Dear Norm,
In order to qualify as smart,
as a precision munition,
an aspiring bomb or cruise missile used to have to
detonate at or within fifty meters of its target,
one try out of two.
A pretty high bar, nevertheless admitting
the negligible chance that one out of two times
a precision-rated munition might blow up somewhere not
within fifty meters of its target.
It was quite a while ago; many new
targeting and munitions delivery and deployment systems
have come on line since: the ordnance market has seen
consistent high demand, the engine of innovation,
which, I don't have to tell you, Norm, guides us
stepwise with certainty toward perfection of the product.
And if the President of the United States
driving the drone himself, on a laptop
from the Shameful Closet of the Oval Office,
to stalk down every teenage girl on his list
and deliver that corsage of blossoming fire
from a silent speck in the distant sky
(having, also himself, accorded each her
full legal process due under the law) ain't
the perfection of the brand, I'll be damned.
To top it off, new policy ensures that
there shall be no collateral casualties:
It is the policy of the United States to view
any adult male killed within the strike zone
of munitions directed at
(the attempted assassination of)
a kill-list personage
as presumptively a terrorist combatant,
by which logic and practice, Norm,
the United States explicitly ratifies
the terrorism it pretends to oppose.
This is not controversial, but it is suspicious
to so clearly strike the ideological symmetry.
Surely the civilians in those office buildings,
and on those planes, trains, busses, in those markets and mosques,
all history's victims of terrorism were within the strike zone.
By definition.
Also, I'm pretty sure,
given it's now-acknowledged state agency and
well-known target and payload, the Stuxnet virus
was probably an act of war. (so the demand for
innovative production is sure to continue apace!)
Your trembling shareholder,
- Al