Should the US military launch nuclear weapons, if Donald Trump orders a first strike?
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Should the US military launch nuclear weapons, if Donald Trump orders a first strike?
The US Government has been cagy about the degree to which the US is assisting Saudi Arabia in its war on Yemen; a war which includes area bombing and terror-strikes against civilians. And, because the US has managed to lull its population into accepting anything “anti-terror” as acceptable, there has been hardly any public outcry at all.
If you’re attacked by ninjas, make sure they’re wet.
Warning: War, Death, War Crimes, Atrocities
Recent discussion of bunkers [stderr] reminded me, over and over, about a horrible piece of propaganda I encountered as a child. [Read more…]
Here’s some more of my fascinating spam – another squint at the underbelly of the American nightmare:
It sounds like the Kurds have been out-maneuvered by the Iraqi regime; then left twisting in the wind by their American backers. Iraqi Abrams M-1 tanks (which are basically invincible against the light vehicles the Kurds have) were the convincing argument – the Iraqis inter-penetrated Kurdish positions in the Kirkuk area, essentially a peaceful “overrun” maneuver – and the Kurds realized that if they offered resistance, they’d be slaughtered.
When you’ve got over half a trillion dollars at stake, people will do or say pretty much anything. So it gets hard to figure out what’s going on when you read headlines in the form of “X is an ongoing disaster” alongside of “great cost-savings achieved via X” for any given X. It’s hard to be both a tremendous success and an ongoing disaster. I am, naturally, referring to the latest news about the F-35 program.
Strategy is the process of imagining possible futures and how they come about, then “pruning” back the lines of causality to try to infer what actions will get you there. It’s an active process that stresses a person’s creativity and analytic skills. The hardest part, I believe, is coming up with (and eliminating) endless hypotheticals of everything that could go wrong right now for any given now. This, however, is the essence of strategy.
Warning: War, death, violence
I just finished reading Mark Bowden’s Huế, 1968. Since it’s history, I won’t warn you of any spoilers.
Whenever we read an account of the beginning of WWI it’s necessary for the historian to first lay out the landscape of interlocking defense treaties that turned Europe into a sort of Venn diagram of fantasy militarism. To me, it’s a reminder of the great Avalon Hill game Diplomacy which we played in my high school Military History Club (AKA: D&D club) – everyone secretly negotiating with everyone else against everyone else. For Europe, the results were grim, and I needn’t go into them.