In the opening hours of a war, tens of thousands of people could die, military officials here say.
To me and to many others at the time, that sounded like rejoicing at the opening engagement of a war that, within weeks, would claim the lives of nearly a thousand people.
Google's recent announcement of a collaborative spreadsheet application is a death knell for Microsoft Office in an opening round of a war that will see applications like spreadsheets, word processors and databases becoming free goods.
On July 16, 2010, 60 years after the Battle of Osan, Eighth Army leaders, in conjunction with government officials of Osan, held another ceremony, speaking of Task Force Smith and describing the engagement as "the opening shots of a war of ideas that exists even today".
The Florida is a nuclear-powered submarine converted from use as a nuclear missile sub to one of the US's few guided missile submarines; it carries 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles and is almost ideally suited for the task of blowing apart an enemy air-defense network in the opening hours of a war.
A half-century ago, Western Kentucky was so thrilled about the opening of a cold war uranium enrichment plant that it named a community Cimota -- "atomic" spelled backward.
Analysts said they did not see the airstrikes as the opening of a new war front, or as an attempt to prop up the Syrian rebels against the Syrian government of Mr. Assad.
R. James Woolsey, the former director of central intelligence, said on Wednesday that Iraq was the opening of a "fourth world war," after World War I, World War II and the cold war, and that America's enemies included the religious rulers in Iran, states like Syria and Islamic extremist terrorist groups.
Even before Gorbachev, there had been a discernible trend in military thinking toward emphasizing the opening conventional stage of a war and toward achieving victory within that stage.
