How should the US wage new wars?

Let's not get into the 'should've' or 'shouldn't haves' of this. Our esteemed elected representatives are going to do whatever the hell they want anyway. The point of this thread will discuss how they go about doing so in the event that they do.

There are a lot of different ways to conduct war, logistics, diplomacy, and just general ways of your country getting what you want. The first and most regularly employed is Economic Warfare. It is also the most effective tactic. It can cripple nations without the need to manufacture a single plane or fire a single bullet if you happen to produce something they need or just have a lot of money. One thing we might do in the future is make use of the vast amount of people with college degrees who are working retail by creating more higher paying jobs. Lower end job growth has been good, but middle to higher (which really does matter if you have an education beyond high school, otherwise there is no return on a huge investment) has not been good.

The second and currently most publicized is military warfare. This is usually what gets us into trouble as we have not been very good at it lately. Some of the blame can be put squarely on the backs of our lack of use of other types of warfare. The rest I think we might put on our information gathering skills. Knowing every random villager can have military grade weaponry would definately make a difference between just sending your troops on patrol and sending, I don't know, a couple tanks on patrol. One of the things we might want to do in the future is get a lot more cultural background before going into an area. Another possible use of military force is to enforce an economic sanction if it's being breached. Engineers can cut pipelines, cruisers can blow up tankers, and generally I'd think it easier and cheaper to disrupt supply than to actually fight the war.

The third and least publicized, because that's the way they want it, is information warfare. Spies, spooks, etc, whatever you want to call them. Their job is to find out the information our other services need to know and MAKE SURE they act on it. Since they're good at finding out things, this generally shouldn't be a problem. So one of the things they might start doing is their damn job and doing it right. There are lots of other nasty things I'd say about them, but I'd really just like to focus on positive things I'd like to see them do in the future. Heh, so starting a sentence with "I'd like to see them NOT ..." doesn't go anywhere.

What're you, kidding or something? America isn't good at military warfare lately? America is far better at fighting than we've ever been.

Maybe all of the whiny stories about how bad things are in Iraq are what's confusing you. The people that write those articles are mostly just upset because they are always predicting that anything America tries to do will be a total failure, especially when there's a Republican President named George Bush. Then, when their idiotic predictions don't come true, they have to act like everything is horrible so people won't realize how totally bad they are at being news reporters.

Is there like a pill i could take to get such a simple worldview?

What's so simple about what I posted? Do you usually call the things that you aren't able to understand "simple"?

Well there is so much wrong with your setup here and all the weird assumptions and statements you are making that its impossible to comment intelligently.

I will violate your first stipulation here and just say that they shouldn't wage war at all.
It's neither necessary, nor anything good.

"The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation."
Bertram Russell

An interesting topic, if a rather dangerous approach on these forums.

I think your breaking down of three types of warfare is a solid approach, but I think its a mistake to think that you can break them apart, all three or not diferent kinds of war, but three aspects of one kind of war.

Econmic pressures lie at the root of war. It can be largely coated in rhetoric that makes it something else, but wars is gerenaly a bypoduct of some economic difficutly. Even this new Islamic funademntalism that is underlying the majority of the current global terrorism is born largly out of the fact that most islamic countries tend to be on the poor side of the scale in terms of population, and terrorism is born out of the idle youth, who can be swayed to great passion by a cause. Terrorists are largely people with nothing to lose but thier lives.

Thus in a very real sense, the economic aspect of war is somewhat meaningless to a terrorist because they can't afford much above subsitence ayway. Any denial of medicine or any trade embargoes will impact non-terroists as well as the terrorists and thus increase thier reslove and villification of the US.

In general econimic warfare is meant to put pressure on the governement of a country by tightenting the belts of the populace. Economic warfare of this sort succeeded in bringing down the soviet union after 45 years of sustainded pressure. But the soviet union was easy, they were trying to compete with the united states on bullet for bullet capability and they had a far smaller GNP to draw from.

Cuba on the other hand does not bother to compete and the embargo is still in place there, and may never be lifted.

How Military force willbe used in the future is the subject of much study by the military. After centuries of military thought in how to overcome rivals who were equally as sophisticated on the battlefield, human conflcit has now taken a turn whereby major conflicts are not economically feasilbe, thus conflcit becomes limited and low intensity.

Part of the problem is trying to forge a military mission out of a non-militray problem. The notion that soldiers are "naition builders" is popular in the rhetoric of the day, but it ignores the truth that you don't build nations with armies. We now like to call our soldiers peacekeepers and use them to ensure things like bringing democracy to Iraq.

But that is not the job of a soldier, its the job of a cop. Except in the case of the romans, occupying armies rarely bring anything but dissention to the community. And even the romans had problems. We ar far removed from the romans because we don't want to engage in territorial exapansion. We don't want the im0perial responsibility or the bad press that goes with it.

thus we need to consider, in the future, what are military objectives and what are diplomatic objectives, and define military goals in military terms. Also, I think militray action will be increasingly done by coalition, and the coalition building process will take more time.In the case of direct threat to a national interest (say invasion or something) I think countries will still act alone, but I think the war in Iraq will ultimately make coalitions of global opinion essential.


As far as information warfare, we need to knkw that more technology does not equal better information, and that there is no subsititue for agents and operatives on the ground so to speak.

Exactly, letting Saddam Hussein torture most of the people in his country is a much better option than having a war. Letting the Taliban in Afghanistan protect Bin Laden and the rest of the Al Qaeda leaders is much better than having a war to get rid of them! We should have just asked them over and over again to give them up!

War is wrong because hippies say so! If they keep whining, maybe suddenly the world will stop working the way that it always has!

Wrong.

Two words, carpet bombing.

Diane,
Typo. Me think yo mean Bertrand

Ignore the linoleum at your peril.

~Ulrika~

You hardly ever stump me, congrats.

edit: ahhhhh Never mind.

That was my guess a week ago as well.

It's a floor-covering pun. You suggested bombing carpet and I reminded you of the danger of linoleum.

~Ulrika~

You are hilarious!
Archie Bunker, right? Or maybe a newer character?

I can't put my finger on it exactly but the act is perfect. Really well done.

thorry.

Yeah I got it after I had posted. Nice one. I'm slow today, my sinuses are rocking.

Stankleberry Sullivan

I assume this Alby person is someone the lefties here have already come up with reasons to dismiss, so now you're going to pretend that I'm him, no matter how completely wrong you are. Typical lefty.

We should try to avoid war except as a very last resort (neither Afghanistan or Iraq qualify as last resorts). When we must wage war it should be done according to international law and the treaties we've signed.

The biggest thing we should be doing is to stop teaching our kids that the United States is somehow morally superior, smarter, more righteous, and all around better than every other country in the world... because it's not. Everyone else in the world rightly takes that attitude as an insult. The kind of overblown nationalism that made the Bush administration believe that the Iraqis would welcome us with flowers and hugs isn't winning us a lot of friends lately. It's downright cultish and creepy.

Yup, call me names and don't bother to address any of the points in my post. Good job, typical lefty arguer.

Keep whining and not making sense. It's awesome.

Chip, please do not insult us professional creeps by implying association.

Yea, we need to wait until the last last resort, which comes when we have a Democrat president! Also, we should start giving the people of the world lollipops for free so they will like us.

Yes, we must start teaching our children that America isn't a good country. There are all kinds of better countries in the world, so we shouldn't think we're anything special. It's not like people in every country around the world consider their country and their culture to be superior to everyone else's. Only evil America does that!

you're like my favorite show.

No pill. It takes years of programming Taco.

Right, I should have addressed the points in that person's post, right? All of those arguments they made against my points, right? Der.