![]() Imagine if the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel happened in the United States, not in one city, but dozens. And on top of that, the plot was calculated to be as devious as possible, leveraged to hurt America where it was softest. Kurt Schlichter’s The Attack is just that; nearly everything we feared post-9/11 but writ far larger, enabled by our callous and feckless government that has left the border unchecked. There’s a lot to unpack, but I’m only going to cover the high points. Frankly, it took me a while to finish the book and consolidate my thoughts on it. When you live in a world like I do, researching this stuff and having a job that involves bad things happening to people, you get sensitive about reading fiction. So my apologies to Kurt for not wrapping it up sooner. All while reading the book, I felt a sense of rage. The carnage in the story is appropriately outrageous but also the ability to generate strong emotions is a sign that the author did a good job. More than this, my emotions came with the understanding (and fear) that this is indeed plausible. Some disclaimers:
The book implies that casualties (both dead and wounded) were in the low hundreds of thousands, without creating a spoiler. Please note I’m taking the story by its spirit and am not offering criticism based on my very high bar of verisimilitude. It’s all plausible; I just think at a much smaller scale, but it’s done well enough that even my borderline autism can accept it. Now I say this part largely to the people who have no real conception of risk analysis, not to criticize the plot. I do not think mass terrorist attacks, with guns and bombs alone, are capable of creating hundreds of thousands of casualties. I know many of you watch Fox News and assume every brown person crossing the border is a terrorist, but that’s not the case. It’s hard to mobilize a legitimate army, let alone one of such size. The 2008 Mumbai terror attacks that were the first “at large” mass shooter style terrorist assault had a kill ratio of 10:1, but this was largely based on target selection that included a crowded railway station and two hotels. The October 7 Hamas attack, despite having approximately 3,000 terrorists to 1,143 victims killed, had a .38:1 ratio. A 10:1 ratio would require over 10,000 attackers. While that number comes across the border in just a few hours, I seriously doubt that many can keep their mouths shut. We’re taking about people who are less-well disciplined than a buck private drunk at a strip club who’s about to deploy. Heck, Al Qaeda tried to get 20 people in to attack the US and only managed to get 19, plus a few other losers who were rounded up after-the-fact. So no, at this scale I can’t see it happening, so even with the millions flowing unchecked across our borders. It’s too hard to get enough people dedicated to that and keep their mouths shut. Plus, the USA is huge in both area and population, so that kind of per capita terror would be hard. I could see the magnitude of such an attack occurring in Great Britain, but not the United States. In the UK, the infiltration of Muslims across society is far greater than the US and in the former, the level of radicalization is much higher. Not that it can’t happen here, but for the same level of permeation it would take more time and great numbers of immigrants. With its head start and the British police unwilling to offend Muslims, plus the practical toleration of radicals in their midst, it is the perfect breeding ground for such an attack. Couple that with largely unarmed police and a disarmed populace and you have a recipe for widespread slaughter. In the US for real, we would probably see a number of attacks across major metro areas, say perhaps a dozen. They may even occur in smaller towns to create a perception of “nowhere” being safe. Kurt certainly carries that across in the book when residential areas are attacked. Again, I don’t think this would be part of anyone’s deliberate plan, but it is useful analogue to things that might happen. For instance, an October 7 cross-border couldn’t really happen in the US the way it did in Israel, but similar events could happen for different reasons. Like the neighborhood attack could be a looting horde of rioters and urban gang members or, in a more dystopian future, racist cartel gangs from Hispanic controlled cities. Or it could be warlords in a James Wesley Rawlesian SHTF collapse (which he did write about). The leftists joining the terrorists? Well the last week’s campus protests certainly opened my eyes to the possibility, although I don’t think such a thing would be pre-planned. Also most of these people are just idiots, not willing to go along with such slaughter for slaughter’s sake. Again, however using fiction as an allegory, what if these dumb kids converted to Islam? Instead of the leftist Weather Underground, they become soldiers of Allah? Or instead of being a Muslim attack on America, it’s a socialist revolutionary pogrom against Republicans or something? Such atrocities have happened in most, if not all, communist revolutions. There are some things I feel Kurt left out. I don’t blame him for some of it. A book can only be so long. Also, Kurt is a legitimate lawyer, officer, commentator, and author; he can’t go to all the dark places that an unaccountable self-published author can. Besides, that’s a good thing. Until now, I’ve always felt “safe” reading Kurt’s books. Kelly Turnbull always saves the day and even the nasty, uncomfortable things that make me as a reader squeamish are handled very softly. Yes, even I who professionally deals with mangled people and horrific stuff get a little soft when it comes to torture, abuse, tragedy, etc. Even though The Attack made me nervous, Kurt wasn’t gratuitous about any of it. Just enough darkness to communicate the emotion and message but also with enough heroism and revenge to rally the dampened spirit. And the part about the .45s? Heck yeah! We would TOTALLY do that. (That part is clearly drawn from how the Israelis responded to the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre). The calls for revenge would be absolutely nuts in the United States. Someone would have to be nuked in reality. Heck, even a president like Obama would probably do it just to avoid a scene out of the French Revolution. Kurt is subtle about it, but it’s clear that America plays by the Big Boy rules after this and is totally unapologetic, as we should be. Our respect with countries like China and Russia, if they had clean hands, would probably ironically go up. The infrastructure attacks are also entirely plausible. I figure in any World War conflict with Russia or China, our power plants, water systems, and communications grid will be hacked and destroyed. Kurt hits the nail on the head with this section and it’s been discussed widely, so we don’t need to go there too much. Just keep in mind that even a conventional war in the 2020s will bring American infrastructure to its knees. Ethnic violence against mosques and Muslims would be commonplace and unstoppable. The fury the American people would pour out would go beyond righteous retaliation to…dark places. Reprisals would be awful in the vein of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque shootings. Predominately Muslim communities like those in Michigan might even come under siege. Police would be too buy responding to the attack, dealing with the aftermath, or otherwise “non-mission capable. The main theme of The Attack is that police are utterly overwhelmed by the scale of the attacks. This is a fair possibility even in the real world due to the nature of police staffing and tactical responses. Smaller cities may take their entire scheduled force for the day to equip the equivalent of one military squad. 8-12 officers for a major city can be the police presence for an entire district/division of a city, meaning that reinforcements have to come from the next one. Then you need officers on perimeter, officers to evacuate the wounded, officers doing crowd control, etc. Also it’s not like a light goes on in these incidents where cops drop their procedures and act as soldiers might. Cops aren’t trained to handle these like spot fires; put one out and move on to the next. Christopher Dorner was one man who tied up LA law enforcement for a week, and when they cornered him, cops had to hold back other cops who wanted a piece of the action. Every cop from miles around will swarm to these scenes and not in an organized fashion. So yes, law enforcement would be rapidly overwhelmed. Most cops aren’t tactically minded nor do they have the mindset of soldiers. Plenty will be brave, but a lot more, even if they don’t chicken out, simply will not know how to respond appropriately. If their agency gave them active shooter training, it’s likely against one loser in a school or something, not a fire team of jihadis. The average beat cop will be ineffective. Look at how badly LAPD was pinned down by the North Hollywood bank robbers. This is where the militia system should fill the gap. If we were a serious country, American minutemen would be able to rapidly respond to the incidents as they cropped up. But we lack any mechanism to organize such a response and most men who have the willingness, and the equipment to, don’t have the training. I’m sure that plenty of veterans or gun-bros would step up and fill the gap, but not enough. We’ve already seen this happen to some extent. During the Mandalay Bay shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, police reported citizens were attempting to arm themselves from police cars (allegedly Dan Bilzerian) to fight back. When that ex-airman shot up a church in Texas, some dude in town grabbed his rifle and took the loser out. And let’s not forget United Flight 93 where the passengers probably beat to death one or two of the hijackers and almost took back the cockpit with hand-to-hand fighting. America has something that practically no other country, even Israel, has: a very well-armed populace. We have men who make tactical shooting and preparing for events just like this a hobby. Guys would come out of the woodwork to fight back. The shame of it is that our laws prevent the willing volunteers from being better armed and trained as a civilian auxiliary. Even so, anyone fighting back will disrupt the terrorism. Kurt touched on this somewhat but I feel that the scale of it was less than it would in reality but hey, you can’t cover everything. If police couldn’t control the situation, guys with ARs and plate carriers would enter the fray. I certainly would. Spontaneous self-organization response teams would form as would neighborhood defense groups. Long-term, private tactical response groups would form the way that adult softball leagues do. I gotta point out that the “just respond” attitude for particularly federal law enforcement was great thinking; don’t respond to your office or group, just go stop the killing nearest to you. In fact, this is the entire idea behind the militia concept. Citizen responders with military-grade firepower at home can handle the situation themselves without waiting for SWAT or the military to save them. How many lives would have been saved in Israel if their people had ARs and plate carriers at home? That’s the big take-home lesson from The Attack. At some level, in some places, America will one day soon have something like this occur. It is one of the inescapable lessons of history that barbarians will eventually come. As I’ve said in my own books, fiction can be a way to help us mentally prepare for “unthinkable” scenarios. The Attack should be seen that way by the reader. How would you react? How would you prepare? How will you feel when it or something like it does happen? Let the story tug at your emotions. Feel them. Consider you and your family being in that situation. Can you rise to the occasion? I’d like to think that the book would serve as a stern warning to our officials and authorities, but we all know government is deaf, dumb, and blind. You may also want to monitor Big Country Expat’s blog; he’s also going to do a review and I’m sure he will colorfully express things I wholeheartedly agree with, but in his customary “frank” style. Sometimes you just gotta be honest with how you feel and he’s got a great way of being blunt and true to the emotions. (He also went to an art school so he’s good at the literary criticism thing too). Comments are closed.
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Author Don ShiftDon Shift is a veteran of the Ventura County Sheriff's Office and avid fan of post-apocalyptic literature and film who has pushed a black and white for a mile or two. He is a student of disasters, history, and current events. Archives
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