Enemy combatant

weapons used in the era of exploration. Although it is accurate the Spanish obtained steel— a more than adequate accessory to combat— it was not enough to secure a victory over the Aztecs. For example, the Spanish wore steel armor to protect against enemy blows. It withstood an abundance of Aztecan weapons, such as arrows. But the armor did not defend the entire body. Areas around the neck and underarm succumbed to the majority of trauma (Unsolved History, 2013), especially to what was named a…

General Shelton didn’t display many vulnerabilities based on the biography I read for this course. However, there were several areas that some may consider some of his decisions as vulnerabilities where I would consider them more of prioritization of urgencies. General Shelton in my opinion placed a huge value in his profession but an even more higher value in family. General Shelton understood the importance of succeeding in his career while making national security decisions, but he also…

In September of 1929, an unlikely chain of events took place in a medical research lab in England that would advance the field of medicine immensely (Ho). Alexander Fleming, a young Scottish researcher, was investigating the theory that nasal mucus had antibacterial effects when he left a culture plate with Staphylococcus aureus, a deadly bacteria, in his lab while he went on a holiday (Ho). When he returned to his lab, he found that there was a clear halo surrounding growth of a yellow-green…

nuclear holocaust. So, the only kind of conflict that the United States dared to wage in the nuclear era was limited war. After all, in a nuclear age, would it not be dangerous in the extreme, even perilously irresponsible, to attempt to compel our enemy to do our will ? A nuclear state is a state that no one can…

the modern and late-modern periods. During the French Revolution, citizens became legitimate targets since war became “total in scope and aims.” During the early 1790s, the French so-called Reign of Terror took several actions against its domestic enemies in order to silence any opposition. French revolutionaries’ actions primarily included governmental repression, most directly in the form of about 17,000 legal executions and 23,000 illegal ones. These actions instigated the characteristics…

for seeing a group defy the odds and come out victorious. When 300 Spartan soldiers, along with men from other Ionian city states, gazed at the sea of Persian men amassed in front of them, no doubt they knew they would be crushed by the waves of the enemy. King Xerxes overlooked the site of the battle from his throne with complete confidence. How could 80,000 of his great army lose to 5,000 Greeks? Finally…

mankind and bring justice against the enemy at fault. Despite being through a religious point of view, St. Aquinas ' writings are universally accepted as the standards for an ethical…

Escalation - On the ground in South Vietnam the outlook remained grim in the final weeks of 1964, as the Vietcong continued to make gains. U.S. officials responded by laying secret plans for an escalation of American involvement. On July 28, Johnson publicly announced a significant troop increase, disclosing that others would follow. By the end of 1965, more than 180,000 U.S. ground troops were in South Vietnam. In 1966 the figure climbed to 385,000. In 1967 alone U.S. warplanes flew 108,000…

How is the futility and hypocrisy of war and bureaucracy explored by Joseph Heller and Francis Ford Coppola in Catch-22 and Apocalypse Now respectively? Catch-22 authored by Joseph Heller and Apocalypse Now directed by Francis Ford Coppola are critically considered two of the finest examples of contemporary anti-war literature and cinema, despite neither being explicitly against the concept of combat as such, but rather, both opposing the bureaucratic absurdity that war inevitably entails.…

our time the 21st century, the intense increases in brutalities against civilians during armed conflict are constantly on the increase. 19% of casualties were civilians during World War I, and approximately half of World War II sufferers were non-combatant and even in the 1980s and 1990s, the majority of casualties experienced through armed conflicts (80%) were civilians (Bhutta, Yousafzai et al. 2010). When gathering the frequency consequence of violence against civilians, armed conflict is…