Thou Shalt Kill-- a great Christmas Message from a Col Ralph Peters.

An item with this title appears in the January, 2005 Edition of Harper's Magazine.It identifies Peters as the author of New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy, which will be published this summer by Sentinel Books.

Some excerpts:

Focus on killing the enemy.With fires.With maneuver.With sticks and stones and polyunsaturated fats.It is difficult to persuade leaders schooled in caution that their mission is not to keep an entire corps' tanks on line but to rip the enemy's heart out. In the bitter years after Vietnam,when our national leaders succumbed to the myth that the American people would not tolerate casualties,elements within our military--although not certainly everyone--- grew morally and practically timid.


Trust me.We don't need discourses.We need plain talk,honest answers, and the will to close with the enemy and kill him.And to keep on killing him until it is unmistakably clear to the entire world who won. When military officers start speaking in academic gobbledegook,it means that they have nothing to contribute to the effectiveness of our forces.They badly need an assignmnet to Fallujah.


Of course, we shall hear no end of fatuous arguments to the effect that we can't kill our way out of the problem.Well, until a better methodology is discovered,killing is a good interim solution.


This will be a long war of attrition, stretching beyond many of our lifetimes.We must ensure that the casualties are always disproportionately on the other side. Nothing says that the wars of attrition have to be fair.It is essential to purge our minds of the cliche'd images the term "war of attrition" evokes.A one sided war of attrition,enabled by our broad range of superior capabilities, is a strong model for a twenty-first-century American way of war.

It cannot be repeated often enough:Whatever else you aim to do in wartime, never lose your focus on killing the enemy.


Note from KBN: I did not know what to think about this article.At first, I thought I had seen the ravings of a lunatic. But then I realized that he is a regular contributor to the WSJ. In this article, the enemy he keeps talking about consists of unarmed women, children and elderly and of course a whole country which is the recipient of armed aggression on our part.In the kind of world the good colonel inhabits, those kind of considerations are secondary to the primary mission of killing.

I now think he should be confined to a lunatic asylum.

Take a look at THE BRICK TESTAMENT to see God talking the talk, but not walking the walk:

http://www.thebricktestament.com/

someone like, oh, say...Leo Strauss.

I guess when one has an axe to grind, it is easy to attribute the evil to that person, idea, or thing.

I, for example, have blamed (and continue to blame) a whole lot on Reagan, Bush, and Bush (and their chums.)

"..a one sided war of attrition..a strong model for a twenty-first century American way of war."

Pyschotic? The very same thing was taught to me in marine boot camp. War is pyschotic. Those who perpetrate it are murderers. That's why they have guns.

up against. He seems to be of the Reinhard Heydrich school of merciless warfare. And yes he should be confined to some institution where his rantings cannot injure more innocent people.

Generals Sherman and Sheridan? You don't have to go overseas to make your point.

I felt the Heydrich model was more impactful, however Sherman I did read about in school and Sheridan I am not as familiar with but I'll take your word on it.

more than Sherman or Sheridan, IMO.

this same mindset will be applied to us as we apply it to someone else. It's a circular endgame. Both sides trying to decimate the other. If we intensify the carnage, so will they. Who is going to buckle first. The Iraqi's who have nothing to lose, or the US who is only in it for the money?

this enmity?

I have no answers. But I think the bulk of the blame can be placed at the feet of one man in particular.

"For thirteen fiery days in September and October 1864 Sheridan's soldiers burned barns, mills, factories, and standing crops; livestock were rounded up and driven away or killed where they stood."
http://snipurl.com/bl8h
It was said that when Sheridan left the Shenandoah Valley even the crows were starving.

another reminder that war is hell.

William T Sherman said.

These weren't people being killed in the Valley in this attrition strategy to which you refer.
This was a last gasp effort - quite successful - by the new General to shorten a war whose end was already in sight - therefore it actually saved lives by shortening the war.
Virginians in the Valley had long sustained the Southern Army with basic foods, and to starve them - the Confederates - out was a brilliant strategy which quite likely was generous to the South in the big picture.
The Army couldn't march on an empty stomach.
...O...

And as insane.

War is about killing. Or, murder, to be more honest about it. All the rest (patriotism, defense, glory, etc) is justification for murder. Hell, they bedeck the most efficient murderers with medals and call them heroes. They erect statues to them, elect them to public office because they killed. The more they murder, the more glorified they are.

But, they insist that murder is justified. Whether it's religious fanatics in airplanes, or GI's blowing up buildings with people inside them, there's always those that want to glorify it and make it noble.

At least the moron who wrote the book is honest.

surfaced on his one track mind.I believe he is talking about killing all 25 million Iraqis over a large number of years.If that is what the good colonel has in mind in his War of Attrition,I think we should lock him up in an institution.

...I suppose that flaccid fuckhandle would rush out to the nearest pet store and shoot all the newborn dogs and cats.

said King Herod.

Okasha

and Tommy that
and Tommy get out you brute
but it's Tommy you're the saviour of our country
when the guns begin to shoot."

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

And some up-armored Humvees wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

Okasha

He want's an army of evilness. Morally timid is a euphemism for "good". He thinks that our soldiers have been too "good", too ethical, too moral.

He wants an army of cold blooded killers, rapists, mass murderers, torturers. He want's an army of orcs. He wants an army that, he hopes, will win through fear and oppression.

Is he channeling Satan?

THIS is obscene. Instead of New Glory, he should have titled it, New Gory.

One sick individual.

He is well known as a bloodthirsty hyperaggressive nutcase. The RW calls upon him to help prepare public sentiment for savagery.