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

To: Sig who wrote (113648)	9/1/2003 10:07:09 PM
From: Sig	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

biz.yahoo.com Its time to get that old Peace candidate dusted off and propped up behind the podium with lots of makeup or else forget it. Its appears Uncle Sam will be ready for the next set of terrorists, and will have one of these personally delivered to his place of residence, be it above ground or below. No charge for the service, airborne rapid transit.. <<< During the next 15 years the Air Force intends to procure 24,000 SDB weapons and 2,000 carriage systems at a total cost of approximately $2.5 billion," the service said. The SDB is a 250-pound class precision-guided weapon, half the size of the smallest bomb used by the Air Force today, that will be launched from a fighter, bomber or unmanned aircraft that will destroy targets from a range of greater than 40 miles and penetrate more than 4 feet of steel-reinforced concrete >>>>. Sig

To: Sig who wrote (113648)	9/3/2003 1:43:56 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Sig; Re: "Soldiers with no knowledge outside their own area,do not know whether a war is being won or lost, except thru trusted people like Babbling Bob from Baghdad. Country leaders do not know, as their military commanders always have a plan to retreat, regroup after a lost battle and then make a brilliant play to win the next. Who could tell which side was winning the battle of Stalingrad.? And did a defeat mean the entire war was lost?" You're failing to take into account the fact that there is nothing like facing death to sharpen one's mind. The efficiency of the rumor mill among soldiers in wartime is legendary. Specifically with the Iraq example, any fool can simply look at the airplanes flying overhead and know that the Americans aren't getting shot down much. Most Iraqis do not live in mud huts with no running water or electricity (at least this was the case before we invaded, LOL), so to suggest that they cannot get information about the war is incorrect. They have radios and TVs, and even if you ignore the American broadcasts, Iranian TV and radio broadcast in Arabic to Iraq. Hell, even in the US it took only a few days for news of the surrender at Yorktown to spread the full length of the country. With WW2, we're talking about a much more mobile population figuring out the score over a period of months or years. Of course they knew. It's true that modern humans get most of their information from sources that were not available even a few years ago, but that does not mean that such primitives were unable to learn things. For a description of what the foot soldiers in Hitler's armies knew about the progress of the war, try reading any book written by a German front line soldier from that war. The fact is that most of them knew that the war was lost years before the war was over. In peacetime, in the US, it's a fact that very few people can analyze even a simple conflict like Iraq or Afghanistan. Most Americans expected Iraqis to greet US soldiers with flowers and celebrations. But note that this naivete was mostly present in people who were not actually going to have the flowers thrown on them. And there were inexperienced troops who expected a cakewalk, but most of the ones who knew what it is like to taste fear, knew that Iraq would be difficult. This is not because the taste of fear makes a person more fearful, but instead because the experience of being shot at makes a person more reflective. There is nothing like a horrible experience (like Vietnam) for a man to be especially keen to the possibilities that the experience will repeat. For example, a recent book (was it "The Fall of Berlin" ???), tells about a civilian on a bus saying that they should fight for victory. He is answered by a front line soldier on leave who loudly tells everyone on the bus that not only are they defeated, but that if the Russians do even half the things to the Germans that the Germans did to the Russian civilians, it might be wiser to kill yourself before the Russians get there. This is typical. Civilians live in a fantasyland because they do not have to face death. Soldiers do not have that option. -- Carl