UNTITLED (GETTING ME OUT THE DOOR)
I’d rather have this one on a cake.
From the December 1939 issue of Amazing Stories and via one of my favorite blogs, Paleo-Future comes this illustration of an imagined ‘land battleship’.
See also in the PF archives: Gigantic Robots to Fight Our Battles and Nazi Paleo-Futurism.
Do you ever check out modern mechanix?
No, but it definitely it’s now in my ‘Archaic Futures’ feeds folder.
“
For me, the Crimean War is the “perfect” war. Started for obscure reasons, hopelessly murderous, and accomplishing nothing.
—Errol Morris
A DynCorp security employee watches over the A.E.F. destroying poppy fields in Uruzgan.
DynCorp traces its origins from two companies formed in 1946: California Eastern Airways, an air freight business and Land-Air Inc, an aircraft maintenance company…
Wankel was in Uruzgan to oversee a poppy-eradication campaign—the first major effort to disrupt the harvest in the province. He had brought with him a two-hundred-and-fifty-man A.E.F. contingent, including forty-odd contractors supplied by DynCorp, a Virginia-based private military company, which has a number of large U.S. government contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world. In Colombia, DynCorp helps implement the multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia, to eradicate coca…
Employees of the company were involved in the trading of sex slaves while working in Bosnia. A DynCorp employee, Kathryn Bolkovac, was fired after revealing that Dyncorp employees had frequented brothels where women had been imprisoned. Another Dyncorp employee, Ben Johnson, was also fired after revealing the involvement of some of his fellow co-workers in forced-prostitution rings in Bosnia.[8] At least 13 DynCorp employees have been sent home from Bosnia—- and at least seven of them fired—- for purchasing women or trafficking of women and children, though none have ever faced criminal sanctions…
The eradication team set off early the next morning for their first day’s work. There were nineteen Americans and a hundred Afghans in a convoy made up of twenty-four all-terrain vehicles—similar to small dune buggies—eighteen Ranger pickup trucks carrying Afghan policemen, and four of DynCorp’s white Ford F250 pickups. I rode in a truck driven by David Lockyear, an amiable six-foot-seven-inch Tennessean in his thirties, known as Doc Dave. Lockyear, who had a goatee and was covered with tattoos, was a paramedic from Nashville who joined the Marine Corps after September 11th. (“I was just pissed off, like a lot of people, and wanted to do something,” he said.) He fought in the first siege of Falluja, and in 2007 he went to work for DynCorp. He smoked a Marlboro and held a cup of coffee in one hand as he drove…
As we entered the nearest village, children gathered along the track waving and holding their hands out, and some of the DynCorp men tossed them gray plastic packages. “Halal M.R.E.s,” Sherepita explained. “The kids love them.”…
Beyond the camp, at each point of the compass, Nepalese Gurkhas hired by DynCorp maintained sentry positions in foxholes and in sandbagged machine-gun nests on the roofs of trucks…
The Gurkhas were designated by British officials as a “Martial Race”. “Martial Race” was a designation created by British officials to describe “races” (peoples) that were thought to be naturally warlike and aggressive in battle, and to possess qualities like courage, loyalty, self sufficiency, physical strength, resilience, orderliness, hard working, fighting tenacity and military strategy. The British recruited heavily from these Martial Races for service in the colonial army.
Gurkhas served as troops under contract to the East India Company in the Pindaree War of 1817, in Bharatpur in 1826 and the First and Second Anglo-Sikh Wars in 1846 and 1848…
(↝via newyorker, wikipedia)
Why the Strong Lose
What is not in dispute is that all major failed US uses of force since 1945—in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia—have been against materially weaker enemies. In wars both hot and cold, the United States has fared consistently well against such powerful enemies as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union, but the record against lesser foes is decidedly mixed. Though it easily polished off Milosevic’s Serbia and Saddam’s Iraq, the United States failed to defeat Vietnamese infantry in Indochina, terrorists in Lebanon, and warlords in Somalia. In each case the American Goliath was militarily stalemated or politically defeated by the local David. Most recently, the United States was surprised by the tenacious insurgency that exploded in post-Baathist Iraq, an insurgency now in its third year with no end in sight.
Don’t worry, this is not the beginning of a series of political Kosian posts, it’s an interesting article from the awesome PARAMETERS.
“During the draft riots, crowds targeted places that represented the war effort, the Republican party, and/or social privilege. Brooks Brothers clothing store was known both as a purveyor of clothes to the upper classes and a government war contractor. In this illustration, the distant perspective makes the crowd of men and women seem industrious but not particularly menacing.”