The all purpose terrorism thread featuring plenty of allah akbar

Originally Posted by Skybird

The enemy treating his wounded fighters, is a hostile act

No.

[Skybird]

No.

Oh yes.

Look up the meaning of "troops reinforcements", and "regrouping". It compares.

In net effect, in a raging war, these ^ are hostile acts as well. Seen from the enemy's POV.

---

Evening TV news over here: they said today the Syrian bunker busting bombs are used to crack up basements and cellars and subterranean tunnel networks the rebels are using to relocate under cover. Now you know why the Syrian air force destroys whole compartment blocks. Its about disrupting the freedom of movement for the enemy. The Israelis tried similiar things in Gaza.

Any war fought on Skybird's principles isn't worth fighting. If you surrender your morality, there is nothing left...

[mapuc]

Been a while since my military days, I do remember our lesson in how to treat pow-and I remember clearly that a wounded pow should be treated like we would treat a wounded friend.

The only thing I can't remember is the answer to following question we were asked

In clash with a small enemy groups two in your group get killed and three get wounded. You have killed most of the enemies and have captured 5 whereof two of them are wounded-You have just enough medic care to take care of 3 person. And then some more.

Can't remember the answer
(sorry for this little derail)

Markus

Originally Posted by Skybird

Oh yes.

No.

There's a reason you don't shoot at those funny vehicles with red crosses.
Anything medical = non-combatants. And attending your wounded is NOT a hostile action. If they shoot at you, it is.
This is the same for irregular forces. Just because they don't follow any rules, regular forces still do (or at least have to).

AndyJWest has a point you know...

Also, don't try to explain how this works to those who actually did this for a living, Skybird.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by AndyJWest

Any war fought on Skybird's principles isn't worth fighting. If you surrender your morality, there is nothing left...

Oh, so a war is agreeable to you when we maintain the illusion that war can be turned into somehting more noble, romantic, humane!?

What you guys here say, is all very wellmeant, and academic. And cynical.

By the end of the day, with my reasoning - be hesitent to go to war, but if you do, then do it with everything you have - many of the wars and conflicts of the past 20 years would not have taken place, would not even have been started, especially 2003. The encouragements for the Arbab spring thgat turned into a nightmare by now, would not have been given. And the few conflicts I maybe would have agreed to nevertheless fight out, would not have ended as strategic defeats. The violence in Iraq qould be at the much lower levels of the dictatorship of Saddam'S reign, and Syria still would be a stable state, hostile to Israel, but predictable. There would have been no MB government in egypt. IS would not even exist. And in Afghanistan the hellfire would have contuinued to rain down until either all were dead or all "radicals" and wanted ones were handed over. The "alliance" with Saudi Arabia and Quatar, two very ruthless actors in syria, btw, would not be what it is today, maybe would not even exist anymore. Mayn people now dead or being crippled from tirture, would still be alive, or would be unhamred. Cities would stand where now there is only rubble. And no European dependency on Erdoghan.

Now compare that with the results of the always cautious, always concerned, always humane policies that in reality has been run n these 20 years. Its a mess. A MESS.

Next you tell me we should seize fire for 8 hours a day to allow the enemy to get some healthy sleep, and to pay his family compensation when we kill him!? Oh wait, in Afghanistan they repeatedly have done right this.

You can leave a wounded enemy alone if he is so heavily wounded that it is clear he will never join combat or train recruits again anymore. But if you see he will recover and then start killing your buddies in you company again and dropping bombs on you, or teaching his recruits how they could kill you and letting them profit from his experience, and you let him escape so that he can recover indeed, then you are a foolish idiot. And a murderer of your own people.

When you fight, do it with all you have, there is no such thing as disproportional or excessive firepower. There is only sufficient or insufficient firepower, and the will to crush the enemy - or the lack of such will.

See where all your concerns have lead the West in the past wars. Defeats. Strategic defeats weakening our stand in the world, and strengthening those powers that are hostile to us. That is the result of your always concerned, always want-to-be-noble policies. It works ruinous.

Save the enemy, and he eats you up. That simple it is. Especially when he is fighting for religious fanatism or does not share your culturally founded reasoning of how to keep your war clean and tidy.

And do not anyone come with telling me if I fight with determination then I am not better than the other guy. I did not tell the other guy to go to war against me, and I reserve EVERY means I deem needed to not only defend myself but to make sure the other thinks twice before he ever feels tempted again to go to war against me a second time - if he stills exists after I am done with him, that is. I do not wage a war for some idiotic political spelling exercise, and I certainly do not do it to help my industry securing wanted resources on another continent that are not mine, or to help out a terror regime I allowed to be "allied" with. If you do not fight a war in order to destroy the enemy once and forever, then you have no point and better should go home.

But make sure, for heaven's sake, that the reasons why you accept to fight a war , do hold their ground before your conscience. If they cannot hold their ground before your consience, you end up in your own self-made hell.

Samurai understood this determination. Romans did. Our forefathers during WWII did. But Westerners today - hopeless.

Be choosy and extremely hesitent to start wars. But if you end up in one, then let all helfire rain down on your enemy. The record of Western forces in the past 25 years, is anything but impressive. The major wars fought in that time, ended in strategic defeats that benefitted our enemies.

We have become experts for loosing wars. Not militarily, but politically and for humanitarian concerns. And while we allowed to fail this way, we have not contained but increased the ammount of suffering and the duration and scale of follow-up conflicts.

And we still run around, proud of ourselves and our precious concerns and hesitations and indifference. The price of our failures gets paid by others. How great we are! How noble! How - romantic!

During the seige of Alesia, Ceasar build a double wall around the place, one wall of 16km length facing the besieged town, and the outer ring of 21 km length pointing outwards, keepign away Gaul reinforcements. The besieged Gauls send out their women and children, and into the no-mans land separating Romans and Gaul. They thought the Romans would care for them, allowed to get distracted and weakned by caring for them, and allowing to share their supplies with them, reducing their military options. Ceasar rejected to do so, and left the people were they were. He won.

What would you have done?

When Richard I. landed in the "holy" land, and was about embarking towards Jeruslem, he had a huge ammount of prisoners taken in short battles before. When he left I think Akkon, he gave order to exceute them all, and so it was done. The reason was a military one. His force was relatively small, a huge battle was ahead, his supply lines were terribly long and vulnerable, and his supplie sin stock were limited. He could not afford to supply several hundred prisoners, and he could not afford to shrink his army even more by leaving behind a garrison to guard the prisoners, which were 800 or 1800 I think. If the prionsers would overwhelm their guardians, Ruichard all of a sudden would have had a strong Muslim army in front of him, and a significant enemy military force in his rear. Releasing them would have meant to meet them again on the battlefield. And so - heads off.

What would you have done?

When the German submarine radioed into the world they had survivors of the Laonia in tow, the Allies decided to not help, but to bomb the UBoat. A German Uboat was a potent threat, it could have sunk Allied troops, sailors, and many more ships, and killed many hundreds, if not thousands of passengers.

What would you have done?

15 or 20 years ago the Israelis knew that the UN observers monitoring the disputed Northern border areas, were sending their reports on Israeli activities and troop movements without encryption, so that Israels enemy could read them and so got first hand intel on what the Israelis were up to. The result was warning fire going down on UN positions and Israeli tanks ramming Finish IFVs and UN vehicles off the road and some of these posts later had to be given up by the UN. The UN deliberately rejected to use radio encryption initially, it wanted to take sides here - with Israeli's enemies. And the Israelis did not accept that.

What would you have done?

During the Gaza war 2006, the enemy was operating via a massive system of subterranean tunnels, and maintaned bases, stockpiled ammo and supplies and ran firing positons in basements and cellars, under Kinderärten and hospitals and schools. Intentionally so, so to force Israel if it would fire at them it would need to accept causing civilian casualties as well. Israel resisted for long time international pressure and nevertheless accepted collateral damages and continued to systemtically destroy the militarily relevant infrastructure and logistcs network, as well as bridges, powerlines and waterpipes. For the same reason, Israel blocks certain goods that could be used for rebuilding these infrastructures, from entering Gaza until today.

What would you have done?

You are in a war. You guard a hospital with wounded own soldiers and wounded experienced enemy special commandoes. You get under attack, here is a risk that the prisoners can flee and either tell the enemy high command the secret information they obtained, or they could tell the young recruits about your tactics and combat methods so that they can ambush you more easily and kill your troops, or they recover, return to combat and start killing your troops again and sabotage your infrastructure and supply lines. I say: do not let them escape, but kill them.

What do you do?

You are in command of a small infantry force on the ground, you are isolated, ammo is short, water and food is rare. You have a group of as many prisoners, enemy fighters, they eat and drink as much as your own people do, and you always need to keep some of your few soldiers behind to guard them whenever you get contact to the enemy and end up in a firefight. You lose this, because you have those prisoners, your troops die because of them, there is no way to make it home with those prisoners in tow. You know nothign about them, they may be dangerous lethal specialists or not, they may have gathered secret infiormation about your side or not - you do not know. Its war, and all around are people are hanging at each other's throats and try to blow stuff and people up.

WHAT DO YOU DO ?

Oh boy.

[Skybird]

Yes, "oh boy". War sucks. Better stay out if you do not have a damn good reason to get involved.

[Jimbuna]

I don't think it acceptable regardless of any set of circumstances for any side to deliberately target civilians wherever they may be located or whichever side they support.

TWO WRONGS DON'T MAKE A RIGHT

What we are seeing daily on our news feeds is systematic genocide, massive overkill by forces bent on the total annihilation of a city and its inhabitants by a mad man who has no hesitation in using outlawed weapons on his own people to further his aims, aided and abetted by a superpower who are led by a democratically elected dictator who is hell bent on making his country as strong as he perceived it to be in the eighties, despite the fact a sizeable proportion of the world have instigated economical sanctions which are slowing 'tanking' his countries economy as a result.

Neither side is correct but surely a blind man on a galloping horse can see the disproportionality of the methods used by one of the sides!!

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

I don't think it acceptable regardless of any set of circumstances for any side to deliberately target civilians

Nowhere ever I have said one should target civilians deliberately. As a matter of fact I said exactly the opposite - and labelled doing the above a war crime somehwere above.



Ah, here it was:

A war crime it is then when the civilian population gets intentionally targetted as the primary target, for the sake of wanting to kill the civilian population, not the military target in its middle.

What I say is the presence of civilians, or of infrasturtcure that dual-serves both civilian and military usage, cannot necessarily be a reason to stop fighting and firing at the enemy and target the enemy. We call that by this sober, clinical term "collateral damage". It is no wanted in the first killing of civiolians, but it is militarily accepted as event taking place as a side effect.

Intentionally wanting to kill civilians as the primary target, and accepting harm to civilians as a side effect of combat action against the enemy, are two different things. Its not nice, none of the two, but thats how it is with war: stuff gets destroyed and people get killed, and often innocent ones get caught in the crossfire. that is neither fair, nor just. that is what happens in war. Chaos.

There are no ways to have a surgically clean, fair and just war. That is a most dangerous, pursuading illusion. There is no such thing like a "just war". I only differer between wars of needs and wars of desires. the first must be waged and won, no matter what. The second must be avoided and refused - again, no matter what.

The nicier people think war is, the easier they agree to have another one.

The bombing in Aleppo, most likely is about both: demoralizing the civilian population by intentionally targetting the civilians with the goal to kill civilians, as well as destroying the rebel-used infrastructure and hideouts and killing their fighters. In other words we see both there: war crimes as well military targetting. Want to keep the two events separate? Good luck. Assad already was a slaughterer before.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Skybird

[U][I]Nowhere ever I have said one should target civilians deliberately.

Didn't say you did.

I am saying the Assad regime and Russians are.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Didn't say you did.

I am saying the Assad regime and Russians are.

Very much most likely they do. The problem is you cannot easily say from outside what was the intention behind this or that attack. When they collapse an appartment building, it might have been because the tunnels and the stockpiled supplies underneath it - but others will insist on calling it a deliberate attack on civilians, and they ignore the military relevance of the target. The same kind of attack on another building maybe was exactly the other way around: while it is claimed it was about the tunnels, Russian intel may have known that the tunnels never made it to that building and that the supply point in its basement was dismantled already 4 weeks ago.

We cannot see the truth from the outside. We should not form opinions just on the basis of media reports and pictures - or propaganda from both sides. Saudi Arabia and Quatar, allies of the US as well as many rebel groups, play extremely dirty and also deliver quite modern firearms into Syria, too - like Russia, Iran do in support of the Assad regime. There are hardly innocent, just combat factions in Syria. They all have dirt on their hands. All.

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Nippelspanner

Oh boy.

Daeshtastic.

[MaDef]

Looks like it might be time to spin this particular topic into it's own thread.

Skybird I happen to agree with you to a point, war certainly is a dirty,nasty & ugly business where civilians get killed & maimed in the crossfire, and because of this it should be used as a last resort.

The Geneva Conventions, while laudable, are really just men putting "lipstick on a pig" in an attempt to make war palatable.

If you'all want a "civilized" war, you need to take up chess.

[Rockstar]

Saw this on RT.

"Aleppo, is the largest city in Syria and is also the largest unbombed builtup area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westward and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas."

Sounds like a good reason to bomb the crap out of the city. Dont you think?