“
Jabir listened but was not convinced. “Iraq and Iran haven’t gotten along for many centuries. Why should we now?
”
”
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
“
Yes, I never expected to see you!
”
”
Karl Braungart (Counter Identity (Remmich/Miller, #2))
“
Sure as hell doesn’t seem that Williams’ study and findings were general. This man talked from fact. I bet this is the scientist and study they want.
”
”
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
“
I’ll be frank, Jerry. Aaron Morris telephoned here a week ago and wanted to know your whereabouts. I told him you were on leave. He said your wife called him about your whereabouts.
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”
Karl Braungart (Counter Identity (Remmich/Miller, #2))
“
And we are not pursuing military information on this trip. At least not about the Russian mafia exchanging Russian-Ukrainian tanks and electronics for their benefit in Syria.
”
”
Karl Braungart (Lost Identity (Remmich/Miller, #1))
“
Remmich’s subconscious mind is controlled by us. He will get what we want.
”
”
Karl Braungart (Counter Identity (Remmich/Miller, #2))
“
Your long-term association with military intelligence is important. Let’s talk about what you might notice in them. Since this happened, one or two may have changed behavioral characteristics. Are there any with peculiarities different from when they started?
”
”
Karl Braungart (Fatal Identity (Remmich/Miller, #3))
“
Thank God for men who manage to hold from afar, wipe tears away with tender words and dish out the life force that is hope. She has never felt so alone but out there, across an ocean, and in a foreign land, there is a man who loves her and would lay down his life just so she could feel the light once again.
”
”
Donna Lynn Hope
“
If I determine the enemy's disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it.
”
”
Sun Tzu
“
The best way to get rid of the negative thoughts is to crowd them out with something else bigger and more beautiful: worship of the One who holds everything in His powerful and capable hands.
”
”
Jocelyn Green (Faith Deployed...Again: More Daily Encouragement for Military Wives)
“
So much of how we think, feel, and live depends on our vision-what we choose to see in any given situation.
”
”
Jocelyn Green (Faith Deployed...Again: More Daily Encouragement for Military Wives)
“
Democrats see our voluntary military supported by taxpayer dollars as their personal Salvation Army. Self-interested behavior, such as deploying troops to serve the nation, is considered boorish in Manhattan salons.
”
”
Ann Coulter
“
When we aim high, pressure and stress obligingly come along for the ride. Stuff is going to happen that catches us off guard, threatens or scares us. Surprises (unpleasant ones, mostly) are almost guaranteed. The risk of being overwhelmed is always there. In these situations, talent is not the most sought-after characteristic. Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill. We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that "tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.
”
”
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
“
I’m back. I’m still here. I never left.
”
”
Brian Castner (The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows)
“
So much of how we think, feel, and live depends on our vision--what we choose to see in any given situation. In fact, I believe that the difference between being simply concerned or being consumed by worry rides on where we tend to focus our sight.
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”
Jocelyn Green (Faith Deployed...Again: More Daily Encouragement for Military Wives)
“
What was it like? Hell if I know. But next time someone asks.... I'll answer crooked, and I'll answer long. And when they get confused or angry, I'll smile. Finally, I'll think. Someone who understands.
”
”
Matt Gallagher (Youngblood)
“
When we deployed, in our heads, the towel we left hanging next to the shower to dry, would still be hanging there when we got back. Well, it won’t be. If it is, some important questions need to be asked.
”
”
Adam Fenner (Post-Deployment Wisdom For The Returning Service Member)
“
The Army's new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure... but don't worry, we're not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn't some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.
”
”
Rachel Maddow (Drift)
“
Border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement, and are most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations. . . We are all, therefore, simultaneously separated by and bound together by the violences of border imperialism.
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”
Harsha Walia (Undoing Border Imperialism (Anarchist Interventions, 6))
“
There is no way to imagine what it feels like to be shot at. I will never be with him when he is the most scared.
”
”
Melissa Seligman (The Day After He Left for Iraq: A Story of Love, Family, and Reunion)
“
Afghanistan changed him, but Iraq sculpted him.
”
”
Melissa Seligman (The Day After He Left for Iraq: A Story of Love, Family, and Reunion)
“
There are two things a combat deployment offers which all of us strongly desire. The first, being purpose. Every morning we woke up and knew why we were there. It is immediate and unavoidable. Although, it is extreme and unpleasant, there is a comfort in that purpose. The second, is simplicity. We have one goal. There are relatively simple rules on how to accomplish it, and we understand that just about everything will go wrong. Pretty simple.
”
”
Adam Fenner (Post-Deployment Wisdom For Those Expecting A Returning Service Member)
“
The desert is an unpredictable place. One day you're sweating, the next you're freezing. One moment the air is damp and cloudy like when the tide is coming in, the next the entire world is orange and dusty. The desert must be a woman.
”
”
Dianna Skowera (Of Those So Close Beside Me)
“
You miss them so much when they deploy, and you want them to be home, but then when they are, things aren’t perfect. And you feel as if they should be. Depending on the deployment and what I’d been through, I also had emotions ranging from sadness to anxiety to anger.
”
”
Chris Kyle (American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History)
“
The greatest regret of my military career was as Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, he later wrote of the decision he made. I lost 169 soldiers during that year-long deployment. However, the monument we erected at Fort Hood, Texas, in memoriam lists 168 names. I approved the request of others not to include the name of the one soldier who committed suicide. I deeply regret my decision.
”
”
David Finkel (Thank You for Your Service)
“
It’s the wide variation of women in our little shared petri dish that makes our lives never boring. Really all that we have in common is we each fell in love with a dude in uniform. The rest of it is a wild card. . . . Each of us trying to get through the day, the deployment, and the time in between.
”
”
Angela Ricketts (No Man's War: Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife)
“
As he moves through his day, sometimes he stops and just stares at me. There is something on the tip of his tongue. But he doesn't say it. I'm not sure he knows what it is.
”
”
Melissa Seligman (The Day After He Left for Iraq: A Story of Love, Family, and Reunion)
“
The military and National Guard were deployed to prevent things that often existed largely in their imagination.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster)
“
Connect with positive people who will stand in faith with you and lift you up in prayer. Study the Word of God and put your faith in action, for the Bible declares, "Faith without deeds is dead" (James 2:26)
”
”
Jocelyn Green (Faith Deployed...Again: More Daily Encouragement for Military Wives)
“
Both sides are reinforced in their suspicions by the military maneuvers and defense programs of the other. Even when they are “normal”—that is, composed of measures a country would reasonably take in defense of national interest as it is generally understood—they are interpreted in terms of worst-case scenarios. Each side has a responsibility for taking care lest its unilateral deployments and conduct escalate into an arms race.
”
”
Henry Kissinger (World Order)
“
I hate myself that I wasn't there for him. I hate that I could not feel it in him. How could I not know what had happened? How could I not hear it in his voice, his comments, or in his demeanor? He needed my help, and I couldn't feel it.
”
”
Melissa Seligman (The Day After He Left for Iraq: A Story of Love, Family, and Reunion)
“
Other nights I lie in bed and think about everything and anything, and the only thing I can feel is nothing. I think about the war and I feel nothing. I think about life and death, mine and everyone else’s, and I feel nothing. I think about myself and I don’t care if I live or die. On these nights, mortars go off and I won’t get out of bed. I’ll lie in bed as the bombs go off. I tell myself it doesn’t matter if I live or die, nothing matters—I like it when I feel nothing.
”
”
Michael Anthony (Mass Casualties: A Young Medic's True Story of Death, Deception, and Dishonor in Iraq)
“
(One note about the body armor—Navy-issued body armor has been known to fall apart. In light of that fact, my wife’s parents very generously bought me some Dragon Skin armor after my third deployment. It’s super-heavy, but it’s extremely good armor, the best you can get.)
”
”
Chris Kyle (American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History)
“
We’ve done these mental-health assessment team studies for six years now—between nine and twelve [months] is where a lot of the stress problems really manifest themselves, where the family problems really manifest themselves,” former Army chief of staff George Casey said recently. “The human mind and body weren’t made to do repeated combat deployments without substantial time to recover.” The suicide rate among active-duty servicemen doubled in the first five years of the Afghanistan War and then kept rising. In the past decade, the US Army lost more soldiers to suicide than to enemy fire in Afghanistan.
”
”
Rachel Maddow (Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power)
“
The fact that no military was deployed to the hot zone during the seven-hour attack was unthinkable. Military assets were just hours away in Italy. Nordstrom testified, “The ferocity and intensity of the attack was nothing that we had seen in Libya, or that I had seen in my time in the Diplomatic Security Service.”87 Yet aside from that one team from Tripoli, which included Glenn Doherty, there was no show of force from outside Benghazi. A special ops whistle-blower told Fox News that the military had a team ready to scramble from Croatia. That would have taken some four to six hours. The attack lasted for seven hours.88
”
”
Ben Shapiro (The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration)
“
The black conservatives claim that the decline of values such as patience, deferred gratification, and self-reliance have resulted in the high crime rates, the increasing number of unwed mothers, and the relatively uncompetitive academic performances of black youth. And certainly these sad realities must be candidly confronted. But nowhere in their writings do the new black conservatives examine the pervasiveness of sexual and military images used by the mass media and deployed by the advertising industry in order to entice and titillate consumers. Black conservatives thus overlook the degree to which market forces of advanced capitalist processes thrive on sexual and military images.
”
”
Cornel West (Race Matters)
“
Forget bringing the troops home from Iraq. We need to get the troops home from World War II. Can anybody tell me why, in 2009, we still have more than sixty thousand troops in Germany and thirty thousand in Japan? At some point, these people are going to have to learn to rape themselves. Our soldiers have been in Germany so long they now wear shorts with black socks. You know that crazy soldier hiding in the cave on Iwo Jima who doesn’t know the war is over? That’s us.
Bush and Cheney used to love to keep Americans all sphinctered-up on the notion that terrorists might follow us home. But actually, we’re the people who go to your home and then never leave. Here’s the facts: The Republic of America has more than five hundred thousand military personnel deployed on more than seven hundred bases, with troops in one hundred fifty countries—we’re like McDonald’s with tanks—including thirty-seven European countries—because you never know when Portugal might invade Euro Disney. And this doesn’t even count our secret torture prisons, which are all over the place, but you never really see them until someone brings you there—kinda like IHOP.
Of course, Americans would never stand for this in reverse—we can barely stand letting Mexicans in to do the landscaping. Can you imagine if there were twenty thousand armed Guatemalans on a base in San Ber-nardino right now? Lou Dobbs would become a suicide bomber.
And why? How did this country get stuck with an empire? I’m not saying we’re Rome. Rome had good infrastructure. But we are an empire, and the reason is because once America lands in a country, there is no exit strategy. We’re like cellulite, herpes, and Irish relatives: We are not going anywhere. We love you long time!
”
”
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
“
I was inspired to write Countdown 'til Daddy Comes Home when I searched for books to help my 4 year daughter cope with her father deploying to Afghanistan and found nothing that quite fit our situation. My book is not only a great story for kids it has real suggestions for parents on how to keep you family connected during deployments or frequent business travel.
”
”
Kristin Ayyar (Countdown 'til Daddy Comes Home)
“
Honest confession is an externalizing of an inward conversation for the purpose of gaining insight, releasing a burden, or admitting reality. Confession leads to movement and helps us get out of merely coping. It opens doors to growth and change because it is an act of congruence. By externalizing--sharing--our true state of affairs, w are better able to receive the help we really need.
”
”
Jocelyn Green (Faith Deployed...Again: More Daily Encouragement for Military Wives)
“
Sometimes I go into the hospital and have to do surgery just as the sleeping pills begin to kick in. I spend the rest of the night pinching myself and throwing cold water on my face. At night I tell myself it’s not worth it. I tell myself I hate the Army and wish I’d never joined. I curse the war on both sides, American and Iraqi. I wish everyone would just...die...so that I could go home.
”
”
Michael Anthony (Mass Casualties: A Young Medic's True Story of Death, Deception, and Dishonor in Iraq)
“
When we aim high, pressure and stress obligingly come along for the ride. Stuff is going to happen that catches us off guard, threatens or scares us. Surprises (unpleasant ones, mostly) are almost guaranteed. The risk of being overwhelmed is always there. In these situations, talent is not the most sought-after characteristic. Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill. We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that “tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.” Regardless of how much actual danger we’re in, stress puts us at the potential whim of our baser—fearful—instinctual reactions.
”
”
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
“
In the spring of 1990 I flew to Aspen, Colorado, to cover a summit meeting between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Herbert Walker Bush. This fairly routine political event took on sudden significance when, on the evening before the talks were scheduled to begin, Saddam Hussein announced that the independent state of Kuwait had, by virtue of a massive deployment of military force, become a part of Iraq. We were not to know that this act—and the name Saddam Hussein—would dominate international politics for the next decade and more, but it was still possible to witness something extraordinary: the sight of Mrs. Thatcher publicly inserting quantities of lead into George Bush’s pencil. The spattering quill of a Ralph Steadman would be necessary to do justice to such a macabre yet impressive scene.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson)
“
Deploying LOGCAP or other contractors instead of military personnel can alleviate the political and social pressures that have come to be a fact of life in the U.S. whenever military forces are deployed,” wrote Lt. Col. Steven Woods in his Army War College study about the effects of LOGCAP. “While there has been little to no public reaction to the deaths of five DynCorp employees killed in Latin America or the two American support contractors from Tapestry Solutions attacked (and one killed) in Kuwait … U.S. forces had to be withdrawn from Somalia after public outcry following the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu.… “Additionally, military force structure often has a force cap, usually for political reasons. Force caps impose a ceiling on the number of soldiers that can be deployed into a defined area. Contractors expand this limit.
”
”
Rachel Maddow (Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power)
“
On the day Rome fell, that great American Army numbered eight million soldiers, a fivefold increase since Pearl Harbor. It included twelve hundred generals and nearly 500,000 lieutenants. Half the Army had yet to deploy overseas, but the U.S. military already had demonstrated that it could wage global war in several far-flung theaters simultaneously, a notion that had “seemed outlandish in 1942,” as the historian Eric Larrabee later wrote.
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”
Rick Atkinson (The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy Book 2))
“
Today Is A New Day/New Beginning
1. Send a food hamper to a less fortunate family
2.Tutor a neighborhood child at no cost
3.Give an elderly or disabled neighbor a ride to church
4.Buy a birthday gift for a less fortunate child
5. Donate school supplies to a nearby school
6.Donate to a Children’s charity
7. Donate new books to a library
8.Send military care packages to deployed Service members
9.Send cards to the sick in a Nursing Facility/Shut-ins
10.Cook and serve meals at a Homeless Shelter
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”
Charmaine J. Forde
“
The grandparents are raising the children because the biological parents have skipped off—for whatever reason, not always meth. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have often meant that both parents in a military family get deployed at once, and they leave their children with their grandparents. Layoffs of single working mothers lead a lot of families to decide to become multigenerational again. A wave of bipolar disorders and addiction to video games and gambling has also taken a toll on families.
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Rinker Buck (The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey)
“
For generations the official U.S. policy had been to support these regimes against any threat from their own citizens, who were branded automatically as Communists. When necessary, U.S. troops had been deployed in Latin America for decades to defend our military allies, many of whom were graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, spoke English, and sent their children to be educated in our country. They were often involved in lucrative trade agreements involving pineapples, bananas, bauxite, copper and iron ore, and other valuable commodities. When I became president, military juntas ruled in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. I decided to support peaceful moves toward freedom and democracy throughout the hemisphere. In addition, our government used its influence through public statements and our votes in financial institutions to put special pressure on the regimes that were most abusive to their own people, including Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. On visits to the region Rosalynn and I met with religious and other leaders who were seeking political change through peaceful means, and we refused requests from dictators to defend their regimes from armed revolutionaries, most of whom were poor, indigenous Indians or descendants of former African slaves. Within ten years all the Latin American countries I named here had become democracies, and The Carter Center had observed early elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, Haiti, and Paraguay.
”
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Jimmy Carter (A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety)
“
Although these firms deploy units that are often much smaller in manpower relative to their client’s adversaries, their effectiveness lies not in their size, but in their comprehensive training, experience, and overall skill at battlefield judgment, all in fundamentally short supply in the chaotic battlefields of the last decade.14 Utilizing coordinated movement and intelligent application of firepower, their strength is their ability to arrive at the right place at the right moment. The fundamental reality of modern warfare is that in many cases such small tactical units can achieve strategic goals.
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P.W. Singer (Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs))
“
Some may wonder how Navy SEAL combat leadership principles translate outside the military realm to leading any team in any capacity. But combat is reflective of life, only amplified and intensified. Decisions have immediate consequences, and everything—absolutely everything—is at stake. The right decision, even when all seems lost, can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The wrong decision, even when a victorious outcome seems all but certain, can result in deadly, catastrophic failure. In that regard, a combat leader can acquire a lifetime of leadership lessons learned in only a few deployments.
”
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Jocko Willink (Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win)
“
The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.
”
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Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
“
Nuclear posture is the incorporation of some number and type of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles state's overall military structure, the rules and procedures governing how those weapons are deployed, when and under what conditions they might be used, against what targets, and who has the authority to make those decisions. Nuclear posture is best thought of as the operational, rather than the declaratory, nuclear doctrine of a country; while the two can overlap, it is the operational doctrine that generates deterrent power against an opponent. To put it bluntly, states care more about what an adversary can credibly do with its nuclear weapons than what it says about them.
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Vipin Narang (Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics))
“
We got pregnant with Angel almost by accident. I was thinking it was just about time to go on birth control and wham-it happened. We wanted two children, but were thinking of spacing them out a little more. God and Angel had other plans.
I’m so glad. Bubba and Angel are so close in age and such good friends that I can’t imagine it any other way. But at the time, I was more than a little apprehensive about it. Once again, it worked out that Chris was preparing to leave just when I was due.
They say God only gives you what you can handle. Chris didn’t cope with crying babies very well. So either he paid the military to deploy him with each baby, or God was looking out for him with well-timed, newborn-avoiding deployments.
This time, the Team guy karma worked: the sonogram technician confirmed it was a girl several months into the pregnancy. She was going to be the first female born into the Kyle side of the family in eighty years. Which made her unique, and her grandparents particularly tickled.
Chris couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease them with the news.
“We’re having a boy,” he said when he called them back in Texas with the news.
“Oh, how nice,” they said.
“No, we’re having a girl.”
“Whoo-hoo!” they shouted.
“No, we’re having a boy.”
“Chris! Which is it!?”
“A girl!”
If they could have gotten away to visit us that night, I doubt they would have needed an airplane to fly.
”
”
Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
“
By tracing the early history of USCYBERCOM it is possible to understand some of the reasons why the military has focused almost completely on network defense and cyber attack while being unaware of the need to address the vulnerabilities in systems that could be exploited in future conflicts against technologically capable adversaries. It is a problem mirrored in most organizations. The network security staff are separate from the endpoint security staff who manage desktops through patch and vulnerability management tools and ensure that software and anti-virus signatures are up to date. Meanwhile, the development teams that create new applications, web services, and digital business ventures, work completely on their own with little concern for security. The analogous behavior observed in the military is the creation of new weapons systems, ISR platforms, precision targeting, and C2 capabilities without ensuring that they are resistant to the types of attacks that USCYBERCOM and the NSA have been researching and deploying. USCYBERCOM had its genesis in NCW thinking. First the military worked to participate in the information revolution by joining their networks together. Then it recognized the need for protecting those networks, now deemed cyberspace. The concept that a strong defense requires a strong offense, carried over from missile defense and Cold War strategies, led to a focus on network attack and less emphasis on improving resiliency of computing platforms and weapons systems.
”
”
Richard Stiennon (There Will Be Cyberwar: How The Move To Network-Centric Warfighting Has Set The Stage For Cyberwar)
“
In early 2016, Amazon was given a license by the Federal Maritime Commission to implement ocean freight services as an Ocean Transportation Intermediary. So, Amazon can now ship others’ goods. This new service, dubbed Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), won’t do much directly for individual consumers. But it will allow Amazon’s Chinese partners to more easily and cost-effectively get their products across the Pacific in containers. Want to bet how long it will take Amazon to dominate the oceanic transport business? 67 The market to ship stuff (mostly) across the Pacific is a $ 350 billion business, but a low-margin one. Shippers charge $ 1,300 to ship a forty-foot container holding up to 10,000 units of product (13 cents per unit, or just under $ 10 to deliver a flatscreen TV). It’s a down-and-dirty business, unless you’re Amazon. The biggest component of that cost comes from labor: unloading and loading the ships and the paperwork. Amazon can deploy hardware (robotics) and software to reduce these costs. Combined with the company’s fledgling aircraft fleet, this could prove another huge business for Amazon. 68 Between drones, 757/ 767s, tractor trailers, trans-Pacific shipping, and retired military generals (no joke) who oversaw the world’s most complex logistics operations (try supplying submarines and aircraft carriers that don’t surface or dock more than once every six months), Amazon is building the most robust logistics infrastructure in history. If you’re like me, this can only leave you in awe: I can’t even make sure I have Gatorade in the fridge when I need it.
”
”
Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
“
Because of this knowledge, because of American backing for Israel and tolerance of its actions, its supplies of arms and munitions for use against civilians, its coercion of the PLO to leave Beirut and refusal to deal directly with it, and its worthless assurances of protection, the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor—their first war aimed specifically against the Palestinians. The United States thereby stepped into a position similar to that played by Britain in the 1930s, helping to repress the Palestinians by force in the service of Zionist ends. However, the British were the leading party in the 1930s, while in 1982 it was Israel that called the tune, deployed its might, and did the killing, while the United States played an indispensable but supporting role.
”
”
Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
“
The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve.
The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries.
Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks.
*FCC - Federal Communications Commission
”
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Klaus H. Krippendorff (Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology)
“
Acronyms also weren’t terribly common until World War II, where they were deployed with aplomb. Unsurprisingly, most of the general words we have in English today that have true acronymic etymologies had their origins in the military: the aforementioned “radar,” “GI” (originally “galvanized iron,” if you can believe it, but misconstrued by soldiers and others as “government issue”), “snafu” and “fubar” (“ situation normal: all fucked up” and “fucked up beyond all recognition,” brought to you by government bureaucracy). It’s true that a few of them snuck into English before the early twentieth century, but very few: “RSVP” (répondez s’il vous plaît) and “AWOL” (absent without leave) are the only two that could be considered general vocabulary, and some people will complain that one of those is not a proper acronym but an initialism and so doesn’t count.* 4
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Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries)
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We started to snack on MREs (military “Meals, Ready to Eat”) we had in our packs. They were left over from the first deployment because no one ate MREs anymore. People were living in luxurious camps and eating meals prepared for them by kitchen staff. They had no need for MREs when they could have steak and lobster on Thursday nights. Well, we didn’t have access to that. We weren’t living in those camps. We were living in the midst of a war zone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. So there we were with these old MREs that had been in extreme cold and then extreme heat a few times over. I opened mine up and squeezed cheese onto a cracker. The cheese was green. I scraped the putrid green cheese, the color of baby vomit, off and ate the cracker. I was hungry and had no other options. The other guys ate the expired MREs and started vomiting. Enough guys got sick that we were rushed some new kosher MREs. Yes, saved by the kosher meal option.
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Noah Galloway (Living with No Excuses: The Remarkable Rebirth of an American Soldier)
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THE PREGNANT-NAVY SYNDROME It isn’t politically correct to even discuss this in the services, but. . . a large percentage of women soldiers are electively aborting their fetuses after they’ve served their purpose of enabling them to avoid their tour of duty in Operation Desert Storm. . . . It is wrong to use a fetus to shirk the responsibility for which you have signed up, and then to kill that fetus. —NAME WITHHELD, Army-Physician, Kuwait22 The mentality of valuing self also produces the “Pregnant-Navy Syndrome”: the phenomenon of a woman benefiting from the technical training and then, just prior to her ship’s being deployed, becoming pregnant so as to qualify for shore leave and not being deployed; or becoming pregnant immediately after her ship is deployed, thus allowing her increasingly to shirk responsibilities, forcing her shipmates to pick up the slack. This is all compatible with valuing self, but in a military situation—when more than .40 percent of the women on ships like the USS Acadia become pregnant during workup for deployment23—this bailing out puts men’s lives in danger.
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Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power)
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The Russian goal was to quickly harness the power of personal access that social media gives and craft metanarratives and distribute in such a way that the enemy population can be turned against their own government. Opinion polls, news coverage, and street talk can be shifted by changing the perception of the populace. Social media not only weaponizes opinion, it gives the attacker the ability to act as puppeteer for an entire foreign nation. Two Russian information warfare officers wrote a treatise describing the combat effects of weaponized news and social media: “The mass media today can stir up chaos and confusion in government and military management of any country and instill ideas of violence, treachery, and immorality, and demoralize the public. Put through this treatment, the armed forces personnel and public of any country will not be ready for active defense.”1 Additionally, the Russians make no distinction between using these activities in wartime and “peace.” The Russian Federation will deploy information warfare and propaganda persistently in a constant effort to keep adversaries off balance. When it comes to information warfare, such distinctions of peacetime and wartime fade away.
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Malcolm W. Nance (The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West)
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Gallipoli was one of a series of military ‘Easterner’ adventures launched without proper analysis of the global strategic situation, without consideration of the local tactical situation, ignoring logistical realities, underestimating the strength of the opposition and predicated on a hugely optimistic assessment of the military capabilities of their own troops. Not for nothing is hubris regarded as the ‘English disease’. But the Gallipoli Campaign was a serious matter: vital resources had been drawn away from where it really mattered. The Turks were all but helpless if left on their own. They had tried to launch an ambitious attack across the Sinai Desert on the Suez Canal but had been easily thwarted. Gallipoli achieved nothing but to provide the Turks with the opportunity to slaughter British and French troops in copious numbers in a situation in which everything was in the defenders’ favour. Meanwhile, back on the Western Front, was the real enemy: the German Empire. Men, guns and munitions were in the process of being deployed to Gallipoli during the first British offensive at Neuve Chapelle; they were still there when the Germans launched their deadly gas attack at Ypres in April, during the debacles of Aubers Ridge and Festubert, and during the first ‘great push’ at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. At sea Jellicoe was facing the High Seas Fleet which could pick its moment to contest the ultimate control of the seas. This was the real war – Gallipoli was nothing but a foolish sideshow.
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Peter Hart (The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War)
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The same effort to conserve force was also evident in war, at the tactical level. The ideal Roman general was not a figure in the heroic style, leading his troops in a reckless charge to victory or death. He would rather advance in a slow and carefully prepared march, building supply roads behind him and fortified camps each night in order to avoid the unpredictable risks of rapid maneuver. He preferred to let the enemy retreat into fortified positions rather than accept the inevitable losses of open warfare, and he would wait to starve out the enemy in a prolonged siege rather than suffer great casualties in taking the fortifications by storm. Overcoming the spirit of a culture still infused with Greek martial ideals (that most reckless of men, Alexander the Great, was actually an object of worship in many Roman households), the great generals of Rome were noted for their extreme caution. It is precisely this aspect of Roman tactics (in addition to the heavy reliance on combat engineering) that explains the relentless quality of Roman armies on the move, as well as their peculiar resilience in adversity: the Romans won their victories slowly, but they were very hard to defeat. Just as the Romans had apparently no need of a Clausewitz to subject their military energies to the discipline of political goals, it seems that they had no need of modern analytical techniques either. Innocent of the science of systems analysis, the Romans nevertheless designed and built large and complex security systems that successfully integrated troop deployments, fixed defenses, road networks, and signaling links in a coherent whole.
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Edward N. Luttwak (The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century Ce to the Third)
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Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from
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Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
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Back home, Chris struggled to readjust, physically and mentally. He also faced another decision-reenlist, or leave the Navy and start a new life in the civilian world.
This time, he seemed to be leaning toward getting out-he'd been discussing other jobs and had already talked to people about what he might do next.
It was his decision, one way or another. But if I’d been resigned to his reenlistment last go-around, this time I was far more determined to let him know I thought he should get out.
There were two important reasons for him to leave-our children. They really needed to have him around as they grew. And I made that a big part of my argument.
But the most urgent reason was Chris himself. I saw what the war was doing to him physically. His body was breaking down with multiple injuries, big and small. There were rings under his eyes even when he had slept. His blood pressure was through the roof. He had to wall himself off more and more.
I didn’t think he could survive another deployment.
“I’ll support you whatever you decide,” I told him. “I want to be married to you. But the only way I can keep making sense of this is…I need to do the best for the kids and me. If you have to keep doing what is best for you and those you serve, at some point I owe it to myself and those I serve to do the same. For me, that is moving to Oregon.”
For me, that meant moving from San Diego to Oregon, where we could live near my folks. That would give our son a grandfather to be close to and model himself after-very important things, in my mind, for a boy.
I didn’t harp on the fact that the military was taking its toll. That argument would never persuade Chris. He lived for others, not himself.
It didn’t feel like an ultimatum to me. In fact, when he described it that way later on, I was shocked.
“It was an ultimatum,” he said. He felt my attitude toward him would change so dramatically that the marriage would be over. There would also be a physical separation that would make it hard to stay together. Even if he wasn’t overseas, he was still likely to be based somewhere other than Oregon. We’d end up having a marriage only in name.
I guess looked at one way, it was an ultimatum-us or the Navy. But it didn’t feel like that to me at the time. I asked him if he could stay in and get an assignment overseas where we could all go, but Chris reminded me there was never a guarantee with the military-and noted he wasn’t in it to sit behind a desk.
Some men have a heart condition they know will kill them, but they don’t want to go to the doctor; it’s only when their wives tell them to go that they go.
It’s a poor metaphor, but I felt that getting out of the Navy was as important for Chris as it was for us.
In the end, he opted to leave.
Later, when Chris would give advice to guys thinking about leaving the military, he would tell them it would be a difficult decision. He wouldn’t push them one way or the other, but he would be open about his experiences.
“There’ll be hard times at first,” he’d admit. “But if that is the thing you decide, those times will pass. And you’ll be able to enjoy things you never could in the service. And some of them will be a lot better. The joy you get from your family will be twice as great as the pleasure you had in the military.”
Ultimatum or not, he’d come to realize retiring from the service was a good choice for all of us.
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Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
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Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.84
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Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
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told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.
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Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
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Here is my six step process for how we will first start with ISIS and then build an international force that will fight terrorism and corruption wherever it appears. “First, in dedication to Lieutenant Commander McKay, Operation Crapshoot commenced at six o’clock this morning. I’ve directed a handpicked team currently deployed in Iraq to coordinate a tenfold increase in aerial bombing and close air support. In addition to aerial support, fifteen civilian security companies, including delegations from our international allies, are flying special operations veterans into Iraq. Those forces will be tasked with finding and annihilating ISIS, wherever they walk, eat or sleep. I’ve been told that they can’t wait to get started. “Second, going forward, our military will be a major component in our battle against evil. Militaries need training. I’ve been assured by General McMillan and his staff that there is no better final training test than live combat. So without much more expenditure, we will do two things, train our troops of the future, and wipe out international threats. “Third, I have a message for our allies. If you need us, we will be there. If evil raises its ugly head, we will be with you, arm in arm, fighting for what is right. But that aid comes with a caveat. Our allies must be dedicated to the common global ideals of personal and religious freedom. Any supposed ally who ignores these terms will find themselves without impunity. A criminal is a criminal. A thief is a thief. Decide which side you’re on, because our side carries a big stick. “Fourth, to the religious leaders of the world, especially those of Islam, though we live with differing traditions, we are still one people on this Earth. What one person does always has the possibility of affecting others. If you want to be part of our community, it is time to do your part. Denounce the criminals who besmirch your faith. Tell your followers the true meaning of the Koran. Do not let the money and influence of hypocrites taint your religion or your people. We request that you do this now, respectfully, or face the scrutiny of America and our allies. “Fifth, starting today, an unprecedented coalition of three former American presidents, my predecessor included, will travel around the globe to strengthen our alliances. Much like our brave military leaders, we will lead from the front, go where we are needed. We will go toe to toe with any who would seek to undermine our good intentions, and who trample the freedoms of our citizens. In the coming days you will find out how great our resolve truly is. “Sixth, my staff is in the process of drafting a proposal for the members of the United Nations. The proposal will outline our recommendations for the formation of an international terrorism strike force along with an international tax that will fund ongoing anti-terrorism operations. Only the countries that contribute to this fund will be supported by the strike force. You pay to play.
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C.G. Cooper (Moral Imperative (Corps Justice, #7))
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In respect to the employment of troops, ground may be classified as dispersive, frontier, key, communicating, focal, serious, difficult, encircled, and death.
When a feudal lord fights in his own territory, he is in dispersive ground. Here officers and men long to return to their nearby homes. When he makes but a shallow penetration into enemy territory he is in frontier ground. Ground equally advantageous for the enemy or me to occupy is key ground. Ground equally accessible to both the enemy and me is communicating. This is level and extensive ground in which one may come and go, sufficient in extent for battle and to erect opposing fortifications. When a state is enclosed by three other states its territory is focal. He who first gets control of it will gain the support of All-under-Heaven. When the army has penetrated deep into hostile territory, leaving far behind many enemy cities and towns, it is in serious ground. When the army traverses mountains, forests, precipitous country, or marches through defiles, marshlands, or swamps, or any place where the going is hard, it is in difficult ground. Ground to which access is constricted, where the way out is tortuous, and where a small enemy force can strike my larger one is called 'encircled.' Ground in which the army survives only if it fights with the courage of desperation is called 'death.'
Therefore, do not fight in dispersive ground; do not stop in the frontier borderlands. Do not attack an enemy who occupies key ground; in communicating ground do not allow your formations to become separated. In focal ground, ally with neighboring states; in deep ground, plunder. In difficult ground, press on; in encircled ground, devise stratagems; in death ground, fight.
In dispersive ground I would unify the determination of the army. In frontier ground I would keep my forces closely linked. In key ground I would hasten up my rear elements. In communicating ground I would pay strict attention to my defenses. In focal ground I would strengthen my alliances. I reward my prospective allies with valuables and silks and bind them with solemn covenants. I abide firmly by the treaties and then my allies will certainly aid me. In serious ground I would ensure a continuous flow of provisions. In difficult ground I would press on over the roads. In encircled ground I would block the points of access and egress. It is military doctrine that an encircling force must leave a gap to show the surrounded troops there is a way out, so that they will not be determined to fight to the death. Then, taking advantage of this, strike. Now, if I am in encircled ground, and the enemy opens a road in order to tempt my troops to take it, I close this means of escape so that my officers and men will have a mind to fight to the death. In death ground I could make it evident that there is no chance of survival. For it is the nature of soldiers to resist when surrounded; to fight to the death when there is no alternative, and when desperate to follow commands implicitly.
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
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Foreshadowing: Was my challenging Allah to unleash the full weight of his fury upon us, with dark clouds looming in the distance.
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Adam Fenner (On Two Fronts)
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Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill. We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that “tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.
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Anonymous
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Education established the backbone for America’s great experiment in civilization; it enabled American industry, commerce, and military to thrive and supplied the intellectual reagent to spur the growth of the American social consciousness that paved the road to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination that tainted this hallowed ground. Education bridges communities together and provides reinforcement to generations of families. Formal edification is worthless unless we also develop our spiritual pillars in a manner that enables a great civilization to deploy its enhancement in technology to improve the health and general welfare of all people.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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By April 23, 2014, thirty-four cases and six deaths from Ebola in Liberia were recorded. By mid-June, 16 more people died. At the time it was thought to be malaria but when seven more people died the following month tests showed that was the Ebola virus. The primary reason for the spreading of the Ebola virus was the direct contact from one person to the next and the ingesting of bush meat. Soon doctors and nurses also became infected. On July 2, 2014, the head surgeon of Redemption Hospital was treated at the JFK Medical Center in Monrovia, where he died from the disease. His death was followed by four nurses at Phebe Hospital in Bong County. At about the same time two U.S. health care workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and a nurse were also infected with the disease. However, they were medically evacuated from Liberia to the United States for treatment where they made a full recovery. Another doctor from Uganda was not so lucky and died from the disease. Arik Air suspended all flights between Nigeria and Liberia and checkpoints were set up at all the ports and border crossings.
In August of 2014, the impoverished slum area of West Point was cordoned off. Riots ensued as protesters turned violent. The looting of a clinic of its supplies, including blood-stained bed sheets and mattresses caused the military to shoot into the crowds.
Still more patients became infected, causing a shortage of staff and logistics. By September there had been a total of 3,458 cases of which there were 1,830 deaths according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals and clinics could no longer handle this crisis and patients who were treated outside died before they could get help. There were cases where the bodies were just dumped into the Mesurado River. The Ivory Coast out of compassion, opened carefully restricted humanitarian routes and resumed the previously suspended flights to Liberia.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the president of Libera sent a letter to President Barack Obama concerning the outbreak of Ebola that was on the verge of overrunning her country. The message was desperate, “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.” Having been a former finance minister and World Bank official, Johnson Sirleaf was not one for histrionics however she recognized the pandemic as extremely dangerous.
The United States responded to her request and American troops came in and opened a new 60-bed clinic in the Sierra Leone town of Kenema, but by then the outbreak was described as being out of control. Still not understanding the dangerous contagious aspects of this epidemic at least eight Liberian soldiers died after contracting the disease from a single female camp follower.
In spite of being a relatively poor country, Cuba is one of the most committed in deploying doctors to crisis zones. It sent more than 460 Cuban doctors and nurses to West Africa. In October Germany sent medical supplies and later that month a hundred additional U.S. troops arrived in Liberia, bringing the total to 565 to assist in the fight against the deadly disease. To understand the severity of the disease, a supply order was placed on October 15th for a 6 month supply of 80,000 body bags and 1 million protective suits. At that time it was reported that 223 health care workers had been infected with Ebola, and 103 of them had died in Liberia.
Fear of the disease also slowed down the functioning of the Liberian government. President Sirleaf, had in an emergency announcement informed absent government ministers and civil service leaders to return to their duties. She fired 10 government officials, including deputy ministers in the central government who failed to return to work.
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Hank Bracker
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Moltke expanded on these ideas and fully explained the intent of mission orders in the second section “Communications between Commands and Units.” The Chief of the Prussian Staff wrote that detailed orders beyond the immediate tactical situation were usually of little value. Each battle, movement, and deployment changed the situation, which required the commander to re-examine the battlefield conditions. He later suggested that this would cause higher commanders to issue too many orders, confusing their subordinates.[28]
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Michael J. Gunther (Auftragstaktik: The Basis For Modern Military Command)
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I expected a dozen people packed into our cabin again but it’s only her and Ben, the guy with the buzz cut and black glasses who looks like a young astronaut. Clean-cut and stupendously brilliant.
Cordero’s not too far off. She’s businesslike in her dark suit, but there’s also a military assuredness to her actions. I get the feeling that when a situation takes a nosedive she knows where the emergency exits are and how to deploy the water slide.
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Veronica Rossi (Seeker (Riders, #2))
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Never forgetting the involvement of military officers in the 1953 attempt to force him from his throne, the Shah took great pains to keep the three services well apart so that they were incapable of mounting a coup or undermining his regime. There was no joint chiefs-of-staff organisation, nor were the three services linked in any way except through the Shah, who was the Commander-in-Chief. Every officer above the rank of colonel (or equivalent) was personally appointed by the Shah, and all flying cadets were vetted by him. Finally, he used four different intelligence services to maintain surveillance of the officer corps. These precautionary measures were mirrored on the Iraqi side. Keenly aware that in non-democratic societies force constituted the main agent of political change, Saddam spared no effort to ensure the loyalty of the military to his personal rule. Scores of party commissars had been deployed within the armed forces down to the battalion level. Organised political activity had been banned; ‘unreliable’ elements had been forced to retire, or else purged and often executed; senior officers had constantly been reshuffled to prevent the creation of power bases. The social composition of the Republican Guard, the regime’s praetorian guard, had been fundamentally transformed to draw heavily on conscripts from Saddam’s home town of Tikrit and the surrounding region.
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Efraim Karsh (The Iran–Iraq War 1980–1988 (Essential Histories series Book 20))
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if there really is no way you can win, you never say it out loud. You assess why, change strategy, adjust tactics, and keep fighting and pushing till either you’ve gotten a better outcome or you’ve died. Either way, you never quit when your country needs you to succeed. As Team 5 was shutting down the workup and loading up its gear, our task unit’s leadership flew to Ramadi to do what we call a predeployment site survey. Lieutenant Commander Thomas went, and so did both of our platoon officers in charge. It was quite an adventure. They were shot at every day. They were hit by IEDs. When they came home, Lieutenant Commander Thomas got us together in the briefing room and laid out the details. The general reaction from the team was, “Get ready, kids. This is gonna be one hell of a ride.” I remember sitting around the team room talking about it. Morgan had a big smile on his face. Elliott Miller, too, all 240 pounds of him, looked happy. Even Mr. Fantastic seemed at peace and relaxed, in that sober, senior chief way. We turned over in our minds the hard realities of the city. Only a couple weeks from now we would be calling Ramadi home. For six or seven months we’d be living in a hornet’s nest, picking up where Team 3 had left off. It was time for us to roll. In late September, Al Qaeda’s barbaric way of dealing with the local population was stirring some of Iraq’s Sunni tribal leaders to come over to our side. (Stuff like punishing cigarette smokers by cutting off their fingers—can you blame locals for wanting those crazies gone?) Standing up for their own people posed a serious risk, but it was easier to justify when you had five thousand American military personnel backing you up. That’ll boost your courage, for sure. We were putting that vise grip on that city, infiltrating it, and setting up shop, block by block, house by house, inch by inch. On September 29, a Team 3 platoon set out on foot from a combat outpost named Eagle’s Nest on the final operation of their six-month deployment. Located in the dangerous Ma’laab district, it wasn’t much more than a perimeter of concrete walls and concertina wire bundling up a block of residential homes. COP Eagle’s
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Marcus Luttrell (Service: A Navy SEAL at War)
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In the United States, the dominant analytic framework for explaining international relations today is realism. ... Those deploying this model to explain Russia’s behavior today...offer several prescriptions for how to defuse the current Russia-Ukraine crisis:
Freeze NATO expansion and Russia will be content.
Offer face-saving concessions that give Russia tangible gains and the threat of war will subside.
Don’t arm Ukraine because that will fuel escalation and trigger a Russian invasion.
If Putin thought like us, maybe some of these proposals might work. But Putin does not think like us. He has his own analytic framework, his own ideas and his own ideology — only some of which comport with Western rational realism.
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Michael McFaul
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Even in peacetime, a military man is deployed for long periods, leaving his spouse to take care of the children and their schooling, to pay the bills, to make sure the lawn is mowed and the oil in the car is changed, and to handle dozens of other tasks usually done by him. During wartime, always hanging over the military wife is the fear that her husband may be wounded or killed in combat.
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Robert Coram (Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine)
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As Borgerding told me, nefarious forces led by the most powerful people in the world—titans of Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and big business—had forced these children to live in thousands of miles of underground tunnels. Hidden out of sight, these “mole children” are terrorized by pedophiles until their bodies produce adrenochrome, a highly coveted liquid that celebrities and the world’s richest financiers drink to stay young. Now Trump and the military were using the global Covid-19 pandemic as a cover to rescue the children. The Navy hospital ships deployed to respond to the virus were secretly treating the rescued mole children. For that matter, most earthquakes aren’t even earthquakes—they are seismic events created when the Army demolishes the pedophile lairs underground.
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Will Sommer (Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America)
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Recognizing a supreme divinity did not . . . translate immediately into conceiving one universal God. Israelites first took YHWH/El as their own while sometimes continuing to worship other people's deities as well. God could be described as heading an assembly of divine beings, but the Lord also sentences its members to death for "showing favor to the wicked" (Ps. 82:2). The prophets frequently express both themes: God is both virtuous and unique. This characterization of a single God who upholds moral standards ("ethical monotheism") surfaced strongly in light of the theological and military problems that Assyria posed. Did that empire's devastating triumph discredit God for having betrayed or failed Israel? "No," answered the prophets. God rules the nations, disposes their affairs justly, and deploys foreign powers as agents to rebuke Israel's iniquities. By the sixth century, this conclusion had become axiomatic. Consoling the exiles, the anonymous "Second Isaiah" reverenced "The Creator.... who alone is God" and who will reduce Babylon for having shown Israel "no mercy" (Is. 45:18, 47:5, 6).
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Charles L Cohen (The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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Sonnet 1008
Helping a human is worth a hundred pilgrimages,
Conquer the heart, you'll conquer the world.
More glorious than trekking a thousand mountains,
Is to trudge the distance from heart to heart.
You don't conquer heart by acting on assumption,
You don't conquer division by acting on ideology.
You don't conquer hate by means of intellectualism,
You don't conquer war by deploying more military.
Peace doesn't happen by conference of ideology,
Peace happens through the confluence of sentience.
Integration doesn't happen by boasting your culture,
But when you overlook yours to learn another's ways.
Bury the dead along with all their artifacts of living.
Better a traitor to the dead than a traitor to the living.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Centurion Sermon: Mental Por El Mundo)
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because of American backing for Israel and tolerance of its actions, its supplies of arms and munitions for use against civilians, its coercion of the PLO to leave Beirut and refusal to deal directly with it, and its worthless assurances of protection, the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military endeavor—their first war aimed specifically against the Palestinians. The United States thereby stepped into a position similar to that played by Britain in the 1930s, helping to repress the Palestinians by force in the service of Zionist ends. However, the British were the leading party in the 1930s, while in 1982 it was Israel that called the tune, deployed its might, and did the killing, while the United States played an indispensable but supporting role.
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Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
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In 1952, a year after becoming Chabad’s leader, the Rebbe undertook to send a newly married couple to serve as shluchim in Brazil. Unlike the Lipskers, in this case the bride and her parents, all three Lubavitchers, were very unhappy with the Rebbe’s request. The father, who held a key position for the movement in Israel, couldn’t comprehend the idea of his daughter and son-in-law moving to a country with little Jewish infrastructure in place, and he wrote to the Rebbe to express his unhappiness. We possess no copy of the father’s letter, but the basic content of what he said is clear from the Rebbe’s response (when the letter was published, the Rebbe, as was his custom, omitted all names). The father, clearly pleased about the marriage, wrote that the family’s “happy event was [now] disturbed” by the news that the couple were to be sent abroad. It seems apparent from the Rebbe’s response that the father made no effort to disguise his displeasure at what the Rebbe had done. The Rebbe was in no way apologetic. He wrote in his capacity as a leader, in a sense as a military general who understood the need to deploy his troops where they were most needed, to “a place where your son-in-law and your daughter can fully utilize their potential.” The Rebbe acknowledged that moving to a foreign and largely nonobservant Jewish community requires a certain measure of self-sacrifice (mesirut nefesh), but he then posed a rhetorical question intended to overwhelm any further opposition. To paraphrase: “If one can’t expect such self-sacrifice from a graduate of our yeshiva, one who is a child as well of such a graduate and who is married to the daughter of such a graduate, if even from such people one can’t ask for a measure of self-sacrifice, then upon whom can one rely?” The Rebbe proceeded to offer both a carrot and a stick. Thus, he assured the father—knowing that the letter would be read by his daughter as well—that the couple would flourish in every meaningful manner by undertaking such a mission: “The vastness of the good fortune that will result if they accept this offer, including good fortune in a physical sense, is obvious to me.” On the other hand—and the Rebbe stated this as a fact, not a threat—refusing such a mission would cut the couple off from the work of the Previous Rebbe (who had died just two years earlier), and, by implication, from the Rebbe himself. Although he expressed “shock” that an offer to spread “the light of Torah and Chasidus” to unknowledgeable Jews could lead to the parents feeling that their happiness had been “disturbed,” he also set down, near the letter’s end, his trademark conclusion: “As stated above, I am not giving an order, Heaven forbid. This is only a suggestion.
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Joseph Telushkin (Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History)
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Brittany was lonely. She'd had Dillon during Carson's first deployment, and when he returned, he didn't seem very interested in getting to know his son. Then, half a year later, he was gone again. The baby could walk now, and Brittany had gotten used to being a single mom. She would have to adjust her life to fit a husband into it again.
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Karie Fugett (Alive Day: A Memoir)
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Young women wore colorful new dresses with high heels and false eyelashes. They clashed against the parking lot backdrop, dust whirling around them. There were babies too young to have ever met their fathers, parents holding each other in anticipation as they waited for their sons and daughters to arrive home from war. Cleve's unit--Third Battalion, Eighth Marines--had been gone seven months. Though everyone was excited to see those who'd survived, we also anticipated the sadness that would inevitably wash over us when the buses emptied too soon.
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Karie Fugett (Alive Day: A Memoir)
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The scholars of international relations look at the subject both from cooperative and conflictual aspects. International relations is generally not concerned with domestic developments of other countries, except to the extent the domestic politics of other countries affect international politics. The scope of international relations is often defined by subtitles, like 'questions of war and peace' as a subtitle of international security. Joshua S Goldstein wrote, 'the movements of armies and of diplomats, the crafting of treaties and alliances, the development and deployment of military capabilities—these are the subjects that dominated the study of IR in the past… and they continue to hold central position in the field.
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V.N. Khanna (International Relations, 5th Edition)
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The Air Force was confused about what it wanted me to be when I grew up. I applied for an ROTC scholarship out of high school because I wanted to be an astronaut. None of my teachers had ever broken the news to me that I couldn’t fly into space, so the third-grade dream remained.
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Brian Castner (The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows)
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But the shock wears off, more quickly for some, but eventually for most. Fast food and alcohol are seductive, and I didn’t fight too hard. Your old routine is easy to fall back into, preferences and tastes return. It’s not hard to be a fussy, overstuffed American. After a couple of months, home is no longer foreign, and you are free to resume your old life. I thought I did. Resume my old life, that is. I was wrong.
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Brian Castner (The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows)
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In a truly dreadful moment of lexical perversion, the US military’s deployment of troops on the island of Grenada in October 1983 was presented as a ‘pre-dawn vertical insertion’.
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Henry Hitchings (The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English)
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He would only be here one more night.
And then back on deployment, whispered the dark part of my soul. He might never come back. You might be the last woman he ever has.
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Sofia Grey (His Temporary Fix)
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You take your superhero cape off every time you come home from deployment,
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Chris Kyle (American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History)
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PARTNERS IN CRIME HOW THE CLINTONS WENT FROM DEAD BROKE TO FILTHY RICH And the money kept rolling in from every side. —Song from the musical Evita The quotation above refers to the Juan and Evita Peron Foundation, established in 1948 by Evita Peron for the purpose of helping Argentina’s poor. Evita professed to be a champion of the campesinos—the wretched workers who lived in shanties on the outskirts of Buenos Aires—and they trusted Evita. She had, after all, risen up herself from poverty and obscurity. Her fame was the result of her marriage to the general who became the military leader of the country, Juan Peron. Long before the Clintons, Argentina had its own power couple that claimed to do good and ended up doing very well for themselves. There are, obviously, differences between the Clintons and the Perons. Despite her personal popularity, Evita remained an appendage of her husband, seeking but never obtaining political office. At one point, Evita had her eye on an official position, but the political establishment vigorously opposed her, and her husband never supported her in this effort. Hillary, by contrast, was elected senator and now, having deployed her husband on the campaign trail, seeks election to the nation’s highest office previously held by him. The Perons also had a foundation that took in millions of pesos—the equivalent of $200 million—from multiple foreign sources, Argentine businesses, as well as contributions from various individuals and civic groups. With its 14,000 employees, the foundation was better equipped and more influential than many agencies within the Argentinian government. Evita and her cronies were experts at shaking down anyone who wanted something from the government; donations became a kind of tax that opened up access to the Peron administration. Trade unions sent large contributions because they saw Evita and her husband as champions of their cause. In 1950, the government arranged that a portion of all lottery, movie, and casino revenues should go to the foundation. While the foundation made symbolic, highly publicized gestures of helping the poor, in reality only a fraction of the money went to the underprivileged. Most of it seems to have ended up in foreign bank accounts controlled by the Perons, who became hugely wealthy through their public office profiteering. When Evita died in 1954 and the foundation was shut down, Argentines discovered stashes of undistributed food and clothing. No one from the foundation had bothered to give it away, so it sat unused for years. Helping the poor, after all, wasn’t the real reason Evita set up her foundation. No, she had a different set of priorities. Like so many Third World potentates, the Perons used social justice and provision for the poor as a pretext to amass vast wealth for themselves. The Clintons have done the same thing in America; indeed, Hillary may be America’s version of Evita Peron.
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Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
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In the military, snipers were almost always deployed in two-person teams. A spotter added security and firepower, set up and calculated shots, kept on top of elements like wind that could vary shots. When the shooter got tired, which often happened because waiting to kill was an exhausting exercise, the team would switch roles and spotter would become sniper.
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David Baldacci (The Guilty (Will Robie, #4))
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...In 2008, when the United States recognized Kosovo´s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, [Vladimir] Putin was furious; the UN had promised to respect Serbia´s sovereign integrity. Putin argued that the US decision oi disregard what Russia saw as Serbia´s threatened to ¨blow apart the whole system of international relations."The United States and other states opting to recognize Kosovar independence, should understand that their decision was ¨a two-sided stick,¨ warned Putin, ¨and the second end will come back and hit them in the face.¨
That particular two-sided stick has already been deployed by the Russians in the context of Ukraine and Crimea, where Putin greeted US protestations about the importance of respecting Ukrainian sovereignty with little more than a cynical smirk. In Syria too, Putin has highlighted inconsistencies in US actions and legal arguments: if the United States can use military force inside Syria without the consent of the Syrian government, why should Russia be condemned for using force inside Ukraine?
The legal precedents we are setting risk undermining the fragile norms of sovereignty and human rights that help keep our world stable. We should ask ourselves this: Do we want to live in a world in which every state considers itself to have a legal right to kill people in other states, secretly and with no public disclosure or due process, based on its own unilateral assertions of national security prerogatives?
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Rosa Brooks (How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon)
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Why aren’t you in a relationship?” she asked. Duncan glanced at her and shrugged. “I was engaged years ago, but my fiancé at the time apparently got lonely while I was deployed. When I came back from Iraq she was pregnant with another man’s child. She was going to break up with me anyway. When I came home broken it just made it easier for her to leave.” Alex knew her mouth was hanging open. “She left you in the hospital? Injured?” He shrugged, moving to set the book on the table. He avoided her eyes. “She had already chosen someone else over me. Honestly, it happens to deployed military all the time.” Alex shook her head, amazed at the audacity of some people. At that moment she had little respect for her own sex, because it was usually the female half of the relationship left behind. “That is so wrong. What a bitch.” Duncan looked up at her, as if deciding whether or not her words were true. “We wouldn’t have been a good match anyway. Yes, it hurt at the time but we’re both better off for not being together. What about you? Why no ring?” Alex blinked. “Well, seems like there are more frogs in my life than princes. I’ve been in a couple of relationships but nothing epic. It just never happened.” She
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J.M. Madden (Embattled Ever After (Lost and Found #5))
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Some Washington observers floated scenarios of a constitutional showdown in which Johnson would deploy Grant and the military to silence Congress. Suddenly Grant’s political tendencies became of more than theoretical interest. Ben Butler, now a Radical Republican, wondered privately whether “Grant can be trusted to disobey positive orders of his chief? When the hour of peril comes, shall we not be
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Ron Chernow (Grant)
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A stock Gulfstream G650, a top-of-the-line business jet, cruises at altitudes up to 50,000 feet. If a G650 were retrofitted with a low-bypass military engine such as the Pratt & Whitney F100, it could lift a payload of 13 tons to 60,000 feet, an altitude that would likely be adequate for the minimal deployment described in Phase 3. A fleet of just twenty aircraft acquired within a few years at a cost of $1.5 billion should enable sufficient radiative forcing to produce large-scale climatic effects that are just barely detectable.
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David Keith (A Case for Climate Engineering (The MIT Press))
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Richard Francis Burton was a British consul, Orientalist, explorer, best known today for translating the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra into English. He was the most educated explorer of the Victorian age, a time when only men of rough disposition set out to discover foreign lands, in stark contrast to the landed gentry, who were uninterested in international travel, unless it was in the comfort of a steamship to go administer a colony for the sake of the Crown or as a military officer deployed to extend the global landholdings of the British Empire. He
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Michael Rank (Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World)
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only a small minority of military personnel have combat-related jobs. In 2015, even after two lengthy wars, the percentage of military personnel in combat specialties was only 14 percent overall—with substantial differences between the services: for instance, 28 percent of enlisted Army personnel serve in jobs that are classified as combat positions compared to just 3 percent of Navy enlisted personnel.
To be sure, many military personnel in noncombat positions end up in combat [zones] anyway. . . . But even when deployed in combat zones, most members of the military never end up fighting.
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Rosa Brooks (How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon)
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in Lebanon in 1983, I was sent to Saudi Arabia as part of the military response deployed to stabilize the region. You’d
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Zach Fortier (Curbchek)