The United States military announced yesterday that it would convert some of its largest ballistic nuclear missiles to carry conventional warheads for use in precision attacks against terrorist targets or rogue states.
The decision formed part of the most comprehensive review of military since the terrorist attacks of September 11 and came the week America adopted a foreboding new name for its global war on terror: The Long War.
The United States is a nation engaged in a long war," the military said in a long document.
Among numerous proposals in the paper the most startling concerned the role of America's "super-weapons", the strategic missile arsenal.
The report stated briefly that the navy would convert "a small number of Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles for use in conventional prompt global strike".
America's defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, did not directly mention the missile scheme but he emphasised that the West must quickly face up to the threat from radical Islam.
"Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide, with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs," he said.
The document, which also detailed plans to double America's fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles and spend $1.5 billion on developing medical responses to possible bio-terrorism attacks, seemed timed to reassure the nation as the government began to use increasingly ominous language to describe its military campaign.
2 comments:
'Long War' does sound depressing but than the lie 'war against terrorism', or the short lived 'war against radical ideologies.'
What is wrong with 'War Against Jihad?'
Sorry, left out the 'better', i.e., better than the 'war on terror'.....
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