An old Flanders and Swann routine was premised on England needing a better national song. Eventually the two came up with “The English, the English, the English are best! I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest!” That’s pretty much my reaction to the outrage vented at Israel over the accidental bombing of the aid workers. It is the ultimate confirmation, if any were needed, that Israel is by far the most admirable and most morally upright nation on earth.
In recent years there's been a spate of articles and books about subterranean warfare, tunnel warfare, depicting it as an effective answer to Western, particularly American, military technique. Writers in venues as diverse as Popular Mechanics ("The Future of Warfare Lies Underground"), the Defense Technical Information Center ("Subterranean Warfare: a Counter to US Airpower"), and OpenDemocracy ("Tunnel Warfare: the Islamic State's Subterranean War") have united to present underground war as a near-insuperable obstacle to conventional air- and surface-based military operations. The terrific casualties subterranean fighters can inflict on troops attempting to root them out, together with their invulnerability to aerial weaponry and shelling, cancel — it is argued — all the advantages possessed by modern armies relying on fire and maneuver. The Gaza Strip, transformed over years of work into a labyrinthine integrated bunker complex, may serve as a test case for tunnel-war theorists. Certainly it has taken Israel as long to winkle Hamas out of its tunnels as it took US forces to exterminate the Japanese in their caves by "corkscrew and blowtorch" on Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On the other hand, the IDF's losses have been minuscule by comparison, and the fighting has produced only a small fraction of Okinawa's civilian casualties, despite Gaza's larger population.
I am finding Blinken and Biden's lectures very hard to take. The United States has tried to prosecute a series of wars from risk-averse distances of 15,000 feet and higher. Of course this resulted in quite a few "accidents." I remember a number of them during the Air War for Kosovo. And just four or so years ago (while not even prosecuting a hot war) the United States capped off the sacrifice of 13 US Marines and over a hundred Afghan civilians with an attempted revenge strike three days later on what turned out to be a family's home which killed nine civilians including seven children. I would like to see a Page One piece in an outlet like the WSJ listing the U.S.'s many civilian-killing bombing and drone misfires.
So you know Flanders and Swann! I met their work at the age of 15 in a housemaster's study in an English boarding school (boys only, of course) in North Yorkshire on a day when the ice was too thick on the fields to be forced to play Rugby. They are magnificent.
The song that still stays with me is "The Gas Man Cometh".
In recent years there's been a spate of articles and books about subterranean warfare, tunnel warfare, depicting it as an effective answer to Western, particularly American, military technique. Writers in venues as diverse as Popular Mechanics ("The Future of Warfare Lies Underground"), the Defense Technical Information Center ("Subterranean Warfare: a Counter to US Airpower"), and OpenDemocracy ("Tunnel Warfare: the Islamic State's Subterranean War") have united to present underground war as a near-insuperable obstacle to conventional air- and surface-based military operations. The terrific casualties subterranean fighters can inflict on troops attempting to root them out, together with their invulnerability to aerial weaponry and shelling, cancel — it is argued — all the advantages possessed by modern armies relying on fire and maneuver. The Gaza Strip, transformed over years of work into a labyrinthine integrated bunker complex, may serve as a test case for tunnel-war theorists. Certainly it has taken Israel as long to winkle Hamas out of its tunnels as it took US forces to exterminate the Japanese in their caves by "corkscrew and blowtorch" on Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On the other hand, the IDF's losses have been minuscule by comparison, and the fighting has produced only a small fraction of Okinawa's civilian casualties, despite Gaza's larger population.
I am finding Blinken and Biden's lectures very hard to take. The United States has tried to prosecute a series of wars from risk-averse distances of 15,000 feet and higher. Of course this resulted in quite a few "accidents." I remember a number of them during the Air War for Kosovo. And just four or so years ago (while not even prosecuting a hot war) the United States capped off the sacrifice of 13 US Marines and over a hundred Afghan civilians with an attempted revenge strike three days later on what turned out to be a family's home which killed nine civilians including seven children. I would like to see a Page One piece in an outlet like the WSJ listing the U.S.'s many civilian-killing bombing and drone misfires.
So you know Flanders and Swann! I met their work at the age of 15 in a housemaster's study in an English boarding school (boys only, of course) in North Yorkshire on a day when the ice was too thick on the fields to be forced to play Rugby. They are magnificent.
The song that still stays with me is "The Gas Man Cometh".