We Don't Need No Civil War (War Dance, One.)

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before

Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars

Did you wear a black armband
When they shot the man
Who said "peace could last forever"
And in my first memories
They shot Kennedy
I went numb when I learned to see
So I never fell for Vietnam
We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all
That you can't trust freedom
When it's not in your hands
When everybody's fightin'
For their promised land

I don't need your civil war
It feeds the rich while it buries the poor
Your power hungry sellin' soldiers
In a human grocery store
Ain't that fresh
I don't need your civil war
Ow, oh no, no, no, no, no

~Guns-n-Roses, Civil War.

When I got home from work this morning, I saw this.

"Civil War" trending, all the idiot Right-wingers saying all the usual idiotic shit.

I cannot stress this enough.

Nobody needs that shit.

Nobody with a brain in their head wants that shit, either.

No matter how tough you think you are.

No matter how tough you think the other side isn't.

I...note I say this as a United States Air Force Bomb- and Missile-Wing veteran...am here to tell you that the government's stick is unimaginably bigger than yours. More to the point the information technology directing the precision with which it's wielded and where it's aimed at literally means these people don't need an entire wing of B-52H Stratofortress bombers (nor the vast amount of destruction they'd inflict) to take out a high-value target now. Most likely, they just need one.

I live in Northern Michigan.

The yearly Northern Strike exercises are ongoing. 

By the way, said exercise is a lot bigger this year than it was last year. While I was trying to sleep, I heard at least one helicopter. Jets, and yes, Reaper drones have been flying over where I live at all day. In fact, via Google News I saw they've got BUFF's participating in our local exercise this year, although for the sake of realistic mission times they're still operating out of Barksdale or Minot.

Half the Troops I've talked to, or waited on at work...they look like young, fit computer nerds.

They're still keeping us pretty cleaned out of beer and tobacco, though. In that way, they're no damned different than they were in my time, and they laugh when I say that. The more certain things change...the more they stay the same.

The difference now is, you don't need a thousand macho dudes to get to one target. You just need one, that knows where they are and can sit at their control station long enough to fly the MQ-9 Reaper drone close enough to the target to launch the AGM-114 Hellfire missile filled with flying Ginsu knives at it, plus a few to maintain the drone and a few more to hang the missile on the wing.

Work smarter, not harder. Why is this so hard for people to understand??

It might not look as impressive, but it still gets the job done and the enemy on the ground is just as dead.

We actually had this figured out 30 years ago, too, but the state of the art at the time meant there were still a lot of high-value assets involved...and very often a tactical control party and whatever force protection it needed to make sure the laser-guided bomb dropped by that F-117 Nighthawk went through the right window...and then you needed a helicopter or two and more people to get that team out.

Nowadays it's GPS and satellites. 

The drone, the armament systems technicians and the maintainers are at some dusty FOB in fuck-knows-where several hundred klicks from the target. 

The pilot might well be sitting at their control station in an Air National Guard base in Battle Creek, MI or (if Active duty) at Davis Monthan AFB in AZ or Shaw AFB, SC. The tactical control party...if any, if you could even call it that...is sitting in an air-conditioned control room outside of Colorado Springs fine-tuning the satellite that's doing the actual work.

Oh, sure, there's some Army guys or Marines...or a HIMARS battery manned by either...on standby somewhere not too far away, just in case. As likely as not, their actual mission is to prevent drone wreckage from being captured, should the bird get shot down...which isn't that much easier for the enemy than shooting down an F-117 Nighthawk would have been.

And if you don't think war can still get nasty and personal with atrocity as the frequent result of this...well, the Russians would be happy to prove you wrong. They might not be as good at this shit as we are, or even as good at modern technological warfare as the Ukrainians are...but they fight nasty and they're adapting fast, too. 

They might be forcing medieval levels of nastiness on their own ground troops, but when it comes to ability to target shit at range...no, they're not as good...but they're a hell of a lot more willing to target undefended civilian targets like grain silos and shit, which then forces the Ukrainians to have to defend that. 

Through sheer spite, they achieve the same effect of either spreading Ukrainian defenses thinner or worse shit gets inflicted on the world as a whole.

The catch is, if the Russians quit, the war's over. If the Ukrainians quit, there'll eventually be no more Ukrainians. Russia's stated goal is genocide.

You see where this is going??

War isn't necessarily about destroying the enemy.

It's about pushing them over the edge and making them give up. I wrote about this once.

Why does that matter?

The Ukrainians know what's at stake, and kept fighting before they got all this support and all these fancy weapons and the training to use them.

The modern Right, all the Apocalyptic mystics, Preppers, RAHOWA-demanders, Religious Fanatics and Survivalists???

They tapped out and started stanning for the COVID-19 virus after like two weeks of no dine-in restaurants or live sports. They got bored, they couldn't stand being in close quarters with only each other. They decided they'd rather die of a deadly virus than sit at home.

How the fuck do you think these same people are going to fight a war??

Even against old guys like me and Gepe, the poster I quoted above...who I've engaged with extensively on matters of Black history over the years, and he knows his shit...they'd probably lose.

But at least, they'd probably see us coming.

The young tough troops I see at work every day, and the pilots slicing flying marvels of technology through the hot, heavy air overhead my house, or the dudes blowing shit up and driving Abrams and Bradleys around the Grayling ranges, or the sailors all haze gray and underway in the North Atlantic or wherever right now as part of the same operation?

Probably not so much. Yeah, think about that for a second.

These motherfuckers get they civil war, the net effect will probably be only that they end up dead, but still inflict PTSD on some kid that didn't deserve it. They might kill a few civilians, noncombatants and old veterans, too, but here's the thing, Republicans. 

If you think that makes you tough, you're worse people than I thought you were.

And who the fuck wants that??

Think on that, too.

You want a better country, be a better citizen. Fapping the sausage to the idea of shooting down your government and your fellow citizens ain't the way.

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Слава Україна!

We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon On The Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. ~General Omar Bradley

The original post for this series is here.