Thursday, June 4, 2015

National Or Merely Upper Looting Class Paranoia? And It Seems To Be Infectious.

  (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Since 1918, Winston Churchill was obsessed with "destroying" Germans. One sick dude.

See also A Very Perfect Instrument and the WWI policies specifically avowed by Churchill and his buddies, not to mention The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Any crime, to hold onto an ill-gotten empire. Is this national or merely Aristocratic paranoia? And it seems to be infectious, seeing as how the US 0.1% has the same disease.

Chuck Spinney writes (reposted with permission):
The Cognitive Reality of Strategic Bombing
High Value Targets Exist in the Eye of the Beholder

Few people appreciate that the leadership liquidation strategy of the drone war is merely old wine in a new bottle. It is a logical extension of the strategic bombing doctrine developed in the 1930s and first executed in WWII. This doctrine posits that target analysts located far from the scene of action can identify the critical nodes in an adversary’s infrastructure which can then be taken out in a systematic program of precision attacks. This central premise of strategic thinking has remained unchanged from the identification of ball bearing factories in Germany during WWII to the Mr. Obama’s picking of individual terrorists to be killed by precision drone strikes in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) based on the analysis of the “signatures” emitted by these terrorists, as analyzed by the targeteers far removed from the scene of action. (This CIA report will give the reader access to some of the banal considerations the CIA purports to use — or says it should use — in the thought process that identifies the “high value targets” for liquidation in its targeted killing strategy.)

Yet, the central feature of every strategic bombing campaign is that the number of targets in the master target lists purporting to map these critical nodes always grows wildly once the bombing starts; a phenomenon that suggests the node may not have been so critical to begin with.* The target proliferation phenomenon has held true regardless of the level of precision in the bombardment. It can be seen in every so-called “strategic" bombing campaign to date, regardless of how the nodes have been defined: WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf War I, Kosovo, and Gulf War II, and the GWOT(where the critical nodes have been reduced to specific individuals).

Attached herewith is a reminder of how this mentality can mutate into the blind butchery of carpet bombing, as happened in the case of the RAF’s night bombing of Germany in WWII**
 
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* One possible theoretical exception might have been the Single Integrated Operational Plan (or SIOP) which laid out the target base and weapons lay down for nuclear strikes on Soviet Union during the Cold War. By the mid-70s, we had far more nuclear warheads than targets and there was no hope of growing the SIOP target list to the point that it was large enough to absorb all the weapons — consequently there was a lot of unnecessary double and triple targeting of even unimportant targets to use up the available nucs. 
Fortunately, this possible exception to the target proliferation rule was never tested.

** The RAF night bombing campaign is certainly one of the three candidates for being the most imprecise, most pointless, and most murderous strategic bombing campaigns ever attempted. The other contenders being the USAAF fire and atomic bombing of Japanese cities and its fire bombing of North Korea’s cities).


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This all reminds me of the 3rd American Revolution.


Including some damn Queen or set of aristocrats reeking of death, whether wielding Divine Right or merely stolen economic might. They can't precisely bomb all of us.

At least not without bombing themselves too. The ultimate drone strategy is to bomb everything outside gated communities. And maybe some of those too.

"You're willing to [bomb] allies?" *

"It's the highest ROI!"

* Even ourselves.


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