The Glade 4.0

The difference between "strategic" and "tactical" is not merely semantic; it goes fundamentally to what decisions are made at what level and understanding why people do what they do. The strategic-level decision makers never have the kind of granular control over the tactical level that people think they do - and when they have attempted to exercise it, such as the SECDEF office picking out individual bomber targets in Viet Nam - it's inevitably ended in disaster.



Actually, in both Japan and Germany the civilian casualties were a known side effect of trying to knock out the enemy's industrial and supply base. However, between the destruction of the enemy's ability to carry on the production of war materiel and supply and support that equipment and the armies, and the associated civilian casualties both nations' will to fight completely collapsed - and both were driven by fanatical, diehard elements that had major public buy-in, just like ISIS, including a religious element in the case of Japan.

So basically you are saying that something that has a 100% success rate, of which you cite an example, has "never worked". Name another instance where it's even been attempted. Prior to WWII it wasn't possible to even attempt - the horrible casualties aside, strategic destruction of an enemy wasn't actually possible. The civil war maybe? Oh wait.. worked there too; the South was completely unable to offer meaningful resistance and lo and behold, just like Germany and Japan we have peaceful relations today without ongoing insurgencies continuing the fight.

You're trying to claim that sort of strategy doesn't work because you morally object to it. If you want to make a moral objection, make a moral objection - at least you have on your side that it would kill a lot of people and political reality frowns on that. However, in probably any instance you're thinking of where a civilian population hasn't been pacified by force there's been no serious effort to do so - even in Afghanistan with the Russians they didn't commit to it fully or prosecute it to the full extent of that strategy; they'd just wreck a village and then go back to base. If you want to claim the strategy doesn't work when pursued in a half-ass fashion then I fully agree.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Russia's goal here in addition to just stabilizing things and keeping a friendly-to-Russia regime in place is to set itself up as an effective manager and player in world affairs opposite the U.S. So far, he's doing exactly that because the U.S. approach to managing this crisis has been "poke at ISIS a bit and hope they don't steamroll Syria or Iraq before Obama's out of office."

Fundamentally though, you're right. There is no reaon not to let Putin do as he pleases, save our money and effort and let him spend his and hopefully weaken himself or get dragged into his own quagmire of mismanagement. At this point ahort of smashing ISIS on the ground or bombing them into oblivion ourselves there are no real options. Obama completely hung his hat on the Arab Spring idea that we could get rid of both Islamism and dictatorship at the same time and that has not born out in any country so far.

In fact, if ISIS is defeated that only makes our position worse because then it will be our group of shitlords and against Russia's group of shitlords and we'll have to make a choice of whether we want to back our shitlords in a cold-war-style proxie conflict with the Russians.

Obama wants to believe a perfect solution is still possible; in reality the best option for us is to cut our losses and tell everyone "fine. we're done. Putin can handle it and world - the next time you want to whine about us being the world police or whatever, just remember Russia will be quite happy to do it if we won't." The anti-Assad rebels we've been backing would be well advised to cut a deal with Assad and bend the knee now and quietly look for new residences elsewhere.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The enemy ARE civilians...

Quite true.

When your aversion to civilian casualties becomes your primary concern it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to weaponize civilian status.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

In related news ISIS touting its medical and maternity facilities in a typically appalling way.

But, as the article points out, the underlying theme here is that ISIS is not merely a terrorist group. They're doing the things that advocates of revolution everywhere fail to understand have to be done when creating ones political utopia - attempting to provide basic services.

Granted, they're probably doing an atrocious job of providing medicine, but they are at least attempting to, and that only boosts their legitimacy. By letting this problem fester too long, we have allowed ISIS to achieve the dream of terrorists everywhere - the ability to move beyond revolution and get about the business of setting up their dream government.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Lemme try this once more, then I'm out:

Talya said:

Not collateral damage, not defeating them militarily. Purposely killing civilians. Maybe I'm just not understanding what a "civilian support structure" is, but, yes, I have a moral problem with that.

And, British strategic bombing was specifically aimed at destroying the enemy's morale and will to fight. NOT ability, will.

Again with the Wikipedia, because it's well-sourced:

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

It's not a matter of tolerating jihadists, its a matter of slaughtering a bunch of subsistence farmers in order to send a message to other uninvolved subsistence farmers who are barely surviving as it is that they better make sure that no one unfriendly to the US exists amongst themselves.

Should we, for example, genocide cities in Somalia in response to piracy in order to make stopping piracy their problem? That's not something like Palestine where the majority wants the West dead, most people there don't care about the US and are just trying to survive. In dealing with, say, Mexico, should we be inspired by the British's actions during the Opium Wars and brutally force them to deal with illegal immigration and drug smuggling, while simultaneously insisting that they continue to allow thousands of US made guns to cross their border every year?

Then you have situations like North Korea which is basically 1984 in real life, is it ethical to slaughter the proles? They're not really capable of being culpable in NKs actions.

It's a term Taly is basically making up herself (i.e. it's not a professional term that I'm aware of), but it's not a bad one (it avoids prejudicial language or euphemism) - but a civilian support structure is a combination of the civilians themselves and the material support they provide to the actual fighters. Just like a regular military can't fight without an industrial and economic base, an insurgency can't fight without civilian support to provide food, places to sleep and hide, etc. ISIS is in this transitional state where it is fighting as a regular military but without the industrial/economic base of a regular military. It is able to get away with this because it has excellent motivation and a strong network to utilize captured and salvaged assets, while its opponents are a mix of unmotivated and incompetent. Air attacks alone are rarely terribly successful; the Kosovo war is the sole exception.

As for the moral problem, it's understandable that you have one but the enemy does not give a ****. Morality is for after the fight. Morality is for not going out of your way to inflict pain, suffering and death unrelated to the fight. Trying to sanitize war with moral considerations in the actual combat just drags it out and encourages those who truly don't care to exploit the moral concerns of their opponents.



These are not exclusive to each other. When your opponent destroys your means of effectively combatting him, what effect do you think that has on your will to fight?

Furthermore, the British bombing campaign is not distinct from the overall Allied campaign which rapidly shifted to focusing on different critical areas of the industrial chain, which were attacked with varying degrees of success - ball ebarings were at one point the target, oil was a target, and so forth.

Finally, just as in WWII, there is no reason this has to be done exclusively from the air. Germany was eventually crushed between the Allied and Soviet invasions. The goal is not to demoralize and destroy the will of the population to fight from the air just for the sake of doing it from the air, or to do that to the exclusion of attacking materiel targets; it's to destroy the enemy's will and ability to fight by whatever means is practicable



I am amazed that I need to point out that 1941 was not only not the end of the air campaign, the U.S. wasn't even involved yet and that campaign evolved over the following 3 and a half years. Furthermore:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II

Strategic bombing has been criticized on practical grounds because it does not work predictably. The radical changes it forces on a targeted population can backfire, including the counterproductive result of freeing inessential labourers to fill worker shortages in war industries.[22]

Much of the doubt about the effectiveness of the bomber war comes from the fact German industrial production increased throughout the war.[23] A combination of factors helped increase German war material output, these included; continuing development from production lines started before the war, limiting competing models of equipment, government enforced sharing of production techniques, a change in how contracts were priced and an aggressive worker suggestion program. At the same time production plants had to deal with a loss of experienced workers to the military, assimilating untrained workers, culling workers incapable of being trained, and utilizing unwilling forced labor. Strategic bombing failed to reduce German war production. There is insufficient information to ascertain how much additional potential industrial growth the bombing campaign may have curtailed.[24] However, attacks on the infrastructure were taking place. The attacks on Germany's canals and railroads made transportation of materiel difficult.[21]

The attack on oil production, oil refineries, and tank farms was, however, extremely successful and made a very large contribution to the general collapse of Germany in 1945. In the event, the bombing of oil facilities became Albert Speer's main concern; however, this occurred sufficiently late in the war that Germany would soon be defeated in any case.

German insiders credit the Allied bombing offensive with crippling the German war industry. Speer repeatedly said (both during and after the war) it caused crucial production problems. Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the U-boat fleet (U-waffe), noted in his memoirs failure to get the revolutionary Type XXI U-boats (which could have completely altered the balance of power in the Battle of the Atlantic) into service was entirely the result of the bombing. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (Europe), says, despite bombing becoming a major effort, between December 1942 and June 1943, "The attack on the construction yards and slipways was not heavy enough to be more than troublesome" and the delays in delivery of Type XXIs and XXIIIs up until November 1944 "cannot be attributed to the air attack",[21] but adds, "The attacks during the late winter and early spring of 1945 did close, or all but close, five of the major yards, including the great Blohm and Voss plant at Hamburg".[21]

Bottom line - while attacking some sorts of targets was unproductive or of unclear utility, attacks on oil, rail, and submarine assets were highly effective. This is attested to by the Nazis themselves. Obviously, there is complex cause at work here and different estimates of how much of the effect was from the bombing and how much from other sources but again - the goal is not to destroy ISIS with air attacks to validate air bombardment as a strategy; it's to get rid of ISIS and there is nothing wrong with combining air attacks with other means.

As for the effects on morale:

[/quote][/quote]

What Taly is doing when she talks about destroying their morale is basically skipping over the intermediate step of what target are you going to attack to destroy that? Morale can be damaged, but not directly; you obviously cannot drop a bomb on "morale". you have to attack something that will negatively effect morale. Taly is not acquainted with the niceties of targeting and such, and shouldn't be expected to be - that's for people that get paid to do that to do. That does not mean she's advocating a return to 1930s era targeting techniques.

The 1930s strategy, of just dropping bombs all over the place in cities and thinking sheer horror was what the British were attempting in the 1941 memo you referenced. It was not that destroying and enemy's will to fight couldn't work, but that the British, in 1941, were doing it wrong. You don't target that will by simply killing the enemy, you do it by removing the enemy's ability to reply. When the British were being bombed by Germany, they could see the effects of their own defense with every German fighter shot down and this meant the terrorization effects were reduced, eliminated, or even reversed - it stiffened their will to fight because they could see they were forcing the enemy to bleed too.

In the allied bombing campaigns the Germans could, of course, see the same thing but they were also being pressed with ground combat in several theaters at any given time, and they could easily see that no matter how many Allied bombers they shot down there were always more and the defenses were being pushed back more and more as the Luftwaffe lost the ability to fly and the number of bombers did not decrease.

The same thing occurred in the Gulf War - The Iraqi Army was not actually destroyed until it was engaged on the ground, but the majority of it had already lost the will to fight because not only were they having the **** bombed out of them, they could see clearly that they were defenseless - their air defense systems were ruthlessly destroyed by SEAD attacks and their air force was obviously neutralized - an Iraqi soldier could easily see that there were no Iraqi fighters doing anything to protect him. On top of that they weren't receiving any supplies.

You target someone's will to fight by targeting their ability to do so. Of course, you have to give them an out as well - once they give up (really give up; not the Palestinian "give up" of starting to fight again 3 hours after the ceasefire) you stop killing them. If you just keep right on killing them you may as well try to exterminate them because with no way out they'll fight like a cornered animal. EVEN ISIS has to be given an out, but that out is basically "surrender and never attempt anything like this ever again" but in order to get there the force used against them can't just be enough to "get them to quit for the moment" but such that they see that resistance is in fact futile.

We don't want to do that because of our moral qualms about it - but those moral qualms are inevitably weaponized by those that don't share them.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No, in fat it's nothing of the sort. In case you hadn't noticed, there is a lot more going on with ISIS than being "unfriendly to the US", and whitewashing their actions as simple "unfriendliness" is really pretty appalling.

Second, they are not merely a "bunch of subsistence farmers who are barely surviving"; there is some subsistence farming but that is hardly the extent of what's going on - and even if they were, where the **** do you think ISIS gets its support base from?

Third, it isn't a matter of "sending a message to anyone else" it's a matter of getting the people in question to stop doing this sort of thing.

Finally, it is not a matter of whether we should do it - we haven't up to this point and aren't likely to start. The question is one of Putin doing this, if he intends to pursue a strategy that amounts to destroying ISIS through overwhelming force. Putin does not need, and is not going to ask, for our permission. Therefore the question is "are we willing to go to war with Russia to prevent them from bombing these people into submission"?

That's a significantly different question. Whether we agree or disagree on what we ought to do to ISIS, when someone says "let Putin do as he pleases" it isn't giving him our permission or endorsement - it's acknowledging that if he's determined to do so it is not in our interests to risk war, or even a localized armed incident, to stop him.



Of course it's not, so why would you suggest such a thing? Piracy is essentially a criminal problem. As a practical matter the military has a hand in dealing with it, but piracy is a mere itch compared to ISIS and just requires occasional scratching. It's a rather spectacular form of robbery, but it's basically just armed robbery.



How exactly would we do this "forcing"? And what have guns going south got to do with it, why would we insist that they allow guns in? Because we want to manufacture gun problems there to push the anti-gun agenda at home? Oh wait.. already tried that, and it didn't work out...

These are fundamentally problems with criminals. The costs of using military force outweigh the threat. Now, if cartel violence HERE suddenly and sharply increased military action might become necessary but that seems unlikely since the Cartels know not to **** where they eat.



Yes, as a matter of fact they are, although less so than their leaders on an individual basis. However, the fact is that in order to defeat the government you're going to need to kill a lot of them in the process, and you really don't need to go out of your way to avoid it. The goal isn't to slaughter norks for the sake of slaughtering norks; it's that you inflict enough damage on NK that the government collapses or at least cannot effectively prosecute the war effort and if a bunch of norks die in the process, oh **** well.

"Ethical" never even enters into it. You worry about Ethical after the white flag goes up. The only "ethics" in the conduct of a war should be winning in as expeditious a manner and at as low a cost as possible - and before you freak out about the obvious extreme of this, no, that does not mean just nuke everyone over everything. The use of force out of all proportion to a threat is not "the lowest cost possible"; all costs have to be weighed including those of political reality.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'll point out that the reason Bin Laden attacked the targets he did was because he considered no citizen of the United States innocent because of how just the living of their lives provides funds and justification for the government's actions.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Bin Laden apologist up in here.

It would behoove people to look at the example of Imperial Japan in WWII. They were, at least to our knowledge, willing to fight to the last woman and child. We had to be willing to meet that victory condition to win, and then we had to prove to the Japanese that we were both willing and capable of exterminating them. Finally, as DE pointed out, we had to give them an out. We had to show that we were willing to lay down arms of they did.

There were discussions of what city to drop the bomb on. Tokyo came up several times and was shot down. We wanted Tokyo to survive so that Japan could have a cultural heart to rebuild around. After Japan surrendered, we revealed this information to them. We told them why not Tokyo, after the long and vicious war. Or at least, why not Tokyo first. It is easy to see why there has been an enduring peace between the United States and Japan. We could and would annihilate them, but we were willing to let it stop.

We have a different problem in the Middle East. They do not believe that we are willing to kill them. They believe we are soft. They are right. We have lost our taste for real war. We know how terrible it is. Middle Eastern arabs do not. They have not been devastated like our enemies during WWII. Russians have no wish for another war like the world wars either, but the jihadists are on their doorstep. The Russians are looking to stop the war before it starts. The best way for us to facilitate that is to not shoot at the Russians.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

You mean horrible government actions like U.S. troops having the gall to set foot on Saudi soil in order to get another guy of whom he was not a fan -Saddam Hussein - out of Kuwait? Because he was buttmad that the Saudis were "lol no" at the idea of a bunch of unemployed mujaheddin being in their kingdom?

Yeah.

I really don't give a flying **** what justification he used. Our enemies are going to attack us for reasons they believe serve their interests and we need to deal with them. "Oh well the U.S. was all consistent and ethical so maybe I'll just not attack them" said none of our enemies, ever.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I had forgotten about this point, but it's quite correct. Thanks for pointing that out.



This is also quite true.

I would also point out that not shooting at Russia in the Middle East greatly reduces the possibility of.. things getting out of control. This is not a matter of "is it ok to bomb the **** out of ISIS until they quit or are annihilated" its "should we stop the Russians from doing it, assuming they plan to, when they are not asking our permission in the first place." Regardless of how innocent or complicit anyone here might think the population here, Vladamir Putin is not interested in that debate.

Specifically Elmo, that means you. Would you like to fight the Russians over the principle that the average person in ISIS territory is not responsible for what they do? No? Good, that's what I gathered from your earlier post.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I was simply pointing out what actions one becomes capable of when one adopts that thought process. Anyone who thinks that has dismissed the notion that there even exists the idea of 'the innocent'.

As to Russia and the US. The US will rob me and my family and friends to prosecute their unjust acts. Russia will not. So long as unjust acts will / may exist I'd rather not pay for them.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I've never actually understood why we were so relatively nice to Japan postwar when the original plan for postwar Germany was literally genocide on a level that would have made the Holocaust look tame. The actual plan was to completely dismantle Germany's industry and reduce it to a "pastoral state," starving 25 million people to death in the process. This plan was well underway and was only abandoned in 1947 when we realized we needed them to not join the Soviets.

First, because the war against Japan was basically a U.S. show, so we could largely set the terms. The other participants were far less involved, especially after the British loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse and the surrender of Singapore. The Soviets came exceedingly late to the party. The Chinese were the only other country that could claim to have as deep a level of involvement in the Pacific theater and they were in no position to participate in the administration of postwar Japan, both because of existing ethnic and postwar hostility and because China itself was on the verge of coming apart at the seams.

MacArthur had a nearly free hand to get Japan in order after the war with little need to accommodate everyone else, and he actually proved more adept at that than he had at fighting wars - certainly more so than his Korea performance.



Because the plan was heavily influenced by Soviet involvement and given their own losses and the fact that they'd been handled roughly by the Germans in 2 World Wars they were pretty keen on making sure it ever happened again regardless of the cost involved.

Second, the "Pastoralization plan" was not intended to kill a lot of Germans, that was a consequence that eventually became clear and was part of the reason it was abandoned. There was no "genocide" involved. It also wasn't abandoned just to make a buffer against the Soviets; it was already falling by the wayside as early as 1946 and really started to fall out of favor because it was pointed out in a 1947 report by Herbert Hoover that an effect of it would be about 25,000,000 deaths. Furthermore, it was advanced by Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury and the State Department objected into this intrusion into their area. Churchill also objected to this plan, and was basically strong-armed into supporting it.

You need to quit throwing that term out. It does not mean "a lot of people dying". I realize it's great for making something sound appalling but frankly it's a lot like "war crime" in that it's a term that's used to distract from an issue by making people afraid to be compared with Nazis.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I have, indeed, dismissed the idea of a vague category of people that the enemy can use as human shields, and people at home can use for their own cynical political gain. Worrying about "innocents" prolongs fighting and emboldens enemies in the future to use "innocents" as leverage for their own purposes. These insincere shows of concern are **** despicable.



No one has proposed giving money to Russia to support their actions, so you don't have anything to worry about. You can continue sitting there resenting that your personal idea of "unjust" is not being followed and rest assured we are not paying for Putin to drop bombs on anyone.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I say the only appropriate response for the US, at this point, is to completely and utterly destroy the Assad regime right now. Russia and its potential client states around the world need to be shown that in a proxy fight between them and us, we can mop the floor with them. The days of parity are long since over. Now, I'm not saying we should send in ground troops and try to run/rebuild the country a la Iraq or get into direct conflict with Russian forces. I'm just saying we should launch a full-scale air war against Assad's government and armed forces. They'll be gone in a matter of weeks, and it's not like Russia will send its own planes up against ours in a direct fight. We were willing to show restraint and let Russia's little client hang on to power because it served our interests to do so, but if Putin wants to stand on the world stage and stick his thumb in our eye, we need to make it very clear that we have the big stick now.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

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Either that or it's some of the best trolling this board has ever seen.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Not trolling; just distilling my actual view down to its essence. Basically, I think (i) Russia is not only or even primarily attacking ISIS; it's attacking every rebel group that threatens Assad, including those we have publicly and materially supported, (ii) the reemergence of Russia as a militarily-assertive power opposing our active efforts on the world stage is an infinitely larger threat to our interests than ISIS ever will be, and (iii) taking out Assad is a morally good thing to do in and of itself, even if a semi-failed state is the result in the short term. We couldn't really do anything about Putin's actions in the Ukraine, because, frankly, that's in Russia's direct sphere of influence. Syria isn't. If anything, it's in ours - it's sandwiched between a NATO member and a bunch of US allies.

Russia is going to re-emerge as a military power no matter what we do; they were not going to remain in their post-Soviet doldrums forever. It is not a safe assumption that they are unprepared for air-to-air combat either; Su-30s with air combat loadouts have been spotted in Syria and ISIS is not flying jets. Militarily we still have an advantage versus the Russians but that's been deteriorating for years. If we are going to re-position ourselves to keep them in check again we are going to need to re-evaluate our entire worldwide posture. Bombing Assad in a fit of pique that they dared intervene in Syria in a way not outlined by us first isn't going to get us anywhere and is just asking for a shooting incident. Furthermore, with us bombing Assad and them bombing the rebels we backed that just gives ISIS more of an advantage.

Furthermore, when it comes to "morally good" about the only target where there's no moral downside to it is ISIS - they're one of those bad guys that's so uniquely appalling that basically no one can argue attacking them is a bad thing. Assad is not a good guy, but our previous experience in Iraq, Egypt, and Syria indicates that removing dictators because they're bad and accepting a potential failed state is a terrible idea. In fact that's basically how we got ISIS in the first place.

I don't see any gain from this course of action that is worth the very real and very significant risks, especially since it's a near-given that smashing Assad would hand the country to ISIS.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Holy ****!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."