friendly fire

147 results back to index


pages: 300 words: 85,043

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

friendly fire, market design, urban sprawl

See explosive ordnance disposal Execute exit explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) Extreme Ownership. See also specific topics in friendly fire for leadership failure fall back familiarity field training exercises (FTXs) fire power 1/506th fog of war business bonus structure in combat compared to ego in Extreme Ownership for goals of opposition in SEAL teams compared to fog of war mission blame for communication in e-mails on Extreme Ownership in friendly fire in Marine Corps ANGLICO in mistakes in QRF in shame from fog of war principle friendly fire (fratricide) Decentralized Command mission and in Vietnam frontline leaders frustration FTXs.

Inside the compound, the SEAL chief stared back at me, somewhat confused. He no doubt wondered how I had just walked through the hellacious enemy attack to reach his building. “It was a blue-on-blue,” I said to him. Blue-on-blue—friendly fire, fratricide—the worst thing that could happen. To be killed or wounded by the enemy in battle was bad enough. But to be accidently killed or wounded by friendly fire because someone had screwed up was the most horrible fate. It was also a reality. I had heard the story of X-Ray Platoon from SEAL Team One in Vietnam. The squads split up on a night patrol in the jungle, lost their bearings, and when they bumped into each other again in the darkness, they mistook each other for enemy and opened up with gunfire.

The squads split up on a night patrol in the jungle, lost their bearings, and when they bumped into each other again in the darkness, they mistook each other for enemy and opened up with gunfire. A ferocious firefight ensued, leaving one of their own dead and several wounded. That was the last X-Ray Platoon in the SEAL Teams. Henceforth, the name was banished. It was a curse—and a lesson. Friendly fire was completely unacceptable in the SEAL Teams. And now it had just happened to us—to my SEAL task unit. “What?” the SEAL chief asked with utter disbelief. “It was a blue-on-blue,” I said again, calmly and as a matter of fact. There was no time to debate or discuss. There were real bad guys out there, and even as we spoke, sporadic gunfire could be heard all around as other elements engaged insurgents in the vicinity.


Chasing My Cure: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope Into Action; A Memoir by David Fajgenbaum

Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, crowdsourcing, data science, Easter island, friendly fire, medical residency, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, the scientific method

Just one error in the genetic code or one mistake in an immune response can be deadly, because its effect multiplies as it cascades throughout the system. Militaries make mistakes all the time. Supplies are lost, equipment degrades, and, in tragic scenarios, armies can even accidentally fire on themselves. But imagine if friendly fire triggered more friendly fire. Which triggered more friendly fire. Which triggered more friendly fire. And all this assumes that we know everything there is to know about the interactions and functions of the immune system. We don’t. * * * — After getting discharged from Rex, I split my time between my dad’s house and my sister Gena’s.

As it turned out, besides the survival rate, what was known about idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease at that time was that—for an unknown cause—enlarged lymph nodes produce substances that lead to vital organ failure and death. To return to the military analogy, this isn’t just friendly fire begetting more friendly fire. It’s like the military dropping a nuclear bomb on every major city it was supposed to be defending. I explained it to my sisters and dad after they returned to my room. My grandparents and aunts arrived from Trinidad a few days later. We tried to be positive. At least now we had a name to curse.

As far as we knew when I was diagnosed, iMCD came down to cytokines, those immune cell secretions that do so much to trigger and coordinate the initiatives of the whole system. Well, one cytokine in particular: interleukin-6 or IL-6. Everyone makes and secretes IL-6; you’re probably secreting some right now. It helps us to fight off infections and cancer. But, in iMCD, IL-6 production goes into overdrive and doesn’t stop—friendly fire run amok—causing flu-like symptoms and life-threatening disturbances to the liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, and bone marrow. Why was it overproduced to start? That’s one of the things we didn’t know. Perhaps it was triggered by a particularly obnoxious foreign agent like a virus, or perhaps the emergence of cancer cells set it off.


pages: 566 words: 144,072

In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones

belling the cat, business climate, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, drone strike, failed state, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, open borders, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, trade route, zero-sum game

All four of its warrant officers had been either killed or wounded. Captain Steve Brown was suddenly in charge of a company that had a corporal acting as company quartermaster and a sergeant as company sergeant major. There was a lull in ground operations after the friendly-fire incident, and the north, along Highway 1, then became the main theater of operation.51 So-called friendly fire is an unfortunate reality on the battlefield. Two years earlier, U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman had been accidentally killed by his own platoon members in eastern Afghanistan. A long-haired, hard-hitting safety with the Arizona Cardinals in the National Football League, he held the franchise record of 224 tackles.

Gauthier, Commander CEFCOM, 22 September 2006, A-10A Friendly Fire Incident 4 September 2006, Panjwayi District, Afghanistan, p. 14. 43. Author interviews with Canadian soldiers, Kandahar, Afghanistan, January 13–17, 2007. 44. Captain Edward Stewart, Op MEDUSA—A Summary. 45. Board of Inquiry Minutes of Proceedings, p. 14; Captain Edward Stewart, Op MEDUSA—A Summary. 46. Author interviews with Canadian soldiers, Kandahar, Afghanistan, January 13–17, 2007. 47. Board of Inquiry Minutes of Proceedings, p. 14. 48. Alex Dobrota and Omar El Akkad, “Friendly Fire Claims Former Olympic Athlete,” Globe and Mail (Canada), September 5, 2006. 49.

In one incident in Balkh Province, police forces were attacked, captured, and disarmed by a drug cartel after an armed clash.37 And again, in the days following a police-led operation to capture Taliban fighters in Sangsar village in the southern province of Kandahar, an after-action report found that there was “no joint plan,” “no unity of command,” and “no intel sharing” between the police and Afghanistan’s intelligence service. The result was seven casualties and one friendly-fire incident. All Taliban escaped.38 In many ways, however, the police were an afterthought; the international training for law enforcement was simply not as good as it was for the Afghan National Army. In the course of four years, control over the police was shifted among three agencies—from the German lead in 2002, to the U.S.


pages: 287 words: 92,118

The Blue Cascade: A Memoir of Life After War by Mike Scotti

Bear Stearns, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, Donald Trump, fixed income, friendly fire, index card, information security, London Interbank Offered Rate, military-industrial complex, rent control

And we heard stories of Marines dying in helicopter crashes and of Air Force A-10s mistaking Marine amtracs for enemy vehicles, and strafing them with their 30mm cannons and just…just shredding those poor guys who were inside. “Friendly fire is a whole different level of hell. It is just a pure fucking waste. You’d never know if it was the result of ignorance or mistakes or incompetence, or confusing combat conditions and exhaustion, or just bad luck. But think about the parents and spouses of those who are killed by friendly fire. They don’t even get solace in the fact that their loved ones died fighting the enemy. Their loved ones died because somebody made a mistake. And think about the guys who are responsible for friendly fire and what that will do to their psyche for the rest of their lives.

You denied the white-phosphorus artillery shells that would burn at 5,000 degrees when the young Marines requesting them were being too aggressive, so the deaths of the people they were shooting at wouldn’t be so brutal. The deaths would be terrible but would maybe be quicker, and the people would not burn, as they would have from the white phosphorus. And you shut down the friendly-fire barrage that day in Baghdad. You saved lives. Remember? Yes. And Captain Griffin from Alpha Company shook your hand and looked you in the eye and said thank you. And Captain Moran said, “You saved the day, Scotti. You saved the day.” Those are honorable things. They are pure. Purer than most things.

It’s the most brutal thing that a human being can endure, both physically and mentally. Because almost everything that happens there can profoundly impact one’s life in some permanent way. And the impact can be either physically permanent, like death, loss of limbs, burns, or scarring, or mentally permanent, like the overwhelming regret or shame if you were the cause of friendly fire or responsible for the deaths of civilians or things like that. The pressure of this permanence and the nature of combat conditions stretch the human body and mind to their limits. Sometimes it stretches them beyond those limits and things snap and tear—like ligaments.” Kristian made a disgusted face when I said ligaments.


pages: 615 words: 191,843

Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda by Sean Naylor

digital map, friendly fire, Iridium satellite, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, old-boy network, operational security

But this doctrinal sleight of hand only papers over the cracks left when two generals at the same base each command forces operating over the same patch of ground, yet neither is answerable to the other, or to another commander in the theater of operations. In the Mountain TOC, the situation made officers uneasy. “There’s definitely some concern any time you’ve got two forces working in the same location, and there’s so little known about what one of them is doing,” Wille said. To reduce the risk of friendly fire and to share situational awareness, Task Force Blue permitted a single liaison officer from Mountain to hang out in their TOC, located at the other end of the airfield from Hagenbeck’s headquarters. But there was only one other exception to TF 11’s “never the twain shall meet” policy regarding conventional forces: Pete Blaber’s AFO.

“I respect them for the warriors that they are…but in my exposure to them their instantaneous reaction to this is ‘We just need to do the air assault and get in there and kill ’em all.’” The A-teams in Gardez who would accompany Zia into the valley were equally concerned. The Special Forces captains and NCOs thought the Rakkasans wanted to land far too close to Serkhankhel. Above all, the SF soldiers feared a friendly-fire incident between the Rakkasans and Zia’s troops. “We had a good clear idea of where the 101st was gonna go, [and] that was a stupid, stupid, stupid thing, because they’re landing right on an objective that I’m treating as a hot objective,” said a Dagger officer in Gardez. The constant references by Larsen and Wiercinski to “the psychological impact of helicopters on the battlefield” only reinforced the special operators’ view that the Rakkasans were more concerned with their place in history than with fulfilling the supporting role assigned them in the original plan.

Their difficulties were compounded by the fact that CFLCC’s order formalizing Mountain’s authority over the other task forces did not take official effect until February 20. Prior to that date, Hagenbeck’s staff held a series of important synchronization meetings to ensure that everyone knew what was supposed to be happening on the battlefield at each stage of the plan, in order to minimize the risk of friendly fire. With no authority to compel other task forces to send representatives, the Mountain staff found the right people rarely showed up. “We never had everybody in the same room at one time,” Wille said. “Even when we did have representatives there, they weren’t always decision makers. They didn’t always have the authority to speak for their commander.”


pages: 496 words: 162,951

We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Donald Davies, drop ship, friendly fire, machine readable, South China Sea

Up the slope, Lieutenant Joe Marm was trying to evacuate his casualties. "My weapons-squad leader, Staff Sergeant Robert L. Parker, organized a party to get out the wounded. He came back about twenty minutes later saying he could not get out because we were surrounded. Whether we were or not is still a question to me; it may have been friendly fire. But the enemy were maneuvering to our flanks. I asked permission to withdraw with the wounded. We policed up the dead. We had quite a problem with all the wounded, but met little resistance going back. When we reached the ditch which was our forward line of departure, the wounded were evacuated back to the clearing and we were resupplied with ammo.

I remember saying that Sergeant Hurdle must be mad at us ' he's shooting at us. That was because of the difference in the sound of that particular machine-gun fire and the other automatic weapons fire we had been receiving." Sergeant Gilreath and his men weren't really on the receiving end of friendly fire. Sergeant Paul Hurdle had been killed covering the withdrawal of his buddies in Herrick's platoon. But Sergeant Gilreath's sharp ears did not deceive him: The weapon he heard was, in fact, Paul Hurdle's M-60. After Hurdle and his gunners were killed, the enemy first used that gun on the cut-off platoon and then turned it against the troopers trying to fight their way through to rescue Lieutenant Herrick's men.

The two men embraced, agreed that this was "some kind of bad shit," and for a few brief minutes stolen from the battle raging around them, talked of home, family, and friends. Canto told the reporter: "If I live, I will be home for Christmas." Vince Cantu survived and made it back to Refugio, Texas, population 4,944, just in time for the holidays. FRIENDLY FIRE Duke bellum inexpertis. ("War is delightful to those who have no experience of it.") --Erasmus The ordeal of rifleman Arthur Viera, crumpled on the ground, terribly wounded, beside the body of Lieutenant Neil Kroger, was just beginning. "The enemy was all over, at least a couple of hundred of them walking around for three or four minutes--it seemed like three or four hours-- shooting and machine-gunning our wounded and laughing and giggling," Viera recalls.


pages: 265 words: 84,449

Roberts Ridge by Malcolm MacPherson

friendly fire, Iridium satellite

The original plan for Anaconda had called for the use of American and friendly Afghan troops to hammer Taliban and al-Qaeda forces, known to have regrouped in the valley in force for the winter, into a steep wall of high mountains. American troops would serve as the blocking anvil against which the routed enemy would be crushed, in theory. But the hammer never swung; it fled from the battlefield under lethal friendly fire from a U.S. gunship, from a shocked reaction to a “softening-up” bombardment that fizzled, and by ferocious mortar attacks by an enemy that was not going to be easily routed anywhere, much to nearly everyone's surprise. The enemy fighters weren't as much in the valley, as imagined, as they were in the mountains looking down on the Americans through the sights of heavy machine guns and mortars.

He planned to pull out of the dive at 1,500 feet above the mountain. As he came in the Viper screamed with a sound that curled the air. At that closer-than-danger-close range, Bartley needed a final clearance before he could shoot. Brown gave him the initials of his name, in essence saying that he accepted the risk of being hit by friendly fire. Bartley would strafe and drop bombs wherever he was told, but he knew that fingers would point at him if there was fratricide. He rolled in, but Brown did not see him on his first pass in time to give him final clearance, and Bartley did not put bullets on the target. He pulled off, made an immediate turn, and came back around on the same axis in an arc the shape of a kidney bean.

The Afghans' abandonment of the valley in the first ten minutes of the operation was originally ascribed to a fierce opposition, when the expectation was that the enemy in the valley would flee; instead, friendly Afghans, under General Zia Lodin, fled the field mainly due to a series of mishaps, including fratricide from a C-130U Spooky gunship, GRIM-31, that fired on the friendly Afghanis and their 5th SOG mentors, killing two and wounding fourteen. Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field chose not to respond to inquiries about the incident, while acknowledging the incident itself. As Milani put it in PITFALLS, “Heavy and sustained enemy resistance, coupled with an AC-130 friendly fire incident, halted the advance of Afghan military forces and caused a withdrawal to Gardez.” “The highest mountain . . . amounts of ordnance”: In PITFALLS, Milani wrote, “A 10,000-foot, snow-capped mountain, named Takur Ghar, appeared as the perfect location for such an observation post. That mountain dominated the southern approaches to the valley and offered excellent visibility into Marzak, two kilometers to its west.


Norco '80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History by Peter Houlahan

blue-collar work, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, index card, Peoples Temple, reserve currency

Classification: LCC HV6661.C22 N674 2019 | DDC 364.15/520979497—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052238 Jacket design by Jaya Miceli Book design by Jordan Koluch COUNTERPOINT 2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318 Berkeley, CA 94710 www.counterpointpress.com Printed in the United States of America Distributed by Publishers Group West 10987654321 For my father, who taught me the joy of a great story Dedicated to Deputy James Bernard Evans CONTENTS Author’s Note Prologue 1.The Jupiter Effect 2.Zeroed Out 3.The RSO 4.Takeover 5.The End of the World 6.Wineville 7.The Graveyard of Cars 8.Interstate 9.Ambush 10.Some Men Never Get to See Their Sons Grow Up 11.Shot Through the Heart 12.The Norco 3 13.Bricks in the Wall 14.Contempt 15.The Investigator 16.On Behalf of the People 17.Friendly Fire 18.Scandal 19.Who the Fuck Is Jerry Cohen? 20.Stockholm Syndrome Epilogue Note on Sources Acknowledgments AUTHOR’S NOTE THE MOTIVE FOR ROBBING BANKS HAS REMAINED THE SAME SINCE FEBRUARY 13, 1866, when members of the James-Younger Gang walked into the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty, Missouri, stole $60,000, and shot a bystander to death in what is widely believed to be the first bank robbery in United States history.

Soon veteran court watchers and just plain folk were lining up in the hallway outside the courtroom of Justice Hennigan to snatch up seats in the gallery for the best show in town. Ahead of them lay the most dramatic and contentious fight of the entire trial, over the single question most likely to determine whether the three defendants before them would live or die: Who really killed deputy James Evans? 17 FRIENDLY FIRE April 12, 1982. Vista, California. D. J. McCARTY SAT ON A BENCH IN THE HALLWAY OF THE SUPERIOR COURT IN Vista, hoping to God no one would notice him. The place was a zoo, spectators packing the seats inside the courtroom and spilling out into the hallway hoping someone might leave so they could take their place.

When the shooting started, McCarty threw open his passenger door, jumped out with his fully loaded gun, closed his eyes, and began spraying automatic gunfire all over the place, unable to control a weapon he had never fired before. When Jim Evans heard gunshots coming from behind him, he whipped his head around to look and a bullet from D. J. McCarty’s gun struck him in the right eye, killing him. Friendly fire, happens all the goddamn time. McCarty was just too ashamed to admit what really happened, they said, and was hiding behind the “thin blue line” of fellow cops lying to protect him, all of it aided and abetted by a prosecutor willing to do anything to send three men to the gas chamber. D.J. eyed the thick binder sitting on the bench next to him stuffed with incident reports, a transcript of his pretrial testimony, and some other documents he could refer to while on the stand.


pages: 516 words: 1,220

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks

business process, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Centcom reviewed his decision, and a month later scaled it back, telling him it was "unacceptably aggressive," according to a subsequent Pentagon inquiry. He was told to drop ten of the twenty-nine interrogation procedures he had approved. His superseding memo incorporating that order was issued on October 12. Friendly fire worsens Fallujah *s woes As the war intensified in the summer, it brought with it a series of incidents in which newly wary U.S. troops fired on civilians, such as carloads of families hurrying to get home before curfew. A Reuters cameraman was killed because a soldier thought the device on his shoulder, seen from a distance, looked like a launcher for a rocket-propelled grenade.

Assem Mohammed, one of the police officers, said later, while recovering from a gunshot wound at Fallujah General Hospital. "They keptfiring,and we kept shouting at them, 'We are police! We are police!'" In the course of the three-wayfirefight—whichinvolved U.S., Iraqi, and Jordanian police, who were all ostensibly allies—a good part of the nascent Fallujah police force was killed. "It was the deadliest friendly-fire incident in the six-month-old occupation, and it left tremendous bitterness on both sides," wrote Bing West, the defense analyst who spent months observing U.S. operations in Anbar province. GETTING TOUGH 241 In the weeks after that, Kipling, the MP officer, recalled, the Iraqi police frequently were wary of U.S. troops.

John's Press, 2005). 240 other countries: The two Sanchez memoranda on permissible interrogation techniques are "CJTF-7 Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy," dated September 14,2003, and the superceding document with the same title dated October 12,2003. NOTES 453 240 "They shot at us for about an hour": The Stars & Stripes article quoting Iraqi police about being shot by U.S. troops near Fallujah was by Terry Boyd, and was published on September 13,2003. 240 "It was the deadliest friendly-fire incident": Bing West's book No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah (Bantam, 2005). 244 "Then all hell broke loose": Wallen was quoted in an article by the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, "Combat Heroine: Teresa Broadwell Found Herself in the Army—Under Fire, in Iraq," that ran on November 23, 2003. 249 "We think the insurgency is waning": Hertling was quoted by Ron Jensen in "Iraqi Insurgency Is Waning, General Says," Stars & Stripes (November 9,2003). 253 "the means toward the strategic goal": This T.


pages: 244 words: 82,548

Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer by Alan Huffman

blood diamond, British Empire, friendly fire, illegal immigration, no-fly zone, satellite internet, Skype

During his first trip he had observed that the Libyan war veered between moments of careful posturing and incredibly dangerous encounters, many of them brought about by the rebels’ ignorance of combat. The fighters weren’t trained soldiers and, as a result, there was a great risk of getting hit by friendly fire or being caught in an unplanned counterattack. Working in such an environment obviously had precious little in common with wedding photography; it was more like photographing a crime scene while the crime was still taking place. In the town of Brega, Hetherington had watched in alarm as the war turned its focus on him.

Mahmud el-Haddad, an anesthetist who worked at al-Hekma, observed, “No one in Misrata was trained to fight in a war. Nobody has a gun. Everybody is trying to find a weapon, and when they do, sometimes they don’t even know what the weapons are.” The results were occasionally disastrous, with many rebels killed or injured by friendly fire, but as Ibrahim Safar, a forty-four-year-old radio announcer who also joined the rebels, said, “We had no choice but to fight. The Gaddafi troops had come to kill us and our families. It was evil. Evil had come here, to our homes.” Computer engineers, journalists, lawyers, students, shopkeepers, truck drivers, mechanics, dock workers, businessmen, and unemployed laborers became soldiers overnight, arming themselves with anything they could get their hands on.

Among the rebel photographers was Abdulkader Fassouk, a slight man of twenty-six who smiled and laughed easily and whose filming earned him a terrific scar running down the middle of his neck, with a corresponding exit wound on the back of his shoulder. Fassouk, who been shot twice in previous episodes, was filming on the front lines when he was hit at close range by a round from a Kalashnikov, the result of friendly fire from a rebel who was trying to get his gun unjammed. Judging from Fassouk’s scar, it seemed impossible that he could have survived, and his brother later observed, “It was a kind of magic.” Not surprisingly, that episode was also photographed and filmed. Liohn also filmed Fassouk’s arrival at the hospital where, later that day, a mortar round killed one of the doctors.


pages: 423 words: 126,375

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor, Donald Kagan, Frederick Kagan

Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, HESCO bastion, indoor plumbing, land reform, no-fly zone, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

This lack of unity of command occasionally caused problems, particularly when sof conducted raids in our area without informing anyone. The combat team then had to deal with the often lethal consequences to the Iraqi civilian population, while the sof departed back to their secure bases outside the area. The risk of “friendly fire” incidents in such circumstances was also high, but as time went on better liaison arrangements were fashioned and communications between organizations improved. It was not an ideal situation, but given the lines of authority in the sof world, there was zero chance of getting a firmer grip on their activities.

I believe we easily could have convinced them that it was in their best interests to sign. Instead, peeved at the behavior of the ird representatives, the Rusafa District Advisory Council refused to sign the contract, the ugly Americans stormed out of the meeting and back to their lair in the Green Zone, and Chuck Sexton and I were left holding the empty bag. Friendly fire and escalation-of–force (the procedures used by friendly forces to decide when to fire at possible assailants, including civilians in a number of regrettable episodes) incidents that could destroy innocent lives were constant concerns. One such episode during this period was particularly devastating.

Although mistakes occur in combat, the Ready First Combat Team had Rusafa 77 committed several fatal and near-fatal errors on these two nights and I was determined to do better in the future. I ordered the Ready First Combat Team S-3, Major Mike Shrout, to conduct a formal investigation into the friendly fire and the Ready First Combat Team Executive Officer, Major Cliff Wheeler, to investigate the killing of the civilians in al-Sha’ab. As usual, they did a professional and thorough job, and I had them summarize the results to the entire leadership of the combat team. We had committed three major errors.


pages: 590 words: 152,595

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

The Tornado’s IFF signal, which would have identified the blip on their radar as a friendly aircraft, wasn’t broadcasting. Even if it had been working, as it turns out, the Patriot wouldn’t have been able to see the signal—the codes for the IFF hadn’t been loaded into the Patriot’s computers. The IFF, which was supposed to be a backup safety measure against friendly fire, was doubly broken. There were no reports of coalition aircraft in the area. There was nothing at all to indicate that the blip that appeared on their scopes as an anti-radiation missile might, in fact, be a friendly aircraft. They had seconds to decide. They took the shot. The missile disappeared from their scope.

In all, they were responsible for 45 percent of all successful ballistic missile engagements in the war. Later, the investigation cleared the lieutenant of wrongdoing. She made the best call with the information she had. Other Patriot units were fighting their own struggle against the fog of war. The day after the Tornado shoot down, a different Patriot unit got into a friendly fire engagement with a U.S. F-16 aircraft flying south of Najaf in Iraq. This time, the aircraft shot first. The F-16 fired off a radar-hunting AGM-88 high-speed anti-radiation missile. The missile zeroed in on the Patriot’s radar and knocked it out of commission. The Patriot crew was unharmed—a near miss.

Apache gunships radioed to say they were coming in on a gun run to hit the people on the rooftops. The U.S. advisors frantically ordered the Iraqi soldiers to pull back. Then at the last minute, the Apaches called off their attack. They told us they thought the “enemies” on the rooftop shooting at us were friendlies. From their vantage point, it looked like a friendly fire engagement. The U.S. advisors yelled at the Iraqis to stop firing and mass confusion followed. Word came down that the people at the other end of the street—probably the ones who were shooting at us—were Iraqi police. Some of them weren’t in uniform because they were members of an auxiliary battalion that had been tapped to aid in the initial gunfight.


pages: 1,153 words: 261,418

Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France by James Holland

Bletchley Park, friendly fire, Kickstarter, the long tail

This meant that the bigger the operation and the greater the number of component parts, the harder it was to operate with tactical agility. Any forward-attacking operation had to be carried out in collusion with the artillery, with the tactical air forces, with engineers, infantry and armour. Timings had to be coordinated to ensure advancing troops were not hit with friendly fire. Ammunition, reserves, fuel all had to be brought forward to maintain the necessary weight of fire. It was the constraints of wealth against the freedom of poverty; the Germans could organize themselves more quickly because they had so much less to organize. All of this Monty understood very clearly and these considerations, as well as the Allies’ experience of being on the offensive against German forces since the autumn of 1942, were what shaped his own views on the OVERLORD plan and those of the Allied staff officers, American, British and Canadian, who were helping both to shape it and to prepare the detail.

They could barely contain themselves – yet Serpent and Bezo had not yet arrived back with the Citroën and that worried him. Then, at 3.15 a.m., instead of seeing canisters floating down, they heard a whistle and explosions. Instead of weapons, they had been on the receiving end of four bombs. ‘Nobody is killed or hurt,’ scribbled Leblanc, ‘but it’s not a good start!’ But whether an enemy bomber or friendly fire, they could no longer risk using La Pilvédière and so had to move again, this time to a small farm on the edge of some nearby woods.17 By now, the German troops all along the Normandy coast were being brought to full alert. At his billet inland, Leutnant Hans Heinze had only recently got to bed and had been fast asleep when he was roused and hurried to an observation post near Colleville, above the eastern end of Omaha Beach.

In all, nearly 11,600 aircraft were scheduled to fly on this day of days. Gabby Gabreski and the boys of the 56th Fighter Group were up early too, at 3 a.m., helping crews to hastily paint invasion stripes on the wings. One of the problems the Allied air forces had faced over Sicily and in southern Italy had been being hit by friendly fire. The idea of painting large black and white stripes on the wings and even fuselage would, it was hoped, make them easier to distinguish and so reduce the number of such incidents. Better, it was thought, to lose potential camouflage – never that effective in daytime in any case – than to be shot down, but the decision to add these stripes had literally been made at the eleventh hour.


pages: 413 words: 117,782

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences by Steven G. Mandis

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Litterman, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business process, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, eat what you kill, Emanuel Derman, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, housing crisis, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, performance metric, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, value at risk

I have donated the entire advance I received from Harvard Business Review Press for this book to educational and medical charities. 36. See D. Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and S. A. Snook, Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Blackhawks over Northern Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 37. Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision, 238. Chapter 2 1. A. Blitz, interview with John Whitehead, 2002, http://www.hbs.edu/entrepreneurs/pdf/johnwhitehead.pdf. 2. “I believe the most important thing I did was to set down in writing what Goldman Sachs stood for.

It’s about knowing that at every performance review, employees are evaluated for both their numbers and their values …” See Welch and Welch, “Goldman Sachs and a Culture-Killing Lesson Being Ignored.” 14. Jack Welch with Suzy Welch, Winning (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). Appendix A 1. Scott A. Snook, Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Blackhawks over Northern Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 225. 2. S. Dekker, Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2011). Johan Bergstrøm (“Listen to Sidney Dekker Lecturing about Drift into Failure,” October 10, 2011, http://johanniklas.blogspot.com/2011/10/listen-to-sidney-dekker-lecturing-about.html.) notes, “The drift concept offers the theory of how organizational failure and success emerge in incubation periods not characterized by incomplete interaction, but by non-linear effects of local interactions in environments characterized by goal-conflicts, competition and uncertainties.” 3.

Dekker, Drift into Failure, 14. 6. Dekker, Drift into Failure, 17. 7. Dekker, Drift into Failure, 17, 116. 8. Snook points out that the word “drift” implies a subtle movement. He believes that detecting such movement “requires a sensitivity to the passage of time. Single snapshots won’t do.” (See Snook, Friendly Fire, 225.) All explanations assume some passage of time. One of the goals of my study is to extend it further, beyond an event. 9. In Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984), Charles Perrow explains a normal accident as normal “not in the sense of being frequent or being expected … it is normal in the sense that it is an inherent property of the system to occasionally experience their interaction.” 10.


pages: 403 words: 132,736

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

At a certain stage, anyone trying to write about the gap between what the Indian state says it does and what it actually does starts running out of appropriate vocabulary. Hypocrisy is too mild a word to describe those who defend this system in the name of the poor. More diplomatically, Amartya Sen has compared the outcomes of the Indian state’s policies to “friendly fire,”23 when soldiers accidentally shoot their own men. Sen best illustrates this “lethal confusion” in his appraisal of India’s price support system for farmers, which is designed to reduce poverty. Under the policy, the government buys wheat and rice from farmers, giving them a higher price than the market would pay in order to increase their incomes.

Higher food prices hit everybody, but they hit the poorest the hardest, since they spend most or all of their incomes on food. In theory, the Fair Price shops should shield the poorest from higher prices by supplying them with cheaper food. But we have seen how the subsidized food outlets work in practice. As Sen’s “friendly fire” quip suggests, India’s food policy is aimed at an enemy called poverty. Instead it shoots the poor. By the same token, India’s judicial system, which we turn to in the next section, is supposedly blind. But it often has eyes for the rich and powerful. • • • It was one of those beautiful Indian dawns in which you savor every drop of mist before the heat of the day forces you back indoors.

India has been described as being a “rich-poor nation” with a “weak-strong state.”28 The writ of the state is visible almost everywhere you look in India; but it is also a state whose powers are easily hijacked by groups or individuals for their own private gain. Sometimes, as we discovered with Sen’s point about “friendly fire,” they even claim to be doing it for the benefit of the poor. The poor do not always take this literally. Often they sign away their allegiance to independent strongmen who operate their own private fiefdoms like parallel ministates. Such as Gawli. • • • “There is no pillow as soft as a clear conscience” said the poster with a picture of Mecca, the holy center of Islam, behind it.


pages: 434 words: 128,151

After the Flood: What the Dambusters Did Next by John Nichol

British Empire, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, Ford Model T, friendly fire, IFF: identification friend or foe, the market place

CHAPTER 6 The End of the Beginning In late April 1944, as part of the build-up towards D-Day, Exercise Tiger was taking place off the south coast of Devon. It involved 30,000 American troops, who were to practise a beach landing at Slapton Sands under live fire. A communications failure first led to a ‘friendly fire’ incident in which American troops were shelled by a British cruiser, but worse was to follow. A British corvette and a line of nine landing ships laden with American troops came under fire from German E-boats which had evaded British naval defensive screens. Two landing craft were sunk and two more badly damaged, with the loss of 750 US servicemen.

Allied bombers had already been pounding gun batteries and radar stations along the entire French coast, trying to avoid revealing the true focus of the impending attack by inflicting equal damage on areas far from Normandy. A thousand aircraft were involved in D-Day operations that night, and the fuselages and wings of all Allied aircraft, including 617’s, were painted with black and white stripes, like a piano keyboard, to minimise the risk of losses to ‘friendly fire’, since the volume of D-Day signals traffic was certain to swamp the normal IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) system that used a transponder to identify friendly aircraft to British radar. Bomber crews were also forbidden from jettisoning bombs over the Channel that night, because of the significant risk of hitting one of the hundreds of Allied ships making the crossing.

It was only that the nose of the plane came off or I’d never have lived myself.’5 Reid and Norris became PoWs, and it was only when they returned to the UK at the end of the war that they discovered that all five of their comrades had died, unable to escape from the aircraft as it plummeted to earth.6 Another 617 crewman saw ‘several unfortunate incidents where a stick of bombs from one of our aircraft hit another, which peeled over and then collided with another Lancaster. It was terrible, there were bodies tumbling through the sky. Nowadays it’s called “friendly fire” – we had a lot of that on daylight raids.’7 Colin Cole Wireless Operator Colin Cole’s Lancaster was another victim of ‘friendly bombing’: A strange article smashed through the window of the Lanc and hit the wireless equipment. It fractured the hydraulic oil pipe and I got smothered in oil.


pages: 522 words: 144,605

Spitfire: A Very British Love Story by John Nichol

belly landing, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, friendly fire, Suez canal 1869

At 6.15am on 6 September, Spitfires from 74 Squadron were scrambled by ground control to vector on an enemy presence over the River Medway in Kent. Two aircraft were shot down. But they were Hurricanes, not Messerschmitts. The scientists had to come up with a solution fast to prevent further ‘friendly fire’ tragedies: the first ‘Identification Friend or Foe’ system that could spot friendly aircraft was introduced. A transponder that was fitted onto RAF aircraft amplified and returned the incoming radar signal. It gave a distorted ‘blip’ on the radar operator’s screen, which made it easily identifiable as non-hostile on the ground controller’s screen.

Ldr Humphry, 125–6 Goering, Air Mshl Hermann, 21, 24, 25, 80, 86, 88, 279 and Malta, 138 revenge attacks on UK promised by, 231 Goetz, Horst, 234, 236 Goodwood, 97, 104, 404 Gort, Fld Mshl Lord, 149 Gracie, Wing Cdr ‘Jumbo’, 143–4, 147, 149 Griffon engines, 330–1, 355, 356, 362 and Spitfire’s climbing ability, 331 Grislawski, Alfred, 320–1 Grosvenor, Lord Edward, 18, 19 Gulf War, first, 8 Haakon, King, 109 Hadler, Karl, 394, 395 Halifax aircraft, 4, 127 Halifax, Lord, 60 Hamble, 129, 326 Hamburg, 346, 361–2, 363–4 Handley Page aircraft, 63 Hawker aircraft, see Fury aircraft; Hector aircraft; Hurricane aircraft; Tempest aircraft Hector aircraft, 48, 58 Heinkel aircraft, 8, 31–4, 61, 63 Henriquez, George ‘Bunny’, 240–1 death of, 355 Hippo Regius, 189 Hitchcock, Alfred, 391 Hitler, Adolf: Churchill on, 56 and Churchill’s Battle of Britain speech, 56 and Czechoslovakia, 23 and Egypt, 138 and forces’ diversion from Russia, 283 and French North Africa surrender, 187 and Goering’s Blitz request, 86 and Horthy, 24 last stand of, 381 and Malta strategy, 230 and Poland, 24 and Russia, invasion of, 107 and Stalingrad, loss of, 226 and Sudetenland, 23 and Treaty of Versailles, 15 and Tunisia, 188 Hitt, Aircraftsman, 219–20 Holmes, Ray, 86–7, 134, 360–6, 360, 376–7, 381–2 Home Defence Force, 40 Hornchurch, 82, 167, 173 Horthy, Adm. Miklós, 23–4 Hudson aircraft, 385 Hughes, Tom, 274, 275–7, 296, 296 bails out, 276 Hunter aircraft, 8, 407 Hurricane aircraft, 2, 7, 20, 21, 30, 407 and defence of France, 40 dive-bomber conversions of, 172 and friendly fire, 29 and German morale, 87–8 ‘Hurribombers’, at Dieppe, 172, 180 and Luftwaffe, over Malta, 151 (see also Malta) and Me109 ‘F’, 139 and production difficulties, 61 protecting London, 86–7 Spitfire compared with, 258 Hutton, Len, 258 ‘Identification Friend or Foe’ system, 285–6, 293 Imperial War Museum, RAF Duxford, 4–5 Imphal, 307, 310 India: and Japan, 308, 309, 310, 318 squadron posted from Italy to, 309 Inverness, 256 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 25, 259 Italy (see also towns and regions): American troops land in, 295 British pressure to invade, 284 and Farish’s Mark 5 solo flight, see Farish Flt Lt Greggs ‘Spanner’ and Fritz X missile, 287, 294 Germans retreat from, 7 Goering sends fighters and bombers to, 138 invasion date set for, 273 invasion of, 284 and mysterious bomb, warships hit by, 286–7 and seaborne landing behind German lines, 295 Sicily seen as springboard to conquest of, 272–3 sortie over, by 185 Squadron, 368–70 Spitfire–Dornier battle over, 288–92 surrender of, 284 and toppling of Mussolini, 283 Iwade, anti-aircraft battery outside, 69 Jablo propeller blades, 215 Japan: and air battle over Burma, 313–17 and India, 308, 309, 310, 318 and Pearl Harbor, 116 and Singapore, 139 Johnson, Amy, 121, 237 Johnson, Johnnie, 104, 163, 174, 175, 176, 389, 390 Junkers aircraft, 30, 61, 63, 144, 158, 226–7 and bombing from height, 71, 231 Britain bombed by, 231–2 and Malta, 144, 161–2 Me109s provide top cover for, 320 and Soviet lines, 320 Spitfire’s high-altitude pursuit of, 233–6 Kasserine Pass, 214, 218, 219 Kearins, Terry, 114–15, 241–54, 251, 256, 327, 329 Kennedy, Joseph, 59 Kesselring, Gen.

., 141–2 (see also Malta) Rose-Price, Arthur, 66–7 Royal Air Force (see also Spitfire aircraft; squadrons): and after-action reports, 34 Berlin’s defences penetrated by, 86 and call for volunteers, 58 and demands of modern air warfare, 17 at Dieppe, see Dieppe and Dunkirk, see Dunkirk 11 Group, 62, 66 Farlow joins, 1 Fighter Command, 34, 39, 53, 55, 58, 61, 103, 173, 331 and Fighter Control System, 39 and ‘finger four’ formation, 103 Fw190 captured by, 166 and Fw190, plan to steal, 165 high-altitude interception flight formed by, 232 liaison between US 8th Air Force and, 264 Lord’s Cricket Ground training centre of, 258 losing control of SE skies, 85 losses suffered by, 53, 62, 66, 76, 81, 91, 103, 112, 147–8, 151, 155, 162, 169, 182, 229 and Luftwaffe, intention to ‘wake up’, 98–100 and Luftwaffe North Africa counter-attack, 210 Martlesham test airfield of, 20 and mock dogfight, 51–2 and pressure on Luftwaffe, 198 Spitfire used as meteorological craft by, 405 squadrons of, see under squadrons 324 Wing, 220, 273, 285, 304, 375 and Vee formation, 62, 99, 102–3 Volunteer Reserve of, 86, 92 Royal Auxiliary Air Force, 240 ethos of, 19 and fate of Britain, 61 squadrons of, see under squadrons Royal Navy, 30 and He111s, 31–3 Malta supply escort of, 159 Russia: German divisions press down on, 186 German invasion of, 107 Hitler diverts forces from, 283 and looting from Hitler bunker, 381 Luftwaffe bomber force in, 231 at Potsdam Conference, 381 and Rall’s kills, 319 and Red Army’s offensive against Nazis, 319 Russian Revolution, 232 Rye, 99, 333 S.84 aircraft, 191–2 Salerno, 284, 286, 287–8, 291–4, 295 Sassoon, Sir Philip, 18 Schneider Trophy, 14–15, 17, 350 Scott, Allan, 13–14, 111–13, 122, 153–4, 153, 155–7, 158, 160, 161, 398–400 Distinguished Flying Medal for, 399 test-pilot role of, 399 Scott, Lena, 14 Scott, Peter, 182–3 Seafire aircraft, 8, 404 Selsey, 256 The Seventh Veil, 391 Sheen, Flying Officer Desmond, 32–3 Sherman tanks, 211 Sicily, 272–84, 294 and airmen’s piano sessions, 280–1 Allies’ assault on, 273–4 invasion date set for, 273 slips from Nazi control, 279 Singapore, loss of, 139, 309 Siskin aircraft, 16 Smith, Sgt Alan, 103–4 Smith, Joe, 99 Solent, 322 Sommer, Lt Erich, 234 Souk-el-Arba, 196, 198–9, 204, 207, 218 Souk-el-Khemis, 217–18, 220 Southampton, HMS, 30 Spain: civil war in, 21, 23, 24, 29 and Messerschmitt, 21 Spezia, 370 Spink, Air Marshal Cliff, 8–9, 406–7 Spitfire Ace, 403 Spitfire aircraft (see also Royal Air Force; squadrons): aircraft-carrier take-offs by, 136–7, 154 (see also Wasp, USS) appearance of, 2, 7, 19, 53–4, 67, 219, 405, 407 in Arab–Israeli War, 405 and assault on Sicily’s air defences, 273 attack on Strawn’s, 224–5 (see also Strawn, Harry) in Battle of Britain film, 398 and battle over Italy, 288–92 beer kegs carried by, 328 Bird’s final journey in, 9–11 Bird’s wartime experiences of, 6–7 blackouts induced by, 22, 41 British public impressed by, 22 and bubble-type canopy, 238 and change to Meteors, 380 Chindits joined by, 308, 310 and Churchill’s requests to Roosevelt, 141, 148 (see also Malta) climb rate of, 220, 331, 356, 404 cone of bullets from, 50 cost of producing, 53 and defence of France, 40, 48 delivery-date problems of, 23 and desert conditions, protection against, 190–1 and Dieppe, see Dieppe different ‘Marks’ of, in different theatres of war, 233 dogfight advantages of, 22, 44, 50, 73 dogfight training exercises with, 240 drop tank fitted to, 137, 143 elderly veterans given chance to fly in, 398 engines in, see Merlin engine F10/35 specification for, 17 fabled status of, 7 Farlow’s final visit to see, 2–3 ferried to Russia, 319 final version of, 8 first Eastern Front appearance of, 319 first flight of, 4, 18 first war action of, 29 and friendly fire, 29–30 funeral fly-past by, 404 German Heinkel brought down by, 8 and German morale, 87–8 and German transporters, 227–8 Germans attempt to match agility of, 101 ‘greatest flying machine ever built’, 357 and gunsights, 73, 98 handling of, 134 He111 aircraft’s action with, see Heinkel aircraft and high-altitude low temperature, 233 and high-altitude pursuit of a Junker, 233–6 high-octane fuel for, 51–2 horrifying incident concerning, 208–9 Hurricane compared with, 258 improvements to and evolution of, 7–8, 50–1, 404 increased speed of, 20, 22, 404 and intelligence gathering, 124 and Jablo propeller blades, 215 Japanese air battle with, 313–17 K5054 prototype for, 15, 18, 21 in Korean War, 405 landing speed of, 297 lost over Russia, 321 Luftwaffe learns from, 52 and Luftwaffe, over Malta, 151 (see also Malta) in Malaya, 405 Malta calls for, 140 Malta landings by, 144, 150 manufacturing rate of, 24–5, 29 Mark I, 7, 22, 37, 51, 99, 102, 240, 331, 349, 362, 404 Mark II, 50–1, 59, 134 Mark V, 102, 107, 117, 136, 137, 165, 173, 176, 181, 190, 207, 215, 217, 218, 231, 260, 297–301, 319 Mark VII, 233, 309, 341 Mark VIII, 308–9, 310, 311 Mark IX, 7, 166–7, 173, 176, 181, 218, 219–20, 223, 232–3, 238, 288, 295, 302, 308–9, 328, 357, 369 Mark XI, 335, 345–6, 347, 348, 349–50 Mark XII, 331–2 Mark XIV, 330–1, 355–6 Mark XIX, 362, 377 Mark 47, 8 and Me109 ‘F’, 72, 139, 145 Merlin engine in, see Merlin engine as meteorological craft, 405 ministry’s early order for, 21 mock dogfight involving, 51–2 naming of, 17 new propeller provides more speed for, 215 and North Africa, see North Africa and nose-dive prevention during taxiing, 210 number of countries operating, 404–5 numbers built during 1936–46, 404 and Ohio defence, 160–1 and oxygen, 262 and Peart’s Me109 encounter, 193–5 precision engineering needed for, 55 and pressurised cockpit, 233, 309, 341 and production difficulties, 55, 61 propellers on, 2, 19, 20, 50–1, 215 Quill’s first flight in, 19–20 Quill’s record-breaking flight in, 24 at RAF Duxford, 5 and rearward sight, 309 and recruiting posters, 92, 96, 114 refurbished, ferried to Russia, 319 remains premier fighter, 120 restoration and showing of, 398 Robertson’s crash-landing in, 205–6 Roddis funeral fly-past by, 404 Rommel attacked by, 328 scrambling, 58 seen as bad for morale, 73 seen as world-class fighter, 51 sold off, broken up for scrap, 398 sound of, 2, 5, 9 Soviet 821st Fighter Regiment, 321 Soviets put best pilots into, 321 split peas used in development of, 21 Stalin’s request for, 319 Strawn’s magazine interview concerning, 229 309 Squadron’s batches of, 215, 223 ‘top cover’ provided by, 46, 175, 215, 223 turning ability of, 194 upside-down flying by, 52, 111, 238 US fighters compared with, 118 US squadrons of, 117 and V1 flying bombs, 332, 336 various theatres of war involving, 404 veterans’ flights in, 398–402 in war’s aftermath, 398 wartime losses of, see under Royal Air Force and Wasp, 142–3, 147, 148 Weymouth patrols by, 64–5 wingspan of, 142 withdrawn from frontline action in USSR, 321 and women, 121–35 Spitfire Fund, 53, 405 ‘Spitfire Girls’, reunions by, 401 squadrons (see also Royal Air Force; Spitfire aircraft): 16 Squadron, 346, 349, 351 22 Squadron, 118 31st Fighter (US), 117 41 Squadron, 240 65 Squadron, 79, 125 66 Squadron, 260, 324, 338, 374 71 Squadron, 405 72 Squadron, 30–1, 33, 34, 196, 198, 207, 218, 274, 279 81 Squadron, 189, 189, 190, 207–8, 277, 278, 288, 309, 310, 386 91 Squadron, 333 93 Squadron, 30I, 303 124 Squadron, 111–12, 399 185 Squadron, 367–71 222 Squadron, 48, 81, 90, 380 232 Squadron, 179 234 Squadron, 36, 61, 63 242 Squadron, 208 309 Squadron, 116, 117, 168–9, 177, 178, 185, 211, 215, 223 331 Squadron, 173 332 Squadron, 173 485 Squadron, 255, 256, 327 504 Squadron, 86 541 Squadron, 360, 361, 377, 381 601 Squadron, 18, 19, 24, 40, 390 602 Squadron, 328 609 Squadron, 63, 65, 75 610 Squadron, 96, 105, 163, 164, 174, 175, 176 (see also Dieppe) 613 Squadron, 49 616 Squadron, 26, 42, 60, 102, 106 630 Squadron, 240 Eagle, 116 new grouping strategy for, 102 Stalin, Joseph, 169, 186, 319 Stalingrad, 226, 320 Stealth aircraft, 4 Steinhilper, Ulrich, 45, 73 Stormtroopers, 18, 23–4 Strawn, Harry, 115, 116–17, 120, 168, 169, 171, 177–8, 184, 186–8, 211–16, 223–6, 229 airborne attack on and injuries to, 224–6 German surgeon operates on, 225–6 new Spitfires praised by, 220 Strawn, Marjorie, see Asquith, Marjorie Stuka aircraft, 42, 47, 63, 64–5, 76, 146, 149–50, 319 Ohio targeted by, 160–1 and precision attacks, 71 Sudetenland, 23, 92 Supermarine, 17, 19, 29, 55–6, 79, 88, 99, 101, 309 subcontracting by, 23 Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), 346, 349 Tangmere, 77, 97, 102, 104, 181, 200, 322, 344 Tangye, Nigel, 28–9, 89, 263–71, 263, 326, 329–30, 333, 334, 372, 373, 390–3, 391 film shooting disrupted by, 392 Todd divorces, 391 tanks (see also panzer divisions): Churchill, 171, 179, 219 and major panzer–Allies North Africa battle, 211 Sherman, 211 Tiger, 211–12, 338 tanks and major panzer–Allies North Africa battle, 211 Taormina, 282 Taylor, Bamby, 295, 297, 301 Taylor, Rev.


Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy, Airman, Gangster, Kill or Die by Giles Milton

Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Khartoum Gordon

Brotheridge was one of the few men in his platoon who was more than just a comrade. But there was no time for sentimentality: a burst of German bullets sent the men diving for cover. News of other injuries reached Howard. Sandy Smith, platoon leader from the third glider, had a broken wrist. And Corporal Webb had got caught in friendly fire from a Sten gun and been shot through the leg and shoulder. But there was good news to accompany the bad. Howard’s sappers had successfully cut all the fuses and wires planted by the Germans, who had been intending to blow the bridge rather than let it fall into Allied hands. Howard had still heard nothing from the men storming Ranville Bridge, half a mile down the road.

Allied planners had realized that if troops survived the initial onslaught and got off the beaches, they could outflank the strongpoints from the rear. If so, they had a real chance of overwhelming them. Allied warships had enough fire-power to transform the struggle for the beaches. Omaha Beach alone had an eighteen-strong bombardment fleet. But the use of big naval guns risked hitting troops with friendly fire: on Omaha, it was uncertain if and when Admiral Carleton Bryant would order his vessels to enter the fray. Rommel’s military strategy was to hit hard and fast, counter-attacking the Allies while they were still on the beaches. To execute this he needed the 12th SS Panzer Division and Panzer Lehr.

‘It swept the town from one end to the other,’ pulverizing homes and spinning men into the air. There was no escape from the naval shells. When the dust finally settled, the full extent of the destruction was revealed. The Allied bombardment had caused ‘a severe number of casualties and a most tragic loss’. Sixty-four men who had survived the battle for Colleville had been killed by friendly fire. Joe Dawson was beside himself with rage. ‘I was angered by it,’ he fumed, ‘angered beyond all measure.’18 It was such a terrible waste of human life. PART VIII Win or Lose As troops pushed inland, two vast temporary and portable Mulberry Harbours were being towed in sections across the English Channel.


pages: 369 words: 90,630

Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nicholas Epley

affirmative action, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, drone strike, friendly fire, invisible hand, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, pirate software, Richard Thaler, school choice, social intelligence, the scientific method, theory of mind

This lesser minds effect has many manifestations, including what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own.21 Members of distant out-groups, ranging from terrorists to poor hurricane victims to political opponents, are also rated as less able to experience complicated emotions, such as shame, pride, embarassment, and guilt than close members of one’s own group.22 One series of experiments even found that apologies from distant out-groups, such as Canadians being asked to forgive Afghan soldiers for a friendly-fire incident, are relatively ineffective because those distant others are seen as relatively unable to experience remorse. Their apologies therefore seemed disingenuous.23 When the mind of another person looks relatively dim because you are not engaged with it directly, it does not mean that the other person’s mind is actually dimmer.

feedback, 8.1, 8.2, nts.1n parroting and progressive storytelling and, n feelings Female Brain, The (Brizendine) feminism Fermilab fetuses, mind debate and Fighter, The financial literacy programs, 7.1, 7.2 first impressions Fish, Stanley fishing industry flat-earth thinking, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, nts.1n flattery, 7.1, 7.2 floods fMRI scanners, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1 Fodor, Jerry football dehumanization of players in speed of motion and, n forgiveness For Love of Insects (Eisner) Fox News France, dehumanization of British by Francis of Assisi, Saint free will Fremont, Calif., GM-Toyota intrinsic motivation experiment at friendliness, experiments on perception of friendly-fire incidents frontal lobes Fryer, Roland Galilei, Galileo Gates, Robert gay rights, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2 “don’t ask, don’t tell” and Geller, Uri gender exaggeration of differences in, 6.1, 6.2, nts.1n, nts.2n similarities and stereotypes and, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, nts.1n, nts.2n General Dynamics Robotic Systems General Motors (GM) intrinsic motivation experiment and General Social Survey gift registries, n Gilbert, Daniel Gilles, Ralph Gilovich, Thomas God anthropomorphism and, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 5.1 egocentrism and, 5.1, 5.2 Goldman Sachs gorillas, 4.1, nts.1n Gould, Stephen Jay, 4.1, 6.1 Government Accountability Office (GAO), U.S.


pages: 316 words: 91,969

Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America by William McGowan

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, David Brooks, different worldview, disinformation, East Village, friendly fire, haute couture, illegal immigration, immigration reform, liberation theology, medical residency, microplastics / micro fibres, New Journalism, obamacare, payday loans, postnationalism / post nation state, pre–internet, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, yellow journalism, young professional

For example, when the former NFL football star Pat Tillman died after his unit of Army Rangers in Afghanistan came under friendly fire, it was a tragedy, and the Army commanders who tried to obscure the details in order to create a heroic narrative were deeply wrong. But could the whole, sad tale be reduced, as one Times editorial said, to a “bogus” story of heroism “used to bolster support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”? Was it so awful that his memorial service was “patriotism-drenched,” as Frank Rich put it? And just when did “friendly fire” become synonymous with “fratricide,” a much darker word that the Times used liberally in almost all of its Tillman stories?


pages: 1,433 words: 315,911

The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, War on Poverty

A South Vietnamese soldier flushes a father and son suspected of being loyal to the Viet Cong from the rice paddy in which they had been hiding, Mekong Delta, 1962. Construction workers and antiwar demonstrators fight for the flag during a demonstration on Wall Street in Manhattan, 1970. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., former Staff Sergeant Dwight Holliday finds the name of a friend, James Miremont, who died in his arms from friendly fire. CHAPTER ONE DÉJÀ VU 1858–1961 A wounded French soldier is evacuated from the battlefield at Dien Bien Phu, to be helicoptered to an army hospital at Hanoi in May 1954. The Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu signaled the end of their war with France and indirectly ushered in a new war, with the Americans.

If he wished to be promoted to general and given command of a corps, Diem told him, he needed to be far more prudent. Cao took the admonition to heart. Vann was cut out of military planning, and over the next ten weeks Cao mounted fourteen operations that lost just three men, all thought to have been killed by friendly fire. On December 22, Cao received the promotion for which he’d hoped. He was now a general, commanding the Fourth Corps and responsible for the whole of the Mekong Delta. Vann cautioned General Harkins that while he had worked hard to build up “Cao’s military leader image” over the past few months, the newly appointed general had not “yet developed a real aggressive attitude on his own.”

The adviser paled, horrified at what his men had done. “At that point,” Laurence recalled, “the company commander just about to be medevaced asked, ‘What kind of fucking war is this?’ ” A chopper lifted Laurence and his wounded sound man out before nightfall. When he got back to Saigon, the Army claimed there had been no friendly-fire incident—since no military source had officially reported one. It was at that point, Laurence remembered, that he came to believe what veteran reporters had been telling him: in Vietnam, truth really was the first casualty. The First Cavalry began moving again, leapfrogging from hamlet to hamlet.


pages: 565 words: 160,402

A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley

currency manipulation / currency intervention, defense in depth, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, land reform, operational security, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea

In a purely military sense, he acknowledged, some of those rules looked silly, but “if you are going to hold it together, they must be followed.”2 Lavelle’s successor, General John Vogt, arrived just in time for Easter. AT NOON ON 30 March 1972 the long-anticipated enemy offensive began in Military Region 1 with widespread attacks by fire. By midnight about 4,000 rounds of mortar, 122mm rocket, and 122mm, 130mm, and 152mm artillery fire had inundated friendly fire bases across the front. The next day a heavy ground attack struck Quang Tri combat base and Cam Lo was heavily attacked. Friendly troops were withdrawn from a crescent of fire support bases as enemy tanks were engaged by allied armor south of the Cam Lo River. In an early report to Admiral Moorer, Abrams advised that “the enemy’s offensive in Quang Tri Province involves a total of ten infantry and five artillery regiments” from the 304th and 308th NVA Divisions.3 This offensive, the enemy told his cadres, was intended to “gain decisive victory in 1972” by means of “wide-spread military attacks coordinated with mass popular uprisings,” actions that would “totally change the face of the war in South Vietnam.”

.: anticipates Tet Offensive (1968), 104, 106 on antiwar movement, 23, 93, 114, 298 on appearance and dress codes, 300 as Army Chief of Staff, 343, 346–48 assessment of NVA in Easter Offensive, 325, 329 on body count, 22–23, 145 on Cambodian incursion, 200–1, 203–4, 206–8, 210, 214 on charts and statistics, 35–36, 195 on civilian battle support, 324 on command incompetence, 295–96 command style, 31–33 commands MACV Forward, 12, 17 concentrates B-52 strikes, 334–35 on conditions among the troops, 298–99, 309–10 on conditions for peace, 352 on conditions in Laos, 246 consults with Thieu on ARVN leadership, 265–66, 330 controls B-52s, 121–22 on Walter Cronkite, 311 death of, 369, 382–83 on declining experience levels, 288 on discipline problems, 293–94 on drug problems, 291–94, 298 on Easter Offensive, 319, 321, 331, 337 on educating the press, 224–25 on effects of budget-cutting, 125, 127–28, 176, 268 on effects of Lam Son 719, 266–67, 270 on effects of U.S. air support, 327–28 on excessive use of force, 219–21 on failures in Lam Son 719, 260 fires Komer, 63 on friendly fire, 124 on Giai, 378 on Giap, 337 on Harriman, 150–51 on importance of local forces, 59–60 on importance of logistics war in Laos, 232–33 on incompetent Vietnamese military leadership, 186–88, 276, 330–31 increases bombing sorties, 44 on inexperience of U.S. troops, 2 on intelligence, 36, 51–52, 106, 131, 142 on interdiction in Laos, 120–21, 229 on interdiction of Ho Chi Minh Trail, 88–89, 198, 238, 275 on “Island Tree” operation, 278 on Kennedy, 142 on Komer, 61–62, 227 on Korean military methods, 192 lasting effect on U.S.

., 121, 125, 144, 150, 152, 221 on antiwar movement, 157–58 on bombing restrictions, 83 on Paris peace negotiations, 91–92 and phased U.S. withdrawal, 179 on planning for Cambodian in cursion, 201–2 and proposed bombing halt, 85–86 retires, 216 on strategy of attrition, 5 on Vietnamization, 137, 163–64, 215–16 “Where Do We Let Peace Come to Vietnam?” (Horton), 220–21 Whitehouse, Charles, 55 on friendly fire, 124 Williamson, Maj. Gen. Ellis, 186–87 Wollenberg, Col. William F., 333 Wright, Lt. Gen. John: on pacification program, 149 Yorty, Sam, 94 Young, Stephen: on success of the war, 219 Zais, Lt. Gen. Melvin: on new tactics, 103 in A Shau Valley operation, 141 Zumwalt, Vice Adm. Elmo, 93 on Nixon Administration, 129, 172 ABOUT THE AUTHOR LEWIS SORLEY, a third-generation graduate of West Point, also holds a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.


pages: 322 words: 99,066

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks by The "Guardian", David Leigh, Luke Harding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, air gap, banking crisis, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, drone strike, end-to-end encryption, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, friendly fire, global village, Hacker Ethic, impulse control, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, machine readable, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, operational security, post-work, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Levy, sugar pill, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

The more he read, the more alarmed and disturbed he became, shocked by what he saw as the official duplicity and corruption of his own country. There were videos that showed the aerial killing from a helicopter gunship of unarmed civilians in Iraq, there were chronicles of civilian deaths and “friendly fire” disasters in Afghanistan. And there was a mammoth trove of diplomatic cables disclosing secrets from all around the world, from the Vatican to Pakistan. He started to become overwhelmed by the scale of the scandal and intrigue he was discovering. “There’s so much,” he would later write. “It affects everybody on earth.

The Coldstream Guards’ unofficial blog described their mood at the time: “The overriding threat is that of suicide bombers, of which there have been a number in the recent past.” Four times in as many weeks, this unit appears to have shot civilians in the town in order to protect its own members. The worst was on 21 October 2007, when the US soldiers reported a case of “blue-on-white” friendly fire in downtown Kabul, noting that some unknown troops had shot up a civilian vehicle containing three private security company interpreters and a driver. The troops had been in “a military-type vehicle that was brown with a gunner on top … There were no US forces located in the vicinity of the event that may have been involved.


pages: 400 words: 109,754

Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan by Sean Parnell, John Bruning

clean water, digital map, friendly fire, operational security, traumatic brain injury

A fresh stream of RPGs joined in as Galang’s support-by-fire element risked hitting its own men in the hope of finishing us off before Delta could fight its way to us. The linkup between our battered platoon and Delta had to go flawlessly. There was no margin for error here. After all we’d been through, I could not stomach the idea of one of my men getting hit by friendly fire. I broke cover and started running downhill. Greeson shouted something and came after me, but I ignored him. Delta’s rigs reached the base of the hill, and I recognized Sergeant Chris Cowan standing tall in Captain Dye’s turret, going cyclic with his 240. Captain Dye’s remaining rigs blew through Galang’s flank security and struck the northern assault element from the rear and flank.

B-1 Lancer A supersonic long-range bomber that when loaded to max capacity, is capable of dropping over 125,000 pounds of ordnance in one flight. BFT Blue Force Tracker. A computer that mounts on the dash of a Humvee and tracks the location of all friendly forces in the area, displaying them on a digital map. blue-on-blue Military terminology for friendly-fire mishaps. breaking contact Military terminology that is synonymous with retreating on the battlefield. call sign A nickname used over the radio to identify units and people in combat. CCP Casualty Collection Point. The place where casualties are brought during battle. chest rig Military slang referring to a soldier’s chest-mounted ammunition holder.


pages: 729 words: 111,640

The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Centre of WWII's Greatest Battle by Iain MacGregor

Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, centre right, clean water, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, too big to fail

Having dug foxholes, the survivors directed fire onto the two blockhouses. A sporadic firefight erupted, peppering both German positions with machine gun fire. Roske heard the desperate calls coming in from Münch’s undermanned battalion CP and issued a rapid radio call for an airstrike. The tragedy of friendly fire that had virtually wiped out one of his companies a few hours earlier was almost repeated. Roske recounted: Despite my [earlier] protest at our own planes not dropping bombs near my area of operations, a German pilot unloaded too close to the pier, which, although it struck the Russians, also inflicted losses for us.

23 Perhaps after days of constant pressure coordinating multiple ground attacks, the Luftwaffe officer in question reacted badly to the intended gibe: That’s all you can say after we’ve been working day and night to procure the bombs, drag them into place, flying all hours, constantly, and defending ourselves to the bone! The regiment had overcome deadly friendly fire from the air, driven out a tenacious enemy in vicious house-to-house combat, and sustained yet more casualties from its own Stuka support just as they reached the Volga. But despite these setbacks, the 71st Division’s objective had been achieved and, in Dobberkau and Münch’s battalions’ case, even exceeded.


The Beach by Alex Garland

David Attenborough, friendly fire, Khyber Pass, South China Sea

The scene in front of me had sent so much adrenalin pumping through my system that my battering was forgotten. I could have run a marathon if necessary, let alone crept into the darkness. But we stayed put. We were transfixed by the dissection of the rafters. Every severed limb seemed to root me further to the spot. Friendly Fire I don't know how long the frenzy lasted. It could have been as long as half an hour. The cutters had to fret and struggle with some of the joints, twisting arms around until tendons gave way. But at some point, I noticed that the crowd had dispersed, sitting exhausted beside their handiwork or milling in the darkness.

Seeing Red Naturism The Good News Ich bin ein Beacher Dislocation The Decisive Moment Aspect One White Lies Ol' Blue Credit Phosphorescence The DMZ Zombie Fish-Eaters Bedlam Incubus Good Morning Epitaph The VC, The DMZ And Me Split The Third Man Shadowed Politics Dissent Whoosh, Boom, Zzz Ashes to Dust My Lost Shit To Those Who Wait Fine Thanks Cabin Fever Secrets Black Cloud Shh Fuckin' A Their Big Mistake I Know Abou' Tha' Cheap Shots Mama-San Reanimator Reasonable Doubt Up-ended Same-Same, But Different Spud-Bashing Is It Safe? Efforts Show, Don't Tell Spiked Don't Mean Nothing Potchentong A Loose End Something Happening Here What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear That Sound Apocalypse Now Friendly Fire But Nothing Strange But True


pages: 404 words: 119,055

One Day in September by Simon Reeve

Boeing 747, disinformation, fear of failure, friendly fire, New Journalism, Seymour Hersh, two and twenty, white flight, Yom Kippur War

“They wanted to fly to Munich and to leave us there, but Genscher and Strauss said, ‘The Israeli general and his companion are here, we have to find where they are and to take them.’”73 There were more than 450 policemen at the airfield, with state police reinforced by officers from neighboring forces and even from the border police. It was the first time in German history all the different forces had cooperated. The four members of the German helicopter crews all survived. Five of the terrorists died. One German officer was killed and several more were injured, at least two by “friendly fire.” But not a single Israeli survived. The German “rescue” operation was a criminally shambolic failure. 7 Champagne Celebrations From the moment the hostages and terrorists left the Olympic Village to fly to Fürstenfeldbruck, a media blackout was imposed on the closing stages of the tragedy.

Even now, nearly thirty years after the massacre at Fürstenfeldbruck, photographs have vanished from files, documents have disappeared, and officials present at the Olympic Village and Fürstenfeldbruck have been cajoled or even threatened and ordered not to talk about the massacre. For example, during investigations for the documentary it has been alleged that one of the pilots injured by “friendly fire” at Fürstenfeldbruck was visited in the hospital by a senior German official and offered a bravery medal on the strict condition that he never speak publicly or to the press about what happened. More recently several German police officers were threatened with losing their pension rights if they spoke to the One Day in September production team.


pages: 395 words: 110,994

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

air freight, anti-work, antiwork, Apollo 13, business intelligence, business process, centre right, cloud computing, continuous integration, dark matter, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, index card, information security, inventory management, Kanban, Lean Startup, shareholder value, systems thinking, Toyota Production System

What started off as a medium-sized payroll failure snowballed into a massive friendly-fire SAN incident. Why? Because we are not talking to one another about what changes we’re planning or implementing. This is not acceptable.” “Second, John is right. We spent yesterday morning with our auditors, discussing a bunch of deficiencies they found,” I continue. “Dick Landry is already crapping bricks because it could impact our quarterly financial statements. We need to tighten up our change controls, and as managers and technical leads, we must figure out how we can create a sustainable process that will prevent friendly-fire incidents and get the auditors off our back, while still being able to get work done.


pages: 752 words: 201,334

Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Boycotts of Israel, Burning Man, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, New Journalism, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, Transnistria, Yom Kippur War

The words conformed to Shemer’s melody. Meir was writing a parody, nothing more, a song for a future campfire. “Jerusalem of iron and of lead and of blackness . . .” “Meir,” a friend interrupted, “no one is going to pick up your mail here.” “I’m just doodling,” said Meir. Chapter 6 “THE TEMPLE MOUNT IS IN OUR HANDS” FRIENDLY FIRE GET SOME SLEEP, that’s an order,” Motta said to Arik, who hadn’t slept in two nights. “But first check on the readiness of the Seventy-First Battalion.” Of all the battalions, the 71st had emerged most intact from the battle for Jerusalem. In less than twenty-four hours, the brigade had suffered nearly a hundred dead and four hundred wounded.

A team of volunteers had assembled hundreds of interviews, diary entries, and letters to wives and girlfriends from among the fighters. When Yisrael had a question about the accuracy of a detail, he consulted with Arik. Also on ethical questions, like whether to write that one of the officers had been killed by friendly fire. “We can’t write lies,” Arik said, “but we don’t have to reveal the whole truth.” Arik liked the diligent culture officer. He appreciated professionalism, and Yisrael was a fine editor. As for Yisrael’s right-wing politics, Arik dismissed that as harmless delusion. Let him and his friends imagine they can determine the future borders of the state; meanwhile, the Labor Party will continue to rein in the utopian fantasies of the Jews.

A Jordanian machine gun had been positioned at the opposite end, toward which the paratroopers charged. “Over and over. When one fell, another charged. For paratroopers there is no such thing as not fulfilling a mission.” They approached the hexagonal tower of the Rockefeller Museum, and entered the courtyard. Yoel pointed to a plaque commemorating three Israeli soldiers killed here by friendly fire. The group walked toward the Old City walls. They came to a sculpture of basalt stone, shaped like a massive uprooted tree trunk, a memorial for the Israeli scouts killed on the night before the breakthrough into the Old City. Yoel told the story of how the scouts, veterans of Unit 101 and the most elite commandos of the IDF, had missed the turn toward the Mount of Olives and found themselves exposed beneath the Old City walls.


pages: 392 words: 122,282

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Columbine, friendly fire, oil shale / tar sands, time dilation, working poor

Scott’s men stop shooting, as do the Marines firing at them in the distance. In his diary that night, Scott writes a considerably more concise and less florid entry than his previous ones: “Combat was not what I expected. How we all made it out without a scratch is beyond me.” IN ADDITION TO THE PROBLEM of friendly fire, Patterson’s Alpha Company snipers on the riverfront are dealing with the ambiguities of guerrilla war, not covered in the Marine Rules of Engagement. The ROE under which the Marines operate are quite naturally based on the assumption that legitimate targets are people armed with weapons. The problem is Iraqis dressed in civilian clothes who are armed not with guns but with cell phones, walkie-talkies and binoculars.

“Those were fucking doctors who a few weeks ago were doing nose and tit jobs in Santa Fe Springs,” Fick tells his men, laughing. “The fucking POGest of the POGs. Luckily, they’re not the best sharpshooters.” Several Humvees up the line are hit, but no Marines are injured. Within minutes of the latest near-death episode, Trombley is snoring, sound asleep. FIFTEEN ° AFTER THE FRIENDLY-FIRE incident outside Ar Rifa on the evening of March 26, Fick pokes his head into Colbert’s vehicle to inform him that the Marines’ night is just getting started. During the next six hours the battalion is going to race across open roads and desert trails, advancing twenty-five to thirty kilometers behind enemy lines, in order to set up observation on an Iraqi military airfield near a town called Qalat Sukhar.


pages: 687 words: 209,474

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Michael B. Oren

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, European colonialism, friendly fire, Mount Scopus, open economy, Seymour Hersh, Suez crisis 1956, Yom Kippur War

These movements went totally unobserved by the Egyptians. Preoccupied with enemy probes against their perimeter, they waited in vain for Supreme Headquarters’ order to counterattack, without which they would not move.11 As night fell, the Israeli assault troops lit their flashlights, each battalion a different color, to prevent friendly fire exchanges. But before the final signal could be given, Sharon received a phone call from Gavish. The Southern Command chief recommended that the attack be postponed for twenty-four hours to allow the air force, now free for ground support, to soften up the target. Sharon disagreed, but his response was garbled by electrical interference.

Our men threw the grenades back and crushed the trucks with their tanks.” Between Tal and Sharon’s forces, close to midnight and with lights blazing, passed the third of Israel’s southern divisions—Gen. Yoffe’s—en route to Bir Lahfan and Jabal Libni. Skirting Abu ‘Ageila to the north, threading through Sharon’s battlefield and exchanging friendly fire with some of his tanks, the lead Centurions of Col. Elhanan Sela advanced and turned southwest. Farther to the north, in the sandy wastes of Wadi Haridin, inched the 200th Brigade of Col. Yissachar “Yiska” Shadmi. Believed impassable by the Egyptians, the wadi had been studied by IDF paratroopers in 1956 and found suitable for tanks.

As many as twelve T-55’s and fifty armored personnel carriers were lost, but the Egyptians stalled the Israelis long enough for most of the 4th Division to escape across the Canal. Sharon’s Ugdah, while bogged down in a muddy riverbed, was hammered by missile fire that forced it to change direction—straight into a “friendly fire” duel with tanks from Yoffe’s Ugdah. The delay enabled Shazli’s Force to slip out of the trap Sharon was planning; the defenders of the al-Qusayma redoubt similarly managed to flee. Meanwhile, the Egyptian air force, though vastly reduced, continued to stage sorties, exploiting the proximity of their bases to the front.


pages: 158 words: 46,353

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield by Robert H. Latiff

Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, CRISPR, cyber-physical system, Danny Hillis, defense in depth, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, failed state, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Internet of things, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Nicholas Carr, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, VTOL, Wall-E

For example, many consider ballistic missile defense: Joseph Cirincione, “Brief History of Ballistic Missile Defense and Current Programs in the United States,” Testimony, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 1, 2000, http://carnegieendowment.org/​2000/​01/​31/​brief-history-of-ballistic-missile-defense-and-current-programs-in-united-states-pub-133. The random failure of a communications satellite: Laurence Zuckerman, “Satellite Failure Is Rare, and Therefore Unsettling,” The New York Times, May 21, 1998. The loss of GPS satellite navigation: “Friendly Fire Kills Three US Soldiers,” Guardian, December 5, 2001. Antibiotics are miracle drugs: Michael Enright, “The Looming Crisis of Antibiotic Resistance,” The Sunday Edition, CBC Radio, August 30, 2015. Chemicals enhance the food supply: Jacque Wilson and Jen Christensen, “7 Other Chemicals in Your Food,” CNN, February 10, 2014.


pages: 432 words: 127,985

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry by William K. Black

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

Wright’s other alternatives on the committee must have been even worse. St Germain, for example, had one of the poorest reputations of any member of Congress and was not popular among Democrats on the committee. Moreover, St Germain probably secretly opposed Wright’s actions of the FSLIC recap bill. FRIENDLY FIRE: TREASURY’S BLUNDER The Treasury Department did a generally low-key, competent job of lobbying for the FSLIC recap in 1987. However, Treasury made a serious mistake that provided the league with its best substantive argument. The blunder was trying to add another argument to an already winning argument: the supplementary argument ended up undercutting the winning argument.

THE ADMINISTRATION MAKES A SEPARATE, SECRET PEACE WITH THE SPEAKER Barry makes clear that Wright had utter disdain for President Reagan; it is also clear that the contempt was mutual. The irony is that the administration almost saved the Speaker from himself. Having already unintentionally damaged chances for a $15 billion FSLIC recap bill with their “friendly fire” assertion of the FSLIC’s purported inability to spend more than $5 billion in any year, the administration now engaged in intentional fire at Gray. With “allies” like this, who needed the league and the Speaker as opponents? The Reagan administration decided to make a separate peace with Wright.


pages: 506 words: 132,373

The Good, the Bad and the History by Jodi Taylor

friendly fire, global pandemic, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, place-making, urban sprawl

He could snap me like a twig and never notice. Keeping my voice calm, I said, ‘Derek’s gone. He left. It’s Max. Let me go, please.’ For a moment, I really didn’t think that was going to happen. There was no comprehension in his eyes. I remember thinking, wouldn’t it be ironic if – after everything that had happened to me – I died of friendly fire? Because here I was, all alone with a very sick Pennyroyal, and suddenly that was a very real possibility. I put some authority into my voice. ‘Pennyroyal, it’s Max. Let me go, please.’ The moment seemed to go on forever and then, slowly, his hands dropped. He lay back again and closed his eyes.

Pennyroyal vaulted the table, overturned it with a crash and took cover. Smallhope scrambled to join him, looking very white. Maybe she wasn’t as uninjured as I had thought. I stood up very carefully. Partly because my knees wouldn’t let me do anything else and partly because I didn’t want to alarm my colleagues out there. Falling victim to friendly fire was not on my agenda. Before I could move, there was the sound of boots as more Insight personnel stormed down the stairs. The firing started before they even entered the room. They obviously intended to spray the room with something lethal even before they were properly through the door. Eddie came first.


pages: 722 words: 225,235

The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East by Abraham Rabinovich

Boycotts of Israel, disinformation, friendly fire, Mahatma Gandhi, Seymour Hersh, Yom Kippur War

All eight tanks that had begun the descent were hit. Mor was blinded and lost an arm but his men managed to extricate him under fire and carry him back up the hill. Some men who managed to escape their burning tanks, including a badly wounded company commander, were captured by Syrian infantrymen. Greengold’s tank was hit too, apparently by friendly fire, but he did not feel it. The gunner, whose clothing was afire, lunged for the turret, and for an absurd and terrifying moment he and Greengold filled the narrow aperture and were unable to move. Greengold finally forced his way back down into the tank as the gunner scrambled out. Something inside the tank exploded, peppering Greengold’s face, and his clothes caught fire.

He had his men lower the antennas and the firing ceased. Morag remounted the road and led his tanks forward, but a torrent of missiles sent them scurrying back. The battalion from Raviv’s brigade assigned to Reshef moved into position a mile north to provide covering fire. Morag was concerned about friendly fire and asked the commander of the tank behind him to keep his eye on the nearest tank in the covering force. As he moved up to the road, the tank commander behind him said, “He’s swiveling his gun.” Morag ordered his driver to pull back. As he did, a shell exploded where he had just been. Morag asked Reshef to have Raviv’s battalion withdraw.

The Syrians had sniper rifles and night sights but they were also using Israeli machine guns they had taken from the outpost. More than once, Golani soldiers, seeing the familiar reddish tracers—readily distinguishable from the greenish tracers of Soviet ammunition—and recognizing the rhythm of the machine gun, shouted “Cease fire,” believing it was friendly fire from a unit that had gotten ahead of them. When they rose, they were hit. As he neared the point of contact, Sergeant Elbaz could hear commanders to his front calling on their men to charge. A rush forward would be followed by the sound of sniper fire and the sight of falling figures. The sergeant had picked up a Kalashnikov rifle from a dead Syrian.


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

The unit was ambushed and an explosion blew the Talon into the river. After the battle ended, the soldiers found the damaged control unit and drove the Talon right out of the river. Another Talon serving with the marines was once hit by three rounds from a .50-caliber heavy machine gun (meaning the robot was actually a victim of friendly fire), but still kept working. The repair facility in Waltham has even worked on one Talon that was blown up on three separate occasions, each time just giving it new arms and cameras. The iRobot team bristles at the idea that their systems are “agile but fragile.” They insist that the PackBot is tough too, but being more science-oriented, cite various statistics on how it can survive a 400 g-force hit, what they describe as the equivalent of being tossed out of a hovering helicopter onto a concrete floor.

So the shells had to be altered to incendiary rounds that blow up in midair, but are less effective. Also, R2-D2 apparently once mistook an American helicopter flying over Baghdad for the Emperor’s Death Star. It locked in on the chopper to shoot it down, as if it were a rocket with some funny rotors spinning on the top. So CRAM had to be reconfigured to avoid any “blue on blue” friendly fire incidents. Finally, R2-D2 does not come cheap. Once you count in all the radar and control elements, the CRAM required a congressional earmark of $75 million in funding. THE NEW WARRIOR AT HOME The “war on terrorism” hasn’t just taken place on battlegrounds far far away. The result has been the creation of immense bureaucracies and massive spending dedicated to this war at home, or what we now call “homeland security.”

The previous RMA “gold standard” of invasions had been the German blitzkrieg in 1940, in which the Nazis took over France in just forty-four days, “at a cost of ‘only’ 27,000 dead soldiers.” For the United States to seize Iraq in 2003, it took half the time, at .005 percent the cost (161 U.S. soldiers lost during the invasion, many of them actually killed by “friendly fire”). Again, the network-centric crowd cited that the key wasn’t that the United States was using fundamentally different weapons than its previous war, but that the networking into information technology had proven “central to American military dominance.” The transformation movement led by Admiral Cebrowski, and embraced by those in power, had seemingly proven that a revolution in war truly was at hand.


pages: 190 words: 52,570

The Planets by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, Colonization of Mars, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Suez canal 1869, Thales of Miletus

This possibility launches the first purely scientific voyage, under the command of Edmond Halley, the only Astronomer Royal ever to win a commission as captain in the Royal Navy. Between 1698 and 1700, Halley leads two expeditions across the Atlantic Ocean, and also to the Atlantic’s northern and southern limits until stopped by icebergs in fog. Off the coast of Africa and again near Newfoundland, Halley’s specially designed flat-bottomed vessel, the Paramore, draws friendly fire from English merchantmen and colonial fishermen who mistake her for a pirate ship. The map Halley publishes in color in 1701 fills the ocean with curving lines of varying lengths and widths describing degrees of magnetic variation east and west. The continents bordering the Atlantic serve merely to anchor the all-important lines, and to bear the cartouches, whose palm trees, muses, and naked natives have been bumped from the busy waters to the empty lands.


pages: 188 words: 54,942

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin

air gap, airport security, autonomous vehicles, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, drone strike, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Jeff Hawkins, Khyber Pass, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, performance metric, private military company, Ralph Nader, WikiLeaks

In February 2002, a drone pilot reportedly killed a tall Afghan who he thought was Osama bin Laden but turned out to be an innocent villager gathering scrap metal.32 During the 2003 Iraq invasion, semi-automated Patriot missiles were fired at what were supposed to be Iraqi rockets: the result was downed allied planes. Their human operators were supposed to override in such cases but failed to do so.33 And in the first known case of friendly fire deaths involving unmanned aircraft, a drone strike in Afghanistan on April 6, 2011 accidentally killed a US Marine and a Navy medic. Marine Staff Sgt. Jeremy Smith, 26, and Navy Hospitalman Benjamin D. Rast, 23, were killed by a Predator drone after Marine commanders mistook them for Taliban. When Jeremy Smith’s father, Jerry Smith, was shown video images of the attack, he didn’t see the high-resolution images one might expect from sophisticated drones.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Suisman, Doug, et al. The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2005. Sutter, Robert. China’s Rise in Asia: Promises and Perils. Boulder, Colo.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Sweig, Julia. Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Talbott, Stobe. The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy. New York: Random House, 2003. Taylor, A. J. P. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1954.

Mark Hertsgaard has identified a number of characteristic foreign views of the United States overseas that contradict American self-perceptions: America is parochial and self-centered, hypocritical and domineering, naïve about the world, full of philistines, self-righteous about democracy, and only looks out for itself. Hertsgaard, The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 21. See also Julia Sweig, Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). 9. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919. 10. For a discussion of the increasing costs to the United States of its alliances over the course of the twentieth century, see David A. Lake, Entangling Relations: American Foreign Policy in Its Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); see also Julianne Smith and Thomas Sanderson, “Evaluating Our Partners and Allies Five Years Later,” Washington Post, September 11, 2006. 11.


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

The platoon commander, the square-jawed Colonel Bayron Carvajal, at first issued a statement describing the incident as a tragic case of “friendly fire.” It had happened at night, he claimed, and the soldiers had mistaken the unit for FARC guerrillas. The eyewitnesses from My Little Home and the neighboring Indian houses were baffled—they knew the attack took place in broad daylight and that the distinctive uniforms of the Special Forces would have been instantly recognized by the army. Far from being friendly fire, this bore the hallmarks of a calculated execution. Furthermore, as the attorney general Mario Iguarán investigated the matter a little closer, it seemed suspiciously as though the soldiers had been acting to protect whoever owned the drugs.


pages: 570 words: 151,259

Broken Angels by Richard Morgan

friendly fire, gravity well, Lao Tzu, the High Line, urban sprawl

“Get back down to the Nagini and help Hansen prep the buoy for firing. And tell Vongsavath to get a launch and landing mapped for tonight. See if she can’t break through some of this jamming and transmit to the Wedge at Masson. Tell them we’re coming out.” He looked across at me. “I’d hate to get shot down by friendly fire at this stage.” I glanced at Hand, curious to see how he’d handle this one. I needn’t have worried. “No transmissions just yet, captain.” The executive’s voice was a study in absent detachment—you would have sworn he was absorbed in the gate countdown—but under the casual tone there was the unmistakable tensile strength of an order given.

It was the same feeling you sometimes get when you turn your back on weapons systems you know are armed. No matter that you’re tagged safe, you know that the thing at your back has the power to turn you into small shreds of flesh and bone, and that despite all the programming in the world, accidents happen. And friendly fire kills you just as dead as the unfriendly kind. At the entrance, the bright, diffuse glare of daylight waited for us like some inversion of the dark, compressed thing within. I shook the thought loose irritably. “You happy now?” I enquired acidly, as we stepped out into the light. “I’ll be happy when we’ve deployed the buoy and put a hemisphere between us and that thing.”


pages: 530 words: 154,505

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, centre right, different worldview, Donald Trump, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, high net worth, illegal immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

On the Boeing’s wing, a press photographer captured a picture of Ehud Barak, still in his white overalls and holding a gun, shepherding the hostages off the plane.19 Twenty-eight years later this image would feature heavily in Barak’s campaign to oust Prime Minister Netanyahu in the 1999 elections. 9 I’ve Reached My Target The friendly-fire wound from the Sabena operation was superficial, and Benjamin Netanyahu was back on operational duty within a couple of weeks. It was nearly the end of his five years of service. Throughout, Bibi had remained ambivalent toward his military career, keeping up correspondence with Yale’s admissions office.

In August, Begin complained, “I know about all the operations, sometimes before, sometimes after.”7 Often their first indication of developments on the battlefield came when Arens was summoned to the State Department to respond to reports from Habib and Draper. Arens strenuously defended Israel’s latest action before rushing back to the embassy to try to gather, over the phone, what had happened and why. In some cases he came under friendly fire from Jerusalem for acting on his own initiative. “We’d thank you if you would send your thoughts to us first,” cabled Begin after Arens discussed possible ceasefire terms.8 In this tense period in US-Israeli relations, the two men in charge of the embassy had between them just three months of diplomatic experience.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Stuxnet’s target was Iran: Jarrad Shearer (26 Feb 2013), “W32.Stuxnet,” Symantec Corporation, http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2010-071400-3123-99. computers owned by Chevron: Matthew J. Schwartz (12 Nov 2012), “Cyber weapon friendly fire: Chevron Stuxnet fallout,” Information Week, http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-and-breaches/cyber-weapon-friendly-fire-chevron-stuxnet-fallout/d/d-id/1107339. industrial plants in Germany: Robert McMillan (14 Sep 2010), “Siemens: Stuxnet worm hit industrial systems,” Computer World, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9185419/Siemens_Stuxnet_worm_hit_industrial_systems.


pages: 492 words: 153,565

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

But McGurk insists this never occurred to them because attribution wasn’t the watch floor’s concern. Their mission was to uncover an attack code’s capabilities and determine the best way for US networks to defend against it. “At first when you look at [malware]… your assumption is that it’s not friendly fire. You don’t think the sniper on the roof is one of your guys shooting at you,” he says. “It could turn out to be … But in the heat of it, at the very beginning, you’re not overly concerned, nor do you naturally default to [that.]” But very quickly, Stuxnet became “an item of high interest” in Washington.

He deleted the tweet very quickly after posting it, however, and not long afterward also deleted his entire Twitter account. It’s unclear if there was any significance to the image of the galaxies in Duqu or if the attackers had just chosen a random picture, but Bencsáth thought it might have been used as a secret signal to identify Duqu as “friendly fire.” Sometimes various intelligence branches of the same government will target the same computers. If the United States or Israel was behind Duqu, the image might have been a signal to “friendlies” who came across the keylogger on an infected machine—in the course of trying to hack it themselves—that the machine was already infected by a compatriot. 10 Some criticized Symantec’s decision to go public so quickly.


pages: 618 words: 146,557

Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, clean water, en.wikipedia.org, friendly fire, full employment, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, trade route, V2 rocket

The battle had lasted forty-three minutes from start to finish, apart from some brutal skirmishes with elements of the Presidential Guard stationed nearby, who were rapidly dealt with. Five members of the Muslim Battalion and the 9th Company of paratroopers were killed and some thirty-five suffered serious wounds.35 The KGB special forces groups also lost five dead. Among them was Colonel Boyarinov, who was killed by friendly fire right at the end of the battle. He seems to have been cut down by Soviet soldiers who had orders to shoot anyone who emerged from the palace before it was properly secured.36 Colonel Kuznechkov, the military doctor who had helped to cure Amin of his poisoning, was also dead, killed by a burst of bullets fired into the ballroom.

Here they were received with honour, but told that they were in no circumstances to talk about what they had done, and made to sign a secrecy agreement. The secrecy was such that medals – not as many as the men had hoped for – were handed out in hugger-mugger. Colonel Boyarinov, who had been killed by friendly fire, was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Kryuchkov went in secret to his Moscow apartment to give the medal personally to his wife and son.35 The men were then sent off for two weeks to a sanatorium in the countryside, where they were treated for stress. Some dealt with their stress in the traditional way, by drowning their nightmares in vodka.


pages: 196 words: 58,886

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe

British Empire, disinformation, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Suez canal 1869, WikiLeaks

The main target was the civilian infrastructure; nothing was spared—hospitals, schools, mosques—everything was hit and destroyed. Hamas responded by launching missiles into Israeli towns not targeted before, such as Beersheba and Ashdod. There were a few civilian casualties, but most of the Israelis killed, thirteen in total, were soldiers killed by friendly fire. In sharp contrast, 1,500 Palestinians lost their lives in the operation.35 A new cynical dimension was now added: international and Arab donors promised aid running into the billions to rebuild what Israel would only destroy again in the future. Even the worst disaster can be profitable. The next round came in 2012 with two operations: “Returning Echo,” which was smaller in comparison to the previous attacks, and the more significant “Pillar of Defense” in July 2012, which brought an end to the social protest movement of that summer, with its potential to bring down the government for the failure of its economic and social policies.


pages: 183 words: 59,209

Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War by Matti Friedman

Ayatollah Khomeini, disinformation, friendly fire, Mount Scopus, Yom Kippur War

Chapter 16 “Not many journalists come here”: Sever Plocker, “Two Fingers from Nabatieh,” Yediot Ahronot, April 3, 1996. Avi’s travel plans and thoughts on Ireland (“a country of contradictions, just like me”) are from a letter to Smadar, May 29, 1996. In the letter he mentions that U2’s “One” came on the radio and he stopped writing to listen. Chapter 17 The “friendly fire” incident mentioned involved a Golani Brigade platoon near the Lebanese town of Taibeh on December 30, 1998. The soldier killed was Staff Sgt. Ohad Zach, nineteen. The description of the Falcon Incident (Hebrew: Irua Baz) of June 10, 1996, is from interviews with Yaacov Artom in 2014; from an account of the battle written by Yaacov after his discharge; from a file in the IDF archive titled “ ‘Falcon’ Ambush—Engagement by Engineering Company with Hezbollah Cell in the Sector of Outpost ‘Pumpkin,’ ” dated June 26, 1996; and from a longer file on the incident prepared for use as an educational tool for soldiers, titled “Ali Taher Range Incident.”


The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Telepathic helmets would enhance the performance of small combat units, especially in situations in which Killer Apps 147 face-to-face and voice contact is difficult (army special operations, for example). The technology blends well with, and is synergistic with, the augmented-cognition helmets currently in development. 8 It will thus increase field effectiveness, reduce unnecessary mortality (including from friendly fire), and quite possible reduce collateral damage, especially if combined with other technologies (e.g., if telepathic helmets are linked to cyborg insects, or to augmented-cognition technologies gridded across the battlefield). So at Level I it's a go. Table 7.2 Technology-level matrix for telepathic helmet.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

Milton Friedman, economist The US Department of Defense called it the ‘largest leak of classified documents in its history’. It’s difficult to overstate how big a threat to the existing world order WikiLeaks was perceived to be in late 2010. There has been revelation after revelation – the Bradley Manning leaks, the video of US soldiers shooting at Reuters cameramen, the ‘friendly fire’ and civilian casualties, then the leak of another 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq war. WikiLeaks had caught the imagination of those opposed to the US and other governments. Many wanted to help. PayPal was the main means by which WikiLeaks was able to receive funds for its activities and, in 2010, its donors gave around one million dollars.


pages: 251 words: 67,801

And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East by Richard Engel

East Village, friendly fire, invisible hand, Mohammed Bouazizi, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, satellite internet, Skype, Yom Kippur War

It was now estimated that seven hundred thousand people had fled their homes. That same day, twenty miles to the southeast, Israel Special Forces launched an attack on Bint Jbeil, a town of twenty thousand. After a massive artillery barrage, Israeli troops made an inauspicious advance from the east. Five soldiers were wounded by friendly fire, and the two tanks sent to evacuate them were disabled by Hezbollah defenders—the first when struck by a missile, the second when it went over a remote-controlled mine. Then an armor-plated bulldozer attempting to rescue the tank casualties was repulsed after being hit by a missile. Two Israeli soldiers were killed and eighteen were wounded, and another two died when their attack helicopter, assigned to fly support for the ground forces, crashed on the Israeli side of the border.


pages: 281 words: 70,908

Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven

dark matter, friendly fire

A voice spoke from somewhere, 'Tec Schmidt's voice sounding much too calm. "All hands, we're fighting from the radiation refuge. I can see invaders on the hull and in four, five, six, and ten. Our motors are burned out, but we're under acceleration anyway. We don't know where it's coming from. We're also facing friendly fire, ARM missiles incoming, sixty and counting, no alien attackers yet. 'Tec-Admiral Wrayne doesn't want us captured, I guess." "Why didn't we see it coming?" she whispered. "They've got an invisible ship! Shh." Schmidt's voice--"The missiles are veering away!"--died in a roar of static. A shadow blinked past the little door.


pages: 196 words: 65,045

Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality by Lee Gutkind, Purba

Apollo 13, Columbine, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, friendly fire, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Mason jar, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan

Box 81536 Pittsburgh, PA 15217 Page 157 Helpful Information Creative Nonfiction Reading List: A Random Recommended Selection of Books and Authors to Sample and Enjoy, from the Editors of the Journal Creative Nonfiction: Anthologies The Art of the Personal Essay, with an introduction by Philip Lopate Best American Essays, edited by Robert Atwan The Creative Nonfiction Reader, edited by Lee Gutkind The John McPhee Reader, with an introduction by William Haworth The Second John McPhee Reader, with an introduction by David Remnick Suggested Books and Authors Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey Remembering Heaven's Face, John Balaban Loving Rachel, Jane Bernstein Bringing the Heat, Mark Bowden Friendly Fire, C. D. B. Bryan The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, Edna Buchanan In Cold Blood, Truman Capote The White Album, Joan Didion Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard This House of Sky, Ivan Doig The Broken Cord, Michael Dorris The Studio, John Gregory Dunne The Great Plains, Ian Frasier Page 158 Appendix 4 The Last Shot, Darcy Frey Colored People, Henry Louis Gates The Shadow Man, Mary Gordon Stuck in Time, Lee Gutkind Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon Dispatches, Michael Herr All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot Hiroshima, John Hersey Far-Flung Hubbell, Sue Hubbell Liar's Club, Mary Karr House, Tracy Kidder Not Necessarily a Benign Procedure, Perri Klass There Are No Children Here, Alex Kotlowitz Cowboy, Jane Kramer Invasive Procedures, Mark Kramer The Balloon Lady and Other People I Know, Jeanne Marie Laskas Hunting the Whole Way Home, Sidney Lea Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez Common Ground, J.


pages: 221 words: 71,449

Not My Father's Son: A Memoir by Alan Cumming

British Empire, colonial rule, Downton Abbey, financial independence, friendly fire, Skype

When I gently asked her the circumstances of his death, my mother quietly described the story as it had been shared with her. He had been cleaning a gun. There was still a bullet in the chamber. He had shot himself accidentally. This was news to me. I had always remembered he had been shot accidentally on a shooting range, a stray bullet making him a victim of that particularly oxymoronic phrase “friendly fire.” I suppose my boyish imagination must have just made that up. The plot was definitely thickening. As the interview wound up I smiled at her and gave her a kiss. I knew Mum had been anxious but she had done a really good job. Now, as she scampered through to the kitchen to begin serving the lunch she’d prepared for me and the crew, I took a moment to reflect on how similar our situations were right now—both of us on the brink of finding out the truth about our fathers.


pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Even though the United States has been continuously at war since 2001, the Venn diagram of the young, fit, and privileged and of those killed or wounded in action consists of twin circles that barely touch. Pat Tillman, the NFL player who enlisted in the army after 9/11, deployed to Afghanistan in 2004, and lost his life there in a friendly fire incident, remains a singularly anomalous figure in recent American history. No other professional athlete or comparably significant personage has followed his patriotic example. In that regard, Donald Trump and his offspring qualify as exemplary upper-class Americans. During the Vietnam War, Trump avoided military service, this at a time when dodging the draft qualified as somewhere between righteous and commonsensical.


Great American Railroad Journeys by Michael Portillo

Alistair Cooke, California gold rush, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, invention of the telephone, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, railway mania, short selling, the High Line, transcontinental railway, union organizing

Jackson had made a name for himself when he led reinforcements at the First Battle of Bull Run, in more ways than one. Leading exhausted men, Brigadier General Barnard Bee shouted: ‘Look at Jackson standing like a stonewall . . . Rally behind the Virginians.’ The name ‘Stonewall’ stuck. A staunch Presbyterian, who died after a friendly fire incident, he once professed his religious beliefs made him feel as safe in battle as in bed. Before settling in at Bull Run, he and his men had rifled through a Union supply depot at Manassas Junction. What was left uneaten was burned. Suitably fortified, they survived numerous attacks by General John Pope’s forces until the Union army was finally outflanked by Confederate reinforcements and forced into a retreat.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Describing herself as “very conflicted” as to whether her “science might be used for good or evil,” she sought approval, saying: “It seems to me that there’s a trust in these practices, assuming they’re taught properly, that is corrective, that the qualities that might be developed could lead to greater good.” Getting no answer, she followed this up by requesting advice. The response was curt. The Dalai Lama said: “Zero!” After a pause in which onlookers laughed, he added: “I appreciate your work. That’s all.”7 Jha defends what she does as harm reduction. “Noncombatant or friendly fire injuries frequently occur when shooters misidentify their target or fail to appropriately inhibit pre-potent responses resulting in unintentional harm to noncombatants or allies,” her latest study says. “The chance to intervene against even a single attentional lapse or cognitive failure would be consequential if that failure contributed to unnecessary loss of life or the loss of critical mission objectives.”8 Surely there are better ways to prevent loss of life than assisting the military with its objectives?


pages: 498 words: 184,761

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland by Ali Winston, Darwin Bondgraham

affirmative action, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ferguson, Missouri, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden Gate Park, mass incarceration, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Port of Oakland, power law, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra

Oakland paid $500,000 to Buenrostro’s parents but admitted no wrongdoing by Roche. The dangers of Oakland’s streets, the willingness of a nucleus of officers to use their firearms, and the department’s reluctance to change tactics caught up with the OPD in 2001, when one of their own was killed by friendly fire. Willie Wilkins grew up in Union City in a Panamanian family. He dreamed of becoming a cop, and at twenty-two he became a patrol officer. By 2001, Wilkins was routinely working undercover. On January 11 he was surveilling an East Oakland drug house when he spotted a stolen car and gave chase in his unmarked Dodge Durango SUV.

Bob Butler, Mary Fricker, and Thomas Peele, “Rank-and-File Begin to Question Bailey Probe,” Contra Costa (CA) Times, December 30, 2008. 46. Harry Harris, “Oakland ‘Street Cop’ Recognized by His Peers Statewide,” Oakland Tribune, March 8, 2006. 47. Kely Wilkins v. City of Oakland; Justin Berton, “Friendly Fire,” East Bay Express (Oakland), May 25, 2005. 48. Randy Wingate made his views known in a June 6, 2020, Facebook post, writing: “My best friend Willie Wilkins was killed by overzealous rookies who should be in jail. If it was me standing in East Oakland pointing a gun at a suspect with a badge around my neck and a radio in hand, I wouldn’t have been shot.


pages: 279 words: 72,659

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians by Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, Frank Barat

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, desegregation, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Islamic Golden Age, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, one-state solution, price stability, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail

The November 24 missile attack was the one the Israeli Army had waited for. From November 25 until January 21, 2009, the Israeli Army bombarded the million and half people of Gaza from the air, land, and sea. Hamas responded with missiles that ended with three casualties and another ten Israeli soldiers were killed, some by friendly fire. A GENOCIDAL POLICY? The evidence collected by Israeli-based human rights organizations, international agencies, and media (although the Israelis barred the media from entering the Strip) was perceived by many to be far more serious than just war crimes. Some referred to it as genocide.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Blackwater, the notorious private military contractor, has deployed a small flotilla to escort oil and cargo vessels, while other companies are offering electric fencing and stun guns to shipping companies. Even though the gloves have come off, deploying expensive military convoys to float in the Gulf of Aden is hardly cost-effective. To avoid both an asymmetric arms race between Western navies and impoverished pirates, as well as potential friendly fire incidents among the dozen or more countries now patrolling the Arabian Sea, a more multidimensional strategy is required. On the other side of the Indian Ocean, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia jointly patrol the Strait of Malacca, with Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan funding the improvement of Indonesia’s coast guard capacity so that it can be a stronger participant in policing the waters rather than the weakest link.


pages: 247 words: 78,961

The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, always be closing, California gold rush, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, kremlinology, load shedding, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, one-China policy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, the long tail, trade route, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

The battlefield would be made more confusing by the serious language barrier that exists between American pilots and South Korean JTACs, or Joint Tactical Air Controllers, who would have to guide the Americans to many of their targets. A-10 and F-16 pilots in South Korea have complained to me that this weak link in the bilateral military relationship would drive up the instances of friendly-fire and collateral civilian deaths—on which the media undoubtedly would then concentrate. As part of a deal to halt the bloodbath, members of the KFR might be able to negotiate their own post-regime survival. What Now, Lieutenant? But middle and upper-middle levels of the American military worry less about an indiscriminate artillery attack on the South than about a very discriminate one.


pages: 260 words: 79,471

A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea by Richard Phillips, Stephan Talty

Bernie Sanders, friendly fire, Neil Armstrong, two and twenty

If I escaped—and that was a big if—I wanted to get the Maersk Alabama between me and the lifeboat. The Somalis installed me in the third seat, port side. It gave me a good view of the cockpit and the rest of the ship and I wanted to stay there. And I wanted to stay in one place, so any allies that pulled up on the scene would know exactly where I was located. Friendly fire will kill you just as dead as enemy fire. I keyed the radio and let my crew know what seat I was in. The pirates closed both hatches. I guess they feared frog-men coming up and climbing down into the boat. That’s when the heat began: unbearable, unrelenting saunalike heat just permeated the entire vessel.


pages: 318 words: 77,223

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

The reason for this sad state of affairs is simple: Many moderate politicians fear that their willingness to compromise politically will cost them in their next primary—after all, in many cases these days, their electoral success depends less on defeating opponents from the other party and more on surviving friendly fire from the more extreme factions of their own. A sense of political despair has been accentuated by a recognition that elections are unlikely to make things better unless the outcome involves a broad sweep by one party of both the executive and legislative functions. As an illustration, consider what happened in the November 2014 midterm elections.


pages: 265 words: 79,944

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, endowment effect, Ernest Rutherford, friendly fire, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the long tail, uranium enrichment, Wilhelm Olbers

Cher Ami, ‘Dear Friend’ in French, flew 40km (25 miles) in 1918, despite being blinded, shot in the breast and having one leg hanging on by a thread. Two pigeons had been shot down before him but his delivery of the message ‘We are along the road paralell [sic] 276.4. Our artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven’s sake stop it.’ stopped a friendly fire barrage and helped save the lives of 194 men.7 Thirty-two wartime pigeons, brave souls such as G. I. Joe, have been awarded the Dickin Medal, the most prestigious award available to military-serving animals. At least one, Mary of Exeter, even has her own little tiny memorial.8 My point? Anywhere you look in history you can usually find a pigeon nearby.


pages: 676 words: 203,386

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, fake news, feminist movement, friendly fire, global village, Golden age of television, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, period drama, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship

LANDMARK TV SERIES: The Garry Moore Show, 1959–62, CBS; The Carol Burnett Show, 1967–78, CBS. OTHER MAJOR CREDITS: Broadway: Once Upon a Mattress, 1959–60; Putting It Together, 1999–2000. Movies: A Wedding, 1978; Annie, 1982. TV: Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, 1962, CBS; An Evening with Carol Burnett, 1963, CBS; Julie and Carol at Lincoln Center, 1971, CBS; Friendly Fire, 1979, ABC; Fresno, 1986, CBS; The Larry Sanders Show, 1992, 1998, HBO; Recurring guest roles on Mad About You, 1996–99, NBC, and Glee, 2010, 2015, Fox. Had UCLA offered a better journalism program in the 1950s, Carol Burnett might never have gone into comedy. She was born in 1933 in San Antonio to parents who lapsed into alcoholism, leaving her to be raised largely by her grandmother, who relocated with her to Hollywood and indulged young Carol’s love of movies and other creative endeavors, including the convenient entertainment medium of radio.

Before The Carol Burnett Show, her guest star roles included appearances on Get Smart, on several of Lucille Ball’s post–I Love Lucy sitcoms, and even on Serling’s Twilight Zone. During the eleven-year run of her series, she reteamed with Julie Andrews for another musical special, reprised for TV her starring role in Once Upon a Mattress, and starred in Robert Altman’s 1978 ensemble movie, A Wedding. And after her series ended, Burnett starred in both Friendly Fire, a dramatic ABC television movie about a grieving mother demanding more information about the mysterious death of her serviceman son, and Fresno, a comic CBS miniseries satirizing the style and content of such prime-time soap operas as Dallas and Dynasty. She also had a recurring guest role on NBC’s Mad About You, for which she finally won an individual Emmy Award for acting, and a memorable guest spot, playing herself, on HBO’s Larry Sanders Show, where she took full advantage of the relative freedom of premium cable television.


pages: 310 words: 82,592

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss, Tahl Raz

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Swan, clean water, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, framing effect, friendly fire, iterative process, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, price anchoring, telemarketer, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment

Minutes later, after the last rebels fled, the squad of Philippine soldiers tried to reassure Gracia that her husband was fine, but she shook her head. After a year in captivity, she had no time for fantasies. Gracia knew her husband was dead, and she was right: he’d been hit in the chest, three times, by “friendly” fire. In the end, the supposed rescue mission killed two of the three hostages there that day (a Philippine nurse named Ediborah Yap also died), and the big fish—Sabaya—escaped to live a few more months. From beginning to end, the thirteen-month mission was a complete failure, a waste of lives and treasure.


pages: 341 words: 87,268

Them: Adventures With Extremists by Jon Ronson

Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, disinformation, friendly fire, Jon Ronson, Livingstone, I presume, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, the market place, Timothy McVeigh

The US marshals then opened fire, nearly blowing off Sammy’s arm. Sammy yelled, ‘Dad! I’m coming home, Dad!’ He turned around to run back to his father, but the US marshals shot him dead in the back. Kevin Harris opened fire. The marshals shot back and one of them was killed, either by Kevin or by friendly fire, as they call it. ‘We were all standing on that rock that overlooks our driveway,’ said Rachel. ‘Mom and Sara and Dad and I. Kevin came running up the hill and said that Sammy had been shot and he was dead. And it was just . . . we just let out a cry and broke down. Dad fired Mom’s .223 into the air.


pages: 285 words: 81,743

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Singer, Saul. “Superpower in Silicon Wadi.” Jerusalem Post, June 19, 1998. Solow, Robert M. “Growth Theory and After.” Nobel Prize lecture, December 8, 1987. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/lau reates/1987/solow-lecture.html. Snook, Scott A., Leslie J. Freeman, and L. Jeffrey Norwalk. “Friendly Fire.” Harvard Business School Case 404-083, January 2004. Case Library, Harvard Business Publishing. Steil, Benn, David G. Victor, and Richard R. Nelson, eds. Technological Innovation and Economic Performance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Stern, Yoav. “Study: Israeli Arab Attitudes Toward Women Undergoing Change.”


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

He glances up—up through the geodesic dome, now (then) whole and complete—just in time to see the top corner of one of the nearby brutalist office towers dissolve into dust, a point cloud of masonry pixels. What the fuck was that? Running, screaming. Shouting. Incoming! Walker wonders who could have been responsible for shattering a building, the dread realization falling across him that it was probably friendly fire, or another rogue round from the malfunctioning drone. Everyone is moving around him, but he’s transfixed again, unable to take his eyes off her. We need to go. No, just stay here! Don’t move! But— We’re safe here, don’t move! Just hold my hand. Walker looks up again, through the geodesic lattice of the dome.


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

These numbers show that in dollar cost per incident, financial fraud competes with the most expensive terrorist act in history, and the subprime mortgage crisis dwarfs it. When researchers put advanced AI into the hands of businessmen, as they imminently will, these people will suddenly possess the most powerful technology ever conceived of. Some will use it to perpetrate fraud. I think the next cyberattack will consist of “friendly fire,” that is, it’ll originate at home, damage infrastructure, and kill Americans. Sound far-fetched? Enron, the scandal-plagued Texas corporation helmed by Kenneth Lay (since deceased), Jeffrey Skilling, and Andrew Fastow (both currently in prison), was in the energy trading business. In 2000 and 2001, Enron traders drove up energy prices in California by using strategies with names like “Fat Boy,” and “Death Star.”


pages: 251 words: 79,822

War by Sebastian Junger

Demis Hassabis, Dunbar number, friendly fire, RAND corporation, satellite internet, Yom Kippur War

It was a crucial piece of terrain that The Rock had spent nearly a year negotiating for; unfortunately, that also gave the enemy plenty of time to prepare. The base would be named Combat Outpost Kahler, after a platoon sergeant who had been killed by an Afghan security guard in a highly suspect friendly-fire incident six months earlier. There was a bad feeling about the mission from the beginning. Days beforehand someone had written “Wanat: the movie” on the mission board, and the men were joking about which actors would play them. An Afghan heavy equipment contractor never showed up on the job, and the Americans’ one Bobcat had a bulldozer blade but no bucket.


pages: 306 words: 84,649

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

The dropping of equipment and soldiers into war zones began to benefit from GPS navigation, and GPS enabled the development of a new family of weaponry: autonomous and remotely controlled robots, including drone aircraft, drone underwater minesweepers and robotic rescue vehicles to recover wounded soldiers. Friendly-fire incidents, which had killed or injured some 250,000 American soldiers in the twentieth century, were dramatically reduced with the assistance of the satellite clocks orbiting overhead. But GPS had been a hard project to sell; America’s military commanders originally struggled to see how the system would help them.


pages: 277 words: 86,352

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

There was so much gunfire through Mount Carmel’s thin walls that the shots “sounded like popcorn.” As he and Constantino fired blindly, their fellow agent Jordan went down, crying, “I’m hit!” Jordan had been winged by a nine-millimeter round that probably came from Buford’s pistol, the first instance of friendly fire during the raid. In Buford’s account, “Shots started coming up through the floor. The first round that hit me got me square in the butt and lodged in my thigh.” He asked Jordan, “Can you move? We need to get out of here.” With Constantino firing through the walls and floor, the three agents retreated through the window.


pages: 271 words: 92,271

The Battle of Mogadishu: Firsthand Accounts From the Men of Task Force Ranger by Matt Eversmann, Dan Schilling

friendly fire

Colonel Oeser, our commander, read us the riot act when we got back, so down she came. We went out on another night mission on September 6, which is worth noting for several reasons. It was the first firefight between Task Force Ranger and the Somalis. It was also the first time I ever experienced friendly fire. The assaulters were again taking down a building north of K4 Circle. Ranger security had cordoned off a four-block area, and our convoy was parked adjacent to a place called the reviewing stand, where Aidid used to make speeches before we began hunting him. My C2 Humvee was in the middle of the convoy of vehicles, which were all in a line pointed north in case we were needed.


pages: 304 words: 93,494

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

“Dust storm in Baghdad today & yet another suicide bomb. Awful reminder that it is not yet all fine here.” The Time 101 Flashes of white light exploded in the air like miniature fireworks in front of Jack, Biz, and Ev. Pop. Pop. Pop. “Over here!” “Look this way!” photographers yelled as their cameras rattled like muted gunfire. Friendly fire: Click. Click. Click. “This way!” they yelled. “Look over here!” The Twitter founders paused every few feet—pop, click, pop—then walked forward as they continued on the red carpet as if they were on a conveyor belt. Coiled white earpieces crawled up the necks of Secret Service agents who stood watch over the scene.


pages: 296 words: 95,377

Daring Raids of World War Two: Heroic Land, Sea and Air Attacks by Peter Jacobs

friendly fire, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable

His citation concluded: By his fearless disregard of the great dangers which he ran and of which he was fully aware, and by his magnificent leadership and outstanding gallantry, Lieutenant Colonel Keyes set an example of supreme self-sacrifice and devotion to duty. It has since been suggested that Keyes was killed by friendly fire but, whatever the truth, his bravery was beyond doubt and his award of the VC was the first of eight VCs won by commandos during the war. Robin Campbell, who had been wounded in the leg and left behind at the villa, was fortunate to be taken as a prisoner of war rather than executed by the Germans.


pages: 376 words: 93,160

More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea by Tom Reynolds

clockwatching, friendly fire, hive mind, illegal immigration, place-making, power law, Stanford prison experiment

So out came my torch and I carefully picked my way between them, my crewmate (hoof-footed fool that he is) managed to splat one of them by accident. After discovering that our patient wasn’t too ill my crewmate helped him get his coat and keys while I snuck out in the garden and started picking the snails out of the way of the partially sighted patient. I’m sorry to say that in my eagerness to save as many as possible one died in a ‘friendly fire’ incident. The patient came shuffling out of the house and, despite my feeble torchlight and my evacuation of as many of our shelled friends as possible, he still managed to step on two of them. Each one was a chain of guilt around my heart. I know it is strange to think about such things but these are the kind that go through your mind at 2 a.m.


pages: 289 words: 90,176

Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds by Rusty Bradley, Kevin Maurer

digital map, friendly fire, operational security, Ronald Reagan, trade route

While Ron sorted through the A-10 mess, Jared identified targets for the Apaches droning above us, which were part of the ISAF Dutch contingent. At his direction, the gunships made runs on the heavily defended buildings in our path to drive out the occupants. But the Dutch pilots were nervous about shooting too close to us. They didn’t want to be blamed for friendly fire. “If you do not engage the targets we tell you, then we cannot use you,” Jared finally snapped, exasperated. “The enemy is within two hundred meters of our location and we need the fire now.” The first two 2.75-inch rockets from the Apaches slammed high into the grape house in front of us, collapsing its entire front.


pages: 474 words: 87,687

Stealth by Peter Westwick

Berlin Wall, centre right, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, fixed-gear, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, knowledge economy, machine translation, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white flight

With the Stealth bomber still a decade from deployment, the report charged, the announcement had given the Soviets a ten-year head start not only to develop their own Stealth bomber but also to develop countermeasures.15 The committee’s outrage was disingenuous, given that the trade press had been discussing Stealth for five years by that time. It was also curious, in that Democrats controlled Congress and were thus attacking a Democratic president in the middle of a crucial campaign. In fact, there were ample precedents for such friendly fire between Congress and a president on military issues (such as the Truman Committee in World War II and the Johnson Committee in the Korean War), which proved only that politicians often prized personal publicity over party loyalty—and that secret programs, ironically, made for great publicity. Stealth was already a political football, and it was still early in the game.16 The press conference also allowed Harold Brown to make a cryptic point, one that revealed an unintended consequence of Stealth.


4. A Trail Through Time by Jodi Taylor

friendly fire, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton

I saw what looked like a flame-thrower apparently made of an old milk churn and some industrial hosing, caltrops, a homemade crossbow, half a dozen Molotov cocktails, and what looked like a Vickers gun from WWI. ‘What is all that?’ ‘Back-up,’ said Professor Rapson and I wondered if it was too late to request a transfer to another team. There seemed every indication this one would fall victim to friendly fire. ‘Last resort,’ I said warningly, wondering if we were in more danger from behind than in front. ‘Got it,’ they said gleefully. Markham rolled his eyes. Peterson turned to me. ‘Bet you wish you’d stayed at Agincourt, now.’ ‘I’m prepared to admit it might have had attractions that I overlooked at the time.


pages: 315 words: 99,065

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, work culture , zero-sum game

They didn’t have to wait long to get a taste of their new corporate culture when Jayne-Anne Gadhia, CEO of Virgin Money, and I hosted a huge street party inside Northern Rock’s headquarters in Newcastle upon Tyne, at which everyone got an opportunity to behave in very ‘unbankerlike’ ways! It was kind of an initiation by friendly fire for all the former Northern Rock people who I don’t think had ever seen their previous bosses loosen their ties, let alone their purse-strings for a bank-sponsored megabash. By the end of the night I must have shaken a thousand hands and my fingers were literally numb from the process. Jayne-Anne and I posed for scores of group photographs and the bank’s staff even got to rub shoulders with some true local heroes in the form of several Newcastle United football stars who we’d invited to join in the festivities.


The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy by Brian Klaas

Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, citizen journalism, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Steve Jobs, trade route, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, unemployed young men, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The United States urged the military government to return to democracy in 1999, but then needed 53 THE DESPOT’S ACCOMPLICE to ignore Pakistan’s undemocratic ways in order to fight terrorism just three years later. This, like many reversals of democracy promotion, had the inadvertent effect of killing off pro-democracy forces in Pakistan with friendly fire from the West, as Washington cozied up to a despot. But could the United States have afforded not to do so in that crucial moment? These are the types of foreign policy dilemmas that Western presidents, prime ministers, and diplomats routinely face. â•… In diplomacy, the safe but unprincipled bet often wins.


pages: 328 words: 100,381

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

Up on the big screen in the ops center, the flight path of these clandestine missions could be displayed—if needed—but usually just a few people would be notified of any potential conflicts or overlap with conventional forces. Still, the CIA and the secret military forces wanted to be in the “fur ball”—that is, to have their basic positions known, if for no other reason than to avoid friendly fire when they were out there clandestinely operating. The Predator video feeds were in real time, broadcast on television cameras to viewers in command centers around the world, as well as to people on the ground and in the air: the army or marine unit being supported, individual special ops teams with unique laptop receivers, analysts assigned to monitor every mission, manned intelligence collection planes, nearby fighter jets, and, of course, the very deadly Special Operations AC-130 gunships.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Perhaps he realized that, for at one point some years ago Hinton reached out to an iconic bearer of the protocols who was having his own doubts. Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor who is considered the founder of modern corporate strategy, had seized Hinton’s attention with a 2011 essay whose rather modest critique of the prevailing approach to business created a stir in a world not used to such friendly fire. Porter was among the most cited authors on business, and a godfather of theories about how business competition works and what makes societies “competitive” for business, which is to say attractive to it. In addition to his teaching and writing, he had gotten into the protocol-spreading business himself, starting a consulting firm called the Monitor Group and lending his advice to many health care reform efforts.


pages: 279 words: 96,180

Anything to Declare?: The Searching Tales of an HM Customs Officer by Jon Frost

airport security, blood diamond, British Empire, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, IFF: identification friend or foe, Louis Blériot

The surveillance on the mainland was being conducted by both Customs and police, but on different targets. There were regular daily briefings between the case officers and the ground commanders of both groups so that everybody knew their jobs, so avoiding any ‘blue on blues’, which was the police codename for what the Army called ‘friendly fire’ or, in other words, shooting your own. On the Monday, it was agreed that Customs CROPs would deploy on the island to carry out recces and close-target recon. There were to be no other Customs or police surveillance officers anywhere near: just ourselves and our back-up teams. CROPs work is dangerous at the best of times so we didn’t need our airwaves messed up by any surveillance boys.


pages: 356 words: 97,794

The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappé

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, low skilled workers, Mount Scopus, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

The 24 November missile attack was what the Israeli army was waiting for. From the following morning until 21 January 2009, it bombarded the million and a half people of Gaza from the air, land and sea. Hamas responded with missiles that caused three casualties and another ten Israeli soldiers were killed, some by friendly fire. The evidence collected by Israeli-based human rights organizations, by international agencies and the media (although the Israelis barred the media from entering the Strip) – some of it repeated in the Goldstone Report, which was both a very conservative and guarded summary of what occurred – reveals the true dimension of the massacre in Gaza in that period.


pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

He is probably better known in anarchist circles as Hakim Bey, author of TAZ, a series of texts originally published in zine form in the mid and late 1980s.3 BOB BLACK (B. 1951) Born in Detroit, Michigan, Black has been involved with the anarchist movement, mainly in North America, since the late 60s. Black is best known for his 1985 essay ‘The Abolition of Work’. He has published a number of books: The Abolition of Work and Other Essays (1986), Friendly Fire (1992), Beneath the Underground (1994), Anarchy after Leftism (1997), Nightmares of Reason (2010) and Debunking Democracy (2011). Black is thought to have coined the term post-left anarchism, a phrase that appears in Anarchy after Leftism.4 ALFREDO BONANNO (b. 1937) Bonanno is a leading exponent of insurrectionary anarchism, theorist, strategist and activist.


JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER by Jodi Taylor

clean water, friendly fire, information retrieval

It stuck out in spikes everywhere. It scared me – God knows what it did to everyone else. One day passed so much like another that I was shocked to find three months had passed. Small signs of spring began to appear. Then I began to cough. I ignored it to begin with. I’ve been injured a lot; some of it friendly fire, but I’m rarely ill and waited for it to go away. It didn’t. I drank copious amounts of water and sweated it all back out again half an hour later. My temperature was so high I wondered if I could hook myself up to the broken water heater. My chest grew tight and hurt. Then my back hurt. Breathing in was one pain and breathing out was another.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

In the 1990s, many thousands of hours of Internet time were spent on elaborating paranoid claims about alleged nefarious activities, including murder, on the part of President Clinton. Numerous sites, discussion groups, and social media posts spread rumors and conspiracy theories of various sorts. An old one: “Electrified by the Internet, suspicions about the crash of TWA Flight 800 were almost instantly transmuted into convictions that it was the result of friendly fire. . . . It was all linked to Whitewater. . . . Ideas become E-mail to be duplicated and duplicated again.”14 In 2000, an e-mail rumor specifically targeted at African Americans alleged that “No Fear” bumper stickers bearing the logo of the sportswear company of the same name really promote a racist organization headed by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.


pages: 385 words: 103,561

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

The Iraqi army had assumed the Coalition forces would be at a disadvantage in the vast, faceless desert, limited to the few major roads and highways. But thanks largely to GPS, the Coalition accomplished the first large-scale deep desert advance in the history of warfare. Knowledge of GPS coordinates allowed tanks and mechanized infantry to move quickly, cutting down on the risk of accidents and friendly fire, especially during the first forty-eight hours of the war, when bad weather caused visibility to drop to as little as five meters. Soldiers found water sources by following goat tracks and marking the spots with GPS. They used GPS to report on the presence of mines, and for positioning artillery.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Even if their lyrics were about getting laid or getting high—as they frequently were—their songs were filled with political force. Those not busy being born, as Dylan put it shortly after taking an axe to his folkie roots, are busy dying. Now, youth culture is largely apolitical, and pop’s soundtrack is just a soundtrack. Those not busy being born are busy listening to their iPods. Whether it’s Fleet Foxes or Friendly Fires, Black Keys or Beach House, today’s bands are less likely to battle the past than to luxuriate in it. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good bands. As Reynolds is careful to note, there is plenty of fine pop music being made today, in an ear-boggling array of styles. But drained of its subversive energies, none of it matters much.


pages: 389 words: 108,344

Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn

airport security, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, drone strike, Edward Snowden, friendly fire, Google Earth, license plate recognition, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, Teledyne, too big to fail, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Reaper is extremely expensive: Winslow Wheeler, “Revisiting the Reaper Revolution,” Time’s Battleland defense blog, February 22, 2012. http://nation.time.com/2012/02/27/1-the-reaper-revolution-revisited/; Craig Whitlock, “When Drones Fall from the Sky,” Washington Post, June 20, 2014. In fact, it carries essentially the same sensors: U.S. Central Command, “Summary of Interview with Captain [name redacted] on April 19, 2011,” Report of investigation into friendly fire incident, Upper Sangin, Helmand, April 6, 2011, p. 203. Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International: Andrea Stone, “Drone Lobbying Ramps Up Among Industry Manufacturers, Developers,” Huffington Post, May 25, 2012. Cessna operation yielded at least 6,500 captives: Winslow Wheeler, “Finding the Right Targets,” Time’s Battleland defense blog, February 29, 2012. http://nation.time.com/2012/02/29/3-finding-the-right-targets/.


pages: 372 words: 111,573

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness by Alanna Collen

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, biofilm, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, David Strachan, discovery of penicillin, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, seminal paper, the scientific method

When the body’s armed forces are put on high alert in anticipation of an attack, rogue bullets in the form of chemical messengers called cytokines whizz around, sometimes causing unnecessary damage. These cytokines get the soldiers of the immune system all worked up and primed to fight, but if there’s no enemy, friendly fire is all that’s left. Depression doesn’t seem to be the only neurological outcome of this immune bellicosity. People suffering with many of the other mental health disorders I’ve mentioned already also show signs of immune overactivity, known as inflammation. ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and even Parkinson’s disease and dementia appear to involve an immune overreaction.


pages: 348 words: 116,848

Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood by Donovan Campbell

friendly fire

I knelt in the courtyard and tore the radio off of my back, frantically trying to roll the radio to the frequency of the Cobras so that I could talk to them directly. Suddenly Yebra was at my side. He knelt, grabbed the radio, and silently began fixing it. I was momentarily nonplussed. I knew Yebra shouldn’t be out here because he should have been confined to his bunk, recovering from dysentery and on bed rest. However, my worry about friendly fire was too great, so I shoved my concerns aside. Straightening, I stood back and let my RO start punching buttons. Suddenly, the distinctive pilots’ voices rang out from the handset, crystal clear. “Joker COC, this is Cobra One. We have one Marine position below us, marked with red smoke. Looks like there’s enemy in the house next door.


pages: 390 words: 119,527

Armed Humanitarians by Nathan Hodge

Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, European colonialism, failed state, friendly fire, Golden arches theory, IFF: identification friend or foe, jobless men, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, old-boy network, operational security, Potemkin village, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, walking around money

The night before the battalion crossed north into Iraq, its staging base in Camp Udairi, Kuwait, saw a real missile attack. Startled from their cots by a deafening crack, soldiers donned gas masks and climbed back in their sleeping bags. The all-clear sounded soon after over the camp loudspeakers. It was friendly fire. As it turned out, we had heard the impact of a U.S. Patriot missile smacking into a Royal Air Force GR4A Tornado fighter. The missile battery failed to pick up the aircraft’s IFF (identification friend or foe) beacon, an electronic signal that is supposed to prevent fratricide.1 Both crew members were killed.


pages: 382 words: 116,351

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed by Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business climate, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

And while that is happening a future successor of mine at the Skunk Works will undoubtedly be peddling ideas for solving technological problems arising out of nonuse of weapons—for example, how to keep silo-based missiles reliable and effective after years of sitting inert in the ground. In some cases reliability has dropped below 50 percent. Another big problem that a Skunk Works would be eager to try to solve is eliminating battlefield deaths caused by accidental friendly fire. Twenty-six percent of our battlefield deaths in Desert Storm resulted from our own shells and bullets. What is needed is some sort of foolproof technology, which the Pentagon has designated IFF—Identify Friend or Foe. The Army plans to spend nearly $100 million developing exclusive radio frequency signals that troops can use in the field at night (our GIs may give off a definite buzz), as well as infrared devices and paints on trucks and tanks that only our side can see using special lenses.


pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure by William Rosen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, biofilm, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, creative destruction, demographic transition, discovery of penicillin, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frances Oldham Kelsey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, functional fixedness, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, obamacare, out of africa, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, stem cell, the long tail, transcontinental railway, working poor

And, even when the body’s determined immune system destroys most of the granulomas, they leave behind huge amounts of scar tissue, which weaken the host’s ability to breathe. Bronchial passages are permanently blocked. Frequently, the cells needed for oxygen uptake are so damaged that victims suffocate. Sometimes the deadliest attacks of all are friendly fire. The immune system’s inflammatory response, which evolved to clear out damaged cells and allow rebuilding to follow, can overshoot the mark, especially when confronted with an especially robust (or wily) invader. When it does, histamines and the other compounds that increase blood flow and ease the passage of fluid through cell membranes cause enough fever and swelling to kill hosts as well as pathogens.


pages: 379 words: 118,576

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service by Eric Thompson

amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, retail therapy, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

From Naval Intelligence, I obtained a recording of a Soviet submarine transmitting on active sonar and then arranged for one of our hydrosounder-fitted boats to run over the aforementioned noise range playing the Soviet tape. It worked. From the listening post ashore, it sounded exactly like a Soviet submarine pinging its way down the range. That was a breakthrough. In a dogfight, if a Soviet submarine were to hear its target transmitting on Soviet sonar, he would think he was in a friendly fire situation. And while he was pondering, we could nail him. The technicalities were far from perfect but I had demonstrated the feasibility. Ideas were now flowing thick and fast. One of the great problems with submarines was how to communicate with them when deep, as radio waves do not travel far through the sea.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

Both early headlines have since been altered, though the final stories from the following day are still available: “Atlanta-Area Police Officer Shot after Responding to Wrong Home,” Fox News, September 1, 2015, www.foxnews.com/us/atlanta-area-police-officer-shot-after-responding-to-wrong-home; Eliott C. McLaughlin and Holly Yan, “Police: Friendly Fire Likely Wounded Officer in Wrong-House Encounter,” CNN, September 1, 2015, www.cnn.com/2015/09/01/us/georgia-wrong-house-shooting/index.html. 7: Adaped from Texas Roadhouse menu, http://restaurantfood.menu/menu/image/allbrandlogo/Texas%20Roadhouse.jpg. 8: U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as cited by Christopher Ingraham, “There’s No Immigration Crisis, and These Charts Prove It,” Washington Post, June 21, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/21/theres-no-immigration-crisis-and-these-charts-prove-it. 9: Justin McCarthy, “Most Americans Still See Crime Up Over Last Year,” Gallup, November 21, 2014. 10: Sarah Lichtenstein et al., “Judged Frequency of Lethal Events,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 4, no. 6 (November 1978). 11: DuckDuckGo, “There are no ‘regular results’ on Google anymore,” October 10, 2012, Vimeo video, 1:21, https://vimeo.com/51181384. 12: Adapted from “Addition using number bonds,” OnlineMathLearning.com, www.onlinemathlearning.com/addition-number-bonds.html. 13: Adapted from a map by the U.S.


pages: 385 words: 115,697

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

animal electricity, friendly fire, Khyber Pass, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Thomas L Friedman

So where did the insurgents go? They were dead, under the rubble, that’s where they were. Buried. Vaporized. Ground to dust. “Have you ever seen what a 2,000 -pound bomb does to a person?” an American officer asked me once, not really bragging because in this case the victims had been American soldiers. Friendly fire, Afghanistan, five guys. “We put the remains in a sandwich bag,” he said. Still, it was a curiosity that we had seen so few bodies. The generals were reporting hundreds of dead, thousands even, we knew that from the radio, but we weren’t seeing many. You’d think by then we would have seen an arm.


pages: 467 words: 116,902

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

affirmative action, cognitive bias, Columbine, Corrections Corporation of America, critical race theory, deindustrialization, desegregation, different worldview, ending welfare as we know it, friendly fire, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, land reform, large denomination, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, pink-collar, power law, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Department of Justice, Department of Justice Drug Demand Reduction Activities, Report No. 3-12 (Washington, DC: Office of the Inspector General, Feb. 2003), 35, www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/plus/a0312. 35 Radley Balko, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, July 17, 2006), 8. 36 Megan Twohey, “SWATs Under Fire,” National Journal, Jan. 1, 2000, 37; Balko, Overkill, 8. 37 Timothy Egan, “Soldiers of the Drug War Remain on Duty,” New York Times, Mar. 1, 1999. 38 Ibid., 8-9. 39 Scott Andron, “SWAT: Coming to a Town Near You?” Miami Herald, May 20, 2002. 40 Balko, Overkill, 11, citing Peter Kraska, “Researching the Police-Military Blur: Lessons Learned,” Police Forum 14, no. 3 (2005). 41 Balko, Overkill, 11, citing Britt Robson, “Friendly Fire,” Minneapolis City Pages, Sept. 17, 1997. 42 Ibid., 43 (citing Kraska research). 43 Ibid., 49 (citing Village Voice). 44 Ibid., 50; “Not All Marijuana Law Victims Are Arrested: Police Officer Who Fatally Shot Suspected Marijuana User Cleared of Criminal Charges,” NORML News, July 13, 1995, druglibrary.org/olsen/NORML/WEEKLY/95-07-13.html; Timothy Lynch, After Prohibition (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2000), 82; and various sources citing “Dodge County Detective Can’t Remember Fatal Shot; Unarmed Man Killed in Drug Raid at His Home,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Apr. 29, 1995, A1, and “The Week,” National Review, June 12, 1995, 14. 45 Ibid., 10, citing Steven Elbow, “Hooked on SWAT: Fueled with Drug Enforcement Money, Military-Style Police Teams Are Exploding in the Backwoods of Wisconsin,” Madison Capitol Times, Aug. 18, 2001. 46 Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilson, “Policing for Profit: The Drug War’s Hidden Economic Agenda,” University of Chicago Law Review 65 (1998): 35, 45. 47 Ibid., 64. 48 Blumenson and Nilson, “Policing for Profit,” 72. 49 Ibid., 71. 50 Ibid., 82. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 83. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 98. 56 Michael Fessier Jr., “Trail’s End Deep in a Wild Canyon West of Malibu, a Controversial Law Brought Together a Zealous Sheriff’s Deputy and an Eccentric Recluse; a Few Seconds Later, Donald Scott Was Dead,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, Aug. 1, 1993; and Office of the District Attorney of Ventura, California, Report on the Death of Donald Scott (Ventura: Mar. 30, 1993), available at www.fear.org/chron/scott.txt. 57 Peter D.


pages: 432 words: 128,944

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes

Apollo 11, colonial exploitation, Columbine, disinformation, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, friendly fire, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, music of the spheres

This is a fixed air pattern – fixed, at any rate, at certain seasons and times of day – in which the upper current is exactly reversed in direction from the lower.fn17 So LaMountain sailed mockingly back over the entire Confederate army, and, valving fast, brought the Atlantic safely back virtually to its point of departure in the Union rearguard, and delivered his report. On at least one occasion he was nearly shot by a German brigade of Union troops as he landed, an early example of ‘friendly fire’. ‘An infuriated crowd of officers and men were intent on destroying the balloon and myself … One bullet passed rather unpleasantly close to my head,’ as he remarked laconically. These flights, both free and tethered, caused a sensation among the opposing armies. The Scientific American remarked on LaMountain’s reckless courage, and the New York Times reported that he had been able to view the whole Confederate encampment right up the east side of the James River, and later all the rebel manoeuvrings on the west side of the Potomac.


pages: 394 words: 124,743

Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry by Steven Rattner

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, business cycle, Carl Icahn, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Ford Model T, friendly fire, hiring and firing, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, supply-chain management, too big to fail

—who had heard of my appointment and didn't feel I had sufficient knowledge of the auto industry to help Detroit stay open for business. Perhaps my new bosses or I should have anticipated it, but we'd been preoccupied with trying to get under way amid the seeming free fall all around us. For me, the friendly fire only added to my terror about going in to lead a team that didn't yet exist on what gave every appearance of being a political and economic suicide mission. For better or worse, history in this administration was going to be made at an accelerated pace. I could not help but imagine a disturbing scene set six months or so in the future in which President Obama, a man I admired, would have to face cameras and reporters and a lot of angry people and explain what had gone wrong: on his watch, two major automakers—iconic companies long among the largest and most important in the United States—had closed their showrooms, fired their workers, and shuttered their plants.


pages: 402 words: 123,199

In the Company of Heroes by Michael J. Durant, Steven Hartov

Adam Curtis, back-to-the-land, friendly fire, job satisfaction, no-fly zone, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, trade route, urban sprawl

I woke up in a cold sweat. It was dead silent except for Firimbi, snoring peacefully on his mat. I searched my body for fresh gaping wounds, then lay flat back and sucked air. The whole thing had been nothing but a nightmare. I guess I was a little stressed out. I thought I had been killed by friendly fire. Chapter 11 THE BIBLE October 9, 1993 On my seventh day as a prisoner of war, I found religion. It has often been said that there are no atheists in foxholes, meaning that even a nonbeliever will begin to pray when faced with his own mortality. But I had never been a Catholic of convenience who only prayed when times were tough.


The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, Donald Davies, friendly fire, information security, Leo Hollis, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, operational security, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Turing machine, unbiased observer, undersea cable, Zimmermann PGP

He just lit up his pipe and walked away. The code talkers soon proved their worth on the battlefield. During one episode on the island of Saipan, a battalion of marines took over positions previously held by Japanese soldiers, who had retreated. Suddenly a salvo exploded nearby. They were under friendly fire from fellow Americans who were unaware of their advance. The marines radioed back in English explaining their position, but the salvos continued because the attacking American troops suspected that the messages were from Japanese impersonators trying to fool them. It was only when a Navajo message was sent that the attackers saw their mistake and halted the assault.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

I intend to support my son and his fellow soldiers by doing everything I can to oppose any offensive American military action in the Persian Gulf. There were courageous individual acts by citizens, speaking out in spite of threats. Peg Mullen, of Brownsville, Texas, whose son had been killed by “friendly fire” in Vietnam, organized a busload of mothers to protest in Washington, in spite of a warning that her house would be burned down if she persisted. The actress Margot Kidder (“Lois Lane” in the Superman films), despite the risk to her career, spoke out eloquently against the war. A basketball player for Seton Hall University in New Jersey refused to wear the American flag on his uniform, and when he became the object of derision for this, he left the team and the university, and returned to his native Italy.

note: Much of the material in this chapter comes from my own files of social action by organizations around the country, from my collection of news clippings, and from publications outside the mainstream, including: The Nation. In These Times, The Nuclear Resister, Peacework, The Resist Newsletter, Rethinking Schools, Indigenous Thought. 23. THE COMING REVOLT OF THE GUARDS Bryan, C. D. B. Friendly Fire. New York: Putnam, 1976. Levin, Murray B. The Alienated Voter. New York: Irvington, 1971. Warren, Donald I. The Radical Center: Middle America and the Politics of Alienation. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976. Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason. San Francisco: Freeman, 1976. 24.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

The American troops had been told that the Russian-made T-72 tank was almost unbeatable, but in actual combat it was no match for the M1A1 Abrams. Early in the morning of February 26, 1991, Lieutenant Colonel Pat Ritter’s battalion encountered one of the best Republican Guard units at a map location known as 73 Easting. The Americans took hits on their lightly armored Bradley fighting vehicles, and some of it was later shown to be ‘‘friendly fire’’ from American units. But the Iraqis suffered casualties like in a horror movie. After the battle, the Americans found fifteen T-72 tanks, eleven armored fighting vehicles, an anti-aircraft gun, and four tanks all burning from direct hits.34 After several such encounters, Saddam issued a general retreat order to save as much of his army as fast as he could.


One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer by Fick, Nathaniel C.(October 3, 2005) Hardcover by Nathaniel C. Fick

clean water, defense in depth, double helix, dual-use technology, friendly fire, John Nash: game theory, Khyber Pass, no-fly zone, Silicon Valley

Ten minutes later, some fucker was shooting at us with a rifle in one hand and a little girl in the other. My guys are trying to do the right thing, but I don’t want to get them fucking killed in the process. There’s a bunch of dead Marines on the road in town. You’ll see ’em when we roll through.” “What happened?” “Depends who you ask. RPG ambush. Friendly fire from an A-10. Hell if I know.” We had spent the day making veterans. Most of the Marine Corps had gone ten years without a real fight. I hoped we were up the steep part of the learning curve already. General Mattis had told us to survive the first five days in combat, the most dangerous days.


pages: 525 words: 138,747

Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines by Bill Hicks

friendly fire, military-industrial complex, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Tipper Gore

Does that mean if we had sent over eighty guys, we still woulda won this fucking thing, or what? One guy in a ticker-tape parade: ‘I did it! Hey! You’re welcome!’ ‘Good work, Tommy, how d’you do it?’ ‘I pulled up G12. It was in the catalogue. Worked like a charm.’ Seventy-nine. After we had a war – we killed 150,000 people, we lost seventy-nine, mostly to friendly fire – did those army commercials even need to be aired any more? ‘We’re the army and we’re looking for a few good – fuck, we got enough good men. Screw it! We need eighty of ya, that’s it. Eighty of ya and that weapons catalogue.’ Y’all are about to win the election as the worst fucking audience I’ve ever faced.


pages: 475 words: 141,189

Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War by Mark Bowden

friendly fire, jitney

The Malaysian officers at first balked at removing their infantry from the APCs, but relented when David agreed to let each vehicle retain a Malaysian driver and gunner. The various units did not have radios that were compatible, so American radios had to be placed with all the vehicles. They worked out fire control procedures, steps to prevent friendly fire incidents, call signs, the route, and a host of other critical issues. David felt a sense of urgency, but not an overriding one. He knew there were critically injured soldiers at the first stash site for whom every minute was important. On the other hand, this convoy was it. If they screwed up, failed to reach the crash site, and got broken up or bogged down, who was going to come in and rescue them?


pages: 459 words: 128,458

The Dream of the Iron Dragon by Robert Kroese

friendly fire, gravity well, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, pattern recognition, time dilation

All in all, eighteen men limped away from the battlefield. Gabe thought one of them was Gunnar, but he couldn’t be sure. When they’d cleared the spike barrier, Gabe climbed down from the lander and looked for other survivors. He found two more men who were barely holding on. One had apparently been hit in the head with an axe—a friendly fire incident. He was babbling incoherently and drifting in and out of consciousness. Gabe stabbed him through the neck. He gave the same treatment to another man with a massive chest wound who was lying on his back, gasping for breath. And then, at last, there was silence. Gabe fell to his knees and vomited into the snow.


The Hour of Fate by Susan Berfield

bank run, buy and hold, capital controls, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death from overwork, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, new economy, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, the market place, transcontinental railway, wage slave, working poor

By the time a more provocative speaker took the stage, it was late, a storm approached, the mayor had returned home, and only about three hundred people remained. Then one hundred eighty policemen arrived in formation. A bomb exploded in their midst. The police fired into the crowd, wounding dozens and killing several. Sixty-seven officers were injured, many from friendly fire, and eight later died. The prominent businessmen George Pullman and Marshall Field were among those who secretly funded the police investigation and the prosecution. Roosevelt, still in Medora in May, was unwilling to distinguish the strikers from the anarchists. He didn’t support their cause or approve of their methods.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Brunsden, “Coronavirus Crisis Revives Franco-German Relations,” Financial Times, April 13, 2020. 31. A. Tooze, “It’s a New Europe—If You Can Keep It,” Foreign Policy, August 7, 2020. 32. C. Pazzanese, “Angela Merkel, the Scientist Who Became a World Leader,” Harvard Gazette, May 28, 2019. 33. H. von der Burchard and E. Schaart, “Dutch Face Friendly Fire as Corona Bond Bad Cops,” Politico, March 30, 2020. 34. “EU ‘Frugals’ Formally Oppose Merkel-Macron Plan for Coronavirus Grants,” CNBC, May 23, 2020. 35. D. Herszenhorn, L. Bayer, and R. Momtaz, “The Coronavirus Plan That von der Leyen built,” Politico, July 15, 2020. 36. D. Herszenhorn and L.


pages: 526 words: 144,019

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

One account reported that “he could not rid himself of the fear that the weakening of the American markets could tempt the Soviet Union to [pose] a challenge to the United States akin to the one that had provoked the Cuban missile crisis, and nuclear war might ensue.” He quickly shook off the worst of his irrational alarms, but there was no disputing how traumatic Black Monday had been for him, and for his partners. Beyond the attacks in the media, he and Leland were facing friendly fire, too, as some prominent academics indicted portfolio insurance as a menace. No less a monument than Harry Markowitz, a legendary financial theorist, had said, “I believe that a significant cause—if not the prime cause—for the precipitous fall in prices on October 19 was portfolio insurance.” Others in the academic community were still debating and studying the issue.


pages: 522 words: 150,592

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

Up until this point all naval confrontations were highly chaotic affairs,47 spray-filled donnybrooks with the sailing vessels ponderously wheeling and turning this way and that in a furious melee, colliding with one another, firing at each other from guns mounted in the bows, not infrequently committing friendly-fire errors, sending flag signals to one another that could not be seen through the smoke, with each master taking his own chance to fight through the fracas as he saw fit. But in the 1639 battle, the Dutch commander decided on the simple idea of standing all his vessels in a line, such that their sides all faced the enemy fleet—and opened fire with broadside after broadside, sending a withering cannonade of shot directly at any Spanish ship within range.


pages: 473 words: 156,146

They Gave Me a Seafire by Commander R 'Mike' Crosley Dsc Rn

friendly fire, IFF: identification friend or foe, Isaac Newton, traveling salesman

It turned out to be the rum store. Rum was pouring down the walls and windows, and, being already mixed with the right amount of water from the fire hoses, made a nice drink. So we settled down to a few grogs, our Petty Officer having gone off to find us some damage to control. We enjoyed ourselves, warmed by the friendly fire, and watching the sparks fly skywards as the grog slid smoothly down our throats. After about six doubles and when the Gosport fire brigade had put out the fire, we wound our way back to St. Vincent, the happiest bunch of neo-sailors that had ever been on Damage Control and only just in control of ourselves, too, as we came through the gates under the suspicious eye of the Duty Chief Petty Officer.


pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Fellow Tory Sir John Biggs-Davison thought: ‘it was revolting for cringing clergy to misuse St Paul’s to throw doubt upon the sacrifices of our fighting men’.55 Mrs Thatcher’s government allowed no bad news stories from the Falklands to spoil the sweet taste of victory. It was essential, for instance, that no one should know that four of the British dead had been killed by ‘friendly fire’. On 6 June, as troops were landing on East Falkland, a Gazelle helicopter was dispatched to Goose Green to collect two passengers. Seven minutes later, it was shot down, killing everyone on board. An inquest held in Southampton in December was told that it had been hit by an Argentine missile.


pages: 513 words: 156,022

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Boeing 747, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, falling living standards, friendly fire, Global Witness, land reform, mandatory minimum, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade, Yom Kippur War

With the pass now blocked, the rest of the convoy was trapped behind it. A hellish scene unfolded. The Ethiopians, realizing the whole of Afabet was surrounded, began to shell their own tanks and artillery to prevent them falling into the hands of the EPLF. Men leapt from blazing tanks, hair and clothes on fire, screaming for help, but meeting further friendly fire. As the panicking Ethiopian troops tried to escape, they ran straight into the EPLF line. EPLF forces swept through Afabet, tightening the noose, fighting house to house while the civilian population hid in their homes. When they arrived at the narrow mountain pass with the burning tanks they found smoldering skeletons by the side of the road.


pages: 528 words: 157,969

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

cloud computing, experimental subject, friendly fire, gravity well, hive mind, pattern recognition, prisoner's dilemma

Others were steering down from above, where they had been drifting at the end of more thread, climbing up against the outwards force of the rotating section; climbing to where they could leap on Karst and his men. Karst’s upraised gun/glove, at the corner of his camera, flashed and flared, trying to track the new targets, killing at least one. They saw one of Karst’s people being hit by friendly fire, boots torn off the hull by the impact, falling away from the ship to end up jerking on the end of an unseen line, as an eight-legged monster came inching up towards his helpless, flailing form. Men and women were shouting, shooting, screaming, trying to run away at their leaden, crippled pace.


pages: 688 words: 147,571

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

A 2016 report of the US Department of Defense research division explored the potential for AI to become a cornerstone of US defense policy.89 A 2017 Chatham House Report concluded that militaries around the world were developing AI weapons capabilities “that could make them capable of undertaking tasks and missions on their own”.90 Allowing AI to kill targets without human intervention remains one of its most controversial potential uses. At the time of writing the most lethal known use of autonomous ground-based weapons was in a friendly fire incident, when a South African artillery cannon malfunctioned and killed nine soldiers.91 It is unlikely to be long before enemies too are in the crosshairs. Robots can care as well as kill. Increasingly sophisticated AI systems are being used to provide physical and emotional support to older people in Israel and Japan,92 a trend which is surely likely to grow, both in those countries and elsewhere as the richer world continues to adapt to ageing populations.


pages: 475 words: 149,310

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

First, at the simple level of fact, one has to question whether this ideology of war corresponds to reality. Doubts are raised, for example, by the continuing high level of “collateral damage” (when will they manage to perfect the technology?), the disproportionate number of U.S. and Allied troops lost to “friendly fire” (when will they better coordinate the information and command structures?), and the unending problems military forces face while conducting the “democratic transition” that follows after “regime change” (when will they train the army better in the social, political, and cultural tasks of nation building?).


pages: 514 words: 153,274

The Cobweb by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, computer age, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Neal Stephenson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Snow Crash, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

He had hardly slept in three days, since the ground war had been launched and Desiree’s unit had gone thundering forward into Iraq. Casualties were light. But earlier today he had seen a report that several members of Desiree’s division had been killed when they had hit a mine in their Humvee. They were medics who had been coming to the aid of an armored personnel carrier that had been struck by friendly fire. At least two of the dead medics were female. As soon as Clyde had heard this report, he had known in his heart that Desiree had been in that Humvee—probably driving it. That would be just like her. He had called the Pentagon hot line for families of servicepeople over and over, but it was always busy.


pages: 509 words: 153,061

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Thomas E. Ricks

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Berlin Wall, classic study, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, interchangeable parts, It's morning again in America, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman

He is scheduled to return to Iraq in November of 2009. When Efflandt left the battalion in 2008, his officers memorialized his command tour in Iraq with a print of Gen. Meade at Gettysburg titled Stand and Fight It Out. Sporadic fighting would continue in Tarmiyah through that year, at one point leading to a friendly fire shootout between American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and police, killing 6 of the Iraqis. BLACK THURSDAY As the surge intensified, with the majority of the additional brigades in country, the situation actually worsened. Thursday, April 12, stands as perhaps the toughest day of this period.


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

And a third big piece would be aid to state and local governments, so they would not have to slash their payrolls and raise taxes as much. Republicans opposed that, too, claiming it would not stimulate the economy. (How come? Aren’t government jobs jobs?) And then there were the three Ts. Despite some external criticisms, including some friendly fire, the administration-in-waiting argued that the need for stimulus was likely to be far less temporary than in past recessions—after all, this one looked like a whopper, both very long and very deep. (Good point.) That thought, in turn, made infrastructure spending a more plausible candidate for stimulus.


pages: 477 words: 144,329

How Money Became Dangerous by Christopher Varelas

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airport security, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, California gold rush, cashless society, corporate raider, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, eat what you kill, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Michael Milken, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, pensions crisis, pets.com, pre–internet, profit motive, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Saturday Night Live, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, universal basic income, zero day

He walked back to the podium through the crowd, the only sound in the room the clinking of flatware. “Operation Desert Storm,” he continued, “changed everything. We sent fifty thousand body bags to the Middle East to prepare for American casualties, but we lost very few soldiers—many of them from friendly fire. That changed the whole expectation around warfare. Now we believe we can fight a war without casualties.” This particular luncheon was in a hotel banquet room in Manhattan, the fourth stop on the road show. The purpose of these events was to schmooze and tell the story of the company, to show off some of the more impressive weapons, gadgets, and technologies, and hopefully stir up enough excitement and interest that the investors would drive up the share price.


Lonely Planet Belgium & Luxembourg by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, centre right, charter city, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Peace of Westphalia, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, three-masted sailing ship, urban renewal

Both towns hold excellent carnivals and make good bases for regional exploration. Malmédy POP 12,600 Lively Malmédy makes a great base for visiting the Hautes Fagnes region – as long as you are driving. A former tanning centre, much of the city was tragically destroyed in a trio of WWII ‘friendly fire’ bombing raids in 1944. However, the centre has retained a core of historical buildings, notably a 1784 cathedral, from whose doorstep you can survey a grand series of spired, century-old mansions that reveal the remnants of a very wealthy past that’s recalled next door in the Malmundarium Museum (www.malmundarium.be; Pl du Châtelet 9; adult/child €6/3; h10am-6pm Tue-Sun Apr-Jun, Sep & Oct, daily Jul & Aug, to 5pm Tue-Sun Nov-Mar). 1Sights Baugnez 44MUSEUM (%080 44 04 82; www.baugnez44.be; Rte du Luxembourg 10, Baugnez; h10am-6pm Wed-Sun Sep-Jun, daily Jul & Aug, last entry 5.15pm) On 17 December 1944, American and SS troop columns met fatefully at the Baugnez crossroads, 4km southeast of Malmédy.


pages: 469 words: 149,526

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine by Christopher Miller

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Bellingcat, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, false flag, friendly fire, game design, global pandemic, military-industrial complex, Ponzi scheme, private military company, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, special economic zone, stakhanovite, wikimedia commons

They are focused on only one thing: destroying the enemy.” Ukrainian pilots did destroy several Russian aircraft in the first hours and days of the invasion. Many were shot down in dogfights but most were downed by surface-to-air rockets operated on the ground. Several Russian jets shot down their own aircraft by mistake in friendly-fire accidents. “They shot down many of their own planes and helicopters,” General Vadym Skibitsky of Ukrainian military intelligence told me. “They lost skilled pilots.” After the first few days, the Russians wised up. They changed tactics, began flying sorties at different times with different approaches.


pages: 1,208 words: 364,966

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, friendly fire, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, open economy, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, the long tail, Yom Kippur War

When I accompanied a British citizen back to the home he had abandoned during fighting near Chatila, we found that the Israeli troops billeted in his house had smeared Hebrew graffiti on the walls with excrement. Examples of Israeli indiscipline were matched by evidence of their incompetence. Twenty per cent of their casualties during the 1982 invasion, it now emerged, had been caused by ‘friendly fire’, by their own rifles, tanks and aircraft. US officials were quoted as describing the Israeli army as ‘an inept, undisciplined horde’.* Even the Israeli air force had managed to kill 34 of its own soldiers in an air attack in the Bekaa Valley.† In Israel, the police discovered that 4,000 hand grenades, 300 Galil rifles, 200 M-16 rifles, seven bazookas, 45 light mortars and two heavy machine-guns had been filched from Israeli army stores in Lebanon and were presumed to be in private Israeli hands.‡ Israeli troops were found leaving Lebanon with hashish bought in the Bekaa.

* Obeid was to be kidnapped from his Jibchit home by Israeli troops in July 1989, an abduction which led to the murder of American UN hostage Col. William Higgins and a death threat against a second US captive. * See the conservative Washington Times, 27 August 1984: ‘Israeli "ineptitude" blamed for “friendly fire” casualties’. † I learned this quite by accident. Studying a list of Israeli military awards for the 1982 invasion, I noticed medals for courage under air attack. Dr Moshe Daniel, an Israeli army battalion medical officer, for example, received a citation from the Israeli chief of staff for treating and evacuating wounded Israelis after an air strike south of Lake Karaoun on 10 June 1982 (Awards ‘for service above and beyond the call of duty’, published Israel, 30 March 1983).


The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, business climate, colonial rule, death from overwork, declining real wages, deliberate practice, disinformation, European colonialism, friendly fire, Gini coefficient, guns versus butter model, income inequality, income per capita, land bank, land reform, land tenure, low interest rates, military-industrial complex, new economy, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, systematic bias, union organizing

But in each of the many places where I went, the testimony was the same: 100 killed here, 200 killed there. One old man summed up all the stories: “The Americans killed some VC but only a small number. But of civilians, there were a large number killed...” Buckley’s notes add further detail. In the single month of March, the Ben Tre hospital reported 343 people wounded by “friendly” fire as compared with 25 by “the enemy.” And as a U.S. pacification official noted, “Many people who were wounded died on the way to the hospitals,” or were treated elsewhere (at home, in VC hospitals or ARVN dispensaries). And, of course, unknown numbers were simply killed outright. Buckley’s actual citation about the “perhaps as many as 5,000 deaths” is that of a senior pacification official who estimated that “at least 5,000” of those killed “were what we refer to as non-combatants”—to which we may add that the “combatants,” who are considered fair game in most U.S. reporting and historical analysis, were of course also South Vietnamese attempting to resist the overwhelming power of a foreign enemy.


pages: 546 words: 176,169

The Cold War by Robert Cowley

Able Archer 83, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transcontinental railway

Their marine pilots delivered the mail quickly, spectacularly, and with what seemed like millimetric accuracy. Over half their strikes were within a half mile of the front lines. This was in sharp contrast to an air force whose difficulties with air–ground coordination resulted in numerous cases of friendly fire, the most notable being the napalming of a British battalion on September 23, 1950. Air support for MacArthur's end-run amphibious landing at Inchon was a marine-and-navy show—and a showcase. The newly organized 1st Marine Division and its army stablemate, the 7th Division, enjoyed air power à la carte.


Croatia by Anja Mutic, Vesna Maric

call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, friendly fire, G4S, haute cuisine, low cost airline, off-the-grid, starchitect

Festivals & Events Terraneo Festival MUSIC (www.terraneofestival.com) If you’re here in August, don’t miss the Terraneo Festival, a great big five-day dance party located in an old army barracks, 4km from the centre of Šibenik and 500 metres from the beach. Past line-ups have included The Roots, The Ting Tings, Thievery Corporation, Groove Armada and Friendly Fires, among many other international and local performers and DJs. International Children’s Festival CHILDREN Šibenik hosts a renowned international children’s festival during the last week of June and the first week of July. There are craft workshops, along with music, dance, children’s film and theatre, puppets and parades.


pages: 780 words: 168,782

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

In the years before, the Soviet secret police had made a tradition of honoring operatives who lost their lives in the line of duty by hanging portraits of them in the buildings corridor’s. But the chaotic assault on Amin’s palace had taken the lives of at least one hundred members of the KGB’s elite commando squad; some of them, even more embarrassingly, were casualties of friendly fire. Andropov decided that such a large number of mourning portraits would draw unwanted attention to the losses. So the deaths of the men went unremarked by their comrades. It was a fitting portent of the squalid war to come.29 20 Solidarity On August 7, 1980, her bosses fired Anna Walentynowicz from her job at the Lenin Shipyard in the Polish city of Gdańsk.


pages: 750 words: 169,026

A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East by James Barr

bank run, British Empire, facts on the ground, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Khartoum Gordon, operational security, Scramble for Africa, short selling, éminence grise

Early in July, Wingate overreached himself when he decided to attack an Arab gang, which had occupied Nazareth, with a force of over eighty men from all three squads. The operation started to go wrong when Wingate set up ambushes around the wrong village. Having realised his mistake, he led an assault on the settlement where the gang was resting, but in a chaotic night attack was hit by friendly fire. It was ‘a cock-up of the first water’, said a colleague.⁵⁶ Wingate wrote up his report of the operation from hospital. ‘More deliberation and care is called for,’ he admitted.⁵⁷ Although Wingate recovered and returned to lead the night squads on further raids, the squads were wound up later in the year.


pages: 1,243 words: 167,097

One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe by David O’keefe

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, conceptual framework, friendly fire, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Suez canal 1869, trade route, trickle-down economics

‘It rained all the time, so we were never dry, and then there were the speed marches, six or seven miles in an hour for hour after hour, in full kit with platoon weapons,’ recalled one recruit; ‘many would have fallen out, but were helped on by their mates.’15 Another hallmark of commando training, in addition to the near-death forced marches with 65-pound packs, called for the use of live ammunition in exercises to simulate conditions on the battlefield – a policy that sometimes claimed ‘friendly fire’ casualties but reinforced most effectively the violent nature of the business at hand. ‘Climbing cliffs, crawling through bogs, under barbed wire, while the staff shot over us with Brens, or chucked grenades about’ was all part of the daily routine for the prospective commandos.16 Today, ‘precise application of will’ rather than mere violence defines the ethos of a Royal Marine Commando, but this modification developed during the peacekeeping era.


Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

In the dense forest, Ashanti snipers slipped between the British formations. ‘The fighting with small number against great odds is all very well on the plains of India or China where you can see what you are about,’ Wolseley wrote home to his wife, ‘but here in this interminable forest where you can never see a hundred yards, it is nervous work.’66 Friendly fire was a hazard, communication almost impossible. The British formed a moving square with rockets at the corners. The critical factor was the imbalance of firepower. The British had Gatling guns but did not use them. But their Snider rifles gave them a huge advantage. The Ashanti had firearms, but mostly Daneguns – smooth bore muskets.


Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, land reform, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, remote working, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing, work culture

At local level, the number went up to 71 per cent.44 Ulbricht had once again remained in the saddle, against the odds. Building Socialism – Resumed Cottbus, Brandenburg, 1960. The nineteen-year-old Gero Vanselow decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the air force. His mother had told him stories about ‘Papa’, whose tragic death in 1945, when his plane was shot down by friendly fire over Germany, had served to create a golden glow around the still image on the mantelpiece. Now it was time for Gero to become the man they had both lost. When he turned up at the recruitment office and said that he wanted to become a pilot, Gero was told that his biography was not acceptable for this role.


pages: 1,800 words: 596,972

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, dual-use technology, Farzad Bazoft, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, IFF: identification friend or foe, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, music of the spheres, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, Transnistria, unemployed young men, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Mechanized Infantry Division, the brief moment of compassion which this engendered probably had more to do with guilty consciences over Western inaction towards the Iraqi insurgents than it did with the enormous loss of human life that it represented.143 Only later would we learn some less heroic truths about the liberation of Kuwait. The Americans, it transpired, dropped nearly as many tons of bombs each day as were dropped on Germany and Japan daily during the Second World War. Of the 148 U.S. servicemen killed, 35—almost one-quarter—had lost their lives to “friendly fire” from other American forces.144 The non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office would subsequently state that the Pentagon and its military contractors made claims for the precision of their Stealth fighter jets, Tomahawk cruise missiles and laser-guided “smart bombs” that were “overstated, misleading, inconsistent with the best available data or unverifiable.”

In October 1998, Phil Garner telephoned me to ask how he could make contact with the doctors treating Iraq’s child cancer victims. He had been reading my reports on the growing evidence of links between cancers and depleted uranium shells. During the 1991 Gulf War, Garner was in the British Royal Army Medical Corps. He wasn’t in the front lines, but he handled the uniforms of Britain’s “friendly fire” casualties, men who were accidentally attacked by U.S. aircraft that were using depleted-uranium rounds. And now he was suffering from asthma, incontinence, pain in the intestines, and had a lump on the right side of his neck. What does this mean? I knew all about these lumps. I had seen them on the necks of the Iraqi children.

Chapter Sixteen: Betrayal 646 “Rise to save the homeland”: See Middle East Reporter (Beirut), 25 February 1991, p. 4, “Iraqis Urged to Revolt, Save Country from Dictatorship, War.” 647 the Iraqis had tried to jam: See Middle East Reporter (Beirut), 4 January 1991, “Anti-Saddam Radio Believed Jammed.” 647 “the allies to liberate Iraq”: Interview with Haidar al-Assadi, Beirut, 3 May 1998. 649 Iraqi dead at up to 150,000: Middle East Reporter (Beirut), 1 March 1991. 649 had claimed that 26,000 Iraqis: Jumhouri-y Islami (Tehran), 19 February 1991, cited by Dilip Hiro in letter to The Independent, 8 February 1992. 649 When a Pentagon source: Newsday, 12 September 1991, cited by Hiro, as above. 650 dropped nearly as many tons: International Herald Tribune, 10 July 1996, quoting New York Times article by Tim Weiner, “Smart Arms in Gulf War Are Found Overrated.” 650 “35—almost one-quarter”: Associated Press report from Washington, 13 August 1991, “Gulf Friendly Fire Casualties Rise,” by Susanne M. Chafer. 650 The independent U.S. General Accounting Office: See International Herald Tribune, 10 July 1996, op. cit. 650 In fact, as Seymour Hersh: New Yorker, 26 September 1994, pp. 86–99, “Missile Wars,” by Seymour Hersh, esp. p. 92. (n.) 650 Timothy McVeigh, a promising young soldier: Reuters report in Irish Times, 3 June 1997. 652 All of this I duly reported: See Independent, 27 March 1991.


pages: 1,222 words: 385,226

Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, Burning Man, clean water, colonial rule, financial independence, friendly fire, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, trade route, unemployed young men, Yom Kippur War

The explosions I’d seen and heard as I ran toward the enemy—they blew up their own mortar shells, the idiots—were actually direct hits on the Russian positions by Massoud’s mortars. The wider mortar strikes that tore into our line were mere accidents: friendly fire, as they say. And that was the elated moment I’d called glorious, in my mind, as I ran into the guns: that stupid waste of lives, that friendly fire. There wasn’t any glory in it. There never is. There’s only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that’s what the word really means. And you can’t serve God with a gun.


Lonely Planet Colombia (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Tom Masters, Kevin Raub

airport security, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Downton Abbey, El Camino Real, Francisco Pizarro, friendly fire, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute couture, land reform, low cost airline, off-the-grid, race to the bottom, sustainable-tourism, urban sprawl

El CoqBAR ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; Calle 84 No 14-02; cover Fri & Sat COP$20,000; h7pm-3am Wed-Sat) This unsigned see-and-be-seen spot evokes a French country greenhouse, complete with basketball goalposts and Spanish moss that's strewn across the retractable ceilings. It counts legions of indie creative types (ad folks, actors, film crews, music biz peeps) as devotees. The electro/indie soundtrack skips happily between Phoenix and Friendly Fires, then throws you for a loop with '80s hip-hop. Andrés Juan, a Colombian actor who isn't afraid to throw down with the cool kids, runs the show. Good ginger mojitos for the Straight Edge crowd. Azahar CafeCAFE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.azaharcoffee.com; Carrera 14 No 93A-48; coffee COP$3000-5000; h8am-9pm Mon-Sat, noon-9pm Sun; W)S Extreme exportation means coffee snobs have more than a little bit of trouble finding a passable cup of Joe in Colombia, but this dead-serious java joint serves single origin, micro-lot coffee prepared in all the ways only considered routine by serious caffeine fiends: AeroPress, Chemex and the like.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Rumsfeld estimated that in the two months it took the coalition to dislodge the Taliban from Afghanistan’s main cities, it had killed between eight and twelve thousand Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, at a cost of 11 U.S. lives. The 122 U.S. service members killed in the first three weeks of the Iraq War largely died from accidents or friendly fire. But the war on terror wasn’t ultimately a fight between countries, as the Gulf War had been. It was a “very new type of conflict,” Rumsfeld told the press a week after 9/11. “We’ll have to deal with the networks.” This metaphor of the network—a set of connected points—became ubiquitous, acquiring the same sort of buzzword cachet that quagmire had possessed in the Vietnam War.


May We Be Forgiven by A. M. Homes

anti-communist, Burning Man, dumpster diving, friendly fire, if you build it, they will come, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Skype, South China Sea

The first thing I see when my eyes are clear is the dented hood, ripped fender, a crack in the windshield, and blood. Walter Penny comes over to me, looks at the car, and takes a white claim form from his manila folder. “I always keep a few of these with me. It’s a government claim form, same for an auto accident as if you’re killed by friendly fire. The government is self-insured—one form for everything. But here’s the thing,” he says, dangling the form. “It only works if you were at the wheel. Did you drive yourself out?” Confused, I look around. The soldier has vanished. “Did you drive yourself out of the woods?” Walter asks again. “Apparently,” I say.


pages: 834 words: 180,700

The Architecture of Open Source Applications by Amy Brown, Greg Wilson

8-hour work day, anti-pattern, bioinformatics, business logic, c2.com, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative editing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, continuous integration, Conway's law, create, read, update, delete, David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, functional programming, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, linked data, load shedding, locality of reference, loose coupling, Mars Rover, MITM: man-in-the-middle, MVC pattern, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, Perl 6, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, Ruby on Rails, side project, Skype, slashdot, social web, speech recognition, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WebSocket

Implemented in some rulesets, the Attack order allows a player to explicitly initiate combat with an enemy Fleet or Planet, fulfilling the final 4X imperative (exterminate). In team-based rulesets, the inclusion of a distinct Attack order (as opposed to simply using Move and Intercept to implicitly attack targets) is important to avoid friendly fire and to coordinate attacks. Since the Thousand Parsec framework requires ruleset developers to define their own order types, it is possible—even encouraged—for them to think outside the box and create custom orders not found elsewhere. The ability to pack extra data into any object allows developers to do very interesting things with custom order types. 21.1.3.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared sleep deprivation a public health epidemic in 2013. The prevailing view until the 1990s was that people could adapt to chronic sleep loss without adverse cognitive effects, but newer research clearly says otherwise. Sleepiness was responsible for 250,000 traffic accidents in 2009, and is one of the leading causes of friendly fire—soldiers mistakenly shooting people on their own side. Sleep deprivation was ruled to be a contributing factor in some of the most well-known global disasters: the nuclear power plant disasters at Chernobyl (Ukraine), Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), Davis-Besse (Ohio), and Rancho Seco (California); the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez; the grounding of the cruise ship Star Princess; and the fatal decision to launch the Challenger space shuttle.


pages: 795 words: 212,447

Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy, Grant (CON) Blackwood

active measures, affirmative action, air freight, airport security, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benoit Mandelbrot, defense in depth, dual-use technology, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Earth, Panamax, post-Panamax, Skype, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl

Dumbing down society was happening in Canada, too. A pity, John thought. Unless United flew only American citizens. The flight was grossly ordinary, with nary a bump, taking hardly an hour before they touched down at O’Hare, named for a World War Two naval aviator who’d won the Medal of Honor before getting splashed, probably by friendly fire, which could kill you just as dead as the other sort. Clark wondered how hard it was for the pilot to find the right jetway, but then he’d probably made this flight before, maybe a hundred times. Now came the hard part, John realized. Where was Hadi going, and could he bag a seat on the same flight?


The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East by Andrew Scott Cooper

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Boycotts of Israel, energy security, falling living standards, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, land reform, MITM: man-in-the-middle, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, strikebreaker, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

The result is an appearance of jitteriness that will continue as long as the President depends so heavily on a secretary of state whose basic feeling about economic problems is that they should go away.” Kraft’s brutal dissection of Kissinger’s handling of U.S.-Iran relations was more than a case of friendly fire. Kissinger was losing the confidence of his realist admirers in the press. He seems to have understood at some level that the Shah’s threat to hike prices another 30–35 percent unless the Ford administration found a way to help him shift Iran’s stockpile of unsold oil amounted to blackmail. WE’RE GOING TO HAVE ANOTHER BAD SITUATION Each morning a car with an Iranian driver collected the two Air Force colonels from outside their homes in northern Tehran.


pages: 736 words: 210,277

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris

Albert Einstein, British Empire, family office, friendly fire, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Suez crisis 1956

On io February 1948, about iSo Arabs poured out of the Old City and attacked the Yemin Moshe neighborhood to the west, across the Vale of Hinnom. They were protected by covering fire from the city walls. The Haganah, eventually aided by British troops, beat them off. Sixteen Arabs died and dozens were wounded (some by friendly fire); the Jews suffered one dead and five wounded.135 Attacks by Arab irregulars on rural settlements also began in early December 1947. On 4 December a band of 120-150 gunmen from Salame attacked Ef al, a small kibbutz northeast of Tel Aviv. The settlers, helped by Palmah reinforcements, beat them off.


Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale by David N. Blank-Edelman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, bounce rate, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, commoditize, continuous integration, Conway's law, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, database schema, Debian, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, DevOps, digital rights, domain-specific language, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, exponential backoff, fail fast, fallacies of distributed computing, fault tolerance, fear of failure, friendly fire, game design, Grace Hopper, imposter syndrome, information retrieval, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, invisible hand, iterative process, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maslow's hierarchy, microaggression, microservices, minimum viable product, MVC pattern, performance metric, platform as a service, pull request, RAND corporation, remote working, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, search engine result page, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single page application, Snapchat, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, systems thinking, the long tail, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, traumatic brain injury, value engineering, vertical integration, web application, WebSocket, zero day

He is the instigator, coauthor, and editor of Site Reliability Engineering and The Site Reliability Workbook. 1 See, for example, “How on-call and irregular scheduling harm the American workforce” from The Conversation, or “Why You Should End On-Call Scheduling and What to Do Instead” from When I Work, outlining the impact on income and family; the costs to the systems themselves are hard to estimate, but “friendly fire” in on-call situations is estimated to occur in over 1% of on-call shifts. 2 Bletchley Park and its complement of WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) on-call operators. 3 According to, for example, Tom’s Hardware, around the Bletchley Park era, “in a large system, [a vacuum tube] failed every hour or so.” 4 See, for example, this MedicineNet article or this free medical dictionary, making specific reference to being reachable in 30 minutes of being paged. 5 “Accident & Emergency” in the UK/Ireland; Emergency Room (ER) in the US. 6 Note that doctors get a lot of automatic alerting as well, it’s just that it seems that a lot of it is very low quality; see, for example, this Washington Post article. 7 See, for example, this article from Medical Protection Ireland, emphasizing not eating junk food, paying bills in advance of a week of night-shift work, and double-checking calculations made during night shifts. 8 For example, this article claims that 5% of their ER admissions gave rise to 22% of their costs; this piece argues more broadly that Pareto Principle–style effects are distributed throughout medicine; and this article showed that adverse drug effects obeyed a Pareto Principle–like distribution across a sample of 700-plus cases. 9 As best I can tell, this situation is unique to software: industries that deal with very complex hardware, such as airplanes, do have problems related to complexity, and uncover latent problems with particular revisions of sensors, and so on, but the nature of software being changed all the time is found, as far as I know, nowhere else. 10 On-call in the medical professional also serves as a triage function, which is partially outsourced to monitoring software in the SRE case. 11 Leaving aside the considerable problems with persuading the public, this would be a good idea. 12 This applies to operations engineers generally, and sometimes to product software engineers. 13 For the purposes of this footnote, I want to attack the notion that failure is unavoidable and that everything in computing is wobbly stacks built on soggy marshes of unpredictability.


The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis

Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, Defenestration of Prague, friendly fire, gentleman farmer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, moral panic, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, plutocrats, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

The bombardier was a man named Giuliano Fiorentino: Leaning there against the battlements, the unhappy man could see his house being sacked, and his wife and children outraged. Fearing to strike his own folk, he dared not discharge the cannon, and flinging the burning fuse upon the ground, he wept as though his heart would break, and tore his cheeks with both his hands. Cellini took over, unrestrained by sentimental worries about friendly fire. And perhaps he was right. There were four or five thousand Roman citizens packed into the space under the castle, but it made little difference if they died now under their own cannon. The walls had fallen. Smoke from burning palaces was darkening the sky. The battle was over, and now the real massacre began.


pages: 826 words: 231,966

GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial exploitation, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, friendly fire, illegal immigration, index card, it's over 9,000, lateral thinking, machine translation, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, New Journalism, operational security, packet switching, private military company, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, social intelligence, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, undersea cable, unit 8200, University of East Anglia, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

While they were being taken out at gunpoint, sympathisers in the adjacent apartment threw a grenade at the intelligence officers. A gun battle developed, and those inside hurled more grenades at the authorities.19 Terrified neighbours called the local police, who were unaware of the super-secret activities of the ISI. In the ensuing confusion twenty policemen were injured, many by friendly fire.20 Ramzi Binalshibh was among those captured. In the spring of 2003 an intercepted email led to the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was very close to bin Laden, and had been a key figure in the planning of the 9/11 attacks.21 He was arrested at a house in Rawalpindi in a joint operation by ISI and the CIA’s paramilitary force, the Special Activities Division,22 and taken to one of the CIA’s secret prisons in northern Poland, where the US government has confirmed that he was repeatedly subjected to ‘simulated drowning’, or ‘waterboarding’.


The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Martin L. Abbott, Michael T. Fisher

always be closing, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, business climate, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, database schema, discounted cash flows, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, friendly fire, functional programming, hiring and firing, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, machine readable, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, the scientific method, transaction costs, Vilfredo Pareto, web application, Y2K

You might as well be witnessing a grade school recess, with different groups of children running around doing different things with absolutely no coordination of effort. But a crisis situation isn’t a recess; it’s a war, and in war such a lack of coordination results in an increase in the rate of friendly casualties through “friendly fire.” In a technology crisis, these friendly casualties are manifested through prolonged outages, lost data, and increased customer impact. What you really want to see in such a situation is some level of control applied to the chaos. Rather than a grade school recess, you hope to see a high school football game.


pages: 2,238 words: 239,238

The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War by Giles Tremlett

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Internet Archive, Ronald Reagan

There was also an attempt to protect prominent political figures and four British volunteers who were due to stand at town hall elections in the UK in November were ordered home. Of the four, Lewis Clive, a Labour councillor in South Kensington, had just died; another of the candidates would be killed by friendly fire, and only Jack Jones and one other made it back to Britain.8 On 15 August, just nine days after they had been pulled out of the front line, XV Brigade was sent back to the Sierra de Pàndols, to a position beside the French-led battalions of the 45th Division.9 These had moved across the river to join the main attack force nineteen days earlier and suffered badly on a peak known as Hill 626.10 Once more, briefly, an International Brigades line was formed in the heart of the battle, even if most of its soldiers were Spanish.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

Their lungs were filled with blood, their livers and kidneys clogged with dead tissue, and their brains swollen with fluid.447 In both cases, cytokine levels were found elevated as expected. The virus evidently had tricked the body into unleashing massive cytokine storms, burning their livers, kidneys, and lungs in their immune systems’ not-so-friendly fire. Interestingly, viral cultures taken at autopsy from all their organs came up negative. It seems that in their bodies’ brutal counter-attack, their immune systems were able to triumph in a way and kill off the virus. Of course, in burning down the village in order to save it, the patients were killed off as well.448 Most of the 1997 victims had either bought chickens (or, in one case, chicken feet) or had shopped next door to a chicken merchant.449 Lam Hoi-ka may have been infected by baby birds in his preschool’s “feathered pet corner.”450 The strongest risk factor to shake out of the subsequent investigations was “either direct or indirect contact with commercial poultry.”451 Human-to-human transmission remained very limited.


She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

Carnegie Institution of Washington Yearbook 3:39–49. ———. 1905. “A Visit to Luther Burbank.” Popular Science Monthly, August. Waddington, C. H. 1957. The Strategy of the Genes: A Discussion of Some Aspects of Theoretical Biology. London: George Allen & Unwin. Wade, Nicholas. 1980. “UCLA Gene Therapy Racked by Friendly Fire.” Science 210:509. ———. 1981a. “Gene Therapy Caught in More Entanglements.” Science 212:24–25. ———. 1981b. “Gene Therapy Pioneer Draws Mikadoesque Rap.” Science 212:1253. ———. 2002. “Scientist Reveals Secret of Genome: It’s His.” New York Times, April 27. Walfred W. C. Tang, Sabine Dietmann, Naoko Irie, Harry Leitch, Vasileios Floros, and others. 2015.


pages: 908 words: 262,808

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Kwajalein Atoll, means of production, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, plutocrats, RAND corporation, South China Sea, technological determinism, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

After a brief war—and victory—against the British the prior month in Somaliland, the Italians had convinced themselves that because of their numbers, they would likely bury the British in Egypt and annex North Africa into the Italian empire.5 The huge size of the Italian army fooled few. It had no updated armored vehicles comparable to even the British lighter cruiser tanks. Its sole competent and charismatic commander, Air Marshal Italo Balbo, who served as commander in chief of Italian North Africa, was shot down by friendly fire over Tobruk on June 28, 1940. His loss resulted in centralizing the supreme command under the well-connected Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. But the hesitant and mediocre Graziani dallied for weeks until mid-September before invading Egypt. Without the machines or the supplies to match a British force a fraction of the size of his own army, Graziani privately predicted disaster.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

If Berlin had risen to the challenge it is hard to see how the rest of the eurozone governments could have resisted. Something very much like this is what they would eagerly settle for in 2012. But this opportunity for German leadership on the crisis went begging. In the spring of 2010, Schäuble’s scheme was shot down, by friendly fire.23 Chancellor Merkel was no European federalist. She had no desire to reopen the terms of the Lisbon Treaty for which she had fought so hard and which was only just coming into operation. She was not about to endow Brussels with its own monetary fund. She was far too skeptical of Europe’s capacity for self-discipline and she had the German constitutional court’s Lisbon ruling to think about.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

And there was the "intruder" detected in the middle of the night at Yolk Field in Wisconsin, resulting in a series of alarms that the crews interpreted as the signal to scramble their nuclear-armed F-I06 inter- ceptors. With the air full of B-52s circling on full alert, and the interceptors expecting to find Soviet bombers, the result might well have been nuclear friendly fire over U.S. soil. The F-I06s stood down only after an officer drove out onto the airstrip and got their attention by flashing his car lights; the "intruder" had turned out to be a bear. THE PHENOMENA SURROUNDING COMPUTERS 219 Nonetheless, says Fano, all the arrows kept pointing his way. Information theory wasn't so very far from computing, after all.


Egypt Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, G4S, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, low cost airline, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

Author Alaa Al-Aswany (The Yacoubian Building) is a professional dentist whose first office was located in the real-life Yacoubian Building, at 34 Sharia Talaat Harb in Downtown Cairo. The story is really just an elaborate soap opera, though it’s remarkable in that it depicts Egypt in a particular time and introduces archetypes that hadn’t previously been captured in Arabic literature. Al-Aswany’s subsequent writing – Chicago, a novella, and Friendly Fire, a collection of short stories – both have a strong focus on contemporary Egypt. His most recent book, published after the 2011 revolution, is On the State of Egypt: A Novelist’s Provocative Reflections. Salwa Bakr tackles taboo subjects such as sexual prejudice and social inequality. Her work includes the novels The Golden Chariot and the excellent The Man from Bashmour.


Egypt Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, low cost airline, off grid, place-making, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

The world’s biggest-selling novel in Arabic, it is reminiscent (though not at all derivative) of the novels of Rohinton Mistry. The story is an elaborate soap opera, but is remarkable for the way it depicts Egypt towards the end of Mubarak's rule and for introducing archetypes that hadn’t previously been captured in Arabic literature. Al-Aswany’s subsequent writing – Chicago, a novella, and Friendly Fire, a collection of short stories – both have a strong focus on contemporary Egypt. His most recent books, The Automobile Club of Egypt and The Republic As If, have not yet been translated into English. Salwa Bakr tackles taboo subjects such as sexual prejudice and social inequality. Her work includes the novels The Golden Chariot and the excellent The Man from Bashmour.


pages: 1,145 words: 310,655

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East by Tom Segev

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, distributed generation, friendly fire, full employment, ghettoisation, government statistician, illegal immigration, invisible hand, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Yom Kippur War, young professional

But Dayan denied Narkis permission to take over the Old City— “that Vatican,” he called it—and ordered that it be encircled instead.16 By June 6, the war in Jerusalem had claimed dozens of lives. In battles for the Jordanian officers’ school and a fortified target known as Ammunition Hill, not far from the border, many soldiers had died. Some were killed by friendly fire: they were mistakenly targeted by the air force. Narkis wrote, “It is very easy to make such mistakes.” He put more pressure on the General Staff, saying that Israel would have only itself to blame if the Wall remained in Jordanian hands.17 King Hussein requested a cease-fire, even begged for one.


pages: 1,013 words: 302,015

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, British Empire, call centre, centre right, deindustrialization, demand response, Desert Island Discs, endogenous growth, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, gentrification, global village, greed is good, inflation targeting, lateral thinking, means of production, millennium bug, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, period drama, post-war consensus, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Five weeks of bombing was followed by a ground war that was shorter than anyone had dared hope. Within four days of the tanks rolling into Kuwait, the Iraqi army had been routed and the operation completed, despite Saddam’s dire warnings that the coalition would face ‘the mother of all battles’. (That was one of the phrases from the hostilities that entered the language, alongside ‘friendly fire’ and ‘collateral damage’.) British and American casualties were remarkably few in number, and if Saddam remained in power, that was what had always been intended; the UN resolution authorising military action had talked of the removal of the occupying force from the sovereign territory of Kuwait, but said nothing of regime change in Iraq.


Egypt by Matthew Firestone

call centre, clean water, credit crunch, friendly fire, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Right to Buy, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban sprawl, young professional

* * * It should be said that this book is groundbreaking more for its plot and characters than the actual language. The story itself is really just an elaborate soap opera, though it’s remarkable in that it depicts Egypt in a particular time and place, and introduces archetypes that hadn’t previously been captured in Arabic literature. Al-Aswany’s more recent Friendly Fire, a novella and collection of short stories, is another of his works with a focus on contemporary life in Egypt. Other recommended books include the following: The Golden Chariot by Salwa Bakr is a short novel in which inmates in a women’s prison exchange life stories. It’s surprisingly upbeat, funny and even bawdy.


pages: 1,118 words: 309,029

The Wars of Afghanistan by Peter Tomsen

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, Internet Archive, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

An Associated Press article examining his time in office before the Taliban reported that “Kandahar was so lawless that people there welcomed the Taliban, whose ruthless ways restored order.”67 The Taliban asked Hamid Karzai for permission to come to Shah Wali Kot to discuss surrender terms. Only hours before the Taliban delegation arrived, on the morning of December 5, a “friendly fire” 2,000-pound bomb exploded near Karzai’s command post outside Kandahar. The errant bomb killed three U.S. Special Forces troops and about fifty Afghans, many of them Karzai’s tribals who had been with him since the beginning of the Tarinkot campaign. Karzai suffered a flesh wound on his cheek caused by flying glass.


pages: 1,071 words: 295,220

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman

Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, operational security, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Often, it was even obligatory to perform “dead checking”—pumping more bullets into the man after he was down. All this without giving him the chance to surrender. The IDF denied that Cherry performed the dead-checking procedure, but proof came after a soldier in the unit, Sergeant Eliahu Azisha, was killed by friendly fire when he was mistaken for a wanted Palestinian. An IDF Criminal Investigation Division probe revealed that he had been shot multiple times to make sure he was dead. Cherry and other units like it carried out hundreds of missions during the Intifada. Peddlers, shepherds, taxi drivers, female pedestrians on the street—just about any type of person one might have encountered in an Arab city or village at that time could have turned out to be a Cherry soldier and suddenly drawn a concealed weapon.


pages: 1,117 words: 305,620

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamond, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

As the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated and the Taliban and other insurgent groups gained ground, a stunning scandal rocked the US military and the Special Ops community that would ultimately lead to the resignation and retirement of General McChrystal, one of the architects of the post-9/11 US killing machine. But his demise had nothing to do with any of his actions with JSOC in Iraq or his involvement in covering up the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, the former NFL player turned Army Ranger in Afghanistan in 2004 or his role in transforming JSOC into a global hit squad. Instead, McChrystal was brought down by an article in Rolling Stone magazine written by Michael Hastings that captured McChrystal and his inner circle making disparaging remarks about President Obama, Vice President Biden and other top US civilian officials.


Northern California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, gentrification, gigafactory, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, Port of Oakland, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the built environment, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

The less expensive 'garden view' rooms lack good lake views. Note that there's lots of activity from the restaurant, and boat dock and marina next door. oFire Sign CafeAMERICAN$ ( GOOGLE MAP ; www.firesigncafe.com; 1785 W Lake Blvd; mains $7-13; h7am-3pm; vc) For breakfast, everyone heads to the friendly Fire Sign for down-home omelets, blueberry pancakes, eggs Benedict with smoked salmon, fresh made-from-scratch pastries and other carbo-loading bombs, plus organic coffee. In summer, hit the outdoor patio. Lines are usually very long, so get here early. SpoonAMERICAN$ ( GOOGLE MAP ; %530-581-5400; www.spoontakeout.com; 1785 W Lake Blvd; mains $9.50-15; h3-9pm, closed Tue & Wed Oct-May; c) Call ahead for takeout, or squeeze yourselves into the cozy upstairs dining room at this little slat-sided cabin by the side of the highway.


pages: 1,171 words: 309,640

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

back-to-the-land, clean water, Colonization of Mars, cryptocurrency, dark matter, friendly fire, gravity well, heat death of the universe, hive mind, independent contractor, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, megastructure, random walk, risk tolerance, time dilation, Vernor Vinge

*That’s a negative, Ms. Navárez. It’s a targeted munition. You shouldn’t be in too much danger. But we need to get a clear line of sight.* “Roger. On my way.” Then Tschetter’s voice popped in the channel: *Navárez. Make sure you put enough distance between you and Ctein. Remember, there’s no such thing as friendly fire.* “Got it.” Kira jabbed the suit toward the hull and stopped herself. Then she threw herself up and back over the approaching Jelly in what would have normally been a stomach-churning somersault but that now felt like a graceful dive. Ctein reached toward her with three of its tentacles, straining its limbs to their fullest extent, but they fell short by a few scant meters.


Southwest USA Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, Columbine, Day of the Dead, Donner party, El Camino Real, friendly fire, G4S, haute couture, haute cuisine, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), low earth orbit, machine readable, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, Works Progress Administration, X Prize

Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge BRIDGE Featuring a pedestrian walkway with perfect views upstream of Hoover Dam, this bridge is definitely not recommended for anyone with vertigo. Mike O’Callaghan was governor of Nevada from 1971 to 1979. NFL star Pat Tillman was a safety for the Arizona Cardinals when he enlisted as a US Army Ranger in 2002. He was slain by friendly fire during a battle in Afghanistan in 2004, and top army commanders, who promoted the fabrication that he’d been killed by enemy forces, covered up the circumstances surrounding his death. Activities For motorized float trips and guided kayaking tours launching below Hoover Dam, see Click here.


pages: 1,199 words: 332,563

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", bioinformatics, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, index card, Indoor air pollution, information retrieval, invention of gunpowder, John Snow's cholera map, language of flowers, life extension, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, speech recognition, stem cell, telemarketer, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Tobacco manufacturing shifted northward as a result, especially to New York, where dandies were eager to try new cultural fashions. World War I was another crucial turning point in the rise of the cigarette. The fighting dragged on for years, and many a long night in the trenches was warmed by the friendly fire of fags.2 Cigarettes were also a distinctly war-friendly form of smoke. Easy to light and quick to finish, they were conveniently smoked while standing, marching, or even (sometimes) shooting. And they didn’t require that extra burden or distraction of the pipe. Thousands of soldiers etched their enthusiasm for smoke into ornately carved tobacco boxes and lighters, born from boredom in the trenches.


I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

He told us that in this context, when you didn’t know if you would still be alive the next day, Catholicism became a vital part of his life. He told us about the experience of being with his platoon one day, coming up a hill, and then being bombed by American planes, and how that had affected his attitude to the American military ever since. I remember as a child puzzling over the meaning of those words ‘friendly fire’. There were two tips for mountain walking, gleaned from his time in the Korean hills. During rests on Welsh walking holidays he would explain that if you lie with your boots raised, the blood circulates more and prevents the feet from getting heavy. Secondly, most accidents on mountains happen when you’re coming downhill, so it’s always best to do gentle zigzags when descending.


Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Note that this link goes to the page showing all coalition casualties; to get the American casualties requires using the filter at the bottom. 57 “final acts of desperation”: Dick Cheney, In My Time, 433–34. 58 “was obviously wrong”: Hayes, Cheney, 477. 59 “getting really bubbled”: Woodward, State of Denial, 399–400. 60 “disconnected from reality”: Kevin Whitelaw, “Hit by Friendly Fire,” U.S. News & World Report, June 19, 2005, http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050627/27bush.htm. 61 “It was analog, not digital”: Person close to George W. Bush, author interview. 62 “No one other than the president”: Michele Davis, author interview. 63 wear a metal bracelet: Peter Baker and Dana Milbank, “Bush Says War Is Worth Sacrifice,” Washington Post, June 29, 2005. 64 “Like most Americans”: George W.


pages: 1,773 words: 486,685

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, friendly fire, Google Earth, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mercator projection, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, South China Sea, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

At this point his ruler taunts him: ‘Thou wast the first of my kingdom, and commander of all my forces’ – Fairfax's translation deviated from the original so that it matched his own position – ‘but hath mad thy selfe soe vile and contemptable as the very children mock att thee’. Fairfax remained in secluded retirement until his death in 1671.19 Similar sentiments afflicted Manchu Bannerman Dzengšeo, when he witnessed a ‘friendly fire’ incident on his way home after a tough but ultimately victorious campaign against the Three Feudatories (see chapter 5 above), mostly fought in mountains and jungle, often in torrential rain. The death of comrades profoundly upset him, and that night he recorded in his diary: ‘In my heart I was frightened and, to keep myself safe, I pondered: “I have served on a military campaign for ten years, and have not lost my life in battle.”’


Executive Orders by Tom Clancy

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, card file, defense in depth, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, experimental subject, financial independence, flag carrier, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, one-China policy, operational security, out of africa, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, power law, rolodex, South China Sea, the long tail, trade route

It had never been tested in combat, and it pleased Al Hamm that he would be the first to prove its worth. His command screens in the M4 got everything. Each single vehicle was both a source and a recipient of information. It began by telling everybody where all friendly units were, which, with GPS location equipment, was accurate to the meter, and that was supposed to prevent blue-on-blue “friendly fire” losses. At the touch of a key, Hamm knew the location of every fighting vehicle he had, plotted on a map which showed all relevant terrain features. In time he would have a similarly accurate picture of enemy dispositions, and with the knowledge of everyone's location came the option to pick his spots.


The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

In 1959 this provender was stacked higher than ever in the larders of Moses' authorities: with $92,000,000 worth of contracts for the Throgs Neck Bridge about to be let, $345,000,000 worth of bond issues for the Verrazano- Narrows Bridge firmed up and ready to be sold, and $100,000,000 worth of new bridge-connecting expressways ready to be approved as soon as Moses gave the word to the federal highway officials under his thumb, the Mayor had half a billion reasons to keep him friendly. Firing Moses would cut his—the Mayor's—tie to the source of funds which kept men loyal to a mayor. And to such men no rationale would excuse such an action. What was he supposed to do? Tell Pete Brennan and Van Arsdale that, because of a little heat from the press, they would have to get along without $100,000,000 worth of expressway jobs?