For God and Country, Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo

Wars are about fighting the enemy and back in the day, the enemy was very clear and was usually running towards you trying to kill you. With advancement in technology like ammunition, artillery, and basic body armor, people are becoming harder to kill. So we make bombs and even bigger bullets and so on. Also now we are not fighting for land we are fighting for different causes. In the case of Zero Dark Thirty, Americans were fighting the war on terror by locating and taking Osama Bin Laden. In which case since we were not fighting a full nation and only fighting people who all look alike, you could not tell if the person next to you was your enemy or was an ally. Using tools like a signal search to find the cell phone that was being used to make calls and then eventually using drone to look into the compound. Woman played a role in the movie by either being the intelligence behind the search or just a wife going for a gun and was eventually shot. As we move on to different types of warfare we may not know who is the enemy in the future. It could be someone who has a vendetta out for whatever country in his or her mind. Or it could be the person sitting in a cubical at the CIA Headquarters who is just fed up with life and thinks they can take on the world. Also with the ever-advancing minds of the youth now a day, kids as young as 12 are hacking the computers of federal businesses and are out doing the men and women that have graduated MIT. Which the phrase of “if you can’t beat them, hire them” comes into play and which is probably the reason why we have so many computer hackers. So if you can’t beat them…. Destroy them works just as well.

Zero Dark Thirty

When 9/11 occurred, I was in first grade. I remember everyone running around and rushing to evacuate my class as soon as possible. I remember people running in the streets, panicking. Looking back on it now, it seems unreal. Being a New Yorker, terrorism in America is a subject that hits close to home. This war began as a way to retaliate for the attack on the United States and because what Osama Bin Laden did to us was so gruesome, our country feels the need to respond in acts of the same magnitude. The film Zero Dark Thirty offers a look inside the operation of taking down Osama Bin Laden and ultimately ending the war. The movie doesn’t hold back, even having a torture scene at the very beginning. The way America treated the attack on the World Trade Center was in a “you hit us, we hit you” type of fashion. I’m not saying it wasn’t completely out of the question to counterattack, I understand where the government was coming from in this situation. However, it just created more problems. We got stuck in a war that is still going on. A new age of racism has blossomed. This type of violence in order to resolve an issue is then being shown to Americans through the media. It creates an unwarranted hatred for another race and religion. It also teaches the younger generation who may not completely understand the war or even have been there on September 11th that this is how The United States deals with it’s conflicts. 

Terrorist Warfare

There are many was in which war has changed in the age of terrorism. Before you would know who your enemy was. You would be able to find the enemy just by them wearing the other uniform and that was all you needed to engage and destroy them, but today you need to jump through so many hoops to get authorization to use lethal force. You first have to find the enemy who knows the rules we play by and knows how to take advantage of these rules. They know as long as they keep their name clean that we can not engage. They know that we can not engage them unless they commit a hostile act first and they use this to their advantage by being able to walk up right beside you looking innocent and obtaining information they can later use against you or just use suicide tactics to take you out right then and there and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. They are able to do this because they don’t wear a uniform, they blend in with the innocent civilians who are just trying to live their lives the best they can. Also the technology of war has changed a little instead of picking up radio transmissions and deciphering them, we just use wire taps and satellite recon to observe and hopefully identify a target so a strike can be authorized. The terrorism also feeds off the media who just feeds the fire by airing their attacks, it is just like a toddler breaking something to get attention. They can not get attention if you ignore their attacks and not let them instill a sense of fear amongst the  populous. But this is not all that new, it is just a form of total warfare which is probably the oldest type of warfare. It is to not just attack the enemies military but to attack everyone they hold dear to them, and is the most effective form of warfare.

Racial Warfare

        Comparing modern war on terrorism with all previous wars based on the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”, I think the key difference is the involvement of intelligence and the random of detention of people with brown skin. It is not that previous wars did not involve intelligence, but the amount of agents that are working for targeting and strategic calculation is more than the soldiers who actually execute the plan. Like in the movie, there is only one seal squad and one single operation that carries out the plan, but the plan itself took more than 129 day to be completed; which unlike previous wars, the soldiers mostly did the job, with minor strategic calculations, and focus more on reacting to whatever happened to each individuals or teams. The other aspect is the racial aspect, the US only kill Arabs and the Al Queda only kill westerners, these activities only increase hatred and nothing was actually accomplished. “One is killed because another was killed”, said by Dr. Sun, the founder of the republic of China(Taiwan), this saying could be extended for racial issues, in previous wars, one is killed, and hatred grew in a limited amount of people that knew the dead person. However, in war on terrorism, hatred grew in a large entity of people, such as Arabs and westerners; not that these two races are programmed by someone or some government, but in terms of human nature, specifically favoritism, the same race tend to have more sympathy toward their own kind; hence, when seeing their own kind got killed, regardless of religion, beliefs or nationality, one would hate whoever did that, and in war on terrorism, a specific race is hated. 

Wars on Ideologies

Terrorism has become a more and more prominent method of warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries. While terror has been used as a weapon since the beginning of war, the rise of terror tactics being used by radical Islamist groups has risen to a unique level not seen before in modern history. Likewise, a superpower's response to an assault by extremists is also something not before seen, especially on a global scale. Massive invasions against other armies are becoming less and less common in the nuclear age, and now it tends to be a state government military fighting opposition with an ideology. The point of terrorism is that it can happen anywhere at any time, so therefore the coordination and sophistication needed by a group to carry out an attack is complicated, as is tracking this communication.

This is a colossal change from what the military spent hundreds (thousands) of years perfecting; warfare between armies. Land combat, air forces, tank warfare, etc etc, generals and tactics. Now, it's tracking down social networks, large families, and very specific individuals on the other side of the planet from a totally different cultural background. It's intelligence gathering and specific strikes, theoretically. Special forces and drones are gaining prominence in this new era. Wars between nation states are expensive and painful for the world, while simultaneously radical ideologies are using violence on a global scale with terrible results.

The result is a War on Terror, a war on an open-ended ideology with no clear beginning or middle or end, that has consequences we can't foresee. It's a different era.

Zero Dark Thirty

So Zero dark thirty made me sick literally. Like I have heard torturing and I have always tried to stay away from watching movies like this. I mean violence is typical in war and I guess necessary as a method of obtaining information but I also find it  crazy as to how people will use violence or justify their use of violence in wars. I mean I’m not too much into war or know a lot about it but the use of violence has definitely increased in the age of terrorism. I guess in a way I always thought about war being just plain fighting like soldiers shooting at each other (this may be a naïve way of viewing war but hey that’s what I thought it was) and watching this movie allowed me to understand a totally different perspective.  To associate religion with certain actions is disturbing simply because while all religions might not agree on certain things, most religions do not promote violence, killing and so on. I mean although I’m not Muslim I’m sure without an ounce of doubt that there is nothing with in the Qur’an that states murdering a mass amount of people is okay, and then to claim it’s in the name of Allah…ahh that’s just a tad bit crazy to me.  It was very disturbing watching this movie I mean you hear of this stuff going on but I guess to actually put a picture to it was very unsettling. I was kind of scared for Maya throughout the whole movie.

Zero Dark Thirty

I've never really kept up with the wars going on because when 9/11 happened and America invaded Iraq I was too young to really understand. So much misconstrued information has been put out there that there is no clear story as to what happened. I do believe the US had a right to fight back because of the terrorist attack. Terrorism is a horrible thing and is usually done by a group associated with a certain country or religion. But the thing a lot of people don’t realize is that it is not the whole country or religion that is to blame. It’s extremist. And just as Zero Dark Thirty showed, many just associate color or religion to a terrorist act. For example when Maya was leaving her house and she was shot at just because she was white, not because they had knowledge of her being in the CIA.

Torture seems like a very common thing during war and trying to find out information. They tear someone down physically hoping to break them into caring about only their own well-being, changing their loyalty in hopes of saving their own life. Terrorism does not seem to care who is harmed, as long as a message is received. With this war, crucial people would give up their lives just to kill Americans, whether they were civilians or the leaders of America.