1st B-log

Every time we go into a war and we don’t figure out what the political end state is … we don’t know how to end them.   I think the first thing, if you go back a few years, what you’ll find, there’s a great article written in The Atlantic I recommend to you.  I believe it was July of 2013 and it’s written by the former President Emeritus of Dartmouth University Jim Wright. He said, “what did we learn from the Korean war?”  If you look at the wars from probably Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, dare I say Afghanistan, every time we go into a war and we don’t figure out what the political end state is, we get into wars and we don’t know how to end them. Then you’ve got a real problem. Every time we go into a war and we don’t figure out what the political end state is … we don’t know how to end them. The most important thing is, if you have to go to war, then do everything you can not to go to war if at all possible. Then you’ve got to get the political end state right or y...

You go all the way back to Thucydides who wrote the first history and it was of a war and he said it’s fear and honor and interest and those continue to this day. The technology and the way wars are fought, they’re like chameleons, a dead German guy wrote, and it changes constantly, especially when you mix technology and all. But it’s still full of fear and courage, cowardice and duplicity, treachery, and clarity, honesty and confusion. It’s a fundamental and predictable phenomenon. So just mix in all the new technologies, the way a society thinks, and you put all that together and out of it comes a non-quantifiable that results in victory or defeat. So it’s hard to say, It’ll certainly be aspects that are in outer space and in the cyber domain that were not there before. We fought on this planet mostly with ground armies until navies became something one hundred years ago. Air forces joined and now in the last ten years, we’ve added space and cyber. So it’ll be a very complex...

History will show you not all the answers, but it’ll tell you a lot of the questions to ask. The human condition, the aspirations, the dreams, the problems that are associated with being social animals, not being a hermit and living alone, but having to interact with others, whether it be your local school district, your community, your state, your county, your national, your international relations, history will show you not all the answers, but it’ll tell you a lot of the questions to ask and furthermore, it will show you how other people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar type issues. I wish now looking back on it, if I’d known what waited for me in life, I would have put a lot more attention into history.

I don’t care for ideological people.   It’s like those people just want to stop thinking. By sitting down and talking with them, after having a good strong argument, going out and having a root beer with them, maybe showing up at the same church, maybe going to the hospital to see their kid when they’re having their appendix out, reminds you that they’re human beings too.  There’s no reason to get all worked up as if someone is evil or crazy. For one thing, none of us are perfect and all-knowing, so this might be their right, and that’s why I don’t care for ideological people. It’s like those people just want to stop thinking.  They know what they think, they don’t read anything but one newspaper that agrees with them or they watch only one television news show because it reinforces them, instead of listening to the ones that don’t agree with them. So, I think the way you get over it is, you take people one at a time and you give them the same credit ...