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Conventional military wisdom is that you cannot win a war from the air. Case in point: Vietnam. You have to put boots on the ground to secure the area and the S
by LargeTomato 3y ago
Conventional military wisdom is that you cannot win a war from the air. Case in point: Vietnam. You have to put boots on the ground to secure the area and the Saudis aren't about to do that and the American people would never support dying for a Saudi war.
- TylerE 3y agoYou don't need to a win a war here, just make life sufficiently hard that most of the fighters give up.
- logicchains 3y agoIt's Yemen, have you checked their GDP per capita recently? Life there is already hard enough that it's difficult to make it significantly worse.
- TylerE 3y agoIf harboring pirates gets your village bombed, villages will stop harboring pirates.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> harboring pirates gets your village bombed, villages will stop harboring pirates The history of area bombardment is it strengthens civilian resolve. Think: the Battle of Britain, Vietnam and America’s wars in the Middle East.
- eastbound 3y agoAren’t there counterexamples? How would Dresden be considered?
- ceejayoz 3y agoNazi Germany was already fundamentally beaten by the time of Dresden.
- greedo 3y agoStrategic bombing in Europe was a drastic failure. The only successful part of it was that it fundamentally wiped out the Luftwaffe. German military production increase annually in spite of the Allies putting so much effort into the bombing campaign. Strategic bombing has only influenced one country to surrender.
- kasey_junk 3y agoAnd that involved nukes
- shiroiuma 3y agoThere's an argument that it didn't influence Japan to surrender: instead, the declaration of war by and imminent invasion of the Soviet Union is what finally caused them to surrender.
- greedo 3y agoYeah, that's the other main argument that we'll never have a definitive answer to. Maybe in 300 years we'll have enough distance to evaluate the evidence without all the cultural biases and baggage, but I doubt it. Every time I read more info about the Manhattan Project and US nuclear policy in the 1950s, my opinion changes. And then when you read about how Truman acted AFTER the war in regards to nuclear weapons employment, I can easily understand that he was going to use nukes no matter what. Japan's political environment during the war was incredibly complex, and trying to view their rationale and motivation through a Western lens is very dangerous. And I don't think the Soviets were anywhere close to an imminent invasion of the Home Islands. I don't think they had the appetite for doing more than grabbling the Kuriles and Sakhalin Island, instead preferring to let the US suffer the casualties. While the Soviet declaration of war surely had some impact, the Emperor said there were three primary factors in his decision to accept the Potsdam conditions; his lack of confidence in Ketsu Go plans to defend Kyushu. The increasing devastation caused by the conventional and nuclear bombing campaigns, and finally, concern about the "domestic situation" meaning internal revolt. Later in private letters he referred to Nippon's deficiency in science, meaning a lack of nuclear weaponry. Hirohito and PM Suzuki realized that with nuclear weapons, the US didn't need to invade Japan.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 3y ago> Aren’t there counterexamples? How would Dresden be considered? I would say that Dresden is not a counterexample. Every year on February 13, many Dresdeners gather on the Neumarkt to commemorate the destruction of the city on the Bombennacht (night of the bombings) in 1944. The spectacle polarizes German society. Right-wing revisionists like to point to the destruction of Dresden to portray Germany as a victim of the Second World War. But for many Dresdeners, this is actually a matter that is associated with personal grief because they lost family members in the bombing. As a result, the possible political implications of this culture of remembrance fade into the background for many Dresdeners. Dresden is therefore a good example of how people move closer together after extensive bombing and how this effect can last for 80 years.
- mhb 3y agoTell the Palestinians.
- quotz 3y agoThats straight out of the Henry Kissinger handbook.
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoAnd every tough guy wants to say that because it makes them feel good, but history keeps proving them wrong.
- nulld3v 3y agoUnfortunately, there is a small problem with this approach: Pirates have guns, villagers don't. So villagers don't get to choose whether or not they harbour pirates.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoSounds suspiciously like Israel's theory of operations for Gaza, which has little evidence for its correctness at this point.
- RugnirViking 3y agoI see you haven't been paying attention to Iraq Afghanistan Palestine Vietnam or really anywhere this tactic has been tried. Turns out bombing villages makes piracy more popular
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> make life sufficiently hard that most of the fighters give up You need to degrade their capability to fire long-range assets precisely. That’s doable. If it’s locals lobbing unguided rockets into the ocean, that’s commercially manageable. Guided missiles and helicopter landings are not.
- underlipton 3y agoThis is an interesting statement to make, considering Yemen's recent history.
- Cyph0n 3y agoDue to their histories, the Yemenis - like the Afghan - have extensive experience using guerilla tactics against better equipped occupiers. Top it off with the mountainous terrain in the northern and eastern regions and you have a recipe for failure through attrition.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> extensive experience using guerilla tactics against better equipped occupiers That’s fine. Let them fight their civil war. The problem is long-range precision warfare extending past their costs. Knocking out that capability doesn’t require boots on the ground.
- Cyph0n 3y agoYou underestimate how important the Palestinian cause is to the Yemeni people. I’d wager they’d be willing to “pause” the infighting for quite some time. Also, this move is making the Houthis immensely popular: they are winning the PR war internally right now.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> this move is making the Houthis immensely popular: they are winning the PR war internally right now As I mentioned elsewhere [1], this is fine. A stable, adversarial Yemen is better than the clusterfuck it currently is. A big part of the problem with the current situation is there is nobody to negotiate with who can credibly claim to control these armed factions. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38917581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38917581
- dragonwriter 3y agoGuerilla tactics don't work against shipping lanes and no one (well, not the coalition to defend shipping, at least, certain of their neighbors might have other thoughts) wants to occupy Yemen in the first place.
- 3y ago
- m101 3y agoThey will not out fight you, they will out wait you. Just like Afghanistan.
- dragonwriter 3y agoSince the strategic objective here will likely be to suppress them while changing the context with regard ro Israel-Palestine and their sponsors in Iran and not regime change, that works in the US's favor.
- TylerE 3y agoWaiting is fine, as long as they aren't fighting. Them just hiding out in a cave somewhere counts as winning here, since we only care about protecting shipping.