Precisely. A Theoretican gets a cut finger, and they go whining to the UN.
It occurs to me now that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to start a GD thread one day before I went on vacation. :o Honestly, I wasn’t intending start an argument and disappear. But you probably won’t being seeing me for the next week, unless the hotel has Internet.
Sorry.
+1
Your airstrike hits precisely doing 10,000 damage.
6 terrorists killed.
42 civilians killed.
Public outrage in Theoretica has created 10 new terrorists.
World opinion lowered, one trading partner lost.
Roll again.
Well that’s perfect. They killed off 48 terrorists and only created 10 new ones. Sounds like a win.
H should just crush T and not worry so much about right and wrong. There’s really no point in keeping T around. H’s job is to protect H’s populace. That’s the only way one can argue about moral right and wrong in this case. Now if you want to say that it’s bad strategy to crush T, then that’s different and can’t be settled without more details.
You’ll note that I said “or I don’t go to war”. If you’re not willing bomb the country to cinders and shoulder the world opinion, then don’t go to war.
Seriously - when did war stop being hell? When did it become a careful little game that we try to play without getting our hands dirty? Forget that - it doesn’t work. If we’re not willing to roll in there with tanks and blow the living hell out of the target, whatever that target is, then we have no business attacking it in the first place. It’s all well and good to be surgical if we can but if actually winning isn’t an overriding priority then we should go find something else to do with our time.
Exactly. Funny that I said exactly this in the earlier GD thread on this subject and a mod got on my case for being “deliberately provocative.”
Assuming that the military value of the base being destroyed outweighs this, then it makes no difference.
But anyone can play the gotcha game.
My next airstrike hits precisely, and kills 42 terrorists and six civilians. It blows up an arms cache, and creates five new terrorists. But they can’t do much terrorism because they have no weapons. The trading partner needs your oil, so they resume normal relations (while publicly condemning you).
Roll again.
Regards,
Shodan
I wonder if this is how genocide starts. I’ve always been curious about what sort of discussion goes on before the top guys start handing out machetes.
There are at least four very significant reasons not to “crush” Theoretica:
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It’s what the militants want. They sign up to be killed because that is their honour system. To not sign up would make them a pussy and they’d never get laid. (yes, I realize you can’t get laid after you die, but they don’t know that). So killing militants helps create more militants.
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It pushes public opinion in favour of the militants, and by this I actually mean in both H and T. As the example of adults vs children, you are seen as barbaric. Assuming you aren’t a despotic dictator, your civilian population has to approve of your actions. Your military and civilian courts will oversee your behaviour. So now you’ll have to work to crush this internal resistance, costing you time and resources. It will get harder to maintain an all volunteer military so you’ll need to have a draft, reducing your overall effectiveness.
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It pushes world opinion in favour of Theoretica as a country, further benefiting the militants. More aid is sent in which the militants can either use or sell. The Red Cross/Red Crescent goes in to provide medical aid to both the militants and civilians, making air strikes even harder. And then the sanctions start. It gets pretty hard to bomb a country when you can’t buy gas, oil, bombs, or airplane parts. It’s even harder when other countries set up a no-fly-zone.
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It costs you the moral high ground. With that comes the pesky UN and a peacekeeping force. And by peacekeeping I mean a NATO lead invasion force to destroy your airbases and tanks. Blockade your ports and harbours. And restrict movement in and out of your country. Then there is The Hague to deal with, which really puts a hamper on your war planning ability. Oh, and the gallows, did I mention those?
Care to play again?
How outraged was this “public” that harbored these terrorists? The terrorists lived among them, they allowed military strike points to be built, and they supposedly understood that these military points would be used to strike the other country. Then they were “outraged” that the other country would dare defend themselves?
And this world opinion? Did they have their own citizens die at the hands of these barbarians hiding their military wares among innocent civilians?
In other words, on one hand they are helpless when it comes to allowing terrorists to live freely among them. But when they speak out against the “attackers” they are speaking their own mind without any type of coercion?
I vote for “Red Triangle.” Need to keep this hypothetical…
The word you’re looking for is “genocide.” At least, that’s the world opinion that you’ll be shouldering. So you either need to kill all your enemies good and dead within a very short time, or else risk finding yourself at war with other powers in the world who will want to stop you from indiscriminately killing man, woman, child, and goat.
ETA: What emacknight said in #4.
What’s funny is that only the terrorists get to be justifiably outraged. It’s not their fault, the other side hit them back and now they are outraged.
Well maybe the people being attacked are outraged, and someday they will be so outraged that they will kill all of the people who support the terrorists. Every time a suicide bomber strikes there are 10 new people who are outraged, so how about if they friggin’ stop doing it?
Oh, and references to genocide are in very poor taste. The jews didn’t send their children into German cafes with bombs full of nuts and bolts to blow up Germans peacefully eating lunch. There was no justification for what the Germans did, and plenty of justification for reprisals from Israel.
Yes, I mean genocide, exactly the same way we committed genocide in WWI and WWII and Vietnam. You’ve got me figured out.
Unless you’re saying that the hypothetical is stipulating that my only two options are to literally kill every living thing in Theoretica and salt the earth, or engage in a grueling war lasting generation and never ending as the resentment between our two countries builds. In which case I really would be suggesting genocide, because that’s the choice offered to me.
In which case my answer is still the same - if you’re not willing to do what it takes to win, then don’t go to war. And if what it takes to win is genocide, I doubt I’d be willing to do what it takes to win. (Though, if the alternative eventually builds to be them genociding me…)
…To give this whole thing a little more serious of a response than it deserves, the only reason that people use human shields against us is because it works. If we stopped caring about that, it would be brutal for a while, but I suspect they’d start moving their bases back into the mountain caves again as soon as they realized that we were serious about bombing the shit out of enemy installations, wherever we found them. So yeah, I think the brutal approach would do more to improve things in the long term, by giving these louts an incentive not to set up camp under their own children.
They are as “outraged” as any normal population would be. They believe their side is right and the other side is Satan. They start off not wanted Hypothistan civilians targeted, they are initially sicked by terrorist acts, and had been working against the militants with what limited resources they have, while trying to do what was best for Theoretica.
Unfortunately, the population is also constrained by cultural norms. It becomes difficult to speak out against the militants because then they get labeled anti-Theoretician on local news stations and are accused of palling around with Hypothistians. There is also a good chance that some of the militants are relatives or friends of friends. Sure, you wanted to go up stairs and tell them to keep the noise down, but with that many guys and that many AK-47s, you think it’s best to keep quiet.
But when you spill blood, they are going to want revenge, they are going to want blood spilled in return. You can’t kill their friends and family without them getting pissed. Eventually they are going to switch from trying to stop the militants, to being complacent, to being excited with every successful terrorist strike. “You killed my children, so now I’m happy that we killed your children.”
Yes, they have lost a lot of citizens, they are also dealing with their own problems, and they’re also still pissed from the last time you blew up a country. They are also not entirely sure of your motives. They know your losing in the polls with an election coming up. They know your population is addicted to ground unicorns, which Theoretica has an abundance of.
They are not entirely helpless, there are things you could have done to help them. But the last time you offered to help, you failed to follow up when the rebellion started and they were crushed.
Conquer and rule the land as with any other war that involves a group that refuses to give up.
Well, this is the problem. The world has evolved to the point that it finds WWII-style Total War intolerable. We don’t have the stomach for it.
Yet people still find themselves in armed conflict (often against groups that DO have the stomach for it).
So you’re forced to respond, so you can mitigate the damage and so it looks to your populace like you’re doing something … but you don’t want to hit TOO hard, because you’ll kill too many civilians, and thereby lose the support of large parts of your electorate as well as foreign nations.
So we’re at a sort of revulsion equilibrium. We hit as hard as we can to satisfy our need to hit back, but not so hard that we lose the moral high ground. (It’s hard to keep the moral high ground when you’re putting babies to the sword, which is what inevitably happens in Real War.)
I like that analysis. The only problem is that there is unequal revulsion. For example, another country’s newspaper has a cartoon mocking your deity and folks go nuts, but sending a child on a suicide mission to kill other children is “meh”.
Tru dat. And a terrorist bomb blowing up people with the same skin color/language as you is big news, whereas a terrorist bomb blowing up people with different skin color/language is a one-paragraph item in the international section.
Don’t shoot…let 'em burn.