December 2022 - AMERICAN PRAETORIANS

The Rock of Battle

Today is the day. The Lost comes to a close as war comes to Cor Chatha: The Rock of Battle. It has been a long road since 1st Platoon drove their Zodiacs into that unseasonable fog off the coast of Norway, and found themselves in this strange and haunted world. It has led them here. To face one of the mightiest armies on the face of the planet. *** War Has Come. The sorcerous rebellion within the Kingdom of Cor Legear was only the beginning. Now half a million men and monsters are on their way to invade the kingdom in the name of the Empire. All that stands in the way is the fortress of Cor Chatha. The Rock of Battle. Conor and his fellow Recon Marines have ridden ahead to scout the enemy and try to disrupt the advance. A recon platoon can only do so much against such an army, however. And the army is the least of their concerns. Monsters, sorcery, and ancient evils descend on the Rock, as the Marines and their allies prepare to make what might be their last stand. The Rock of Battle is available now on Kindle and in Paperback. ***

Dec Livestream – James Rosone and Ukraine

James Rosone joins us once again on the livestream tonight, to talk about the war in Ukraine. James has some unique insights on what led up to this, and he’s been digging deeply into what’s been happening. (He also dealt with the Ukrainian situation in his fiction way back in 2017.) We might well get into some uncomfortable truths about the war tonight. War is almost never as clear-cut or neat as the narrative (on either side) would have you believe. Tune in on Facebook or YouTube: While the livestream is currently only on YouTube and Facebook, we do have a Rumble account as well. Once that hits 100 subscribers, we can stream on Rumble, getting us out from under the Google thumb, so go check that out, too. This episode will be up on Rumble tomorrow.

Setting the Stage – Gradients of Warfare

The term “Fifth-Generation Warfare” has been getting bandied about a lot, lately. The YouTube channel “S2 Underground” even did a lengthy video about it, explaining its somewhat amorphous nature. In short, “Fifth-Generation War,” coming on the heels of “Fourth-Generation War,” which is supposed to be largely guerrilla-based, is so low-level that it’s hard to detect it at all. The full video is here, and well worth checking out: However, when you really start to dig into history, you see that while technology and the geopolitical situation might change some of the details, many of these forms of war have been around since time immemorial. Guerrilla warfare didn’t suddenly appear in the mid-20th century, and as you might have seen from the earlier Setting the Stage post on the T’ai Kung, the use of influence operations, bribery, and crime to plant the seeds of an adversary’s downfall from within is just as ancient. So, what if the whole “Generations of War” idea is bunk? In The Handbook of 5GW, Daniel H. Abbott introduces what he calls the “xGW Framework,” which, in his words, “rejects the theory of sequential emergence, and the Generations of Modern War (GMW) school that is associated with it. While