AN EXTRAORDINARY FORCE IN VENEZUELA?

Not too long ago I wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek article about a fictional weapon that, if I possibly could find or hijack, I would fire at America’s leftists.

This was the “Brown Note” system that was supposedly commissioned to disrupt riots and large gatherings of people by causing them to involuntarily evacuate their bowels, but Internet searches indicated that, while possibly plausible to a degree, it hadn’t made an actual appearance outside of South Park cartoons.

Fast forward to today.

A report in the New York Post that hasn’t gotten much press at all described the U.S. attack from the perspective of some Venezuelan guards during the recent U.S. special operation down there.

There’s a lot to unpack, of which a “Brown Note” system is the least significant.

I have to say up front that the report is only one account that, as far as I know, hasn’t been supported by additional data.  It could be made up.

But I have learned that spontaneous statements from bad guys (sometimes called “res gestae”) are often truthful ones, particularly when they are in some form of shock or emotional state.

Also, it is hard to imagine these guys wanting to make the U.S. “look good” by inventing fictional accounts of being overpowered by Trump and the “Yuge” forces of El Norte.

But, if the story is to be believed, at least one element of the force that participated in the attack was of a mysterious, advanced character, and brought some capabilities with it that the targets could hardly understand.

This leads me to make some informed speculation about what might have happened—and also may explain some of the stories about weapons such as “Brown Note” as possibly being incomplete accounts of actual systems the U.S. has that are operational.

So, according to the guard’s account, here is what the attack he experienced looked like.

A sudden and devastating electronic attack, accompanied by drones.

Electronic warfare dominance is without question going to be a cornerstone of how future wars are fought.  U.S. forces depend on GPS as well as certain frequency bands for command, control, and communications, as do others.  We will want to preserve our access and take away the enemy’s access.

Whoever detects—and jams—the other side first has a tremendous advantage in the sea, air, and ground.

I predict that the underdogs will increasingly have to “go dark” rather than compete against the billion-dollar big boys, but it remains to be seen how far iron sights, primitive signals, and good fieldcraft will get you on the new battlefields.

War is changing and, more now than ever, the best will utterly thrash and tear apart the second best.Possibly the first real indication of this was the Gulf War, aka the Kuwaiti Turkey Shoot.

There is no doubt that U.S. forces will want more electronic attack platforms, with more capability, that can be deployed nearer the schwerpunkt and sooner than those of the opponent.

Drones were a highly predictable way to get there.

Eight helicopters, carrying approximately twenty troops.

Twenty troops might be considered a light load for eight helicopters.  We don’t know what kinds of helicopters they were, but assuming they were conventional choices used in an assault role by the U.S. Army or Marines, it is likely they were MH-6 “Little Birds,” UH-60 Blackhawks, or the larger CH-47 Chinooks.

Little Birds can carry two pilots and up to four troops, but I doubt these were what the guard saw.  First, because the troops are very exposed riding on supports on the aircraft exterior, which is not ideal for long flights.And second, for the factors I will discuss next regarding how these troops were equipped.

If they were either Blackhawks or Chinooks (and both types were filmed by Venezuelans on the ground) this gets much more interesting.

That would put an average of two to three troops on each helicopter; each one very large and capable of carrying many more conventional troops and their equipment.

Why would you use so many helicopters for so few troops? With this in mind…..

The troops had a strange appearance that defied conventional explanation and were extraordinarily lethal, killing possibly “hundreds” of Venezuelan troops.

The highest “official” body count mentioned in the raid on the Venezuelan/Maduro side was one hundred, but it could have been more, and underreported, under various scenarios.

As we are writing, up to eighty thousand people have probably died in Iran in what we now call a revolution, but the “official” sources have the count much lower.

We will probably not know for sure until the revolution succeeds and what is left of the IRGC is in prison or with the hangman (hopeful forecasting here).

The U.S. has been working on advanced warfighter tools for a long time.

These tools include exoskeletons that could boost soldier physical capabilities, human or animal-like drones that can fight and carry weapons, sights and fire control systems that can automatically direct weapons onto targets, and situational awareness tools such as Anduril’s new Eagle Eye warfighter helmet.

Could a group of these or similar technologies have been equipping the twenty troops that were reported?

A strange weapon was fired into the area, which felt like a “sound wave,” incapacitating the surviving Venezuelan soldiers and apparently inflicting significant internal injuries on some of them.

Allow me to redirect you to my article on UAPs.  While I didn’t get into this point much in that article, the same sources that have been describing our encounters with apparently alien craft and objects have also been saying the U.S. has been getting them and reverse-engineering them.

It is probable that some of the ones seen by people these days aren’t from “out there,” but are actually U.S. vehicles.

When people have encountered these things, they have experienced negative physiological and psychological effects.  People report incapacitation, “lost time,” and various other phenomena.

Not that you have to have “aliens” or technology attributed to them, here.  Such thinking could be a slippery slope towards subscribing any misunderstood phenomena as being “from out there.”

There are reports that a device capable of producing just the effects described in the article has been under development and research for some time.

Regardless, such a device that could be portable and knock the people down in an entire area as described represents an amazing capability that not only has implications for warfighting, but for civil liberties worldwide.

You wouldn’t want His Royal Senescence, the Chicoms, Hillary/Billary, or any others on the Left, or even some on the Right, to have the thing.

It’s unclear whether cover, masking, ear protection, or the other conventional defenses prepared citizens have come to trust would be effective at all in stopping a device like this.

Biden might have funded just something like this to get revenge on the people making fun of his obvious shortcomings.

This attack apparently came from either the helicopters, some of the drones nearby, or some other source that one would assume would have had to be nearby in the area.  It is doubtful that it was projected over a long distance.

But, then again, it was once doubtful that there were such things as UAPs.

It is also not the first time reports of strange, directed-energy weapons in the hands of U.S. forces have cropped up.  Consider this investigative report from almost twenty years ago about the possible use of directed energy weapons in Iraq.

Are we seeing tiny pieces of a great puzzle throughout time?

What happened out there?

The U.S. has a pattern of “testing” new weapons and doctrine on limited real-world missions before expanding the capability in the force.

Examples include the F-117 “Nighthawk” bomber, the B-2 bomber, the M-16 rifle, and the M-26 Pershing heavy tank.

It is probable that if the tests of these new systems were ruled to be successful, we should see these capabilities becoming mainstreamed in the next few years.

Regardless of what we may find out, it’s clear that U.S. military capabilities, and by extension, the capabilities of governments around the world (Google helped the Chinese set up their surveillance systems), are evolving in areas that should not only concern the warfighter, but the citizen desiring to remain free.  These include:

1. Targeting.  High-definition digital cameras, as well as thermal and other electromagnetic sensors, are becoming ubiquitous and cheaper, and are able to sense the locations and activities of persons outside of the visual spectrum.  It is requiring tremendous effort and money to match or evade this.  Hiding from any of it is increasingly difficult.
It’s not enough, even, to mask your thermal signature, for instance, if you can be observed going to and from the battlespace or located by the electronic signals you generate.  I will add that generally, if you are in plain view in a public space, you have less—and sometimes, no—right to privacy.

2. Surveillance.  Due to rapid communications and sensor and system fusion, the watching of a party—possibly without their knowledge—and bringing force to bear on them can be practically simultaneous.  In the Ukraine, drones are being used to spot foes and within seconds bring artillery or air strikes on them.  This process on battlefields used to be far more ponderous.

3. AI tools.  One limiter on the payoff of using more sensors used to be the speed at which humans could process the data.  AI systems, soon to include systems that can process and improve themselves individually as agents, will change that.
Another aspect of this that isn’t getting enough attention are the coming quantum computers that will make existing computer systems look like abacuses.  Amidst the rush to build bigger and better data centers, many aren’t looking ahead to this.

4. Data analysis by AI systems. Those same AI tools will be useful toward collating data on a target through all aspects of life.  When you use social media, you not only give away your beliefs and personal details, but often the lists of who you interact with and consider friends, whose information also can be seen.
I have minimized my social media use and assume that everyone can see everything I write.  Social media is a gigantic fifth generation psychological warfare tool that enables the worst sort of personal attacks and social harm as well, but that’s a subject for another article.
Add to this every other record you generate—bank records, driving records, grocery purchases, medical records, school records, text alerts, online games, and TV shows and movies watched—all the way to how many times this week you checked in at the gym.
And other governments, including hostile ones, can be doing this to us as well.  The street has many side roads.  Note also that many of the tech companies producing the systems that enable this aren’t necessarily “American” in their culture or behavior, Google example aside.

5. Smart(er) weapons. Most everyone knows the capabilities of first-person-view drones as well as other remote drone weapons by now, as well as the need for the U.S. to make up the shortfalls.  But the power of the technology engines that shaped smart weapons in the middle part of the last century (the first laser-guided bombs made their debut in Vietnam) are now exponentially better and are filtering assets down to the individual level.
These include smaller drones as well as man-portable weapons that can hit targets out of the line of sight, as well as direct-fire personal weapons with electronic-assisted aiming.
We can expect the basic concepts here to extend to every aspect of warfighting.  This will, I predict, include fully autonomous systems able to make “kill” decisions on their own.  This will occur out of sheer necessity, as there won’t be enough humans to manage all of these systems.

The other insidious factor about this is that tyrants can shrug their shoulders and claim a lack of responsibility when those systems eliminate people who are deemed to be a problem.  I can raise the current situations in Iran, Syria, and China and say all I need to.

All of this will require a reassessment of what preparedness and the idea of an armed society being a free society will mean, as well as what citizen engagement will mean if we are to remain a free country.  But we will need another article, soon, to dive into that as we should.

Mark Deuce has had a life-long career in community law enforcement. He is the author of Deuces Wild for TTP.