Great Article On The Benefits Of Intelligence In Warfare

One man turned the tide in Korea:

Donald Nichols, an Air Force spy in Korea at the dawn of the Cold War, was the best and worst kind of American warrior. Ferocious, creative and unbreakable, he won more than 20 medals for valor during the Korean War and vacuumed up battlefield secrets that saved countless American lives.

Yet Nichols was callow, untrained and very young—just 23—when he arrived on the Korean Peninsula. He was a seventh-grade dropout. He was virtually unsupervised. He would soon veer out of control, losing touch with morality, with legality, even with sanity—if Air Force psychiatrists are to be believed. He attended mass killings and trained South Korean police who specialized in torture. He was photographed standing beside a severed human head.

Nichols became America’s Kurtz, an uncontrolled commander in a faraway shadowland. The Air Force gave him an astonishingly long leash: his own secret base, his own secret army of spies, and a self-proclaimed “legal license to murder.” His commanding general described him as a “one man war…”

Seven years before he was ignominiously removed from command, Nichols played a starring—albeit secret—role in the decisive early weeks of the Korean War. His code-breakers helped the Americans halt and turn back a North Korean invasion that stunned the world.

The coming unrest could very well break down into a multifaceted war with many fronts, from street gangs, to lone criminal masterminds, to local chieftains, to religious mobs of fanatics of the Muslim persuasion, to an establishment elite that is not amused by the memes of the Chans and Redditors. The members of each group who will succeed and survive will be those who only act when they know everything about their target, and exactly how they will attain their objective, and they will know it long before they start their attack.

It is tempting to be enamored by guns, and tactics, and fortifications, and vaults. But you will need to learn how to keep your secrets completely from everyone you know, and find out the secrets of others. It isn’t as glamorous, and as the article shows there are aspects of it which are distasteful to the average K-strategist.

But when the collapse comes, that may be the difference between survival and death.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because we all have a lot to learn to survive what is coming