How The US Government and US Military Became Murder, Inc.

How The US Government and US Military Became Murder, Inc.

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research, March 26, 2015
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/how-the-us-government-and-us-military-became-murder
-inc/5438840
paulcroberts
Andrew Cockburn has written a must-read book.  The title is Kill Chain: The Rise Of The
High-Tech Assassins.  The title could just as well be: How the US Government and US
Military Became Murder, Inc.

The US military no longer does war.  It does assassinations, usually of the wrong people.
The main victims of the US assassination policy are women, children, village elders,
weddings, funerals, and occasionally US soldiers mistaken for Taliban by US surveillance
operating with the visual acuity of the definition of legal blindness.

Cockburn tells the story of how the human element has been displaced by remote control
killing guided by misinterpretation of unclear images on screens collected by surveillance
drones and sensors thousands of miles away.  Cockburn shows that the “all-seeing” drone
surveillance system is an operational failure but is supported by defense contractors
because of its high profitability and by the military brass because

general officers, with the exception of General Paul Van Ripper, are brainwashed in the
belief that the revolution in military affairs means that high-tech devices replace the
human element.  Cockburn demonstrates that this belief is immune to all evidence to the
contrary.  The US military has now reached the point that Secretary of Defense Hagel
deactivated both the A-10 close support fighter and the U-2 spy plane in favor of the
operationally failed unmanned Global Hawk System.  With the A-10 and U-2 went the last
platforms for providing a human eye on what is happening on the ground.

The surveillance/sensor technology cannot see human footprints in the snow.  Consequently,
the drone technology concluded that a mountain top was free of enemy and sent a detachment
of unsuspecting SEALS to be shot up.  Still insisting no enemy present, a second group of
SEALS were sent to be shot up, and then a detachment of Army Rangers.  Finally, an A-10
pilot flew over the scene and reported the enemy’s presence in force.

By 2012 even the US Air Force, which had been blindly committed to the unmanned drone
system, had experienced more failure than could any longer be explained away.  The Air
Force admitted that the 50-year old U-2 could fly higher and in bad weather and take
better pictures than the expensive Global Hawk System and declared the Global Hawk system
scrapped.

The decision was supported by the 2011 report from the Pentagon’s test office that the
drone system was “not operationally effective.”  Among its numerous drawbacks was its
inability to carry out assigned missions 75% of the time. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff told Congress that in addition to the system’s unacceptable failure rate, the
drone system “has fundamentally priced itself out of our ability to afford it.”

As Cockburn reports:  “It made no difference. Congress, led by House Armed Services
Committee Chairman Buck McKeon and Democratic Congressman Jim Moran (whose northern
Virginia district hosts the headquarters of both Northrop and Raytheon) effortless brushed
aside these pleas, forcing the Air Force to keep buying the unwanted drone.”

Cockburn provides numerous examples of the utter failure of the unmanned revolution
ushered in by unrealistic dreamers, such as Andrew Marshall, John Foster, William Perry,
and David Deptula, who have done much harm to the US military and American taxpayers. The
failure stories are legion and sad.  Almost always the victims are the innocent going
about their everyday affairs.

The book opens with the story of three vehicles crammed with people from the same village
heading to Kabul. Some were students returning to school in Kabul, some were shopkeepers
heading to the capital to buy supplies, others were unemployed men on their way to Iran
seeking work, and some were women bringing gifts for relatives.  This collection of
ordinary people, represented on screens by vague images, was willfully mistaken, as the
reproduced conversations between drone operators and assassins show, for a senior Taliban
commander leading forces to attack a US Special Forces patrol.  The innocent civilians
were blown to smithereens.

The second chapter tells of the So Tri, an indigenous people in the remote wilderness of
southeastern Laos who were bombed for nine years because the stupid American military
sowed their environment with sensors that called down bombs when human presence was
detected.  High-tech warfare misidentified the villagers with Viet Cong moving through
jungle routes.

One heartbreaking story follows another. If surveillance suspects the presence of a High
Value Target in a restaurant, regardless of nominal restrictions on the number of
innocents who can be murdered as the “collateral damage” part of the strike, the entire
restaurant and all within are destroyed by a hellfire missile.  Remember that the Israelis
denounce terrorists for exploding suicide vests inside Israeli restaurants.  What the US
military does is even worse.

On other occasions the US assassinates an underling of a High Value Target on the
assumption that the Target will attend the funeral which is obliterated from the air
whether the Target is present or not.

As the murders are indiscriminate, the US military defines all males killed to be valid
targets. Generally, the US will not admit the deaths of non-Targets, and some US officials
have declared there to be no such deaths.  Blatant and obvious lies issue without shame in
order to protect the “operationally ineffective” and very expensive high-tech production
runs that mean billions of taxpayer dollars for the military/security complex and
comfortable 7-figure employment salaries with contractors after retirement  for the
military brass.

When you read this book you will weep for your country ruled as it is by completely
immoral and inhumane monsters.  But Cockburn’s book is not without humor.  He tells the
story of Marine Lt. General Paul Van Riper, the scourge of the Unmanned Revolution in
Military affairs, who repeatedly expressed contempt for the scientifically unsupported
theories of unmanned war.  To humiliate Gen. Ripper with a defeat in a massive war game as
leader of the enemy Red force against the high-tech American Blue force, he was called out
of retirement to participate in a war game stacked against him.

The Blue force armored with a massive database (Operational Net Assessment) and
overflowing with acronyms was almost instantly wiped out by General Ripper. He sank the
entire aircraft carrier fleet and the entire Blue force army went down with it.  The war
was over. The 21st century US high-tech, effects-based military was locked into a preset
vision and was beaten hands down by a maverick Marine general with inferior forces.

The Joint Forces Command turned purple with rage.  Gen. Ripper was informed that the
outcome of the war game was unacceptable and would not stand. The sunken fleet magically
re-floated, the dead army was resurrected, and the war was again on, only this time
restriction after restriction was placed on the Red force. Ripper was not allowed to shoot
down the Blue force’s troop transports. Ripper was ordered to turn on all of the Red
force’s radars so that the Red forces could be easily located and destroyed. Umpires
ruled, despite the facts, that all of Ripper’s missile strikes were intercepted.  Victory
was declared for high-tech war.  Ripper’s report on the total defeat of the Blue force,
its unwarranted resurrection, and the rigged outcome was promptly classified so that no
one could read it.

The highly profitable Revolution in Military Affairs had to be protected at all costs
along with the reputations of the incompetent generals that comprise today’s high command.

The infantile behavior of the US military compelled to create a victory for its high-tech,
but legally blind, surveillance warfare demonstrates how far removed from the ability to
conduct real warfare the US military is.  What the US military has done in Afghanistan and
Iraq is to create far more enemies than it has killed.  Every time high-tech killing

murders a village gathering, a wedding or funeral, or villagers on the way to the capital,
which is often, the US creates hundreds more enemies.  This is why after 14 years of
killing in Afghanistan, the Taliban now control most of the country.  This is why Islamist
warriors have carved a new country out of Syria and Iraq despite eight years of American
sacrifice in Iraq estimated by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes to have cost Americans a
minimum of $3 trillion.  The total failure of the American way of war is obvious to all,
but the system rolls on autonomously.

 The Revolution in Military Affairs has decapitated the US military, which no longer has
the knowledge or ability or human tools to conduct war.  If the crazed Russophobic US
generals get their way and end up in confrontation with Russia, the American forces will
be destroyed.  The humiliation of this defeat will cause Washington to take the war
nuclear.

 Here is Stanislav Mishin’s view of what awaits the foolish West:
http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/03/22/4790