3 ms·

I'll respectfully beg to differ. At the beginning of the US war in Afghanistan (at the time I was a US Army UAV "drone" pilot in training), for the first 48 hou

by SEJeff 10y ago

I'll respectfully beg to differ. At the beginning of the US war in Afghanistan (at the time I was a US Army UAV "drone" pilot in training), for the first 48 hours, a Tomahawk cruise missile was fired, on average, every 12 seconds. They were firing at all kinds of things up to an including caves! I think that would qualify as firing everything you've got at little outposts. I think ultimately it depends on the situation and the resolve of the aggressor to take you out. After 9/11, the US went balls to the walls with conventional military.

dogma1138 10y ago
That's because the US conducts modern wars like it has an unlimited supply of everything, mostly because it doesn't need to worry about the economics of the otherside. This is why I specifically talked about wars where there is any level of parallelism between the belligerents. The US will not fire a 2M missile at every Russian pillbox if there would be a real war, because they would lose. When you are fighting the Taliban who doesn't have any real long range or strategic weapons you don't really care about force depletion, if you are fighting a standing army with equal equipment, equal or greater manpower and at least as far as war economy goes equal or greater production capabilities you start picking your targets with considerably more discrimination. The US excels at combined arms coordination, but it also makes it's engagement very wasteful, granted one can argue that losing less men is important than having more bombs but that doesn't go very far once the economics of a full war with an equal opponent kick in. If you are going to waste an airstrike on every ground engagement, and a Javelin missile on every truck you'll have issues when 50,000 tanks start rolling into Europe (these are cold war numbers, chillax ;)). Shock and Awe might work against Iraq and the Taliban, it wouldn't work against China or Russia, they can withstand it and return in kind, you also will never push a nuclear power into a corner, so US tactics will change to facilitate holding and controlling the ground rather than carpet bombing Beijing or Moscow for 48 hours expecting a surrender. If nothing else is that this only works when you can unilaterally walk out of the fight like the US can do it now, they could and had dumped everything they could on Afghanistan and Iraq and they can and did just walked away, if you do the same thing to a country that can then chase you home you probably going to reconsider how you wage war.

by SEJeff 10y ago

dogma1138 10y ago

That's because the US conducts modern wars like it has an unlimited supply of everything, mostly because it doesn't need to worry about the economics of the otherside. This is why I specifically talked about wars where there is any level of parallelism between the belligerents. The US will not fire a 2M missile at every Russian pillbox if there would be a real war, because they would lose. When you are fighting the Taliban who doesn't have any real long range or strategic weapons you don't really care about force depletion, if you are fighting a standing army with equal equipment, equal or greater manpower and at least as far as war economy goes equal or greater production capabilities you start picking your targets with considerably more discrimination. The US excels at combined arms coordination, but it also makes it's engagement very wasteful, granted one can argue that losing less men is important than having more bombs but that doesn't go very far once the economics of a full war with an equal opponent kick in. If you are going to waste an airstrike on every ground engagement, and a Javelin missile on every truck you'll have issues when 50,000 tanks start rolling into Europe (these are cold war numbers, chillax ;)). Shock and Awe might work against Iraq and the Taliban, it wouldn't work against China or Russia, they can withstand it and return in kind, you also will never push a nuclear power into a corner, so US tactics will change to facilitate holding and controlling the ground rather than carpet bombing Beijing or Moscow for 48 hours expecting a surrender. If nothing else is that this only works when you can unilaterally walk out of the fight like the US can do it now, they could and had dumped everything they could on Afghanistan and Iraq and they can and did just walked away, if you do the same thing to a country that can then chase you home you probably going to reconsider how you wage war.