Word: armorer
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...secret of the transformation from group to mob: a few leaders incite the rest, knotting the rope, throwing it over the limb of a tree. The others allow themselves to be carried passively by the group purpose. Lynch mobs always armor themselves with a sense of their retributive righteousness. They also mean to exert social control by exemplary doses of terror, on the conceit that violence is the only language the victim understands...
...British and French military men couldn't wait to paw over some of the Soviet-supplied Iraqi tanks littering the Kuwaiti desert. They expected the abandoned armor to be a boon for battlefield training and analysis. But many tanks were reduced to smoldering hulks by guided missiles. Others, taken out by A-10 attack planes, at first appear to be in good condition, until survey crews discover a small hole in their exteriors. That hole indicates that shrapnel produced by armor-piercing shells has destroyed everything inside. Although the allies captured thousands of Iraqi tanks, the Americans have found just...
...gulf may have been exposed to a battlefield risk that won't show itself for years. M1A1 Abrams tanks and A-10 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers fired thousands of high-velocity shells that are made with depleted uranium, an extremely heavy metal that enables the weapons to penetrate the armor of enemy tanks. On impact, radioactive oxidized uranium is released into the air, which may have exposed anyone downwind to a lung-cancer risk. The Army and Air Force have judged the use of these shells to be safe. Yet concern over the hazards of depleted uranium goes back...
...conducting an orderly fighting retreat. The allies were determined to give them no breathing space to pull themselves together to make a stand -- or to regroup for an assault on the American Army, which had cut them off to the north and stood between them and Basra; the Iraqi armor was heading away from one battle but toward another. In any case, many a general has bitterly rued the day he let a beaten enemy army get away to turn around and fight again...
...very existence at the beckon of the state. When foreign invaders come to America's shores, or if aggression abroad compels American action, I would hope that the call to arms is answered swiftly and positively. But if military service is compelled, then America will have dented its moral armor...