With a hat tip to Bill Keezer, here’s a look at the Obama administration’s increasingly routine use of kill lists and drone strikes to prosecute foreign policy.
I excerpt two notable quotes from this post. The first is by its author:
Benghazi illustrates the problem of the President having the authority for everything and the responsibility for nothing.
The second is from the great war historian B.H. Lidell Hart:
In peace we concentrate so much on tactics that we are apt to forget that it is merely the handmaiden of strategy.
As disturbing as this new tactic is, frankly I think we will need to get used to it. Even under historical, traditional conditions of war, where antagonistic nations pit uniformed armies against each other on the battlefield, and navies upon the sea, the transparency and diffusion of power inherent to representative democracy has always been a hindrance to the cohesion of strategic and tactical will, as well as to stealth and surprise. But in this not-so-brave new world, where the enemy arrayed against us is a shape-shifting army of shadows, and in which we good people of the compassionate West bind our military’s hands with rules of engagement better suited to a suburban paintball club than to mortal combat against implacable, pitiless foes, this sort of thing is about all we’ve got. I expect it will continue, no matter who wins the election.