The Taliban is winning

[Guest Muttling]

I wasn't commenting on how we got them; just that we have them. Never in history has a country had the power that we do and do not exercise said power. War is an uncivilized act, and I do not see the sense in trying to civilize it...period.

There is too much history not to see a sense in putting some level of limits on it.

The systematic enslavement, torture, murder, and rape of civilian populations over the past 100 years should be example enough as to why we should have a manner of dealing with animals like Ishi, Mengela, Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein.

War is uncivilized, but that doesn't mean we have to accept saddistic insanity as a normal part of it.

[E4 No More]

War is not won by playing nice with your enemy. War is won by being nastier than the enemy. Ask the Japanese and Germans. If you are not willing to do this then you have no business engaging in war to begin with, and that is where I blame Bush.

[wjh2657]

War is not won by playing nice with your enemy. War is won by being nastier than the enemy. Ask the Japanese and Germans. If you are not willing to do this then you have no business engaging in war to begin with, and that is where I blame Bush.

I am not as far in disagreement with you as you might think. I spent a lot of time in RVN, but I learned early that we were not in a war, we were taking sides in a revolution. We are doing it again.

In WWII we declared war on the nations of Japan and Germany. That is war against all of their people, not just their military. You can kill civilians, if they get in the way, they are part of the "enemy force." We can fight a total war and win. We have done it several times!

In RVN, Iraq and Afghanistan, we did not declare war on a country. we declared war on their military (Hussein in Iraq) or their Insurgents (Later Iraq, RVN and Afghanistan). The countries and their populations were not to be considered combatants. We are trying to fight their revolutions for them. Noble thought but not practical. As in any revolution, nobody, not even the home boys, can tell who is the good guys and who are the bad guys. And folks change sides at every chance. In the end, invarably, the outside "help" (us) ends up being the "invaders" and the bad guys.

We are equating the terrorists we are after with all of the insurgent elements we are fighting. That just isn't true, some of them are just insurgents. If they ally with our bad guys we can't be sure if it was before or after we started shooting at them. When this started we were after a small bunch of Al Quaida and we haven't caught up with all of them yet.

Meanwhile we are neck deep in civil wars all over the Middle East. If the argument is that they are all militant Muslims and are together, then declare war on all of the Muslim countries and go after the whole lot. If that is too much to take then we haven't distilled our concept of who the "enemy" really is yet and shouldn't be fighting. Either the whole country is our enemy or it is an internal problem for them. Anything less than fighting all is not war, it is political games and a real waste of some fine military manpower.

Let them fight it out. If our side loses, smash the h*** out of the one left standing, but don't get between them.

[Guest justme]

On recent events concerning Russia's military....

They're firing more than half of their senior officer corps. 200,000 of them. This is part of the military reform effort started by Putin following their crappy performance in Georgia.

Russia Firing 200k Military Officers

Crappy performance? Well I can agree to a point--but remember..in 5 days the Russians totally decimated the Georgian Army...Maybe Putin was unhappy that it took 5 days--maybe he felt that in 5 days time All of Georgia should have been over run, total regime change instituted and the flag of the Russian Federation flying again from Tblisi...

[Guest justme]

In WWII we declared war on the nations of Japan and Germany. That is war against all of their people, not just their military. You can kill civilians, if they get in the way, they are part of the "enemy force." We can fight a total war and win. We have done it several times!

Actually in World War 2--we "won" the battles yes...we destroyed Japan, and then rebuilt them back better than ever...We destroyed the Nazis, and then the Marshall plan rebuilt Germany back...So while we won the battles--we actually lost in the long term.

[Guest Muttling]

Crappy performance? Well I can agree to a point--but remember..in 5 days the Russians totally decimated the Georgian Army...Maybe Putin was unhappy that it took 5 days--maybe he felt that in 5 days time All of Georgia should have been over run, total regime change instituted and the flag of the Russian Federation flying again from Tblisi...

It's not my opinion, it's Valdamir Putin's opinion that they did crappy.

5 Days to overrun (not hold) a very small country who doesn't even ONE division of main battle tank? 5 days for T-72's and T-80's backed by superior infantry numbers, Hinds, air power, etc, etc, etc?

They also lost 4 fighter aircraft in those 5 days to a country that didn't have a networked air defense grid or a significant air to air combat capability.

Russian 152mm howitzers and 155m regular sized atillery was unable to break Georgian mountain positions so they had to bring in the massive Russian breech loaded mortar (230mm I think, but I could be wrong.) It took that beast more time to set up than it did to break the stale mate, the Russians are REAL lucky the Georgians didn't have a counter-battery fire capability in those mountains.

All of this as compared to our 100 hour manhandling of Iraqi ground forces the first time that was primarily slowed by the mass number of surrendering Iraqis. Or our sprint to Bahgdad the second time around was mainly slowed by refueling stops and rest stops. Heck, we had unsupported Bradleys accidentally going toe to toe with hulled down T-72's and we still took out defending main battle tanks without taking a single loss to a Bradley.

I'm not trying to say we had it easy in Iraq. Absolutely NOT. We faced superior numbers and we were on the offensive against a native force. The American soldier proved his metal.

Putin expects Russia's military to be on par with the American performance and their performance in Georgia wasn't even close to what we showed in Iraq....TWICE. They aren't the military that they used to be and Putin is furious. Problem is, they don't have the economy to maintain a Russian sized top notch military much less restore one.

Edited August 19, 2009 by Muttling

[Guest Muttling]

War is not won by playing nice with your enemy. War is won by being nastier than the enemy. Ask the Japanese and Germans.

Ummm......There are few better examples of countries loosing despite getting nastier than the enemy.

The Soviets used Tulerimia on the Germans at Stalingrad along with much more and won. We used nukes on Japan and won. There's a difference in getting nasty with tech and just getting nasty.

Read up on what Japan's Unit 731 did. OMG!!!!!!! Weapons testing on humans, using humans to produce Bio weapons, use of bio weapons, etc, etc, etc....

Then we are all familiar with the German operations.

Soviet and American operations in WWII weren't even close to the nastinest of what Japan and Germany did, but they still lost......because of technology.

But today's battlefield is not the WWII battlefield and we don't fight the same enemy. Wars aren't won by the nastier enemy, but the smarter and more forward thinking one. I pray that is us.

Edited August 19, 2009 by Muttling