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I don't just mean humanitarian aid, which I think is dwarfed by the costs of whatever attacks are being considered. I'm talking about direct support to the rev

• sillysaurus2 13y ago
  The goal of a war is to win, and to win the opposing army must die. Napoleon demonstrated that. Most warfare in the preceding centuries was focused on winning battles rather than killing armies. But then Napoleon demonstrated how frighteningly effective it was to win a battle and immediately chase down and kill the opposition. Along with the invention of the standing army, warfare changed forever. We've been mainly focused on killing people ever since, because the people who wouldn't focus on that were swiftly debased. If America chooses to support this conflict, I wish we would do it quickly and efficiently, and then immediately leave. Setting aside the question of morals, the primary reason Iraq and Afghanistan were such disasters is because we stayed. Actually, I wish we would bow out of the Middle East entirely and leave people alone, but that's unlikely to happen in the current political climate. It's important to always remember the goal of modern warfare. When you choose to support war, you are choosing to kill other people, even if you're not doing the killing directly. There are no half measures. Either your side wins, and therefore the other army is dead, or yours is. So if you're going to support the war and endanger your countrymen, you want to win. Otherwise what's the point?
  • lotharbot 13y ago
    To win, the opposing side must lose its capability to wage war. One way to accomplish that is to kill the opposing army, but that's not the only way. Other ways include destroying warfighting equipment (say, aircraft that are still on the ground), decimating the manufacturing base (thereby denying the opposing army the ability to rebuild lost capability), denying the opposing side critical resources such as fuel (why do you think the US has such a large "strategic oil reserve"?), or destroying the morale of opposing forces. Granted, all of those methods generally involve killing people on the other side... but the implications are different than your assertion, wherein winning wars requires the slaughter of opposing forces. A careful study of modern warfare would show that the majority of wars were not won because the opposing army was mostly dead, but because of equipment and materiel and logistics and morale.
    • sillysaurus2 13y ago
      Midway is probably the best example in support of your claim. Its outcome is generally accepted as the reason Japan lost. And yet it's interesting to note that the war was not won until their army was effectively dead: they believed so fiercely in the war that they would not yield until they believed imminent death was unavoidable. I'd like to paste an interesting excerpt from 100 Decisive Battles: "When Okinawa was finally declared secure, the cost had been horrific. Some 150,000 Okinawans died, approximately one-third the island’s population. An additional 10,000 Koreans, used by the Japanese military as slave labor, died as well. Of the 119,000 or so Japanese soldiers, as many as 112,000 were killed in the battle or forever sealed inside a collapsed cave or bunker. Aside from the human cost, most of the physical aspects of Okinawan culture were razed. Few buildings survived the 3 months’ fighting. Collectively, the defenders lost more dead than the Japanese suffered in the two atomic bombings combined. The United States lost 13,000 dead: almost 8,000 on the island and the remainder at sea; another 32,000 were wounded. The loss of life on both sides, particularly among the Japanese civilians, caused immense worry in Washington. New President Harry Truman was looking at the plans for a proposed assault on the Japanese main islands, and the casualty projections were unacceptable. Projections numbered the potential casualties from 100,000 in the first 30 days to as many as 1 million attackers, and the death count for the Japanese civilians would be impossible to calculate. If they resisted as strongly as did the citizens of Okinawa—and the inhabitants of the home islands would be even more dedicated to defending their homeland—Japan would become a wasteland. It was already looking like one in many areas. The U.S. bombing campaign, in place since the previous September, was burning out huge areas of Japanese cities. How much longer the Japanese could have held out in the face of the fire bombing is a matter of much dispute; some project that, had the incendiary raids continued until November, the Japanese would have been thrown back to an almost Stone Age existence. The problem was this: no one in the west knew exactly what was happening in Japan. The devastation could be estimated, but the resistance could not. Thus, with the casualties of the Okinawa battle fresh in his mind, when Truman learned of the successful testing of an atomic bomb, he ordered its use. This is a decision debated since 6 August 1945, the date of the bombing of Hiroshima, and even before. Just what was known of Japanese decision-making processes before that date is also argued to this day. Was the Japanese government in the process of formulating a peace offer, in spite of the demand for unconditional surrender the Allies had decided upon in February 1943? If they were doing so, did anyone in the west know about it? Who knew what, when they knew it, and what effect that knowledge had or may have had on Truman’s decision making is a matter of much dispute. Whatever the political ramifications of the atomic bomb on the immediate and postwar world, Truman’s decision was certainly based in no small part on the nature of the fighting on Okinawa. Truman wrote just after his decision, “We’ll end the war sooner now. And think of the kids who won’t be killed.” Horrible as the effects of the two atomic bombs were, the number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as compared with the potential number an invasion could have caused is small indeed." It's noteworthy that in order to win vs Germany we had to kill the vast majority of their army. Right up until Hitler shot himself, their morale remained high. A post on AskHistorians recently delved into that topic. Vietnam would be a good example of losing without an army being mostly destroyed. The war was effectively over right when mainland America lost the will to keep fighting, even though we had just scored major military victories. But most Americans weren't tied to the negative consequences of losing, so their morale was perhaps a special case. I can't think of any modern decisive conflicts that resulted in political change that didn't also require destroying the majority of the opposing army except Vietnam. And since Syrians will be quite invested in the negative consequences of losing, their morale will probably remain high until one side is mostly dead, if history is to be our guide.
• ctdonath 13y ago
  I'm talking about direct support to the revolutionaries The problem is that the revolutionaries are worse than the Assad regime, which is bad. If the Obama is serious about getting involved, regime change and nation building is the only viable option - and that's a pretty ugly option.