West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine’s Fate

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo

War requires a declaration of such by Congress. No such declaration has occured since 1942. It isn't a war otherwise.

Every single time we have deployed troops into an active combat situation since 1945, they have had their hands tied under ROE's that don't allow them to wage war. When 3 members of the military are courtmartialed because a killer of 4 US civilians gets a bloody lip, the ROE's are not warfighting - they are nannyisms.

War is what war does? By that arguement alone no conflict since WW2 has been a war - since no conflict has been fought with the pure intent to wreak maximum destruction upon the enemy wherever we may find him.

Your country labelled itself as being at war. Your leaders did. Your troops did. the events equal those in war.

You may have fought with wrong ROE, you may have fought for wroing reasons and without needed determination, you may have fought the war wearing glace gloves, okay okay I haqve coimplained about all that myself many times in the past ten years..

But war is as war does. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands got killed. It may have been smaller wars compared to WWII. But wars it were nevertheless. And the US lost both.

And you counter with an unimportant bean-counting formality, like a bureaucrat? Should I really take that serious? Maybe you want to avoid listing two more lost wars in the US history, by denying that there have been any wars at all? Some kind of a Dolchstoßlegende, maybe?

BTW, both Bush and Rumsfeld told the world and the nation that the US were at war. Both said also that the US got attacked (9/11), and that that equals an act of war. Do you plan to file a lawsuit against them? Obviously they lied to your country and to your people then and needlessly ordered military action although there was no war. That would be a conspiracy that borders high treason, eh? Don'T count beans again, i know there is no High Treason paragraph, at least it was claimed in past debates, but we all have a relatively congruent idea of what we associate with the term, right?

P.S. The wars that are not wars. The torture that is not torture. The defeat that is not a defeat. Well, I see patterns emerging there. Cognitive Dissonance Theory, anyone?