War is a Racket/Rev XX ...

War is a Racket, a no BS essay detailing the raison d'ete for war, written by Major General Smedly Butler, the only two time Congressional Medal of Honor Winner, comes to mind here as he's right, the end product of this dreadful enterprise are the dead and wounded while the weapons makers and  banks who finance this racket, profit, no matter what the cost may be.  With this being said, cluster bombs, manufactured by the millions, show, in no uncertain terms, why war is the vilest enterprise of all.

In early 1991, BLU-97s were a type of explosive submunition making their combat debut. But Crick and other munitions experts knew they were exceptionally hazardous. Cluster munitions are bedeviled by a widespread failing: a high dud rate, meaning that a large percentage fail to detonate when they are supposed to. BLU-97s in particular were sensitive to disturbance and possessed no timed self-destruct feature. Further, whether because of an oversight or by design, they had a particularly nasty feature — once a bomblet was armed, there was no way to disarm it. The weapon’s fuzes could not be safely broken apart or removed, and an armed bomblet was too sensitive to handle. The sole official protocol in 1991 for making a BLU-97 dud safe was to use another explosive to destroy it.

WTF??? Read the rest of the NYTimes piece to see why Buttler's essay rings true.

Major General Smedly Butler