Air Force plans to war game the Idaho public from 10,000 feet — a tasty reflection of American "soul"

09 April 2019

Unexamined momentum often takes us into Imbecile Land

You can probably treat that proposition as a worthy spiritual aphorism.

For example — who thought this was a good idea?

Last October, the Idaho Press reported that:

Amid concern from some residents, the U.S. Air Force is preparing to move forward with its plan to conduct as many as 160 urban war games a year in nine towns and cities across southwestern Idaho.

Those war games, or “training events,” would include unarmed members of the military dressed as plainclothes civilians stationed in some of southwestern Idaho’s urban locations, such as downtown Boise.

Military personnel on the ground would communicate with U.S. Air Force planes overhead, and the two groups would work together to find targets, which aircraft would identify with “low-power, eye-safe lasers,” according to a document released by the U.S. Air Force.

Troops would train both during the day and during the night . . . .

The current proposal includes 160 training days a year.

A third of the planes used in the training would belong to the Republic of Singapore, according to the environmental assessment.

Apparently that October report was not enough — to get the "Air Head" brass to listen to themselves

So, now the moral and societal questionability of using one's own citizens (and their cities) for:

simulated target practice

for more than a third of each year

as well as

letting a foreign country do the same thing

. . . has gone to court.

Tommy Simmons continues:

The complaint filed Monday lists potential hazards of the training and says the Air Force didn’t do enough to inform the public or local cities about its plans.

The complaint alleges the Air Force began “conducting project training operations over the urban centers” before the review process was complete, indicating that it had made up its mind beforehand, attorneys wrote in the complaint.

One Boise resident wrote those who oppose the project are a “very small, very vocal group of naysayers in Boise who have nothing better to do than solicit others to oppose anything to do with fighter jets, Gowen Field, or military ops in general.”

“They rely on misinformation, outright lies, and propaganda to spread their venom,” the resident wrote.

“The vast majority of Boise and the Treasure Valley supports this training op.”

"No doubt, Mr/Ms Boise point-misser"

We Americans seem to think that we exist solely to support our military's attempt to take over the country and the world.

This current perspective is opposite to General and President George Washington's concept of the citizen soldier. Someone who was supposed to stay home and arm up only, when attacked.

Of this reversal of American precedent

Retired colonel and current professor, Andrew Bacevich, pointed out that:

[W]hile senior military officers will never overtly disobey their president — heaven forbid! – they have evolved a repertoire of tricks over the decades to frustrate any president’s intentions.

On the eve of his retirement from office in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower went on national television to tell the American people how it’s done.

Credit the present generation of generals with having gone one further.

Remarkably enough, they have inverted Clausewitz. No longer does discernible political purpose serve as a necessary precondition for perpetuating a war.

If generals (and militarized civilians) don’t want a war to end, that suffices as a rationale for its continuation. The boss will comply.

The commander-in-chief isn’t really in command.

No one — outside the behemoth US military and the plutocrats it serves — is in charge

That is my point about the war game plight of Boise and its sister cities.

Evidently, it is okay for the United States' top-ranking militarists:

who have (we should take into account)

— not been able to win a war

— even cobble marginally sensible geopolitical strategies

to use American cities and their infrastructures

in pursuit of training

that these (historically demonstrated incompetents) claim is necessary

so as to

continue their arguably vacuously murderous rampages around the planet.

A sense of proportion, factual objectivity and the ability to reason — are long gone from American shores

Were they ever here at all.

Osama bin Laden's ghost must be laughing itself silly

His small band of plotters managed to set create a psychological trip wire that set American strength against itself.

Osama's tiny gang pinpointed the United States' three most obvious characteristics and boomeranged each into us. We now are seeing what happens, when massive American muscle is greedily and brainlessly led and controlled.

The moral? — Does the US "really" stand for more than swaggeringly senseless destruction and purpose-lacking violence?

This question is why, I imagine, the Idaho court-goers are upset with Mountain Home and its masters.

Who is serving whom?

For what purpose?

And do we (really) all need to be dragged down this militaristically nihilistic US course?

If more Americans were to ask themselves those questions, we might bootstrap our way out of the gesticulating societal inanity that we create and inhabit on a daily basis.

I am not optimistic. I think that bin Laden too successfully took our measure.

Fate now watches the United States topple slowly, under the weight of the mental and moral deficiencies that he noticed and spiraled back upon us.

It is an ignominious end that crafts itself from unexamined habits and patterns.

But isn't that, for the most part, how History works?

I (again) comfort my silly small self with the concept of Geologic Time.

PeteFree.com

Air Force plans to war game the Idaho public from 10,000 feet — a tasty reflection of American "soul"