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Strategies & Market Trends : Fascist Oligarchs Attack Cute Cuddly Canadians -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcos who wrote (969)	3/3/2003 3:54:06 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 1293

There is more to Bonzo's war than of course he can tell. If he were to reveal all that he knew then the bad guys would know he knew it, and how too. au.af.mil Some of the repeating reasons are buried in this dissertation. (BTW FWIW, the Gatling Gun had many times the fire-rate it is credit with here. It could sustain 600 to 1000 RPM even as far back as 1870. The first one demonstrated for Lincoln in 1864 was operated by an electric motor, and fired at 1400 RPM!) We must resist the temptation to think that just because people are somewhat less powerful than us, that they are correspondingly nice. We are not sure what they believe. One thing is for sure, no Arabic or ME state, for one second thinks that it can take on the US in a real war. They are all playing a game and it is primarily political. I don't think they are too keen on Bin Laden, as he really unsettles their primary objectives. When Afghanistan took on the Soviets a few years back, they did not really inflict that many casualties, but it is pertinent that they had massive help from the CIA in intelligence, weaponry, tactics, and reconnaissance. The states that may wish to give the US a hard time in the ME right now have no such aid. They have limited options strategically or tactically in a hot war. To keep war from becoming hot, they had better look to redefining their overall objectives or tactics. If they do not, it may be their undoing. There are all sorts of really heavily compormised factions in the ME community that have walked tightropse for hundreds of years. Armenians, Kurds, Shiites, Cossacks and Azeris are all Asiatics and have roots in the ME but they have few ties to extremists and are not likely to want to destabilize Western regimes. We have a hard time distinguishing them, but it would pay us to doa more in depth analysis of the forces at work in that part of the world. We must never destroy our links with potential allies in that area, by painting the ME with too broad a brush. The US lessons in Korea, and Indochina have been absorbed well and the mistakes will not be repeated. McArthur was setting the adminstration up to take on China, but they declined. McArthur knew he had no airforce to speak of, but he resisted the intelligent deployment of these craft against the Japanese. Perhaps he wanted to spare the pilots. Today, modern military forces have undergone a sea change. They have enormous wide ranging deep strike capability that operates with impunity. They can force strategic decisions on nations within months. Only the major powers, if they came to balance of nuclear standoff, are at loggerheads. Without deep strike, and massive firepower, the loss rate of a second-rate even nuclear capable nation, must make it see that any threatening confrontation with a major power would be suicidal. The larger nations have continent-spanning "smothering" capability and logistical endurance that makes their conventional warfare a one sided affair with a casualty rate that is very light on both sides. Not many have to suffer, unless the enemy has set up its military defenses such that its own non-combatants are hostage. But despite the low losses relative to say the second world war, the defeat of a combatant who takes on a Nato ally is a certitude within a short period. France was overrun by the German army in a matter of a month with losses of 100,000 men. Today the equivalent losses would be perhaps 5 to 6 percent of that in an equally unbalanced situation, but the decision would be as final. and as quick. What this underscores, is that for a humane war to have been waged in Vietnam, it would have had to have been a more total engagment of its populace and its total capability to fight. To end war faster you have to attack more broadly and fight more seriously. The limited engagment of the war in Vietnam, and the very limited technological superiority of the US forces against the Soviet supplied, WW1 tactic Vietnamese, dictated the large casualties on both sides. EC<:-}