Bracken: Operation Jade Conditioning

Western Rifle Shooters – by Matt Bracken

First, let’s cover what Joint Military Exercise Jade Helm 15 is not: it is not a covert plan for the military to conquer the Southwest and institute martial law. And no, the hundreds of special operations troops and thousands of other military personnel taking part in Jade Helm 15 are not bad guys who are out to establish tyranny in America. Those are straw man arguments, posited to be rejected.  

But the elimination of the straw men does not mean that Jade Helm 15 is benign. Reality check, please: does anybody reading this seriously believe that President Obama is contemplating dropping thousands of American troops across an area as vast as the space covered by Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Egypt? If you believe that, then I will give you a special discount when you buy any two of the eleven New York metro area bridges and tunnels that I currently own.

Many will say, “But the Green Berets have been doing this kind of thing with exercises like Robin Sage for years and years. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s no big deal.” These people are either paid shills, or well-meaning but naïve dupes. Note the motto of Jade Helm 15: “Master the human domain.” From our military to our intelligence agencies to federal law enforcement, Social Network Analysis is a booming field, a field which is now stretched to include imposters and liars paid by the post to influence social media trends. This government-sponsored social media influencing begins in the understandable realm of legitimate foreign counter-terrorism, but today the all-seeing eye is increasingly aimed inward at perceived domestic threats.

FTX Robin Sage and similar legitimate exercises typically take place across a few counties and involve coordination at the sheriff and state police level. The volunteer role-players are often old Special Forces guys or local farmers. One of them that I know was a decorated MACV/SOG hero who for years after his retirement played a mysterious guerrilla chieftain for the newbie Q-coursers. And in a younger age, I ran with a crowd that that pretended to blow up radio towers, bridges and fuel dumps with simulated demolition charges. We also did cross-country movements and escape and evasion training exercises in and out of uniform with a variety of weapons. This was done with the knowledge of the local authorities, to avoid people getting shot due to misidentification when crossing public and private spaces.

But Robin Sage and other training exercises were never scaled up to become regional show-stopping extravaganzas spread across six large Western states, requiring real-time coordination between multiple governors, state police departments, county and city law enforcement jurisdictions, federal law enforcement agencies, and active duty military units from all branches of the service. No, Jade Helm is not Robin Sage. It’s not even Robin Sage on steroids.

Will there be Robin Sage elements to Jade Helm? Of course. Embedded reporters will no doubt be sending back live video, visually establishing the overtly benign and beneficial impact of the exercise as Green Berets and SEALs freefall and fast-rope into their insertion points. An analysis of some of the information gleaned from the Jade Helm 15 informational packet suggests that some of the spec-ops troops will participate in cross-country movements of greater than fifty miles, humping rifles and rucks from Texas into New Mexico among other land routes. But that camo-paint and boot-leather Robin Sage visual is just camouflage for the genuine objectives of Jade Helm 15, which in my opinion are twofold:

First: conditioning Americans to accept increasingly frequent and intrusive military and paramilitary police actions up close and personal. These will include low-altitude over-flights by military aircraft at all hours, plus roadblocks, checkpoints and denied out-of-bounds areas declared during so-called “realistic military training exercises” in and around Anytown, USA. Some of the military participants might be dressed as civilians, or even as enemy terrorists—foreign or domestic. That is to say, the troops will not necessarily be identifiable to John Q. Public as good old G.I. Joe. Instead, they might be dressed up like Jihad John, or even Redneck Jake. We will be told to mind our business, stay indoors, and trust those in authority who can see “the big picture.”

“Hey Martha, what’s all that noise and commotion? It sounds like World War Three is breaking out across the highway downtown!”

“Oh, don’t worry, George. The Army is just doing another urban warfare drill. I saw it on TV.”

Google keywords like “military drill training exercise urban warfare helicopters” and see how many of our cities have already been treated to simulated “Black Hawk Down” battles, complete with booming explosions, midnight helicopters swooping at rooftop level, and plenty of ratatat-tat. Step by step we are being conditioned to living in a battlefield state of mind. Full dress rehearsals for all-out urban warfare are becoming the new normal in the Land of the Free.

To what purpose? Well, to what purpose does the chef slowly turn up the heat under the frog pot? If and when the time comes that the federal government decides to eliminate some pesky nests of sedition in the name of national security, folks living just a few miles away will simply yawn and change television channels, placid as cows chewing cud. Operation Jade Conditioning: mission accomplished.

The second objective of Joint Military Exercise Jade Helm 15 is to practice simultaneously operating all of the control levers of armed federal power on American soil, from major military units and federal law enforcement agencies down to the state police and local law enforcement. (Posse Comitatus? Heavens, no. It’s just a training exercise!)

When the time comes to eliminate those pockets of bitterly-clinging dead-enders standing in the way of social progress that Team Obama seems to hate with far greater vigor than it hates the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, the federal bosses will already know which county sheriffs and chiefs of police are “reliable.” That is, reliable in the KGB or Stasi meaning of the world. Click your heels, Sheriff, and set up the roadblocks as instructed. It’s a federal order! Do it just like we did it last year.

Again, it’s Operation Jade Conditioning. Ditto for our generals being conditioned to take orders from civilian bureaucrats for military deployments directly into American cities and towns.

That’s my opinion. Or, you can choose to believe that President Obama is actually getting our military primed and ready for simultaneous spec-ops team insertions across the entire Middle East from Egypt to Iran, and Syria to Yemen, the same geographical area covered by Joint Military Exercise Jade Helm 15.

It’s your choice to believe that, if you wish.

https://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/bracken-operation-jade-conditioning/