Military Targeting Quotes

Only a foolish woman would allow her man to earn his living as a moving target.

When you’re in The System, like after being arrested, you’re no longer a participant. You’re being processed. Instead of an easy to ignore, well-greased cog, you become a sharp edge that needs to be ground down.

...Were you in the military?" "Are you kidding me? I was in high school." "High school," he said quietly. "You’re American. And a civilian?" "Uh, yes. An American civilian." "Lovely. A straight answer. Keep it up. Did somebody train you?" "No, nobody trained me. Unless you count the Rhode Island child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Why?" Malachi held up his hand and ticked off the reasons with his fingers. "You stole a Guard's weapon. If I'm not mistaken, it belonged to a Gate Guard. Which means you managed to do it on your way into the city. You escaped Amid even after he had you in hand. You slashed his leg in just the right place, preventing him from chasing you. Under extreme duress, injured and cornered, you threw a knife and hit a target-" "It's not like I hit something vital.

Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.

We have several sources of fire support available to help you complete this mission. All you need do is give us a call with a target indication and we will blast the gooks. If your coms are down and can’t call for fire support, just fight it out as best you can. You ask of me and then what? Oh that part is real simple, you will indubitably be fucked.

The United States is baiting China and Russia, and the final nail in the coffin will be Iran, which is, of course, the main target of Israel. We have allowed China to increase their military strength and Russia to recover from Sovietization, to give them a false sense of bravado, this will create an all together faster demise for them. We’re like the sharp shooter daring the noob to pick up the gun, and when they try, it’s bang bang. The coming war will be so severe that only one superpower can win, and that’s us folks. This is why the EU is in such a hurry to form a complete superstate because they know what is coming, and to survive, Europe will have to be one whole cohesive state. Their urgency tells me that they know full well that the big showdown is upon us. O how I have dreamed of this delightful moment.

Increasingly the United States found itself isolated. Having for two decades enjoyed its status as champion of the free world, it was increasingly the target of bitter criticism abroad and at home, where a growing number of prominent intellectuals and church leaders denounced the bombing campaign as barbaric. The military might disdain the fickle nature of public sympathy, but a democracy cannot sustain a war effort without it, and moral revulsion was growing.

preemptive strike n. A blow or punch delivered by military aircraft to a target who is suspected of being adverse to one's plot for world domination.

Noise” includes any unwanted signal that contaminates the target of measurement.

Certainly this is an animated world, a world of the simplest things. No world of will-be or must-be, it seems to me, rather a world of maybe with entirely undetermined possibilities, a world of colorful twilight. It seems as if there are only modest waysides here, close at hand, no distant targets, no broad straight military roads. No heaven above, no hell below. A strange world in between--everything merges in soft shades--a colorful painting, harmonically fused in itself.

At 13:57 local time, a low yield nuclear warhead exploded in the city of Chongjin, North Korea. A long standing military target. Chongjin is home to some 532,000 men, women, and children. This city has survived a number of wars. It will not survive this. But her people will. As 13:57 and .00001 microseconds, half a million Koreans seemed to materialize on a hilltop 35 miles away from the blast. They were carried there . . . One at a time, sometimes two . . . At a hair's breadth short of the speed of light . . . By one man . . . The Flash. The Fastest Man Alive.

We are not statistics. We are the people from whom you took this land by force and blood and lies. We are the people to whom you promised to pay, in recompense for all this vast continent you stole, some small pitiful pittance to assure at least our bare survival. And we are the people from whom you now snatch away even that pittance, abandoning us and your own honor without a qualm, even launching military attacks on our women and children and Elders, and targeting — illegally even by your own self-serving laws — those of us, our remaining warriors, who would dare to stand up and try to defend them. You practice crimes against humanity at the same time that you piously speak to the rest of the world of human rights! America, when will you live up to your own principles?

Hamas repeatedly and continually used protected civilian sites for military attacks, rendering them legitimate military targets. An IDF study shows that Hamas fired rockets from amusement parks, first aid stations, U.N. facilities, playgrounds, hospitals, medical clinics, and schools.28 Consequently, Hamas, not Israel, is the party committing war crimes. Incidental or collateral damage on both sides

Because all this stuff about military targets is absolute rubbish. There’s no point in bombing German factories, because they just rebuild them. So we’re targeting large areas of dense working-class housing. They can’t replace the workers so fast.

Looking back at the recent history of the world, I find it amazing how far civilization has retrogressed so quickly. As recently as World War I—granted the rules were violated at times—we had a set of rules of warfare in which armies didn’t make war against civilians: Soldiers fought soldiers. Then came World War II and Hitler’s philosophy of total war, which meant the bombing not only of soldiers but of factories that produced their rifles, and, if surrounding communities were also hit, that was to be accepted; then, as the war progressed, it became common for the combatants simply to attack civilians as part of military strategy. By the time the 1980s rolled around, we were placing our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population.

In effect, the human being should be considered the priority objective in a political war. And conceived as the military target of guerrilla war, the human being has his most critical point in his mind. Once his mind has been reached, the "political animal" has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.

Because all this stuff about military targets is absolute rubbish. There’s no point in bombing German factories, because they just rebuild them. So we’re targeting large areas of dense working-class housing. They can’t replace the workers so fast.” Lowther looked shocked. “That would mean it’s our policy to kill civilians.

In America's 'nonlinear war', with no frontline or clear political or territorial goals, the number of enemy killed apparently revealed who was 'winning'. 'The military kill' became 'the prime target, simply because the essential political target is too elusive for us, or worse, because we do not understand its importance'.

With the military deliberately targeting doctors, they became as scarce as laughter.

Dresden, which I am told presents no military or industrial targets whatsoever for the RAF.

Anyone who can’t afford to depend on serendipity would say you have to identify your target or goal in advance.

WHO has been de facto “weaponized” as an instrumentality of US strategic military policy.

The military just used different terms—modeled influence attribution or target profiles observed acting in concert. But in fashion, we just call that a trend.

Welcome to the Beirut Hilton. Military Discounts Available.

It's the secrecy surrounding drone strikes that's most troubling. . . We don't know the targeting criteria, or whether the rules for CIA and military drone strikes differ; we don't know the details of the internal process through which targets are vetted; we don't know the chain of command, or the details of congressional oversight. The United States does not release the names of those killed, or the location or number of strikes, making it impossible to know whether those killed were legitimately viewed as combatants or not. We also don't know the cost of the secret war: How much money has been spent on drone strikes? What's the budget for the related targeting and intelligence infrastructures? How is the government assessing the costs and benefits of counterterrorism drone strikes? That's a lot of secrecy for a targeted killing program that has reportedly caused the deaths of several thousand people. (117-118)

terrorism is nothing more than a form of psy­chological warfare, as acts of terrorism have no intrinsic military value aside from their effects on the psyches of the target populations.

Flares and small incendiary bombs began to fall as the car approached Kreuzberg. The neighborhood was a typical target for the RAF’s current strategy of killing as many civilian factory workers as possible. With staggering hypocrisy Churchill and Attlee were claiming they attacked only military targets, and civilian casualties were a regrettable side effect. Berliners knew better.

As if to demonstrate the possibilities of socialism, the People's Republic of China not only survived but is prospering just when the productive decrepitude of capitalism is more apparent than ever, its imperial offer unable to obtain submission and its military power unable to compel it, only to rain destruction on societies that are the targets - such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria - or proxies - such as Ukraine today - in vain efforts to do so. Against this background, Chinese and other persisting socialisms demonstrate to increasingly interested publics worldwide, particularly amid the pandemic and the war, that there are saner ways to organise society, material production, politics and culture as well as a society's relations with nature and other societies.

Like a vast, random experiment targeting the environment with health doomed to be collateral damage, chemicals have been released into the air, soil, and water since nineteenth-century industrialism. While some may shrug that the aerial release of chemical nanoparticles and nano-sensors, microprocessors, and biologicals under the classified Project Cloverleaf is just more of the same, nanoparticles able to breach the blood-brain barrier make it uniquely diabolical, as does the global conspiracy of power to turn the entire planet into an electromagnetic grid and plug everyone into it. War has gone corporate and all of life reframed as a battlespace of disposable noncombatants (civilians) redefined as potential “terrorists.” The military is no longer a protector but partnered with giant transnational corporations and wealthy dynastic cartels like that of Big Pharma and Big Oil.

March 9–10, 1945, 334 B-29 aircraft dropped tons of jellied gasoline—napalm—and high explosives on Tokyo. The resulting firestorm killed an estimated 100,000 people and completely burned out 15.8 square miles of the city. The fire-bombing raids continued and by July 1945, all but five of Japan’s major cities had been razed and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians had been killed. This was total warfare, an attack aimed at the destruction of a nation, not just its military targets.

if destruction were ever to come to America, it would come not from abroad, from a “transatlantic military giant,” but from within, specifically the vigilante forces of racist mob violence that target the press, innocent people, and democracy itself.

The relationship between physics and war is clear: the ruler and the general want to threaten or obliterate targets; destruction requires energy; the physicist is the expert on matter, motion, and energy. It's the physicist who invents the bomb. But to destroy a target, you have to locate it precisely, identify it accurately, and track it as it moves. That's where astrophysics comes in. Neither protagonists nor accomplices, astrophysicists are accessories to war. We don't design the bombs. We don't make the bombs. We don't calculate the damage a bomb will wreak. Instead, we calculate how stars in our galaxy self-destruct through thermonuclear explosions – calculations that may prove helpful to those who do design and make thermonuclear bombs.

It was simply noted in American military reports that “chemical agents” were being used extensively against civilian targets. Iraq was more important to the United States than the principles of international law—and more important than the victims.103

Language is a powerful thing, and it changes the way we view ourselves, and other people, in delightful and horrifying ways. Anyone with any knowledge of the military, or who pays attention to how the media talks about war, has likely caught on to this. We don’t kill “people.” We kill “targets.” (Or japs or gooks or ragheads). We don’t kill “fifteen year old boys” but “enemy combatants” (yes, every boy 15 and over killed in drone strikes now is automatically listed as an enemy combatant. Not a boy. Not a child.).

The first mission of American military forces had been to oversee the withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organization, an operation that had a clear objective. But now, what precisely was the new mission? And without a defined goal, what would define success? No one knew.

Clandestine Service, tells us a story about the building at the center of the Pentagon courtyard, which is now a food court but used to be a hot dog stand. Chesnutt explains that during the height of the Cold War, when satellite technology first came into being, Soviet analysts monitoring the Pentagon became convinced that the building was the entrance to an underground facility, like a nuclear missile silo. The analysts could find no other explanation as to why thousands of people entered and exited this tiny building, all day, every day. Apparently the Soviets never figured it out, and the hot dog stand remained a target throughout the Cold War—along with the rest of the Pentagon. It’s a great anecdote and makes one wonder what really is underneath the Pentagon, which is rumored to have multiple stories belowground.

Kenneth Strong of War Office Intelligence wrote: ‘We had a continuous stream of callers from the Services with an extraordinary variety of queries and requests. What were the most profitable targets for air attacks in this or that area, and what effect would these attacks have on the German Army? Was our information about these targets adequate and accurate? How was the German Army reacting to our propaganda campaigns? I found some quite fantastic optimism regarding the effects from propaganda. The dropping of leaflets was considered almost a major military victory.

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")

McRaven’s thesis, which would become part of the curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School, set out the core concept of special ops: that a small, well-trained force can deliver a decisive blow against a much larger, well-defended one. He defined such a mission as one “conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue (in the case of hostages), is a political or military imperative.” Refining the key elements to success for such missions, he prescribed, in a nutshell, “A simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly and realistically rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.

The mission’s ambiguous nature frustrated General Vessey. “American military forces are reared in the doctrine that says that if you are going to use the forces, you need to give them a task to perform. What is it that you want them to do?” Vessey said. “We never got a sufficiently defined task that either we or the forces on the ground really understood.

Sami and I had exactly one day together in the old world. On Tuesday the jihadists came to our front door and knocked down our buildings. Our new world was hijacked planes, anthrax, and Afghanistan. Then we had snipers inside the Beltway. Then came Iraq. With every military action we were told reprisals were not just probable, but a foregone conclusion. An intelligence officer with a fancy PowerPoint briefed teachers on ‘our new reality.’ He called us ‘targets.’ He said ‘get used to it.’ He told our Webmaster ‘get off your ass’ and remove bus routes/stops from the school’s website. Johnny Jihad would find that information especially helpful if he decided to plow through our kids one morning as they stood half-asleep waiting for the school bus.

Terrorism is theater. Its real targets are not the innocent victims but the spectators. Those on the political side of the dead are to be frightened, intimidated, cowed, perhaps drawn into ugly retaliation that will spoil their image among the disinterested, who in turn are to be impressed with the desperate vitality and significance of the movement behind the terrorism. Those on the side of the gunmen, the bombers, the hijackers, are to be encouraged that the cause is alive. The goal of terrorism is not to deplete the ranks of an army, to destroy an enemy’s weapons, or to capture a military objective. It seeks an impact on attitudes, and so it must be spectacular. It relies on drama, it thrives on attention, it carries within it the seeds of contagion.

Indeed, future historians may well attribute our recent successes—toppling the two worst regimes in the Middle East, presiding over the birth of consensual governments in their places, and losing fewer soldiers in the effort than during many individual campaigns of the Second World War or Korea—to an ever-innovative American military that learned quickly from mistakes of the kind described in Finding the Target and War Made New. The sometimes dour work of Frederick W. Kagan and Max Boot is itself emblematic of one of our society’s greatest strengths: the capacity to adjust to changing events with the help of thinkers who rely on a more deeply informed sense of historical reality than is conveyed in the panicked conclusions of the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

Pitting these two angry bears against the DNC was not a fair fight, Shawn Henry of CrowdStrike said in the Post article: “This is a sophisticated foreign intelligence service with a lot of time, a lot of resources, and is interested in targeting the U.S. political system. You’ve got ordinary citizens who are doing hand-to-hand combat with trained military officers, and that’s an untenable situation.

COLIN GUBBINS’S DECISION to attack the Pessac transformer was at one level blindingly obvious. Deprive the U-boat base of power and you deprive the enemy of his ability to function. But it was also a clever piece of lateral thinking, one that opened up a whole new realm of possibilities. Military factories, aerodromes and industrial docks: suddenly, the Nazis’ soft targets looked enticingly vulnerable

Israel’s reliance on assassination as a military tool did not happen by chance, but rather stems from the revolutionary and activist roots of the Zionist movement, from the trauma of the Holocaust, and from the sense among Israel’s leaders and citizens that the country and its people are perpetually in danger of annihilation and that, as in the Holocaust, no one will come to their aid when that happens.

We have seen mass protests about military invasions and about injustices of many kinds, but we are now entering a new era of understanding and for the first time we are going to see people protesting in large numbers about the conspiracy itself and not just its individual expressions, like globalisation and wars. It is a time when the irresistible force (the human awakening) is going eye-to-eye with what it thinks is the immovable object (the agenda for global control). Immovable it is not, as we shall see in due course, but it is not going to go quietly. We need to be strong and refuse to acquiesce to these control freaks under any circumstances, no matter what the scale of intimidation and provocation. The Illuminati families may have the money, governments, banks, corporations, police and military, but the humanity that they so mercilessly target has the sheer numbers.

But as much as this is a soldier's reason d'etre, it is not often that you hear a soldier explicitly talk about 'killing'. The k-word as a verb is instead often disguised and supplanted by any number of other euphemisms. In precise and technical military parlance, reflecting the ever more precise and technically removed means of killing, the 'enemy' becomes the 'target'. But for the soldiers who personally 'engage' these 'targets', these objects are colloquially 'slotted', 'dropped', 'hit', 'fragged', 'sawn in half', 'smashed' or just plain 'shot'. Then the soldier will have achieved the noun of a 'kill'. The author's supposition is that such words are used by the soldier in combat as an attempt to mentally dissociate himself from the reality of his actions, so he can continue to operate as a soldier - and perhaps, when all is finally said and done, as a human being back home.

While British Bomber Command believed in leveling entire cities, the Americans considered themselves “precision bombers,” a term that implied attacks exclusively against military targets out of revulsion at indiscriminately killing civilians. But because the skies of central Europe were chronically overcast, half of Eighth Air Force’s bomb tonnage was dropped using “blind bombing” radar techniques; often, as few as one out of ten bombs fell within half a mile of an obscured target. Even when conditions were ideal for bombardiers—this was the case in roughly one sortie of seven—less than a third of all bombs detonated within a thousand feet of the aiming point. The term “precision bombing,” Spaatz conceded, was intended “in a relative, not a literal sense.” Bad weather also caused frequent diversions to secondary targets such as rail yards, a practice that amounted to emptying bomb bays over city centers.

Why should we, the brains of the military, have so much anxiety about our contribution to the war that we feel we have to ape Special Forces guys? To Fitzgerald commandos were just glorified jocks - pitchers and quarterbacks from suburban high schools who traded baseballs for bullets. There's no doubt they had skills. They could slither right up to the enemy on their stomachs survive on worms for days and plunk a target with a piece of lead from a mile away. All very impressive. But they couldn't speak Arabic or juggle a million intelligence requirements and 703 follow-up questions from the community while sitting three feet away from some Islamic firebrand who has no reason to talk. "Do you think those Special Forces guys are wracked with Interrogator envy?" Fitzgerald would say. "You think they're over there in their special sunglasses polishing their special weapons saying 'man if only I could do some hot-shit interrogations and write some hot-shit reports?

Even for Joan, there was a familiarity, by now, to the workings of the military machine. The noise was deafening. The roar of the Armagnac cannon was answered by artillery blasts from the walls above; whenever a Parisian gunner struck his target, the screams of mutilated horses and men added a nerve-shredding counterpoint to the shouts of the soldiers who toiled in the moat, hurling bundles of wood into the standing water at the bottom in an attempt to build a makeshift pathway to the foot of the walls.

Assad is willing to run a high-risk policy using his considerable assets to physically intimidate Lebanese communal leaders as well as to employ military force in support of Syria’s surrogates,” one secret State Department memo explained. “Syria has become so implacably opposed to Amin Gemayel that it is willing to see him fall rather than attempt to reach some accommodation with him.” To accomplish this, Assad tapped Druze and Shiite militias as proxies to wage war on Lebanon’s central government and undermine Gemayel.

The usual fiction – that the war would involve precision targeting and the careful avoidance of civilian deaths – was stated by Tony Blair at the beginning of the war. After similar bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia and Iraq, Blair was by now acting as virtual White House spokesperson, providing the pretence of an 'international coalition' in what was clearly a US war. This role was more important than Britain's military contribution, which in the early days of the bombing campaign was token and probably of no military value. The British army did later prove useful, however, when it was...

These were the very same systems that Marshall wrote in 1992 would be "progressively less central to military operations" because they would become large, vulnerable targets as US adversaries developed their own reconnaissance-strike complexes. And yet it was into these legacy systems that Washington poured billions of dollars, year after year. And because Washington focused on means more than ends, pieces more than networks, platforms more than kill chains, the US military has ended up with an array of sensors and weapons that often struggle to communicate with another and function together--like a box of mismatching puzzle pieces...

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.

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.

The agent carrying the team’s nonlethal rifle raised it and fired. The projectile that launched down the aisle and wrapped itself around Bellamy’s legs was nicknamed Silly String, but there was nothing silly about it. A military technology invented at Sandia National Laboratories, this nonlethal “incapacitant” was a thread of gooey polyurethane that turned rock hard on contact, creating a rigid web of plastic across the back of the fugitive’s knees. The effect on a running target was that of jamming a stick into the spokes of a moving bike. The man’s legs seized midstride, and he pitched forward, crashing to the floor. Bellamy slid another ten feet down a darkened aisle before coming to a stop, the lights above him flickering unceremoniously to life.

In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia. One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War. The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets. Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened. To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses: Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types. On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge. Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.

The BBC announcer’s voice changed. “The news,” he said, “has just been received that Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in Hawaii. The announcement of the attack was made in a brief statement by President Roosevelt. Naval and military targets on the principal Hawaiian island of Oahu have also been attacked. No further details are yet available.” At first, there was confusion. “I was thoroughly startled,” Harriman said, “and I repeated the words, ‘The Japanese have raided Pearl Harbor.’ ” “No, no,” countered Churchill aide Tommy Thompson. “He said Pearl River.” U.S. ambassador John Winant, also present, glanced toward Churchill. “We looked at one another incredulously,” Winant wrote. Churchill, his depression suddenly lifted, slammed the top of the radio down and leapt to his feet. His on-duty private secretary, John Martin, entered the room, announcing that the Admiralty was on the phone. As Churchill headed for the door, he said, “We shall declare war on Japan.” Winant followed, perturbed. “Good God,” he said, “you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” (Later Winant wrote, “There is nothing half-hearted or unpositive about Churchill—certainly not when he is on the move.”) Churchill stopped. His voice quiet, he said, “What shall I do?” Winant set off to call Roosevelt to learn more. “And I shall talk with him too,” Churchill said. Once Roosevelt was on the line, Winant told him that he had a friend with him who also wanted to speak. “You will know who it is, as soon as you hear his voice.

The government of Pakistan is yet to understand that the insurgency is not the disease but the symptoms of the disease. If the government really needs to cure the crisis in the area, then it must engage in genuine treatment procedure rather than engage in ad hoc solutions that go under the motto: picked up, killed, and dumped. Kidnapping the target and dumping his or her bullet riddled and tortured corpse in a public place to scare the people in the area is a military strategy which aims to provide a lesson to those who still retain seeds of resistance. If this is the only solution that the government is capable of then it will have to commit genocide against the people of Balochistan so that it can continue to steal their natural resources and have total control of the province.

For a long time, the German shepherd was the standard bearer for work in law enforcement and the military, but for many reasons, including practicality, the breed has been surpassed by the Malinois. Among the factors in favor of the Malinois are size and resiliency. While the Malinois has nothing on the German shepherd when it comes to brainpower or strength, it does have the advantage of being a smaller and more agile breed. the Belgian Malinois is built for military work, and especially for the sort of job commonly undertaken in Special Operations. While either breed can reliably detect the presence of explosives or a human target in hiding, the Malinois is quicker and stabler, simply by virtue of it's smaller and more compact musculature. It is better suited to traversing uneven terrain, and, when necessary, more easily transported.

He ought to be up there, guarding the pass, or at least striving in some way to keep his country. His. The thought never failed to thrill him. It was worth death. Worth almost anything to become again the person he had been before the Herran War. Yet here he was, gambling the frail odds of success. Looking for a plant. He imagined Cheat’s reaction if he could see him now, scouring the ground for a wrinkle of faded green. There would be mockery, which Arin could shrug off, and rage, which Arin could withstand--even understand. But he couldn’t bear what he saw in his mind. Cheat’s eyes cutting to Kestrel. Targeting her, stoking his hatred with one more reason. And the more Arin tried to shield her, the more Cheat’s dislike grew. Arin’s hands clenched in the cold. He blew on them, tucked his fingers under his arms, and began to walk. He should let her go. Let her slip into the countryside, to the isolated farmlands that had no idea of the revolution. If so, what then? Kestrel would alert her father. She’d find a way. Then the full force of the empire’s military would fall on the peninsula, when Arin doubted that the Herrani could deal even with the battalion that would come through the pass in less than two days. If he let Kestrel go, it was the same as murdering his people. Arin nudged a rock with his boot and wanted to kick it. He didn’t. He walked. Thoughts chipped at his sanity, proposing solutions only to reveal problems, taunting him with the certainty that he would lose everything he sought to keep. Until he found it. Arin found the herb threading up through a patch of dirt. It was a pitiful amount, and withered, but he tore it from the ground with a fierce hope.

Yes, but I’ve also walked about in your city and I’ve watched your people. Your people are aggressive!” “You see, Duncan? Peace encourages aggression.” “And you say that your Golden Path . . .” “Is not precisely peace. It is tranquility, a fertile ground for the growth of rigid classes and many other forms of aggression.” “You talk riddles!” “I talk accumulated observations which tell me that the peaceful posture is the posture of the defeated. It is the posture of the victim. Victims invite aggression.” “Your damned enforced tranquility! What good does it do?” “If there is no enemy, one must be invented. The military force which is denied an external target always turns against its own people.” “What’s your game?” “I modify the human desire for war.” “People don’t want war!” “They want chaos. War is the most readily available form of chaos.

The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among “the most powerful corporations on the planet” — hence the state’s relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other. The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny—namely, the domestic aspects of the “War on Terror.” Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state’s bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained—short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government’s reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely — an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. At the same time, law enforcement was also obsessively pursuing — and sometimes fabricating—cases against environmentalists, animal rights activists, and anarchists while ignoring or obscuring racist violence against people of color. What that shows, I think, is that the left/right imbalance persists, but sometimes other biases matter more.

Oppenheimer had played an ambiguous role in this critical discussion. He had vigorously advanced Bohr’s notion that the Russians should soon be briefed about the impending new weapon. He had even persuaded General Marshall, until Byrnes had effectively derailed the idea. On the other hand, he had evidently felt it prudent to remain silent as General Groves made clear his intention to dismiss dissident scientists like Szilard. Neither had Oppenheimer offered an alternative to, let alone criticism of, Conant’s euphemistic definition of the proposed “military” target—“a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Though he had clearly argued for some of Bohr’s ideas about openness, in the end he had won nothing and acquiesced to everything. The Soviets would not be adequately informed about the Manhattan Project, and the bomb would be used on a Japanese city without warning.

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.

Their military experience made them more of a threat. Their pride was seen as something in need of control. Once again irrational white supremacist fears turned into extreme forms of brutality. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, no one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than Black Veterans who had proven their valor and courage as soldiers. Thousands of Black Veterans were assaulted, threatened, abused or lynched following military service. Violence targeted at Black Veterans and their families led to one of the bloodiest summers for Black Americans, known in history as the Red Summer. Approximately 25 race riots broke out across the United States. In different cities, white rioters attacked Black men, women, and children, targeted Black organizational meetings and destroyed Black homes and Black businesses. Hundreds of Black people were killed and thousands were injured in the onslaughts. service

During the war in the Persian Gulf, massive bombing attacks became "efforts." Thousands of "weapons systems" or "force packages" "visited a site." These "weapons systems" "hit" "hard" and "soft targets." During their "visits," these "weapons systems" "degraded," "neutralized," "attrited," "suppressed," "eliminated," "cleansed," "sanitized," "impacted," "decapitated" or "took out" targets. A "healthy day of bombing" was achieved when more enemy "assets" were destroyed than expected. If the "weapons systems" didn't achieve "effective results" during their first "visit," a "damage assessment study" determined whether the "weapons systems" would "revisit the site." Women, children or other civilians killed or wounded during these "visits," and any schools, hospitals, museums, houses or other "non-military" targets that were blown up, were "collateral damage," which is the undesired damage or casualties produced by the effects from "incontinent ordnance" or "accidental delivery of ordnance equipment.

We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history. At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school: The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction. The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term. The imperial-era French engaged in mercantilism as a matter of course, but so too did any up-and-coming industrial power. The British famously product-dumped on the Germans in the early 1800s, while the Germans did the same to anyone they could reach in the late 1800s. One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less). In essence, both possible models would be implemented with an eye toward sucking other peoples dry, and transferring the pain of general economic dislocation from the invaders to the invaded. Getting a larger slice of a smaller pie, as it were. Both models might theoretically work in a poorer, more violent, more fractured world—particularly if they are married. But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem: Too many guns, not enough boots.

During the same hours of 1993 when the chopper crews in Somalia were slowly being overpowered and gunned down, there were twenty-four young boys back in the United States who would grow up to be future players in that African struggle. They had no way to know anything yet about the unique fighting group every one of them would eventually strive with all his determination to join. They also couldn’t know, though they would one day find out in person, that this particular battle corps is so elite, the candidate must first be a Navy SEAL just to attempt to get through the training - and even then, three out of four of those superb warrior-athletes fail to qualify. The group has had numerous military names during its long rise from the murky history of the early “frogmen” swimmers, to the black operations of the Underwater Demolition Teams whose only calling card was to render their targets dead, to the latest appellation as the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group - or DEVGRU, for those who prefer names ugly and short. But the group is better known to the general public as the near-mythical warriors of “SEAL Team Six.” Their complex training supports a brilliantly simple task: to be the very last thing their opponents see, if they are ever seen at all.

Most presidents would instantly draw a sharp, clean line between campaign operations and the use of military force. This is the proverbial “wag the dog” scenario where a president in trouble seeks to bomb his way out of it by hitting a target overseas. With no adult supervision in the Pentagon—just who is the acting, provisional, temporary, staffing-agency, drop-in SECDEF this week?—no one should put it past Trump to escalate conflicts with China, Iran, or elsewhere when some part of his lizard brain tells him that some boom-boom will goose his polling numbers. Some of my former GOP colleagues will whisper, “How dare you accuse the American president of ever using the military for…” and then drop the subject, because no matter how deep they are in the Trump hole, they know who this man is and what he’ll do. Trump proves time and again that morals, laws, norms, traditions, rules, guidelines, recommendations, and tearful pleading from his staff mean nothing when he gets a power boner and decides he’s going to do something stupid. President Hold My Beer comes from the Modern Unitary Executive Power theory, where there are no limits, no laws, and no right and wrong. I’m not saying it’s a matter of if Trump will wag the dog in 2020. I’m saying that anyone who thinks he wouldn’t is a damn fool.

The military implications are obvious, if difficult to act upon in today’s fiscal environment. There’s a clear and continuing need for Marines, for amphibious units and naval supply ships, for platforms that allow operations in littoral and riverine environments, and for capabilities that enable expeditionary logistics in urbanized coastal environments. Rotary-wing or tilt-rotor aircraft, and precise and discriminating weapons systems, will also be needed. There’s also a clear need to structure ground forces so that they can rapidly aggregate or disaggregate forces and fires, enabling them to operate in a distributed, small-unit mode while still being able to concentrate quickly to mass their effect against a major target. Combat engineers, construction engineers, civil affairs units, intelligence systems that can make sense of the clutter of urban areas, pre-conflict sensing systems such as geospatial tools that allow early warning of conflict and instability, and constabulary and coast guard capabilities are also likely to be important. The ability to operate for a long period in a city without drawing heavily on that city’s water, fuel, electricity, or food supply will be important as well, with very significant implications for expeditionary logistics. I go into detail on all these issues, and other military aspects of the problem, in the Appendix.

The prevailing inability or unwillingness to talk about Hamas in a nuanced manner is deeply familiar. During the summer of 2014, when global newsrooms were covering Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip, I watched Palestinian analysts being rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright. This condemnation was demanded as a prerequisite for the right of these analysts to engage in any debate about the events on the ground. There was no other explanation, it seemed, for the loss of life in Gaza and Israel other than pure-and-simple Palestinian hatred and bloodlust, embodied by Hamas. I wondered how many lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, have been lost or marred by this refusal to engage with the drivers of Palestinian resistance, of which Hamas is only one facet. I considered the elision of the broader historical and political context of the Palestinian struggle in most conversations regarding Hamas. Whether condemnation or support, it felt to me, many of the views I faced on Palestinian armed resistance were unburdened by moral angst or ambiguity. There was often a certainty or a conviction about resistance that was too easily forthcoming. I have struggled to find such. I have struggled to find such certainty in my own study of Hamas, even as I remain unwavering in my condemnation of targeting civilians, on either side.

(Note: The following was written in 2003, before the full implication of US military commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq could be fully appreciated. The passage also predates US drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen - to say nothing of Israeli affairs since 2003. It is unknown if and how the author's comments would change if he were writing the same today.) The value of Israel to the United States as a strategic asset has been much disputed. There have been some in the United States who view Israel as a major strategic ally in the region and the one sure bastion against both external and regional enemies. Others have argued that Israel, far from being a strategic asset, has been a strategic liability, by embittering U.S. relations with the Arab world and causing the failure of U.S. policies in the region. But if one compares the record of American policy in the Middle East with that of other regions, one is struck not by its failure but by its success. There is, after all, no Vietnam in the Middle East, no Cuba or Nicaragua or El Salvador, not even an Angola. On the contrary, throughout the successive crises that have shaken the region, there has always been an imposing political, economic, and cultural American presence, usually in several countries - and this, until the Gulf War of 1991, without the need for any significant military intervention. And even then, their presence was needed to rescue the victims of an inter-Arab aggression, unrelated to either Israelis or Palestinians. (99)

It was a civics lesson which cities across the northern tier of the country would all learn in similar fashion. Dzink and his Polish supporters had, in good American fashion, convinced their elected representatives of the justice of their cause, only to have the federal government countermand their efforts with a combination of black intelligence operations directed against American citizens and overwhelming military force. The government’s actions in the Sojourner Truth case would also establish a precedent in both housing and racial matters for the post-war period. Whenever blacks claimed discrimination, they could be sure of the federal government’s concern. Whenever the Catholic ethnics would claim that their neighborhoods were being targeted for destruction, they were written off as racists suffering from paranoid delusion. No matter how much clout the ethnics could muster locally, it could always be countered by some judge, appealing to higher moral principles. The same was true of Poles in Detroit, where “vested powers might have considered Polish Detroiters and neighborhood brokers expendable.” One year later when the worst race riot in the history of the country broke out in Detroit, the Poles again were blamed, but with the experience of Sojourner Truth behind them, Detroit’s residents were skeptical. “After the street battles of 1943,” Capeci writes, “Conant Gardens residents remembered ‘something funny’ about the 1942 housing controversy, something phoney that seemed to come from outside the neighborhood.” Residents of Chicago would soon notice the same thing.

CRACKING A WHIP MADE OF SMALL ROBOTS JOINED END TO END into a long, flexible chain was neither an especially bad nor an especially good way of engaging a foe in ambot-based combat. Extensive studies conducted within Blue military research labs had concluded that, on average, it was somewhat less effective than the more obvious procedure of just shooting individual ambots out of katapults. A dissenting opinion held that such studies were flawed because they failed to take into account two factors that were important in actual battle: One, the psychological impact on a defender who knew that the attack might literally whip around and come at him from any direction, including around corners or over barricades. Two, the element of skill, which was difficult to measure scientifically; the test subjects wielding those things in the lab were unlikely to have the same knack for it as Neoanders who had grown up using them and who had access to an ancient body of lore—a martial art, in effect—that they were disinclined to share with anyone else. If the whip was allowed to dissociate in midcrack, then its component ambots would be flung toward the target at supersonic velocity, which was as good as could be achieved by shooting the same objects out of a katapult. If it made contact with the target, direct physical damage would be inflicted and the ambots that had inflicted it could decouple themselves and carry out their usual programs. And if the whipcrack was off target, the chain could be recovered in full with no waste of ammunition. All the ambots came back for another attempt: something that certainly could not be said of ones that had been fired out of kats.

It is no surprise, then, that the earth deities of the Old Religion were demonized or co-opted. A typical task for Greek heroes was to rid the civilized world of those “earth-born bogeys.” The Gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turned men to stone, became an obvious target. Nevertheless, on the periphery of the Greek world, there is evidence that She was venerated in her ancient powers. During the 6th century BCE on the island of Corfu, an eight-foot-high full-bodied sculpture of Medusa was placed at the highest point on the pediment of the temple of Artemis. This Medusa is not raging, but is radiant in her full potency. Snakes with open jaws extend from each side of her head and two copulating serpents encircle her waist, carrying the potential for both death and new life. She wears winged sandals, her great wings are fully extended, sheltering her two children, and her bent-knee posture suggests that she is flying. All shamanic dimensions are Hers—the Great Above, the Great Below, the Primordial Waters, and the entire expanse of the Earth. She is flanked by great felines, just as the Phrygian Mountain Goddess Cybele and the seated Ancestral Mother from Çatalhöyük before her.'' ''The establishment of the Greek patriarchal world shifted the previous cultural valence from the egalitarian continuity of the Old Religion to the extreme imposition of male dominance and the cult of the hero. Under this new world order, all challenges to male hegemonic systems were to be crushed. As the classicist Eva Keuls emphasizes, “the suppression of women, the military expansionism and the harshness in the conduct of civic affairs all sprang from a common aggressive impulse.” That impulse was the expression of “male supremacy and the cult of power and violence.

In a 2013 speech, President Barack Obama laid out three rules for deciding whether to launch a drone strike against a specific target. The starting point was the national security, geopolitical, and civilian-safety objectives the president hoped to achieve. Three simple rules translated these broad goals into more concrete guidelines: Does the target pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people? Are there no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat? Is there near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured? Only if the answer to all three of these questions was yes would a drone strike be authorized. The American drone program is shrouded in secrecy, and it is unclear exactly how these simple rules have been used within the chain of decision making. By virtue of their simplicity and directness, however, they could provide a useful framework to structure discussions about these very tough decisions. And there is some evidence that they are working. In 2013, the year Obama articulated these simple rules, there was a sharp decline in confirmed civilian casualties by drone strikes. The concreteness of these rules also makes communicating them, both to U.S. citizens and the international community, straightforward. The United States has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on military drones, but that will not last forever. The U.K., China, Israel, and Iran had operational military drones in 2014, while other countries, including India, Pakistan, and Turkey, have advanced development programs. By articulating and adhering to a set of principles governing the use of drones, the United States has an opportunity to shape the international standards that other countries will use to guide their decisions in the future.

Our regiment was all women…We flew to the front in May 1942… The planes they gave us were Po-2s. Small, slow. They flew only at a low level. Hedge-hopping. Just over the ground! Before the war young people in flying clubs learned to fly in them, but no one could have imagined they would have any military use. The plane was constructed entirely of plywood, covered with aircraft fabric. In fact, with cheesecloth. One direct hit and it caught fire and burned up completely in the air, before reaching the ground. Like a match. The only solid metal part was the M-11 motor. Later on, toward the end of the war, we were issued parachutes, and a machine gun was installed in the pilot’s cabin, but before there had been no weapon, except for four bomb racks under the wings—that’s all. Nowadays they’d call us kamikazes, and maybe we were kamikazes. Yes! We were! But victory was valued more than our lives. “Before I retired, I became ill from the very thought of how I could possibly not work. Why then had I completed a second degree in my fifties? I became a historian. I had been a geologist all my life. But a good geologist is always in the field, and I no longer had the strength for it. A doctor came, took a cardiogram, and asked, “When did you have a heart attack?” “What heart attack?” “Your heart is scarred all over.” I must have acquired those scars during the war. You approach a target, and you’re shaking all over. Your whole body is shaking, because below it’s all gunfire: fighter planes are shooting, antiaircraft guns are shooting…Several girls had to leave the regiment; they couldn’t stand it. We flew mostly during the night. For a while they tried sending us on day missions, but gave it up at once. A rifle shot could bring down a Po-2… We did up to twelve flights a night. (...) You come back and you can’t even get out of the cabin; they used to pull us out. We couldn’t carry the chart case; we dragged it on the ground. And the work our girl armorers did! They had to attach four bombs to the aircraft by hand—that meant eight hundred pounds. They did it all night: one plane takes off, another lands. The body reorganized itself so much during the war that we weren’t women…We didn’t have those women’s things…Periods…You know…And after the war not all of us could have children.

person.” Nobody came to Slote’s flat on Sunday evening. The front page of the Zurich Tageblatt, lying on his desk Monday morning, had a spread of Japanese photographs about the Singapore victory, furnished by the German news service: the surrender ceremony, the hordes of British troops sitting on the earth in a prison compound, the celebration in Tokyo. The story about Father Martin was so short that Slote almost missed it, but there it was at the bottom of the page. The truck driver, who claimed that his brakes had failed, was being held for questioning. The priest was dead, crushed. 19 A Jew’s Journey (excerpt from Aaron Jastrow’s manuscript) APRIL 23, 1942. American bombers have raided Tokyo! My pulse races as it once did when, an immigrant in love with everything American, infected with baseball fever, I saw Babe Ruth hit a home run. For me America is the Babe Ruth of the nations. I unashamedly confess it. And the Babe has come out of his slump and “hit one over the fence”! Strange, how Allied airplane bombs infallibly fall on churches, schools, and hospitals; what a triumph of military imprecision! If Berlin radio speaks the truth—and why should Germans lie, pray?—the RAF has by now flattened nearly all institutions of worship, learning, and healing in Germany, while unerringly missing all other targets. Now we are told that Tokyo was unscathed in the raid except for a great number of schools, hospitals, and temples demolished by the barbarous Americans. Most extraordinary. My niece calls this “Doolittle raid” (an intrepid Army Air Corps colonel of that name led the attack) just a stunt, a token bombing. It will make no difference to the war; so she says. What she did, when the news came through on the BBC, was to entrust her baby to the cook, rush down to the Excelsior Hotel where our fellow journalists are housed, and there get joyously drunk with them. They are drunk nearly all the time, but I have not seen Natalie inebriated in years. I must say that when her chief local admirer, a banal-minded Associated Press reporter, brought her back, she was full of amusing raillery, though scarcely able to walk straight. Her mood was so gay, in fact, that I was tempted to disclose then and there the grave secret I have been harboring for two weeks, not even entrusting it to these pages. But I refrained. She has suffered enough on my account. Time enough to reveal

Dehumanization has fueled innumerable acts of violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocides. It makes slavery, torture, and human trafficking possible. Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith. How does this happen? Maiese explains that most of us believe that people’s basic human rights should not be violated—that crimes like murder, rape, and torture are wrong. Successful dehumanizing, however, creates moral exclusion. Groups targeted based on their identity—gender, ideology, skin color, ethnicity, religion, age—are depicted as “less than” or criminal or even evil. The targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code. This is moral exclusion, and dehumanization is at its core. Dehumanizing always starts with language, often followed by images. We see this throughout history. During the Holocaust, Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen—subhuman. They called Jews rats and depicted them as disease-carrying rodents in everything from military pamphlets to children’s books. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Indigenous people are often referred to as savages. Serbs called Bosnians aliens. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. I know it’s hard to believe that we ourselves could ever get to a place where we would exclude people from equal moral treatment, from our basic moral values, but we’re fighting biology here. We’re hardwired to believe what we see and to attach meaning to the words we hear. We can’t pretend that every citizen who participated in or was a bystander to human atrocities was a violent psychopath. That’s not possible, it’s not true, and it misses the point. The point is that we are all vulnerable to the slow and insidious practice of dehumanizing, therefore we are all responsible for recognizing it and stopping it. THE COURAGE TO EMBRACE OUR HUMANITY Because so many time-worn systems of power have placed certain people outside the realm of what we see as human, much of our work now is more a matter of “rehumanizing.” That starts in the same place dehumanizing starts—with words and images. Today we are edging closer and closer to a world where political and ideological discourse has become

the invention of the stirrup gave the armed knight on horseback a formidable assault capability. He could now attack at full speed and not be thrown from the saddle by the impact of his lance striking a target. The military value of the heavy cavalry was further enhanced by an Asian, invention that penetrated through Western Europe in the tenth century; the nailed iron horseshoe. This further improved the durability of the horse on the road.27 Also adding to the improved effectiveness of the armed knight were the contoured saddle, which made it easier to wield heavy weapons, the spur, and the curb bit, which enabled a rider to control the horse with one hand while fighting.28 Together, these apparently minor technological innovations dramatically devalued the military importance of the smallholders, who could not afford to maintain war-horses and arm themselves. The cheaper of the horses specially bred for war, the large chargers known as destriers, were worth four oxen or forty sheep. The more expensive warhorses cost ten oxen or one hundred sheep. Armor also cost a sum that no small holder could afford, equivalent to the price of sixty sheep.29

After it was revealed that the Miami Police Department used images of Black men for target practice, a movement of clergy and other activists initiated the hashtag #UseMeInstead circulating their own, predominantly White photos. In another form of subversive visualization, activists called out the way media outlets circulate unflattering photos of Black youths murdered by police or White vigilantes. They used the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and asked the question “Which one would they use?” with dueling photos of themselves looking stereotypically “thuggish” (e.g. not smiling, wearing a hoodie, throwing up hand signs, smoking, or holding alcohol) and “respectable” (e.g. smiling, wearing a graduation gown or suit, playing with a baby, or wearing a military uniform).

elite SWAT-like ERU, prompting John Glynn’s frantic call. Another man was dressed in drag, complete with make-up and a wig. Ireland is a country which has dealt with large-scale terrorism in the past, but this invariably involved attacks on the security forces, particularly in Northern Ireland. It has also seen its fair share of gangland assassinations, but these were always carried out with as few witnesses around as possible. This was something else entirely. One criminal gang, the Hutches, had launched a brazen military-style attack on a rival criminal group, the Kinahan cartel. The dead man, drug dealer David Byrne, was a senior figure within the latter outfit. One of the injured men, Sean McGovern, was a lower-ranking cartel member while the other, Aaron Bolger, was a hanger-on. The real target, however, was Daniel Kinahan, the son of Christy Kinahan, and one of the leaders of the Kinahan drugs and arms cartel. When the gunmen entered the front door of the hotel, Daniel

As lethality improved, military units always found one of the best ways to survive was to disperse more and to provide a smaller target for the enemy.

On the evening of March 30–31, 1990, an F-16 launch was initiated after the observation of strange lights by several policemen, and after an assumed flying object was confirmed by two military radar stations. Once aloft, the pilots tried to intercept the alleged crafts, and at one point recorded targets on their radar with unusual behavior, such as jumping huge distances in seconds and accelerating beyond human capacity. Unfortunately, they could not establish visual contact.

You walk into a room and smell chili cooking...a dog walks in and smells each ingredient in the pot.

(1) military necessity (which permits the use of only that degree and kind of force, not otherwise prohibited by the law of armed conflict, that is required to achieve the legitimate military purpose of the conflict); (2) distinction (which requires discrimination between the armed forces and military targets and, on the other hand, non-combatants, civilians, and civilian targets); (3) proportionality (which requires that losses resulting from a military action should not be excessive in relation to the military advantage expected to be gained from the action); and, above all, (4) humanity (which forbids the infliction of suffering, injury, or destruction not necessary for the accomplishment of legitimate military purposes). The implications of these principles, and of more detailed prohibitions on weapons and tactics, are spelled out in military manuals issued by many States, such as The Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict issued by the UK Ministry of Defence in 2004. Serious violations of the laws of war, such as the deliberate targeting of civilian non-combatants or the wanton destruction of towns and villages, amount to war crimes, for which the perpetrators may be punished by national courts, or by an international criminal tribunal that has jurisdiction over the events in question. Such international tribunals have been established on an ad hoc basis following the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, and (in slightly different hybrid forms, as ‘internationalized criminal courts’—national courts with some international judges) for Cambodia, East Timor, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone. There is also the permanent International Criminal Court (‘ICC’) established in 2002 under the 1998 treaty known as the Rome Statute. By the end of 2013 the ICC had exercised its jurisdiction in relation to seven conflicts, all of them in Africa, and was investigating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in other situations.

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Killing or injuring Palestinians should be as easy as ordering pizza. That was the logic behind an Israeli military–designed app in 2020 that allowed a commander in the field to send details about a target on an electronic device to troops who would then quickly neutralize that Palestinian. The colonel working on the project, Oren Matzliach, told the Israel Defense website that the strike would be “like ordering a book on Amazon or a pizza in a pizzeria using your smartphone.

In the weeks following my arrest, many of my family members were rounded up by the military as a form of collective punishment for what I had done and for the global attention it had garnered. In a single night, six of my relatives were arrested in predawn raids. Israel’s notoriously racist far-right defense minister justified the arrests by saying, “Dealing with Tamimi and her family has to be severe, exhaust all legal measures and generate deterrence.” And so, the occupation forces continued to target and punish my relatives. It got so bad that some of the parents, with the help of local activists, organized teach-ins to prepare the youth in the village for arrest, blindfolding them to simulate the experience. They also carried out mock interrogations and educated them about their rights.

Hiba S. is one of the pioneer Iraqi women academics and authors in the field of media and journalism, currently exiled in Amman. During a visit to her office in summer 2014, Hiba shared that the early days of the occupation in 2003 were the most difficult she had ever experienced. She recollected: ‘I was sitting in my garden smoking when I suddenly saw a huge American tank driving through the street. I saw a Black soldier on the top of the tank. He looked at me and did the victory sign with his fingers. Had I had a pistol in my hand, I would have immediately shot myself in the head right then and there. The pain I felt upon seeing that image is indescribable. I felt as though all the years we had spent building our country, educating our students to make them better humans were gone with the wind.’ Hiba’s description carries strong feelings of loss, defeat, and humiliation. Also significant in her narrative is that the first American soldier she encountered in post-invasion Iraq was a Black soldier making the victory sign. This is perhaps one of the most ironic and paradoxical images of the occupation. A Black soldier from a historically and consistently oppressed group in American society, who, one might imagine had no choice but to join the military, coming to Iraq and making the victory sign to a humiliated Iraqi academic whose country was ravaged by war. In a way, this image is worthy of a long pause. It is an encounter of two oppressed and defeated groups of people—Iraqis and African Americans meeting as enemies in a warzone. But, if one digs deeper, are these people really 'enemies' or allies struggling against the same oppressors? Do the real enemies ever come to the battlefield? Or do they hide behind closed doors planning wars and invasions while sending other 'oppressed' and 'diverse' faces to the battlefield to fight wars on their behalf? Hiba then recalled the early months of the occupation at the University of Baghdad where she taught. She noted that the first thing the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) tried to do was to change the curriculum Iraqi academics had designed, taught, and improved over the decades. While the Americans succeeded in doing this at the primary and high school levels, Hiba believed that they did not succeed as much at the university level. Iraqi professors knew better than to allow the 'Americanization of the curriculum' to take place. 'We knew the materials we were teaching were excellent even compared to international standards,' she said. 'They [the occupiers] tried to immediately inject subjects like "democracy" and "human rights" as if we Iraqis didn’t know what these concepts meant.' It is clear from Hiba’s testimony, also articulated by several other interviewees, that the Iraqi education system was one of the occupying forces’ earliest targets in their desire to reshape and restructure Iraqi society and peoples’ collective consciousness.

Target fixation” is a term first coined by the military to explain crashes of ground-attack planes that could not be attributed to enemy fire. Investigators found that pilots could fixate so completely on their target that they ceased to take in outside data, which would tell them important things like, “You’re about to hit the ground.” In their zeal to make a perfect “drop,” it is not uncommon for pilots who are suffering from target fixation to fly their airplanes directly into the target before dropping their bombs, or to pull out so low that they have no chance to avoid hitting the ground. Target fixation is exactly what afflicted the investigation in Perugia, and with such ferocity that the detectives and the prosecutors continued on that fatal course, to the destruction of their case, their credibility, and, likely, their careers.

But the RF rarely addressed the most important causes of death, notably infantile diarrhea and tuberculosis, for which technical fixes were not then available and which demanded long-term, socially oriented investments, such as improved housing, clean water, and sanitation systems. The RF avoided disease campaigns that might be costly, complex, or time-consuming (other than yellow fever, which imperiled [the military, and] commerce). Most campaigns were narrowly construed so that quantifiable targets (insecticide spraying or medication distribution, for example) could be set, met, and counted as successes, then presented in business-style quarterly reports. In the process, RF public health efforts stimulated economic productivity, expanded consumer markets, and prepared vast regions for foreign investment and incorporation into the expanding system of global capitalism.

God hurts when people are starving because of human greed enacted by political leaders. God hurts when people are scapegoated and “othered” by governments and then put into concentration camps, bombed into oblivion, or sanctioned into horrific poverty. God hurts when racism is at the core of lawmaking and law enforcement. God hurts when LGBTQIA people, all of whom are beautiful expressions of divine creativity, are targeted for harassment, violence, and being denied the same rights that heterosexual people are given. God hurts every time a new recruit signs up for the military, because the military is always used to kill other children of God. God hurts when God’s creation is destroyed and pillaged to generate profits with no regard to the sanctity of God’s creation and the life it contains. God hurts when his children forget to love their neighbors as themselves by putting profits over people instead of enacting laws that would protect humanity and foster human thriving, such as universal health care and universal basic income would. God hurts when people accumulate vast wealth, while billions of God’s children struggle to live without basic necessities. God hurts when people like Donald Trump blaspheme saying that only he can prevent Joe Biden from hurting God. God hurts when people of faith defend the actions of and offer support to a man like Donald Trump who brazenly admitted to being a sexual predator, has a multi-decades long history of racism, and whose utter narcissism and lack of empathy has fueled his many cruel policy decisions.

As we’ve said before, they’re attempting to develop a repertoire that matches the aesthetics and ideology of National Socialism. They want ‘pure’ German content, drawn from national fairy tales, and legends—anything that deals with the glorification of the fatherland, or the politics of race. They’ve targeted the new jazz out of America because it’s linked with Africans, but the music is so popular, Goebbels can’t keep the people away from the swing bands, so they pretend it’s German. They recently broadcast Duke Ellington’s ‘Caravan,’ repressing its origin. They rewrote Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus with Judas rebirthed as a powerful military dictator.” “They’re trying to erase reality,” Ida said, incredulously.

OPERATION FLAG BEARER WAS a particularly thorny case. At least twice, according to Shin Bet records, authorization for a hit on Flag Bearer was withheld for fear of harming innocents. The first time was on March 6, 2002. Shehade had been placed with a high degree of certainty in a south Gaza apartment, but because of the presence of a large number of civilians in the same building, along with the knowledge that his wife, Leila, and possibly also his fifteen-year-old daughter, Iman, were with him, the attack was called off. Three days later, a suicide bomber sent by Shehade blew himself up in Café Moment, near the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, killing eleven civilians. On June 6, another attempt on Shehade was called off, for similar reasons. Twelve days after that, a suicide bomber from the Hamas military wing killed nineteen passengers on a bus in Jerusalem. The frustration in the Israeli security establishment was palpable. As IDF chief of staff Moshe Yaalon said, “I told my American counterparts about this business, and it exasperated them. I told them that at first we held back because his wife was with him, that he never moved without her. From their angle, that was insane. ‘What,’ they asked me, ‘because of his wife you didn’t attack?’ Their criteria regarding collateral damage was very different from the suspenders that we’d tied our own hands with.

My Lai was a footnote, My Lai was an uninteresting footnote to a military operation called Operation WHEELER WALLAWA—which was a huge mass-murder operation, in which B-52 raids were targeted right on villages.

Now look at verse 22.” Ibrahim continued reading. “‘With pestilence and with blood I will enter into judgment with him; and I will rain on him and on his troops, and on the many peoples who are with him, a torrential rain, with hailstones, fire and brimstone.’” “Here the Lord talks of the judgment he will bring against Gog, the Russian dictator, and his allies. This will be the most terrifying sequence of events in human history to date. On the heels of a supernatural global earthquake that will undoubtedly take many lives will come a cascading series of other catastrophes. Pandemic diseases, for example, will sweep through the troops of the Russian coalition. And the attackers will face other judgments such as have rarely been seen since the cataclysmic showdown in Egypt between Moses and Pharaoh. Devastating hailstorms will hit these enemy forces and their supporters. So, too, will apocalyptic firestorms that will call to mind the terrible judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Scriptures indicate that the firestorms will be geographically widespread and exceptionally deadly.” Birjandi took a sip of tea as he let the implications of the words sink in. “Think about it, gentlemen. This suggests that targets throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union, and perhaps throughout some of Russia’s allies, will be supernaturally struck on this day of judgment and partially consumed. These could be limited to nuclear missile silos, military bases, radar installations, defense ministries, intelligence headquarters, and other

products are dramatically cheaper than Apple’s. Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture. Meanwhile, as business conditions shift and your strategy evolves, you have to keep changing your culture accordingly. The target is always moving.

If there is no enemy, one must be invented. The military force which is denied an external target always turns against its own people.

It was far easier for the Stasi and the KGB to infiltrate West Berlin, due to the lack of security around the city’s transportation networks that led to the east. During the Cold War, more than thirty thousand assets worked for the Stasi in the Federal Republic, and a great many of them filtered through to or via West Berlin, which as a military city was chock-full of targets the Warsaw Pact would require intelligence on.

To try to make sure gunmen do hit their targets, cartels have developed training camps. The first such camps were discovered in northeast Mexico and linked to the Zetas, but they have since been found all across the country and even over the border in Guatemala. Most are built on ranches and farmlands, such as one discovered in the community of Camargo just south of the Texas border. They are equipped with shooting ranges and makeshift assault courses and have been found storing arsenals of heavy weaponry, including boxes of grenades. Arrested gangsters have described courses as lasting two months and involving the use of grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns. A training video captured by police in 2011 shows recruits running across a field, taking cover on the grass, and firing assault rifles. Sometimes training can be deadly. One recruit drowned during an exercise that required him to swim carrying his backpack and rifle. The discovery of these camps has sparked the obvious comparison to Al Qaeda training grounds in Afghanistan. But however much schooling they give, cartels still love gunslingers with real military experience. In the first decade of democracy, up until 2010, one hundred thousand soldiers had deserted from the Mexican military. There is a startling implication: country and ghetto boys sign up for the army, get the government to pay for their training, then make real money with the mob.

Again and again, the Islamists stated that the Western intervention [in Iraq] was directed against the Muslim people and not against one political leader [Saddam Hussein] who did wrong. As a proof of this theory, they mentioned that the military and economic boycott, imposed by the "so-called security council", was sufficient to realise the two pretended aims of the US intervention: the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait and the destruction of the Iraqi military power. Ḥamās deplored the undifferentiated bombing of military and civilian targets that proved the "extent of the Western hatred of Islam and the Muslims" (madā ḅaqdihim ‘alā alIslām). This "ideological concept" (tas ṣawwur ‘aqā’ idī) was said to link the West and the Jews more than just economic and security interests. According to Ḥamās, one of the true goals of the Western invasion was the "establishment of the ‘Greater Israel’" as laid down in the texts of the Talmud. The invasion of Iraq should "facilitate Israel to conquer Jordan" (ghazw al-‘urdun).

Nowadays, most of his strategic thinking and writings are collectively referred to as “Mahanism,” and it typically places great importance on naval power. This would eventually lead to him lending his voice to and arguing in favor of the US annexing Hawaiʻi, which occurred in 1898. Specifically, the threat of Japan to the US was the key factor in the thinking that placed such military importance on Hawaiʻi. Along with other popular writers, Mahan wrote about other concerns, such as the Japanese immigrants failing to assimilate with the culture of the United States. These writings both directly and indirectly fueled hysteria around the sensational image of the “Yellow Peril,” a racist ideology that targeted people of East Asian descent. This hysteria would eventually bleed over to the islands of Hawaiʻi, which was home to a large and growing population of Japanese migrant workers.

Palestinians have learned to use civilians as both swords and shields: they target Israeli civilians, then hide behind Palestinian civilians when the Israeli military comes after them...They deliberately place their bomb-making factories adjacent to schools, hospitals, and other civilian buildings.” “To reward rejection and violence with even-handedness is to encourage such conduct. There must be a high price paid by those who reject peace in favor violence, as the Palestinians have done since the 1920s

Ilich's academic syllabus motivated him much less than far-left politics, as he readily recognised: 'I acquired a personal culture by travelling in Russia and other countries. I learned to use Marx's dialectic method. It's an experience which is useful to all revolutionaries'. Fellow students describe him as passionate about Marxism, but as a romantic rather than an ideologue. An envoy of the Venezuelan Communist Party came to the conclusion that this young man had potential. But the offer of a post as its representative in Bucharest which Dr Eduardo Gallegos Mancera, a member of the party's politburo, made to llich when they met in Moscow did not tempt him. As his father had done, Ilich decided to keep the party at arm's length and turned Mancera down. His snubbing of the appointment did not endear him to the Venezuelan Communist Party, and he further blackened his name by supporting a rebel faction. Since 1964 a storm had been brewing back home following the refusal of the young Commander Douglas Bravo, in charge of the party's military affairs and loyal to Che Guevara's doctrine, to toe the official line. Party policy dictated that armed struggle as a means to revolution should be abandoned in favour of a 'broad popular movement for progressive democratic change'. The storm broke in the late 1960s when Bravo left the party. Ilich, still at Lumumba University, wholeheartedly supported him as a true revolutionary, and this led to his expulsion in the early summer of 1969 from the Venezuelan Communist Youth, the first political movement he had joined. Robbed of the backing of a Soviet-endorsed party, Ilich was an easy target for the university authorities, whom he had again angered earlier in 1969 when he joined a demonstration by Arab students. Moscow had no time for Bravo's followers: one Pravda editorial condemned Cuban-backed revolutionary movements in Latin America like Bravo's as 'anti-Marxist' and declared that only orthodox parties held the key to the future.

The spies, sent to search out the Promised Land, could be likened to a Baptist committee. Instead of looking to God’s promises, they fed on one another’s perception of the impossibility before them—conquering the land God had promised. God’s great works have not come through committees but through leaders who were totally surrendered to Him. While ten of the twelve committee members were fearful of the giants and battle, Joshua fixed his focus on God. He had the pure vision to focus on God’s clearly revealed will rather than on the obstacles to fulfilling it. “And Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, which were of them that searched the land, rent their clothes: And they spake unto all the company of the children of Israel, saying, The land, which we passed through to search it, is an exceeding good land. If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey. Only rebel not ye against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not. But all the congregation bade stone them with stones. And the glory of the LORD appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel.”—NUMBERS 14:6–10 A pattern oft repeated in the lives of leaders who make a difference is the opposition that comes as they edge closer to being used of God. It’s as if the devil senses the potential for God’s power to flow through their surrendered lives and plants doubts in their minds and accusations in the minds of others. “You’re not good enough,” “You can’t do it,” “You’ll never see people saved,” “It can’t be done,” “No one wants to hear what you have to say”—these thoughts are common darts of discouragement the devil hurls at leaders. The person who places confidence in personal ability, education, friendships, allegiances, or alliances, will fail indeed. But while there will always be the naysayers who insist that God’s will cannot be done, a Spirit-filled leader will place his confidence solely in God Almighty and press forward. Joshua knew the victory would not come through his sword, his ingenuity, or his military skill. But he also knew that if God was in it, God would do it. This knowledge gave him the confidence to insist, against the voice of his peers, “If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land, and give it us” (Numbers 14:8). In a world of ideals, such leadership would be appreciated and readily followed. But the results in Joshua’s life were not quite so rosy. For believing God and trying to lead others to do the same, Joshua became a target. The people wanted to take the life of this faith-filled man of God! If you will be a spiritual leader where you work—a man of God who doesn’t laugh at improper jokes or join in ungodly conversation—if you will be distinct and stand for what is right, not everyone will applaud. You may be mocked, criticized, and ostracized. Standing for Christ may be difficult at times, but it does make a difference. Like Joshua, we must understand the importance of vision and be willing to make sacrifices to lead others. For “where there is no vision, the people perish…” (Proverbs 29:18).

Terrorism suspects aren’t the NSA’s only targets, however. Operations against nation-state adversaries have exploded in recent years as well. In 2011, the NSA mounted 231 offensive cyber operations against other countries, according to the documents, three-fourths of which focused on “top-priority” targets like Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea. Under a $652-million clandestine program code named GENIE, the NSA, CIA, and special military operatives have planted covert digital bugs in tens of thousands of computers, routers, and firewalls around the world to conduct computer network exploitation, or CNE. Some are planted remotely, but others require physical access to install through so-called interdiction—the CIA or FBI intercepts shipments of hardware from manufacturers and retailers in order to plant malware in them or install doctored chips before they reach the customer.

Tanks are easily identified, easily engaged, much-feared targets which attract all the fire on the battlefield. When all is said and done, a tank is a small steel box crammed with inflammable or explosive substances which is easily converted into a mobile crematorium for its highly skilled crew.” -Brigadier Shelford Bidwell, British military historian

What is the life of one person worth? Although the Supreme leader Kim Jong-un is not suicidal, life to him is relatively cheap, after all he had his half-brother murdered. The countries population of almost 25 million people is harshly subjugated and the military consists of 5,200,000 men and women both active and in the reserves. Although his military ranks as 25th of the worlds military powers, it is the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems that makes Kim Jong-un so dangerous. It is estimated that they have about a dozen nuclear devices that could most likely be delivered as far as Japan. Of course their future targets, including the United States are more ambitious. In contrast to their troop strength, the United States has 1,400,000 personnel under arms, South Korea has only 624,465 and China has 2,333,000 personnel. Our advantage is primarily technical, however regardless of our superiority in battlefield technology, oil which they get from China, remains the lifeblood of their supporting economy and army. North Korea has threatened to fire missiles at the U. S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam. The reality of a war is that we would most likely win such a conflict but at a very high cost. The biggest losers of a war on the Korean Peninsula would be South Korea, North Korea and the United States in that order. If there were to be a winner it would be Russia. What are we thinking? Perhaps we should come up with a better strategy.

thought they could contain the infection by locking down the civilian population. Not surprisingly, this didn’t stop people running like rats when they saw what was happening. Thousands, maybe millions, tried to get out of London along the north–south arteries, the A1 and M1. The authorities responded ruthlessly, first with military roadblocks and then with targeted airstrikes.

In May of 1952, about a dozen individuals lead by Fidel Castro formed a group of anti-Batista rebels called “The Movement.” Fidel Castro had become a well-known activist and wrote articles intended to fire up the public in an underground newspaper El Acusador (The Accuser). In one year, his group grew to about 1,200 people. They began accumulating weapons with the idea that they would openly attack a Batista stronghold as a uniformed militant force. Being careful, Castro kept his intentions secret and only a few people knew that the target would be the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack on the second largest military barracks in Cuba, named after General Guillermón Moncada, a hero of the War of Independence, was worked out in the tiny two-room apartment of Abel Santamaría. Abel and his sister Haydée lived on the corner of 25th and O Streets in El Vedado, Havana. Only Abel, Haydée and seven other people were entrusted with the details of the attack. Tight security was maintained throughout and since the volunteers of the revolution were divided into cells, few of them knew each other…. One hundred and thirty two men and two women went up against 1,000 trained soldiers and although the battle ended badly for the Castro brothers, the attack on the barracks caused a public fury throughout Cuba. At his sentencing for leading the failed mission, Fidel delivered his famous “History will Absolve Me” speech. Read more in “The Exciting Story of Cuba.

On December 16, 1940, “Operation Abigail Rachel” became the first deliberate, indiscriminate, bombing raid on Germany. Mannheim and nearby Ludwigshafen were bombed constantly from that time on until the end of the war. The massive amounts of bombs, dropped over Mannheim in the shortest interval possible, became known as “bomber streaming.” Despite the lack of any proven success, indiscriminate bombing was soon approved for similar raids throughout Germany. From that time on, the British no longer conducted attacks on just military targets but began “carpet bombing” entire cities, without regard to the civilian population in residential areas. Civilians became targeted every bit as much as the industrial centers and the incessant bombings became a total devastation of humanity. The largest raid on Mannheim was conducted on September 5th and 6th, 1943, during which a major part of the central city was completely destroyed. In 1944 an air raid attack destroyed the historical Mannheim Palace, leaving only one room out of over 500 rooms undamaged. During World War II, the people of Mannheim became the victims of over 150 air raids.

Midway was merely a convenient target chosen by Yamamoto to draw the Americans out, and both sides’ objectives were attritional attempts to degrade their opponents’ carrier units. Nevertheless, the result created space for the Americans to begin their cautious advance back across the Pacific. This started with Guadalcanal and proceeded along two axes. Nimitz would command the larger and predominantly naval effort across the central Pacific, and island fortresses such as Saipan and Iwo Jima would soon go down in military legend. To the south, General Douglas MacArthur led a campaign across New Guinea and the Philippines, with a more land-based focus. Notwithstanding that, it was off Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in October 1944 that the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered a fatal blow in the largest naval battle in history, during which four carriers and three battleships were lost.

mass communications in free societies, is an indispensable element of terrorism. Closed societies, with control of mass communications, are not good targets.

As if this wasn’t enough, word spread of a new peril. Enemy troops masquerading as refugees were said to be infiltrating the lines. From now on, the orders ran, all women were to be challenged by rifle. What next? wondered Lance Bombardier Gentry; Germans in drag! Fear of Fifth Columnists spread like an epidemic. Everyone had his favorite story of German paratroopers dressed as priests and nuns. The men of one Royal Signals maintenance unit told how two “monks” visited their quarters just before a heavy bombing attack. Others warned of enemy agents, disguised as Military Police, deliberately misdirecting convoys. There were countless tales of talented “farmers” who cut signs in corn and wheat fields pointing to choice targets. Usually the device was an arrow; sometimes a heart; and in one instance the III Corps fig leaf emblem. The

Nevertheless, what saved Iran from a comprehensive defeat was not the ferocity of its military resistance but rather the limited objectives of the Iraqi invasion. Saddam’s decision to go to war was not taken easily or enthusiastically. He did not embark on war in pursuit of a premeditated ‘grand design’ but was pushed into it by his increasing anxiety about the threat to his own political survival. War was not his first choice but rather an act of last resort, adopted only after trying all other means for deflecting Iran’s pressure. It was a pre-emptive move, designed to exploit a temporary window of opportunity in order to forestall the Iranian threat to his regime. If Saddam entertained hopes or aspirations beyond the containment of the Iranian danger – as he may have done – these were not the reasons for launching the war but were incidental to it. The reluctant nature of Saddam’s decision to invade Iran was clearly reflected in his war strategy. Instead of attempting to deal a mortal blow to the Iranian army and trying to topple the revolutionary regime in Tehran, he sought to confine the war by restricting his army’s goals, means and targets. The invasion was carried out by half of the Iraqi army – six of 12 divisions. Saddam’s initial strategy also avoided targets of civilian and economic value in favour of attacks almost exclusively on military targets. Only after the Iranians struck non-military targets did the Iraqis respond in kind.

Other Christian communities reported horrendous losses from similar events. Lord Bryce alleged that the Turkish government was pursuing a “plan for exterminating Christianity, root and branch,” which equally targeted “the minor communities, such as the Nestorian and Assyro-Chaldean churches.” Claiming to have lost two-thirds of their own people during their own wartime genocide, the Assyrians recall 1915 as sayfo, “the Year of the Sword.” In the Christian-majority region of Lebanon, the Turkish military deliberately induced a famine that left a weakened population unable to withstand the ensuing epidemics: a hundred thousand Maronite Christians died. All told, including Armenians, Maronites, and Assyrians, perhaps 1.5 million Christians perished in the region.35

CHAPTER FIVE Collateral Damage “In an ordinary war, we differentiate between combatants and civilians. Not everyone is part of a nation’s army. But what about a corporation? Surely security and fleet forces are combatants in the traditional sense. Are executives valid targets? Paying taxes is generally compulsory for a nation’s citizens, but are shareholders equally detached from a military effort? Are they collaborators? Where does one draw the lines, or are there any?

In some places, such as Kiel, the T-Forces actually enlisted the Third Reich's guards and police temporarily to help protect vital facilities from arson or vandalism, as a British T-Force diary reported: “[T]he German military forces and police would be allowed to keep their rifles. […] The police, evidently used to taking orders, were prepared to do anything ordered. Reports continued to come in to 'T' Force headquarters of German armed guards on certain dumps and targets. All troops were told to allow the Germans to carry on with the guards, which they were doing very well.

Known as "Ike,” Eisenhower was born prior to the Spanish American War on October 14, 1890. Graduating from West Point Military Academy in 1915, he served under a number of talented generals including John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall. Although for the greatest time he held the rank of Major, he was quickly promoted to the rank of a five star general during World War II. During this war he served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe. Eisenhower was responsible for organizing the invasion of North Africa and later in 1944, the invasion of Normandy, France and Germany. Following World War II, influential citizens and politicians from both political parties urged Eisenhower to run for president. Becoming a Republican, the popular general was elected and became the 34th President of the United States. Using the slogan “I like Ike!” he served as the 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. Having witnessed the construction of the German Autobahn, one of lasting achievements we still use is the Interstate Highway System, authorized in 1956. ] He reasoned that our cities would be targets in a future war; therefore the Interstate highways would help evacuate them and allow the military greater flexibility in their maneuvers. Along with many other accomplishments during his administration, on January 3, 1959 Alaska became the 49th state and on August 21, 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state. On March 28, 1969, at 79 years of age, Eisenhower died of congestive heart failure at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington D.C. He was laid to rest on the grounds of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. Eisenhower is buried alongside his son Doud, who died at age 3 in 1921. His wife Mamie was later buried next to him after her death on November 1, 1979.

I need actual X-Ultra vests, not schematics and spec sheets.” “More than one?” “A statistically significant sample would be best. Like a hundred.” “Why so many?” “Target practice.” Her eyes widened. “Let me make sure I have this straight. You want to blow holes in one hundred bulletproof army vests.” “That’s correct.” “Where do you plan to do that?” He looked at her. “I’ll ask Norm,” Kenzie said. “If it’s not too much trouble. What if he tells you no?” Kenzie shook her head. “He’s ex-army.” “Should have known. He never shaved again,” Linc said. “Shut up. He’s a ZZ Top fan. Be glad he won’t mind. He might ask you not to be too conspicuous about it. There’s a smaller range off to the side. You haven’t seen it.” “If he has the right targets, I can pay him,” Linc offered. “You should see what’s in the basement. Everything from paper thugs to wooden dummies. I’ll borrow a gun from Norm. I want to get this done and over with.” Kenzie was military all the way, but he hadn’t noticed her having much interest in hardware. “Mind telling me why you’re so gung-ho?” “Because sooner or later I’m going to be the one to tell Christine that Frank Branigan died. And I don’t want her to think I had a chance to help find out why and did zip.” “Okay. I understand. But I’m the one who has to get the vests. You can’t do that. They know who you are.” She conceded the point with a nod. “How are you going to get in?” she wanted to know. “Right through the front gate.” Kenzie shot him a curious look. “Let me guess. You aren’t going to explain how you’re going to do that because you would have to reveal your secret identity.” He chuckled at her reply. “You’re not that far off.” “Thought so,” she said with satisfaction. “And,” he went on, sobering, “there is one more thing I have to do.” “Let’s hear it.” “Mike Warren and I noticed that a lot of lines are starting to converge on SKC. While I’m inside, I want to take video.” “Of what?” “More like who. As in everyone I can get on microcam.” “How micro is it?” “About as big as a button.” He rose and stretched, rubbing his back. “Which is good. I may not be able to carry anything ever again.” “Tough workout?” she teased. “Let’s just say I had more fun watching yours.

In less than ten minutes in the earl’s company, she’d come to understand he was a very deceptive man. Not willfully dishonest, perhaps, but deceptive. He looked for all the world like an elegant aristocrat come to idle the summer heat away in the country. A touch of lace at his collar and throat, a little green stone winking through the folds of his neckcloth, a gleaming signet ring on his left hand, and even in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, he projected wealth, breeding, and indolence. His speech was expensively proper, the tone never wavering from a fine politesse that bespoke the best schools, the best connections, the best breeding. He wielded his words like little daggers though, pinning his opponent one dart at a time to the target of his choosing. His body deceived, as well, so nicely adorned in attire, tailor-made for him from his gleaming boots to his neckcloth, to everything so pleasantly coordinated between. And he was handsome, with sable hair tousled and left a little too long, deep green eyes, arresting height, and military bearing. His face might be considered too strong by some standards—he would never be called a pretty man—but it had a certain masculine appeal, the nose slightly hooked, the chin a trifle arrogant, and the eyebrows just a touch dramatic. No honest female would find him unattractive of face or form. Beneath the well-tailored clothes, great masses of muscle bunched and smoothed with his every move. The hands holding Emmie’s chair for her were lean, brown, and elegant, but also callused, and she’d no doubt they could snap her neck as easily as they cut up Winnie’s apple tart. He was clothed as a gentleman, spoke as a gentleman, and had the manner of a gentleman, but Emmie was not deceived. The Earl of Rosecroft was a barbarian. But

In less than ten minutes in the earl’s company, she’d come to understand he was a very deceptive man. Not willfully dishonest, perhaps, but deceptive. He looked for all the world like an elegant aristocrat come to idle the summer heat away in the country. A touch of lace at his collar and throat, a little green stone winking through the folds of his neckcloth, a gleaming signet ring on his left hand, and even in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, he projected wealth, breeding, and indolence. His speech was expensively proper, the tone never wavering from a fine politesse that bespoke the best schools, the best connections, the best breeding. He wielded his words like little daggers though, pinning his opponent one dart at a time to the target of his choosing. His body deceived, as well, so nicely adorned in attire, tailor-made for him from his gleaming boots to his neckcloth, to everything so pleasantly coordinated between. And he was handsome, with sable hair tousled and left a little too long, deep green eyes, arresting height, and military bearing. His face might be considered too strong by some standards—he would never be called a pretty man—but it had a certain masculine appeal, the nose slightly hooked, the chin a trifle arrogant, and the eyebrows just a touch dramatic. No honest female would find him unattractive of face or form. Beneath the well-tailored clothes, great masses of muscle bunched and smoothed with his every move. The hands holding Emmie’s chair for her were lean, brown, and elegant, but also callused, and she’d no doubt they could snap her neck as easily as they cut up Winnie’s apple tart. He was clothed as a gentleman, spoke as a gentleman, and had the manner of a gentleman, but Emmie was not deceived. The Earl of Rosecroft was a barbarian. But then, there was the most puzzling deception of all: He was a barbarian, but barbarians did not notice when small children grew tired, they did not think to cut up a little girl’s tart for her, they did not coax and charm and guide when they could pillage, plunder, and destroy. So he was an intelligent, shrewd barbarian. Emmie

Colonel Olds, among many others, was of the opinion that fighter bombers carrying a single bomb flying low and fast would have been far more effective against German military and strategic targets. He said that a single Mustang could have dropped a five hundred pound bomb through the window of any factory in Germany. It was impossible to hit a factory with a huge formation of bombers flying at 25,000 feet without destroying everything for miles around it. He also emphasized that this would have greatly minimized civilian casualties. Perhaps the colonel was naive. Perhaps he did not understand that the very purpose of “strategic bombing” was to maximize civilian casualties. In a word, the purpose of “strategic bombing” was genocide!!

American officials estimated millions would be spent to develop internal security systems, and State Department officials expected the Cuban government to increase internal surveillance in an attempt to prevent further acts of terrorism. These systems, which restricted civil rights, became easy targets for critics. CIA officials admitted early on in the war of terrorism that the goal was not the military defeat of Fidel Castro, but to force the regime into applying increasingly stringent civil restrictions, with the resultant pressures on the Cuban public. This was outlined in a May 1961 agency report stating that the objective was to “plan, implement and sustain a program of covert actions designed to exploit the economic, political and psychological vulnerabilities of the Castro regime. It is neither expected nor argued that the successful execution of this covert program will in itself result in the overthrow of the Castro regime,” only to accelerate the “moral and physical disintegration of the Castro government.

American officials estimated millions would be spent to develop internal security systems, and State Department officials expected the Cuban government to increase internal surveillance in an attempt to prevent further acts of terrorism. These systems, which restricted civil rights, became easy targets for critics. CIA officials admitted early on in the war of terrorism that the goal was not the military defeat of Fidel Castro, but to force the regime into applying increasingly stringent civil restrictions, with the resultant pressures on the Cuban public. This was outlined in a May 1961 agency report stating that the objective was to “plan, implement and sustain a program of covert actions designed to exploit the economic, political and psychological vulnerabilities of the Castro regime. It is neither expected nor argued that the successful execution of this covert program will in itself result in the overthrow of the Castro regime,” only to accelerate the “moral and physical disintegration of the Castro government.” The CIA acknowledged that in response to the terrorist acts the government would be “Stepping up internal security controls and defense capabilities.” It was not projected the acts of terror would directly result in Castro’s downfall (although that was a policy aim), but only to promote the sense of vulnerability among the population and compel the government into increasingly radical steps in order to ensure national security.18

I went along on this ride, as did Adolph, and we returned to the Feudenheim district of Mannheim, which was where our apartment stood. The roads were extremely cratered from the frequent bombings and the driver had to carefully circumvent these deep chasms. As we drove along we were fully aware that we could also become an inviting target, but eventually we arrived at the house safely. Surprisingly, the house was still relatively undamaged and my flat was locked up and further secured with a padlock, which I had used. It was apparent from the drawn blinds that everyone had moved out. Luckily I still had the keys and could open the door. Letting ourselves in, we looked around. It was really surprising that everything was still in place and that looters hadn’t ransacked everything, as was usually the case. Pointing out the items of furniture I would need, Herr Meyer quickly organized the boys, in a military fashion, and had them carry my things down the three flights of stairs. Even the truck driver helped carry my things, and to my delight the move went smoothly. When the truck was finally loaded, the weight became apparent. Weighted down with an old coal stove and its chimney sections, kitchen cupboard, a radio, double bed and mattress, a sofa and my wardrobe as well as pots and pans, it was down onto its axles.

Just so you know, the only thing keeping this dog from tearing you to pieces is me, so I suggest you stand still, very still, and tell me what I want to know.

Major Donahue was briefing them on their mission. Their very classified mission. Their very classified mission to use their attack helicopters on a civilian target, inside the United States. Arizona to be specific. They were briefed that a very dangerous parahuman was on the loose in the desert, being tracked by another military unit.

But I bet they don’t know what I saw.” Puller sat down in a chair next to her bed. “So why don’t you tell me what that was?” Knox glanced at the glass door to her room and saw a police officer, a man in a suit, and a burly MP standing guard there. “They’re not taking any chances with you,” he said, following her gaze. “Cops, FBI, and the military.” She turned back to Puller and slowly but clearly told him what she had seen. The van, the kid, everything. “So it was a deliberate setup the whole way,” Puller concluded. “It appeared to be. But why target Carter?” “Well, he heads up an important part of our nation’s defenses. He’s a target just by virtue

The war on terror for which civil liberties have been curtailed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent has failed miserably. The belief that Isis is interested only in ‘Muslim against Muslim’ struggles is another instance of wishful thinking: Isis has shown it will fight anybody who doesn’t adhere to its bigoted, puritanical and violent variant of Islam. Where Isis differs from al-Qaida is that it’s a well-run military organisation that is very careful in choosing its targets and the optimum moment to attack them.

Number of SWAT teams in the FBI alone in 2013: 56         Unlikely federal agencies that have used SWAT teams: US Fish and Wildlife Service, Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, US National Park Service, Food and Drug Administration         Value of surplus military gear received by Johnston, Rhode Island, from the Pentagon in 2010–2011: $4.1 million         Population of Johnston, Rhode Island, in 2010: 28,769         Partial list of equipment given to the Johnston police department: 30 M-16 rifles, 599 M-16 magazines containing about 18,000 rounds, a “sniper targeting calculator,” 44 bayonets, 12 Humvees, and 23 snow blowers105

In fact, this figure [five million “murdered” Gentiles] is too high if one is counting victims who were targeted exclusively for racial reasons, but too low if one counts the total number of victims the Nazi regime killed outside military operations. (...) Wiesenthal’s aggrandizement of his role in the Eichmann capture is far less disturbing and historiographically significant than another of his inventions. In an attempt to elicit non-Jewish interest in the Holocaust, Wiesenthal decided to broaden the population of victims—even though it meant falsifying history. He began to speak of eleven million victims: six million Jews and five million non-Jews. Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer immediately recognized that this number made no historical sense. Who, Bauer wondered, constituted Wiesenthal’s five million. --The Eichmann Trial, page 8

Those who champion a so-called Independent America will tell you that drones create more enemies than they kill, and that America will attract more admirers by perfecting American democracy. Do you really believe that young men living among the tribes of the Afghan-Pakistan border are less likely to support extremist ideologies if we build better schools in Ohio and better hospitals in Arkansas? Do you accept that Somali jihadis are less likely to plan attacks on Western targets or that U.S. embassies around the world will be safer if U.S. policymakers redouble their commitment to American civil liberties? In the real world, a leader must often choose the least bad of many bad options. Drones achieve military objectives with much less risk for our military and at much lower cost to our economy. Use them. Never

He was the first military remote viewer—the first man to transcend time and space for the purpose of viewing selected targets and collecting intelligence information. I learned early to rely on his counsel. What he said was always true: no lies, no exaggerations, no betrayal, and no ego.

Marc Goodman is a cyber crime specialist with an impressive résumé. He has worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, Interpol, NATO, and the State Department. He is the chief cyber criminologist at the Cybercrime Research Institute, founder of the Future Crime Institute, and now head of the policy, law, and ethics track at SU. When breaking down this threat, Goodman sees four main categories of concern. The first issue is personal. “In many nations,” he says, “humanity is fully dependent on the Internet. Attacks against banks could destroy all records. Someone’s life savings could vanish in an instant. Hacking into hospitals could cost hundreds of lives if blood types were changed. And there are already 60,000 implantable medical devices connected to the Internet. As the integration of biology and information technology proceeds, pacemakers, cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, and so on, will all become the target of cyber attacks.” Equally alarming are threats against physical infrastructures that are now hooked up to the net and vulnerable to hackers (as was recently demonstrated with Iran’s Stuxnet incident), among them bridges, tunnels, air traffic control, and energy pipelines. We are heavily dependent on these systems, but Goodman feels that the technology being employed to manage them is no longer up to date, and the entire network is riddled with security threats. Robots are the next issue. In the not-too-distant future, these machines will be both commonplace and connected to the Internet. They will have superior strength and speed and may even be armed (as is the case with today’s military robots). But their Internet connection makes them vulnerable to attack, and very few security procedures have been implemented to prevent such incidents. Goodman’s last area of concern is that technology is constantly coming between us and reality. “We believe what the computer tells us,” says Goodman. “We read our email through computer screens; we speak to friends and family on Facebook; doctors administer medicines based upon what a computer tells them the medical lab results are; traffic tickets are issued based upon what cameras tell us a license plate says; we pay for items at stores based upon a total provided by a computer; we elect governments as a result of electronic voting systems. But the problem with all this intermediated life is that it can be spoofed. It’s really easy to falsify what is seen on our computer screens. The more we disconnect from the physical and drive toward the digital, the more we lose the ability to tell the real from the fake. Ultimately, bad actors (whether criminals, terrorists, or rogue governments) will have the ability to exploit this trust.

According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, the National Security Agency often identifies targets for drone strikes based on controversial metadata analysis and cell phone tracking technologies—an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.

Thus, the next president would be left with two choices: acquiesce to Iranhaving nuclear weapons (which it could then use to murder Americans and our allies), or launch a targeted military attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity. The

The Democrats did play a role in Reconstruction—they worked to block it. The party struck out against Reconstruction in two ways. The first was to form a network of terrorist organizations with names like the Constitutional Guards, the White Brotherhood, the Society of Pale Faces, and the Knights of the White Camelia. The second was to institute state-sponsored segregation throughout the South. Let us consider these two approaches one by one. The Democrats started numerous terror groups, but the most notorious of these was the Ku Klux Klan. Founded in 1866, the Klan was initially led by a former Confederate army officer, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who served two years later as a Democratic delegate to the party’s 1868 national convention. Forrest’s role in the Klan is controversial; he later disputed that he was ever involved, insisting he was active in attempting to disband the organization. Initially the Klan’s main targets weren’t blacks but rather white people who were believed to be in cahoots with blacks. The Klan unleashed its violence against northern Republicans who were accused of being “carpetbaggers” and unwarrantedly interfering in southern life, as well as southern “scalawags” and “white niggers” who the Klan considered to be in league with the northern Republicans. The Klan’s goal was to repress blacks by getting rid of these perceived allies of the black cause. Once again Republicans moved into action, passing a series of measures collectively termed the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1871. These acts came to be known as the Force Bill, signed into law by a Republican President, Ulysses Grant. They restricted northern Democratic inflows of money and weapons to the Klan, and also empowered federal officials to crack down on the Klan’s organized violence. The Force Bill was implemented by military governors appointed by Grant. These anti-Klan measures seem modest in attempting to arrest what Grant described as an “invisible empire throughout the South.” But historian Eric Foner says the Force Bill did markedly reduce lawless violence by the Democrats. The measures taken by Republicans actually helped shut down the Ku Klux Klan. By 1873, the Klan was defunct, until it was revived a quarter-century later by a new group of racist Democrats.

Machine learning also has a growing role on the battlefield. Learners can help dissipate the fog of war, sifting through reconnaissance imagery, processing after-action reports, and piecing together a picture of the situation for the commander. Learning powers the brains of military robots, helping them keep their bearings, adapt to the terrain, distinguish enemy vehicles from civilian ones, and home in on their targets. DARPA’s AlphaDog carries soldiers’ gear for them. Drones can fly autonomously with the help of learning algorithms; although they are still partly controlled by human pilots, the trend is for one pilot to oversee larger and larger swarms. In the army of the future, learners will greatly outnumber soldiers, saving countless lives.

the research? “So many people, I did not know them all. They studied my work. They asked me questions. I told the ISI about it when I got home. A major like you, he was. You can check.” The major did not want to make more work for himself. And it was true, the story as it had been narrated and understood was all in the files. “Why did you go back to America?” he demanded, looking at a sheet of paper. “I was invited to present a paper at a conference that was cosponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It was a great honor for me, and for my university. You can ask them.” He held out his cell phone again, so that Major Nadeem could make a call to verify, but the major shook his head. They spent several more hours like this, going through the major episodes of Dr. Omar’s career. When they came to his most recent work on computer-security algorithms, Dr. Omar apologized that he could not talk about this work in any detail because it had been classified as “top secret” by the Pakistani military. The major found nothing of interest. Dr. Omar was very careful, then and always. The major asked him to sign a paper, and to report any suspicious contacts, and Dr. Omar assured him that he would. The Pakistani authorities never came after him again. That was three years before his world went white.   Omar al-Wazir had multiple binary identities, it could be said. He was a Pakistani but also, in some sense, a man tied to the West. He was a Pashtun from the raw tribal area of South Waziristan, but he was also a modern man. He was a secular scientist and also a Muslim, if not quite a believer. His loyalties might indeed have been confused before the events of nearly two years ago, but not now. Sometimes Dr. Omar grounded himself by recalling the spirit of his father, Haji Mohammed. He remembered the old man shaking his head when Omar took wobbly practice shots with an Enfield rifle, missing the target nearly every time. The look on the father’s face asked: How can this be my oldest son, this boy who cannot shoot? But Haji Mohammed had taught him the code of manhood, just the same. Omar had learned the

The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA, “enemy killed in action,” even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless

Violence was what the military existed for. Controlled violence directed against appropriate targets.

And the PRCS [Palestinian Red Crescent Society] had not lost just one hospital: thirteen clinics and nine hospitals all over Lebanon had been destroyed in this way. Only Gaza Hospital, for a reason I was to discover three years later, was still standing. At the height of the air raids, when the Palestinians found out that every single PRCS hospital and clinic was a bomb target, they put three Israeli soldiers captured in south Lebanon on the upper floors of Gaza Hospital, and radioed a message to the Israeli Army saying that any further military action on Gaza Hospital would result in Israeli lives being lost. That saved Gaza Hospital from further destruction.

Sound the call to attention,” Ned told the bugler. The goblin put the instrument to his lips, but after a pause he lowered it. “What’s that sound like? I forget.” Ned strained his memory. It’d been a while since he’d heard it himself. “I think it goes da-da-da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, dum-dum-da-dee.” “Begging your pardon, sir, but that’s the dismissal song,” said Frank. “Call to attention has more pep. Da-dee-da-dee, dum-dum-dee-dum, dee-dee, I believe.” “I thought it was more like dee-dee-dee-dee, dum-dum-dee-, dee-dee-doh,” said Gabel. “You’re both wrong,” countered Regina. “It’s dum-dum-dee-dee, dum-dum-dee-dum.” “That’s the orcish wedding march,” said Gabel. “Call to attention has more ooomphh.” “What’s ooomphh?” asked Frank. “It’s half the pep,” said Gabel, “and about three-quarters more pizzazz.” “There’s no pizzazz in the call to attention,” said Regina, “and if you ask me, he’s already overdoing the pep.” The insulted bugler balked. “My pep is always dead-on, I’ll have you know. My pizzazz is nearly perfect. I’ll grant you my ooomphh isn’t always on target, but I’d say a touch more shebang and a healthy dose of zing is what’s required here. I could throw in a little wawawa as well. That never hurts.” “There’s no place for wawawa in legitimate military music,” said Regina. “Yes,” agreed Gabel. “Just stick with the ooomphh.” “No shebang either?” said the bugler. “I guess you could put in a little shebang,” said Gabel, “but if I even hear one note of wawawa I’ll have you thrown in the brig.” Though small, the bugler’s slight chest was mostly lungs, and he unleashed a long blast of musical improvisation. The discordant tune filled the citadel. The orcs and goblins nodded along appreciatively, while everyone else covered their ears. The powerful sound floated all the way to the roc pens where the giant birds proceeded to tear at each other in panicked alarm. Caught up in the performance, the bugler kept on playing until Ned gave the order to stop, and Regina yanked away his instrument. The sweaty bugler gasped. “How was that?” “Too much zoop,” said Frank. “Not enough zing,” added Gabel. “No bop at all,” said Regina. The goblin snatched back his bugle. “Everybody’s a critic.

Some has been written about the reaction of our forces to the bombing of the “highway to death.” The criticism revolves around the lack of apparent remorse or guilt, and perhaps even bloodlust, at bombing the relatively easy targets. Everybody reacts to the stress of war and life and death decisions differently, and to narrow the image one would construct of an individual to his reaction immediately following the events of any battle is superficial and simplistic. Naval aviators are a strange mix of people—utterly homogeneous in certain respects, particularly to the casual observer, and radically different in their core and substance. Very few naval aviators show honest emotion easily; they’re not supposed to fracture the military bearing that has been instilled in them through years of training and detached experience under the stress of carrier aviation. Anger is the easiest emotion to display because it is the natural, instinctual outlet for stress and fear. But even expressions of anger might be as diverse in their reaction to a common event as physical violence or the mere raising of a voice. Most emotion comes out at the officers’ club, or on liberty in a foreign port, where the beer either softens or heightens aviators’ feelings to the edges of their flexibility, which often is not very far. Virtually all naval aviators are college graduates—some from state colleges, some from the Naval Academy, even a few Ivy Leaguers. This is their greatest obvious commonality—a college degree and mutual survival of the weeding-out process to get where they are in the navy. Many are religious, many are not, and the greatest of the values shared by the men is a trust in their comrades, a dedication to their country, and an absolute focus on their mission. It is exceedingly difficult most times for an outsider to register where a naval aviator is “coming from.” The uniform, the haircut, and the navy-speak contribute enormously to the building of a stereotype. So do the mannerisms of each individual; some express the control of emotion in reserved stoicism, others in an outburst of emotional release through inappropriate laughter or anger. Still others never express emotion at all. But the emotion is there, it has to be; despite years of training and desensitizing to hide the race of the heart and the sickening chill in the stomach, anyone who has landed on an aircraft carrier, never mind fought in a war, knows what fear and exhilarating intensity are.

One of the pilots asked what Doolittle would do if his plane were hit. “Each pilot must decide for himself what he will do and what he’ll tell his crew to do if that happens,” he answered. “I know what I’m going to do.” A silence hung over the men before the pilot asked the logical follow-up. “I don’t intend to be taken prisoner,” Doolittle replied. “I’m 45 years old and have lived a full life. If my plane is crippled beyond any possibility of fighting or escape, I’m going to have my crew bail out and then I’m going to dive my B-25 into the best military target I can find. You fellows are all younger and have a long life ahead of you. I don’t expect any of the rest of you to do what I intend to do.

Coleman also states: “A One World Government and one-unit monetary system, under permanent non-elected hereditary oligarchs who self-select from among their numbers in the form of a feudal system as it was in the Middle Ages. In this One World entity, population will be limited by restrictions on the number of children per family, diseases, wars, famines, until one billion people who are useful to the ruling class, in areas which will be strictly and clearly defined, remain as the total world population. There will be no middle class, only rulers and the servants. All laws will be uniform under a legal system of world courts practicing the same unified code of laws, backed up by a One World Government police force and a One World unified military to enforce laws in all former countries where no national boundaries shall exist. The system will be on the basis of a welfare state; those who are obedient and subservient to the One World Government will be rewarded with the means to live; those who are rebellious will simple be starved to death or be declared outlaws, thus a target for anyone who wishes to kill them.”[12]

We were sexual targets, marked as eternal sluts for exploring the desires only acceptable in men.

Tracked Vehicles "Each war proves anew to those who may have had their doubts, the primacy of the main battle tank. Between wars, the tank is always a target for cuts. But in wartime, everyone remembers why we need it, in its most advanced, upgraded versions and in militarily significant numbers." - IDF Brigadier General Yahuda Admon (retired) Since their first appearance in the latter part of World War I, tanks have increasingly dominated military thinking. Armies became progressively more mechanised during World War II, with many infantry being carried in armoured carriers by the end of the war. The armoured personnel carrier (APC) evolved into the infantry fighting vehicle (IFV), which is able to support the infantry as well as simply transport them. Modern IFVs have a similar level of battlefield mobility to the tanks, allowing tanks and infantry to operate together and provide mutual support. Abrams Mission Provide heavy armour superiority on the battlefield. Entered Army Service 1980 Description and Specifications The Abrams tank closes with and destroys enemy forces on the integrated battlefield using mobility, firepower, and shock effect. There are three variants in service: M1A1, M1A2 and M1A2 SEP. The 120mm main gun, combined with the powerful 1,500 HP turbine engine and special armour, make the Abrams tank particularly suitable for attacking or defending against large concentrations of heavy armour forces on a highly lethal battlefield. Features of the M1A1 modernisation program include increased armour protection; suspension improvements; and an improved nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) protection system that increases survivability in a contaminated environment. The M1A1D modification consists of an M1A1 with integrated computer and a far-target-designation capability. The M1A2 modernisation program includes a commander's independent thermal viewer, an improved commander's weapon station, position navigation equipment, a distributed data and power architecture, an embedded diagnostic system and improved fire control systems.

Surprise long-range helicopter assault operations against targets deep within enemy territory, supported by the ground attack aircraft, became a hallmark of EO operations, as did the use of pinpoint suppressive fire with mortars and follow-up pursuit of ambushes.

CIVILIAN OR MILITARY The governments of the world would like very much for you to make the distinction between civilian and military targets. This is interesting because they do not make that distinction when they wage their class warfare upon us. Is a family a military target when they are beaten and thrown in the street and their belongings are tossed in the gutter? There are no military targets. Likewise, there are no civilian targets. These are abstract ideas that are part of a nineteenth-century framework. We

there are no morals. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets. If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who kill our

Across the Reich, the Gestapo recorded increased the activity of anti-state elements. It’s kind of a helpless protest by those wretches against our celebration of victory. They organize bomb attacks against representatives of the Reich or against the civilian German population. We’ve also noticed murder-suicides. Eighty-seven civilians killed have been reported during the last week. From the Protectorate of Bohmen und Mahren, the destruction of Peter Brezovsky’s long-sought military cell was announced. From Ostmark…” “Enough,” Beck interrupted him, “I’m interested only in Brezovsky.” That name caused him discomfort. In his mind, he returned to the Bohemian Forest in 1996. It was in a different dimension, before he had used time travel. At the time, Peter Brezovsky was the only man who had passed through the Time Gate. He’d offered him a position by his side during the building of the Great German Reich. He’d refused. Too bad, he could have used a man like him. These dummies weren’t eager enough to fulfill his instructions. He also remembered Werner Dietrich, who had died in the slaughter during an inspection in the Protectorate. “… in the sector 144-5. It was a temporary base of the group. There were apparently targeted explosions of the surrounding buildings,” the man continued. “This area interests me. I want to know everything that’s happening there. Go on,” he ordered the man. He was flattered at the leader’s sudden interest. Raising his head proudly, he stretched his neck even more and continued, “For your entertainment, Herr Führer, our two settlers, living in this area from 1960, on June the twenty first, met two suspect men dressed in leather like savages. The event, of course, was reported to the local department of the Gestapo. It’s funny because during the questioning of one of Brezovsky’s men we learnt an interesting story related to these men.” He relaxed a little. The atmosphere in the room was less strained, too. He smiled slightly, feeling self-importance. “In 1942, a certain woman from the Bohemian Forest made a whacky prophecy. Wait a minute.” He reached into the jacket and pulled out a little notebook. “I wrote it down, it’ll certainly amuse you. Those Slavic dogs don’t know what to do, and so they take refuge in similar nonsense.” He opened the notebook and began to read, “Government of darkness will come. After half a century of the Devil’s reign, on midsummer’s day, on the spot where he came from, two men will appear in flashes. These two warriors will end the dominance of the despot and will return natural order to the world.” During the reading, men began to smile and now some of them were even laughing aloud. “Stop it, idiots!” screamed Beck furiously. In anger, he sprang from behind his desk and severely hit the closest man’s laughing face. A deathly hush filled the room. Nobody understood what had happened. What could make the Führer so angry? This was the first time he had hit somebody in public. Beck wasn’t as angry as it might look. He was scared to death. This he had been afraid of since he had passed through the Time Gate. Since that moment, he knew this time would come one day. That someone would use the Time Gate and destroy everything he’d built. That couldn’t happen! Never! “Do you have these men?” he asked threateningly. Reich Gestapo Commander regretted he’d spoken about it. He wished he’d bitten his tongue. This innocent episode had caused the Führer’s unexpected reaction. His mouth went dry. Beck looked terrifying. “Herr Führer,” he spoke quietly, “unfortunately…” “Aloud!” yelled Beck. “Unfortunately we don’t, Herr Führer. But they probably died during the action of the Gestapo against Brezovsky. His body, as well as the newcomers, wasn’t found. The explosion probably blew them up,” he said quickly. “The explosion probably blew them up,” Beck parodied him viciously, “and that was enough for you, right?

US intelligence officials believe that the Chinese military has mapped out infrastructure control networks so that if the two nations ever went to war, the Chinese could hit American targets such as electrical grids or gas pipelines without having to launch a missile or send a fleet of bombers.

What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? (p8)

This assault wasn’t on mere buildings. It was an attack on our entire nation by targeting its chain of command, its military capability, its economy, and its civilian population. It obviously resulted from the highest levels of coordination and—however evil—professionalism. It was the sort of atrocity we always feared and always prepared for. Our forces couldn’t be everywhere, but they could be anywhere. And not only that, they were already there. Close enough to sit next to you on a plane. But you’d never know. Danger-close.

Some analysts have renamed the welfare state, which obtained basically from about 1945 until in the 1970s, the garrison state. State legitimacy now depends on protection from these threats by targeting of dangerous others. I’ll say more about this in two weeks, but just to repeat what I indicated last week, the idea that the globalized form of capitalism means that decisions about the economic security and welfare of citizens are no longer within the hands necessarily of nation-state governors. To preserve their legitimacy as governors, they need to find a new basis for legitimation. Some people are arguing, and I would agree with much of this, that this is the new basis. The protection from dangerous others. We have endless enemies. Foreign communism morphed into terrorism. We now have a tremendous fear of immigrants and refugees. Witness the recent ban orders, the deportations, the detentions, the demonization of others. We have domestic enemies, people of color, the young, the old, LGBTQ communities, the differently abled, and along with that the militarization of the police and the criminalization of protest, which we’ll talk about in the last couple of weeks. Where is all of this headed? The Pentagon has a very bleak view of the future (see “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity: A Pentagon Video”), which views urban areas (both foreign and domestic) as basically breeding grounds for instability, unrest, and chaos. To think about the kind of underlying view of humanity this way I think comes naturally in some sense out of this very long history of militarization. That is, if you think of yourself as military, then everybody outside is an enemy. This is also what becomes part of the problem of militarizing the police. As the police become increasingly militaristic, the people that they supposedly protect and serve begin to look more and more like the non-police, like the enemy. This is, I think, an extremely dangerous kind of trend that we’re seeing. The forecast that this is the way in which the military will sort of reproduce itself by now being able to respond to these kinds of future threats where the mass of humanity is either an enemy or is in a witting or unwitting cloak for enemies. It’s extremely dangerous. One we should think very carefully about, but this is the Pentagon’s view largely of what that future looks like, and it is, in fact, urban, militarized, and dangerous.

The first Superfortress reached Tokyo just after midnight, dropping flares to mark the target area. Then came the onslaught. Hundreds of planes—massive winged mechanical beasts roaring over Tokyo, flying so low that the entire city pulsed with the booming of their engines. The US military’s worries about the city’s air defenses proved groundless: the Japanese were completely unprepared for an attacking force coming in at five thousand feet. The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reached them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their backs only to discover—when they stopped to rest—that their babies were on fire. People jumped into the canals off the Sumida River, only to drown when the tide came in or when hundreds of others jumped on top of them. People tried to hang on to steel bridges until the metal grew too hot to the touch, and then they fell to their deaths. After the war, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” As many as 100,000 people died that night. The aircrews who flew that mission came back shaken. [According to historian] Conrad Crane: “They’re about five thousand feet, they are pretty low... They are low enough that the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft...They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas, because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft. (...) The historian Conrad Crane told me: I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation, one of the senior Japanese historians there stood up and said, “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.” That kind of took me aback. And then he explained: “We would have surrendered eventually anyway, but the impact of the massive firebombing campaign and the atomic bombs was that we surrendered in August.” In other words, this Japanese historian believed: no firebombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese don’t surrender. And if they don’t surrender, the Soviets invade, and then the Americans invade, and Japan gets carved up, just as Germany and the Korean peninsula eventually were. Crane added, The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter. Because what happens is that by surrendering in August, that givesMacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feedJapan...I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s great successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.He is referring to General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers in the Pacific. He was the one who accepted theJapanese emperor’s surrender.Curtis LeMay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible. In 1964, the Japanese government awarded LeMay the highest award their country could give a foreigner, the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force. “Bygones are bygones,” the premier of Japan said at the time.

prices. A vigorous effort to collect taxes, to requisition for military garrisons, to relieve urban shortages, or any number of other measures might, given the crudeness of state intelligence, actually provoke a political crisis. Even when it did not jeopardize state security, the Babel of measurement produced gross inefficiencies and a pattern of either undershooting or overshooting fiscal targets.50 No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement.

Arab and Jew attacked civilian and military targets. The worst violence occurred in the Holy City, Jerusalem. On a stormy winter night, the Haganah bombed the Semiramis Hotel, the Arabs’ headquarters, in the neighborhood of Katamon. The Haganah had received word that Abdul Khader himself was there that night. A young Arab woman named Hala al-Sakakini, daughter of Khalil al-Sakakini—one of the Palestinians’ leading intellectuals—recorded:

Viewed from St. Louis, the history of capitalism in the United States seems to have as much to do with eviction and extraction as with exploitation and production. History in St. Louis unfolded at the juncture of racism and real estate, of the violent management of the population and the speculative valuation of property. The first to be forced out were Native Americans, who were pushed west and killed off by settlers and the US military. But in St. Louis the practices of removal and containment that developed out of the history of empire in the West were generalized into mechanisms for the dispossession and management of Black people within the city limits. And because removal is fundamentally about controlling the future, about determining what sorts of people will be allowed to live in what sorts of places, it is always concerned with the control of gender, sexuality, and reproduction; often women and children are singled out for particular sanction and targeted violence.

a marked change occurred between 2019 and 2020. The dual crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests ran slam into the twin dangers of Q-Anon and the consolidation of the Trump paramilitary. In 2019, there were sixty-five incidents of domestic terrorism or attempted violence, but in the run-up to the election in 2020, that number nearly doubled, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Twenty-one plots were disrupted by law enforcement.5 Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps. ISIS radicals who abandon their homes and immigrate to the Syria-Iraq border “caliphate” almost exclusively self-radicalize by watching terrorist videos. The Trump insurgents are radicalizing in the exact same way. Hundreds of tactical training videos easily accessible on social media show how to shoot, patrol, and fight like special forces soldiers. These video interviews and lessons explaining how to assemble body armor or make IEDs and extolling the virtues of being part of the armed resistance supporting Donald Trump fill Facebook and Instagram feeds. Some even call themselves the “Boojahideen,” an English take on the Arabic “mujahideen,” or holy warrior. U.S. insurgents in the making often watch YouTube and Facebook videos of tactical military operations, gear reviews, and shooting how-tos. They then go out to buy rifles, magazines, ammunition, combat helmets, and camouflage clothing and seek out other “patriots” to prepare for armed action. This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.

So many things had to happen for these men to arrive at their deaths. Start with the invention of the internal combustion engine. Follow with the development of Europe and the Americas and the rest of the world creating a ravenous appetite for oil, which created oil rigs and refineries and massive wealth for desert princes. Then global supply chains, trade agreements, secure shipping routes, and the law of the sea. Negotiated arms sales, too. Add in the vast edifice of Western science. Computing and radio technology. The space race and the microchip. Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex. And other, subtler developments. American-pioneered methods of high-value targeting. The post-9/11 explosion of private military contractors. It took all of the massively complex, interconnected modern world to bring these men their deaths. It was a shame they were incapable of appreciating it.

Because living cells are programmable like computers, they could eventually be engineered to make just about anything. Potential uses include manufacturing plastics, creating plants that can detect chemical munitions by changing color, and even designing bioweapons that target individuals on the basis of their DNA.12 Here, too, Chinese military leaders have made innovation a top priority, calling biotech the new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense.

The target was destroyed. But the CIA had misread its maps. The building was not Milosevic's military depot. It was the Chinese embassy.

So why do so few of us have a plan for unexpected violence? For some reason, we see training for self-defense as a Herculean effort reserved for the physically elite, so we dismiss it. That means there are just two main groups who study and prepare for violence. One group is the predators (we’ll talk more about them later). The other group is the professional protectors, like the police and military. Many people are content to bank on those protectors to be there in times of need. But pinning all your hopes on the possibility that one of those professionals will be on the very spot at the very moment you’re in danger is a lot like throwing out your fire extinguisher in the hopes that a fire truck will be turning the corner onto your block the very moment the flames touch the drapes. I don’t want to live like that, and this book is for those who don’t want to live like that, either. Obviously, I hope violence never visits you. But we don’t always control whether we experience violence. That’s never entirely up to us, because violence is an equal opportunity offender. It cuts across all demographic lines—race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socioeconomic status. There is no amount of privilege or social standing that can make you immune to, or allow you to opt out of, violence when someone has identified you as their target. The choice you do have is whether you’re going to be ready for it. I believe that the wisest thing we can do is ready ourselves for the kind of moment we hope never happens. The solution to fear is

Counterintuitively for an American and Western mentality, the Russian doctrine envisions infliction of civilian casualties as a way of de-escalating conflict. Russian military planners believe they can compel an adversary to sit down at the negotiating table by targeting civilians and concluding a cease-fire on terms favorable to Russia, because the Westerners cannot stand seeing imagery of human suffering on CNN.

The collapse of the Roman population in many areas obviously contributed to economic and military weakness. Nothing of that kind has happened today, at least not yet. Taking a longer view, perhaps, the scourge of new “plagues” will compound the challenges of technological devolution in the new millennium. The unprecedented bulge in human population in the twentieth century creates a tempting target for rapidly mutating microparasites. Fears about the Ebola virus, or something like it, invading metropolitan populations may be well founded. But

As you know, here in the city of Los Angeles, we train our beautiful animals to hold a suspect in place by barking. Heaven help us she bites some shitbird unless he’s trying to kill you, coz our spaghetti-spined, unworthy city council is only too willing to pay liability blackmail to any shyster lawyer who oozes out a shitbirds ass….” “Your military patrol dog, however, is taught to hit her target like a run-away truck, and will take his un-American ass down like a bat out of hell on steroids. You put your military dog on a shitbird, she’ll rip him a new asshole, and eat his liver when it slides out. Dogs like our Maggie here are trained to mean business.

In the slum countries of the world today, what are they saying? The rich Americans, they pay attention only to violence- and to money. You don’t care what they say, American? Good for you. Still, they may insist; things are no longer under the old control; you’re not getting it straight, American: your country- it would seem- may well become the target of a world hatred the like of which the easy-going Americans have never dreamed. Neutralists and Pacifists and Unilateralists and that confusing variety of Leftists around the world- all those tens of millions of people, of course they are misguided, absolutely controlled by small conspiratorial groups of trouble-makers, under direct orders from Moscow and Peking. Diabolically omnipotent, it is /they/ who create all this messy unrest. It is /they/ who what given the tens of millions the absurd idea that they shouldn’t want to remain, or to become, the seat of American nuclear bases- those gay little outposts of American civilization. So now they don’t want U-2’s on their territory; so now they want to contract out of the American military machine; they want to be neutral among the crazy big antagonists. And they don’t want their own societies to be militarized. But take heart, American: you won’t have time to get really bored with your friends abroad: they won’t be your friends much longer. You don’t need /them/; it will all go away; don’t let them confuse you.

In your entire military career, there was only one failure. One target in your sights that you and Ryan couldn’t eliminate.” “Sure,” I agree. “Bishop. We came close, but the son of a bitch was good.” “Yeah, sure is.” Something in his tone – and word choice – makes me look twice. I blanch. “You?” Derek snorts. “You seriously didn’t know? Jesus, how do you call yourself a genius?

Around the same time Abdul Khader’s men were mourning their leader, another assault was being planned on a nearby Arab village. About 150 men of the rightist dissident militia groups, the Irgun and Stern Gang, joined together on the morning of April 9 to attack the last Arab village not yet under Jewish control. The men began the assault with high hopes; it was the first time they had ever participated in a formal military operation. Their target was an important one, for if the village of Deir Yassin were taken, the heights above the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem Highway would firmly be in Jewish hands, securing the Holy City.

I wondered how the Trump campaign had drawn the line between negative campaigning and voter suppression. Usually, there was a clear difference, but in the digital age it was hard to track and trace what had been done. Governments no longer needed to send the police or military out into the streets to stop protests. They could instead change people’s minds simply by paying to target them on the very screens in their hands.

Apparently, while stationed in Afghanistan, he met a group of scientists working on a special project for a company in India. They’d posited that biogenetic weapons could be developed to target religious groups based on common ancestry. Vance brought it to his superiors; and six weeks later, he was stateside with a military pension and an honorable discharge.

Nuclear colonialism began in New Mexico, where the nuclear weapons complex began. If Spanish colonialism brought Spanish colonizers, and U.S. colonialism brought American colonizers, then nuclear colonialism brought nuclear colonizers—scientists, military personnel, atomic bomb testing, and nuclear waste among them. This book exposes nuclear colonialism as both the third major settler colonial period in New Mexico and as an “ism,” that is, a “form of doctrine, theory, or practice having, or claiming to have, a distinctive character or relation.”4 Rhetorician Danielle Endres defines nuclear colonialism as “a system of domination through which governments and corporations disproportionately target and devastate indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process” (Endres 2009, 39). I would add to this definition what Patrick Wolfe (1999) says about settler colonialism: “the colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event” (2). In their essay “Rethinking Settler Colonialism,” Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita (2014) define colonization as a “state-sponsored settlement” and follow Wolfe’s rationale that settler colonialism is a form of colonialism in which “the colonists displace or eliminate the natives wholesale” (1041). Nuclear colonialism and settler colonialism share many of the same characteristics, but there is one major distinction: nuclear colonialism is a neocolonial framework that targets not only Indigenous people but also other ethnic minority groups in poor economic situations that have become disenfranchised because of state occupation of their homelands.5

In many ways, these two great polities – Aztec and Inca – were ideal targets for conquest. Both were organized around easily identifiable capitals, inhabited by easily identifiable kings who could be captured or killed, and surrounded by peoples who were either long accustomed to obeying orders or, if they had any inclination to shrug off power from the centre, were likely to do so precisely by joining forces with would-be conquistadors. If an empire is based largely on military force, it is relatively easy for a superior force of the same kind to seize control of its territory, since if one takes control of that centre – as Cortés did by laying siege to Tenochtitlan in 1521, or Pizarro by seizing Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 – everything else falls readily into place. There might be stubborn resistance (the siege of Tenochtitlan took over a year of gruelling house-to-house fighting) but, once it was over, the conquerors could take over many of the mechanisms of rule that already existed and start conveying orders to subjects schooled in obedience.

Russia targets Chechen refugee camps. Russian troops stand alert and ready to go on the offensive. Dozens of them are building a new base at the gates of the Slipsovsk refugee camp. It is just a small part of Russia's military crackdown along the border and right across Chechnya after last week's seizing of a Moscow theatre by armed Chechens and the subsequent deaths of more than 100 of their hostages during a rescue mission. Inside the camp, the thousands of refugees whose homes have been destroyed by years of conflict are apprehensive. They expect the Russians to enter their tent city soon, carrying out mass arrests - detaining sons and husbands suspected of supporting the Moscow hostagetakers, and their demands for an independent Chechnya. In one tent, I found Suleiman Azanaurov and his family waiting for the inevitable Russian revenge. Suleiman has been in the camp for the past three years. His house, and the cafe he used to run in the Chechen capital, Grozny, were blown up during the Russian assault on the city. Aid handouts Now, home is a tent shared with his wife and six children aged between eight months and 17 years old. It is a squalid existence, reliant on handouts of aid and charity. Suleiman is angry. He dismisses accusations that the Chechens who went to Moscow are terrorists - as far as he's concerned, they were heroes. He tells me they were fighting for Chechnya's independence, drawing attention to a cause the world prefers to ignore. Suleiman says he has no doubts that they did the right thing, even though more than 100 of their hostages died during an operation to rescue them: «These people had no other option. They carried out this extreme act because we can't stand this war anymore.

Sun had hit $1 billion in sales within four years. McNealy did it by smartly targeting a customer base that had money to spend—corporate R&D departments, the U.S. military, and the National Laboratories, a less glamorous but much more affluent set of customers than the universities Steve went after. Sun next went after Wall Street, which was just beginning to discover the power of using computers to identify quick trading opportunities. These customers didn’t much care what the computers looked like, as long as they had big screens and could handle multiple computing threads simultaneously. Sun succeeded by identifying the market’s real need, by delivering just that product, and by keeping its machines reasonably affordable. NeXT failed at all of that. In fact, NeXT didn’t actually sell its first computer until almost a year after that splashy debut in Davies Hall—four full years after Steve had started the company.

Gagarin’s death was shameful not just because of the loss of a national hero in muddled circumstances, but because of the dangerous flaws revealed in the Soviet military technology of his time. Obviously their radar systems were not capable of simultaneous mapping of aircraft heights and positions, nor of positively identifying one target from another. The implications of this were highly alarming.

The U.S. military is no more capable of operating without the Internet than Amazon.com would be. Logistics, command and control, fleet positioning, everything down to targeting, all rely on software and other Internet-related technologies. And all of it is just as insecure as your home computer, because it is all based on the same flawed underlying technologies and uses the same insecure software and hardware.

We see reports of our devastated, impoverished brethren being bombarded by a modern, superior military. We watch in horror as young and old alike die for simply being present. We see Israeli politicians hold demonstrations chanting "There are no innocents in Gaza!" I don't know if I can explain how it feels to know that the person holding the gun to your head sees you as a worthless animal. I don't know if I can explain how it feels to see Israel drop a bomb and massacre an entire family, all while saying it was targeting a terrorist that no one in the neighborhood has ever heard of...or that any one of us would have traded places with the four children who were there. This is who we are. I've tried to explain it. It might sound tragic, but don't feel bad for us. We have a connection to each other you might not ever understand. We smile and laugh more than you think. And somehow, we still fall asleep with a heart full of warmth, justice, and hope. When we wake up, that hole in our heart is back again. But just like you, we live another day.

War is not a football game, nor is it merely an expanded version of a fistfight on the school playground. Because Fourth Generation war involves not only many different players, but many different kinds of players, fighting for many different kinds of goals (anything from money to political power to religious martyrdom), it is more complex than war between state militaries. Attempts to simplify that complexity by ignoring various elements merely set us up for failure. The worst possible simplification is reducing the problem to putting firepower on targets.

Key requirements for SAM systems to be used in eastern Ukraine include autonomy and stealth. The former means the ability to attack targets with a single operational combat vehicle; the latter means attacking targets without revealing the SAM system’s location through the use of radar. These

Mathematics is a suspicious activity. All those hypotenuse drawings must be plans for assassination attempts. Algebra is treacherous code. When did you ever meet a student of infinitesimal calculus who didn’t harbour rabid ambitions to rule the world? And anyone who tells you Archimedes was killed at the capture of Syracuse by a soldier who didn’t know who he was, is ignorant of how military forces work. There will have been a secret order: man making diagrams in the dust equals number one target.

Israel says it dropped leaflets to warn residents in high-risk areas to flee before an airstrike occurred. If you've never been to Gaza, you can easily find out what it's like. Go to a Wal-Mart on a Sunday afternoon when it's really packed. Then imagine they lock all the doors. Then imagine they only turn on the water and electricity for a few hours a day. A few of the members of this new Wal-Mart community might go crazy. You might not agree with the crazies, but you know why they're crazy. Then the same people who locked the doors tell you all to stop being so crazy. You organize demonstrations, chanting, "Unlock the doors!" They respond by attacking you all, to root out all the "crazies." And they're still not unlocking the doors. But lucky for you, they drop leaflets. "Attention Wal-Mart shoppers...We will be bombing the sporting goods department in 15 minutes. We hope no flying bikes hit you in the head." I never understood this leaflet-dropping nonsense. If you say you're targeting terrorists, and then drop leaflets to warn the non-terrorists, won't the terrorists see the leaflets too? Are the terrorists illiterate? Or maybe the leaflet asks the non-terrorists to tell the terrorists. Of course, none of Israel's actions are about getting the terrorists. In this military campaign, as with her other campaigns, her objective was to punish those whom she has imprisoned, precisely for speaking out against their imprisonment. She knows exactly what she can get away with.

Hitler’s electoral success—far greater than Mussolini’s—allowed him more autonomy in bargaining with the political insiders whose help he needed to reach office. Even more than in Italy, as German governmental mechanisms jammed after 1930, responsibility for finding a way out narrowed to a half-dozen men: President Hindenburg, his son Oskar and other intimate advisors, and the last two Weimar chancellors, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. At first they tried to keep the uncouth Austrian ex-corporal out. One must recall that in the 1930s cabinet ministers were still supposed to be gentlemen. Bringing raw fascists into government was a measure of their desperation. The Catholic aristocrat Franz von Papen tried as chancellor (July– November 1932) to govern without politicians, through a so-called Cabinet of Barons composed of technical experts and nonpolitical eminences. His gamble at holding national elections in July let the Nazis become the largest party. Von Papen then tried to bring Hitler in as vice chancellor, a position without authority, but the Nazi leader had enough strategic acumen and gambler’s courage to accept nothing but the top office. This path forced Hitler to spend the tense fall of 1932 in an agony of suspenseful waiting, trying to quiet his restless and office-hungry militants while he played for all or nothing. Hoping to deepen the crisis, the Nazis (like the Fascists before them) increased their violence, carefully choosing their targets. The apogee of Nazi street violence in Germany came after June 16, 1932, when Chancellor von Papen lifted the ban on SA uniforms that Brüning had imposed in April. During several sickening weeks, 103 people were killed and hundreds were wounded. Von Papen’s expedient of new elections on November 6 diminished the Nazi vote somewhat (the communists gained again), but did nothing to extract Germany from constitutional deadlock. President Hindenburg replaced him as chancellor on December 2 with a senior army officer regarded as more technocratic than reactionary, General Kurt von Schleicher. During his brief weeks in power (December 1932–January 1933), Schleicher prepared an active job-creation program and mended relations with organized labor. Hoping to obtain Nazi neutrality in parliament, he flirted with Gregor Strasser, head of the party administration and a leader of its anticapitalist current (Hitler never forgot and never forgave Strasser’s “betrayal”). At this point, Hitler was in serious difficulty. In the elections of November 6, his vote had dropped for the first time, costing him his most precious asset—momentum. The party treasury was nearly empty. Gregor Strasser was not the only senior Nazi who, exhausted by Hitler’s all ornothing strategy, was considering other options. The Nazi leader was rescued by Franz von Papen. Bitter at Schleicher for taking his place, von Papen secretly arranged a deal whereby Hitler would be chancellor and he, von Papen, deputy chancellor—a position from which von Papen expected to run things. The aged Hindenburg, convinced by his son and other intimate advisors that Schleicher was planning to depose him and install a military dictatorship, and convinced by von Papen that no other conservative option remained, appointed the Hitler–von Papen government on January 30, 1933. Hitler, concluded Alan Bullock, had been “hoist” into office by “a backstairs conspiracy.

Col. James N. Rowe, a United States Army officer who spent five years as a prisoner in Vietnam before escaping in 1968, was shot to death yesterday (April 21, 1989) by gunmen near Manila, where he was a military adviser to the Philippine armed forces. He was 51 years old. Colonel Rowe was being driven to work at the Joint United States Military Advisory Group headquarters in Quezon City, a suburb of Manila, shortly after 7 A.M. when at least two hooded gunmen in a stolen car fired more than 20 bullets into his vehicle. His driver, Joaquin Vinua, was wounded but was reported out of danger. Colonel Rowe was pronounced dead at a nearby military hospital. Communist Rebels Suspected No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but Philippine officials said they believed the killers were Communist rebels. The rebels have threatened to attack American targets unless the United States closes its military bases in the Philippines and ends its support of the Philippine military's fight against the insurgency.

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In an influential article published in 2013, the Russian general Valery Gerasimov argued that “in the twenty-first century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared.” The example of the 2011 Arab Spring suggested to Gerasimov that “nonmilitary” means of war could be far more threatening to state powers in the future than traditional military ones. All political regimes have points of acute vulnerability, he argued, of which they themselves may not be aware because they’ve never considered them in terms of war. Small acts of transgression can have major political effects, if the right tool and target are carefully selected.

In China recruitment operations against foreign nationals include diplomats and government officials as targets as well as academics, journalists, and businesspersons. The MSS recruits these people to conduct espionage against their home government, to influence events overseas on behalf of the PRC, or to provide business intelligence and restricted technology. The MSS and China’s Military Intelligence Department (MID) invite foreign scholars to lecture or attend conferences in the PRC under the guise of research associations or universities. All expenses for the visiting lecturer and his or her family frequently are paid for by the intelligence services. The visiting specialist is subjected to a demanding itinerary of lectures, meetings, travel, and social engagements. The purpose of this rigorous schedule is to wear down the prospective recruit’s physical and mental stamina. The visitor is encouraged to partake of alcohol as much as circumstances permit. The subject is then more approachable concerning personal and confidential matters. 2

The salespeople trumpet their system’s ability to minutely model and target consumers as if they were Taliban in the crosshairs of a military drone. And yet, the same service, when it must simply detect if a user is underage, will turn out to be unable to counter the deceptions of children.

Despite public anxiety about extremists inspired by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, the number of violent plots by such individuals has remained very low. Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years. In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012.

The military mentality is a bandit and raider mentality. Thus, all military represents a form of organized banditry where the conventional mores do not prevail. The military is a way of rationalizing murder, rape, looting, and other forms of theft which are always accepted as part of warfare. When denied an outside target, the military mentality always turns against its own civilian population, using identical rationalizations for bandit behavior. — BuSab Manual, Chapter Five: "The Warlord Syndrome

Rage and aggression are the staples of military life but to produce an effective killing machine you have to dehumanise it. You have to remove empathy, understanding, forgiveness. Otherwise an enemy pleading for his life might garner a moment's hesitation, which is long enough to get control of a weapon and kill an entire squad. ‘It's all very clever until the soldier is released back into society. The mind-set instilled is not a temporary state. It's an altered set of beliefs. But suddenly, where is the enemy? Where is the guidance? Where is the rest of the team united in one clear goal? ‘Society then tells soldiers that what they did was wrong. Violence is wrong, killing is wrong. ‘You can't just suddenly wipe a mind clear because you now want that person to exist in a “normal” society. The hatred doesn't go away. It just has no clear target.

Moreover, in light of OLPC’s mission to bring these ideas to children across the Global South, constructionism and OLPC could also be seen as imperialist, and Paraguay Educa’s faithful adherence to OLPC’s vision as problematic.34 After all, Paraguay Educa uncritically adopted a set of ideals largely developed at MIT, an elite institution in a country with a history of both military and cultural imperialism in the region: the United States. It moreover chose to invest in an untested technological intervention instead of food, vaccinations, working bathrooms, or any number of other kinds of much-needed aid. OLPC’s claim that a country could merely replace its textbook budget with a laptop budget and access online textbooks, for instance, assumed that the target country had a textbook budget to begin with and that schools in that country regularly used textbooks. In Paraguay, for one, this was not true.

Without solid information, a military is open to feints and surprises and is likely to miss opportunities. Intelligence aids in the production, use, and conservation of power.37 In short, the right intelligence can lead to better and more rational policy-making. In a world full of many possible threats, contingencies, and opportunities, sound intelligence can help policy-makers prioritize objectives and tasks. Once focused, policy-makers rely on accurate information and analysis to guide their decisions, as no policy-maker can ever hope to know offhand all that he or she must about a potential adversary or a geopolitical event. Good intelligence can also sometimes act as a brake on unchecked ideology. Although policy-makers largely retain decision-making power, well-reasoned analysis can minimize the degree to which decisions rely on hunches, biases, and predispositions. By accurately and fairly framing issues, intelligence can ensure that reason has a place in government. This is a role long prized by some famous analysts.38 But intelligence collection can be threatening to the state targeted by the operation. States must bear additional costs to keep their operations secret. If