Monday 29th of April 2024
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the ides of war...

ides of war

 

The target was hard to locate and people were risking their lives to find him. The United States took the shot. A child died, and we deeply regret that he did. But his grandfather had a garage full of dangerous chemicals, and he intended to use them, perhaps on Americans.

We tried to get better. Carefully reviewing video of one successful strike, we could discern — as a GBU was already hurtling toward an arms cache — a frightened woman responding to another weapon that had just detonated. She was running with young children square into the path of the incoming bomb, and they were killed. We realized, once our after-action review was done, that we needed to put even more eyes on targets as they were being struck to try to avoid any future civilian casualties.

For my part, the United States needs not only to maintain this capacity, but also to be willing to use it. Radical Islamism thrives in many corners of the world — Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Mali, the list goes on — where governments cannot or will not act. In some of these instances, the United States must.

And unmanned aerial vehicles carrying precision weapons and guided by powerful intelligence offer a proportional and discriminating response when response is necessary. Civilians have died, but in my firm opinion, the death toll from terrorist attacks would have been much higher if we had not taken action.

What we need here is a dial, not a switch.

 

Michael V. Hayden, a retired Air Force four-star general, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror.”

 

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opinion/sunday/drone-warfare-precise-effective-imperfect.html

 

This article by a General FOUR Stars would be passable if it came from the army canteen staff. It's full of fancy idealism and meek apologies for not aiming better the sticks of destruction. In the best of an ideal world, this analysism stinks of ratty imperialism from the comfort of a drone station. 

It forgets that for any granddad killed — with a garage full of chemicals that "could be" used to arm American troops traipsing where they should not — about ten members of a family become "radicalised" and plot revenge for good reason. If you want submission, please send a couple of bataillons of US SS. Even a few undercover Seals might give you a couple of pinpointed victories but the resentment they breed in the remnants of their targets is a hundred fold the anger and possibly the danger. 

Prevention of possible harm by murder is totally insane and immoral, and lazy — as it does not sort out the reason of war, but continues the foment of it and increment it.

If you wish to bomb something radical and Islamic that feeds such terrorism, just carpet bomb Riyadh's Palaces. Then we would believe you are serious about ending the war on terror declared by imbecilic George.

But I guess ending a war for a General would be like generating self-unemployment before retirement. There are so many days in any one year for military Parades in which to shine those buttons.

And I have no idea what the general means: What we need here is a dial, not a switch. No idea.

And I am joking when I say bomb Riyadh... of course. I mean bomb nothing.

Oops I only placed 3 stars on the general... And I always find terms like "playing" and "game" quite unsavoury when associated with war professionals. I can understand that from stupid video gamers, but not from real McCoys.

 

war...

 

War is a state of armed conflict between societies. It is generally characterized by extreme collective aggression, destruction, and usually high mortality. The set of techniques and actions used to conduct war is known as warfare. An absence of war is usually called "peace". Total war is warfare that is not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant casualties.

While some scholars see war as a universal and ancestral aspect of human nature,[1] others argue that it is only a result of specific socio-cultural or ecological circumstances.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War

 

Gus: or imbecility from the human species..., especially in the 21st century. And its possible that granddad had fertiliser in his shed for growing his poppies...

 

freedom to run aground into a reef...

One of the most powerful figures in the United States military has called on Australia to follow America's lead by launching a "freedom of navigation" operation within 12 nautical miles of contested islands in the South China Sea.

The Commander of the US Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral Joseph P Aucoin, is visiting Australia for high-level talks with defence leaders, where he has discussed growing concerns with Beijing's military expansion in the region.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-22/aus-should-challenge-claims-in-south-china-sea-says-admiral/7189598

 

What will be the result of such navigational protest? Run aground on uncharted reefs? Get the Chinese to stop buying our coal? Keep the diplomatic hullabulla employed? Stop the Chinese for sending us more tapes of "she'll be the one"? Would the Chinese pay attention to our navigational exploit and diplomatic demands — and remove themselves from the newly created Islands? 

The answer from the Chinese will be simple and to the point: Go away... We know that. So what the fucup is Vice Admiral Joseph P Aucoin trying to do? 

recanting after the act...

 

Michael Hayden is the only official to have served as head of both the National Security Agency and CIA. Once retired from public service, the chief spy for much of the George W. Bush era has always had a difficult time staying out of the headlines.

At the NSA, the former Air Force general oversaw what many now consider to be the illegal warrantless surveillance of communications between individuals in the U.S. and alleged foreign terrorist groups. Later appointed CIA director by George W. Bush, Hayden served until 2009, when he resigned and joined the private security consulting Chertoff Group.

To publicize his new book, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, Hayden has ventured to criticize certain positions being taken by GOP presidential aspirant Donald Trump. He has in particular focused on Trump’s support of torture and his willingness to kill entire families of “terrorists.” Hayden has suggested that officers in the military can refuse to do either, even if ordered to do so by the president, because both actions are currently illegal under Pentagon guidelines. It is an odd position for him to take as he defends torture in his book and never challenged White House orders when he was at NSA.

Hayden also somewhat curiously disagrees with Trump and all the other Republican candidates in his unwillingness to support Obama administration efforts to obtain backdoors on security systems in place on telecommunications equipment. Hayden was referring specifically to attempts to coerce Apple to crack the security on its iPhones to obtain additional information relating to the San Bernardino terrorist attack. This position places him at odds with FBI director James Comey. Hayden, as a former director of the NSA, bases his opposition on his knowledge of how security systems can be broken. He asserts that once a breach is engineered into a system it becomes easy to compromise. If Apple were to do as the government is demanding, every iPhone could potentially be attacked down the road by criminal hackers as well as by government agencies acting without any legal authority.

Books by former top spies are generally self-serving, written to explain away the bad decisions made by the authors, a form of confession without any penance or even a mea culpa. They also frequently come with a whopping advance, $4 million in the case of the memoir authored by George Tenet in 2007. Publishers apparently think that anything written about spying is a potential best seller, even though the actual books most often turn out to be somewhat less than that and wind up on remainder piles.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/bush-spymaster-revises-history/