[CaptainHaplo]

Armchair general's wisdom.... gotta love it.

The vast majority of you have never even pounded sand in a conflict area. Yet you want to debate "strategy" as if you have the answers.

If it wasn't so pathetic, it would be funny.

Let me share a dirty little secret with you. We are not at war. Haven't been at war since since September 2, 1945.

Now - are we in various conflicts? Sure we are - but the reason for them continuing as long as they have has not been because of profit motives - its been due to a political lack of will to actually fight them like they were a war.

Afghanistan and Iraq could be totally pacified in less than 60 days. The costs would be less than what we currently pay in the lives of our soldiers. The "collateral damage" however would be intentionally much higher. But no politician has the cahones to say its what we should do. Instead, they continue to tie the hands of those in conflict.

If its a war, you fight it like one. You think we cared how many casualties or "innocent lives" were lost in the firebombing of Dresden? How about Nagasaki or Hiroshima? How about Hamburg?

Our goal was maximum destruction - not only to take out the infrastructure, but to make it clear that we would stop at nothing to succeed. If it took massive civilian casualtes - well - thats unfortunately what war does. Now? We hold a civilian life higher than those of our soldiers who are there - purchasing a small modicum of freedom for them with the blood of our best. Call it whatever you want, but that ain't war.

Insurgencies survive because the civilian population allows, protects and enables them to. You can repress an insurgency through "surge" tactics, but you can't destroy it. The only way to destroy an insurgency is to destroy its civilian support. Win the hearts and minds? You can never win every single one - so its a doomed idea. So how do you undercut civilian support of an insurgency? You demonstrate that the cost of allowing it to exist is higher than the cost of rooting it out.

Insurgents will kill your family if you don't support them. How do you overcome that? Simple - you support them and its not just your family that gets killed - its not your whole block that gets flattened - its the entire neighborhood that goes away in the concussive waves of a carpet bombing campaign that levels 1/4 of a city.

Oh go ahead - spout the claptrap of how this will just create more militants. Guess what - when the civilian population figures out that they don't get clobbered until someone starts supporting the insurgency - they realize that the best security they can have is to keep the insurgency out of their cities, towns, neighborhoods and families.

Costly in human lives? Sure. Not ours though. But hey - thats war.

But don't worry - the idea of a politician supporting anything that would actually be cost effective and would work is anathema to the whole idea of politics - so it won't happen.