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Source: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. Greg Jaffe, Gene Thorp, Bill Webster/The Washington Post.
Source: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. Greg Jaffe, Gene Thorp, Bill Webster/The Washington Post.
99 Red Balloons: How War With China Would Start -- Matthew Hipple, War On The Rocks
A former professor of mine was standing on the West German border as a young junior officer, wrestling with an unpleasant realization. The border patrols he had inherited were a finely tuned machine: precise, timely, but disturbingly predictable. In every scheduled gap lurked possible communist sorties. He vowed to discover what was happening in the fog, switching up his entire patrol schedule. Within hours, he had discovered previously undetected mobilizations all across his sector. His natural response was to send more soldiers on patrol. As actions across the border and communications within them grew more frantic, the senior NCO burst into HQ and, with all due respect, taught my professor his first lesson in international relations. The detected communist mobilization was his counterpart in East Germany responding to perceived aggressive maneuvering, not a change in the watch rotation. The situation normalized when the watch bill returned to normal.
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My Comment: This analysis is so true .... read it all.