Sure, but at the same time we have spent billions of dollars building bombs and missles designed to level buildings and unleash death and destruction over a wide area. The entire point of such research being that if we ever went to war we would level our enemies. We also hoped that we would never have to wind up using them.chenry said:
In general even if throwing rocks from planes does a lot of damage, it's also much easier to miss. It's also a heck of a lot less intimidating. The entire point of say dropping Daisy Cutters or collapsing buildings with warheads is so when a nation looks at the amount of dead, including civilians they will be intimidated and nobody will EVER want to face that again. It also means that the guys sitting around are going to be a lot less tolerant of guys like Al Sadr or whatever because when we come from him we would be taking them out too. Think of it this way, even if one is to assume that I'm wrong about the culture (I don't think I am) a bunch of strongmen with guns become a *LOT* less intimidating if you know that if you let them have their way you are going to die just as surely as if they shot you. If say a thousand peasants mobs 50 dudes with automatic weapons, they will eventually run out of bullets and be taken down, albeit at a substantial cost of life. On the other hand if some plane drops a bunch of bombs on your town, kills more people, and on top of it levels their houses, families, crops, and everything else... well... I'm sure you can figure it out.
People forget we did this in World War II, we were hitting all the Nazi factories, farms, homes, and infrastructure. We did just as much a job on their cities in the end as they did to Britan. Worse when you consider what happened when we fought "The Volkssturm" and had to deal with "The Hitler Youth". Monsterous, yes, but that is why war (real war) is a horrible thing.
I consider the entire mentality about sparing civilians and such to be a problem. The reason why they are replacing warheads with concrete is to spare civilian lives, when really that's a bad move both practically, and from the perspective of psychological warfare.
You drop a concrete "bomb" onto some dude's bunker, or through a building, there is a reasonable chance your going to miss the target. Not to mention kill civilians anyway if a buiulding falls on them, or the concrete smashed through the target and goes skidding down the street.
This is getting way off subject though, the point I'm making here is that it's stupid, and why I have little respect for the people who support this kind of thing. I see a war as being less about right and wrong, and more about "us or them", this goes for any war (the winners write the history books). War blows chips and is to be avoided, but when you DO go to war, you should do it right, kill people, break things, and get it over with quickly.
However we are in a polarized country a LOT of people do not agree with me, and due to the propaganda of things like World War II think we can somehow fight an "antiseptic" war (which I won't get into any more). These people are of course adverse to weapons development, and show up at submarine comissionings (down here in the Groton/New London area of Connecticut) and toss fake blood all over the place and so on. Kind of hard to hide submarines under construction, but I'd imagine with other weapons, technologies, and prototypes and such there is a vested interest in keeping them secret. Speaking hypothetically, let's say I made a handheld energy cannon that a single guy could aim at the base of a skyscraper and chop it down just by moving it back and forth... never mind what this could do to takes and infantry. Keeping this secret from other nations is of course a no-brainer (never know who you might someday have to fight), but also in the US at least we have to keep it secret from our own people or else we'll have thousands of people screaming to ban this entire area of research (which might even lead to things not war related) because of how devestating it is and how well it could kill people.
Nothing like that exists, it's just a hypothetical "X-weapon" (X = Unknown, a general term for a secret and unexpected weapon being held back by a goverment). Area 51 is military research, and in the US we have more reasons than most nations to keep this stuff secret.
In the end, if the chips are ever well and truely down, we'll probably be *REALLY* happy that we continued the research, even if right now naive ethics and related politics prevent us from using what we have.
I for one think it's kind of funny (dark humor at it's greatest) that we build the most powerful and advanced military in the world, spend billions and billions on explosives, guidance systems, and jets that are basically impossible to engage... then finally we go to "war" and regress to dropping rocks and engaging on the ground rifle to rifle.
Apologies to anyone this upsets, but we all have our own opinions.
