War

The US loves to complain about foreign hackers hacking US sites, but the Chinese claim that US hackers frequently attack its sites too.

"The sites were subject to about 144,000 hacking attacks each month last year, two thirds of which came from the U.S., according to China's defense ministry."

What an incredible waste of resources on both sides.

Boeing pushes proven super-Hornet as alternative to the unproven F-35 at half the price.

Here's a scary description of what our troops go through in Afghanistan.

"This year for Christmas I received a copy of The Outpost by ABC’s White House correspondent Jake Tapper, which was particularly daunting as it is nearly 700 meticulously researched pages in length. I was given the book by my daughter because it tells the tale, among many others, of a friend of hers from high school who went to Afghanistan with the Fourth Infantry Division and was killed there. My daughter had seen her friend on his last home leave and he had described the base in Nuristan province that he was posted to as a death trap where he and his comrades were attacked every day with little ability to defend themselves. He predicted that he would not be coming home again. He was twenty-one years old when he died."

That's a different perspective than the one provided by government's media.

"Tapper explains in an epilogue that he set out to "better understand what our troops go through, why they go through it, and what their experience has been like in Afghanistan." He tells his tale dispassionately, inexorably demonstrating the human cost of a war that need not have been fought on a small stage where blunder after blunder killed quite ordinary Americans who under other circumstances, in another place and time, might have been our next door neighbors. The book describes in detail the devastating wounds that kill and maim a succession of soldiers posted to the indefensible Combat Outpost Keating, located inexcusably in a depression overlooked by mountains on three sides. He follows the wounded through their hospitalizations, writes about their grieving families, and chronicles the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and even suicides that afflict many of them when they try unsuccessfully to return to civilian life."

This sounds like a much needed book.

"The original rationale for the siting of the base in a valley was that it provided a presence in remote Nuristan province that could be supplied by a road. The road quickly becomes unusable as the tale unfolds but the soldiers remained in place, bleeding, dying and killing for no reason whatsoever."

That sounds like a snowglobe version of all foreign wars.

"American resolve gradually becomes a confused sequence of "kinetic" (combat) operations interspersed with COIN (counter-insurgency) interludes, none of which successfully take root in a remote region which was littered with the wrecks of Soviet combat vehicles. Some of the local tribesmen believed that the Americans were actually Russians left over from the 1980s and found it difficult to understand why they should not be driving out the new invaders. "

What an amazing example of Hayek's fatal conceit of central planners.

"The book is admittedly about the Americans involved in the war and most of the Afghans are snapshots, but the insurgents come across as tough, dedicated and tenacious fighters who quickly learn to adapt to the changing tactics used by the better trained and equipped U.S. Army. The fighters, willing to suffer heavy casualties to engage the foreign soldiers, consist mostly of highly motivated local villagers who are seeking to drive out the invaders to defend their homes and way of life, not ideologues who are trying to bring some particular type of governance to Afghanistan. Indeed, they clearly have difficulty in relating to Afghanistan at all.
The American soldiers fight doggedly in a situation in which they know they are sitting ducks with a high likelihood of a fatal outcome. They fight hard and die often, accepting it as part of their job. Their allies, the Afghan National Army, frequently choose to run rather than fight and often betray the Americans to the insurgents, highlighting the futility of the entire enterprise of nation building in a place where all loyalties are local, illiteracy is nearly universal, and corruption mixed with drug trafficking is the only business worth engaging in."

This contradicts government's narrative of the war.

Bradley Manning pleads guilty to 10 of 22 counts.

""I believe that if the general public ... had access to the information ... this could spark a domestic debate as to the role of the military and foreign policy in general," Manning said in court, according to the Reuters news service.
Pfc. Bradley Manning would plead guilty to sending hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, in violation of military regulations but not in violation of federal espionage laws."

That sounds heroic. More.

"Army Pfc. Bradley Manning pleaded guilty Thursday to 10 charges that he illegally acquired and transferred highly classified U.S. materials later published by WikiLeaks, saying he was motivated by a U.S foreign policy that “became obsessed with killing and capturing people rather than cooperating” with other governments."

Sounds accurate to me.

The CBS headline reads: Manning pleads guilty in WikiLeaks case. They don't even bother to differentiate because the government wants him destroyed. 

Thirty four killed and 70 wounded in Iraq. It's interesting how some people blame this violence on the US invasion and others blame it on the US withdrawal.