04-02-2017, 07:16 PM
(04-02-2017, 06:15 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(04-02-2017, 02:46 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: We have a capital-intense military. We prefer cannons to cannon-fodder, so to speak. We far prefer inflicting casualties to taking them. That's what one expects in First World countries, the worst countries to face in major wars. Think of Finland in the Second World War -- the Finns achieved a 30-1 kill-to-loss ratio against the Soviet Union, a country still preferring cannon fodder to capital.
Poorer countries can simply give a rifle to infantry and tell the infantry to keep firing until commanded to cease firing once the war starts. Very often the infantrymen end up being killed before they get any order to cease firing. Such is the reality of All Quiet on the Western Front, a reality that none of the participants of the "Great" War of a century ago want to endure again.
And the Soviets still won the war against Finland, and the Italians lost against the Ethiopians. Sometimes the capital wins, and sometimes the cannon fodder wins.
The Finns were severely outnumbered. They needed a big kill-to-loss ratio just to survive. They got out of the war very gracefully -- probably because their kills were strictly in warfare and not in torture chambers or concentration camps. I'm guessing that the Finns got favors from Churchill and Roosevelt that the Croats, Hungarians, Romanians, or Bulgarians could never get. The British and Americans promptly delivered war criminals to the harsh justice of the Soviet Union or people that Stalin trusted to impose harsh judgment upon Holocaust perpetrators. The Italians lost to the Ethiopians with much British aid to the Ethiopians in the first big Axis disaster. (In the Italo-Abyssinian War, the Italian Army faced astonishing setbacks).
Quote:I'm not saying we shouldn't have a capital intensive military - we should have it - I'm just saying that looking only at the dollars provides a false sense of security.
True. We have Special Forces. The Russians have Spetsnaz -- and I don't want to be anywhere near a Spetsnaz target, let alone be that target. Had the 9/11 attack been against Russia, there would have been no safe hiding place against Spetsnaz -- not even the USA. Special Forces have their limitations: they are good for pin-point rescues or for personal revenge.
There is a $250,000 compensation to families for American military servicemen killed in combat, a good fiscal reason to not sacrifice thousands of lives on charges against trenches in the manner of World War II. Downed drones do not cause compensation for anyone.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.