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A different plane would not have helped winning Afghanistan. suffering might have been even longer. The expectation to win there is an illusion. Looking for te
by lispm 11y ago
A different plane would not have helped winning Afghanistan. suffering might have been even longer. The expectation to win there is an illusion.
Looking for technological solutions - low or high tech - is just more of the same misguided thinking. The case is lost in a totally different way - it's not technology.
- eru 11y agoAt least they could have made their mistakes cheaper.
- 6d0debc071 11y agoIf you make your mistakes cheaper, you may be inclined to keep making them for longer.
- venomsnake 11y agoIf someone makes same mistake twice - you relieve him of duty. That is as old principle as they come. Things get done by people that do different mistakes every time. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-failure/309148/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-...
- venomsnake 11y agoEverything is winnable. But the pentagon is mostly a state/corporate subsidy program with some military capabilities as a side effect. US hasn't been in a war they HAVE to win since WWII (and even then continental US was pretty safe) so the institutional knowledge that was bought with blood is soon forgotten. Afghanistan was not won, because there was never a criteria for winning towards which the military and the state department to work. And the fact that US has the habit of cooperating with the wrong people in third world countries, makes things worse. If the US had courts in Afghanistan in which to try corruption, Afghanistan would be a better country now.
- emp_zealoth 11y agoIt's like you guys refuse to learn from the past. For example in WW2 there was Bomber Mafia. Nearly as bad as F35 mafia
- hydrogen18 11y agoIt is actually even worse. The US had the bomber mafia. But at least they were focused on the idea of hitting high-value industrial targets with daylight raids. If this had been carried out it would have removed the industrial capability of Germany. The British also had a bomber mafia. But they were obsessed with nighttime raids that just carpet bombed cities. These were safer for crews, but completely ineffective. They just destroyed cities and massacred civilians.
- arethuza 11y agoYou are correct that the UK nighttime raids were safer - but worth noting that they weren't safe in an absolute sense - 44.4% of Bomber Command aircrews were killed in action.
- richmarr 11y ago> ... obsessed with nighttime raids that just carpet bombed cities The US and Britain agreement was to divide sorties in Europe into daytime (US) and nighttime (Britain), and pre-GPS accuracy at night pretty-much dictates aiming for vary large targets. The obsession came with Dresden, but that seems to be a different point to the one you were making.
- rjsw 11y agoThe pre-GPS bombing accuracy during daytime isn't any better if it is a cloudy day, which happens more often in Europe than the western US where the USAAF had trained.
- hydrogen18 11y agoYou are absolutely correct. But my point is the nighttime raids were not only a waste of resources, but they just killed civilians en masse. This didn't really do anything to change the war. Germany had no shortage of slave labor, so some dead civilians were just less mouths to feed. Britain would have been better off just not building those bombers and bombs. The resources could have been diverted into something else. Maybe fighter escorts for the daytime raids? I'm not trying to totally destroy the British contribution to the war. It is just that this policy of night time carpet bombing was totally misguided.