Of course he is. Who sold him on the approach? Apparently, he has an advisor called Vladislav Surkov who is a science fiction writer. He recently wrote a short story (published under his nom de guerre) called “Without the Sky” about a many vs. many war. A type of warfare very familiar to readers of Brave New War.
“This was the first non-linear war. In primitive wars of the nineteenth, twentieth and other Middle Ages fought usually two sides. Two nations or two temporary union. Now faced four coalition. And is not that two on two. Or three against one. No. All against all. And what were the coalition! Not like before. Rare state included in them entirely. Sometimes, several provinces were on one side, some on the other, and any city or generation, or gender, or professional community of the same state – the third. Then they could change its position. Go to whatever site. “
In other words a swirling “bazaar of violence.” The author and TV producer Peter Pomerantsev also sees a connection between this approach an a corporatist view of the world. A world where “corporate raiding” can now be accomplished by states and the raids can be violent. I see that too.
In the 21st Century, warfare isn't politics by other means.
Warfare is business by other means.
PS: I wrote some interesting scenarios depicting economic warfare against Russia as a means of defeating it bloodlessly back in 2004.
Much is made of the implications of the arms trade and the spread of weapons, notably manufactured by the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. This has become a fact of life and is accepted as such.
Curiously it is less evident whose weapons are used in the final killing of individuals in combat — especially the weapons used “illegally” by insurgents. The following is a brief exploration of the possibility of identifying who supplied the bullet which finally entered the body of the person maimed or killed.
Does the person so wounded — or the relatives of those killed — have the right to know who produced the bullet? Is this a fundamental human right or a matter of human responsibility?
Whereas not many years ago it would have been considered ridiculous to sell fruit individually identified by marks enabling their precise origin to be determined — even to the person who packed them — such labelling is now commonplace. The argument is that in the event of a threat to health associated with the product, whether fruit or other consumer products, responsibility can be precisely established. Such labelling may be a requirement governing import of foreign products.
If precise labelling can be justified for sources of life-giving human nourishment, because of their potential threat to health, is there not a case for denitrifying those products intended as a means of incapacitating individuals, possibly terminally? Do relatives have a right to the bullet by which a loved one was killed?
More generally is it appropriate to be able to indicate, with as much details as possible, who was responsible for the manufacture of the bullet? Should the bullets used in insurgency operations be a matter of public knowledge?
Supporters of the A-10 “Warthog” close air support aircraft in Washington and US combat Soldiers and Marines who have seen, and are seeing, combat in Afghanistan were stunned Monday to read about a decision of the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Buck McKeon (R-CA). He is joining with the Air Force and wants to retire all of these extraordinarily effective combat aircraft, sending them all to the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force base, starting as soon as next year.
Ever since Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF) Mark Welsh decided to get rid of all of 300-plus A-10s in the active and reserve Air Force and the Air National Guard, the media and congressional hearings have been stuffed with information from combat veterans, pilots and defense specialists about how spectacularly the A-10 has been performing in Afghanistan and all other recent US wars in Libya, Iraq and Kosovo–going as far back as Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
McKeon's A-10 sell-out comes in the form of a ruse. His draft legislation, to be moved Wednesday (May 7) at the mark-up of the House Armed Services Committee of its FY 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), creates a distinction without a difference with CSAF Welsh's retirement plan. McKeon's own description of his handiwork says he “would limit funds . to retire A-10 aircraft unless each such retired aircraft is maintained in type-1000 storage [which]. means storage of a retired aircraft in a near-flyaway condition that allows for the aircraft to be recalled into use by the Regular or Reserve Components of the Department of the Air Force.” Falling for the ruse either foolishly or knowingly, some media describe the language as “something of a compromise” or emphasize the “near fly-away” condition of the A-10 fleet after it is sent to the boneyard at Davis-Monthan. However, a simple check of what “type-1000 storage” means reveals that the aircraft will be made un-flyable and sealed in two layers of latex, which can be removed and the aircraft made operable only after considerable effort.
A very interesting interview over at InfoWars, which can be heard in part in the video below, with a former CIA gun runner, William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, which confirmed that before the Benghazi attack which killed four Americans, including Ambassador John Stevens, the Ambassador had expresed concern over the illegal arms reaching Islamic radicals.Plumlee talks about the lack of information provided to the mother of one of an information officer killed that fateful day:
“I began to wonder ‘why won’t they tell her anything?’” He asked. “Then a contact of mine in the Middle East, a high-ranking NATO official, mentioned to me that he had reports that the ambassador [J. Christopher Stevens] had been complaining about the dispatches and cables that he had got from the State Department about the weapons being received and [Islamic] radicals armed, including Stinger missiles.”
According to Plumlee, Steven was ordered to stand down after he asked the State Dept. what he should do about the American arm shipments to al-Qaeda.
“The ambassador and his people had written a series of field reports and cable dispatches advising our State Department that the rebel factions had been armed with U.S. weapons,” he said. “Now my contention is this: if that is the case, why is that classified as a national security matter?”
Was Stevens and the other three Americans killed because of what they knew and expressed concern about? Is that why the White House deliberately had officials providing false information to the public over the attack directly following it, which the latest Benghazi bombshell recently revealed?Is this also why the military was told to stand down and were not allowed to go in to save Ambassador Stevens and the others?
KBR and Halliburton – two major U.S. military contractors – can be sued for the health impacts of trash incineration on U.S. soldiers who served in the war in Iraq, according to a new court decision that allows a series of 57 lawsuits against the companies to go forward.
This piece first appeared at TomDispatch. Read Tom Engelhardt’s introduction here.
After an argument about a leave denied, Specialist Ivan Lopez pulled out a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun and began a shooting spree at Fort Hood, America’s biggest stateside base, that left three soldiers dead and 16 wounded. When he did so, he also pulled America’s fading wars out of the closet. This time, a Fort Hood mass killing, the second in four and a half years, was committed by a man who was neither a religious nor a political “extremist.” He seems to have been merely one of America’s injured and troubled veterans who now number in the hundreds of thousands.
Some 2.6 million men and women have been dispatched, often repeatedly, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and according to a recent survey of veterans of those wars conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly one-third say that their mental health is worse than it was before they left, and nearly half say the same of their physical condition. Almost half say they give way to sudden outbursts of anger. Only 12% of the surveyed veterans claim they are now “better” mentally or physically than they were before they went to war.
The media coverage that followed Lopez’s rampage was, of course, 24/7 and there was much discussion of PTSD, the all-purpose (if little understood) label now used to explain just about anything unpleasant that happens to or is caused by current or former military men and women. Amid the barrage of coverage, however, something was missing: evidence that has been in plain sight for years of how the violence of America’s distant wars comes back to haunt the “homeland” as the troops return. In that context, Lopez’s killings, while on a scale not often matched, are one more marker on a bloody trail of death that leads from Iraq and Afghanistan into the American heartland, to bases and backyards nationwide. It’s a story with a body count that should not be ignored.
War Comes Home
During the last 12 years, many veterans who had grown “worse” while at war could be found on and around bases here at home, waiting to be deployed again, and sometimes doing serious damage to themselves and others. The organization Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) has campaigned for years for a soldier’s “right to heal” between deployments. Next month it will release its own report on a common practice at Fort Hood of sending damaged and heavily medicated soldiers back to combat zones against both doctors’ orders and official base regulations. Such soldiers can’t be expected to survive in great shape.
Immediately after the Lopez rampage, President Obama spoke of those soldiers who have served multiple tours in the wars and “need to feel safe” on their home base. But what the president called “that sense of safety… broken once again” at Fort Hood has, in fact, already been shattered again and again on bases and in towns across post-9/11 America—ever since misused, misled, and mistreated soldiers began bringing war home with them.
Since 2002, soldiers and veterans have been committing murder individually and in groups, killing wives, girlfriends, children, fellow soldiers, friends, acquaintances, complete strangers, and—in appalling numbers—themselves. Most of these killings haven’t been on a mass scale, but they add up, even if no one is doing the math. To date, they have never been fully counted.
