nothing ever goes as planned

‘The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against.’
That stroke of brilliance from U.S. Army jackass Lt. Gen. William Wallace, who obviously missed this fabulous Guardian article about last summer's rigged war games:
Van Riper had at his disposal a computer-generated flotilla of small boats and planes, many of them civilian, which he kept buzzing around the virtual Persian Gulf in circles as the game was about to get under way. As the US fleet entered the Gulf, Van Riper gave a signal - not in a radio transmission that might have been intercepted, but in a coded message broadcast from the minarets of mosques at the call to prayer. The seemingly harmless pleasure craft and propeller planes suddenly turned deadly, ramming into Blue boats and airfields along the Gulf in scores of al-Qaida-style suicide attacks... "A phrase I heard over and over was: 'That would never have happened,'" Van Riper recalls. "And I said: nobody would have thought that anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Centre... but nobody seemed interested."

originally posted by daiichi

randomWalks @randomWalks