Word: viper
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Radical Shi'ite factions settled into a virtual viper's nest in Baalbek, an ancient city in the Bekaa Valley 40 miles east of Beirut. There a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, inspired by the Khomeini revolution, sent young Lebanese fanatics out on bottle-smashing sprees in the bars of Beirut, taught them how to rig cars with powerful bombs and prepared them to die for their cause. "Like Khomeini," says Gary Sick, a former National Security Council staffer and an expert on Islamic fundamentalism, "these Shi'ite fundamentalists are rejecting the entire Western system...
Actually, it is not a terrible word but a rather distinguished one, derived from the Latin depopulare and meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "to lay waste, ravage, pillage, spoil." Shakespeare used it in Coriolanus when he had the tribune Sicinius ask, "Where is this viper/ That would depopulate the city?" John Milton's History of England referred to military forces "depopulating all places in their way," and Shelley wrote in Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills of "thine isles depopulate...
Another classic case of waste and confusion involves the Viper antitank weapon. Ten years ago, the Army decided to provide infantrymen with cheap, light antitank bazookas. The Vipers were projected to cost about $75 apiece, but design changes began almost as soon as the weapon was proposed. The weight, it was decided, must be reduced to less than seven pounds This meant the warhead had to weigh less than a pound, which sharply limited its potential destructive power. The size of the rocket motor was also reduced to cut blast noise. By the time the contractor finished redesigning...
Even Congress, which is usually tolerant of procurement high jinks, was appalled by the Viper debacle. So the lawmakers cut the program last year. But is it dead? Buried in the 1983 Defense budget is $10 million for testing a light antitank system. The 1985 budget authorizes $122 million to purchase the first weapons. Like many discredited weapons
...systems, the Viper is a Lazarus. A slavish devotion to the latest high technology is perhaps the most basic cause of problems in the weapons-buying process. It results in massive sacrifices in the quantity of arms to achieve what seems on the surface to be improvements in quality. "The fallacy of the past 40 years has been that technology will save us," says the Heritage Foundation's Kuhn. The trend toward relying on high-tech weapons to offset the numerical advantages enjoyed by the Soviet bloc accelerated during the tenure of Robert McNamara as Defense Secretary...