World War III Has Already Begun

World War III has already begun.

Nations from four continents are acting as belligerents in continually escalating conflicts across the globe. These conflicts, while currently limited in scope and geographically separated are likely to grow and coalesce into a wider and broader conflict.

Let's look at the current state of the globe.

Russia continues operations in Ukraine, and since early October, reports show that at least 10,000 North Korean troops are in Russia and have engaged Ukrainians in combat. These DRK personnel must have passed to Russia with Chinese assistance.

Russia continues to receive Iranian missile and UAV shipments, artillery shells from North Korea, microchips, semiconductors, thermal imaging equipment, turbojet engines for cruise missiles, and navigation equipment from China. The US, NATO and FVEY nations continue to back Ukraine with intelligence, funds, munitions, tanks and vehicles and military training.

Both Russia and China are asserting strong arm influence in Africa and South America, building critical infrastructure in exchange for loans with crushing interest rates, and purchasing African goods to dodge US, EU and UN embargoes. Both these nations commit millions of cyberattacks a day on the US and its allies, and hacking campaigns have targeting American political candidates in attempts to influence our elections. North Korea, as always, is a threat to the stability and safety of its southern neighbors.

China has surrounded Taiwan with warships thrice as part of military exercises and has rehearsed how they will blockade key ports on the island if they were ever to invade. They have committed acts of aggression against the vessels of the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan, to name a few, and have trespassed the exclusive economic zone of virtually every maritime country in Asia. They unabashedly sailed an intelligence vessel through the strait of Tsugaru in Japan, spied on the United States and our allies with intelligence balloons, and purchased US intelligence secrets from American traitors.

Israel continues its war on Hamas, and recently opened another front against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The US continues to send money and military equipment to assist Israel in these campaigns. Our enemies continue to spread propaganda to poison Americans against their own government in favor of terrorist organizations whose founding documents state their aims are to eradicate the nation of Israel and kill every Jew on the planet. Americans have protested in favor of those who have kidnapped and raped Israeli women and slaughtered Jewish infants in their cribs.

Since Hamas started the war on Oct 7, 2023—by launching more than 5,000 rockets at Israeli civilian targets and conducting raids of slaughter into Israeli homes—Iranian-Aligned Militia Groups have conducted hundreds of attacks on US military installations throughout the Middle East using weapons provided to them by Iran. In January, three US soldiers were killed by a drone attack on Tower 22 in Jordan. Iran is the leading sponsor of global terrorism, and currently trains, arms, and funds terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East and the world.

On October 1, Iran launched two barrages of 200 missiles each into Israel. Israel struck back the night of October 26, attacking Iran with hundreds of aircraft and destroying scores of military targets. In the counterstrike, Israel destroyed all of Iran's Russian-made S-300 Air Defense Artillery systems. But Iran is unlikely to roll over.

Historians Richard F. Hamilton and Holger W. Herwig "define a world war as one involving five or more major powers and with military operations on two or more continents."* The current state of world conflict meets this definition.

Of course, if one defines Iran and Israel, or even Russia, as regional rather than major world powers, one could argue it does not meet this definition. But now we are splitting hairs. For all intents, three major powers are involved in direct conflict (Russia, Iran, Israel) and five more are involved in direct support of one of the belligerents (US, Britain, Germany, France, China), seven if you consider Canada and Australia as major powers. This does not include the many regional powers, or smaller nations involved in the current conflicts. This is a world war.

We may view the conflict in Ukraine and the one in Israel as separate and unrelated, much like our predecessors who saw the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Italy's conquest of Ethiopia, and Germany's push into Poland as separate and unrelated conflicts. Contemporaries who lived these events separated them in their minds, yet in hindsight we teach them as interrelated causes of the Second World War. The conflicts in Israel and Ukraine are more interrelated than we currently believe, and that they will contribute in a correlating nature to escalation of global warfare. Escalation in one war will invariably lead to escalation in the other.

Similarly, we may see these conflicts as limited in scope, but we must remember that so were the first two world wars at the onset. World War I was initially isolated to Europe alone. Campaigns in Egypt and China were later developments. The US was isolationist and had no intention of getting involved in either that war, or World War II, and yet it did. In both the First and Second World Wars, very few contemporaries would have predicted they would escalate to the point that they did. And yet that is what occurred. While currently limited in scope, current conflicts will not remain that way. None of these conflicts are likely to deescalate, the Big Four (Russia, China, Iran and North Korea) are too proud to take a loss, while the nations they threaten cannot and will not allow themselves to be conquered, or attacked with impunity. There is only one likely course: that the wars will expand and grow and pull more and more nations into kinetic war. 

We may not be calling this a world war. But we must remember that neither of the first two world wars were called by those terms while they were being waged.

We cannot continue to cower in fear of a world war. It is already upon us. We should begin to stand up additional Brigades and Divisions now, in order to meet the impending challenge ahead.

The views expressed are my own and do not reflect the official position of the United States Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

My assessments are made based on my understanding of history and publicly available information, and not from any special knowledge as an Intelligence Officer.

*Richard F. Hamilton & Holger W. Herwig, Decisions for War, 1914-1917, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.

There Is A Kinder Holocaust

On January 10, 2022 the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee unanimously voted to remove Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman, from the eighth-grade curriculum for “rough, objectionable language” and depictions of nudity. This vote came in the wake of school district legal counsel informing the Board that (due to copyright issues) objectional language and nudity could not be redacted, which the school board had initially sought to do.

In a PBS interview on the matter, Spiegelman said “they want a kinder, gentler holocaust to present to their children.” His implication was that truth is being sacrificed for sensitivity.

Spiegelman’s words rubbed me the wrong way. For some reason I could not place, I felt he was wrong. While I agree that we cannot shy away from the horrors of the holocaust when teaching it to our children, I also find the images in Maus distasteful. Maus is not a book I would want to be included in my children's classroom instruction, even if the curse words and nudity were redacted.

I struggled to understand my own uneasiness. Spiegelman depicts piles of bodies, and mass hangings; things I myself had seen photos of when learning about the holocaust in school, and something I would not have a problem being shown to my children. What, then, was the problem with Maus?

A Summary of Grossman's Nonkiller Thesis

 An Enigma Explained

As a student of history, I was often confused by the numerical inconsistency in battle records of wars throughout time: for example, battles in the Crusades involving tens of thousands of soldiers, lasting more than eight hours, and yet resulting in only a couple hundred deaths. In the Battles of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution, after eight hours under fire the British force, numbering 1,500 had sustained only 73 KIA. While the loss of life in battle is lamentable and cannot be downplayed by mere appeals to proportions of casualties, percentages in the single digits during hours of battle (where the goal is, ostensibly, to kill one’s enemy) seemed strange to me. Why do we see such low casualty rates given the scale of many of these battles?

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and West Point psychology professor Dave Grossman’s Nonkiller Thesis resolves the enigma. Dr. Grossman found historical evidence that a surprising number of U.S. soldiers in the American Civil War, World War II, and the Korean War who never fired their weapon in battle (non-firers) and evidence of many soldiers throughout modern history firing their weapons, but purposely missing (non-aimers). His Nonkiller Thesis states that there is a psychological aversion to killing other humans, which has expressed itself as many (but not all) soldiers playing at war to appease their superior officers, while not actually putting much effort into killing their opponents. This phenomenon is “a resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.”[1] This is not just fun psychological speculation; Grossman has the historical documentation to support the existence of significant numbers of non-firers and non-aimers. Let’s examine what he found.

What the Scriptures Don't Say

In recent years I have encountered a bizarre and alarming need when teaching from scriptures–or even secular accounts–to not only discuss what the sources say but to elaborate on what they do not say. For example, the scriptural accounts of the Nativity do not mention the age of either Mary or Joseph. Nor is it ever mentioned that Jesus was born in a stable, merely that He was not born in the inn, and that He was placed in a manger (Luke 2:7, 12, 17). The assumption is that managers are located in stables, but the type of place where Christ was born is actually never mentioned; the manger could have been located in a cave or in an open coral, not necessarily in a stable building. The number of wise men is not stated, only that there were three gifts (Matthew 2:11), not three individuals. The plural form of the word “men” (Matthew 2:1) tells us there were at least two, but there could have been four, seven, or twenty-seven wise men. The wise men did not visit the Savior on his birth night, but an undisclosed amount of time later, in his house (Matthew 2:11).

The Problem of Polemic

Three related terms are often used in religious studies: polemics, apologetics, and neutral exposition.

Polemics are strong critical attacks about someone or something; in religious theology, polemics often take the form of attacks against religious institutions or religious doctrines. Apologetics is the religious discipline of defending religious doctrines through systematic argumentation and discourse, often in response to polemic criticisms. Neutral exposition seeks to describe and explain doctrines and facets of religion without engaging in either polemics or apologetics; neither praising nor criticizing.

The Impact of the Emancipation Proclamation

I was surprised to hear during a family history discussion that my daughters, students at a small county school in Upstate New York, have been taught by their history teachers that the Emancipation Proclamation “didn’t do anything”, or to put it more professionally than their ignorant instructors, was of little historical impact. This short article seeks to put that myth to rest. I will not delve into a graduate-level analysis of the impact of Lincoln’s executive action, although countless historians have done so; but merely address it from a secondary-school level of analysis.

Are Hurricanes Really Getting Worse?

In September 2019 I encountered a New York Times opinion piece by David Leonhardt that suggested that “Hurricanes Are Getting Worse” (the title of the article) and that this was caused by global climate change.  Not long after, in November of that same year, I encountered another opinion in the same paper that seemed to assume the correctness of the first: that climate change was making hurricanes worse, and that this could explain why “New York City’s subway system did not flood in its first 108 years, but Hurricane Sandy’s 2012 storm surge caused nearly $5 billion in water damage”.

Being a natural skeptic, I decided to crunch the numbers to verify if indeed climate change was affecting hurricanes.