Tag: military industrial complex

I had hoped to speak to high-schoolers – I still do – but the six high schools nearest me either ignored my offer to speak or declined it.  “Do it for the kids,” they say when asking to raise your property taxes, but it’s beyond the pale to dissuade those very same kids from needlessly putting themselves in harm’s way?  Parents might have a different opinion, so here’s my speech:

Before we get into this, let’s discuss what most would label “a hypothetical.”  Tonight, I’m going to break into your home, point a gun at you, and rob you – all the while claiming that I’m not your enemy.  Your enemy, I’ll say, is elsewhere, and I don’t mean across the street but in a different country.  What will you do?  By a show of hands, will you fight back and protect those in your home by evicting me or even by killing me?  By a show of hands, who will thank me and travel to said country in search of the enemy, leaving those in your home vulnerable to me?  Anyone?  Nobody?  It sounds absurd, but for reasons that I’ll soon explain, you’ll understand that it’s more real than hypothetical.

Hello, I’m Casey Carlisle.  I’m a West Point graduate, and I spent five years in the Army, including 11 months in Afghanistan.  Some of you are thinking about serving your country, and most of you are asking yourselves, “Why am I listening to this guy?”  I’m glad that both of these groups are here, and I promise that my remarks will cause both groups to think differently about military service.

I was a high-school senior on September 11^th, 2001, sitting in class and stunned after hearing the principal announce that our country had just been attacked.  Why would someone want to do this to the greatest country on Earth?  I was also livid, and I wanted revenge.  I wanted to kill the people responsible for this atrocity, and my dilemma then was between enlisting in the military to exact revenge now or first spending years at a military academy before helping to rid the world of terrorists.  I chose the latter, so I didn’t deploy to Afghanistan until 2009.  My time there radically changed my views, which was uncomfortable, but, as with failure, discomfort breeds learning.

I learned that not only were we not keeping our fellow Americans safe or protecting their liberty, we were further impoverishing one of the poorest countries in the world.  I watched in disgust my alleged allies – the Afghan police – rob their neighbors while on patrol and in broad daylight via traffic stops.  Imagine getting pulled over, not for speeding, but because the cop hopes to rob you.  My enemy – the Taliban – didn’t do such things, which is why I ended up having more respect for them than for my mission or for those who were allegedly helping us accomplish it.  “Oh, but they’re horrible in other ways,” you might argue, and I’d agree; however, it’s much harder to kill an idea than it is to kill a person.  Killing someone who holds an idea that you find distasteful only helps that person’s loved ones accept that idea.  It turns out that killing someone for their ideas is a great way to spread those ideas.

Instead of dismissing me as an anti-American lunatic, consider the following.  In the year 2000, the Taliban controlled most of Afghanistan, and today, they control all of it.  This is just one of the reasons why I feel contempt for those who thank me for my alleged service.  Our ‘service’ was worse than worthless, and the people thanking me were forced to pay for it.  All of those who died there did so for nothing.  And the innocent Afghans who were displaced, injured, or killed during our attempt to bring democracy to a country that didn’t want it were far better off in 2000 than they are now.

To be clear, the desire to serve one’s country is noble, but we must first define “country.”  Serving one’s country is entirely different from serving one’s government.  They are not the same.  Serving one’s country is serving one’s family, friends, neighbors, and the land that they’ve made home.  Serving one’s country is serving one’s community.  Serving one’s government, however, is ultimately what everyone does when they enlist or when they take my path as an officer.  Who are these people in government that you’ll end up serving?  Are they your family, friends, or neighbors?  For the most part, they are not, yet, they are ultimately who will decide your fate while in uniform.  Whether they’re politicians or bureaucrats, they decide what serving one’s country entails, and, naturally, they’ll subordinate our country’s prosperity to their job security.  If given the opportunity, these people will not hesitate to send you to your death if it means scoring a measly political point against their ideological foes.  Serving one’s country in this context – reality – means serving these parasites.

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We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy.

Bombs also make people rich.

When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”

The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.

Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.

Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.

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Death from a thermobaric weapon is articulated by two events. The first is the release of the fuel aerosol. The second is the igniting of the aerosol. 

Within the immediate vicinity of the explosion, flesh is pulverized, blown to bits or melted as the temperature reaches up to 3000°C, about half as hot as the sun. The burning fuel can be inhaled, incinerating a person from the inside out. Lungs, ears, sinuses and intestines are particularly vulnerable, collapsing as the vacuum created by the combustion sucks the oxygen from the surrounding air. 

Those not incinerated in the initial kill zone will be hit by the shockwave, which moves with immense force and can cause internal injuries to the pulmonary, cardiovascular, auditory, gastrointestinal and central nervous systems. Victims may harbor fragments from the blast that are undetectable to medics using X-rays. A recent study in the International Review of the Red Cross notes that the injuries caused by the “enhanced explosions” of thermobaric explosions are “difficult to treat.” 

Because thermobarics produce clouds of fuel mixed with the atmosphere that can penetrate buildings and confined spaces, they are often used against bunkers, trenches, caves and armored vehicles. In villages and cities, the weapons can obliterate civilians hiding in basements and subway systems, as the enclosure transforms into an oven for those sheltered there. This new weapons group is diverse. It includes air-dropped ordnance (known as fuel-air and vacuum bombs), shoulder-launched rockets and even hand-held grenades.

For militaries, thermobarics are efficient and useful. Few other non-nuclear technologies of mass death can compare. For human rights lawyers who specialize in war crimes, thermobarics are an object of outrage and loathing.

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