Matt Schmidt, PhD

This essay explores the Eurasianist idea that underlays Putin’s theory for war in Ukraine, and suggests that he is not deterrable as Western policy understands the idea.

… the progressive collapse, first of the German state and then of theGerman idea itself took itscourse  Germany was not merely wholly defeated in1919; it ceased to exist as a coherent nation, waiting in a state of rancor to be told what it was supposed to be doing.

–Nicholas Fraser, describing the final days of WWI. (Harper’s, April 2002.)

Like Germany in the decade after Versailles, the 1990s for Russia have seen not only the implosion of the Soviet State and its sustaining idea but also the failure of the original democratic impulse that gave birth to Yeltsin’s federation as well as the subsequent dissolution, if not outright collapse, of the democratic-federative idea at its core. With the economic collapse in 1998 and the ascension to power of Vladimir Putin in 1999, Russian political elites were desperately searching for an alternative political philosophy to what they saw as an increasingly corrupt and emasculating situation. In the words of one commentator, many in Russia saw Putin’s official election in 2000 as marking, “… a clear watershed dividing the different historical epochs. In their search for an ideological framework for the future, many in Russia are looking to the past.”¹

To end what many saw as a decade of humiliation at the hands of the “West”, a new idea of national self-determination (samo-stoiatel’nost‘) was required – one that would be able to reconstitute an otherwise atrophied pride of belonging, provide an organizing principle for both domestic and foreign policy, and provide a rallying point for a broad cross-section of groups living across the territory of the former Soviet Union. What has emerged is the philosophy of a “Eurasian” cultural, spiritual, and political identity that ostensibly transcends any specific national appellation, but which could easily provide a philosophical argument around which a reinvigorated Russian nationalist movement might rally. This neo-Eurasianist movement is led today by Aleksandr Gel’evich Dugin, a man whose political influence is reflected in his role as the chief adviser to the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament (Duma), and as a frequently cited expert on geopolitics within the Russian military establishment

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(Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on December 8, 2014)

On November 24, U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced the latter’s resignation as secretary. National media have stressed that Hagel served “less than two years in the job” (according to the Washington Post, which the New York Times changed to “on the job”). The point of this is to emphasize that, as TIME put it, Hagel is in “retreat” from a “Pentagon under fire.”

But Hagel has, in fact, served longer than Obama’s first SecDef, Leon Panetta. And even Robert Gates, Panetta’s predecessor originally nominated by President Bush, only enjoyed a two-and-a-half-year tenure under the current administration. Thus, Hagel’s time in office is actually about average for Obama. To be sure, the norm for this administration’s Defense Secretaries is markedly truncated when compared to recent U.S. administrations. (See this handy chart.) Part of the reason for this is that Donald Rumsfeld, who ceded the job to Gates in 2006, happens to be the second-longest serving Department of Defense head in history—just ten days more and he would have been the longest. Given this recent history, the two-year average under Obama comes off as particularly stark. But the media’s crude emphasis on term length is not just misleading—it also misses the point entirely.

What is most telling about this case is not the seemingly abridged nature of Hagel’s term. It is, instead, the administration’s relative openness about the reasons for his departure. Indeed, neither Hagel nor the White House has really challenged the narrative that Hagel is resigning—or perhaps was pushed out—because of insurmountable disagreements with the Obama administration’s current policies in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. What has changed, fundamentally, is not Hagel’s stance but rather that of the administration. Hagel initially befriended Obama in the Senate, where they were united in their opposition to the Iraq War. The former secretary then came to the Pentagon with the intention of winding down the war in Afghanistan. As he leaves his post, however, the Obama administration is deploying 3,000 U.S. troops back to Iraq, and just negotiated a deal to let the 10,000 troops remaining in Afghanistan conduct combat operations for the foreseeable future. In the administration’s view, the ongoing Syrian Civil War and the rise of ISIS have birthed a new security environment, constituting a revised stance from U.S. policymakers. Given this new dynamic, both the president and the former secretary seem to be in agreement that Hagel is no longer suited for a top leadership position. Yet the fact that they were able to make that decision in a way that largely avoided scandal is a testament to both men’s professionalism.

Focusing on the timescale of Hagel’s tenure and the new security moment that has resulted in his departure also undercuts his other noteworthy achievements. Besides Afghanistan, Hagel’s top priority while in office was to get the defense community—accustomed as it was to bloated, no-questions-asked budgets—to accept the sequester cuts put in place back in 2011. He has done that job well, even managing to push through the biggest force reduction since the “peace dividend”of the 1990s. As part of this effort, Hagel has also been especially successful in getting both the Army and Marines to reduce their current active-duty troop strength, the latter force to its smallest numbers since the Second World War.  In fact, only President Dwight Eisenhower, the best-known Army officer of his day, was as successful at cutting infantry in response to a changing security environment. Although they initially put up a fight, the two services eventually did the mature thing and placed their individual service interests behind those of the country as a whole.

Credit for facilitating that compromise goes largely to Hagel, who was able to get the Joint Chiefs to support cutting the Army to its smallest size since World War II. Their support was the critical variable in avoiding a long, vicious fight with Congress and the cumbersome military bureaucracy. Also key were Hagel’s connections in Congress and his time served as an infantryman in Vietnam, which afforded him a measure of protection from charges that he was anti-Army or anti-Marine.

Hagel did his work quietly for Washington, which, frankly, was part of what endeared him to Obama, another politician who has earned a reputation for even-tempered composure (perhaps even to a fault). But this demeanor was also, evidently, what prevented Hagel from ever fitting in with Obama’s less demure national security staff. The former secretary’s more laidback approach to meetings caused him to lose policy debates during key instances in which decisions began to solidify. He reportedly preferred to let these critical moments pass in order to instead wait for a private word with the president. But it is ultimately White House staff that frames the President’s choices—and once that frame is set, it is unlikely that later meetings will change the course of a decision.

It would seem that, on ISIS and Afghanistan at least, Hagel lost these crucial framing debates. Given the increasing discord between his own conception of those conflicts and the president’s, both men appear to have reached the same conclusion. On Friday, the president nominated former Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter to replace Hagel. Carter will likely be a war secretary, executing the fights against ISIS and the Taliban in a way that his predecessor never could. But while Hagel may have lost out, the way both he and President Obama have succeeded in putting country over career should be a model for future leaders.

(Co-written with Christopher Shays and Originally Published at RollCall on September 11, 2014)

Ukraine can defeat the separatists but it can’t defeat Russia. For Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to build a strong Ukrainian state, independent of Moscow, he first must secure a cease fire.

All paths to victory for Kiev require Russia exit the battlefield. The problem is there’s no way for Ukraine to force this militarily.

That’s why Poroshenko should call on NATO leaders this week to commit to a peacekeeping force in eastern Ukraine. That guilt-ridden alliance should jump at the chance to draw a line against Russia’s Putin in Ukraine, where it will have a real deterrent effect. By sending NATO troops into Ukraine as peacekeepers, the West will signal its resolve against Moscow’s imperial intentions, while better securing Kiev’s political and economic future.

Congress should support Ukraine by passing a resolution supporting the deployment of U.S. troops as peacekeepers. President Obama has already taken a half-step, sending 200 soldiers on a peacekeeping exercise. Senators Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., have already called for sending weapons to Ukraine. The more effective move would be to send U.S. and NATO peacekeepers.

Funneling weapons to Ukraine also won’t make a difference. Ukrainian troops don’t have time to train with and master the kinds of arms they need to counter Russia. Moreover, Russia ended Ukrainian air superiority by providing the separatists with surface-to-air missiles. Ukrainian troops now operate on battlefields where enemy artillery can move and fire with little risk of being attacked from the air.

The number of separatists is now greater than the number of troops Ukraine can field. And Ukraine says there are 15,000 Russian troops fighting alongside the separatists. At best, Kiev has been able to put 12,000 soldiers into the fight on any given day. To put this into context, when the U.S. Army fights in urban environments, military doctrine calls for a three-to-one advantage at minimum; and that’s with tactically superior troops against second-tier defenders.

Moreover, the mix of “holidayers” from Russian special forces, and separatists (many of whom are Soviet veterans) means the rebels are the more experienced and better trained fighting force. Add in the Russian conscripts being sent into the fight, and the reality of the situation is clear: Moscow is fighting a war of attrition against Kiev.

It’s a war Kiev can’t win. Every time Ukraine puts the rebels on the ropes, Putin simply adds more and better troops to bolster his side  . . .  500 today, 1,000 tomorrow. Even if Poroshenko’s government could match the numbers, Putin will beat him with superior troops and weapons.

This is why NATO needs to put peacekeepers in Ukraine. They’d be a tangible sign of the West’s resolve to halt Putin’s expansionism.

Of course, Putin would almost certainly respond to NATO by putting Russian “peacekeepers” on his side of the line of demarcation. There is risk in this for the West. There will be great unease at having Russian and U.S. forces so close. NATO and Soviet troops spent decades in similar proximity during the Cold War. We can manage the stand-off safely.

Ukraine has become something bigger than itself. It’s a symbol for the West’s core moral interest in democracy and self-determination. If those words mean anything, they’re worth at least as much risk in NATO’s European home, as the alliance has accepted in Afghanistan for far lesser goals.

It won’t be easy for Poroshenko to accept the temporary loss of key land, but a sober assessment of the military balance shows that there’s no military solution for him. He must push for peacekeepers now before the battlefield situation further deteriorates. Inserting western peacekeepers is the best remaining move for Ukraine. It would trigger a freezing of the conflict, but with NATO peacekeepers it wouldn’t give Putin the leverage over Ukraine’s future that he wants. With a strong U.S. presence the hot-war could be frozen be on terms that would safeguard Ukraine’s long-term future. This is why Congress should act now. Both Presidents, Poroshenko and Obama, need the push.

Such a frozen conflict would give Kiev the moral high-ground, and is a step above the faux federalism Russia wants. Ukrainian nationalism would strengthen in the Russian-occupied east as the differences between the Russian and Europeanized zones grew.

The West knows how to win back occupied territories. It’s the model that broke the Soviet Union’s power over a divided Germany. The process may take years, but it stands a better chance of success than pressing the fight against a much stronger enemy.

With NATO and EU help, Ukraine could build a strong economy and the capable military it needs to stand as a bulwark against Russia and ensure its long-term independence.

(Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on March 31, 2014)

Any further Russian annexation of parts of eastern or southern Ukraine will follow the Crimea model. The fevered discussion about massed troops on the Ukrainian border misunderstands Putin’s operational model. Notably, the most interesting element of Putin’s takeover of Crimea was that, needing a highly disciplined force, he deployed the Russian special forces, the Spetsnaz, not because they are the best killers in the military, but rather because they would be least likely to cause a bloodbath. It is critical to understand that the purpose of massing conventional forces is to signal the Kremlin’s seriousness, and not primarily to preposition troops to seize territory. The conventional forces build-up is primarily there to buttress the psychological part of the operation and act as a follow-on force if needed. The mere presence of troops on the border acts as a deterrent, to intimidate first the provisional government in Kiev, and, second, NATO.

In the case of a Russian takeover of additional Ukrainian territory, if it occurs, Russia’s core mission will fall to the special forces. How those same forces conducted their mission in Crimea provides a blueprint for understanding what such a mission would look like on the ground. The three main objectives for Russian special forces in Crimea seem to have been the following:

1. Keep local pro-Russian militias from causing casualties among ethnic minority or opposition populations.
2. Seize key infrastructure, especially the gas line junction at Strelkovoye, which sits on Ukrainian territory.
3. Contain Ukrainian forces while avoiding the actual use of force.

Strategic success rested on achieving these operational objectives in order to create a fait accompli before the “West” could mobilize a countermove.

A move by Russian forces into eastern and southern Ukraine would look similar. Indeed, it strains credulity to think that Russian special forces are not already in place in these areas. Putin’s otherwise absurd insistence that what looked like Spetsnaz troops were just “local self-defense forces” wearing knock-off military uniforms served a purpose. The disciplined repetition of this line by senior Kremlin officials was a critical part of the psychological warfare being conducted in support of the ground operation. The denial maintained an exit for Putin in the case actual local defense forces or sparked violence, or actual special forces did. Having that option allowed Putin to move forces in with confidence because the deployment itself did not represent a final decision to annex as long as the thin veneer of deniability remained. Kiev, Washington, and Brussels all shared in this fiction about “local” defense forces. No one pushed too hard against it because they assumed it was Putin’s way of preserving a face-saving exit strategy for himself. It was. But it was also what allowed him to move with such speed and assurance.

The same basic model is almost surely in place along the Ukrainian border, with some key exceptions. First, the absence of legal cover for the presence of troops is a problem. In Crimea, Russia could legally put 25,000 troops on the peninsula. That’s roughly the number of U.S. forces still in the whole of Afghanistan, a much larger geographic area. Lacking that cover is all the more reason to use special forces instead of conventional ones.

Second, the lack of a clear termination line, a geographic boundary marking the furthest extent of the operation, is a problem. On the peninsula of Crimea, this was not an issue. In eastern Ukraine, it begs the question of how much popular support for annexation is enough to support the military operation. In Crimea, the ethnic Russian population did not comprise more than 60 percent of the peninsula. And even in that population there was less than 100 percent support, so the mandate for annexation was weak.

Ethnic Russians who also supported the ‘deposed’ President Viktor Yanukovich in elections (Yanukovich is viewed as ‘deposed’ in Moscow) are an overwhelming majority in four administrative regions: Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Zaporizhia, In this case, maintaining the public argument that what happened in Kiev was an illegal takeover of power provides Putin a rationale for further intervention, if he wants to.

Again, Putin is preserving options. He has a strong incentive to have significant numbers of special forces already in place, doing what special forces do: engaging with communities, organizing rallies, and supporting local leaders that further the strategic mission. Even so, as long as the official line is that local forces are doing all the organizing and agitating, then Putin keeps an exit open. Absent a worst-case scenario, if conventional forces move across the border, it will be to formalize the results of a battle that was already won by special forces and supported by local populations. Any kind of military countermove by the West would thus be nearly impossible. Putin has created a situation where the only way to get at his main Spetsnaz elements is to engage in a counterinsurgency; no one has the stomach for that kind of fight. So long as Putin has the will to create a partially artificial insurgency against Kiev, he retains this type of deterring capability.

If a further move into Ukraine is in the offing, western analysts should pay attention to Zaporizhzhia. Taking this region puts Russian forces tantalizingly close to the wellhead at Strelkovye and a land-bridge into Crimea. If I were Putin, this would be a tier-one aim.

Any further Russian annexation efforts will take place before the May 25^th Ukrainian elections. Any later than mid-May, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) election monitoring teams, other international observers, and the results of the election itself will cause problems for the public relations requirements of the operation.

While a further Russian invasion is not inevitable, the likelihood of it happening is considerably higher than 50/50. The costs of the sanctions are already figured into Putin’s calculations, and the United States will speed up liquid natural gas exports no matter what happens now, so why not take what can be taken? Only novel, unexpected, responses are likely to cause Putin to redo his strategic calculations. The question is if the United States and Europe can come up with any.

(Originally Published at ForeignPolicy on November 6, 2012)

The U.S. Army doesn’t seem to want to be an army. Or, rather, they seem to want to be half an army, like (no offense) the Marines! They want to do the first part of war, the invasion part, but not the less glamorous, more difficult, messy part that is occupation. The Army’s seeming disdain for doing the work of occupying a place after the Hollywood scenes of major combat are over betrays a culture that just doesn’t get the nature of (modern) war.

To be clear, plenty of individual people in the Army do understand the importance of thinking about the post-combat phase of warfare, but the institutional culture, the code of language, and behavior that dominates the everyday world of the Army is decidedly focused on the minutiae of combat tactics.

Put another way, the Army has lost a clear sense of what makes it different from the other services. The Navy and Air Force can fight. The Marines can fight. But only the Army can occupy. This is the essential difference in the services when you strip away all the trivia. Armies are built to occupy places. They are meant to be the big ground force that sweeps over an area and sits on it. The Navy can project power to ‘turn’ a stubborn mule of a regime back in the right direction. The Air Force can heavily influence the ground game by providing air-space superiority for troops, and it can project power like the Navy. And the Marines can kick in the door to places and conduct small-scale land operations for limited periods of time.

But only the Army is big enough to extend control over the ground across an entire chunk of the planet for any length of time.

Of course this usually (but not always) means fighting conventional battles against other forces similarly armed. So I’m not saying that major combat isn’t part of the Army’s mission. But no other service can do what the Army should be designed to do after the first part of the fight is done. No other service can control the crucial space where real human beings live, engage in trade, or practice politics. We like to imagine the art of war as being about winning the fight. But at the highest level, as Tom pointed out in his most recent Atlantic article, generalship “must link military action to political results.” This is, of course, just a restating of Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war should be understood as the continuation of political policy. Yet most of Army culture is relentlessly tactical in nature, even in the staff college where I teach.

I’ve always been curious about this reading of military history. If you think of the history of the Army as the story of the battles it fought from the Revolutionary War to today, of course this is what you see. But a deeper reading of history shows that the Army fought battles in order to occupy and administer large swaths of territory with large populations for far more of its history. The battles of the Civil War gave way to the occupation of the reconstruction era, a period of time that had troops engaged in occupation operations three times as long as they had combat. If you count the history of westward expansion, most of the work the Army did involved a kind of armed public-administration, not Indian conquest. The same is true of the Spanish American war, which saw U.S. troops conducting counterinsurgency and civil affairs for years after in the Philippines. Add in the post-WWII occupations of Germany and Japan, the long, tedious mix of combat and occupation in Vietnam, and the extended occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and it’s overwhelmingly clear that the Army’s main historical work has been occupation, not battle.

But we teach “operational art” and “strategy” as though fighting battles is the only work of an army. It isn’t. It never has been. At best it’s only half of what an army is asked to do and it often isn’t the most important part. We wonder how the Army fits into strategic frameworks like the new AirSeaBattle, all the while ignoring the obvious. We skimp on exploring the problems of using military force to achieve the political ends that are the purpose of occupations, and effectively define the work of generals and their staffs too narrowly, as a stringing together of a series of battles in order to gain a military-strategic aim. We pay relatively little attention to thinking about the work of generals as stringing together actions best thought of not as battles, but as the problems associated with using the resources that accompany military occupations to build political regimes that further our interests.

What we should be doing is devoting a much greater share of our time examining how the best generals in history conducted occupations after the main fighting was done. This isn’t just the generalship of the future, it’s the generalship of the vast bulk of “military” history. Fighting is about the tactics of the battlefield. Winning is about securing the victories of those battlefields. Neither the Navy, the Air Force, or the Marines can secure battlefield victories where they ultimately matter — where people live. That’s the Army’s mission. We should recognize that mission as being at least as important as winning in combat. And we should educate, promote, and fire our military leaders to reflect that reality.

(Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on November 20, 2012)

A quick post-election comment. President Obama’s re-election is likely to ensure that the strategic posture of the U.S. military will resemble what Eisenhower did after Korea. So it’s worth recalling what that posture looked like, and what the political logic was underneath it.[1]

Eisenhower’s “New Look” program came out of his conviction that the proper objective of the military was to prevent, not fight, wars. This would be especially true in the just dawning nuclear age. The former Supreme Allied Commander saw his “most frustrating domestic problem” as dealing with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose service parochialism put the interests of their branches over that of the country. Eisenhower lamented that the standard for picking heads of the Services was contorted. “Character rather than intellect, and moral courage rather than mere professional skill,” he wrote, should be the main qualifications for the job. By the summer of 1953 the Service Chiefs had been replaced, and by December of that year the New Look was made official policy. This vignette is not being offered to imply the same is true today for our current Joint Chiefs. Rather, history shows how even a military-hero president can face an obstructionist Pentagon. Cutting forces when one is not a military-hero president must be an even harder sell to troops, even if the logic is sound.

Ike handed 40% of the military budget to a single service: the Air Force. He split the rest between the Navy and Army. The Army—his former service—took particularly deep cuts, shrinking from one and a half million men to one million by 1955. The Navy and Marines took lesser, but still large cuts as well. Conversely, the Air Force actually expanded by 20,000 men. Asked by his own party’s Senate leadership to explain the differences between his and his Army Chief General Matt Ridgway’s perspectives, Eisenhower replied that he had to consider “the very delicate balance between national debt, taxes and expenditures.” The service chiefs didn’t. He went on to dismiss Ridgway’s concern about possible scenarios for when a bigger Army might be needed as mere “theory,” arguing that the only real threat to the nation was a nuclear attack by air. Any other talk about projecting ground troops overseas was “perfect rot.”

The parallels to today are striking, if not perfect. What is exactly the biggest threat to the nation is not nearly as clear. Obviously terrorist groups pose a threat to the country, but nowhere to the extent that the Soviet Union did in 1953. And there’s a strong argument to be made that the biggest “threat” to the nation actually comes from overreaction to the terrorist threat. Spending trillions on defense to fight an enemy that spends millions, if even that, seems like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. To be clear, when your enemies don’t worry much about innocent casualties and you do, your costs are going to be appropriately higher. But our strategy for combating the terrorist threat over the last decade has amounted to picking the most expensive alternative with little evidence that the extra cost of occupying two countries for over a decade made us any safer than more limited responses would have.

At some point overkill becomes a strategic threat, as, in Ike’s words, using too many tax dollars for defense “[dries] up the accumulations of capital that are necessary to provide jobs for the millions of new workers that we must absorb each year.”

It’s worth remembering that while a dollar on defense might spur at best $1.50 in return on investment, a dollar spent on roads or bridges returns more than twice as much. Even better, a dollar spent on education produces up to $10 in returns. The shift toward Asia and the Air-Sea-Battle concept is the Obama administration’s New Look policy on defense. It recognizes the second and third order costs involved with large-scale deployments,[2] and it shifts priority to preventing wars, not fighting them.

This should be a welcome development for everyone with the nation’s best interests at heart.

(Originally Published at Georgetown Journal of International Affairs on August 28, 2012

Imagine Tea Party extremists seizing control of a South Carolina town and the Army being sent in to crush the rebellion. This farcical vision is now part of the discussion in professional military circles.

So began an editorial in the Washington Times last week that ended with a not-very-veiled call for the dismissal of retired COL. Kevin Benson from the Army’s University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies because of a scenario paper, “Full-spectrum Operations in the Homeland,” published in the Small Wars Journal. (Full disclosure: I know COL. Benson. He and his co-author, Jennifer Weber from the University of Kansas, told me they are not commenting on the controversy.)

Then this week brought news that the farcical part may well have been only that the scenario was set in South Carolina rather than Texas.

Judge Tom Head of Lubbock County, TX (confusingly “judge” here means he’s the chief administrative official of the county) declared he wanted to raise a special tax in order to pay for extra police to defend Lubbock against the coming assault of socialistic UN storm troopers that President Obama would send in to quell the inevitable “Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe” that will come should the sitting president of the United States be re-elected and have the chance to enact his secret elders of Zion plan to hand over the sovereignty of the country to the illuminati of the new world order. You see, in Judge Head’s head the reelection of Obama would lead the right-thinking ‘real’ Americans of Lubbock and elsewhere to take up arms to “get rid of the guy [POTUS]”.

Here’s the key offending passage from Benson and Weber, the one the Times called “cartoonish and needlessly provocative”:

“In May 2016 an extremist militia motivated by the goals of the “tea party” movement takes over the government of Darlington, South Carolina, occupying City Hall, disbanding the city council, and placing the mayor under house arrest.  Activists remove the chief of police and either disarm local police and county sheriff departments or discourage them from interfering.  In truth, this is hardly necessary.  Many law enforcement officials already are sympathetic to the tea party’s agenda, know many of the people involved, and have made clear they will not challenge the takeover.  The militia members are organized and have a relatively well thought-out plan of action.”

Here’s Judge Head:

“Now what’s going to happen if we do that [re-elect Obama], if the public decides to do that? He’s going to send in U.N. troops. I don’t want ‘em in Lubbock County. OK. So I’m going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say ‘you’re not coming in here’.

And the sheriff, I’ve already asked him, I said ‘you gonna back me’ he said, ‘yeah, I’ll back you’. Well, I don’t want a bunch of rookies back there. I want trained, equipped, seasoned veteran officers to back me.”

(Read the full crazy here.)

I’ll give you a minute to digest.

Done? Great.

Judge Head might be a cartoon were he not an actual official. But he’s not. He’s a real person, holding a real position of power, living in a real place, purportedly talking about a real sheriff. Is the problem that Benson and Weber are being provocative or eerily prescient?

And let’s not forget that just a few months ago a sitting governor of Texas and presidential candidate maintained the state’s right to secede from the Union.

The Times insists this was a terribly “wrongheaded” thing to do. But what they really meant was “impolitic.” As the trolls on the comment boards insisted, if Benson and Weber had only used a modifier other than “tea party” in their scare quotes all would be well. But why should they? It’s not like the Earth Liberation Front has a sitting governor and presidential candidate openly suggesting the possibility of secession. There’s no “green party” judge in Oregon declaring he wants to raise a local militia to save the town’s trees by combating the WTO’s armada of private jets that surely a President Romney would use in order to hand over sovereignty of the nation to a cabal of transnational darwinian-capitalist corporations.

There’s only one mainstream political movement that talks like this.

Judge Head didn’t come up with his crazy-talk all by himself. He was helped along the way by movement leaders more adept at code-switching language than himself. That he merely connected the dots too many movement leaders put in front of him just shows what energizing the base in this manner can lead to.

It’s not an accident that Dr. Weber is a Civil War expert. Few people thought the South was serious about taking Ft. Sumter, either.