IBlackKiteI said:
Therumancer said:
But the current war on terror is unlike any war fought by the US before.
There is no clear front line or even combatants, you can't just go in and say "That's the enemy, fuck 'em up."
Its a complete mess which is why it is so hated.
Anyways, what I mean is some sort of game showing the prosperity that war brings to the victor would not be suitable in this time period.
Theres no more of this love of country or belief that your countries cause is just like decades ago.
I think to have a chance at showing war in a somewhat positive way you would need to focus on a past conflict, probably WWI.
Of course the war was disastrous, but entire populations were bullshitted into the belief that they were in the right no matter what.
Therefore it could disregard the brutality of war and focus on the prosperity brought to the victors in a sort of 'Ignorance is bliss' kind of way.
Actually "The War On Terror" is *NOT* unlike any war we've fought before. That's the entire problem. Our morality and impractical view on conflict, not to mention caring more about what other people might think to the excuslion of our own interests, has caused us to set objectives that are simply put impossible to meet. One cannot walk into a conflicted region like that and create a progressive culture through force. Our problem is that we are trying to fight an 'antiseptic war' which is targeted at the symptoms of the problem (Terrorists) rather than the actual problem (the cultures in the region). If we had decided to simply go in like a proper military, exterminate anything that wasn't in one of our uniforms for a while, and blow up every structure we could hit, we could remove the threat presented by the region with relative ease despite what a lot of the "peace at any price" crowd thinks. "Total War", that is the extermination of entire cultures down to a tiny fringe, is very effective and has been proven time and again by past empires like the Romans. Justifications for why we can't do that ultimatly come down to modern morality and the simple fact that it's become anathema to kill millions of people for any reason, even when they present a clear threat.
A lot of people don't like the point, but if you look at things like World War II, this is fundementally what happened. Nazism was not a tiny group of Germans that somehow managed to conquer and occupy large portions of the world by magic, oppressing their own people along with other nations. Quite to the contrary, it was a huge international movement. Hitler was an international man of the year. To destroy Nazism in the final days we pretty much bombed the living bejeezus out of the German civilian population. Schools, hospitals, factories, farms, everything we could get our hands on to wreck infrastrcture and kill/terrify people. According to many reports between us and the Russians we dropped more bombs than Germany did during the Blitz. What's more we even killed our own people doing this, we have PoWs being forced to work on some of those farms, and in some of those factories, and we killed them along with everyone else. While most people talk about the fighting being "building to building" few people bother to think about what that actually meant. That means we were pretty much exterminating every person we came accros. We didn't slow down to try and figure out who the actual Volkssturm and Hitler Youth members were, what's more many people fighting simply were defending their homes, but that really didn't matter since morality was irrelevent. Patton didn't have our guys sit down for a friendly "getting to know you" chat with the Germans to decide who could be shot ethically. Of course history doesn't present it this way, the winners of any war are going to present themselves as the good guys, this is why we talk about "The Blitz" but we don't spend a lot of time going into guys like "Bomber" Harris (despite the exsistance of a movie):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Harris
Incidently as the article points out this guy was called "Butcher" by his own people (The Brits/RAF), and a war criminal by any standards. Today the few people who know about him tend to try and present him in a totally negative light, but at the time he was a big time hero (despite how it might sound) and "Butcher" wasn't exactly meant as an insult but more in a "w00t, we're getting some real payback now, now they get to meet our own killers" sense.
This is to say nothing of the time spent hunting down Nazis after the war which people tend to forget. One of the big reasons why recruiting guys like Von Braun and "Operation Paperclip" type activities were so contreversial is because they were contrary to agreements made after the war. Where allied forces were killing German war criminals, we were pardoning ones we felt were useful. Our attitude being that someone who was just a nazi was fodder for a firing squad, or show trial, but a Nazi who could share science with us was worthy of preservation. Guys like Von Braun indirectly killed thousands of people, while some buck private showboated through a little publicized trial and shot by a military firing squad might not have actually ever killed anyone. The reasons why we did it were obvious, and probably right in a "big picture" kind of way when looking at what was going on with the Russians, but it was the height of hypocracy.
At any rate, since World War II, pretty much every War the US has been involved in has lead to us losing, albiet without our military ever being beaten. Largely because the victory conditions we set for ourselves have little to do with actual use of force. Veitnam is a good example of this. Whether we should have gotten involved or not (we shouldn't have, we leaped before we looked carefully enough, namely because the guys we were defending weren't as advertised), the bottom line was that the entire "war" was effectively a defensive action where we spent time defending and protecting a DMZ. Yes we did place "fire bases", engage in some psychological warfare (vanishing villages), and other things. Even our bombings and the usage of things like "Agent Orange" was overall mostly defensive where we were removing cover and where we thought bases were along a defensive parameter. We didn't approach 'Nam from the perspective of going in there and literally killing every single VC/Communist we could find. The end result was that a lot of people died, but they couldn't do much to us overall as long a we hung around, and there wasn't anything we were going to do to resolve the situation under that engagement doctrine. What's more, the people we were defending were complete scum when you get down to it, and had no real desire to see a progressive, democratic society. They simply said that to get us there. The end result being that we wound up continueing a war that rapidly became about maintaining the wartime economy than any meaningful objective.
It's not an exactly parallel, but the situation is very similar. There isn't much nations like Iraq or Afghanistan can beat us. We're effectively invincible, and heck we're only using a fraction of what we have access to for moral reasons (ie we won't drop a couple of Daisy cutters on a village to nail a couple of high priority targets due to the collateral damage). There isn't a whole lot the entire region could do if we decided to use all of our tech and just steamroll the entire place. On the other hand since we're more or less just sitting around trying to maintain order, and "win the peace", it's not like we're actually accomplishing much either since the culture just keeps on doing right what it does, and for every insurgent we take out, there is another one being produced to take their place. It's endless.
Also don't get the impression with some of the methods I talk about that I'm being unfair here just because it's foreign countries. If someone decided to invade the US and used these methods it would be endless from us as well. As long as the culture exists, even in hiding during an occupation, more fighters would be produced, even if they were a minority compared to the people just holding the idealogy. You'd have to use the same exact methods, including the deaths of hundreds of millions of people to ever really defeat/destroy the USA. Ironically while called a racist by some, I'm exactly the opposite, I am giving the enemy the same credit I give my own people and can see what it would take for them to be defeated and this conflict through the eyes of what it would take to beat us in a similar situation. On a lot of levels it's actually a sign of respect.
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at any rate that is a HUGE giga-rant, but now back on to my original point.
There is a lot of appeal in going into an area full of people you don't like, horribly dominating them, taking their stuff, and then heading back home. Like it or not, it's how we're wired. It's also a nessicary survival and competition trait.
It's like this, did a group like Vikings or whatever head out to raid and wipe out people they don't like, sit around and focus on the horrible affect that what they did had on the survivors? No they sit around and focus on how much money they gained, how much stronger their own people are as a result, and how they have all these gorgeous slave women now to serve the mead and do other things.
That's an ancient example, but the point is we're lost the abillity to do that at least in the US. We've spent so much time listening to moralists and whiners, that we can't see war and conflict any other way than through the eyes of the victims, and that's a problem when dealing with groups who don't share equally evolved senses of morality.
A more modern version of the same thing would be similar to say "Warhammer 40k" and it's Space Marines, of certain military Science Fiction novels. Albiet, as I pointed out you would need to do it by removing a lot of the darker and more psychotic elements from the whole thing.
See, it's not a matter of "ignorance is bliss", but more a matter of being able to appreciate what you've done as a positive thing. It's good that we've hurt our enemies. That suffering, they deserved that!. Oh well, sucks to be them...
Now, don't misunderstand my overall point here. I am not saying that we should be quite so callous in reality. I simply feel that right now we need more of that attitude expressed to balance all of that "empathize with the enemy" and "oooh the poor victims" stuff. A real middle ground. The thing is that the pendelum has swung so far in the other direction, that to create a balance I think we need to see some titles that take a very "War is glorious" attitude so things can be balanced out and we can get in the right frame of mind overall.
While beyond the issue of "Homefront" itself, I think what we need are things like "Moden-Warfare" and "Homefront" style first person shooters, that take an attitude similar to that you might find in an old viking saga. They should make you hate the enemy so when you head in and do unspeakable things to a village your screaming "USA! USA!" (or whatever) rather than going "noes, all the poor civilians".
Heck, I've also been one of the big proponents of how preventing looting is counter productive. Nothing like someone using a sacred golden bowl as a household spittoon after the fact to say "we really whooped you". That's a real example incidently, though I don't remember the details. The bowl taken in India during by the Brits, and later being discovered after people forgot what it was and didn't even realize it was gold anymore due to being so encrusted with grime. I believe they returned it.
Or to put it bluntly I think we need more Kipling and Norse Sagas in our military attitudes and less of "Emo Mcangst's Hippy Manifesto".
In the end though this is just what I think, and I already know a lot of people here disagree with me, and any kind of protracted arguement is not going to go anywhere.
