Word: battlefield
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...battlefield situation is grave...
...Hanoi's answer to this offer was a refusal even to discuss our proposals and, at the same time, a massive escalation of their military activities on the battlefield. Last October, the same month when we made this peace offer to Hanoi in secret, our intelligence reports began to indicate that the enemy was building up for a major attack. Yet we deliberately refrained from responding militarily. Instead we patiently continued with the Paris talks...
...politicians continue to assume it is a science, a matter of vectors and the measurement of force. The irrational must be made rational before men can feel themselves in control of events. Perhaps that is also why war is so often portrayed as a game or sporting event, the battlefield as an extension of the playing fields of Eton. Nixon the poker player is seen raising the stakes; General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Communists' superquarterback, is seen fading back for a last-second touchdown pass...
...bombing targets. (Although "people sniffers" can now distinguish between Americans and Vietnamese--meat-eating Americans have different chemicals in their perspiration--no sensors have yet been developed to distinguish between the "enemy" and the civilian population. As the head of the Defense Department's special project on the electronic battlefield admitted, "A group of wood-cutters...might look like a squad to (the sensors); you could make a mistake, I think...
MITRE--an MIT spin-off--provides the brains behind the electronic battlefield. It calls itself the "systems engineer behind the Igloo White (electronic battlefield) sensor exploitation program." In other words, it figures out how many sensors to use, how many planes, and in what arrangement to maximize their effectiveness in destroying anything that moves. Domestically, MITRE uses this systems-engineering sophistication to coordinate police communications. However, the military insist that the majority of its work be military-oriented because MITRE provides "a degree of expertise unobtainable elsewhere in the country...