It was a big week, filled with the new and the old all mixed together. A quick trip to Northern Virginia was the big deal, riding up as a passenger and driving back, in command of my own machine, rolling through what was familiar and is now changing to accommodate new needs.

Then the vaccination thing- Refuge Farm and all salaried staff is fully vaccinated. It was a modest effort on our part, well organized and efficient, but still a new sort of thing wrapped up in images we have seen before. Inflation. Gas shortage. Incredible political divide. And the world appears at war.

As an old national security apparatchik, this is the one that has me off balance. Some old comrades and shipmates were gathered just a year or so ago, and someone brought up “the number.” In this context, it was an effort to describe the number of wars in which members of the group had experienced. We were all Cold Warriors at one point, with one Main Enemy. Many had been to the Vietnam conflict. DESERT STORM was another, and of course the Global War on Terror. The rest of the operations, contingencies and covert actions were lumped into an awkward amalgam of motion and kinetic action.

There seemed to be general agreement on at least three and as many as five or six conflicts. But one thing they shared was that it mostly fit the old model- us versus them. Conflict ws a binary thing, one political (or religious) belief system against another. It was as simple as shrugging on an old jacket.

Like I said, I was distracted with local commitment early in the week, and while trying to capture the other events to which I had paid little attention, I realized life had lurched again. The Storie were interesting. Israel is under assault, more than a thousand rockets, most manufactured in Iran were fired from the Hamas redoubt in the Gaza Strip at civilian targets in the Jewish state. One landed in a school and killed 85 kids. What is happening there follows an old pattern. Hamas will do something provocative and the Israelis respond.

I tried to imagine the reaction here, if some mad Canadians fired a thousand rockets from Windsor across the river at Detroit. There would have been consequences. But that was just a part of the trouble happening around the globe. The Russians still have thousands of troops around Ukraine. NATO allies are anxious to have more force deployed to the East against Mr. Putin’s various adventures. Here at home, a cyber organization associated with other Cyrillic activities apparently was responsible for the malware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, crippling 45% of fuel distribution on our East Coast.

The company says they are getting back to work, but ti will take weeks to return to normal operations. To compensate, restrictions on rail and highway transport have been lifted. But it was big. Confronting the drive south a few days ago, I plotted the route to include a fuel stop at a station likely to be operating so I could arrive back at the farm with a full tank. The event certainly seems to meet the threshold of a national security disaster. Some say if Mr. Putin is involved, it was an act of war.

Iranian speedboats harass our ships in the Persian Gulf and north Arabian Sea. Shots have been fired in warning to them, so we are actually already in a shooting situation.

That is just what is happening to the east of us. To the South, it appears the cartels have leveraged the “children in need” requirement to make ICE and DHS partners in distributing kids in crisis to places deep in the heartland where they may be exploited in the vilest way. It makes our government a partner in the greatest human trafficking operation in history, accepting custody of the unaccompanied kids at the Border, and then transporting them to cartel operatives cloaked as family in cities across America.

And to the West? China is building a formidable navy and threatens what it claims to be part of itself- the “independent” nation of Taiwan. The idea of a maritime conflict is real and building, and could subject us to military action thousands of miles away while Eastern Europe confronts the Russian Army. And there is blood being spilled on the streets of Jerusalem.

That is a multi-polar world, for sure. Much of it doesn’t seem to like us. I have only been called to three wars and a handful of ambiguous actions. But it used to be much easier to get oriented. It is a new sort of world, and we are in domestic conflict about how things used to work, and how many would like it to work. We will see about that. Everyone in the circle that discussed numbers is now too old to be called back.

We used to know what to do and how to act. I am not sure anymore. I guess we will have to see how the New World is going to work. Given what is going on, It should be interesting. I am done counting. The number are getting too big to keep straight.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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