is war really football? or futbol?
May. 5th, 2008 02:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerTwo years old, and Grauniad hyperbole instead of terribly thoughtful analysis, but entertaining none the less, if not least for this passage:
But if it's OK to see sport in terms of war, what happens if war is seen in terms of sport? What if you score touchdown after touchdown, declare mission accomplished but then discover that the enemy has kept on playing? What if you see foreign policy as a series of short, brutal and self-contained "plays" but your foe keeps going for the full 90 minutes? What happens if you play American football against a team playing soccer? Or chess? What happens when a culture based on carefully considered and rigorously practiced game plans based on the anally retentive study of millions of statistics comes up against a culture based on flow and improvisation? In short - what sort of idiot brings the Battlestar Galactica to a knife-fight?
British writer Tommy Udo is not alone in noticing how closely fully equipped US troops resemble American football players.
"It's the body armour and the good helmets. They get overconfident because they can maim some other trainee dentist at high school when they're sporting all that padding. Then you're walking down a street in Saigon or Mogadishu or Tehran or Baghdad dressed up like Rocky Jones Space Ranger talking into your fucking Bluetooth set like you're in Starship Troopers when ...BAM! ...here comes wee Achmed armed with a bomb made from a Coke tin, some Mintos and a fistful of panel pins."
But if it's OK to see sport in terms of war, what happens if war is seen in terms of sport? What if you score touchdown after touchdown, declare mission accomplished but then discover that the enemy has kept on playing? What if you see foreign policy as a series of short, brutal and self-contained "plays" but your foe keeps going for the full 90 minutes? What happens if you play American football against a team playing soccer? Or chess? What happens when a culture based on carefully considered and rigorously practiced game plans based on the anally retentive study of millions of statistics comes up against a culture based on flow and improvisation? In short - what sort of idiot brings the Battlestar Galactica to a knife-fight?
British writer Tommy Udo is not alone in noticing how closely fully equipped US troops resemble American football players.
"It's the body armour and the good helmets. They get overconfident because they can maim some other trainee dentist at high school when they're sporting all that padding. Then you're walking down a street in Saigon or Mogadishu or Tehran or Baghdad dressed up like Rocky Jones Space Ranger talking into your fucking Bluetooth set like you're in Starship Troopers when ...BAM! ...here comes wee Achmed armed with a bomb made from a Coke tin, some Mintos and a fistful of panel pins."
