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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (15240)	1/2/2002 8:02:37 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Maurice Winn; Great post. Re: "Gorby and the USSR were not goaded by the star wars threat into cuts in nuclear weapons." I agree. I was pointing out the contradictions in the article, rather than trying to correct all the errors. Re: "They were not pushed in the slightest by the remote prospect of a semi-effective space shield." I'm not so sure of this. Here's some Prvada search hits: google.com Re: "I think the star wars defence is a bit like Iridium as a space-based mobile phone service. Technically possible but a bad return on investment because there are much better ways to skin a cat." One of the odd things that has remained constant through history is that war requires toys that are the most expensive available at that time. During peacetime it's completely normal to complain about the costs. It's not as if anything the US does militarily makes a lot of sense as far as "return on investment". Are you aware how much that B-1 that splashed a few weeks ago cost? For comparison, here's a link to the GDP of Afghanistan: cia.gov Another example. During the "Great War" (i.e. WW1), even a simple, relatively cheap aircraft like the famous Sopwith Camel cost something like 14x as much as a simple, relatively cheap car (1 pound = 2.7 dollars at the time): aviation-history.com mtfca.com Maybe it has something to do with the love of expensive toys, but military equipment has always been expensive. This is not unique to modern history. My guess for the reason for this is that the boys with the expensive toys usually win, and almost never decisively lose. Note: Countries that lose a war decisively have (a) their capital occupied by the enemy, (b) their government put out of power, etc.) There has never been a time at which military operations were cheap. For example, the cost to Athens of building the Parthenon was only one third the cost of executing a 2-year siege against a single enemy city: tulane.edu The (ruins of the) Parthenon still stands, but the only thing people remember about the siege of Potidaea is that Socrates distinguished himself in battle by saving the life of Alcibiades: socrates.clarke.edu This is one of the reasons I'm in favor of spending government bucks on making big, beautiful buildings. Pretty much everything else we do is completely forgotten in just a few thousand years, only the stones remain. Re: "A better return on investment would come from reconstituting the UN and resolving the foundations of most conflicts." The only thing that the UN could have done in Afghanistan is simply what the US did, but slower, less efficiently, etc. If the US hadn't spent all those big bucks on fancy military equipment the bloodshed in Afghanistan would have been far, far, far more brutal on the civilian population. *Just a generation ago it was considered normal to do your darndest to attempt to bomb enemy civilians into submission.* They didn't put it that way, but that was what *everybody* did. After the fact, it's obvious to us now that the reason they did this was because their weapons were cruder than our own. War is about winning over the hearts and minds of the enemy, and it's a hell of a lot easier to do if you are able to "surgically" remove his command and control (read: "leadership") instead of nuking his civilians or even killing all his soldiers. It's not as if the Allies didn't try to kill Hitler, it's just that they couldn't hit him. So they killed the inhabitants of Dresden instead. Makes sense, don't it. -- Carl