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davisem

Russia Says Aleppo Combat Has Ceased; Residents Disagree - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ebels-russia-lavrov-assad.html

shared by davisem on 09 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Russian officials said Thursday that the Syrian Army had stopped combat operations in the divided city of Aleppo in order to evacuate civilians, but residents of the rebel-held enclave reported that after a day of intense bombardment, fighting was continuing
  • 150 airstrikes had killed at least 50 people and in which residents said they were unable to flee because of the intense combat
  • At the United Nations, the agency’s envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told reporters he could not verify whether the fighting had stopped or whether civilians were being allowed to evacuate
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  • Pleas for help from eastern Aleppo escalated on Thursday, with doctors warning that they could no longer provide more than first aid
  • Mr. Assad told Al Watan, a pro-government newspaper, that victory in Aleppo “doesn’t mean the end of the war in Syria. It is a significant landmark toward the end of the battle, but the war in Syria will not end until terrorism is eliminated,” he said, referring to insurgents
  • Bombs containing chlorine, banned as a weapon by international law, fell on the front line near the Kalasseh neighborhood, sickening about 30 people, the White Helmets said.
  • and that now the United States and Russia, as well as the Syrian combatants, could not agree on a plan to deliver aid and evacuate civilians who want to leave
  • Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued an angry and sarcastic response to a statement from six Western countries a day earlier that had warned of a humanitarian catastrophe in Aleppo. The ministry said that Russia was providing aid to residents it said had
  • Led by Canada, the United Nations General Assembly is scheduled to vote on a draft resolution that calls for a “cessation of hostilities” for an undefined period of time and that allows humanitarian aid to be delivered. It would have no force of law.
  • davisem on 09 Dec 16
     
    Syrian Army stopped combat in the city Aleppo because they wanted to evacuate the citizens, but after they were bombarded, there was still fighting. It is so bad that for doctors, it hard to provide financial aid.
Javier E

I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674759

trigger resilience social media psychology mental health culture history

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Trigger warnings migrated from feminist websites and blogs to college campuses and progressive groups. Often, they seemed more about emphasizing the upsetting nature of certain topics than about accommodating people who had experienced traumatic events. By 2013, they had become so pervasive—and so controversial—that Slate declared it “The Year of the Trigger Warning.”
  • he issue only got more complicated from there. Around 2016, Richard Friedman, who ran the student mental-health program at Cornell for 22 years, started seeing the number of people seeking help each year increase by 10 or 15 percent. “Not just that,” he told me, “but the way young people were talking about upsetting events changed.
  • He described “this sense of being harmed by things that were unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The language that was being used seemed inflated relative to the actual harm that could be done. I mean, I was surprised—people were very upset about things that we would never have thought would be dangerous.” Some students, for instance, complained about lecturers who’d made comments they disliked, or teachers whose beliefs contradicted their personal values.
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  • Friedman worried that students also saw themselves as fragile, and seemed to believe that coming into contact with offensive or challenging information was psychologically detrimental. In asking for more robust warnings about potentially upsetting classroom material, the students seemed to be saying: This could hurt us, and this institution owes us protection from distress.
  • My own doubts about all of this came, ironically, from reporting on trauma. I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.
  • as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?
  • Since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011. Though the pandemic undoubtedly contributed to a crash in adolescent mental health, the downturn began well before COVID hit.
  • Part of the issue may be a social-media ecosystem that lets teens live within a bubble of like-minded peers and tends to privilege the loudest, most aggrieved voices; this kind of insularity can encourage teenagers to understand distressing experiences as traumatizing. “I think it’s easier for them to artificially curate environments that are comfortable,” Shaili Jain, a physician and PTSD specialist, told me. “And I think that is backfiring. Because then when they’re in a situation where they’re not comfortable, it feels really alarming to them.”
  • The CDC study suggests that, over the past decade, bullying among high schoolers has actually decreased in certain respects. Today’s teenagers are also less likely to drink or use illicit drugs than they were 10 years ago. And even before pandemic-relief funds slashed the child-poverty rate, the percentage of children living in poverty fell precipitously after 2012. American public high schoolers are more likely to graduate than at any other time in our country’s history, and girls are significantly more likely to graduate than boys.
  • So what has changed for the worse for teenage girls since roughly 2010? The forces behind their deteriorating mental health are opaque and complex, but one big shift has been a decline in the time teenagers spend with their friends in person, dipping by 11 hours a week—a decline that began before the pandemic, but was badly exacerbated by it
  • Since 2014, the proportion of teens with smartphones has risen by 22 percent, and the proportion who say they use the internet “almost constantly” has doubled
  • this idea—that to develop resilience, we must tough out hard situations—places a heavier burden on some people than others.
  • Applying the language of trauma to an event changes the way we process it. That may be a good thing, allowing a person to face a moment that truly cleaved their life into a before and an after, and to seek help and begin healing. Or it may amplify feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, elevating those feelings above a sense of competence and control.
  • “We have this saying in the mental-health world: ‘Perception is reality,’ ” Jain said. “So if someone is adamant that they felt something was traumatizing, that is their reality, and there’s probably going to be mental-health consequences of that.”
  • Martin Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the past 50 years researching resilience. One study he co-authored looked at the U.S. Army, to see if there was a way to predict PTSD. Unsurprisingly, he and his fellow researchers found a link to the severity of the combat to which soldiers were exposed
  • But the preexisting disposition that soldiers brought to their battlefield experiences also mattered. “If you’re a catastrophizer, in the worst 10 or 20 percent, you’re more than three times as likely to come down with PTSD if you face severe combat,” Seligman told me. “And this is true at every level of severity of combat—the percentage goes down, but it’s still about twice as high, even with mild combat or no obvious combat.”
  • In other words, a person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling. “To the extent we overcome and cope with the adversities and traumas in our life, we develop more mastery, more resilience, more ability to fend off bad events in the future,”
  • Teenage girls report troublingly high rates of sexual violence and bullying, as well as concern for their own physical safety at school. But it’s not clear that their material circumstances have taken a plunge steep enough to explain their mental-health decline
  • soldiers who experienced severe trauma could not only survive, but actually turn their suffering into a source of strength. “About as many people who showed PTSD showed something called post-traumatic growth, which means they have an awful time during the event, but a year later they’re stronger physically and psychologically than they were to begin with,” he said. But that empowering message has yet to take hold in society.
  • what would be a more productive way to approach adversity
  • physical exercise. “It’s like any form of strength training,” he told me. “People have no hesitation about going to the gym and suffering, you know, muscle pain in the service of being stronger and looking a way that they want to look. And they wake up the next day and they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so painful. I’m so achy.’ That’s not traumatic. And yet when you bring that to the emotional world, it’s suddenly very adverse.”
  • “But conversely, to the extent that we have an ideology or a belief that when traumatic events occur, we are the helpless victims of them—that feeds on itself.”
  • he exercise metaphor rankled Michael Ungar, the director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada. “Chronic exposure to a stressor like racism, misogyny, being constantly stigmatized or excluded, ableism—all of those factors do wear us down; they make us more susceptible to feelings that will be very overwhelming,” he told me. There are, after all, only so many times a person can convince themselves that they can persevere when it feels like everyone around them is telling them the opposite.
  • “the resiliency trap.” Black women in particular, she told me, have long been praised for their toughness and perseverance, but individual resiliency can’t solve structural problems
  • From Dent’s perspective, young people aren’t rejecting the concept of inner strength; they are rejecting the demand that they navigate systemic injustice with individual grit alone. When they talk about harm and trauma, they aren’t exhibiting weakness; they’re saying, Yes, I am vulnerable, and that’s human.
  • patients are being more “transparent about what they need to feel comfortable, to feel safe, to feel valued in this world,” she said. “Is that a bad thing?”
  • Most of the experts I spoke with were careful to distinguish between an individual student asking a professor for a specific accommodation to help them manage a past trauma, and a cultural inclination to avoid challenging or upsetting situations entirely
  • Thriving requires working through discomfort and hardship. But creating the conditions where that kind of resilience is possible is as much a collective responsibility as an individual one.
  • to replace our culture of trauma with a culture of resilience, we’ll have to relearn how to support one another—something we’ve lost as our society has moved toward viewing “wellness” as an individual pursuit, a state of mind accessed via self-work.
  • “If everything is traumatic and we have no capacity to cope with these moments, what does that say about our capacity to cope when something more extreme happens?”
  • “Resilience is partly about putting in place the resources for the next stressor.” Those resources have to be both internal and external
  • Social change is necessary if we want to improve well-being, but social change becomes possible only if our movements are made up of people who believe that the adversities they have faced are surmountable, that injustice does not have to be permanent, that the world can change for the better, and that they have the ability to make that change.
  • we need to provide material aid to meet basic needs. We need to repair broken community ties so fewer among us feel like they’re struggling alone. And we need to encourage the cultivation of a sense of purpose beyond the self. We also know what stands in the way of resilience: avoiding difficult ideas and imperfect people, catastrophizing, isolating ourselves inside our own heads.
  • In my interviews with women who have experienced sexual violence, I try not to put the traumatic event at the center of our conversations. My aim instead is to learn as much as I can about them as people—their families, their work, their interests, what makes them happy, and where they feel the most themselves. And I always end our conversations by asking them to reflect on how far they’ve come, and what they are proudest of.
grayton downing

Looking to Israel for Clues on Women in Combat - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-clues-on-women-in-combat.html

israel combat us

shared by grayton downing on 26 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • As the United States moves to integrate more women into combat roles, some have looked to Israel, which on paper has one of the most gender-neutral militaries in the world
  • “There’s a lot of pressure on the women to be just as good as the men because we have a lot to prove,”
Emilio Ergueta

BBC News - UK ends Afghan combat operations - 0 views

www.bbc.com/uk-29776544

bbc news afghan combat history politics

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 26 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The last UK base in Afghanistan has been handed over to the control of Afghan security forces, ending British combat operations in the country.
  • The number of deaths of British troops throughout the conflict stands at 453. The death toll among US military personnel stands at 2,349.
  • Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, Mr Fallon accepted the Taliban had not been defeated, but said Afghan forces were now taking "full responsibilities".
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  • The UK forces were part of a US-led coalition which toppled the ruling Taliban in 2001, following the 9/11 attacks in the US. After 9/11, US President George Bush had demanded that the Taliban hand over any leaders of al-Qaeda - the militant group which later claimed responsibility for the attacks - in Afghanistan, but the Taliban did not immediately comply.
  • "We're not going to send combat troops back into Afghanistan, under any circumstances," he added.
  • At the height of the war in 2009, about 10,000 UK troops were based at Camp Bastion and the UK's 137 patrol bases in southern Afghanistan.
  • Rear Adm Chris Parry, who helped plan the role of UK troops in Afghanistan, told the BBC that Britain's involvement had been "worth it", saying the country was now "more stable", was improving economically and had 40% more children going to school. But he said politicians in 2001 had not known what they wanted to achieve, the military had not had enough resources and there had been no "coherent military plan".
redavistinnell

Sikh Soldier Allowed to Keep Beard in Rare Army Exception - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rd-in-rare-army-exception.html

sikh soldier allowed keep army exception

shared by redavistinnell on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Sikh Soldier Allowed to Keep Beard in Rare Army Exception
  • On his first day at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Simratpal Singh sat in a barber chair where new cadets get their hair buzzed short, forced to choose between showing his faith and living it.
  • “Your self-image, what you believe in, is cut away,” he said in an interview. For a long time after, he would shave without looking in the mirror.That was almost 10 years ago. The cadet graduated, led a platoon of combat engineers who cleared roadside bombs in Afghanistan and was awarded the Bronze Star.
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  • “It is wonderful. I had been living a double life, wearing a turban only at home,” he said. “My two worlds have finally come back together.”
  • It is the first time in decades that the military has granted a religious accommodation for a beard to an active-duty combat soldier — a move that observers say could open the door for Muslims and other troops seeking to display their faith. But it is only temporary, lasting for a month while the Army decides whether to give permanent status to Captain Singh’s exception.
  • “This is a precedent-setting case,” said Eric Baxter, senior counsel at the Becket Fund, a nonprofit public interest law firm that specializes in religious liberty. “A beard is a beard is a beard. If you let one religious individual grow it, you will need to do it for all religions.”
  • The United States military has become increasingly inclusive, allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly, and women to serve in combat roles. But it has held a stiff line on uniforms and grooming standards. Though over the centuries these standards have included powdered wigs and Civil War mutton chops, in recent decades the military has insisted on men being clean-shaven with hair shorn high and tight.
  • The general added that any break from uniformity could erode esprit de corps and “damage the esteem and credibility” of the entire officer corps.
  • This summer, a United States District Court judge rejected the safety argument, noting that more than 100,000 troops have been allowed to grow beards for medical reasons such as acne and sensitive skin. The judge ruled the Army’s denial was illegal. But the decision applied only to students enrolling in R.O.T.C., leaving the larger question of beards for active-duty troops untouched.
  • Bearded Sikhs fought in the United States Army in World War II and Vietnam. Today, Sikhs in full religious garb serve in militaries around the world.
  • “It was a way to identify the Sikhs, who became a sort of military order that stood up against oppression,” said Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi, a doctor who is a major in the Army Reserve.
  • The Army has used a procedural Catch-22 to sidestep the question of
  • whether regulations protecting religious freedom allow for beards. For years, it denied requests from incoming recruits, saying accommodations could be granted only after recruits had formally joined. Recruits could not formally join without conforming to grooming standards. In short, to get permission to not shave, you had to shave.
  • “A true Sikh is supposed to stand out, so he can defend those who cannot defend themselves,” he said. “I see that very much in line with the Army values.”
  • He has made his own camouflage turbans to wear to his first day of work at Fort Belvoir, Va., on Monday.“I hope this shows others that they can both serve their faith and serve their country,” he said.
anonymous

A Supreme Court case on registering women for the draft evokes Ginsburg's legacy. - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-evokes-ginsburgs-legacy.html

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Since 2016, women have been allowed to serve in every role in the military, including ground combat. Unlike men, though, they are not required to register with the Selective Service System, the government agency that maintains a database of Americans who would be eligible for the draft were it reinstated.
  • But the requirement that only men must register for the draft remains. The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to hear a challenge to the requirement
  • “It imposes selective burdens on men, reinforces the notion that women are not full and equal citizens, and perpetuates stereotypes about men’s and women’s capabilities,” lawyers with the A.C.L.U. wrote in a petition on behalf of two men who were required to register and the National Coalition for Men.
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  • Justice Ginsburg, who died in September, argued six cases in the Supreme Court. In the first, Frontiero v. Richardson in 1973, she persuaded the court that the Air Force’s unequal treatment of the husbands of female officers, who were denied housing and medical benefits, violated equal protection principles.
  • In 1981, in Rostker v. Goldberg, the Supreme Court rejected a sex-discrimination challenge to the registration requirement, reasoning that it was justified because women could not at that time serve in combat.
  • In 2019, Judge Gray H. Miller, of the Federal District Court in Houston, ruled that since women can now serve in combat, the men-only registration requirement was no longer justified.
  • The government has not drafted anyone since the Vietnam War, and there is no reason to think that will change.
  • “Should the court declare the men-only registration requirement unconstitutional,” their brief said, “Congress has considerable latitude to decide how to respond. It could require everyone between the ages of 18 and 26, regardless of sex, to register; it could rescind the registration requirement entirely; or it could adopt a new approach altogether, such as replacing” the registration requirement “with a more expansive national service requirement.”
Javier E

Opinion | I was a combat interpreter in Afghanistan, where cultural illiteracy led to U... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...h-ahadi-us-cultural-illiteracy

afghanistan Culture history us military policy cultural illiteracy failure

shared by Javier E on 01 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • I also know that many Americans have been asking: Why is this crazy scramble necessary? How could Afghanistan have collapsed so quickly?
  • As a former combat interpreter who served alongside U.S. and Afghan Special Operations forces, I can tell you part of the answer — one that’s been missing from the conversation: culture.
  • When comparing the Taliban with the United States and its Western allies, the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils. To many Americans, that may seem an outlandish claim. The coalition, after all, poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan. It built highways. It emancipated Afghan women. It gave millions of people the right to vote for the first time ever.
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  • All true. But the Americans also went straight to building roads, schools and governing institutions — in an effort to “win hearts and minds” — without first figuring out what values animate those hearts and what ideas fill those minds. We thus wound up acting in ways that would ultimately alienate everyday Afghans.
  • First, almost all representatives of Western governments — military and civilian — were required to stay “inside the wire,” meaning they were confined at all times to Kabul’s fortified Green Zone and well-guarded military bases across the country.
  • As it was, however, virtually the only contact most Afghans had with the West came via heavily armed and armored combat troops. Americans thus mistook the Afghan countryside for a mere theater of war, rather than as a place where people actually lived.
  • U.S. forces turned villages into battlegrounds, pulverizing mud homes and destroying livelihoods. One could almost hear the Taliban laughing as any sympathy for the West evaporated in bursts of gunfire.
  • Sometimes, yes, we built good things — clinics, schools, wells. But when the building was done, we would simply leave. The Taliban would not only destroy those facilities, but also look upon the local community with greater suspicion for having received “gifts” from America.
  • The Marines I worked with were shocked, for example, to hear me exchanging favorite Koran verses with my fellow Afghans, mistaking this for extremism rather than shared piety
  • When talking to Afghan villagers, the Marines would not remove their sunglasses — a clear indication of untrustworthiness in a country that values eye contact.
  • In some cases, they would approach and directly address village women, violating one of rural Afghanistan’s strictest cultural norms.
  • Faux pas such as these sound almost comically basic, and they are. But multiplied over millions of interactions throughout the United States’ two decades of wheel-spinning in Afghanistan, they cost us dearly in terms of local support.
  • From the point of view of many Afghans, Americans might as well have been extraterrestrials, descending out of the black sky every few weeks, looking and acting alien, and always bringing disruption, if not outright ruin.
  • This isn’t just about Afghanistan. When it comes to cultural illiteracy, America is a recidivist. We failed to understand Iraqi culture, too, so that now, many Iraqis see Iran as the lesser of two evils. Before that, we failed to understand Vietnam. And so on. Wherever our relentless military adventurism takes us next, we must do better.
Javier E

This is what a 'multipolar' world looks like. It's chaos | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...lar-world-looks-like-its-chaos

multipolar rules-based world order hamas israel enlightenment culture politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 15 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • The Hamas terror attack has triggered war in Gaza, a geopolitical crisis and now – from Sydney to New York City – outbursts of street-level anti-Semitism in the West. Unless it de-escalates quickly, it looks like a strategic turning point both for Palestinian nationalism and Israel
  • though I am no expert on the region, I can throw some concreteness into the current battle of abstractions.
  • But the international community has a right to demand proportionality, restraint, respect for international law, and condemn breaches of it. President Biden last night was right to emphasise the need for lawfulness.
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  • Let’s start with the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, rescue the hostages, arrest and prosecute Hamas and engage in lawful armed combat with its enemy.
  • People claiming the Hamas attack is the ‘violence of the oppressed’ are deluded. Hamas rules Gaza like a mafia state: its operatives walk around neighbourhoods in twos, dressed in dark suits, prying into people’s business. They run the place on a mixture of terror, public service provision and the kudos of their fighters.
  • They are feared but there is widespread disrespect for them, especially among secular and nationalist sections of the population.
  • Paradoxically, the western ‘anti-imperialists’ trying to apologise for the terror attack, and the Israeli right calling for retribution against civilians, both need to identify Hamas with the Palestinian population of Gaza in order to justify violence. But there is no basis for doing so.
  • The fact that a violent action takes place in the context of a wider oppression does not make it either (a) just (b) lawful under international law or c) effective in pursuit of social justice.
  • In this case, Hamas’s act of terror looks set to achieve the opposite.
  • What does Hamas want?
  • Hamas has offered a truce and asked for negotiations, stating that it has ‘achieved its objective’. If so, it’s logical to conclude that the immediate objective was to demonstrate proof-of-concept of an unstoppable pogromist terror. Do as we ask or we do this again, might be a fair summary.
  • The wider aim, according to numerous experts, is to force Hamas and Iran back into the power-broking process in the Middle East region, paralysing Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.
  • The firm view of the Islamic Republic is that the governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will suffer losses. Defeat awaits them…Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not a situation that encourages closeness to it. They [other governments] should not make this mistake. The usurper [Zionist] regime is coming to an end.
  • Hamas could only achieve the aim of ending Saudi-Israeli rapprochement with an attack designed to trigger massive retribution, risking a regional all-out war.
  • there’s a line in Khamenei’s 3 October speech that, in retrospect looks explanatory: Thus, [the Zionists] are filled with grudge. They are filled with anger! Of course, the Quran exclaims: “Say, “die of your rage!” (3:119). That’s right. Be angry, and die of your rage. And this will happen. They are dying. With God’s help, this matter of ‘die of your rage’ is happening now as regards the Zionist regime.
  • ‘Die of your rage’ might actually be a good summary of what Hamas intends Israel to now do.
  • Enraged by the barbarity of the attacks, Israel unleashes unprecedented collective punishment against Gaza, triggering both Hezbollah and West Bank militants to join in the fight; this in turn prompts a wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations in western cities, and draws the USA into a regional quagmire, testing the limits of American support for Israel
  • Meanwhile combat losses, and retribution over the complete failure of Netanyahu’s strategy of ‘managing’ the conflict, raise political divisions in Israeli society to the point where its democracy fails.
  • In a context where both Russia and China have complex hybrid destabilisation operations going on in western democracies, and where the Brics+ project is pursuing the active decomposition of the rules-based order, this objective does not look as mad as at first sight.
  • the ‘multipolar world’ turns out not to be one of peaceful coexistence, but characterised by extreme conflicts and genocide.
  • In pursuit of systemic competition Beijing and Moscow are scraping at every open wound in the body geopolitic
  • it’s what you get when you purposefully dismantle an international order based on treaties and explicit rules. And where elites in Russia, the USA, Brasil and parts of Europe are openly experimenting with ethno-nationalist politics.
  • Chaos, then, is a feature of multipolarity, not a bug.
  • Israel has signalled its military objective is to destroy Hamas. From my experience in Gaza I would say: that is possible.
  • But be in no doubt. It will need a sustained urban combat operation, a long-term military occupation, massive loss of civilian life, an existential refugee crisis in Sinai, and the diversion of US-supplied ammunition and resources from Ukraine.
  • Attempting it with a largely conscript/reservist army, full of recently mobilised and enraged soldiers? Again it’s worth remembering Khamenei’s exhortation to Israelis to ‘die of your rage’.
  • The very impossibility of all these outcomes shows why we need an internationally mediated peace, alongside a functional two-state solution, which allows the people of Gaza to live in peace, exercise democracy and travel across borders.
  • not only will liberal sympathy for Israel evaporate, but the Muslim minorities in some Western countries will be radicalised.
  • Typically, from my experience, combat in Gaza takes the following form. There is a street with children playing at one end; in the middle it is eerily deserted; at the other end is the IDF and above is an IDF drone. But there is no front line. The mujahedeen are in tunnels, popping up to take sniper shots or lay IEDs at night, and only committing ATGMs once a vehicle comes into view. The only front line is, for most of the time, between the IDF and Palestinian civilians.
  • Both sides risk miscalculating. Hamas does not care what happens to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of whom hate Hamas.
  • But there is a danger of miscalculation for Israel too. Netanyahu’s far-right government completely missed the threat, actively stoked tensions in the West Bank and Al Aqsa, and could easily now double down on a self-destructive course.
  • Ultimately, you cannot hold two million people in an open air prison without a gaoler to keep order. If Hamas can’t do it, the IDF will have to be a permanent occupation force, or it will have to install the PA, or the UN will have to send a stabilisation force.
  • Danger of miscalculation
  • The Brics+ ideology
  • The Gaza crisis is the latest example of how the Russian/Chinese ‘multipolar world’ project works in practice. It doesn’t matter whether there is a chain of command that goes Moscow→Tehran→Hamas. There is a chain of understanding – seize every opportunity to militarise all conflict; exploit every unexpected breakthrough; make all violence symbolic; weaponise the information space and push conflict into the heartlands of ‘imperialism’.
  • the Brics+ ideology. Its central tenets are that a multipolar world is better than the charter system; that universalism and international law are over; that the West no longer has the right to use the structures of international governance to normalise concepts like democracy or human rights; and that everything that disorganises the rules-based order is progressive, even when carried out by reactionary political forces.
  • Arab nationalism no longer looks like the dominant ideology on the demonstrations we’ve seen in Sydney, London and NYC. Alongside it there’s a mixture of Islamism plus the ‘decolonisation’ agenda of postmodernist academia.
  • For the past two years, during the Ukraine war, this incipient red-brown ideology has been mostly contained:
  • with this conflict there is now a danger that the masses turn up, and are corralled into this emergent fusion of far-left/far-right politics.
  • I’ve spent the period post-2016 trying to equip the democratic left to defeat this ideology. It’s not about being ‘anti-woke’, or apologising for colonialism: it means teaching people that a cocktail of anti-humanism, anti-universalism and anti-rationality is a route to excusing the totalitarian states in Russia and China, and – now – the genocidal actions of their proxies.
  • A case study of this is the statement issued by 31 Harvard student groups saying they ‘hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence’ – just hours after the Hamas attack began.
  • the global left is rapidly splitting into irreconcilable camps – as Edward Thompson recognised it would, under the influence of post-structuralism in the 1970s.
  • The logical implication is that Palestinians have no agency whatsoever. That Hamas murders civilians because Israel has ‘structured’ Palestinian reality to make that inevitable. For people presumably wedded to ‘decolonising’ the curriculum, it is a shockingly colonialist premise.
  • The logic is that Israel is responsible for everything Hamas does because its violence has ‘structured every aspect of Palestinian existence’ since the Nakba.
  • There are many civilisations, and none is superior or inferior to another. They are equal since each civilisation represents a unique expression of its own culture, traditions, and the aspirations of its people.
  • In a way, what Putin preaches is an ‘intersectionality of the peoples’: identity politics raised from the level of the individual to the level of the ethnic group.
  • And it turns out anti-Enlightenment leftism makes it pretty easy to converge with that view. The common assumptions are disdain for universalism, scorn for international law and human rights, repudiation of the Enlightenment (and thus liberalism, social democracy, humanistic Marxism and anarchism) and worship of any totalitarian government that delivers economic development.
  • This is the modern incarnation of Stalinism, and – to the surprise of nobody who has studied actual Stalinism – it has no problem seeing fascists like Hamas as the ‘agent of progress’.
  • we need to understand how closely this hyper-deterministic and anti-universal world view maps onto the ideology presented, for example, by Putin at Valdai last week. For Putin there is no single human civilisation, only civilisations, which must be rooted in ethnicity establish their co-existence through the survival of the fittest:
  • One camp, he said, is a theology. The other a tradition of active reason. The first repudiates liberalism and universalism. The second recognises its debt to liberalism and wants to make universalism consistent
  • The first claims international law is a sham; the second knows that, though the institutions of the rules-based order are flawed, they are better than chaos.
  • that you can stand with the Israeli people under attack while simultaneously standing up for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
  • Those flaunting their joy at the murder of Israeli civilians need to understand the licence this creates in the minds of rightwing ethno-nationalists in our own society. What Hamas did to the kids of Kfar Azar, the far right wants to do to you.
nataliedepaulo1

Pentagon might propose sending ground troops to Syria - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 16 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The Defense Department might propose that the US send conventional ground combat forces into northern Syria for the first time to speed up the fight against ISIS, CNN has learned.
  • Trump may be asked to do away with all the limits so complete units can be sent and temporary deployments will also be counted. Commanders say this will give them more flexibility in operations, but it also will increase the number of troops there, something the Iraqi government would have to agree to.
  • maxwellokolo on 16 Feb 17
     
    "It's possible that you may see conventional forces hit the ground in Syria for some period of time," one defense official told CNN. But the official emphasized that any decision is ultimately up to the President. President Donald Trump has ordered his defense secretary to come up with a proposal to combat ISIS before the end of the month.
qkirkpatrick

Ukrainian soldiers ill-prepared for psychological toll of war - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-9dfb-03366e719af8_story.html

ukrainian war history

shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • In a military training class north of Kiev late last month, volunteer ­instructor Viktor Mosgovoi led 30 would-be officers through hours of jumps, breathing exercises and group massages — Ukraine’s first mandatory psychological training for recruits
  • Most of them followed along with blank looks or smirks on their faces. A few erupted into giggles. “Sing a song about what you see,” Mosgovoi suggested as a way to beat the battlefield blues. “And don’t drink.”
  • In nearly a quarter-century of independence, Ukraine’s military has seen so little combat that the country’s defense minister estimated the nation had only 6,000 battle-ready troops a year ago. Over the past 10 months, the Ukrainian army has drafted almost 70,000 soldiers in a war against pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • And most of the fighting has been carried out by recruits and volunteers with no prior combat experience.
  • “We lack the military specialists. We lack experience in this field.”
  • But with no post-Soviet combat experience, and a military structure that officials say was intentionally wizened under years of pro-Russian leadership, very few people had any practical experience with war trauma.
  • We practically do not have military psychology in this country,”
  • Before the war, few Ukrainian men had ever heard of post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological shock or mental trauma — or would openly discuss such afflictions.
  • qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15
     
    Ukrainian soldiers do not know how to deal with war. Most of them have never been in fighting, and many of them are volunteers or were drafted recently
alexdeltufo

The Enduring Impact of World War I - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ing-impact-of-world-war-i.html

shared by alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • the bloodiest episode of combat in human history, generating 60,000 casualties in a single day
  • but its occurrence in a television program that is acutely sensitive to historical accuracy is a sign of just how deeply, if in some ways obscurely, World War I remains embedded in the popular consciousness.
  • “the war to end all wars,” it has instead become the war to which all subsequent wars, and much else in modern life, seem to refer.
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  • novel form of organized mass death.
  • filtered through the blood, smoke and misery of those earlier engagements.
  • tablished a pattern that would continue to hold, consciously and not, for much of the 20th century.
  • a tradition that included not only martial epics and popular adventure novels but also religious and romantic allegories like John Bunyan’s
  • That soldier, in turn, with some adjustments of outfit and equipment, would march through the subsequent decades, leaving behind a corpus of remarkably consistent firsthand testimony.
  • This was clear enough to Larkin, whose patriotism rested on the notion that England was the worst place on earth with the possible exception of everywhere else.
  • The title of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s cycle of autobiographical stories about life before, during and after combat in Vietnam,
  • “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.
  • has remained in effect even as the geography has changed.
  • arkin’s subject is less the war as such than a faded England of “archaic faces” and bygone habits, an England that ceased to exist sometime
  • arkin also suggests that it is complicated, even deceptive. Individuals like the anonymous children and husbands
  • last few centuries conquering most of the rest of the globe are another story. Photo
  • whole, its legacy for the individual veteran will be cynicism and disillusionment.
  • To imply that Britain (or for that matter any other combatant nation)
  • Another, favored at the time by a handful of vanguard intellectuals (notably the Italian Futurists)
  • ccounts of that summer, especially in France and Britain, frequently emphasize beautiful weather and holiday pleasures.
  • A lovely example of the interplay of empirical reality and literary embellishment: the meteorological record will attest to the color and clarity of the sky, but only the cruel, corrective irony of hindsight can summon the word “optimistic.”
  • chapters will also make clear the extent to which that “civilization,” so intoxicated by its own rhetoric of national glory and heroic destiny
  • argely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”
  • After Sept. 11, 2001, we were told — we told ourselves — that everything had changed. In a curious reversal of the logic of the Great War, the
  • detachment and personal whimsy” would give way to an ethic of seriousness and sincerity.
  • Ordinary soldiers were routinely referred to as “heroes” and “warriors,” even as their deaths and injuries were kept from public view.
  • But the Great War is not quite finished with us. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down in bloody inconclusiveness, the men and women who served in them have started writing,
  • The book belongs in the irreverent company of “Catch-22,” which is to say on the same shelf as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Chevalier’s “Fear.”
  • “The Things They Carried.” A deceptively modest collection of linked short stories, “Redeployment” bristles with place names,
  • who derived a stark lesson from his own experience at the Battle of the Somme: “The War had won, and would go on winning.”
  • alexdeltufo on 14 Jan 16
     
    A.O. Scott
anonymous

China says carrier group reaches 'initial' combat capability | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...initial-combat-capability.html

china politics attack war US

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • China's aircraft carrier Liaoning (C) takes part in a military drill of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in the western Pacific Ocean, April 18, 2018.  (REUTERS) Just a week after the Pentagon disinvited China from military exercises because of its “militarization” of the South China Sea area, the Communist country announced the carrier group led by its first aircraft carrier had reached "initial systematic combat capability."
  • The ship is conventionally powered by steam turbines, according to CGTN, and is capable of carrying different types of aircraft, including the J-15 fighters, as well as surveillance and anti-submarine helicopters.
  • Little is known about China’s aircraft program which is a state secret, but the country recently began sea trials of its first domestically-produced aircraft carrier that has yet to be named.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The new carrier is based on the former Soviet Union's Kuznetsov class design, with a ski jump-style deck for taking off and a conventional oil-fueled steam turbine power plant.
  • The country has used its naval fleet to stake claim to virtually the entire South China Sea and to range farther into the Pacific and Indian oceans – a provocative move that has heightened tensions with the U.S. Last Wednesday, the Pentagon said it was disinviting China from the Rim of the Pacific Exercises following reports the country was again secretly beefing up its military operation. 
  • Wu Qian, spokesperson Ministry of National Defense, said the "provocative action" was a "serious infringement" on China's sovereignty.
saberal

How the 'good war' went bad: elite soldiers from Australia, UK and US face a reckoning ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lia-uk-and-us-face-a-reckoning

US politics

shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • As the post-9/11 Afghanistan conflict dragged deep into its second decade, with persistent rumours alleging impropriety, brutality, and even possible war crimes swirling among Australia’s tight-knit defence community, Dr Samantha Crompvoets, a civilian sociologist, was commissioned to investigate alleged cultural failings within its special forces.
  • Roberts-Smith, a former SAS corporal, is suing the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times over a series of 2018 articles he claims defamed him because they portrayed him as committing war crimes while on deployment in Afghanistan. He strenuously denies all allegations and has previously rejected them as malicious and deeply troubling.
  • US soldiers were convicted over the deaths of two unarmed Afghan civilians on Bagram airbase in 2002. Two soldiers from a self-declared “kill team” pleaded guilty to murder while deployed, while Staff Sergeant Robert Bales pleaded guilty to the murder of 16 Afghan civilians during a shooting spree in Kandahar province in 2012. Members of the storied Seal Team 6 have been accused of war crimes, including beheading and mutilating slain enemies.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • These were soldiers from the militaries of liberal democracies, avowedly promoting the rule of law and seeking to bring peace and stability to a country that has known little but conflict for generations. Yet some have been accused of the most serious crimes imaginable, of targeting civilians, of torturing captives, of slaughtering children.
  • In her 45-page report sent to Australian defence force chiefs, Crompvoets wrote of the “well-crafted reports” of special forces operations that offered legal justification for the actions of soldiers.
  • During Major Chris Green’s deployment with the UK’s Grenadier Guards in Helmand province in 2012, he became increasingly concerned that special forces tactics were undermining the coalition’s broader counterinsurgency mission.
  • “People knew laws were being broken, people understood the modus operandi of the night raids. But every time an operator reported back from these raids and didn’t find themselves in front of a tribunal that just further convinced them they were doing the right thing, that the laws didn’t apply to them.”
  • “War is dynamic and imperfect and the freedom and autonomy in special forces is a double-edged sword,” one SAS member told Crompvoets.
  • Frank Ledwidge, a barrister and former military officer who served in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, argues that over the course of the Afghan war, a culture developed among coalition special forces that celebrated violence, prioritised kill statistics and dehumanised those they fought.
  • The JPEL was a list of “kill or capture” objectives – targets that were considered combatants and could be lawfully killed. It was a dynamic document, with names being added or subtracted as intelligence came in. Allegedly this dynamism was exploited.
  • Australia’s initial involvement, between 2001 and 2002, was focused on combating al-Qaida: “We weren’t trying to seize and hold ground. It was a mission entirely appropriate for our special forces.”
  • “The multiple rotations of people into Afghanistan particularly, some operators went there 12 times. That must affect their mental health ... or impact the way they went about their operations. Certainly it would impact upon the judgment questions about why they are there.
  • Saul argues there are drivers, too, of non-compliance with international humanitarian law. Moral disengagement emerges from combatants finding justifications for violations, and from a dehumanisation of the enemy.
  • When Sergeant Alexander Blackman of the Royal Marines shot a wounded, unarmed insurgent at point-blank range in the chest in Helmand in September 2011, he turned to his comrades and said: “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I’ve just broke the Geneva convention.”
  • “If there’s no structural change that challenges those power dynamics within special forces, there won’t be enduring changes.”
Javier E

Ukraine Invasion: Russia's Military Is Adapting After Early Failures - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-adapting-after-early-failures

russia military ukraine invasion weakness

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Russian killed-in-action numbers are stunning. In 20 years of hard fighting in Afghanistan, the U.S. suffered roughly 2,000 troops killed in combat. The Russians, in just over two weeks, have lost at least 4,000 and possibly twice that.
  • Russia is reportedly sending its jets on 200 sorties a day, using a tremendous amount of fuel and spare parts that will be increasingly hard to come by given sanctions. Ukraine claims to have shot down more than 50 aircraft at $20 million to $50 million a pop.
  • One recent estimate put the cost of the war at billions of dollars per day, and at that rate Putin will run out of money even before he runs out of public support.
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  • For the Russians on the ground in Ukraine, the worst is still ahead. For Putin to subdue Kyiv, a city of nearly four million, he will have to throw a significant level of combat power into the fight
  • It took the U.S. First Marine Division — the most elite combat troops in the world — nearly two months to conquer Fallujah, an Iraqi city about a tenth the size of Kyiv.
Javier E

U.N. Court Acquits 2 Serbs of War Crimes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-of-crimes-in-balkan-wars.html

war crimes court UN

shared by Javier E on 31 May 13 - No Cached
  • a United Nations court on Thursday acquitted two close aides of the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, spurning the prosecution’s demand for life sentences for his once all-powerful secret police chief and the chief’s deputy.
  • The judges, voting 2 to 1, found that the men had formed, directed and paid special secret combat units during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia from 1991 to 1995, but that they were not criminally liable for crimes committed by those units.
  • Legal experts expressed astonishment at the acquittals, which apparently rested on new standards applied by senior judges.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This and other recent acquittals have effectively absolved Serbia of any responsibility for atrocities committed by proxy armies in Croatia and Bosnia and by the covert network of paramilitary combat units trained, paid and supervised by the secret police.
  • “The entire doctrine of command responsibility has been ditched,” said Eric Gordy, who teaches the politics of Eastern Europe at the University College London and follows the trials closely. “So has the liability for aiding and abetting.”
  • “This and several other recent decisions have become completely irrational,” he said, citing as evidence the Serbian attack in late 1991 that virtually leveled the town of Vukovar in eastern Croatia, where both Mr. Stanisic and Mr. Simatovic were present with special units and giving directions. “There is no way they could not have known there were crimes involved,” he said.
rachelramirez

Zika Virus Causes Birth Defects, Health Officials Confirm - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-causes-birth-defects-cdc.html

zika health crisis

shared by rachelramirez on 14 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Zika Virus Causes Birth Defects, Health Officials Confirm
  • The conclusion should settle months of debate about the connection between the infection and these birth defects, called microcephaly, as well as other neurological abnormalities
  • The announcement may increase pressure on Congress to allocate more than $1.8 billion in emergency funding that President Obama requested for prevention and treatment of the outbreak
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Dr. Rasmussen and her colleagues also reviewed the biologically plausible explanations for how the virus might cause damage to the brain, and the absence of other explanations that make sense.
  • About 700 people in the United States have been infected with the Zika virus as of last week, including 69 pregnant women, Dr. Anne Schucat, the deputy director of the C.D.C., said on Monday at a White House briefing. About half of the cases are in Puerto Rico, where the virus is circulating locally.
  • C.D.C. officials said they were not ready to confirm that Zika can cause neurological conditions in adults, including Guillain-Barre syndrome, cases of which have increased in some countries in the Zika outbreak.
  • Beyond microcephaly, Dr. Rasmussen said, the authors concluded that Zika causes some other fetal brain problems, such as calcifications inside the skull.
Javier E

Home Should Not Be a War Zone - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-should-not-be-a-war-zone.html

guns debate

shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Some opponents of closing these gaps in our laws will continue to argue that dangerous people will obtain guns in our country no matter what, and therefore that taking steps to make it harder for them is fruitless. That is both poor logic and poor leadership.
  • Just as something as complex as a combat operation in a war zone meant that we could not eliminate every enemy combatant or prevent every American casualty, we cannot prevent every dangerous person from getting a gun, and we cannot prevent every gun tragedy. But wouldn’t preventing many of them be worth it? I believe it would.
  • We Americans are not a uniquely bloodthirsty people. We do not have more violent video games or movies than other countries. We do not have more dangerously mentally ill individuals than other countries. We are not unique in facing down the threat of global terrorism and active shooters.
Javier E

Interview with World War II Historian Andrew Roberts - 0 views

www.historynet.com/i-historian-andrew-roberts.htm

WWII historiography

shared by Javier E on 31 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • You write that Hitler's war aims were impossible—how so? The Germans were trying to win a straightforward conventional war and, at the same time, trying to fight an ideological war: a specifically Nazi war as opposed to a German war. I believe that a true German nationalist—Otto von Bismarck, say, or Helmuth von Moltke—could have won the Second World War, because he wouldn't have made the kind of demands of the German military that Hitler did, which was to win a two-front conventional war while at the same time imposing the policies of the "Aryan master race." Those aims were directly in opposition.
  • Could the Nazis have won, had they done something differently? Absolutely. If they had not invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and if they had instead thrown at the Allies even a fraction of the 3 million men they eventually unleashed against Russia, they would have chased us out of the Middle East and cut off access to 80 percent of the Allies' oil. We simply would not have been able to continue the struggle.
  • Was Hitler solely responsible for Germany's military blunders? No, there were plenty of people to blame. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring is a perfect example: He promised Hitler that no Allied bombs would fall on Germany; he promised to destroy the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk solely through airpower; he promised to completely supply the German forces at Stalingrad by air. Yet he could not deliver on any of these promises.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In the end, all of these poor military leaders were appointed or promoted by Hitler, many solely because they were Nazis, and that's no way to fight—or win—a war.
  • Who were the most effective combat generals of the war? The Russian Georgy Zhukov, because he was given every impossible task and succeeded at all of them. For Germany, Erich von Manstein, who came up with the "sickle cut" maneuver that in May 1940 defeated France and was the most effective German general on the Eastern Front.
  • The Germans saw the Japanese as adjuncts to the greater effort they were putting in. The Japanese never trusted the Germans; they didn't even tell Berlin they were going to attack Pearl Harbor. Neither country put in the diplomatic work required to really coordinate their efforts. Essentially, the Second World War was two separate conflicts fought simultaneously.
  • The major problem with the historiography of World War II is the Cold War—it was not in the West's postwar interest to acknowledge that it was the Russians who destroyed the Wehrmacht, at an unbelievable cost to themselves. We are just now beginning to acknowledge the Soviet Union's contribution.
  • Statistically, the Eastern Front was where the war was won—out of every five Germans killed in battlefield combat, four died on the Eastern Front
Javier E

Warning Labels on Helmets Combat Injury and Liability - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mbat-injury-and-liability.html

football injuries head

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • “They are saying to the public that you should buy our helmet, and they’re saying, if someone gets hurt, don’t blame us,” said Michael Kaplen, a lawyer who leads the New York State Traumatic Brain Injury Services Coordinating Council. “The selling of helmets is being done by the marketing department, and the label is made up by the legal department.”
Javier E

Top 10 books on U.S. interrogation-The Best Defense | FOREIGN POLICY - 0 views

ricks.foreignpolicy.com

interrogation torture

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - Cached
  • The Army bureaucracy and culture prizes information flow and reliance on assets and technology, making personal leadership a secondary priority. For example, reports --how to send them, what was the best format, and their content were the key priority prior to the commencement of DATE during our preparations. This over-emphasis on information flow and technology meant that during the actual exercise, there was little attempt to actually gain good situational awareness through battlefield circulations and terrain analysis.
  • in The Sling and the Stone. Hammes argues that during the 1990s and into the first years of the 20th century, DOD developed an institutional mindset completely centered around technology. The planning and vision papers put out "see increased technical capabilities of command and control as the key factor shaping future war." The command and control systems created would "exceed the capabilities of any opponent and will provide us with a near-perfect understanding of the battlefield."
  • This viewpoint formed the basis for the Future Combat System (FCS) and drove our training and mindset for much of 1990s. As a retired general told me who played a key role in the initiation of FCS , "future combat system was hijacked by people who thought you could completely lift the fog of war." Although FCS was eventually scrapped, the ideas that underpin it still drive Army culture. "Currently, DOD has defined the future as technology and is driving all experiments in that direction."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Because of the emphasis on information flow and technology, it's natural for commanders to remain in their command posts where they can have access to the flow of reports from the front and UAV feeds from above. In theory, they can access a near-perfect view of the battlefield and micro-manage their formations thanks to the excellent communication and sensor technologies at their disposal. In such circumstances, commanders moving forward behind their lead assault elements aren't necessary to get a good idea of the battle or drive their subordinates to take action quickly.
  • DATE showed the fallacy of this mindset. The opposing forces we fought did not afford us the opportunity when they attacked to form a near-perfect view of the battle. Why? Because they moved so quickly and concentrated their forces so well that by the time reports and UAV feeds were processed, the information was already useless. This occurred because commanders never moved forward to get a good idea of the terrain, and so our enemy was able to utilize it effectively to bypass all of the obstacles and areas we planned to kill them in.
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