Mixed in with the stories of chasing al Queida and Taliban irregulars, is interesting stuff on Special Forces training, and combat stress. The units drill like olympic atheletes, looking to make moves that’ll keep them alive into habit:

Haralson’s training — or, as [Dave] Grossman might describe it, his operant conditioning — helps explain why he had the presence of mind to instantly fling himself to the ground when his grenades were thrown back at him. Ordinary soldiers might freeze for a split second, and this could cost them their lives. Then Haralson, amid the violence, was able to calmly figure out, as though fine-tuning a tennis stroke, that he needed to hold a live grenade in his hand for a couple of seconds before throwing it, and then do just that.

The article goes into the questions about this sort of training, and how do the Reily’s of the world adjust to civilian life. And the Special Forces soldier, who has to switch roles from diplomat to hellhound in a instant, probably has an advantage over a regular infantryperson who has gone through the sort of ‘operant conditioning’ Dave Grossman talks about in On Killing.

“True, some have had their choice of words for me,” she said. “But when they realize that where they travel next depends on the opinion of a woman, not only does that put them in their place, it scares the bejesus out of them.”

Okay, it’s not empowerment by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s probably not going to enlighten the Wahabis; but somedays you have to revel in the irony.

The government of Israel had a legitimate reason to send troops into the camp, it was a base for attacks on their citizens, and they had every right to go there and apprehend or kill the bombers. However, the report documents the troops of the IDF behaving in a manner that’s an embarrassment to professional soldiers.

They used civilians as human shields, which is a violation of the laws of combat.

And they treated the civilians with contempt. I can appreciate the anger of those young men in the IDF, no doubt many of them had friends or family murdered by a suicide bomber, and they must have been full of rage and hurt. I would be as well. But a soldier has to get past rage and hurt to act as a professional in the best interests of the IDF and the people of Israel, mistreating civilians, even if it isn’t a crime, doesn’t win hearts and minds. If the IDF had treated those people with a little respect and decency, instead of going in with a bust heads ‘tude, they might had learned more about where the terrorists were located. But they spat on civilians, and marched them out ahead of their bomb sniffing dogs into areas which may have been mined or booby-trapped.

That’s a major difference between my country’s war on terror, and Israel’s: we went into Afghanistan as liberators, trying to eliminate a criminal regime, and we distinguished between Taliban, al Quida and civilian (were we successful? I don’t think so, but we had good intentions). It seems to me that the IDF went into Jenin with the preconception that everyone in that camp was the enemy. I don’t think that’s the right way to fight terrorism.

Please, note well, I’m not accusing the IDF of war crimes over who got shot by a sniper, or who was killed by a stray rocket or bomb. I don’t discount those deaths, but I also know that innocents die in warfare, and I’m not going to second guess the actions of a soldier who has to make a life or death choice. The laws of war allow for that, and the only court where those cases are adjudicated is the conscience.

The IDF better damn well do a better job of disciplining its troops, because while they may have found all the suicide bombers in Jenin, they left a few thousand willing volunteers for the next wave of ‘martyrs’ in the rubble.

“The Spanish Civil War was the place where the major powers all tested out their new weapons before World War II,” said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. “Well, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today is the Spanish Civil War for the 21st century. A big test is taking place of whether suicide terrorism can succeed as a strategy for liberation. It must be defeated, but that requires more than a military strategy.”

Chilling.

The US understands that if we use a nuke, we are going to get smacked, hard.

NMD is an attempt to allow us to unilateraly use a nuclear weapon, and duck the consequences.

Suppose our fearless leaders decide to drop a “crowd pleaser” on someone. Wouldn’t you suppose that Russia or China might decide that Dallas, Houston, LA, or (ghod forbid San Francisco) was forfeit? So you’d want a way to take the third party counterstrike. If you shoot down the response, then you can say: the only way to go is for you to back down and accept that the US can use nuclear weapons with impunity, or escalate and murder everyone on the planet.

Richard Muller, of Cal Berkeley’s Physics department, says that an attack on Iraq will happen because Iraq’s been working on an ‘gun style’ bomb, like the one the US used on Hiroshima, and that Saddam will use it. The advantage of such a bomb is that it’s simple and doesn’t require sophisticated testing. You slap the two sub-critical masses together and foom.

Unfortunately, Muller loses me when he explains that the reason Saddam would use an fission bomb is because he’s evil. That argument works when you’re a comicbook superhero, but for the rest of us mere mortals, it’s lazy thinking. I know perfectly well that Saddam is willing to lie and kill to acheive his aims. But explaining that by saying he’s evil and leaving it at that doesn’t help.

Remember, we (as in the US) are killing and lying (you might prefer the term dissembling) to achieve our policy goals. But we’re not evil (the last time I checked), and we have a compelling story about why we’re doing what we’re doing: to protect ourselves, to disrupt terrorist activity, to put a government in Afghanistan that isn’t the bitch of Bin Laden’s people.

If you’re telling the story of why we’re good and they are bad: I need something more sophsticated than Harry Potter.

US Servicewomen, as part of the hired help keeping King Fuad in power, have to wear head to toe veiling when going off-base. Oh, and they can’t drive. And they have to be accompanyied by men.

Try telling that to a woman who flys an A-10 Tank Killer.

And please don’t give me any of that cultural differences crap. Shoving your maid down the stairs is not cultural differences. It’s feudal arrogance.

The term du jour for future military operations is “asymmetric warfare”; ironically, it’s a concept as old as warfare itself. For centuries, even millennia, weaker opponents have sought to neutralize their enemy’s technological or numerical superiority by fighting in ways or on battlefields that nullify it. It is the human dimension of man’s oldest profession… .

For example, the name for the US Marine operation to aid victims of the 1991 typhoon which devastated Bangladesh was originally Operation Productive Effort, a name that General Colin Powell admitted he never liked and which neither he nor his staff could remember. “After a day of struggling with Productive Effort, I said to my staff, `We’ve just got to get a better name.’” When the following day’s newspaper reported that the Bangladeshis who saw the Marines coming in from the sea by helicopter and landing craft said, “Look! Look! Angels! From the sea!” the operation was rechristened Sea Angel.

The name of the current home defense operation is Noble Eagle. Thanks to Dale Cruse for the info.