Total War VS Civilized Warfare

[msmith537]

@Sailboat

In spirit it was much more like a mediaeval Chevauchée than total war.

"Chevauchée"sounds so much prettier than “rape and pillage” or “tear some shit up”.

[kingpengvin]

@Shodan

Defining “total war” in the genuinely Clausewitzian terms as “breaking the enemy’s will to resist” -
[snip]
I can’t think of another military action that was so overwhelmingly successful as the first Gulf War, and yet it still didn’t go far enough. Because it was not waged as a total war, in the Clausewitzian sense.

Regards,
Shodan

But don’t forget that Clauswitz’s main point is that, since war is an extention of politics it must have clearly defined aims and goals. The 1st Gulf war was just that. The Coallition agreed that the war was designed to expell Iraq from Kuwaiit and nothing more. They achieved that objective.

The failure perhaps lay in the goals but even if they had decided to push further the occupation of Iraq would not have been magically better. They were certainly not equiped to occupy Iraq.

But this is an aside. Total war is a horrible and inhumane idea (war is horrible but this goes so much further). It’s goal is not just to defeat an enemy army but to crush the nation all costs, which means combatants are willing to use any means at their disposal, limited only by their fear of reprisal.

For example, Despite the total War of WWII Germany and England refused to use chemical gas weapons on each other knowing that their civilians would become targets. It was almost a pre nuclear version of MAD in that both stockpiled but neither used.

To be honest, if an objective in war is not defined beyond beating the other guy to smitherenes, you can only pin your hopes of safety and survival based on both side not being run by lunatics.

[AK84]

@xtisme

I thank you for the compliment. I also disagree with your final assessment here. True, you want to destroy the proposed target with the minimum exposure of your own forces. I don’t think a ‘minimum amount of ammunition’ is important though, since it’s really the cost that becomes the factor…and smart ammunition, while certainly is a minimum, also costs a LOT more, so it balances out.

But let’s do a comparison in killing ability between Excalibur and the MLRS in order to kill your target in the first salvo without telegraphing your punch. Now, the TOT aspect is available for both systems, and has been for decades. This is one of the few US military innovations that is all us, and we’ve used it effectively since WWII. By now it’s been developed to the point where the precision is astounding.

Ok, the target is counter battery fire in close proximity to civilian buildings and populations. With an MLRS battery, firing a TOT mission, they can essentially wipe out everything within several square kilometers instantly…no chance at all that our punch will be telegraphed, no way anyone is getting out of there alive. Including those civilian structures or populations. If we use Excalibur though, we can fire a salvo from a regular 155 battery and drop the rounds precisely on the counter battery unit (we could actually drop individual rounds on individual guns if we had spotters and if this was desired…or drop rounds on ammo colliers or personnel carriers or whatever), minimizing collateral damage and civilian casualties. The enemy counter battery is just as dead in both cases, the cost of the mission was higher for the Excalibur volley (in terms of money, especially development) than for the MLRS volley, even though a minimum of ammunition was used. So, if minimizing civilian casualties is not one of the major goals, why use Excalibur? The old system did the same job after all…though it killed a lot more civies and tore up a lot more structures.

Why use the new hyper-precision munitions if you could use cluster bomblets? Or why continue to refine and develop precision munitions to get greater and greater accuracy? The stuff we used in Desert Storm was pretty effective after all…and the first smart bomb was used in Vietnam…why continue to develop them when they already did the job of killing the enemy, though at a higher cost of civilian casualties? To me, the answer is that the American people (and most of the peoples in other nations with such capabilities) are no longer tolerant of the mass slaughter of civilians, and that, though it costs more and takes longer to develop, it’s money we and they are willing to spend to attempt to minimize those civilian causalities as much as is humanly possible. This only makes our military more effective in the fact that we can fight our enemies even when they choose to put themselves in close proximity to civilians and civilian structures. We could always (well, for the last several decades anyway) simply kill them all and let the gods sort them out, after all.

-XT

Sorry for the late reply but, once agaon I must respectfully disagree. MLRS (like all rockety arty systems) is an area weapon. While it can do CB fire, its not the best for it. MLRS would be used against targets such as logistics points, commuication nodes, supply depots, troop concentrations etc, one of the reasons it often has cluster munitions as the warhead.

Excalibur OTH is a smart munition in a 155mm field arty piece, the situations it ios designed for is accurate bombardment of specific targets, instead of a barrage you now just need a few salvos.

And a 155mm arty round has a lethal radius of about 30 m. Hardly something that I would characterise as “humane”.