Professional Writing

That ought to be a good read!

Spitty-

I read your paper, and I agree with the underlaying theses, particularly with regard to Pakistan's support of violent extremist groups. A couple of notes/suggestions:

-"War on Terror" was President Bush's thing, President Obama uses "Overseas Contingency Operations."
-You said "Warisistan" but I think you meant "Waziristan."
-"Detention" is also misspelled.

Here is the final paper I wrote for this semester. It was for a strategy/history class I really liked. For this paper, we could write on anything we liked as long as it tied into strategy. I decided to take a chance and try something "funny and witty" (some here like to remind me that I'm neither ;) ). I applied the grand strategic principles of the books we studied over the past semester (Art of War, The Prince, On War, The Armada, The Peloponnese War, The History of Rome, etc.) and see how they might be applied in a bar on a Friday night. I also added in some references to some of our other readings, and to some inside jokes from the class. The bit at the end is a little jab at my professors for not including On Guerrilla Warfare by Mao to the syllabus. I admit I hadn't read much out of these books before I took the course, but I thought there would be many site members better-read than I who would get the jokes and find this amusing.

Napalm sticks to kids

I think that's exactly right. Landmines are an "area denial" weapon, which have very long "shelf lives" and are very indiscriminate weapons. In contrast, napalm is an "instantaneous effect" weapon. Interestingly, the US is one of the countries which is not a signatory on the international treaty to ban land mines. MOO, this is because 1) the US recognizes the extreme utility of area-denial weapons, and 2) IIRC, all of our landmines have built-in self destruct mechanisms and 3) we are very, very careful as to when, where, and how we use them. For these reasons, the US does not believe we need to sign the treaty; we're responsible enough without it. Again, this is MOO and AFAIK not an official position of the USG.

Another related issue is the use of cluster bombs. Again, they are a highly effective area-denial and direct targeting system, but they, like napalm, are instantaneous. Only... sometimes they're not. Apparently there is a high dud rate of the cluster munitions, and being round like baseballs, many times they're picked up and played with, with unfortunate results.

Glad to do it.

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That is brilliant, actually. It might have to go into the revision...

Yeah, IIRC it gets pretty regularly ignored by the executive branch. Which pisses off the legislative branch.

I don't know a lot about the topic but if you want to post your paper here, I'm sure a couple of us will read it and tell you how crappy it is provide useful feedback.

Search for it here on the site. I think someone pissed me off posted something that interested me about this subject, which caused me to get off my ass to prove him wrong in an Internet fight do some research on it. If we didn't delete it, it might still be here.