The U.S. military is no stranger to outside-the-box thinking, but a couple of recent news stories make me wish they wouldn't venture so far away from the box:

The Gay Bomb. Pentagon officials recently confirmed that in 1994 a military lab produced a proposal of non-lethal alternatives weapons which included "a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting." The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

Operation Northwoods. In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. Plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

These are only "what if" scenarios that never made it past a proposal stage, but the thought process is disturbing nonetheless. If the military is so good at asking "what if" questions relating to gay bombs and attacking U.S. cities, whatever happened to the question, "What if the Iraqis don't greet us as liberators and we get bogged down in an extended quagmire?"