Word: grounded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this time, Solomon had backed out the door he had entered. His rifle abandoned, he was kneeling on the ground. He pulled out another gun, a powerful .357 magnum revolver, and put the barrel in his mouth. "It's going to be all right," a voice said. "Put it down." Something about the voice must have calmed the boy. He took the gun from his mouth. The voice belonged to assistant principal Cecil Brinkley, into whose arms T.J. then collapsed, shaking. "Oh, my God, I'm so scared," T.J. said...
Therein lies the crux of NATO's dilemma. Except for Britain, no other nation has seemed willing to sacrifice its soldiers to this cause, in the skies or on the ground. Yet this week the U.S. will urge NATO to send 50,000 ground troops to the region, either to escort the Kosovars home with Milosevic's assent or to threaten an invasion without it. The war could succeed faster if the allies risked their own troops more, but political leaders fear the first body bags would destroy the public support they need to keep the confrontation going...
...advised the retired Army general. "You have to have pretty solid political objectives, and then apply decisive force to them," he said. "Nothing in the Powell doctrine says no casualties." He pointedly noted that the Gulf War planners kept all their options open from the start. "We had a ground force waiting," he said, "when air power had gone as far as we could take...
...illustrated Washington's hesitancy more than the Apache debate that burst into the open last week. Just 48 hours into the war, NATO Commander Wesley Clark called on Washington to send in the state-of-the-art AH-64 helicopter gunships as the best weapon against Milosevic's ferocious ground-level cleansing of Kosovo. After a week of backroom debate, a deeply reluctant Pentagon and White House agreed to deploy the Army's premier tank killers--but not to use them in battle. More than two weeks later, to great fanfare, the first of 24 began arriving in Albania along...
Military and political leaders probably wouldn't be agonizing over what planes to fly, and how high, if they could settle on an answer to the question of ground troops. The longer the air war drags on, the more frequently the ground issue pops up. Last week the alliance found itself in a new muddle as various capitals sent out contradictory messages. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder called the use of ground troops "unthinkable" and pledged to block any alliance combat on land. From London came the opposite, a steady drumbeat of demands by the Blair government to start assembling...