BlackStar42 said:
Therumancer said:
The objective of a real war is to pretty much kill the normal people/civilians as horribly as possible, the government/military protecting them is the obstacle you face to get to that point as the ordinary people are pretty much the heart and soul of a civilization and if you don't kill, or terrify them enough to force change, you accomplish nothing.
No, it isn't. The objective of any war is to put your opponent in such a position that it is more beneficial to them to yield than to continue fighting. Butchery for butchery's sake alone does not win wars.
Your attitude is an overtly modern one, based in implausible western morality. The idea isn't butchery for the sake of butchery but to force the other side to capitulate and prevent them from ever having a choice in the matter. The degree to which you pursue things depends on your objectives. If you want the land the people are on, then of course you want to kill them all to the point where they flee, and there aren't enough free survivors to ever mount anything resembling a counter attack. If you simply want the resources you want to kill people until the indigenous population is broken and harmless and then take whatever you want whenever you want it. If the objective is to remove a threat, then you want to break a culture to the point where their idealogy dies in their hearts and minds, while ultimately keeping them down to the point where they are simply incapable of raising any kind of military force able to oppose you from thereon out.
The problem with the modern school of thought is that if you go in and fight only until the other side says "we give up" when it's starting to not become beneficial, all that does is leave a strong, unbroken, culture that hates you and is going to turn on you like a rabid dog as soon as they get the opportunity, an opportunity they are constantly going to be looking for. Iraq and Afghanistan are examples of this, we left the cultures more or less intact and pretty much accomplished nothing, they continued to define themselves as Islamic states and didn't embrace any progressive policies like women's rights, and the terrorism continues as the culture is intact and keeps producing people willing and able to carry out violence over stupid things like internet trailers for indie comedy movies. To be honest in their case targeting the people themselves was always the requirement as they were never a direct military threat, but a cultural and idealogical one. On a lot of levels we might have dominated militarily but NOT killing the people once we did and breaking the culture has simply caused us to lose, since we've gone as far as our morality allows while fear and terrorism continues and you see employers creating special muslim prayer rooms and giving out special rights like not having to follow dress codes, basically rather than forcing The Muslim World to back down, we've arguably been backing down to it and re-organizing our society along their lines a little bit at a time to avoid antagonism since they are simply put willing to go further than we are.
The thing is that modern propaganda and morality demonizes things like dropping the A-Bombs on Japan rather than presenting them as simply being a very efficient method of doing what needs to be done. It also tends to overlook the way guys like "Bomber" Harris decimated the German population (even killing captured prisoners... our own people... being forced to work in factories and being used as shields), and what we did to groups like the Volkssturm and Hitler Youth in the final days of the war. We were literally fighting building to building, and rounding up Germans from their homes and machine gunning them just to get them out of the way. Whenever someone with an education wants to call America a group of hypocrits this tends to be brought up, since it's pretty well documented in it's own way. It's just we prefer to deny it, convince ourselves it was purely "good" war and we won farting rainbows, which arguably does us no good when we believe our own hype and try and deal with new threats according to our mistaken beliefs about what works. The US has generally speaking lost, or perhaps more accurtatly given up on, on pretty much every war that we've been in since. The reason is our own morality and the fact that once we have military superiority we're never willing to push the issue and do what needs to be done. We turn our "wars" into retarded police actions, let insurgents play games with us while we refuse to attack the vulnerable core of the culture, and then eventually leave, letting any changes we did bring while we had a gun to their head evaporate because there was nothing genuine behind it, just a realization that we could pull the trigger any time if we ever got over being stupid.
Right now the easiest way to beat America is to cry to the media and appeal to moral left wing sentiment, you can stop the military with a few videos of dead children where their entire combined armed forces wouldn't be up to it. That's our problem. As a culture we should pretty much be saying "better your kids being dead than ours, maybe people should think about that before they mess with us...". Indeed we should want these people to cry and feel powerless and realize we're probably going to kill us at any time. Once they are no longer a threat on any level and are willing to do anything and change any way just to live... that's when you've won. As bad as this sounds, this is what it would take to beat the USA if we were invaded, we just wouldn't give up otherwise, it's foolish to assume similar extremes are not nessicary when dealing with those who oppose us.
