The Nature of the Business, So Easy To Forget

From Franz-Stefan Gady, “The One Thing Geeky Defense Analysts Never Talk About,” The Diplomat:

The one thing defense analysts never talk about is violent death. While they are capable of superbly analyzing weapon systems, military doctrines, organizational structures and dissecting intricate details of what the future of war may look like, they rarely mention that the elephant in the livingroom of all their analyses is the violent killing of human beings.

The simple purpose of any military is to be an effective and expeditious killing machine—cloaked in the justifying mantle of national defense and as permitted by the “laws of war.” All the discussions about strategy, tactics, logistics, training, and procurement serve the single aim of killing  men— and collaterally, or even intentionally, women and children—when elicited by the rationale or whim of state sponsored aggression.

Perhaps defense analysts do not discuss violent killing because it is all too obvious. Also, perhaps they do not fully assess or comprehend the implications of their analyses and commentaries. Or perhaps they willingly embrace doublethink euphemisms in which killing is replaced by value neutral terms which sanitize slaughter and normalize the polite punditry of bellicose hellfire.

…

All of this is true. It is on my mind often.

2015-05-08T00:57:12+00:00May 8th, 2015|Gold|0 Comments
Read More

When Your Grandfather Fought on the Wrong Side

From Marcus Finster, Quora, “Should Germans today take a more sympathetic view of German soldiers who fought in WWII?“

I was born in 1976. I remember when I was growing up, I’d see many old women. Fewer old men. Many of the old men missed an arm or a leg.

I was lucky in the sense to have two grandfathers, both on my mother’s and my father’s side.

My mother’s father had been a Russian POW at the end and spent a few years in Siberia. He was barely able to walk when he was finally released in the 50s.

He’d remain frightened of the chance to starve to death until he died

He told some stories about the war. He’d show us pictures of him in his Wehrmacht uniform. When we were old enough to ask, he’d tell us about only doing his duty and keeping clear of “the others”. It took me a while to understand what the others were – the SS and the Einsatzgruppen.

(more…)

2015-03-25T04:18:53+00:00March 25th, 2015|Gold|0 Comments
Read More

So Long, Jon

Who is the twenty-first century’s Edward Murrow? Walter Cronkite?

It’s probably not Brian Williams. Nor Dan Rather. Nor Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw or Katie Couric, although they were and have been influential in their own right. The fact is that broadcast news has been mostly toothless (or plain wrong) for over a decade now, essentially a regurgitation of online headlines and government press conferences and g-rated YouTube clips. If you’ve wanted what broadcast news used to be—original, incisive, and fairly principled—you’ve had to look to the Daily Show and Jon Stewart.

And now he’s leaving. Let’s talk about that.

(more…)

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00February 11th, 2015|Culture|0 Comments
Read More

A Different Sort of Carpentry

A fine wooden desk sits in my room. It’s one of a number that my grandfather refinished. This was his hobby: hunting from one yard sale to the next; eyeing cast-off, beaten-up furniture and evaluating by a checklist only he could see; setting each new acquisition on his workshop operating table; and emerging months later with something reinforced, refinished, and utterly transformed. He was an artist. When I knew I was bound for DC, I drove the desk 400 miles north with me.

Same as I know the desk is something special, I also suspect it’s something I’ll never make. I’m not “handy;” I’ve met only a few people from my generation who are. “Handiness”—the ability look at a problem, rifle through a toolbox, and know immediately how to solve it—seems for a lot of us to be going the way of calligraphy, dedicated photography, or even the humble hometown newspaper. With stuff both cheaper and more complicated, buying another is easier than repairing the one you have.

But before mourning Millennials’ callous abandonment of skills once thought integral to the life of an industrious man or woman (carpentry! canning! sewing!), it’s worth considering what we’ve learned in their stead. This is an interesting exercise: often times, something doesn’t even seem like a “skill” until you meet someone who can’t do it.

(more…)

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00February 8th, 2015|Life, Tech|1 Comment
Read More

Partying with Shakespeare

Wayne Bailey passed away December 17, 2014.

“I have borne a charm’d life with you,” the Bard said. “Your counsel hath guided my every footstep; driven me to dare and gamble and seize the day; taught me temperance and delivered me wisdom where too often I had none. But why not tarry longer? Why go thither; why go now?“

The pair stood in the grand old Globe, the ground about the stage still littered after a particularly raucous show of “Much Adoe.” One man, the Bard, furrowed his brow in worry. The other, the traveler Wayne (once a barrister by trade, but always a teacher at heart) smiled serenely, one hand resting on the device that would whisk him away to parts unknown.

Over the years, Wayne had skipped in and out of the Bard’s life often, a friend and mentor who always seemed to emerge at the right place and time. It was Wayne who had first suggested, with a twinkle in his eye, that the Bard try his hand at plays. It was Wayne who had laid the Globe’s cornerstone into place. It was even Wayne who had stayed up long nights with the Bard, splitting tankards and rewriting and reciting the sonnets of Othello and Puck and Macbeth until they sang. And now he was leaving.

(more…)

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00December 17th, 2014|Life|0 Comments
Read More

The Price

Excerpted from The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer

On the evening of November 8, 2003, at around 7:40 p.m., a two-Humvee convoy pulled out through the front gate of the American base at the Rashid military camp in south Baghdad. The mission was to pick up a sergeant attending a meeting at the combat support hospital inside the Green Zone. In the rear left seat of the lead vehicle sat a twenty-two-year-old private named Kurt Frosheiser.

There was nothing obvious to set Private Frosheiser apart from the tens of thousands of other young enlisted men who served in Iraq. He was from Des Moines, Iowa. He had a twin brother, a married older sister, and divorced parents. He had been an indifferent student and a bit of a rebel through high school, and by age twenty-one he was a community college dropout, living with his sister’s family, delivering, pizza, and partying heavily. He had a brash, boyish smile, with his father’s full mouth and lidded eyes; he liked Lynyrd Skynrd and the Chicago Cubs; and one day in January 2003, he flew through the door with the news that he had just enlisted in the Army.

His father, Chris, wasn’t thrilled to hear it. There was a war on terror going on, and the strong possibility of a land war in Iraq. But he didn’t try to argue with his son. In February, Kurt dropped by his father’s apartment around two in the morning after a night out drinking and said, “I want to be part of something bigger than myself.”

(more…)

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00November 11th, 2014|Gold|0 Comments
Read More

A Truly Exceptional Nation

I’ve been struck, watching the steady stream of ISIS air strike footage released via U.S. Central Command these past few days, by the precision and global reach of the power on display. I’m sure this is exactly the message the U.S. military is trying to convey – but that doesn’t make it any less true. There really is no analogue to U.S. military capability in modern history. You have to wind the clock back – way back – to find an appropriate comparison.

What makes the current air campaign impressive or unique? Consider that the United States has now launched dozens of orchestrated, simultaneous attacks on ISIS hard targets across Syria, a region 6,754 miles away. It’s done so primarily via the USS George H.W. Bush carrier strike group, an armada of carriers, cruisers, and destroyers that no other military in the world can match.

We maintain eleven such formations. (more…)

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00September 29th, 2014|Defense|0 Comments
Read More

Thirteen Years Later, We’re Still Fighting the 9/11 War

I was twelve years old when those two planes flew into the Twin Towers and turned the country upside down. 2,996 people were dead. More attacks seemed imminent. Jon Stewart cried on television. The United States was ready to fight back – but how? And against whom? It was a strange, confusing, and frightening time to be an American.

This  was the world in which my generation began its political education. It was like a switch had flipped, with all the rules suddenly reset and reshuffled. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect, the adults had little more idea what was going on than we did.

We invaded Afghanistan; we toppled the Taliban. We established a Department of Homeland Security and developed a vast, new intelligence apparatus to fuel it. We overturned some laws and rewrote many more.  In a national paranoia, we glued our eyes to a color-coded terror warning system and – when enough people said it was the right thing to do – we invaded Iraq.

We declared war on a vast, transnational network of extreme jihadi organizations. We launched thousands of drones into the sky and hovered them over isolated hamlets, seeking to kill terror at its source. We passed death sentences on Pakistani villagers from 7,500 miles away.

We did it all – continue to do it – so we can feel safe again.

(more…)

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00September 11th, 2014|Defense|2 Comments
Read More
Go to Top