On: Fort Hood shooter to be executed by firing squad - a first for US military...

A soldier kills soldiers on his own ground, and the answer is to line up rifles against him. The state calls this justice. I call it a commander who has run out of moves.

Thirteen unarmed. Unarmed men are not defeated by strength; they are defeated by the assumption that no attack would come. The base was full of weapons and empty of watchfulness. That emptiness is where every such wound enters. No firing squad closes it.

Consider what the execution actually accomplishes. The dead do not return. The frightened do not sleep easier. What remains is a spectacle: the state, in uniform, doing to one man what he did to thirteen. The shape of the response mirrors the shape of the attack. This is not strategy. This is grief wearing a uniform.

The lever is elsewhere. A man radicalises in the open, and no one moves, because no one wishes to seem unjust. Fear of a false accusation becomes the condition for a true one. The load-bearing point was never the rifle at his shoulder; it was the silence of everyone who saw him first. Collapse that silence and the whole structure of such attacks fails before it is built.

Know the enemy, they say, and know yourself. The enemy here was known - his words were public, his drift visible. What was unknown was the willingness of his own side to look. That unwillingness cost more than any weapon since.

Let them have their squad of riflemen. It is the cheapest part of the bill and pays the smallest debt. The expensive work - the hard looking inward, the courage to report a brother - remains undone, and will be needed again.

The battle that must not be fought is the one won before it begins. They are still fighting the last one.