The Sorcerer's Apprentice

[Daveparts still]

The Sorcerer's Apprentice
By David Glenn Cox


During the energetic days of the Bush administration when nothing seemed too extreme, when almost no plan was considered over the edge, “Prompt Global Strike” was viewed with a cocked eyebrow of suspicion. It is a plan not unlike the evil plans of those James Bond villains. It is, in reality, a Doctor Strangelove scenario of a push-button war.

Imagine for just a moment a soldier/technician siting at a console in some military bunker. Orders come across his computer screen; with confidence he punches the numbers into his computer and an intercontinental ballistic missile is launched from a desert base in the United States aimed at anywhere in the world. Tehran, perhaps Caracas, anywhere in the world where the United States presumes enemies to be hiding.

Rather than nuclear weapons the missiles will be armed with conventional weapons. Now imagine that you’re sitting at your air defense radar screen in Russia or China and see a volley of ICBMs headed your way. What would you do?

The concept is to give the United States the ability to strike anywhere in the world with an ICBM or hypersonic cruise missile in one hour. It depends on an incredibly flawed premise that other nuclear powers should just sit back and trust the United States. This after the United States attempts to ring Russia with an anti-missile system in Europe with the promise that our missiles are pointed at the country behind them. That country which doesn’t possess missiles that could reach the US, but might someday. Now add to this equation the US moving an anti-missile system into the Persian Gulf.

The guidance systems are to be based on the next generation GPS satellites and in theory have the ability to hit a single house on a street. In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote, "The US cannot take its current dominance for granted and needs to invest in the programs, platforms, and personnel that will ensure that dominance's persistence."

In a very short and sweet declaration, the Secretary of Defense defines the purpose of “Prompt Global Strike,” which is military dominance. Unlike terrorist groups trying to blow up schools or mosques or airliners, the US wants the same capability for themselves and calls it dominance in the name of self defense.

Forget for a minute that this program is incredibly provocative and holds the promise to start a new arms race if not a nuclear war. Can you imagine China and Russia developing a similar capability? If the US proposes to hold itself in a position to strike any country on Earth at will, how will we respond when other nations claim the same right? If the US should decide to strike Iran, what if China counters by striking Baghdad?

In the early days of intercontinental ballistic missiles, factions within the Pentagon argued that the Air Force and Navy were now obsolete. There was no longer a need for expensive aircraft or warships with ICBMs. Their argument was defeated by the obvious defect that once launched they couldn’t be recalled. Lighting the fuse of war unleashes forces of unknown explosive powers, or as momma used to say, “Act in haste, repent in leisure.”

One scenario is the White House orders a submarine at sea to launch a 65-ton Trident missile towards the target. Each missile costs the US a mere $60 million. As the missile re-enters the atmosphere its multiple warheads separate, and with the use of flaps are directed toward their individual targets. Traveling at 13,000 miles per hour the warheads blossom to release thousands of tungsten steel rods, each twelve times as deadly as a fifty-caliber bullet.

It seems the Pentagon lives in perpetual denial, forgetting the 60 missiles lobbed at Baghdad in an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein missed, killing instead several dozen innocent civilians. Or in the first Gulf War when fighter jets dropped laser-guided missiles on a presumed military bunker which turned out to be a civilian air raid shelter, killing hundreds of civilians. Then there's our more recent experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan where predator drones kill as many civilians as targets.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in 2006 that the launch of such a missile "could provoke an inappropriate response from one of the nuclear powers, could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces."

That was countered by the madness of Donald Rumsfeld stating, "Everyone in the world would know that was conventional," he said, "after it hit within 30 minutes." Could a grown man be such a dullard or so dimwitted as to not understand that nuclear war is an equation that you only get wrong once?

There is something very different about the “Prompt Global Strike” program. It is not a program for dominance on the battlefield, it is a program for state terrorism. Its purpose is to strike down leadership targets or alleged terrorist targets but it all really depends on which end of the missile you face. It is not a weapon designed to bring peace but to bring only death and assassination. It is strictly an offensive weapon system.

It is a weapons' system that requires a great deal of trust from the public that it will not be abused or misused. There is no method of oversight as the launch platforms will be far out at sea or in the desert. If then a mosque were to blow up in Iran or an oil refinery in Venezuela, we must just accept that as coincidence. But what will we say or do when it is we who are targeted? Will we remember that we broached this boundary first?

This scope of battle was debated first in the 1950s and '60s when wiser men were on saber points in a life and death struggle of the cold war. It was decided and agreed by both East and West that the risk of launching ICBMs, regardless of warhead type, was far too great a risk to take. The resulting treaty was abrogated by the Bush administration and it leads us to what appears to be a safer and more sanitary type of war. Yet since the end of WWII there have been dozens of nuclear near misses, faulty readings, unannounced missile launches and defective computer chips.

Is it worth the chance? We can only hope that Bush-era thinking will change.

[Hawkowl]

1. Cut the "defense" budget in HALF

The Pentagon has become the world's biggest threat since the Third Reich. We are living in a state of perpetual war a la Orwell's 1984.

[DemReadingDU]

4. Yes

and with that extra money, restart the FDR jobs programs to get unemployed people working again.

[Lost Jaguar]

2. "Madness! Madness!"

--the last line of dialog in "The Bridge On the River Kwai."

A military posture such as this can only come out of the minds of those who are cynical, or intellectually dishonest. One can not condemn terror while one is simultaneously poised to practice it; not without being guilty of hypocrisy as well as war crimes.

The common folk in this country who approve of such barbarity are victims of the atavistic tendency to subvert one's decency in favor of one's tribe. In other words, "It's moral if we do it to them, but immoral if they do it to us."

It reminds me of the torture issue. People approve of torture and the denial of habeus corpus, but they refuse to recognize that these things could happen to them.

There's an exchange of words in the great drama, "A Man for All Seasons," in which Sir Thomas More chastises his son-in-law, William Roper.

Roper: "So now you'd give the Devil the benefit of law?"
More: "Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?"
Roper: "Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!"
More: "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast; man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

[truedelphi]

3. I love that section of "A Man For All Seasons."

Thanks for bringing it into the discussion.

[jotsy]

5. Rabid boys with dangerous toys

I've contended since this farce of preemptive war crap started that you can not win a war on terror because war is terror. I spend some days trying to avoid thinking about what life for their children must be and wonder how long before my nation's actions would see our own kids living in the rubble and the shell shock. If ever there was such a time as the dawn of the age of reason, then there is likely a twilight, I had hoped mine wouldn't be the generation to witness it. I guess that's kind of selfish.

Kicked, as per usual.