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

To: Jack Hartmann who wrote (31046)	5/30/2002 1:08:25 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Jack Hartmann; Re: "Too bad the 100 hours became a fixiation." [With regard to the Gulf War.] Most people haven't realized it yet, but the revolution in military affairs has severely decreased the US' natural ability to bring enemy countries to the point of unconditional surrender that we brought Germany and Japan to in 1945. People on this thread have commented on the fact that the Germans weren't making suicide bombs at the end of WW2. The reason for this is that the Germans were beaten with 10% of their population dead. The Germans realized that they had had their opportunity to fight, that they had fought as well as they could, and they had been beaten for once and forever. Their hope was gone, so they looked to the future and discarded the past. Now, it's easy as hell to get the military to surrender, but as the Israeli experience in Palestine clearly illustrates, it's another thing completely to bring the civilians to a point of unconditional surrender. It's only when the civilians (in other words the whole society) unconditionally surrenders that the risk of terrorism is eliminated. Until then, the enemy "military", though supposedly surrendered, simply hides in the civilian population. This is not some new perversion of the 20th century; the tradition of civilian militias dates to the birth of history and figured prominently in the American Revolution. Historically, unconditional surrender is achieved when there have been such huge numbers of deaths (~10% of population) on the losing side that the survivors come to realize that their cause is hopeless, and that continuing the conflict will only result in their further destruction. But the revolution in military affairs has so improved targeting that the civilians bear little of the death rate in a war. In addition, our preponderance of force makes it all the more likely that our wars will be 100 hour type wars, and as history has repeatedly demonstrated, 100 hour wars (between more or less equal sized opponents), while temporarily decisive militarily, have never resulted in the losing side concluding that their cause was hopeless and giving up unconditionally. (I should note that giving up unconditionally means giving up the right to form your own government, and allowing the enemy to occupy your cities without conflict.) Another way of putting this is to say that our military has become so good that it's only use is as a defensive force. It's the prefect weapon for eliminating another country's military, but it is not designed to bring the other country's civilians to their knees. We are unrivalled in our ability to liberate territory from a foreign force (like Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or Kuwait from Iraq), but it is close to useless for achieving unconditional surrender of civilians / militias in their home territory (like Aidid in Somalia, or Arafat in Palestine). If it ever comes down to the US versus the entire Arab world, the US can only end the conflict permanently with a complete victory through the killing of a substantial percentage of their populations. Back in WW2, this would be a natural side effect of regular military operations, but nowadays we would have to deliberately target civilians to get the numbers required. If we failed to do this, we'd simply be faced with a worse terrorism problem, as is happening now in Israel. Our weapons systems are optimized for use against military targets. The raid in Mogadishu illustrated some of this. US small caliber ammunition is designed to penetrate military armor, but the effect on unarmored combatant civilians was that the round passed through with little more damage than an ice pick. In the book "Blackhawk Down", soldiers repeatedly wish for standard 7.62 ammunition, and have to use multiple hits to bring unarmored people down. What we need to do now is to develop plans to ensure that we will have the technology to quickly and efficiently kill large numbers of civilians when needed, but without nuclear weapons. This may seem immoral, but it's where unconditional war with well supported terrorism must lead. Two wrongs don't make a right, but the fact is that it's the objective of the terrorists to kill as many of our civilians as possible. To the extent that enemy populations support their terrorists (and to deny that there is massive support is unrealistic), the enemy civilians should also bear the burden of punishment. We won't need these weapons unless full scale war breaks out (which I think is unlikely) but I think it is better to be safe than sorry. While it's possible to kill enough civilians to bring a nation to their knees using stuff like house to house combat, it's also a great way to run up your own casualties, and you don't have this opportunity against nations whose militaries have surrendered (but whose populations are still raring to go). The Middle East is huge. Our bringing the whole region to its knees would not be an easy task, and no matter that the odds of our needing to do it is slim, we need to be ready for the grim necessity. My comments here may seem over the line, but it is inevitable that terrorists will eventually possess nuclear weapons, and if we decide to continue stirring the pot in the Middle East, we're going to get dragged into this thing. As I've said before, time is on our side. If we simply wait them out, envy will take over and drop these nations into the palm of our hand like ripe fruit. Vietnam is slowly dropping now, 30 years after we gave up trying to convert their hearts and minds with weapons. But we really should be prepared for another all out war. -- Carl P.S. An article on armor piercing small arms ammunition: snipersparadise.com