This is a perfect moment to deploy this photograph that I took in the Mill Road in Cambridge three weeks ago. Over at Belmont Club there’s an entry pointing at an amusing idea for a war simulation game:

“I want a War Sim where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a ‘nuclear missile silo’, only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage. I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack.”

Next, it moves on to quote Army Magazine‘s piece, Sun Tzu’s Bad Advice: Urban Warfare in the Information Age, thusly:

“We do not live in Sun Tzu’s world, nor even in that of Clausewitz, Fuller or Liddell Hart. The modern world has urbanized to an unprecedented degree, and it is inconceivable that future military contingencies will not involve urban operations. Sun Tzu lived and wrote (if indeed he was a real person) in the agrarian age, when most of the land was either wilderness or cultivated. Large segments of the population lived outside cities, and warfare typically occurred in flat, open terrain. Such battlefields–the stomping grounds of warriors from Sun Tzu to Napoleon–are becoming scarcer each day. Furthermore, the very success of American joint operations–and joint fires in particular–guarantee that a clever opponent will move into cities for protection. The modern battlefield is urban.”

I am now counting down to the first rebuttal comment from Timbeaux or Duff.

This item formally launches a new PooterGeek subject category…