Replies

I’ve bookmarked it to read the rest later.

For several thousand years, the three indispensable "hardware" elements of any war have been soldiers, weapons and a battlefield. Running through them all has been the "software" element of warfare: its purposefulness.

Something we pay little attention to. We come up with a reasonable sounding purpose to wage war – than assume the job is done and forget about it. Reasons must be kept simple, basic and highly moral.

Moreover, when a nation state or national armed force, (which adheres to certain rules and will only use limited force to obtain a limited goal), faces off with one of these types of organizations, (which never observe any rules and which are not afraid to fight an unlimited war using unlimited means), it will often prove very difficult for the nation state or national armed force to gain the upper hand.

We will forever play by the rules – we aren’t allowed to "lower ourselves to the level of the terrorist". We have to maintain the high moral ground. Every time we gain ground by taking out a high level terrorist operative, there are protests. Special Operations forces are made heroes - until they conduct a successful special operation.

"We will forever play by the rules – we aren’t allowed to "lower ourselves to the level of the terrorist"."

If this continues, it will be our downfall (IMHO). While the MSM is doing it's best to dissolve any sense of solidarity or national purpose in the US, our politicians, fearing vilification, restrict our soldiers to fighting a kinder, gentler war against an enemy who engages in guerrilla tactics and actually benefits from negative publicity. We're worried about damage control for a story about an Abu Ghraib prisoner being forced to wear panties on his head while our enemy cuts the heads off of it's prisoners and intentionally posts video of it onto the internet. This is sick.

Another unfortunate outcropping of our unilateral method of warfare is that it stretches our military thin. Somehow, the worlds most powerful nation, through it's politics and misguided altruism, has bogged itself down fighting a "relatively" small group of primitive fighters in two nations.

Now let's hope that it stays at only two fronts. North Korea and Iran could go out with either a whimper or a bang. The Saudis, Syrians, Egyptians, and Pakistanis have populations that hate us (regardless of what titular government figures pretend to be our friends). The PROC is busy ramping up it's industrial capacity and doing all it can to enrich itself without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. It should not fall on deaf ears that although the people of China may want personal social prosperity, this is not the end that their government has in mind.

There is a lesson to be learned from the Germans in WWII. They were, at least in the early years of the war, the most powerful military in the world. Their technology and weaponry was amazingly advanced and had they stopped short of invading the USSR, may very well still control all of western Europe. In the end though, despite any technological or motivational advantage, they were spread too thin, had too few allies, and lacked the natural resources, industrial capability, and manpower necessary to wage war on the scale they intended.

Ok... /Rant..... Taking off the tinfoil hat and going back to work.