Ep 089 "The CG Mailbag: Question Time [Fall 2026]""

Bill Buppert (0:08)

The Army doesn't like more than one disaster in a day. It looks bad in the newspapers and upsets civilians at their breakfast.

I'm Bill Buebert, retired Army officer and irregular warfare practitioner and scholar. Welcome to Chasing Ghosts, an Irregular Warfare Podcast, the show that examines the mythos, loss history, bad thinking, martial malpractice and government incompetence that informs so much of irregular warfare. Today I want to peek behind the curtain at the vast machinery and briar patch politics of insurgency and counterinsurgency and everything in between. Now let's go ghost hunting together.

Hello, this is Bill and welcome to Episode 89 of Chasing Ghosts, an Irregular Warfare Podcast. The title of this episode will be The CG Mailbag Question Time, Fall 2026

So apologies for stepping out of my fortnightly cadence and being at a twice fortnightly cadence. But due to the arrival of my ninth grandchild, God bless us, and the arrival of a hurricane, in which I thought that for the first time here in the Florida Gulf, this summer would be the only summer in which we didn't suffer any hurricanes whatsoever. Well, I was proved wrong by Mother Nature. We weathered the storm. House is intact. We are vertical and alive. But the rear fence of our property was assaulted by feral trees. And after a considerable amount of work to include chainsaws, hauling much foliage, and have yet to repair the fence, not too bad, but we'll be able to do that.

We fared rather well. We were the recipients of what's called a sting jet, which apparently, if I've got this right, is an accelerated microburst of air, whether vertical or horizontal, that comes down. And it is rather savage. Imagine 10 Chinooks landing on your roof. That would probably be a good analog for what it was like. Chinooks, of course, being those helicopters I have very fond memories of when I was a young platoon leader in the 101st Airborne Division. And we used to call them flying dumpsters being raped by two palm trees. Additional housekeeping. Remember that these prospects for American renewal, which is the Arcata's first inaugural conference that they're going to have in Bozema, Montana, which is November 13th and 14th of this year. I will be one of the speakers there along with several other folks. Some of those speakers who I will be accompanied by will be James Howard Kuntzler, James Dellingpole, PG. Keenan, Alexander Makris, Johan Kurtz, Michael Martin and myself along with Stephen Mirage who will be the Master of Ceremonies and of course the inestimable Douglas Dye who is the Arcata CEO. So if you get the opportunity to come, let me know beforehand because I would love to press the flesh and break some bread with you if you are one of my listeners and you happen to be there in Bozeman, Montana.

And on one other minor note, 70s, 80s, 90s, besides listening to WTMI, the Classical Music Station down in South Florida in the 70s and 80s, I do remember being very fond of a program called Hearts of Space with Stephen Hill. And I was surprised to see that it is still here. And I think it was founded in 1974 And it just so happens that my middle son and I both love ambient space music and that kind of thing. And they had available as a Christmas present for my son, and I'm not paid by these guys to flog this, an unlimited access to their entire archive for I think it was $110. Got that for my middle son for Christmas. I know he'll be delighted with that. But it was so nice to revisit Hearts of Space and the music. I'll put that in the footnotes, the show notes for this podcast. Again, they're not an advertiser. I get no moneys from them or anything. But I thought I'd mention because I really support what Stephen Hill has done. So on with the show, we'll get into this episode. First question is, why the future of warfare is not Clone Wars? So I've had a number of conversations through email and maybe the comment section on occasion, please use my comment section for my podcast episodes, in which we discuss what's going on in the world of warfare for the next quarter century, in this second quarter century of the new millennium, and what it may possibly look like throughout the conclusion of this particular century.

As a conflict futurist, it's really difficult for me to establish what things are going to look like in the next 50 years of this century, but I think we can't prognosticate forecast and dare I say, predict what's going to happen over the next quarter century. But keep this in mind when it comes to this kind of time traveling as we're doing not in reverse but forward, is that it was the 1990s in which you had eminentos like the ex-gurble Bill Gates saying that the Internet was a fad, fax machines were here to stay, and that portable telephony and such was simply a fantastical notion that would probably not come to fruition. So when I say Clone Wars, I'm referring of course to some of the Star Wars sequels that came out before Star Wars was completely destroyed, speaking of the last quarter century, when it was taken over by Disney. But that is neither here nor there for this episode. Remember, they were bipedal, smaller, soldier-like robots that would deploy, interestingly enough, out of a dropship or in a carrier of some sort, and all of these little analog men would dash from there, holding weapons and such in their hands and maybe even having vocal capabilities and human interaction capabilities and such, all a bunch of poppycock. I am the same guy who was raised as a youth and a young adult in the science fiction milieu, in which we discussed what would happen when we had enhanced power suits, exoskeletons, Heinlein starship troopers, having those kind of things where we could take our organic human meat sacks, pop them into these augmented modalities, much like you saw at the end of the first brilliant alien movie, where young Sigourney Weaver fought the Xenomorph on the ship in what looked like some kind of a portable but enhanced forklift in which a human was at the center. It was, of course, bipedal or quadpedal, if I recall, and she used it to fight said Xenomorph and push it out of the ship.