Hey dudes.

[nodlew]

Of course.
Still, all of these things, technology, geography, doctrine, resources...in themselves and combined they look like good answers to the question "Why did we beat them?", but I think there are deeper and more subtle factors at work. Things like national character. Basic principles like Humanism. Evil Agents, like the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, suffer from inner contradictions. In order to justify themselves, they manufacture lies which they must feed to their populations. The mentality of the entire national enterprise is hobbled from the very beginning. Creative thought, realism, honesty--these essential psychological capacities of a people trying to fight a war are undermined. What I'm aiming at is, contrary to the doctrine that Might Makes Right, actually, being Right has a tendency to increase your Might. Being Right wins you allies. Being Wrong (while shrilly declaring your virtues) alienates you. Evil societies are doomed ultimately because they cannot make the most sense for the most people. If they are not destroyed by other societies trying to protect themselves from threat, they collapse from within, lacking a raison d'etre which can long endure (Soviet Union).
I know words like Evil are not intellectually gold-standard these days. But I think a society which attempts to exist at the expense of others can be called Evil. A society which places its own racial heritage at the apex of a specious scale of value (both Nazis and Imperial Japan), and dehumanizes others is Evil, if there is such a thing. Which there is.

Of course, had Japan and Nazi Germany been liberal, humanistic societies, WWII would never had happened in the first place. Which I think can be expressed as a military doctrine which I will call The Nodlew Doctrine: To take military action which makes it necessary for most of the world to attempt to destroy you is to invite defeat.

Which is why terrorism is doomed to failure. Terrorism can only be practiced by a dehumanzed, mentally crippled sort of person. A Fanatic. A person willing to blow himself up on the basis of a bunch of hogwash fed to him by manipulators who put no stock in the value of individual human life at all. Perhaps such people will always exist, but they will always be a sliver of humanity. Even in the poorest and harshest communities on Earth, the majority of human beings possess too much common-sense to buy into that crap.