Law of Armed Conflict and Small Wars

[Infanteer]

You can't win the game, any game, when you're the only one playing by the rules.

What are the rules and what is winning the game?  Your allegory is suspect as it makes no attempt to define to problem.  Are you saying we would be winning the war if we were planting IEDs and driving around in civilian vehicles?

If it were up to me, not one drop of medevac chopper fuel, not one minute of a doctors already busy day, not one centimetre of suturing, would be expended on wounded enemy combatants.

Again, how does this impact our ability to kill bad guys or defeat his campaign?

Now I truly am done in here.

Sure, by all means.  However, I still haven't the foggiest on what sort of logic you are basing your argument on because you refuse to expand your posts beyond simple jingoism.

 

[Kat Stevens]

Never mind.  Please wave your magic mod wand and remove any trace of my existence in this thread, or any other for that matter.

 

[gcclarke]

What are the rules and what is winning the game?  Your allegory is suspect as it makes no attempt to define to problem.  Are you saying we would be winning the war if we were planting IEDs and driving around in civilian vehicles?

Again, how does this impact our ability to kill bad guys or defeat his campaign?

Sure, by all means.  However, I still haven't the foggiest on what sort of logic you are basing your argument on because you refuse to expand your posts beyond simple jingoism.

The crux of the matter is the definition of "Victory". If the only goal is to kill all the Taliban, then hey, let's just pull out and nuke the entire region. That should get them.

But no. I believe the goal is to stabilize the region until such time as the local, friendly, Afghan government is able to do so without our assistance. When we can pull out without fear of things going to hell in a handbasket, then we have won. And, I also think it's safe to say that acting like Barbarians ourselves would be detrimental to this goal.

 

[Kirkhill]

I agree with those that demand we keep the moral high ground, but I also find myself agreeing with those that argue we are facing an enemy bolstered by their belief that they are engaged in a Holy Crusade.  That belief, that Mysticism if you will contributes to the staying power of the enemy forces and their ability to absorb defeat and keep coming back.  We need some of that.  And by "We" I refer to the entire post-modern, liberal community.  Without that staying power, without that core "intolerance" (??? - dam I hate when I end up contradicting myself) then the liberal world we find to be so right may well end up going the way that Kat and Mario suggest.

Toleration when necessary but not necessarily toleration.  ;D

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Kat, I understand your frustration as we see our soldiers being wounded/killed and though it would appear via the media coverage that we are just over there taking a shit-kickin', I have much faith in the fact the bad guys are going byebye at a very rapid rate.

1. I don't want those videos/pictures splashed all over the media for those who think taking out baby killers is wrong to use against us.

2. Better those types die or get taken prisoner there than get caught/die here and then get all nice and comfy in our cushy prison system with taxpayer supplied lawyers/food /health care here.

 

[Infanteer]

Without that staying power, without that core "intolerance" (??? - dam I hate when I end up contradicting myself) then the liberal world we find to be so right may well end up going the way that Kat and Mario suggest.

German and Japanese forces had all the fanaticism to carry them in their conquests and we literally obliterated their societies.  I've seen one historian argue that the only thing that defeated German fanaticism was a more ferocious Soviet fanaticism.  But we've also confined those guys to the dustbin of history as well.

I don't think the Liberal Democratic West gets enough credit.

 

[Kirkhill]

Point taken.  But I also think that we ignore at peril the "faith" that sustained much of our parents' and grandparents' generations.  Many of them, during the campaigns against those "fanatical" hordes of Huns and Nips found a quite solace in their faiths - their churches and their Gods.  That faith may not (or in the case of some -Wingate? Harris? -may) have driven them to fanatical behaviour themselves, but it allowed them to endure.

Ultimately I find the secret to success in many wars to have been the ability to stand fast and endure, or as Inglis of the 57th would have it, to hold and "Die Hard".

It is not the ability to slaughter the enemy in large numbers that is critical to success so much as the ability to absorb punishment.  That ability gives Commanders time and space.  Space in that it provides a firm, secure base of operations and time to run three or four more OODAs to find a successful counter to the counter.

 

[mariomike]

But I also think that we ignore at peril the "faith" that sustained much of our parents' and grandparents' generations.  Many of them, during the campaigns against those "fanatical" hordes of Huns and Nips found a quite solace in their faiths - their churches and their Gods.  That faith may not (or in the case of some -Wingate? Harris? -may) have driven them to fanatical behaviour themselves, but it allowed them to endure.

History has not been very kind to Bomber Harris or Gen. LeMay. But, in 1945 they were heroes. Since Vietnam, publication of enemy body counts is frowned upon.

 

[Kirkhill]

History has not been very kind to Bomber Harris or Gen. LeMay. But, in 1945 they were heroes. Since Vietnam, publication of enemy body counts is frowned upon.

Agreed Mariomike - Bomber is going through the same twilight that Haig wandered through for a while.

 

[mariomike]

Agreed Mariomike - Bomber is going through the same twilight that Haig wandered through for a while.

Haig didn't have the Lancasters and Super Fortresses available a generation later. He did the best he could with what he had. Incidentally, I see that Gen Haig's son passed away this summer. He was in the news in 2006 regarding the pardoning of soldiers shot for cowardice:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1528044/Haigs-son-attacks-pardoning-of-306-soldiers-shot-for-cowardice.html

 

[wildman0101]

cheeky-monkey
the capt your refering to is?????
and if so was he convicted or proven innocent..
just a question as i hevent heard or seen anything
otherwise,,,,
midnight rambler i hear ya was there lahr rcd (intel)
cold war and those numbers scared me all to hell..
cant say much more as my sec clearance was secret...
well back in the day...probably still is....

                      scoty b
am i allowed to tell that (regards my sec clearance)
f**k it bluidy old old news so if they want me they can
come get me,,, hell ill even buy the beer...







9

 

[Infanteer]

cant say much more as my sec clearance was secret...

 

[GAP]

Gee.....I think I need a cryptographer to read that....must be a secret message in there somewhere..... :

 

[Yrys]

(slight derailment)

I think wildman0101 has the soul of a poet,
because he write like one  ...

 

[vonGarvin]

midnight rambler i hear ya was there lahr rcd (intel)
cold war and those numbers scared me all to hell..
cant say much more as my sec clearance was secret...
well back in the day...probably still is....

You are no longer cleared secret, if the last time you were "secret" was Lahr RCD.  As for the numbers of Soviets opposite the Federal Republic of Germany (pre-reunification), it's pretty well all open-source.  Two fronts in the German Democratic Republic, and one front in the CSSR, with another in Poland.  A minimum of four tank armies, each with four tank divisions.  That alone is 4320 or so tanks just in the tank divisions that were resident in tank armies.  Another eight tank divisions in the Combined Arms Armies, for a further 2160 or so tanks there.  Then there were the tank regiments in the motor rifle divisions.  That's roughly 1920 more tanks there.  So far, in the first echelons, you would have seen some 8400 tanks.  Just throwing that out there.

 

[Jammer]

October Revolution parade in Beijing tommorrow.
Should be a good one.

 

[Edward Campbell]

October Revolution parade in Beijing tommorrow.
Should be a good one.

Drifting further off topic: see here.

Back to the topic at hand.