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Javier E

The Fog of War - Wikipedia - 0 views

  • Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
  • Lesson #2: Rationality alone will not save us.
  • McNamara emphasizes that it was luck that prevented nuclear war—rational individuals like Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro came close to destroying themselves and each other.
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  • Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
  • McNamara talks about the proportions of cities destroyed in Japan by the US before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, comparing the destroyed Japanese cities to similarly-sized cities in the US: Tokyo, roughly the size of New York City, was 51% destroyed; Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, was 99% destroyed; Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles, was 40% destroyed; Osaka, the size of Chicago, was 35% destroyed; Kobe, the size of Baltimore, was 55% destroyed; etc. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment.
  • Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong. McNamara affirms Morris' framing of lesson 7 in relation to the Gulf of Tonkin incident: "We see what we want to believe."
  • Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. McNamara says that, even though the United States is the strongest nation in the world, it should never use that power unilaterally: "if we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we better reexamine our reasoning."
  • We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
  • we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.
  • War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.
  • If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding"—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.
  • We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
  • Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
  • We failed then—and have since—to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
  • We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
  • We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
Javier E

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) | CosmoLearni... - 0 views

  • R.S. McNamara's eleven lessons of war
  • 1. Empathize with your enemy
  • 2. Rationality will not save us
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  • 5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
  • 8. Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning
  • 1. The human race will not eliminate war in this century, but we can reduce the brutality of war—the level of killing—by adhering to the principles of a "Just War," in particular to the principle of "proportionality."
  • 5. We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
  • 8. War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court—that the U.S. has refused to support—which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.
  • 9. If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy—I don't mean "sympathy," but rather "understanding"—to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.
  • 3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
  • 5. We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine.
  • . We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture
  • 9. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
  • 10. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
  • 11. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
maddieireland334

The Quest For a Safe Gun - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Gun-safety technology has barely improved over the decades, even as many firearms have become more powerful.
  • n a speech at the White House earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced he’s directing the departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security to conduct or sponsor research into what it would take to make guns harder to use without authorization, and less likely to fire accidentally.
  • For one thing, gun owners often want their weapons to be instantly accessible and usable. That’s why so many people choose not to store their firearms in safes
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  • Making guns personalized so that they only work for approved users is a major theme in gun-safety technology today, but not everyone agrees that fingerprint sensors are the way to go
  • A review by America’s 1st Freedom, a publication run by the NRA, called Armatix’s smart weapon “sleek” but unreliable and ultimately “disappointing.” The review also raised questions about remote hacking, an aspect of personalized authentication that is likely to continue to come up.
  • TriggerSmart is developing its own RFID-enabled gun, one that he hopes—like many of the people developing advanced gun-safety technologies—will appeal to law enforcement
  • If gun enthusiasts see police officers and members of the military using a certain weapon, they’re more likely to buy the same thing.
  • That’s the idea, anyway. TriggerSmart is still testing its product, a painstaking process, and one that McNamara estimates will take a couple more years. “Because they’re such serious weapons,” he said. “We need to go and test technology rigorously in extreme conditions—in the desert in Africa and in the snow up in Alaska—to make sure that they perform perfectly well.”
  • “Nobody’s trying to take away guns,” McNamara said. “This is just offering another kind of gun. There’s thousands of types of guns. This is just another one. I don’t think, in any stretch of the imagination, that there’s anything in the president’s announcement that we’re taking away anybody’s guns. But of course there’s the fear-mongering. Paranoid fantasies.”
  • In the United States alone, there are some 350 million firearms—or, as The Washington Post recently pointed out, more guns than people. “The majority of gun owners are responsible,” Hirsch said. “I don’t know if guns are any more lethal than they used to be. The problem is they’re falling into the wrong hands.”
  • That’s true. People do kill people, just like guns-rights advocates like to say, but they wouldn’t always be able to without guns.
  • “Just the simplicity, pulling the trigger. It’s not something like a construction machine, where if you make a mistake you might lose a hand. You’re playing on a much higher level when talking about safety.”
Javier E

Rumsfeld's War and Its Consequences Now by Mark Danner | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • if the attacks on New York and Washington had been bold and shocking and outlandish, the goals behind them had been the classic objects of insurgents for millennia: to encourage recruits to join the insurgent cause, to show the vulnerability of the ruling power, and to provoke that power to overreact—to respond to insurgent attacks in such a way that would reveal to the world the regime’s cruelty and repressiveness and so bring the quiescent population (in this case, all Muslims) increasingly over to the insurgents’ side
  • the Americans offered a gift undreamt of in al-Qaeda’s philosophy: they invaded and occupied Iraq, a much more important country. The result was catastrophe, not only for Iraq but for the Bush administration’s worldwide “war on terror,” for the invasion seemed to brand Bush’s war, in image after bloody humiliating image of “Americans killing Muslims,” as a new Western crusade against the Islamic world, confirming in every newscast the guiding idea of al-Qaeda’s politics and propaganda.
  • Henry Kissinger, Rumsfeld’s old antagonist from the Ford administration, when asked why he supported the Iraq war, had reportedly replied, “because Afghanistan wasn’t enough.” The radical Islamists had wanted to humiliate us, he went on, “and we need to humiliate them.”3 This was about restoring national credibility, about rebuilding the national power—consisting in no small part of the image of power—that had been severely diminished by those world-altering real-time pictures of the collapsing towers
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  • Proud realists, neither man put much stock in the “democratic tsunami” that, in the fantasy of neoconservative true believers like Wolfowitz, the Iraq war would send sweeping out of Baghdad to engulf the Middle East. Instead they put their faith in “American leadership” and the restoration of American power through a decisive demonstration of American strength.
  • Rumsfeld is first and foremost a patriotic midwesterner, a politician who nourishes in his soul a primordial and undying belief in the manifest need for, and rightness of, American power. To him this truth is self-evident, imbibed at an Illinois breakfast table. Who do we want to lead in the world? Somebody else? The idea is plainly inconceivable.
  • As for the occupation—well, if democracy were to come to Iraq it would be the Iraqis themselves who must build it. There would be no occupation, and thus no planning for it. Rumsfeld’s troops would be in and out in four months. As he told a then adoring press corps, “I don’t do quagmires.”
  • He was smart, brash, ambitious, experienced, skeptical of received wisdom, jealous of civilian control, self-searching, analytical, domineering, and he aimed at nothing less than to transform the American military. The parallels with McNamara are stunning.
  • month after month in his arrogance and tenacity he would deny an insurgency had taken root. Month after month, as the shortcomings of the army he had sent into Iraq—too small, too conventional, not configured or equipped or trained to fight an insurgency and thus fated in its impotent bludgeoning to make it ever worse—became impossible to deny, he would go on denying them, digging in his heels and resisting the change he had to know was necessary.
Javier E

Saigon's Fall Still Echoes Today - WSJ - 0 views

  • the two most decisive factors in the outcome of the war were incompetent micromanagement by PresidentLyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
  • and Hanoi’s brilliant propaganda campaign, which fueled a gullible—and often disingenuous—global peace movement. Protesters, as angry as they were misinformed, ultimately persuaded Congress in May 1973 to prohibit spending on further U.S. combat operations in Indochina.
  • As Yale University’s John Lewis Gaddis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2005, “Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home.”
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  • Perhaps the cruelest myth was that—in the long-ago words of the current U.S. secretary of state while addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971—U.S. military personnel in Vietnam were regularly committing “war crimes” and behaving in a “fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”
  • a brilliant psychological warfare campaign by this country’s enemies misinformed and divided the American people, with tragic consequences—a reflexive hostility, in many quarters, to the use of U.S. military power anywhere in the world—that still weaken the nation today.
  • Congress ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory
  • By resisting Communist insurgencies in the region the U.S. bought time for vulnerable targets such as Thailand and Indonesia to become stronger
  • the real tragedy is that on almost every major point of contention war protesters got the facts wrong. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a nationalist who would likely be a buffer against Chinese expansion if we supported him. This ignored Hanoi’s official biographies, which acknowledged Ho’s role as a co-founder of the French Communist Party in 1920, his subsequent training in Moscow, followed by years traveling the world on behalf of the Communist International.
  • we would do well to clear away the myths that still adhere to that bloody conflict and understand why America got involved, what went wrong and what the consequences were.
  • We went to war because by ratifying the United Nations Charter in 1945 and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (Seato) treaty a decade later, the U.S. pledged to oppose armed international aggression
oliviaodon

Why Do People Refer to a Non-Existent 'Nuclear Button'? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Asking if the nuclear button at President Trump’s disposal is an actual button, as the president claimed on Twitter Tuesday, or merely a figurative term to describe the means by which a nuclear missile can be deployed is a bit like asking someone if they’d preferred to be shot or stabbed to death—a distinction without a difference. And yet here we are in the first week of the new year asking precisely that question.
  • Notwithstanding the puerile, schoolyard-like taunt from Trump, his tweet referred to the “nuclear football,” a series of launch codes contained in a briefcase that the president must enter in order to authorize a nuclear strike—one that no country has ordered since President Harry Truman dropped nuclear weapons on Japan to force it to surrender in World War II. (An early plan for nuclear war was codenamed “Dropkick.” According to former defense secretary Robert McNamara, the Kennedy- and Johnson-era defense secretary, you need a “football” for a “dropkick.”)
  • The term’s use continued through the Cold War. In the U.S., criticism of Senator Barry Goldwater’s apparent openness to using nuclear weapons in Vietnam prompted a New York Times story on September 27, 1964, with the headline: “Controversy Grows On Who Controls Nuclear Button.”
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  • The term “nuclear button” might have outlived the Cold War, the fear of global destruction, “duck-and-cover” drills, and even its original antagonists, the U.S., the Soviet Union, but as other countries, such as India and Pakistan, began developing their own nuclear-weapons programs, the metaphorical “nuclear button” entered their lexicon of war, as it did in countries like Israel, which does not confirm or deny the existence of a nuclear program.
  • It’s not known if Kim Jong Un possesses an actual nuclear button, as he claimed, or a metaphoric one—but he, like his father and grandfather before him, enjoys absolute power.
  • Even if he doesn’t have an actual button to order a nuclear strike, it’s quite possible he has something like it—with fewer safeguards in place than in the more established nuclear-weapons states. It’s that uncertainty that enhances the dangers of a “nuclear button”—the idea that annihilation can be unleashed with such ease by simply pressing a button.
  • But that’s little comfort for tens of millions of people if a nuclear warhead is hurtling toward a major city on the Korean Peninsula or the United States.
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