U.S. Command Declares Global Strike Capability

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Strategic Command announced yesterday it had achieved an operational capability for rapidly striking targets around the globe using nuclear or conventional weapons, after last month testing its capacity for nuclear war against a fictional country believed to represent North Korea.

STRATCOM said a new Joint Functional Component Command for Space and Global Strike on Nov. 18 “met requirements necessary to declare an initial operational capability.”

The annual Global Lightning exercise last month tested U.S. strategic warfare capabilities, including the so-called CONPLAN 8022 mission for a global strike, according to publicly available military documents.

CONPLAN 8022 is “a new strike plan that includes pre-emptive nuclear strike against weapons of mass destruction facilities anywhere in the world”.

http://www.nti.org/d_newswire/issues/2005_12_2.html#FB378486

CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY!

Any nation spending to prepare to WAGE a nuclear war has lost all sense of humanity not to mention a loss of collective wisdom.

The US as a "Christian" nation would rather champion war and spending on military than helping the poor or infirmed at home or around the world. We give foreign aid but it's peanuts (except what we give to Israel)compared to what we really are able to give and would be able to give if it weren't for our wars and preparation for them.

Who the hell are we to use pre-emptive strikes?

or the government of their country

those space based platforms will give the "powers that be" total control of the planet

I saw a documentary on FSTV that laid it out in chilling detail

wish I had a link for it.....

do you really believe that for self defense you have to absorb the first hit? Don't you think that is ludicrous standard when you are talking about WMDs and you might never get the opportunity to defend yourself? It can and has been misused many times in the past but do you really think that there is no place in the world for preemptive attacks?

Could Russia have rightly fully attacked the German armies massing to attack it in 1941? Could the US have attacked the Japanese carriers heading towards Pearl Harbor? Could Iran attack US forces massing in the Persian Gulf if they felt sufficiently threatened?

NOT. :eyes: :sarcasm:

The problem with preemptive strikes is what defines a preemptive moment in time?

Again, Iraq was the test case for the so-called Bush Doctrine, and it failed miserably.

is it your position no nation has the right of preemptive attack? What about my examples?

Not everything is about Bush - what if there is some value in preemptive attack for some other nation?

In this regard, the United States was "legally defeated" in a landmark case decided by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on June 27, 1986. In the case of Nicaragua vs. the United States, the ICJ, by a solid majority of 12 votes to 3, rejected the US' contention that it was acting in "collective self-defence" when it mined Nicaraguan harbours and trained the anti-government Contra rebels.

The ICJ ruled that just because Nicaragua allegedly (according to the United States) trained or supported the leftist rebels that were fighting the government of El Salvador, the US did not have the right under the pretext of "collective self-defence" to engage in acts which clearly violate Nicaragua's sovereignty and also the fundamental norms of international law.
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/south_pacific_islander_law_professor.html


Also
International Law

The limits of the use of military power are established in international law, and have been developed over centuries. The legality of the use of preemptive or preventive military operations to attack nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons facilities is questionable, the use of nuclear weapons in such operations even more so.

These questions are controlled by two areas of international law, jus ad bellum and jus in bello. The international law on whether force can be used to address a breach of or threat to international peace and security is called the "jus ad bellum." The law concerning the conduct of war is called the "jus in bello" and is set forth mainly in the Geneva Conventions.

The Legality of Preemptive or Preventive Counterproliferation Strikes: Jus Ad Bellum

Just War Theory in international law would require leaders of state who are considering pre-emption against an emerging NBC weapons threat to follow five rules:

1.Taking action only after peaceful remedies are exhausted.
2.Taking only those actions that have a reasonable chance of success
3.Taking actions proportional to the injury or anticipated injury about to be suffered.
4.Acting only in self-defense
5.Taking action only if exercised by a competent authority.

According to the UN Charter, nations may not use force or the threat of force in their relations with other countries. It is up to the Security Council to decide whether there is a breach or threat to international peace and security, and whether force is warranted to correct it. Individual nations may use force only in self-defense, and then, only if an armed attack has occurred, and only until the Security Council can take over.

http://www.counterproliferation.org/law/

Russia had a plan for attacking Germany in 1942. Therefore, Germany was justified in attacking Russia in 1941.

Japan KNEW that the U.S. would attack them eventually... therefore Pearl Harbor was justified.

Of course, Russia and Germany were a alliance of convenience, and both intended to betray the other... the Germans just did it first.

And the reason Japan KNEW the U.S. would attack is because Japan intended to seize British, Dutch and Thai territory in Southeast Asia... which if they hadn't done, the U.S. wouldn't attack.

At what point does a attack go from being 'pre-emptive' and become a unjustified assault?

I think that if the US Fleet had gone out to meet the Japanese prior to Pearl Harbor, or in the other cases you mention, that simply moving up to the line would have instigated a simultaneously engaged conflict. That's not really preemption.

The very concept of 'preemption' in this context is suspect, IMO. The only way you can truly preempt something is if you KNOW FOR A FACT that it will happen in the near future. For example, a softball game can be preempted. The event was planned, and something happened that caused it to be delayed or canceled.

The only case I can see for something vaguely resembling preemption would be Pearl Harbor, per my example above.

But simply allowing one country, ANY COUNTRY, to attack based on unverified claims is not preemption. It's aggression and conquest, pure and simple. Call it what it is.

Remember that the FIRST WORDS out of chimpy's mouth when he decided to illegally invade Iraq was: "Don't touch the oil fields."

I think that says it all.

learned(rock solid, no doubt evidence) that a terrorist group had WMDs and were planning to attack a major city and that they would move in a couple of hours? Would a rapid preemptive strike on those weapons be permitted no matter where they might be? What other alternative could there be?

If WMD in the hands of terrorist is a valid threat then this is a scenario that some country (and not necessarily the US) will certainly face. I think the nature of WMDs necessitates a preemptive strike if needed.

The strike should be proportionate to the need - ie to knock out the ability to attack with WMD of the terrorists. That could be achieved with conventional weapons with far less loss of life. In particular, you'd target the means of delivery of the WMD - aircraft, trucks, missiles or whatever.

What has now been announced is miles from your scenario, anyway. It doesn't talk about an imminent WMD attack - it talks about WMD facilities (you know, the things that the USA itself has thousands of, not to mention several other countries). And it's talking about the possibility of using nuclear weapons for it too - which could kill thousands of innocent civilians.

does the converse apply?

The foundation of your thesis is that the US is an absolute good. There are few, in any, true absolute goods in the realm of our existence, and governments have, throughout the course of history, proven themselves to be in direct opposition the concept of absolute good.

That is to say: when power or resources are involved, no government can be trusted to act under a valid pretense of self-defense.

So, with that in mind, let's take your example and reverse the context. You mentioned earlier that all nations equally have this right. So let's say that a country had concrete information that the US was going to perform a Black OP in their country. Would it be within their right to strike the US first? For example, Syria is feeling pretty threatened by the US right now. Are they entitled to preemptively strike the US? You think that would actually stand up at the ICC? Of course not. So why should it be any different for the US?

This is crux of my argument. You can't claim that preemption applies to one set of countries, and not to the other. Because as soon as you claim that ANY country has a right to preemptively attack, we begin th e Age of Conquest all over again, this time under one massive pretense of preemption.

thanks - I learned things about my self I never knew!

Ingenious incentive program.

Russia could have morally and legally attacked Germany when German armies were massing to attack it in 1941 because that represents the time-honored definition of "imminent threat". Ditto a U.S. attack on carriers heading towards Pearl Harbor.

"Pre-emptive" is a different story. I recommend taking a look at the National Security Strategy of the United States, posted to whitehouse gov around 9/20/2002. It points out that the USG will no longer be bound by the prerequisite of imminent threat before attacking another nation, all that is needed now (the right the Bush administration grants to itself) is "sufficient threat".

I understand the arguments that, in the age of WMD proliferation and of ferocious terrorist will (greatly elevated with the attacks of 9-11), we may now need to rethink policy. Significant threats may no longer announce themselves as armies massing along borders, allowing time for security-maintaining (and legal) first strikes based on observed imminent threats. Some reasonable and thoughtful people today believe that the first sign of "imminent threat" might now be a rising mushroom cloud over Manhattan or Washington DC. They think, therefore, we must eliminate, not just real present threats, but the potential for such threats to emerge. Children and mothers in foreign lands might have to die based on a whim and a fear held by our President that someday – perhaps in a month, a year, or ten years – their leaders may develop the means and the will to attack the United States directly or by proxy via terrorists. Saddam Hussein, for example, might have been developing nuclear weapons, and he might have intended to share them with terrorists, therefore we had to amass our armies on his borders and attack to protect ourselves. I wholly reject this thinking.

Let me go at this with a slightly different tack: How does one judge a group of four NYC policemen who unholster their guns and shoot 41 bullets into the chest a man of color who happened to be reaching for his wallet and identification, not a gun? (I refer to the Amadou Diallo case in NYC a few years back.) With disapprobation, certainly; potentially with dismissal and even imprisonment and fines.

So how does one judge GWB when he dumps more bombs on Iraq during the first 7 days of the war than were dropped in all of Gulf War I? Did Saddam come out blazing with his WMD? Diallo was gunned down because he was black, because he did the perfectly natural thing of reaching for his wallet, because the police were looking for a rapist that looked nothing like Diallo. Saddam was gunned down because (we were told) he might have WMD, he might have the delivery systems to use them, and he might use them against us. Turns out neither Diallo nor Saddam had any smoking guns.

If we agree Diallo's murderers deserve disapprobation, then why don't we also agree that George W. Bush deserves the same? Why don't we agree that the thuggery of the Bush Doctrine needs to be retired and corrected?

In my case, before I would judge a pre-emptive attack as the right thing to do, it would have to rise to the level of imminent threat. I would want to know for certain that (for example) Iraq possessed WMD and had the means and intention to use them against the United States. If I didn't have the evidence, then noting that containment had worked successfully for 12 years I'd continue with containment while continuing to monitor the situation until and if clear evidence of weapons, means, and intention surface. If clear evidence is surfaced, then I'd think about war.

Alternately, I'd want to see clear evidence that Saddam Hussein was fomenting terrorists to strike against U.S. targets, that he was behind 9-11 (as was floated early and often before inconveniently the CIA reported Saddam Hussein had zero involvement with terror outside his borders since 1993). If clear evidence emerged, then I'd consider war.

In the absence of clear evidence, I would continue the successful policies of containment, anti-proliferation programs, inspections, and monitoring. I would not go to war because of a purely speculative "he might have" or "he might do". That's where I draw the line.

Of course, threat and WMD had very little to do with the real reasons for the Iraqi war (entirely an imperial adventure) -- as Wolfowitz said, WMD were picked simply because they thought the issue could be used to manufacture consent.

Just what the world needs to hear. With these Bozos in charge, there's not only the hideous evil of a pre-emptive nuclear attack, but it's all too likely that they'd target a country (say Iran) based on their own peculiar way of interpreting bad intel and wind up hitting someplace else entirely, like China.

with our troops tied down on the other side of the world.

Terrific. :scared:

It sounds like the planet Earth is the new enemy.

"We have met the enemy and he is us".

This poem expresses my feelings perfectly-

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night,

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Totally insane.

Tell me that this cannot really happen? Surely no one could really think we could pre-emptively use NUKES on a sovereign nation.... then again bush needs to get his war rush going (I really think he gets off on the whole war thing), and he hasn't gotten to use nukes pre-emptively yet...

that idea stayed any notion of a "pre-emptive" strike during the cold war with the then USSR - only because we knew (or suspected) that the target would annihllate us completely in retaliation or at least damage us to a level that is unacceptable to any sane human being. Its all a matter of scale and some portion denial apparently. North Korea and Iran may (or may not) possess enough atomic weapons for a traditional "exchange" with us to survive the first second of such a war. We know we can "pre-emptively" strike those targets without fear of a "traditional" military retaliation, atomic or otherwise. The calculation is that even if missiles were launched against us, it will be no where near the hundreds of warheads that the USSR was once feared to be able to fire back at us, and therefore, easier to intercept (but with WHAT proven system?). So what the hell right? The denial (or ignorance) comes from the fact that there does not seem to be any thought placed on the after effects of such an act. I do not believe that once a pre-emptive action like this is under taken, that there will not be some other retaliation of some kind provided by others that may or may not be aligned with the original target - and in fact will now find common cause to hurt us. And around and around it goes. I am a stupid person, I do not have the training or practice that I assume that the people in government are supposed to have - but I do not have the confidence that there is anybody in those positions that are capable of any long term thinking beyond next years election poll or that a few short years later.

and maybe 15% more could be "persuaded" to go along by the corporate media.

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to see the US use nuclear weapons against North Korea.

and threatening!!!
Where is humankind heading???

Not out loud, but I'm sure that many other governments are exchanging messages about the American Problem.

the latest bits of info regarding sub orbital aurora space bombers are truely frightening scenario. which will launch into the new age of space warfare, command and control satalite bases equiped with precision guided laser missles will dominate the globe. there will be no rival, a NWO will emerge out of coalition of the submisive.

If you and i both play a zero sum war game to develop WMD's and achieve
comparative superiority, the one first to the nukes will wipe the other
out with a big preemptive attack to prevent the second from gaining the
competetive capability. It is really rather basic bloody fucking
defense... like its hardly reassuring that a bunch of whining cowardly
military assholes can barely protect the country as it stands, let alone
mouthing off about their new ability to committ mass crime.

The military should take its implied threats for aggressive nuclear
war and stuff them up its collective behind...fucking loser cowardly
assholes who would sell out ameircan values of freedom for the thrill
of threatening poeple with nuclear weapons... tragic.

years ago. How often does the U.S. have to make these silly statements that everyone in the world is aware of?

Fear mongering, scare tactics, saber rattling, never works in the end. Why do they hate us? Because they do, so lets kill them? Is that the mentality that we want those that "represent" us and lead us to have? So we suppress all that animosity at us with the atomic / military stick. Now what? Have we trapped ourselves into a corner? Use it or lose it? Do we use the pre-emptive option so that we can prove to the world that we say what we mean and mean what we say? We'll never learn. Others have used it, so have we. We're still doing it and we'll keep on doing it until the whole world is destroyed.

the common working man of this country. The commoner will have the last word.

Good post my friend.

ICBM's have been around for 40 years...
B1's and B2's and Trident missle subs are not new.

Something is up...besides strategy.

this has been known for years that we can alter the evolution on this planet. slow news day or the guys at stratcom are feeling left out

Laying the groundwork in the American psyche for what could happen.

bush certainly can`t take them on the ground and would lose planes in an air attack. easier for a few well placed tac-nuke low yield weapons of to show the iranians just how tough he is.

could ya know... just obliterate the whole thing without getting any on us.... pity.

We need to dismantle this imperial war machine before it gets us all killed!

Under LeMay, SAC nearly triggered WWWIII by flying provocative missions into Soviet air space during the height of the 1962 Missile Crisis. President Kennedy was shocked to find out that SAC had the authority to fly into Soviet air space without even telling the President.

Surely that would bring Jesus back.

war, can they? They're just drooling and chomping at the bit for more action,
bullying every other country around, now that all that Iraq excitement is fizzling out!
So just watch, if one war stops they will start another.:scared: