random thought: maybe if enough wars are lost, they'll stop practicing war and try to get their needs met by other means.</randomthought> I think Norvell B. De

random thought: maybe if enough wars are lost, they'll stop practicing war and try to get their needs met by other means.</randomthought> I think Norvell B. De Atkine might have missed out on some key details due to his status as an outsider. Especially if every Arab with whom he interacted truly suspected he was a zionist spy. It's difficult to overcome that kind of paranoia and the skills for doing so are not taught in the U.S. military. Also, it sounds like a lot of these people are being forced to participate in the wars, and that's just a recipe for failure. Guns are scary it takes a lot more than a draft to convince someone to stick around for that shit. Another thing to consider is that the rituals used to build loyalty in the U.S. military are kind of a secret. Generally, only the ones participating in the rituals get to know what they are. The content is not entirely intuitive either: imagine being told to sleep in a 1-meter wooden cube in the woods; ants crawl into the cube and bite you; at bedtime, human chanting is played from speakers inside your cube, alternating between quiet and deafening over five minute intervals until the sun comes up. This is meant to build unit cohesion. It's weirdo shit devised by psychos to break human minds. Also, the article is called "Why Arabs Lose Wars" but half of the examples he initially cites are wars in which both sides were arab: Egypt v Yemen, Syria v Lebanon, Iraq v Kuwait. Arabs won those wars... but I guess that wasn't worth noting because the losing side was arab? Those were just some details which stuck out to me while I was reading the article. I acknowledge that about half of this article is objective, fact-based observation and those observations were genuinely interesting. I think that his evidence is inconclusive simply because of the context in which his observations were gathered.