It all sounds so familiar.

I have been reading Victor Davis Hanson on the seige at Khe Sanh. We fired off 200,000 shells (not counting bombs and such) and MUST, simply MUST have killed at least 10,000 Vietnamese.

Not that their bodies ever turned up.

And besides, how awesome is firepower if, even accepting Hanson's naive statistics, 95% of the shells didn't hit anybody?

As a student of the war in the Pacific, I'd like to have a dollar for every time I read that 'no one could have lived through that bombardment.'

Yet, somehow, when the Marines went ashore, someone had.

You can't defend a jungle--there's nothing to bomb. During the siege we should have been bombing Moscow.

OJ,

What do you mean bomb Moscow? Is this really your position?

Perry

Perry:

Yes. We should have fought a hot war not a Cold War.

Oj,

Really, wow, then we might all be dead, I guess it is a God thing I don't understand. - Perry

No, it's a communism thing. They couldn't have done much.

Orrin is delusional that way, Perry.

He thinks that because the Russians could not make good shoes, they could not make good weapons.

Well, we don't make good shoes, either

We don't make shoes because any clown with a machine we design can. We kept our weapons industry because only we can make them.

OJ,

It occurred to me you may have been referring to end of WW2 as the time to bomb Moscow. Is this accurate? Originally, your post led me to believe you advocated a war with USSR in 60's or 70's to deal with communist North Vietnam. I want to understand your position and as I think a war with USSR anytime after ww2 was not even fathomable. I donot yet have an opinion if war was justifiable at the end of ww2 although with hindsight, it would have been in everyone's best interest. - Perry

Perry:

Any time throughout would have been fine, though the earlier the better.

OJ,

I think you lose alot of credibility advocating this position. Letting Patton stir things up enough for some shooting to break out is one thing but an all assault on the Soviets well past ww2? The USSR was a sovreign nation, the morality of attacking them would be akin to a crusade. Not to mention the risk of nuclear excahne or full all out nuclear war. Can you point to any works or reveiws supporting your idea? - Perry

Perry:

What's wrong with a crusade against a murderous tyranny?

Nothing, except that we'd have lost as many as they did.

Perry, Orrin has this delusion that because Russian technology was worse than ours, it was useless.

Now, no amount of money would make me fly on an Ilyushin airliner, but the fact is, about 99.975% of the time, they work as designed.

Given the number of warheads, you'd have to turn that upside down and count on 99.975% failure rates in Rooskie technology.

In fact, for Orrin's deal to work, Russian technology would have had to be 9 orders of magnitude worse than we know it is.

When it comes to Communism, Orrin believes the U.S. should have behaved the way he believes Muslim terrorists are behaving in Iraq now.

Go figure.

Even at their best, in the late 80s, half of the Soviet's ICBMs wouldn't have lifted off, or successfully completed the flight.

Of those that made it, most would have missed their targets by over a mile.
Of course, with nuclear warheads, that wouldn't have mattered much against civilian targets.

The US' ICBMs during the 60s were exactly the same, but got better much more rapidly than the USSR's.

Harry:

No, I believe wer should have treated Communism like we did Nazism and are Islamicism. Only you and fellow travelers can distinguish between the three.

They were good enough during the '60s. There was no point in making them better, Michael

Harry:

They were crap. Even the Soviet archives demonstrate that they were basically helpless against us at the time of the Missile Crisis.

Then why are you so concerned about No. Korea's nukes?

Thiers are better?

No, theirs will be even worse. That's why we have carte blanche to attack them. Regime change, as in Iraq, is justified by morality, not security.

Harry:

The only way in which they were "good enough" is that they existed.

The Atlas series missiles were estimated by the Pentagon to be only 65% operational at any given time.

So?

If you only need, say, 500 items to work, and you have 50,000, then you don't have to worry until your failure rate tops 99%.

If Orrin believes Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces were 99+% inoperative, he's nuts

Well, I don't think bombing a capital is necessarily the best way to approach a problem (notice I think Communism was/is a problem), but neither is ignoring them and yanking on Patton's chain like Roosevelt did. We have this very ineffective way of handling war these days - beat 'em just enough to make 'em "rethink their wrongness" and hopefully turn to the right. It's a fairly innocuous way of being politically correct in war.

But the only problem is that war never really is "politcally correct". It can't be dressed up in suits and ties. It is the worst of mankind, killing each other and taking life. But it is at times a necessity, and when necessary, it should be done as quickly and as effectively as possible. None of this placating our conscience with a "nice" war. It's stupid.

Well, I don't think bombing a capital is necessarily the best way to approach a problem (notice I think Communism was/is a problem), but neither is ignoring them and yanking on Patton's chain like Roosevelt did. We have this very ineffective way of handling war these days - beat 'em just enough to make 'em "rethink their wrongness" and hopefully turn to the right. It's a fairly innocuous way of being politically correct in war.

But the only problem is that war never really is "politcally correct". It can't be dressed up in suits and ties. It is the worst of mankind, killing each other and taking life. But it is at times a necessity, and when necessary, it should be done as quickly and as effectively as possible. None of this placating our conscience with a "nice" war. It's stupid.