Posted on 11/18/2017 3:07:30 PM PST by mandaladon
I am no advocate of appropriate measured response, that is why we are on our knees to terrorists. Nukes are forever - in as much as they can create a host of forever enemies....
Japanese seemed awful friendly last time I was there.
Won't get into the issues about fighting for your career if you refuse what you deem to be an illegal order......
Andy - I couldn’t agree with you more. As I said in the post, the process laid out by the General has been a standing order for many administrations, and has worked. My active duty ended after Korea where I came home an artillery battery commander. I was not the lynchpin in our battery. It was the first sergeant. He was a career soldier, I was in the reserves. Without him I would have been toast.
There are too many knee-jerk responses to serious questions today, not only on FR, but throughout all media and society when we are desperately in need of thoughtful discourse. No one looks behind the headline and seeks facts. Truth has become a victim to purposefully omitting salient points, the skewing of known facts, the interjection of opinions, etc.
IMO we are approaching a tipping point as an American culture and it is not because of the President, He is doing a remarkable job and has a program laid out that, if successful, can do all he says it will do. The problem lies with those who oppose him. Many of whom fit the description laid out in the previous paragraph.
Thank you for your good post.
I trust the “football” in President Trump’s hands far more than I would with any president since Reagan. He has already shown the world he heavily and effectively uses the advise of his military advisors, and he is surrounded by some of best there are.
Who publicly criticized Trump. Hyten didn't.
You confuse authority with lawfulness. An duly appointed officer senior to you in the chain of command has the authority to issue the order, and you have a duty to comply with such an order, unless it is unlawful, i.e. violates the law, the constitution, treaties, such as the Geneva treaty, or accepted international norms of the law of war [i.e. is the military action necessary, does it discriminate between innocent bystanders and combatants, is it proportionate to the exigency under consideration, does it use otherwise acceptable means?]
But if you comply with an unlawful order you can go to prison or be executed (think Nuremberg).
The See BS Reporter that wrote the Headline just made it up.
The Liberals commenting on the SEE BS Website where this originally Posted were having a field day with this, even though the actual article puts what the General said in context and never mentions POTUS Trump by name.
I guess those same Liberals need to be reminded that the only President to ever use Nuclear Weapons was Democrat Harry Truman and he killed over 200,000 Japanese Civilians doing so.
Itsa - Japan is friendly because we utterly destroyed large swaths of their island Nation. We occupied the Island and proceed to destroy much of the culture - not all, but a lot. It didn’t hurt that we also helped to rebuilt the place, but with our spin on it.
Islam is a non-State actor. Like trying to nail Jello to the wall.
As for the ‘on our knees’ - maybe under the last administration.
Is there a fix? Dunno.
I suppose you would support a Continent-wide round up of all Muslims - or suspected Muslims and have them shipped out someplace? Or just have them all shot?
Nukes are funny in some ways - they don’t discriminate - a nuke strike kills everyone - Muslin, Jew and Christian alike.
We bombed German cities into ruble without regard to civilian casualties and as I recall we won that war.
Peace happens when one of the factions can no longer continue.
the worst bombings in world history in terms of the number of deaths. Ironically, all five of the worst bombing campaigns were carried out by Allied Forces over cities having mostly civilian population. So much for democracy!
So was Hiroshima lawful? What about Dresden? Probably not under current thinking. Would it be lawful to wipe out the village a terrorist came from? Again, probably not, but our enemies practice war that way, and it may take those kind of tactics to defeat them eventually. Like what Sherman did in the south, destroying the home territory of the enemy to make them stop fighting. If it got to that, I wouldn’t want some 2nd Lt. thinking he can call the shots. I’m not saying commit genocide, or shoot prisoners, but there are things that in a fight to the death as part of a total war, like WW2 was, that have to be done to win.
I understand what you are saying, and the distincton between a lawful order and an authorized order. I just don’t think we should be so mindful of the need to have an order proved to a subordinate to be lawful to the point that you are contacting lawyers about it.
Look, you make valid points. Hiroshima lawful? Arguably. Dresden? Arguably not on the grounds of necessity, perhaps, but it was "proportional" in the sense of being a response to the firebombing of London or German attrocities against civilians.
But that is not the point. I think the point is that there are whole classes of conceivable uses of nuclear weapons that would be illegal under all scenarios. Perhaps enumerating examples would lead to that charge that those would be presposterous, e.g. nuking Paris during a cod war. But the problem is that the left has accused Trump of likely resorting to nuclear weapons in preposterous situations.
And NK is a neat balance between convincing the madman running that place that you are at the end of your teather and one wrong move will lead to the flattening of NK while convincing allies that you are reasonable and rational (which was presumably why Hyten was at the Halifax meeting) or China that this is there mess and you will only use weapons in extremis [but threatening Guam or Japan or Republican enclaves in California puts us in extremis and so get control of your former client state and tell him to step way way way back].
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