Red Dawn and Contemporary Military Strategy

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The Choice Is Clear

A previous post (the most recent one, actually) indicated the importance of remembering Red Dawn, going so far as to point to an article on cognitive neuroscience to help elucidate the memory processes and help readers get over the biological determinism of forgetting.

You see, Red Dawn posits the now-defunct Soviet Union as the greatest threat to the security of the American Midwest. Events of the late-nineteenth and early twenty-first century (the collapse of the Soviet Union, 9/11) have done a great deal to mitigate the possibility of a foreign invasion that can only be stopped by the efforts of a handful of high schoolers.

In the contemporary scheme of international violence, one rarely considers a conventional war on American soil as a remote possibility. Continued nuclear proliferation and the emergence of highly skilled, motivated, and funded terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda have greatly diminished focus on old-style military conflict. However, Red Dawn was prescient in one crucial manner; the use of teenage boys armed with automatic weapons--once an empowering masculine fantasy--has since been fully realized several times on foreign soil.

Despite taking Red Dawn's advice on the military capabilities of high-school aged young Midwestern boys, current and past administrations have made the strategic error of failing to recognize their key military use: in a defensive, conventional war against an invading power. If we are to believe the performances of Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen (as we undoubtedly should), it is important to acknowledge that groups like their Wolverines are best suited to defend their hometowns against the robotic machinations of conformist Commies. The current endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan greatly overestimate the ability of paramilitary teens to preemptively strike countries hostile to U.S. interests.

It is not too late to correct this error, however. Highly trained militias can recruit and train young children in the ways of firearms and explosives to fight the real war we have on our hands: a defensive war on terrorism, whose principle targets have typically been airports and landmarks of great symbolic significance to the U.S. Deploying our corn-fed, bright-eyed teenage dudes (especially the varsity athletes) in these locations will help prevent another attack from what currently poses our greatest national-security threat.

Meanwhile, as Point of No Return clearly shows, hot babes pulled off death row to become assassins are fucking great at urban warfare. Ship em out in droves.

Red Dawn Trailer

I Forget What You Forgot

It's on the tip of my tongue.

It is the dawn of World War III. In midwestern America, a group of teenagers band together to defend their town, and their country, from invading Soviet forces. What was the name of that movie? It has a young Charlie Sheen, Patrick Swayze? What was it?!?!?!

Ever struggle to recall really important information, those crucial tidbits that just might one day save your life?

Scanning the latest news tagged "Cognitive Neuroscience" led me to this article on why we sometimes forget things or details but, you know, they're on the tip of our tongues.



Basically, the article indicates that memory travels via electrical impulses from the brain to the tongue, where the information is normally transmitted via muscular contractions (known as elocution). Sometimes, oral buildup occurs, however, insulating the tip of the tongue from the electronic impulses, resulting in the memory shifting endlessly back in forth between tongue and brain. This scientific explanation has since been dumbed down for the public and appears now in colloquial English as "having [something] on the tip of [one's] tongue."

Okay just kidding. The REAL scientific explanation is that your brain stores a whole bunch of memories next to each other according to their characteristics. Sometimes competing memories with similar characteristics interfere with retrieval of the desired memory. So, if your brain were in charge of finding a stapler on your desk the way you are, it would sometimes pick up associated objects like a packet of staples (go in the stapler), or some pieces of paper (get stapled), or a paper clip (functions like a stapler). Thankfully our brains aren't in charge of those tasks, just finding memories.

Listen Up, Brains:

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Here's the practical upshot. If you find yourself in a situation where you forget someone's name, or a REALLY important detail of something, just start quoting the study titled "Tip of the Tongue and Retrieval-Induced Forgetting." It's sure to a) impress whoever your talking to, and b) make them forget what you forgot.

RED DAWN. Don't you forget it. Ever.