Soren wrote on Oct 7
th, 2014 at 12:52pm:
Karnal wrote on Oct 6
th, 2014 at 9:42pm:
And yet, you’ve just avoided the question. Again.
How are calls for carpet-bombing the tinted races any different to calls for terrorist attacks?
Idiotic or not, I’m still curious. What makes your calls to violence, death and destruction superior to any others?
You cravenly, mendaciously and yes, lyingly misrepesent me.
We were talking about war and response to enemies. I used the example of Germany (not tinted) and Japan (slightly tinted).
I said we should not get into any war unless we are prepared to kill the enemy until it knows it is beaten.
There is no point of going to war in order to spare the enemy. If we beat them and they have an election and choose a government that continues to be our enemy, then they are clearly not thinking that they are beaten and so a war will again ensue and the killing can be resumed IF we want to beat them. .
Excellent thinking, Soren except of course you have forgotten what the key function of war is, in the modern world. As Karl von Clausewitz suggested so succinctly in his seminal work,
On War, "war is but politics by other means." The function of war is not to kill your enemy but rather to force a political decision in our favour. Indeed, killing people tends to be counter-productive. As the examples of both Germany and Japan in WWII, waging total war, giving no other means of surrender than unconditional meant that they dug their heels in, until we saw the horrors of atom war unleashed. Millions died unnecessarily in whole cities razed to the ground by fire and blast.
Modern war is not total war, modern war is fought for limited objectives, intended to force a political decision, Soren and your obvious misunderstanding of it reflects more about your personality than you might be comfortable revealing to us. Increasingly I see little or no difference between you and the Islamists you oppose. You are their mirror image.
Quote:Carpetbombing means killing the enemy until it taps the mat.
"Carpetbombing" is a nonmilitary term which is meaningless. It is hyberbole.
Quote:This is what happed with Germany and Japan and Serbia and now they are playing nice.
No it was not. What happened in German was that brave Russian soldiers fought the Germans to a standstill on the Eastern Front at the gates of Moscow and then drove them all the way back to Berlin. Strategic bombing as practiced by the USAAF and the RAF actually had little real effect on the German being able to wage war. Were you aware that German aircraft production actually increased until the last few months of the war, despite the strenous efforts of the Western Allies to stop it? How? Because the Allied bombing actually released labour by destroying all the civilian industries and that enabled the Germans to actually redeploy those workers to military industries. In Japan's case, it was the US Navy's unrestricted submarine warfare which defeated Japan, not the USAAF's bombing campaign. By the time the two atomic bombs were dropped, Japan was starving, there was insufficient food for the population, no fuel for industry or the military and no raw materials for industry. The A-Bombs forced the Japanese Government recognise their precarious position but even then, the militarists still wanted to fight on until the Emperor's personal intervention.
Quote:It did not happen with Iraq, Iran, Labia, Syria.
"Labia"? A Freudian slip?
"Syria", "Iran"? I wasn't aware that the West had yet intervened there in either nation nor made any attacks against them. Obviously they are non-starters as an example, Soren.
There were simply not the targets to justify such a bombing campaign, Soren, in Iraq. So we didn't see it attempted. Also, Iraq was not a total war but a limited war, with limited objectives - although, as we saw, even those limited objectives proved too ambitious for the US and its coalition of dupes.
There are many examples of where strategic bombing has failed as a means of winning a war, Soren. Others have mentioned them. Unfortunately for the Douhetists, airpower alone cannot win a war. "Boots on the ground" are needed, with an extended occupation usually, to reinforce the message of defeat. Clever means also of winning the civilian population over are also required but you'd just prefer to exterminate them all, now wouldn't you, Soren, particularly if they are Musselmen.