Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad

Stephen CoughlinAfter the events of September 11, 2001, Stephen Coughlin was mobilized from his private sector career to the Intelligence Directorate at the Joint Chiefs of Staff to work in Targeting. Thus began his education in terrorism.

In the years that followed, Coughlin earned recognition as the Pentagon’s leading expert on the Islamic-based doctrines motivating jihadi groups that confront America.

He came into demand as a trainer and lecturer at leading commands and senior service staff institutions, including the National Defense University, the Army and Navy War Colleges, the Marine Corps-Quantico, the State Department, and the FBI.

Red Pill BriefingSo effective were his presentations that some in the special operations community dubbed them “Red Pill” briefings, a reference to an iconic scene in The Matrix.

It’s an apt metaphor: Once the facts and doctrines are properly explained and understood, there is no going back.

This was more than our enemies – and, it seems, our leaders – could tolerate.

Muslim BrotherhoodBeginning in 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood convinced the White House to ban Coughlin and put an end to his briefings. The move was in keeping with shariah concepts of slander that seek to blindfold America to certain realities that render us defenseless against a threat made existential by the very ignorance it gets our leaders to enforce.

In times like this – when the White House’s former counterterrorism strategist can declare it unconstitutional to allow national security analysts to look to Islam to understand jihad – there’s an urgent need to pull away the blindfold so we can see and confront the threat.

Such is the goal of Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad by Stephen Coughlin.

The book, drawn heavily from Coughlin’s “outlawed” briefings, is a comprehensive assessment of Islamic law and doctrine known to form the basis of hostile threat strategies directed against America and the West, the challenges they present, and the ideologically induced breakdown of fact-based decisionmaking that is nothing short of professional malpractice by our national security elites.

Note from Stephen Coughlin:

The time has come to present this case to the American people.

I hope to offer to the reader the same quality of information and analysis that has been presented to national security professionals and which has been studiously ignored.

  • I will provide the necessary citations to Islamic law, both historical and contemporary, from books written in English for Muslim consumers of Islamic law (also called shariah), and will explain the key principles for interpreting these laws, particularly as they relate to non-Muslims and jihad.
  • We will go through, in detail, the Islamic legal concept of abrogation and how it impacts the actions of Muslims who have chosen to wage jihad.
  • We will examine the impact of Islamic scholar and Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb, and how his understanding of abrogation led to what I call “The Milestone Process,” which guides the performance of jihad for our enemies in the War on Terror.
  • We will discuss what is called the “Islamic Movement” and how the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other groups oriented on the Milestone Process view themselves as unified by varying degrees against us.
  • We’ll examine the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation and see how their understanding of themselves as a kind of “Proto-Caliphate” may be accurate, even though our decisionmakers don’t even know they exist.
  • With this understanding of the rules and the players achieved, we’ll discuss how each of these groups works in accordance with Islamic law as they understand it, to the great detriment of those who fail to recognize the threat they pose.
  • We’ll examine the postmodern world of American national security policymaking, where fidelity to political correctness, the need for “balance,” and standards that put assumptions and social science theories before facts have left us dangerously exposed.
  • And we will examine how our failure to understand these factors has repeatedly led to tragedy and real loss of life, leaving America vulnerable to those who wish to destroy us.

I hope to show that returning to traditional standards of threat analysis—bolstered by common-sense professional standards and grounded in the obligations we have to support and defend the Constitution—will enable us once again to know our enemies and develop methods to defeat them.

Listen to Coughlin talk about the book:

Why We Are Losing to Jihadists: In-Depth With The Pentagon’s Leading Expert on Islamic Law/National Security

Major Stephen Coughlin (Ret.), a man known as the Pentagon’s leading scholar on Islamic Law as it relates to national security, sits down with Ben Weingarten of TheBlaze Books to discuss his forthcoming title, “Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.” During the interview Stephen and Ben discuss the enemies’ threat doctrine and its basis in Islamic law, the plan for civilizational jihad in the West and how well it is currently being executed, the sinister elements and disastrous policy of “countering violent extremism” (CVE), the compromised state of America’s national security establishment all the way to its highest levels, the damage of politically correct narratives to our ability to defend the country and related impact of the Muslim Brotherhood on America’s national psyche, Iran and much much more.

Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad by Stephen Coughlin

George Rasely, CHQ Editor:
“Every time I hear Steve Coughlin speak or have the opportunity to discuss with him the war Islamists have declared on the West, and our response to it, I learn something new, insightful and most importantly, actionable. If you want to understand how we got where we are in the so-called “war on terror,” and how we are losing the war with Islam, despite the fact that Islamists readily tell us what their plans are, and most importantly, arm yourself with the knowledge necessary to defend constitutional liberty against the unrelenting attacks of Islam, you’ve got to read Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.”