He would be 69, if he had not been killed. It is one shame of my people. I am so sorry that it happened, so sorry that white people did that.
Yeah, it’s freakin’ Sherlock Holmes territory over here. Nobody can figure it out.
Interesting to think what would be happening right now if the old USSR still existed. Suddenly, for a period of several days – maybe longer – jet airplanes are useless over Europe. The overwhelming western advantage in airpower is suddenly neutralized. They could be in the south of France in a week. Would they go for it?
As it is I wonder what that crafty Putin might be planning.
One of the games I’ve played on Facebook is called Realm of Empires. It’s a quite involved game of village development and medieval combat. You start out with just one village and a few troops; from there you can conquer huge sections of the world, make alliances and treaties with your neighbors, and try and crown yourself king. (Gee, why would I find this game interesting?)
Positives: it’s a lot of fun to build up your villages and get them nice and strong, so that you can bully the local neutrals into signing on with your empire. The graphics are quite pretty without being disruptive or distracting. The game has a quest system that introduces you to all the game features and gives you bonus gold for learning how the game works – which means you rarely encounter a player who’s just completely clueless about how the game is supposed to work. Setting up your attacks is challenging.
Negatives: the game lacks some verisimilitude; you can support a village with troops from another village, but the supporting troops can’t be “localized” – the city that built a troop is that troop’s city, forevermore. This makes organizing your empire at higher levels somewhat challenging. The map doesn’t show troops in motion, which would be cool and would really bring the game more to life.
Most of the things I find I don’t like are things where the game could be better and cooler, though, not things where the game is bad. For example, it would be great if you could have profitable, quiet trade with your peaceful neighbors. As things stand, there isn’t much incentive to be friends with people other than to avoid having to fight them; being friendly just means you leave each other alone as the game exists. I’d also like to see more high fantasy elements, like court wizards (good on defense, boost village productivity) or higher levels of palace. But these are quibbles.
The game itself is quite fun, it’s easy to play in just a few minutes a day, and it’s free to start. You can buy servants to get access to some management tools but this isn’t necessary until you’re quite into the game, and there are lots of free offers you can do to get more servants if you don’t want to shell out the $5 or so you might need in a month to play the game at the fullest level. Recommended to anyone wanting an enjoyable building/fighting game with a medieval theme.
Here’s a screenshot of the area around my main complex of villages:
and here’s a shot of my army list, of a village about to become part of the Kingdom of Bob.
The Romans were defeated by the Carthaginians at Cannae. Better luck next time, fellows.
It’s buried in the story – even the Times can feel shame – but the French are currently kicking our asses in the ass-kicking department.
That. Is. Not. Right.
…and Michael W. Chapman certainly does like to type “Dickey-Wicker“.
We are citizens of a republic. Because our republic is so massively wealthy and so enormous in size, we can afford to have a professional military that has achieved a level of skill and deadliness that is unprecedented in history. I don’t say that lightly; I’ve studied military issues all my life, grew up in a military family, missed going into the service myself through various physical defects. I grew up admiring the Roman legions, Alexander’s hoplites, the Zulu Impi, and all the rest. Military organizations are not the simple product of the weaponry and equipment and logistics that they can bring to bear. Those things help in achieving deadliness, and they certainly make a huge contribution to the success of any military. However, what really makes a military are the moral factors – comradeship, duty, loyalty, the feeling of being connected organically to the nation they are fighting for, etc.
Our military has achieved levels of those factors that are extremely high. That, coupled with training resources that would make Caesar weep with envy, creates a human military that is of unparalleled effectiveness. When you combine that with the fact that our technology, weaponry, and logistical capabilities are also unprecedentedly awesome, we wind up with, quite literally, the greatest military force in recorded human history.
That creates a problem. The general citizenry begins to think of itself as being truly distinct from the military class. We think of soldiers as “those brave men and women who protect us”. And of course they are – and may God bless every one of them, every day.
But at the same time, we are losing track of something that has to be a core value of a republic, if that republic is to survive over the long term. The citizens of the republic, ultimately, are the people responsible for its defense. We ably discharge our obligation to maintain and support our professional military, and obviously that military is going to be the front line in any conflict. Consider, though, what happened on 9/11. I am not the first person to notice that the professional military was not able to defend our country. (Not their fault, I hasten to add - just the nature of an open society.) The only effective military action launched on that day was launched by the citizen soldiers of Flight 93 – Americans who realized that they were now in combat, and acted accordingly.
That Flight 93 mentality is the mentality that all of us should be engaged in, all of the time. I don’t mean that we should be wearing fatigues and constantly scanning the horizon for Charlie. That would be counter-productive, as well as somewhat silly. I mean, though, that we all need to realize in our bones that we are soldiers. We are soldiers far behind the lines, and we are soldiers who have a great deal of material comfort and physical security, but we are soldiers nonetheless.
Republics are defended, in the final analysis, not by their military forces, but by the fact that in time of need, every single able-bodied citizen is a fighting man or woman. Al-Qaeda did not make 2,000,000 enemies on 9/11 – they made 300,000,000 enemies. Every one of us is a citizen soldier, part of the defense in depth of our country, our culture, and our civilization.
That means that when we go on a business trip overseas and get caught by our enemies, we comport ourselves like soldiers. We don’t give our enemies the propaganda victory they’re looking for; we spit in their faces and we die trying to kill them and get away.
That means that when we’re on an airline and three men suddenly stand up, pull knives, and start heading for the cabin door, we don’t wonder where the air marshal is or call 911 on our cell phones. We form up and we take them out.
That means that we don’t breed nuance in our hearts, we breed ferocity. We don’t look for excuses to hand over the job to someone else, we look for opportunities to defend our country.
We are all of us soldiers, and our enemies should learn the lesson the hard way, every time they make war on America, every time they capture an American, every time they encounter an American.
Weapon systems are, in the end, about one of two things:
1) Creating a capability for your side, or extending a capability that already exists;
or
2) Removing or degrading a capability that the other side has.
It is possible for a weapon system to fill multiple slots in this capabilities analysis; submarines, for example, create a capability of sudden surprise strikes, while also degrading the enemy’s capability to send surface shipping without military escort.
We can currently remove any dictator in the world by invading his country, marching to and encircling his capitol, and smashing his military to flinders - then it’s just a matter of finding the spider hole. However, this form of combat is very intensive in terms of logistical deployments, in terms of straining alliances and diplomatic relations with other countries, in terms of time expended, and in terms of human lives lost. If the only goal of the war in Iraq had been to capture or kill Saddam Hussein, we could have done that – but it would have cost a couple hundred American and who knows how many thousand Iraqi lives.
Bunker-busters create a powerful capability for US forces. They will permit us to remove enemy leadership – bypassing his conventional military – without having to engage in ground combat. They permit us to strike rapidly, without a costly and vulnerable military build-up. They permit us to strike unilaterally, without begging the permission of neighboring countries to use their territory for staging.
They also remove a powerful enemy capability, albeit not one that is purely military. Right now, tyrants like North Korean’s Kim Jong Il have the ability to hide behind their civilians. We could eliminate him in a week, after the necessary deployments; the cost would be horrific. Five or six South Korean or Japanese cities A-bombed during the lengthy buildup, thousands of American and South Korean soldiers killed in huge battles – it would not be pretty. It wouldn’t be pretty to drop a bunker-buster on him, either, but it would be a lot better for Seoul and Tokyo.
More important than the use of such a weapon is the credible threat of its use. Right now, Kim Jong Il knows that we cannot remove him without unacceptably high collateral casualties, and so his diplomatic position is accordingly intransigent. With buster-bunkers in our arsenal, however, and a President who has shown that he will not flinch from military action, Kim’s ability to bluster and stonewall are massively reduced.
In short, nuclear buster-bunker bombs add powerful capabilities to our arsenal, and greatly degrade the ability of our enemies to defy us. There is no reason not to avidly pursue their development.
An interesting post and comments thread at Commentary on Iran and the middle east.
The Iranian people do not want war with the west. I hope they can make their voice heard.
