Therumancer said:
Blasted Rules of Engagement.[/quote]As someone who has actually read Michael Walzer's
Just and Unjust Wars I believe I can firmly say, regarding rules of engagement: BLLLAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!! And, my head hurts.
We approach war from the perspective that there can be such a thing as an honorable war. There can't-full stop. All we can do is try to limit the effect on the bystandars.[/quote]
While this upsets some people I'm going to again explain my perspective. Apologies to those that it offends.
I am what you'd call a realist. There is no such thing as "morality" when something has gone as far as war. It's about winning or losing. Nations are defined by their people and their culture. Soldiers defend their people, BUT it's the people themselves that keep ideas and policies alive. The entire point of engaging in a war is to destroy, or change a nation OR culture (sometimes both) that means the ultimate goal is to target the people as well as their leaders. The Greeks, Romans, Chinese and other groups all understood these things.
The US also *used* to understand this, after all when you look at World War II we were no nicer or antiseptic than the Nazis. We murdered women and children, dug people out of their homes and killed them, bombed factories, farms, and buildings, and everything else. The Volkssturm was pretty much German civilians and we butchered them, and we killed anyone who might have been a potential threat while moving building to building. We also wiped out refugees in massive numbers to keep cities contained and prevent nazis and such from escaping. You don't hear about this because we won the war, we got to write the history books, we get to decide which pictures of corpse piles you get to see. We also spent a LONG time spreading propaganda to demonize the Nazis so our soldiers would be fairly unresistant to killing a mother and her 8 year old or whatever if the need arose. One of the reasons why the Nazis more or less collapsed is because we destroyued them, and that includes plenty of civilians who simply embraced the ideas for economic reform. This is one of the reasons why sparing specific scientists and such was especially contreversial. Not just because of war crimes, but because if your pretty much executing 20 guys who registered Nazi and supporting Hitler, is it right to spare some dude just because he has knowlege you want to use? (along with the other arguements).
The point being that the "Clean" war we engaged in was anything but. By current standards we would have tried Patton as a war criminal.
I'm not going to rant and rave about The Middle East specifically despite being our current arena of engagement. The truth is that people everywhere are not going to simply give up if invaded. In the US if we were invaded we would resist ANY invader heavily, civilians (especially with our right to bear arms) would do exactly the same stuff as we're seeing abroad, and in the end the only way to truely "beat" the US would be to basically committ mass murder and gut 99% of the population. You could never take it over and hold it otherwise. Heck digging people out of the Appalacian mountains alone would probably make the Afghanistan insurgency look like a cake walk.
Once you realize what it would take to beat us, you realize what it takes to beat any other group of humans out there (equality being what it is).
At any rate, where this is all going is that our engagement doctrine is not flawed so much because of our troops not being able to defend themselves except reactively (though that is part of it), but simply because we engage on a naive level trying to occupy nations and dig out endless insurgencies and win conflicts through nothing but police actions and "Shock and awe" intimidation without making any meaningful inroads. The US would not peacefully go into the night against the techniques we have been using to fight "Wars" so why should we expect them to work elsewhere?
What's more part of our entire military strategy has always been to have the best technology and most highly trained people we can obtain. We still want a large force, but a much smaller one than we would otherwise require. All of this is of course meaningless when we insist on going into nations and taking people on man to man, and rifle to rifle. That's why the Infantry gets so heavily slammed, and frankly it's a miracle of training that we haven't pretty much lost everyone given the meat grinders we sent these people into, and the rules we put on them.
In general the military isn't supposed to be sent unless we need to take a group out. They are not a police force. The entire idea of our technology is the fact that we blow things to bits with artillery, missles, and bombs, and then send our troops in to mop up whatever is left. Not ride around hostile crowds in hummers waiting to be ambushed.
I think our problem is that we look at the morality of killing 50,000 people with daisy cutters to get one dude as being "wrong". On the other hand that is exactly what our military was designed to do. That is why we MADE bombs like that. The entire point is that by the time we feel the need to go into a nation to get that dude (or whomever else) it's a foregone conslusion, we're there to take the whole region out.
Also it's noteworthy that intimidation only works if people are scared of you. Few people are really scared of the US due to the limits we place on ourselves. We're the guys who have replaced the explosives in our bombs with bloody concrete (I posted a link about this before when asked) to "minimize damage" (which makes me wonder why bother to have bombs when we could have just been stockpiling rocks....). Part of the point of say killing tens of thousands of civilians is not just to engage in a war of elimination, and other things, but also to spread fear.
Think of it this way, if you can point at the 50k "innocent people" you killed, it means that if you have a problem with a dictator or something, the people are more likely to rebel against their own leader for fear of you. I mean sure, his hundred bodyguards might kill 40k of those people before he went down, but the handfull of survivors are more than if America comes for them.
Also when you have a reputation for doing things like that, that's when a big fireworks show to demonstrate what you COULD be doing has a lasting effect. If nobody believes your going to pull the trigger, then you can make as much noise as you want and once it's over people are just going to carry on.
Or basically, if you engage in REAL WAR, it makes acts of mercy more possible. Kill a couple million people a town or city at a time, then later on in other conflicts you can make a big noise and spare tens of millions who will surrender/adjust because of what they already saw you do. A sort of "morality by the numbers" that people don't just get.
Basically I feel warfare and Mass Murder are pretty much the same thing (ie a war is when two groups try and committ mas murder on each other). Our entire engagement doctrine is naive.
Don't get the wrong impression here, I believe in military action as a last resort, not something you enter into casually. When you do it though, it's an ugly, brutal, thing. Nothing is going to change that, just as nothing is going to change the fundemental nature of humanity that mandates that in such conflicts things have to go to that level to accomplish anything.
Sure a lot of people would say that if the US is invaded they would surrender. It's hip to act that way in certain circles (Anti-US sentiment is vogue for Americans), but if it actually happened? Let's just say it would be nasty. People are just as vicious about defending their little patches of ground as we are of ours. So as I said, think about what it would take to truely destroy the US and American Ideaology... that's pretty much what we need to do to our enemies to stop them.
Sincere apologies if this upsets anyone again, I'm trying carefully not to accidently take it too far, since sometimes when I get ranting I go further than even I intend.[/quote]
I'm sorry, I also need to see works cited page to go along with that essay.
