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Game Technology Helps Drive Military Training
longacre writes "With the gaming industry now spending more to develop user interfaces than the Pentagon, the Army has begun putting all that R&D to good use in weaponry and training. Reversing the traditional role of games attempting to simulate real life killing machines, it is now the weapons makers using gaming technology to make their products more effective. Popular Mechanics notes, 'Already, [Mark Bigham, director of business development for Raytheon Tactical Intelligence Systems] says that Raytheon has been experimenting with Wii controllers to explore the possibilities for training simulators and other applications that require physical movement. Just think, one day, the R&D that Nintendo put into Wii bowling could end up influencing basic training.'"
This isn't shocking in the least. The Army plays a glorified version of laser tag. Pilots use flight simulator software. Even in the low-budget Marine Corps, I fired on a virtual M16 course.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Does this mean there gonna build the BFG?
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
"We here are Accuracy International are dedicated to using state of the art virtual reality software to help us create and arm the next generation of AWP Whore."
The enemies of Democracy are
Just think, one day, the R&D that Nintendo put into Wii bowling could end up influencing basic training.
Are we suppose to be proud or excited by this? Arguably the military is one of the few things left in the US that works well. Get back to me when the government puts a decent size fraction of what they spend on the military into energy research, healthcare, education and career retraining. I'll be thrilled when Wii research ends up in a surgeon's hands than an Air Force cadet.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
Are they going to add the rocket-jump to the handbook? I heard strafe jump worked out pretty well in recent conflicts.
The secretary of defence has released the following press statement: WE PWN YOU NOOB NATIONS! ANYBODY WANT TO JOIN OUR EMP... CLAN?
on the tank game in Wii Play doesn't it?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Or something... that's what it's called. Essentially a glorified computer game. The first time I got to train on it was during my pre-mobilization training before I deployed to Iraq in 2005. The second time I got to train on it was a few months ago during weekend drill.
You basically have actual M-16's, M-4's, 240-B's, M-249's and 50 cals hooked up to the system. When you fire, the weapon shoots a laser to the screen in front of you. (It's a really big projector screen). You have different scenes (one was an oil-refinery scene of some kind, and the other was an urban setting) where you have to engage the enemy.
The graphics aren't all that great, but it's still pretty fun. I wanted to hook up Halo or GoW to that big-ass screen. That would have been pretty sweet.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
So sensor technology that was funded by expensive military research, which finally came down to prices to be used in consumer products, are now coming full circle to be used again for military purposes? Sounds like the interweb all over again.
You get what you pay for. In the US, money gets spent on fear.
The Intestate highway system was not sold to Congress as a vital transportation network, but rather as a defense system that could be used to truck around ICBMs to shoot at the ruskies.
The foundations of the Internet were all funded out of DARPA research as ways to communicate during wars, where communication links might be severed and need to be routed around.
Many medical advancements have originated from the efforts to stitch people back together during wars.
If you look at how much money the US spends on being ready to kill, compared to how much it spends being ready to compete, it's no surprise why there's all this technology spilling from the military. They're the only ones being funded because fear results in funding.
If we poured money into education, transportation, information technology, health, etc, we'd see significant paybacks from those investments too. But Americans only think they're getting their money's worth when fear is involved. They haven't quite figured out why Pentagon toilet seats costs $10,000.
I don't think Republicans are entirely to blame, they've just corned the market on fear and have become great at selling it to the "I'll pay you to scare me" American public. Democrats also enjoy the funding that comes with fear, making it a key issue both sides can agree on.
Obama's Apple, McCain's Microsoft: the Politics of Tech
One of the best examples of military grade games and their consumer equivalent is Virtual Battlefield Simulator (VBS) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBS2 and Operation Flashpoint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFP / Armed Assault http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArmA:_Armed_Assault. Both are really great games and are used for military and civilian (police, swat) training.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
"Arguably the military is one of the few things left in the US that works well."
Say what?
Trillions of dollars wasted, over a million innocent Iraqis dead, over 5 million refugees forced from their homes, thousands imprisoned and tortured without trial, a puppet regime that will fall the moment the US withdraws and more people hating the US than ever. You might even call it a "cakewalk." I wouldn't, but it sounds like we're not on the same page.
Then there's the thousands of dead US soldiers, tens of thousands injured, hundreds committing suicide each year, and nearly all of them receiving sub-standard care from a neglectful and under-funded VA system. Then there's the little-discussed fact that 1/3 of women in the US military are raped.
Imagine the ways in which we could improve the world, people's lives and reduce the widespread antipathy the US has engendered if only the military were shrunk and kept neatly within its *own* borders. As long as the US government wastes over half its budget on the military and wars there will never be enough money for education, jobs and health care. Those things will bring far more security than illegal wars for oil based on lies.
Forgive me if I don't rah-rah the latest technology that is going to "help" the military. Such technology is only going to "help" increase human misery the world over.
http://www.singinst.org/media/singularitysummit2007
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=207
That transcript for the talk doesn't including the question and answer session, so I'll transcribe it here:
The question is, can I talk about the inspiration for the user interface on the combat robot?
Yes, on the combat robot, we started out with engineers designing it, very expensive, joysticks with force reflecting, we put it out in the field, the kids out in the field, the 19 year old started doing *bang* *bang* *bang* pulse width modulation with their hands, umm, we changed it then to a game controller and now the 19 year olds in Iraq pick it up, zero training, know what to do.
Great.
[question about flat worms, etc]
[different question about humans merging with ai, losing emotions, etc]
[question about research funding]
The question is, I used to talk about insect level intelligence, what's my attitude to that.. well, I've got 3 million robots out in people's homes with insect level intelligence. It's a real commercial success. But it doesn't mean we should stick with just that. Some of the principles from that we've been using in these humanoid robots and I was trying to explore a different set of space, but really, I tend to think that, humans are just bit insects. [laughter] Ha ha, we're not as smart as we like to think we are. I still believe that, at its core.
The question, is about [soldiers] becoming emotionally attached to the robots and has that caused us to rethink at all. No, we haven't done that in the military space, but in the home space we've seen people getting attached.. there's a whole set of third party industry making clothes for roombas, there are skins for roombas that you can get, there's some web sites, so I think those, ya know, we'll have Facebook for robots [laughter] I mean, there really is part of this attachment that's an interesting phenomena going on there. Sherry Turpils looked at it with Furbies a lot. There's a lot of projection onto these devices which they don't really deserve from a rational point of view. But we're not rational beings.
The question is, there have been reports of packbots being equipped with machine guns and what do you do worrying about friendly fire. Actually, that's not true, none of the packbots have had a machinegun, the Talon from Foster Miller has had a weapon on it,
all with safety circuit and a human in the loop. I think it is an interesting question, when (if ever) do we want to allow robots to have independent targeting authority. I think now is the time to act. There's a bunch of ethics conferences coming up in the next year. I think its time to put this into the Geneva Conventions - some governments do go along with the Geneva Conventions - and [laughter] I think its time to think about that. Absolutely.
[Audience member asks a follow-up:] You said "some governments" follow the Geneva Conventions, but apparently not that you've done some work for. Is it a good idea for you to be developing AI and robotics for the US government? and, umm, in my mind, that could lead to some of the worst nightmare scenarios and I'm wondering how, ya know, what your thoughts are on mitigating against...
Yeah, I think that, in a sense is nothing to do with AI, that's been a question which has faced scientists in the past since the time of Da vinci, who was completely funded by military, doing military work for his patrons. So that's an issue that scientists have had to deal with for hundreds of years. Independently, of AI. And I think it is a big responsibility of scientists to worry about controls of how things are used and I think, actually, the Geneva Conventions have been a good way of
How we know is more important than what we know.
Once the QA and Qual guys are done with it, a mil-spec Wii remote will weigh at least 50lb, so it will be excellent exercise...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
'Just think, one day, the R&D that Nintendo put into Wii bowling could end up influencing basic training.'...
While I am no expert on this or any topic for that matter. I highly doubt that this situation is anywhere close to being in the realm of possibilities imagined when Nintendo created the Wii or for that matter when they brought out the NES(in all its Gyrobot glory).
But it works well as a business (throughout history to this point, and the near future)
No matter how much is wasted, or goes towards ineffective technology, they will revieve even more money the next year until something comes of it.
And a defeat of one side, is a victory for the other, even if the defeated spent more money on their military, the victorious side will spend more to assimilate their technology and strategies (see WW2), so as to not be outdone by a poorer country (see Vietnam). Even a war with no winners, or technically even battles, induces increased spending (see Cold War)
Wether a loss, or a victory, it promotes the continuation of funding.
That aside, ss much as I can appreciate the technology and strategies that come from war, I dont agree with it, in the same way I can appreciate the audacity, and intellect of some serial killers, but (may) not support their ideology.
uh... "they will revieve" = receive, but I like my new word regardless...lol
I'm not sure this is news at all, as this has been going on for years now. It would be the same as saying "Military now use computers!" Really now?
As a veteran soldier, I can honestly give a thumbs-up on this.
If the military finds that incorporating video game technology into weapons will make them more deadly, more reliable, and more accurate in the hands of today's service members, then the money is well spent. We can even use technologies and ideas from VG's to create less collateral damage in the process - precision warfare is crucial on today's battlefield.
Our guys with BOG (boots on ground) don't need this to be effective, but if it helps us complete the missions we have no choice to carry out, with more effectiveness and fewer casualties, then who can really argue that?
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
Exaggerate much?
He isn't exaggerating much, if at all. The budget numbers are always cooked, never more so than by this president. One of the biggest games played is to throw in entitlement programs like social security and medicare into the numbers when it is convenient and leave them out when it isn't. When you look at discretionary spending, it is MORE than 50%. From the article that you cited:
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
My stepson, an avid FPS gamer, joined the Army in 1999. They put him in an ultra-realistic tank simulator, and he destroyed everything that moved on the virtual battlefield. When he came out, they were all standing there staring at him...
He asked, "What are you looking at?"
They replied, almost in unison, "A tanker."
He ended up driving a tank to Baghdad with the elite 3rd Squadron of the 7th Cavalry, and fought in the only force-on-force tank battle of the war at Objective Montgomery (out near the airport).
I stand by my statement. He said the US government spends over half of its budget, not over half of its discretionary budget. Clearly that is not the case. In fact it's not even close.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Fine, if it makes you feel better. I guess he didn't have time to run it past the proof readers before posting. Most people could tell from the context of the discussion what he meant and it in no way diminishes his point.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
The Intestate highway system also used alot of the toll roads that where built be for hand and with out the Intestate highway system we likely see more toll built the same way as the free Intestates are built.
In the US, money gets spent on fear.
Your point is well taken and many more examples could be offered - e.g. NASA, space race with Soviets, etc. I think we agree that giving the military buckets of money and being satisfied with whatever technology filters out accidentally into the commercial arena ten years after the fact isn't the most productive use of our national treasure.
I am too much of cynic to become overly optimistic but it would be great if a certain candidate's message of hope (as opposed to fear) actually sunk into people. This country is always at its best when it dares to dream, not cower in fear.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
What about America's Army? The game has been out for a while, and has some great potential for training simulators. Integrate it into actual weapons, and it's even better :)
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
Yes! Mod up!!! You can make any unsubstantiated, unsupported claims IF its about how bad the USA sucks ass!!!
From the post above, it sounds like someone has been drinking the daily kos cool aide by the gallon. First, get things straight. The US military works well, very very very well. So well that the whole world has been leaning on the US for military support and protection for the past 60 years. This includes conflicts right there on European soil (Bosnia, reference Srebrenica), and trying to clean up the mess caused by European colonials in Africa, who just packed up shop and said "oh well, not our problem".
The US military destroyed the Iraqi army in less than a week. This is a fact. The botched occupation was not a military plan, but a civilian leadership fiasco. The Bush administration had some twisted day dream that the rest of the world would donate troops and supply to bring democracy to Iraq, and the Bush administration was dead wrong, hence the catastrophe in Iraq. Its not a lack of military power, but a lack of political resolve. I guess you fail to see that, but since I'm talking truths and your playing to anti US sentiment, you'll get modded +5 insightful, and I'll get modded troll/flamebait.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
I see a major problem here: real life doesn't have a respawn.
The tactics you use to play a game like Counter-Strike (a cooperative military FPS) would be very different if you only got one life every 24 hours.
Say what?...it sounds like we're not on the same page.
It seems to me we are very much on the same page.
Perhaps it was poorly phrased but what I meant by the military working well is that it performs its function superbly, regardlessly of the dubious and sometimes obscene missions it is given and the costs involved. Sadly, if you were to take a poll of the one thing the world thinks America currently excels at it would almost certainly be military related. Well, maybe prison technology. Certainly not telecom, broadband penetration, health care delivery, educational achievement, industrial base growth, etc.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
I can just see it now: Uncle Sam, pointing down the stairway to the parents' basement, calling out, "I want you!"
Have gnu, will travel.
Get back to me when the government puts a decent size fraction of what they spend on the military into energy research, healthcare, education and career retraining.
They already do spend a "decent size fraction" on the things you mention:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/
* Military spending: $730.8 billion
* Education spending: $848.2 billion
* Health care spending: $925.0 billion
I guess he didn't have time to run it past the proof readers before posting.
That's just the thing. Would he accept such a statement about lack of proofreading from Bush about the WMD intelligence? I doubt it. By using crappy figures, emotional rhetoric, and exaggerations, he does a disservice to the point of view he would like to support.Let's take his rape accusation. I found some figures (I found them here) that indicate 10% - 23% is a more realistic number. Now, that number is staggering. It's sickening. It's worthy of outrage. But it's significantly less than his number. Where did he get that number? Maybe his numbers are newer than mine. Maybe his numbers are an exaggeration he read on a blog. We don't know. He doesn't say. His presentation style makes it obvious that he would rather grind a political axe than make a meaningful post about technology. And THAT takes a lot away from his point.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Remember 1980 ? Naw, 'course you don't, most of you weren't even born I bet.
In 1980 there was this little Atari game called Battlezone, where you'd drive around in a tank, blowing shit up.
The army commissioned Atari to produce a special simulator based on Battlezone, called the Bradley Trainer (named after Bradley tanks). It was built into a high-end arcade cabinet, with a fancy controller that became the Star Wars flight yoke a few years later.
The army has been using gaming tech since video gaming was born.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Well I am guessing that you didn't mean to equate some guy writing a quick post on Slashdot to someone who had the entire machinery of the federal government at his disposal. It seems the latter was more of case of Bush's willful rejection of facts and opposing viewpoints than clerical error.
I agree with your overall point on the rape comment, however. It struck me a tangential and gratuitous swipe that detracted from the larger point.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
I'm not the original posted of the 1/3 number, but I had it in my head too, and I thought I read it someplace reliable. I searched my browser history and tracked it back to this article, which I read a few days ago. It's in the New York Times, but it's an Op-Ed piece and it says "nearly a third" not "one third" as I recalled.
So, I guess this is why it's always best to cite your sources. It's a small but very significant step from "a reliable source said 1/3" to "some op-ed piece in the NYT said 'nearly a third'".
A huge problem is that young psyched up soldiers go crazy with boredom and start getting lax. A huge percentage of casualties are due more to screwing around, or not following safety procedures, than to enemy action. But nobody wants to send mom a letter saying that Jimbob shot his dumb self when playing the fool with his rifle so instead they get sent back a letter saying something about "hero".
Then, when the shit does hit the fan (the stuff that happens in video games), things get a bit intense for a while, then settle down again. Often though, the troops are bored, gotten lax, and are not ready for the attack so get hit far harder than they should have if they'd been following their training.
Video gaming can help with the action stuff, but can't really help with the other stuff.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think one of the biggest problems that can come out of this is even more soldiers confusing reality with what happens in the game. What may be a slight point penalty in the game can translate to dead by-standers, and ruined families... We already see partipants in combat dissociating from reality and starting to see anyone who is not one of "them" as being non-human. This, if done without extreme caution, will only make matters worse.
Imagine the markup nintendo will make on military grade wii controllers.
And maybe we could get them for our own systems!
Your pie chart includes things like "Veterasns benefits" separate from defense. I do agree that after asking these people to die for their government you better as hell at least give them benefits. But without our excessive warmongering, there wouldn't be nearly as many veterans. So I think, until we start fighting wars without humans, we can include "veterans benefits" as part of money spent on military and wars.
And Interest on debt doesn't count at all in your pie chart? Well, I'm glad to see that instead of spending money on the military, we're spending money paying off interest for the loans we took out in order to finance our military.
And social security? Social security isn't even part of the taxes collected. It's pretty much just a pyramid scheme that steals from the young to give to the old. But it just shuffles money around among various people, the government doesn't actually spend it anywhere. The government only puts that into it's official budget to make it look like it spends less on the military.
Not to mention that a lot of the money for the war on terror is financed outside the official yearly budget and so doesn't even go into your pie chart. Though it may not be in the yearly budget, it is still a part of the governments budget that you and I still pay with our tax dollars.
>Get back to me when the government puts a decent size fraction of what they spend on the military
Well, the government decides where it goes but it was your money before you payed tax.
And you (well, in theory at least) get to decide who gets to be "the government", so.....
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
Quite honestly, it seems like it would be easier and less trouble to just hack together some accelerometers and bluetooth circuits and go from there instead of trying to build things around the Wii controller-- but it's not my project.
For all the people jabbering about Nintendo doing development for US war efforts, don't count on it any time soon. Sure, they've helped in the past, but utilizing a Wii controller for an application does not have to involve a Wii or Nintendo. It involves someone on the project going down to the store to purchase some controllers and hooking them up to a PC.
People also need to quit knocking sims for not being "like actual gunfire". A lot of military folks I know play paintball avidly. Does it improve accuracy with an M16? Probably not, but it helps develop the areas of the brain that have to figure out friend from foe, how to function in small teams, hand-eye coordination, not to mention all the excersize from running around. Even FPS games on a console help some of these skills, albeit, nowhere near as much as getting off your butt and practicing hurling your own body through time and space while dealing with real projectiles.
I seem to remember that that's a myth, and it doesn't make any sense anyway.
If the US sat back and did nothing, it would be blamed for being self-centered and indifferent and guilty of assisting genocide by not doing anything about it or whatever.
Yeah, I think it would be way better if the US Air Force reverted back to WW2 technology.
Thanks, I needed a laugh, but I think by "decent size" he meant something like this:
* Military spending: $96.42
* Education spending: $848.2 trillion
* Health care spending: $925.0 trillion
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
With the ongoing development of unmanned vehicles war will turn into a 1942 kind-of game for most of the US army. Including respawn. Your predator got pawned? You get automatically to control the next available one.
So it makes sense to use the same interface you've been using all your youth years. I'd stick with the good old ASDW and mouse, over any other if you ask me.
The world cyber games champion will be tomorrow's Rambo, so don't mess with her/him.
>> "Arguably the military is one of the few things left in the US that works well."
> Say what?
> Trillions of dollars wasted, over a million innocent Iraqis dead,...
Depends on how you define "works well". From a USA perspective, IIRC, the invasion went quite well, same as in the first Iraq war (to 'liberate' Kuwait). However the USA failed to "win the peace", and the locals suffered disproportionately.
"I don't think Republicans are entirely to blame, they've just corned the market on fear and have become great at selling it"
Wow, your charity at not ENTIRELY blaming Republicans is admirable.
Perhaps the idea that Dems are just as adept at selling different 'scare stories' is "An Inconvenient Truth"?
Republicans have sold security fears for decades.
Dems have tended to prefer to sell class envy, but they haven't shied away from scare stories - for the last 30 years, focussed on environmental chicken littling.
-Styopa
Look again. Interest on debt (8.4%)
... because during the years when it was running a surplus the money was spent on other things (defense, welfare, medicaid being the big three). When it comes time to draw it down the money won't be there. So it is really not true to suggest SS should not be counted as part of the budget - it is used that way. Oh, and as regards your claim that "The government only puts that [SS} into it's official budget to make it look like it spends less on the military.", I think you are mistaken. One could equally conclude that they include SS into the official budget to make it look like they spend less on buying votes via welfare, unemployment and medicaid "entitlements", which are the lion's share of the budget.
Veteran's benefits are 2.5%, so go ahead and add it to the 19% and see how close that gets you to "over half" of the federal budget.
Social Security isn't part of taxes collected? You know as well as I that the SS moneys go right into the general fund and are spent. That is why there is no trust fund, and why SS is headed for fiduciary ruin
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Nice find. The 1/3 number rung a bell with me, but I couldn't track it. What I did find was almost as shocking. From 2003, we have 10-23% rape statistics, some raped multiple times. The verall treatment of victims and their accusations is simply mind numbing. Further, about 2/3 women in the study reported sexual harassment. I have to wonder why the nation isn't boiling over this.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I agree that when it comes to good old-fashioned butt-kicking, our military is #1. The main problem with the military is that the Commander-In-Chief is a moron. Everything he did was wrong, including starting the war in the first place.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Are we suppose to be proud or excited by this? Arguably the military is one of the few things left in the US that works well. Get back to me when the government puts a decent size fraction of what they spend on the military into energy research, healthcare, education and career retraining. I'll be thrilled when Wii research ends up in a surgeon's hands than an Air Force cadet.
Um, humans like to blow stuff up/kill things far more often than healing/saving them. That side, the civil war surgeon's game where you get to cut limbs off wounded soldiers would out sell the realistic surgeon in training game. Actually, count the raw number of FPS or fantasy/scifi military games that are already on the market that the military could adapt to their use. Now count how many games that simulate various forms of health care are on the market. That's why you haven't seen doctors use a game adaption to learn, because doctoring/nursing games don't really exist. (O.k. I'm sure that they do for actual health care professionals going through a university program; I'm sure some one's made a game for them.) What I really mean is a game where elementary and junior high kids spend hours learning somewhat useful health care knowledge through medical gaming. Sure, I think its a great idea, but has anyone actually made a really successful one yet?
Can you point me at the wave of innovations in education, IT, health, etc., that have come out of Europe in the past couple decaeds? EU governments have poured and continue to dump trainloads of euros into all of these ventures. Or do you believe that there's something intrinsically special about Americans that makes whatever they spend money be the best in the world? I will admit that I generally find transportation in the EU, more specifically in Germany, to superior to that typically found in the US. However, I'm not sure how much of that is the result of resources as opposed to population density.
The US military destroyed the Iraqi army in less than a week. This is a fact. The botched occupation was not a military plan, but a civilian leadership fiasco. The Bush administration had some twisted day dream that the rest of the world would donate troops and supply to bring democracy to Iraq, and the Bush administration was dead wrong, hence the catastrophe in Iraq. Its not a lack of military power, but a lack of political resolve. I guess you fail to see that, but since I'm talking truths and your playing to anti US sentiment, you'll get modded +5 insightful, and I'll get modded troll/flamebait.
It took more than a week, it took over two weeks before the fall of Baghdad, which wasn't the end of the conventional phase of the conflict. However the only reason it took so long is because Sec Def Donald Rumsfeld almost fucked it up. He's a civilian, so that fits in with what you're saying. The military itself did a damn nice job, especially considering they had an ignoramus in charge who thought he could create a "legacy" by tearing up the Army logistics manual and inventing a kind of American Blitzkrieg which has never been our style, and his version of it was stupid anyway and made our supply lines vulnerable so we had to slow down and regroup.
On that note, saying that the major failing of the civilian leaders was that they underestimated how much our allies would help doesn't sit well with me. As if it was really these other countries' lack of support that caused the catastrophe. No, not at all. It was the complete and utter lack of a plan for the post-invasion that caused the catastrophe. Adding more troops into the mix would not have helped, without any plan via which they were to create and maintain peace. The twisted day dream they were dreaming was that Iraqis would love us unconditionally, and that Iraq would turn into Iowa by magic and democracy would spring from the ground, and thus they didn't need to do anything other than kick Saddam's ass. They were such insular narcissistic idiots, that any of their underlings who suggested that a plan would be helpful were told to stuff it. Even when the insurgency was gaining momentum they were stubbornly refusing to deal with it. That was their major failing.
In the end I agree that it was not in any way a lack of military power (or really any competency of our military), and perhaps a lack of political resolve describes why Rumsfeld et. al. would not commit to the occupation. But the buck on this Iraq fiasco stops at the civilian leaders of our country, not any other.
The enemies of Democracy are
I guess you fail to see that, but since I'm talking truths and your playing to anti US sentiment, you'll get modded +5 insightful, and I'll get modded troll/flamebait.
So since you were modded +5 insightful as well, does that mean that you are playing to the anti-anti-US sentiment?
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
What's to wonder about?
or:
Boom Headshot
http://www.youtube.com/v/olm7xC-gBMY&hl=en
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Of course, there are some differences between climate change and the Iraq war.
Reasonably intelligent people who are aware of the facts don't doubt that climate change should be addressed, but also know that Iraq had nothing to do with global terrorism, Al Qaeda, or WMDs.
Conversely, the US has spent trillions on sending 4,000 soldiers to die in the sand, while officially having spent very little to do anything about climate change other than pay conservative think tanks to come up with "perhaps nothing is happening" propaganda.
So the difference is that irrational, ignorant fear can pull money out of Americans rather easily, as the Neocons have been doing expertly for the last decade, while rational, informed risks are being entirely ignored and can't get funding.
The fact that you have right wing opinions doesn't change reality. I don't know how old you are, but if you've witnessed "30 years of environmental chicken littling" and haven't grasped the relationship between why US cities are far cleaner than they were prior to regulation efforts in environmental issues (in particular with cars), or why air in US cities is easier to breathe than the "free market" air in Bangkok, then it's hard to take much of what you say seriously.
If anti-regulation conservatives had their way, we wouldn't have seat belts, catalytic converters, factory scrubbers, OSHA, etc and would all be living in 1850 shanty towns where 12 year old kids worked 80 hour weeks so that Chancellor Bush could afford to declare war on the other fascists over who gets to colonize Africa. Wake up it's 2008 and we're all a bit more sophisticated than that.
This doesn't make it ok of course, but to put it into context here are the statistics for colleges, which are more-or-less the same age group as people in the military:
http://abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/scs/salt7.html * One out of four women will be sexually assaulted on a college campus.
* One out of eight women will be raped while in college.
Actually, if you include the entire US government (not just the federal government), defense spending (including war spending and veteran spending) is 14.3% of the total budget:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/
So your point, to summarize, is: "it's ok for the Democrats, because I agree with them."
That's supposed to be persuasive?
Please note a couple of additional points:
- there is a significant number of people who, while recognizing that the climate is changing, don't accept that this logically proves this change is anthropogenic, alterable on a human scale, nor even necessarily bad in the largest view. It's warming? I can throw chart after chart of paleoclimatological data at you that shows that the BULK of earth's history has been significantly warmer and that we're in a cool period. To assume that this anthropophilic climate would remain so forever (when has the climate ever NOT changed, by the way?) is like predicting the day's temperature based on the fact it just got cooler when the sun went behind a cloud. Sea levels are going to rise and flood [insert endangered city/country here]? Aside from the very basic point that over time, the likelihood pretty much any city being wiped out is eventually 100% precisely because NO city was founded with its location planned based on epochal condition changes - they are where they are because of needs of human CONVENIENCE. If that means they eventually will flood, that shouldn't surprise anyone. Finally, I'd contend particularly that many of these endangered places DIDN'T EVEN EXIST AS HUMAN-HABITABLE 1000 or 2000 years ago. Look at historical sea-level data....http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Sea_level_temp_140ky.gif - frankly, I don't see ANY reason to blame that on humans. Why don't we ask the inhabitants of Acre, which used to be the major port for the Eastern Med (in medieval times) which is now what, 5 miles inland?
- to instantly swallow all claims of anthropogenic climate change but then somehow neglect realities of geopolitics is simply mendacious. No WMDs, no immediate threat to the US, I still believe that destroying the Hussein regime was a legitimate geopolitical move, although the follow-through was indeed completely botched. No argument there. And as far as what threats 'neo-cons' or conservatives in general have preferred to focus on, why don't we just meet and discuss it on the observation deck of the World Trade Center in NY? Personally, yes, I'd rather deal with the real and imminent threat of people who have stated that they would like to murder me, than the vague and unproved assertions of a bunch of long-haired hippies who've been insisting since the 70's that "if we don't do something now!!!" we're all going to die from overpopulation, lack of clean water, too many landfills, guns, lack of food, and happened now to land on a new issue with slightly more traction because of a much-hated, incompetent Republican administration: global ice ages, er, warming, er climate change.
-Styopa
if you include the entire US government (not just the federal government)
Which serves to illustrate why it is pointless to compare the defense budget to anything other than the federal discretionary budget. Almost all of that spending is dictated by bodies of local, state or federal law. There are no choices. But given the pool of money in which there is an annual opportunity to distribute funds freely, namely federal discretionary funds, defense takes up 65%!