Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 21:10:26 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: F1.17 (was Re: C2 Trusted FreeBSD?) Message-ID: <13340.876888626@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 15 Oct 1997 10:59:00 %2B0930." <199710150129.KAA00726@word.smith.net.au>
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> I vote to kill it. It would appear that moving it to chat and being > flippant hasn't much helped people understand. I expect that the > average American male doesn't have much hope of recognising what most > of the rest of the world finds so funny about the "major" military > powers and their armed forces. Ooh, wonderful, yet another one of those gross oversimplications we've come to expect from the rest of the world, firmly locked into its comfortable and somewhat smug assumptions that all U.S. males have the same opinions and mindset regarding the use and disposition of military forces. :-) Suffice it to say that this is not true, and if the "average american male" seems to spend what may seem to be an inordinate amount of time thinking about military hardware, it's for many good reasons. We appear to have been involved in more conflicts during this century than just about anyone else, save perhaps the Israelis, and ask the average Israeli citizen just what he thinks of, say, the Galil assault rifle and you'll get back a far more detailed opinion about such things than the average american could ever give you - it's all a question of perspective and exposure and military issues are also a bit more on our minds than most and with small wonder, considering the number of yankees who've left their corpses dotting various foreign battlefields over the last 4 generations. We also spend more of our money (whether the average citizen likes it or not) on military hardware than just about anyone these days, save perhaps India, since the Soviet Union collapsed. That also tends alter one's perspective, and it's no secret that our entire economy was seriously altered by WW-II, when we managed to transform ourselves into a war material producing machine the likes of which had never been seen before. You think all those folks just went away again afterwards, content to go into other lines of work just because the war was over? :-) Also, to be fair, I think that some of the more innovative thinking about modern military dispositions has *not* come from Australia, despite what appear to be closely held (prideful? patriotic? ;-) beliefs on your part to the contrary, and if any paradigms are going to shift here it'll probably be a result of America trying to figure out how to play global cop* for a few more decades without spending quite as much on it as we are now. I don't think it's going to come about because some middle east dictator somehow manages to realize that all this hindbound thinking has left a fatal opening in our military strategy for him to exploit and gives us all a rude awakening. I think you overestimate the amount of innovation on tomorrow's battlefield, and it's no surprise that many of the tactics we're using today were invented several thousand years ago in China. Some things just don't change all that much, including the folks like yourself who come by every 10 years or so and claim to have the answers for what modern warfare will look like! :-) Jordan * And no cracks about America having a lot of chutzpah to even think it can play global cop. Like real cops, most people hate them until they actually need one, then it's "Heeeeeelp! Get your ass over here and save me right now! Forget what I said before!" It's almost enough to make a guy totally cynical. :-)
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