(From Pointless Waste of Time..)
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in a press conference, “Mount St. Helens is the most dangerous weapon of mass destruction we know. It’s 30,000 times the diameter of Osama Bin Laden, and has the power to discharge almost twice as much pyroclastic material.” Rumsfeld promised nuclear retaliation against the volcano.
(PWOT homepage here.)
These guys are an absolute scream.
A while ago they had a piece that was widely circulated, called The Ultimate War Simulation.
This is the funniest thing I have ever seen about the near impossibility of waging Fourth Generation Warfare successfully. Read it and get a sobering lesson in modern politico-military strategy while laughing out loud.
And the point is? You can never defeat an insurgency because them folks is just so dang slippery? Varmits!
Insurgencies have been defeated numerous times. There’s nothing new about guerrilla tactics.
What’s new, since the 1960’s, is having the press and the ‘loyal opposition’ willing to lose a war for political gain.
“What’s new, since the 1960’s, is having the press and the ‘loyal opposition’ willing to lose a war for political gain.”
Gotta disagree. Just finished Churchill’s My Early Life. He has a bunch of stuff about how the Liberals were opposed to the Boer War. The opposition in France to the Algerian War is a counter-examnple. There was opposition in the USA to our counter-guerilla activities in the Phillipines. This is actually a story almost as old as guerilla warfare itself.
We should also recall that there were copperheads in the North in the civil war, and There were Whigs in Britain who strongly opposed the war against the American rebels. The pheonomenon of a barely loyal, if that, is every bit as old as any democratic state going to war.
World War II was the outlier. Everybody sees that as the “normal” war where everybody was united. It was not normal, it was weird.
The point is not that defeaing insurgencies is impossible. The point is that the main front is domestic public opinion. The whole war will be decided there. If the political leadership is unaware of this, or handles it badly, defeat becomes likely even though the “purely military” equation looks absurdly out of whack in favor of the conventionally powerful state trying to suppress the insurgency.
I stand corrected. My partisanship wrt to the war shineth through.
I’m sleepy and having trouble keeping up – is wrt with regard to – or what?
In the past, however, were the forms of government as likely to reflect the volatility of the nation?
My 2cents: Ben Franklin stops speaking to his son and lets him languish in a harsh American prison – even though Franklin had not too many years before hoped we could become junior partners (rather than a colony or a separate nation). His Tory son is disinherited & moves to Canada. And this was one of the two great
“indispensables” of those years.
Yes, we tend to judge things by the finish not by the middle. Certainly we all thought October 2004 – just before the election here and as the new govenrment & new police are being set up there – was going to be bloody. We hope it won’t get worse, but I’m not sure why we are surprised. Of course, maybe this isn’t process but rather a small taste of a disasterous end. It just doesn’t look that way if we are honest about our old expectations.
Somebody should buy the film rights to the Ultimate War Simulation and make that sucker. It’s too good.
i play starcraft everynight. Right after i get done reading this blog : )