[ARCHIVED THREAD] - How to avoid a long war? (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 11/4/2007 7:51:34 AM EDT
I believe that quote still holds true today. If you don't agree, please post an historical example of the benefits (not conjecture on "what would have happened if..."). If you do agree please post any suggestions on how to avoid the "persistent conflict" (our new euphonism for long war) that is "the new normal," as General George Casey, the Army's chief of staff, told the House Armed Services Committee last month. |
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Think of terrorism like cold weather or winter. It's never going to go away but you can shield yourself and start fires wherever it's coldest. We have two fires going right now: Iraq and Afghanistan. Think of them as wings of your house. We can't keep the house warm with one of those doors left open. And, until those countries are able to produce their own "heat," we'll have to do it for them. The best we can do is wrap our families up in the protective blanket provided by our armed forces. If you leave yourself vulnerable and unprotected, you will die. Never forget 9-11. |
And there you have it.....Carpet Bombing Works! How did we ever think we would win a war against a group of people, whose highest honor is to die for their cause, without inflicting a significant amount of collateral damage? You blow up his house, blow up his church, kill his mother, his wife, and his children. Of course, to actually accomplish this you have to care more about winning, than what all of the other "spectators" think about your methods. This is just another reason why you cannot win a political war. |
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Sun Tzu would also have abscribed a policy of negotiation that benefitted the stronger army. There is no negotiation with this enemy. You must understand the period of Sun Tzu to understand the writtings. Like the fucking idiots who quote Clauswitz. Fog of war friction politics by another means. No shit fuck nut. Now can you apply those near worthless platitudes or do you just quote it to sound smart? |
Killing children. Now there's a great idea. You're no different than the terrorists themselves. ...and the keyboard commandos approach their stations... 
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Sun Tzu would have approved the above message. |
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Don't get me wrong, Rapid Dominance offers some ground breaking thoughts on modern warefare, but it could use at least one major adjustment. When you move away from the linear battlefield, and instead of controlling the field, phase line by phase line, get inside the enemy's head, convincing HIM to think he's lost, whether battle calculus says he has or hasn't, you can dramatically shorten major combat operations, bypass huge enemy forces, and destroy his critical centers of gravity, while sustaining up to orders of magnitude fewer friendly losses, but... ...once he waves the white flag, or abdicates and runs, huge wells of potential negative kinetic energy remain in play within the battlespace, the now unemployed military legions that have not been attrited below 50% combat effectiveness, and the stockpiles of war materiel they left behind when they shucked their uniforms and walked home. On a linear battlefield, the surviving enemy have dissipated huge quantities of pre-battle nervous energy just to stay alive, they have been handed an obvious defeat, and in many cases, have been captured wholesale and forced to stack arms, then spend days or weeks burying their comrades in arms, a decidedly unpleasant task. All that potential energy summed in units honed for a fight, all those warm bodies, and all those abandoned arms and ordnance, represent a threat of the highest order to the postwar attempt to consolidate gains and build a sustained peace. I don't know the precise answer, but if you choose to employ a Rapid Dominance doctrine, and it succeeds, you better have a plan to dissipate the bypassed enemy's urge to fight, to put all those warm bodies back to work, to feed their families, and perhaps most important, police up their arms, or else all that unfocused potential energy will find new focus, and could easily coalesce later on to bite your ass. |
Perhaps one has to identify the enemy first? |
Political correctness says there are no enemies, only neighbors who disagree with your point of view. If you offer fresh baked cookies and give them a cold glass of milk, they will come over to your side. 
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So your solution is to kill everyone in the region. You'll get your targets, and a lot of others who aren't your targets. 
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Bah - who cares about PC?? no option between "cookies and milk" (lolz!!) & the final solution/kill 'em all and let God find his own? |
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Sun Tzu would argue that we are currently NOT in a state of war. Rather we are in a period of manuevering to AVOID a true war. War in the sense which he wrote was a complete commitment of men and resources to the defeat of an enemy. We are currently not in that state. Rather, we are in a period of shaping a battlefield using minimim force and minimum resources to avoid the all out war which is so destructive. We are utilizing negotiation (pakistan, saudi arabia, turkey, iran, etc) some force, and economic means to create a condition where we win before a war begins. Or is that too, "off topic?" |
Yep Sun Tzu would not have considered our current actions as war but as actions designed to avoid a real war. |
Don't get into wars in the first place? When you do, don't try to be "surgical" about it, and don't hang around for decades afterwards "rebuilding"? If we have an enemy, we should smash them quickly, efficiently, and ruthlessly. We should then walk away and leave what remains of our enemies to their own devices. But the "War on Terror" isn't a war against a particular group of identifiable enemies... it's a war against a tactic. It's a tar baby that will prove the truth of Sun Tzu's axiom over and over again. |
With "minimum" force and resources in a simple maneuvering scenario having the entire nation in-debt/bankrupt (not that is is the sole cause), costing .. what is now? $1.2 TRILLION dollars of borrowed money... then the deaths (approaching 4k in Iraq) and injured (~ 24K)... I'd sure hate to see what a real allocation of resources looks like! Good on ya for being smarmy tho! 
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Yes you would hate to see what a real allocation of resources looks like... it would dwarf what we have done in recent years. I am amazed at the number of people that actually think we are making some vast commitment now because we are not compared to what we would have to do in any real large scale war. ETA: I suggest you actually go back and look at real large scale war cost in money and lives… if you do that you will quickly drop the false pretense we are currently involved in a major action. |
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In ROTC we were taught the Principles of War www.2worldwar2.com/principles-of-war.htm One thing the Colonel also taught was a principle that the Russians added - Annihilation. The enemy must be absolutely destroyed. If you fail at this, you have a prolonged war. |
Killing people is bad. That said, if you end up in a situation where other people are trying to kill your people, the way to "win" is to minimize how many of your people die and maximize how many of their people die. War should be an absolute last resort, but if it comes down to it, it's better to kill than be killed. It sucks and it isn't very nice, but the question is how to avoid a long war. The answer is to win (kill the other guy deader than dogshit) as quickly as possible. |
Well, the OP's question didn't specify whether he was talking about lessons learned in Iraq, Iran, the WoT, or a more general question. To judge his intent, you scroll up and find that YOU are the OP. That and your latest comment make it a question of efficiently defeating an assymetric threat. For other scenarios, I'll stick with my previous answer. That issue needs to be addressed, and many of the authors of Rapid Dominance are out of play now. In the short term achieving ascendancy over an assymetric enemy requoires fixing him to the degree possible, gaining fire superiority, putting him on the defensive. In the long term, you have to attack and destroy his log trains. You have to look at how he's set up, and make his "army" choose, at all levels, between feeding their families and fighting. You have to cut his funding, in hard currency, you have to block his recruitment, you have to go after his ability to train recruits, in many ways, you have to go back to Air Land. It's almost impossible to predict and disrupt terrorist operations in progress, so you look deep, go for the assembly areas, isolate and destroy his backfield. This would be a lot easier to accomplish if we didn't have to stay on Saudi Arabia's good side to keep the cheap oil flowing. Success in Iraq, and eventually Iran holds promise, but not in the short term. That also may explain Rice's comments (unchallenged by any Admin member AFAIK) regarding Pakistan. If she's a good litmus indoicator of Bush's position, we either want Musharraf gone in favor of unnamed others, or we want Musharraf's behavior modified such that others can exert more influence on Pakistani policy. I think the only viable short term solution is the nuclear option. Otherwise, it's going to be a series of incremental steps, and it's going to take time. There is one non-nuclear possibility, we used it in Iraq, but I'm not yet sure how to implement it in the war on terror. Before OIF, the RGFC dispersed and dug in. SOP for a dispersed and dug in enemy is to threaten a critical center of gravity, in OIF this was done by sticking an (two) armored column in Baghdad's face. That pulled the enemy out of their bunkers and schools, into massed defenses, in the open, where we cut them to ribbons with air. In this case, the enemy is distributed over a wide theater. There are centers of gravity, and it is at least mathematically possible to force the enemy to defend them in open conflict where our military superiority will prevail, but as far as actually devising a mechanism to accomplish that, I'm going to have to think on it some more. |
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How to avoid a long war ? Don't fight wars that you can't or won't win. If you don't have the will to take the fight "all the way", then stay the hell off the battlefield. Moderation in war is imbecility; war is an all or nothing proposition. Anything less than a full effort towards victory inevitably ends in defeat. If a football team were to exercise moderation on the field, that football team would constantly find itself getting beaten by teams which do not act in moderation on the field. |
Borrowing money is not a crime, nor is it an automatically unsound financial strategy. Example 1. A kid who can't afford college, but can qualify for student loans. Example 2. A college graduate who can't afford a car but who can qualify for a car loan. Claiming the US is bankrupt is simply inaccurate, right up until we miss interest payments, or until we can no longer borrow money. |
Well you finally got to it… why hide what you are really at to start with. First that estimate for the cost of WWII is probably low by 30-50%. AND I know where you got those figures from, a tin-foil New World Order conspiracy wed site threeworldwars.com. One that does the usual stupidness and cites references like Zionist banker. Finally proposing we should use nukes show you as a hopeless… |
Obviously you don't target women, and children. You also can't lose the war to protect them. |
Whoa...that's a very good post. I'm glad to see there are people out there who can think beyond bumper sticker slogans. |
Yup - I was keeping the topic general on purpose. There can be all sorts of "long wars" and my contention is that they're all not beneficial and should be avoided, as Sun Tzu long ago stated. I appreciate your thoughtful posts (good stuff, really). So the general consensus, if there is such a thing (lol), is that one should win wars quickly to avoid long term wars. Diplomacy, negotiations, etc., are untenable and a defensive strategy (other than the best defense is a good offense) hasn't been proffered (unless I missed it, if so - sorry). I wasn't starting this thread with an answer already in mind... I think fighting/protecting against terrorism is a tricky prospect. |
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+1 Solid points. We are in this war to avoid a larger scale conflict. |
We can never be bankrupt as we can always print more money.
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The moment the US starts nuking civilian populations, I will be one of many to leave this country and volunteer my services to whoever mans up to put this place out of it's misery. I would accuse some of you of being leftist trolls, if not for your post counts. |
thats some quality trolling! |
How many died in WWII? How about the Civil War? What would those conflicts cost in today's dollars? Good on you for being obtuse. |
No-genocide is not the answer. However the core goal of war is to not die. If you kill the other guy before he kills you, you win. To bolster that win, you make sure he cannot get back up and restart the fight. Half measures and compromises do little to decisively stop a conflict. If it helps, look at it from a self defense POV. Bad guy initiates a fight. He is armed and his goal is to kill you and your family. Do you try to negotiate with him or do you take any advantage that you have and use it against him? Do you shoot him once and then try to negotiate or do you shoot him until you are CERTAIN that he is no longer a threat? And at least have the stones to directly call me dumb. I'm not going to go and report you, but if you're going to dish it out, don't be such a pussy about it. |
So who is the enemy then? You are proposing to "kill them all" to which particular group? Kill all Muslims, Kill all Iraqis, Kill all non Americans? |
So if some guy walks up behind you in a bar and sucker punches you, you should turn around and kill every mother$%^ in the bar, just to make sure you got the right guy? Sounds reasonable to me.
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The posed question (or the title at least) was "How to avoid a long war". I gave a simplistic answer without concern for geopolitical concerns. If you want to end a war as quickly as it is begun, (not as a first strike but as a retaliatory response) you decimate the people who attacked you. Wars are initiated by governments. Unfortunately, people sometimes get caught up when their government screws the pooch (see also the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima). Now you're trying to paint me as some racist hellbent on genocide because I answered a generic question with a generic answer. If you want to call me a racist, then grow a pair of balls and do so. You also seem to have failed to read my subsequent responses. War is bad. Killing people is bad. It should be an absolute LAST resort. That said, if it becomes necessary to start killing people, then don't fuck around with it. Violence should be the last resort, but once it becomes needed, don't hold back. Sorry to have ruffled your frilly shirt, but if I am left with no other option than violence, you can be assured that I will do great violence without remorse. If someone backs me into a fight, then it's their mistake. I would much rather avoid confrontation than pick fights, but there's no excuse for not defending yourself. Now, would you care to expound on precisely where I advocated killing all non-Americans, or are you just talking out of your ass? 
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