Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast

By: Bill Buppert
  • Summary

  • An unauthorized podcast series peeking behind the curtain at the vast machinery and briar patch politics of fighting terrorism and insurgency and everything in between. I'm a "COINtra" and not a "COINdinista", the latter are the vast army of apparatchiks and apologists who fire the engines of Irregular Warfare (IW) planet-wide. We're the skeptics and doubters of all things IW and special operations. And we are a tiny sliver of the IW community. I have noticed a jarring gap in this part of the discussion and intend on filling the breach.

    Substack: Chasing Ghosts: An Irregular Warfare Podcast

    Smedley D. Butler Fellow for Military Affairs at the Libertarian Institute

    Chasing Ghosts Podcast on YouTube

    I am an Amazon Affiliate.

    You can contact me at cgpodcast@pm.me

    Bill Buppert 2022-2024
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Episodes
  • Ep 058 "The Mexican Cartel Conundrum: War Without End"
    Feb 10 2025

    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

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    55 mins
  • Ep 057: "CG Announcement November 2024: WarNotes Podcast Rising"
    Nov 25 2024

    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

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    6 mins
  • Ep 056 "Pearl Snap Tactical Interview with Mark Booher"
    Nov 11 2024

    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

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    59 mins

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Excellent material and presentation

Bill is an exceptional erudite, particularly where this subject matter is concerned. He is also a captivating orator. I'm excited to listen to more from him. Keep up the excellence, Bill.

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