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I sure hope we did. "Plan" in the context of national militaries has a very different meaning from making a "plan" with your buddies. Any national military plan
by ufmace 10y ago
I sure hope we did. "Plan" in the context of national militaries has a very different meaning from making a "plan" with your buddies. Any national military planners wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't have a plan for attacking any country they could conceivably reach. It's their job to have plans available and ready for the political leaders, and it's those leaders' jobs to decide which plans to actually execute and when.
Consider: If you're, say, the Secretary of Defense, at any meeting, the President might tell you "Country X just went nuts! We have to deal with this now! What can we do?". You don't wanna tell the President "Umm, I dunno, let us look into it". You wanna be able to say something more like "We could go with a nuclear strike, using units A, B, and C. Expected casualties in country X are Y military and Z civilian, and we estimate a possible retaliatory nuclear strike against at least 10 US cities, with casualty estimates as described. Or we could launch a conventional strike with Carrier Group D, attacking these government and infrastructure targets, optionally following up with a land invasion with these units or special forces attacks, with enemy and friendly casualty estimates."
Clearly, we want to have plans for every possible way of attacking every country we would be capable of attacking, all continuously updated to reflect our forces and their readiness, as well as estimated enemy forces and their readiness. We also want to be able to talk intelligently about possible force level changes. If the President wants to, say, dissolve one or more Army divisions, raise another one, buy or sell aircraft, retire nukes or build more, etc, we want to be able to describe how that would affect our ability to attack and defend against attacks from various countries.
- bootload 10y ago"I sure hope we did." I'm sure the 'dogs of war' tried. In '60 Eisenhower green-lit an invasion plan by the CIA (Dulles) in response to the nationalisation of Esso, Standard Oil and Shell in Cuba. Does this sound familiar? (https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/The-Bay-of-Pigs.aspx https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/The-Bay-of-Pig...) It's election year. Kennedy was elected in '60 and a key part of that was equalising the 'missile-gap'. There was no missile gap. US had 100 times the capability of USSR. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Balance_of_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Balance_o...) In '61 Kennedy didn't provide ^air support^ for Operation Mongoose organised by Lansdale. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Project) Dulles is fired as head of the CIA. In October '62, the US B team of Generals (Joint Chiefs of Staff) LeMay, Lansdale, Anderson, Anderson, Shoup and Wheeler were being pushed for implementing the first strike over Russian (LeMay) and invading Cuba again (Lansdale). (https://govbooktalk.gpo.gov/2012/10/18/hawks-vs-doves-the-joint-chiefs-and-the-cuban-missile-crisis/ https://govbooktalk.gpo.gov/2012/10/18/hawks-vs-doves-the-jo... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Project) The time clock of the missile crisis, shows the operational nature of the CIA. (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/bayofpigs/chron.html http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/bayofpigs/chron.html) Cooler heads prevailed. Khrushchev and Kennedy negotiated secretly, while the military of both sides maintained their cool. Just as well. It's now known that Cuba was in the possession of ^tactical^ nuclear weapons. So without any control from the USSR, field commanders ^could^ have deployed them if Cuba was invaded. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Post-crisis_revelations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Post-cris...) In '63, JFK was assassinated. A year after that Khrushchev was rolled. The change of US political direction allowed the war footing to escalate, ever since. Lansdale, LeMay, Dulles, Nixon, the CIA and US arms and resource companies all had great careers in the post '63 era. [0] [0] The inference here is you can find potential conspirators that lead to 22 November 1963. The same names appear again and again in the "Assassination Records Review Board: Files of Douglas P. Horne" (http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-board/horne-files.html http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/review-board/horne-file...)
- pekk 10y agoYou're not responding to the point of the post you are replying to, you're just talking about how the Bay of Pigs was scary. Nobody is saying it wasn't scary, but that isn't the sense in which the word "plan" is used with regard to military planning. You are ignoring that point and it's a valid point.
- bootload 10y agoHistory lesson: listen to "Col. L. Fletcher Prouty Explains the Bay of Pigs and Viet Nam" to understand planning of this era ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz56WytRlqo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz56WytRlqo
- Spooky23 10y agoThe point of the story is that it wasn't an academic war plan. This was a serious proposal, probably made by a sociopath like Gen. LeMay, to execute a specific attack in 1963, before Soviet capability caught up. Per LeMay: > Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had aquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.
- pfarnsworth 10y agoMao Tse Tung tried to convince the Russians to attack the US in a nuclear war as well. He figured that after a nuclear war there would be 200-300M Chinese left over and they could take over the rest of the world.
- s_q_b 10y agoAnd Eisenhower wanted to use nuclear weapons in Korea. It's also not the first discussion of a nuclear first strike. That would be with President Truman once prior the their use on Japan and again at the dawn of fusion weapons when deciding not to annihilate the Soviet Union.
- marcoperaza 10y agoFailing to use the foreseeably short period of being the sole nuclear power to prevent any other nuclear powers from rising is probably the biggest blunder in the history of the world. Permanent world peace was at hand and we totally blew it.