Fact imitates fiction in modern methods of warfare

Date Published: {J}

Two of the most enjoyable films in recent years from my point of view have to be the Harrison Ford adventures Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger.

They won’t go down in history as great movies of all time but they were cracking good stories and gave an extraordinary indicator of the way war would develop in the following years.

In Patriot Games Ford and his family foil an attempt on the lives of members of the British Royal family and become the target of a nutter IRA man (Sean Bean).

In Clear and Present Danger Ford finds himself in the middle of an illegal drugs war declared by the US against the Colombian drug cartels.

What is interesting is that at one point in Patriot Games the spy satellite system operating over the Middle East is re-tasked so that it flies over a terrorist training camp twenty minutes earlier – the terrorist long since having learned the habit of ducking in and out of cover from the training camp when the satellites were due to pass over.

The re-tasking results in the identification of one of the terrorists – a balding book seller from London whose glowing sunburnt head shows up clearly on Central Intelligence Agency screens at their headquarters in Massachussets.

In Clear and Present Danger, CIA bosses are able to sit in their offices and watch real-time footage of raids and a roadside soldier is able to "paint" a target hacienda with a laser light so that when a jet at higher than 50000 feet drops a bomb, the armament is guaranteed to hit the target hacienda and any vehicles in it.

Switch the time forward to just a few months ago and here on live TV were President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and a group of security specialist advisors sitting down to watch in real-time the raid on the Osama Bin Laden hideout in Pakistan.

Fiction from Patriot Games had become reality as television viewers all over the world watched soldiers break into the Bin Laden compound and kill most of the people there.

In other words the face of war has changed – first of all we can now see it live on TV, if they care to show it to us, but even more importantly, the days when masses of soldiers had to be on the ground fighting wars to take out important targets are gone forever.

It’s very unlikely that we will ever have thousands of poor bastards twenty years of age and younger marching through places like Vietnam, singing about Mickey Mouse – a la Full Metal Jacket – and hoping to hell that there are not soldiers behind the next rise simply waiting to shell them.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.