LoD 108 El Imperio Contraataque (The Empire Strikes Back): Fighting the War to Retain the American Southwest Part 4, An Ounce of Prevention…

Copyright (c) 2016, 2025 Thomas P. Kratman

We need to start getting ready for this now. Maybe we can head it off before it comes to pass. Maybe we can mitigate it if, or, more likely, when, it does. Maybe we can set it up so that we can win it with the least possible bloodshed and necessary tyranny. Maybe we’ll fail at all that but we still should at least try.

In the very first column that led this series of series, I talked about building the wall.[1] We should start doing that now or as soon as Trump takes office, as I am beginning to expect he will. It should have sufficient observation towers for complete coverage, said towers to be small arms proof up to 14.5mm[2], equipped with either light amplifying scopes or thermal imagers, and with machine gun pintles fixed. They shouldn’t have the machine guns, not quite yet, but we can certainly let the order for four of five thousand of them with FN Manufacturing, the local branch of Fabrique Nationale Herstal. The wall, as mentioned back in March, should be mostly a barrier and a wall only in places subject to sniping. The coast guard should probably be expanded to deal with attempts to circumvent the wall via the sea.

Four or five thousand towers implies forty or fifty thousand new members of the Border Patrol for the wall alone.

In addition, they need several battalions of police trained in riot control. I’d suggest one grouping of five hundred to one thousand men, each, based at San Diego, Yuma, Sierra Vista, El Paso, Shafter, Del Rio, Laredo, and McAllen. (I said “men” and I meant men; women have little real place in riot control. As far as I can tell, their sole useful roles are a) in detaining and carting off women involved in the riot and b) infiltrating the riot, which can be risky, indeed. For the rest it’s muscle work and steel hard discipline.) Forget using the Army’s Civil Disturbance manual for training them; the old one was horse manure and, while the newer one, 3-19-15, has kept up with technology to some extent, it’s still largely a product of intellectual exercise, not informed by much practical experience or testing, and completely misses the proper scale of the thing. Just ask, O Border Patrol, and I’ll find you a dozen veterans of the old 193^rd Infantry Brigade (Canal Zone) who know how it’s to be done.[3]