this article are based off are from 2016. Written up and played out during the Obama admin – not the Trump one.

  4. notabanker


    Mission accomplished!

    1. D

      I suspect its because there is very little politicians can do about those. but they can push lots of money into DOD. and there are jobs related to that, plus the corps in military gear sales will put money into their pacs/campaigns. so for them its a win/win

  5. David

    Two points:
    There’s nothing new about the “Left” being seen as a threat. Cold War exercise scenarios generally assumed that all armed groups of the day would cooperate with a Soviet attack. Even the poor British Communist Party was expected to take too the streets in demonstrations designed to bring down the government.
    That said, selective leaks of exercise scenarios like this are always misleading, because the point of the exercise is to practice for all possible scenarios, no matter how unlikely. There is a greater than zero chance, for example, of an ISIS-inspired attack on the US in the near future, as there has been in many other countries. A government that said “we’re not going to bother planning to cope with such a contingency because more people die in car accidents” would rightly be criticised. In real life you plan for both.

    1. HotFlash

      OK, the military can plan, budget, implement, and get funded for this sort of thing, that is their shtick. The rest of the government should be dealing with the other, and I would argue, more important, threats — planning, budgeting, implementing, and getting funded for them. Proportional to actual damage done. You know, measures such as universal health care, social security, properly-funded pensions, perhaps along the same lines as the USPS is required to have.

    2. funemployed

      There is also a greater than zero chance of a large asteroid hitting the world, or of a randomly-typing-monkey writing hamlet. These “games” take rather a lot of time and resources, so there is indeed a plausibility threshold, or at least an assumption that the things learned might be applicable to a reasonably plausible scenario. I’ll grant you, however, the argument that war “games” involve planning for a range of scenarios of various plausibility, and are not necessarily predictions of an assumed likely future.

      Respectfully though, your critique misses the point of what makes this exercise fundamentally disturbing.

      1) It is a war “game” to address problems that are fundamentally caused by violence and the dehumanization of certain “categories” of people with…you guessed it…escalating violence against and expanding dehumanization of more categories of humans. This is what systems analysts call a “reinforcing feedback loop.”

      2) Legitimate targets of such violence now citizens whose fundamental democratic rights the US military ostensibly exists to protect (i.e. U.S. citizens, e.g. those opposed to “globalization and capitalism”).

      3) The conflation of small groups of violent extremists with their beliefs/ideologies. Is it ok to fear all Muslims when the overwhelming majority are not violent? Is it ok to fear all immigrants when they are, on average, less violent than your typical American? Should we violently attack all people who express patriarchal sentiments because domestic violence against women is vastly more violent and harmful than domestic terrorism? Where are the white nationalists in this war game? (not that they subscribe to a violent ideology or engage in terrorism, of course; the ones who do that are just suffering from “mental illness.” /sarc)

      4) Most importantly, a fundamental assumption that the role of the US military is not to protect basic democratic rights and norms (which cannot, fundamentally be spread by violence – this is what distinguishes actual democracy from authoritarianism and imperialism), but existing and rapidly deteriorating ideologies and socioeconomic systems (e.g. globalization and capitalism).

      1. funemployed

        Oh yeah. The military is now preparing for domestic “threats.” There’s good reason to create a firewall between the military and domestic policing. Not doing that tends to result in coups. Don’t take my word for it though – there are many history books.

        1. D

          We have one there is a law that prohibits the military from doing much ‘policing’ can recall its name but it does come up from time time

          1. Hepativore

            Do you mean the Posse Comitatus Act?

            While in theory it prohibits US army or air force involvement in domestic uprisings, I am sure that it would be quickly ignored or gutted in a broad bipartisan effort should an actual rebellion arise. The US does not have the most stunning record when it comes to rule of law in recent decades.

      2. David

        Well, I imagine that somewhere or other there are scenario or exercise plans for national disasters of the type you mention, as well as other forms of violence. The issue is the role of the military in it, and in general, militaries do not plan for involvement in any domestic contingency unless there’s a plausible chance that its scale will be such that military help is required This may be in natural disasters, it may be in things like air crashes, or it may be circumstances where there is a level of violence beyond what the police can cope with, or where special assets (eg helicopters or engineer equipment) are needed. All countries do this as a matter of routine, and all major countries have, and exercise, procedures for deciding when and if to call in the military.
        These exercises exist to test procedures, not to make predictions, and in general the scenario element is nothing much more than an excuse for kicking the action off. After that, the concentration in the exercise itself is on what reaction should be and what kinds of problems the exercise throws up. In larger countries (and certainly in the US) these exercises are written by dedicated scenario authors, often fairly junior personnel, and not necessarily picked for originality or profundity of thought. NATO’s exercises in the Cold War, for example, were notoriously mocked by insiders for the unreality of their political assumptions. In this case, there must have been some level of political clearance of the scenario, but that wouldn’t amount to political endorsement of the assumptions. The article is a bit dishonest anyway in trying to conflate a 2016 technical exercise when Obama was President with public statements by politicians today. I don’t think the scenario, as printed, is calling for attacks on anybody, and of course it’s not policy. It’s the sort of clumsy and unimaginative thinking that those with experience of them have come to expect from the US military.
        But actually, there are some quite realistic elements. The number of people killed in terrorist attacks in France was zero for many years before 2015. Then suddenly it was about 200. Now it stands at around 250 (about double that for Europe as a whole) so past performance is not a guide etc. It’s clear that there are a number of groups that would like to do the same in the US (AQIM is mentioned but there are others). To do this they would need to smuggle people into the country. Most of the European attackers came back from Syria via Turkey and into the Balkans. (The French attackers came via Brussels). Obviously, the US is a more difficult target, and as far as I can see there are only two land borders that could be used. And Islamic groups have a history of merging in with genuine refugees, something that worries a lot of European countries at the moment. So the scenario is far from impossible, but then it is a scenario for an exercise, not a work of political analysis.

  6. Katsue

    The idea of the INLA raising itself from its state of torpor to launch rocket attacks on Shannon Airport is really something.

  7. allan


    I think the wargamers misspelled

    * 2011 hurricane season: as the aftereffects of Superstorm Sandy raged in the eastern United States,
    Occupy Sandy established relief efforts designed to compete with the U.S. government
    and Red Cross’ inadequate and corrupt responses, in order to “help people”.

    Also, the fact that they also cooked up a name (UPAIGO) that sounds almost identical to PAYGO is hilarious, since many consider the enforced austerity of PAYGO as a form of domestic terrorism, brought to us by Peter Peterson and the culture of “fiscal responsibility” he spawned.

    1. Code Name D

      This is also how you dehuminize the “enimey”. The senario says that they are trying to discredit the US government by probiding humanitarian aid. In otherwords, providing food, water, and cloathing to disaster victems is reinterpreted as a threat.

      Kind of like how you are only voting for Jill Stine because you hate women.

  8. Doug Hillman

    For someone who’s several paces left of Bernie Sanders*, the left as a threat is a little bit funny. I imagine Bernie fighting his way out of a paper bag. How many cheeks does he have?

    Sorry, can’t we all just get along?

    * … and well to the right of Jesus Christ

  9. Indrid Cold

    From the vitriolic tenor of officially approved “news”, it soon won’t matter wether ones opposition to globalist neoliberalism comes from the right, left or some middle area, you’re going to be stifled, doxxed, labeled a conspiracy nut and surveilled.

    1. Synoia


      Form birth, until you join the 0.1%

      Your behavior is suspicious!
      Why, I haven’t done anything!!
      Precisely. Everybody else has.

  10. GF


    Are we a military state yet? How many war colleges do we need. Do they actually communicate with each other outside these sporadic war game exercises. Very scary stuff. Not mentioned in the above list are some of the coordinating units including – U.S. Army Intelligence Center and the U.S. Army Network Enterprise Technology Command located at Fort Huachuca AZ.

  11. tc10021

    Not sure of the belly-aching here, the folks authorizing these budgets were voted in by most of you. These systems take years to develop, so, Trump may not be your culprit.

    1. marku52

      Yup. Trump has almost nothing to do with this. It’s “Bipartisan”, like most bad stuff is these days.

  12. Colin Spenncer

    I totally agree with The Rev Kev. What this is about is squashing internal dissent regardless of how violent or pacific this dissent may become. The terrorist scenarios are just excuses for what they 1% really have in mind. Just think of what happened at Occupy Wall Street. That was just a prelude to the future.

    1. Wukchumni

      If you have a pressure cooker of a country like ours and never allow steam to vent off, the pressure building up must be enormous.

  13. kioseff

    This reminds me of an Adam Curtis blog post where he explored the possibility that spies and national security people are actually weirdo lunatics imposing on us their own paranoid, fantastical version of the world.

    I am filled with fear when I see evidence that our military minds don’t know very much about the world, are extremely ideological, or are guiding real policies through a dialogue with Hollywood instead of with the truth.

    Stanley Kubrick nailed all this long ago in Dr. Strangelove.

  14. Synoia


    Would that include the Koch brothers’ attacks?

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