Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast

I am an un-credentialed amateur historian who has done very little archive work and lack the substantial infrastructure credentialed historians have to practice their craft. I have debated esteemed historians and won on stage (Daniel Walker Howe looked at my CV and did not prepare) but that doesn't make me better than them. I think my various detours in life mostly outside the formal academy gives me a unique insight into how history works and why I think I am more sober than university historians. I describe some of the reasons I do it and the techniques I employ to get the single most accurate picture of what happened then to determine what's going on now. I am the Smedley D. Butler Fellow for Military Affairs at the Libertarian Institute. Recommended Reading: Mortimer Adler How To Read a Book Robert Strassler The Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika (Landmark Series) Mike Snook How Can Man Die Better: The Secrets of Isandlwana Revealed Mike Snook Like Wolves on the Fold: The Defence of Rorke’s Drift David Stahel Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East David Hackett Fischer Historians' Fallacies : Toward a Logic of Historical Thought Keith Windschuttle The Killing of History John Burrow A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century Harry Elmer Barnes A History of Historical Writing US Army Center of Military History My Substack Email at cgpodcast@pm.me

Here is Part One: Ep 058 "The Mexican Cartel Conundrum: War Without End Part One" We continue the inquiry into the implications and future returns on going kinetic in the drug war as elucidated by worthies in the new administration. I examine the implications and the second and third order effects of this endeavor which is, by extension, a declaration of war on the Mexican government. *** Anyone attending the Special Operations Forces Week festivities in Tampa on 5-8 May 2025? If so, we should arrange a rendezvous. *** References: Tom Wainwright Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel Benjamin T. Smith The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade Anabel Hernandez Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers Ioan Grillo El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency David F. Marley Mexican Cartels: An Encyclopedia of Mexico's Crime and Drug Wars Carmen Boullosa A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War” Patrick Winn Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA Jesse Fink Pure Narco: One Man's True Story of 25 Years Inside the Cartels Mark Santiago A Bad Peace and a Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795–1799 Amy S. Greenberg A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico My Substack Email at cgpodcast@pm.me

Chasing Ghosts is back! There has been chatter and enthusiasm to use military means to take on the drugs and human trafficking organizations and cartels in Mexico (and I imagine the cartels in the north in Canada), this will not end well. I examine the implications and the second and third order effects of this endeavor which is, by extension, a declaration of war on the Mexican government. References: Benjamin T. Smith The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade Anabel Hernandez Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers Ioan Grillo El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency David F. Marley Mexican Cartels: An Encyclopedia of Mexico's Crime and Drug Wars Carmen Boullosa A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the “Mexican Drug War” Patrick Winn Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA Jesse Fink Pure Narco: One Man's True Story of 25 Years Inside the Cartels Mark Santiago A Bad Peace and a Good War: Spain and the Mescalero Apache Uprising of 1795–1799 Amy S. Greenberg A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico My Substack Email at cgpodcast@pm.me

I will be pausing Chasing Ghosts from its fortnightly cadence of issuance for the remainder of the year. I am taking the time to regroup and focus on the new occasional podcast series, WarNotes: A Conflict Podcast as a companion podcast focusing on conventional conflict and strategic thought. I think the new election results may be the time for the western military complexes to take a knee and refocus and re-calibrate strategic and grand strategic opportunities in addressing the real-time shortfalls in facing Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMA) that are littering the battlefields of the 21st century. My first WarNotes series will be a comprehensive survey of how to fix the broken, shattered and most expensive paper tiger in the history of the world, the US military complex. The Fixing Fight Club series will be weekly until I finish the survey. The US is at a crossroads: continue to invest and spend on exquisite platforms that will simply be missile sponges in the emerging salvo competition landscape or retool a more thoughtful application of military power in concert with rationally extrapolating second and third order effects to stymie the pristine track record of military failure and stalemate since 1945. I suggest the American military complex has a mere generation to reset its arthritic, sclerotic and top heavy platforms and stratagems before irrelevance and abject systemic military failure becomes the sole avenue left. You can find the WarNotes podcast at my substack or look for it on your podcast vendor of choice. My Substack Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me

Mark Booher at Pearl Snap Tactical interviewed me discussing irregular warfare and the threat to the homeland. We discuss irregular warfare and the impacts of an up-sized catastrophic attack on the US homeland. We riff on and discuss my "Storming America" series (episodes 37, 41-43 and 49-50) on the CG podcast. The election results don't change the imminent danger but may alter the warp and woof of the probability and timeline of attack. Pearl Snap Tactical interview can be found here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-150848439?source=queue I talk about William Forstchen's "Day of Wrath" and Kurt Schlichter's "The Attack". References: William Forstchen Day of Wrath Kurt Schlichter The Attack Matt Bracken: Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Foreign Enemies And Traitors. Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista. The Red Cliffs of Zerhoun. Castigo Cay. Eric Frank Russell The Wasp Michael Z. Williamson The Weapon (and the entire Freehold series) Ernest R. May Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France Robert Heinlein The Moon is a Harsh Mistress Robert Asprey War In The Shadows: The Guerrilla In History My Substack Email at cgpodcast@pm.me