Kindle Notes & Highlights
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July 18, 2017 - March 8, 2018
seventh grade,” said one enlisted man. “If you do something stupid, your crew mates never let you forget it.”
“You don’t join the army to wipe your enemy’s ass. You join to kill, or for you yourself to be killed, and above all to have a good sense of humor about it.”
“It’s a matter of suppression. You do kinetic ops until you find that magical balance—an acceptable level of violence that allows you to shift resources to nation-rebuilding. Don’t overdo the killing of bad guys. Ending the violence completely is a foolish goal without development.”
“How do you take out a chemical-biological site of a rogue nation with surety, without inadvertently killing thousands of innocent civilians downwind? Well, the only certain way of avoiding collateral damage might be to obliterate the site in place.”
One flaw of journalism is that because it is so consumed by the present, it cannot see the future, whose challenges may be entirely different.
The B-2’s wings were longer than the distance covered by Orville Wright in his first flight at Kitty Hawk.
The two sides once held a meeting in Panmunjom that went on for eleven hours. Because there was no formal agreement when to take a restroom break, neither side budged. It became known as the “Battle of the Bladders.”
In such a world, the real threat to our national security may be our own lack of faith in ourselves, which, in turn, leads to an over-dependence on technology by our military establishment. How to kill at no risk to our troops is only in our eyes a sign of strength; in those of our enemy it is a sign of weakness, cowardice even.
