It will certainly give new meaning to the term "Edwardian warfare."

...the Pentagon's Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems program.

heh. Codename: JUCkASs

That's right folks, casualty-free war is just around the corner!

At last we will find a use for John Edwards.

Anon: We could do it now, if we wanted to. We don't want to.

David:

Agreed. An atavistic part of me wants to see bodies stacked like cord-wood. I've been persuaded that, if you kill enough adherents to an ideology, the ideology dies with them. Hence, no resurgence of Japanese Imperialist tendencies, much less German Nazis. Going back a bit further, notwithstanding the Klan (an isolated and ineffectual movement), we have not seen for 150 years a resurgence in secessionist sentiment. Sherman was right.

That's right folks, casualty-free war is just around the corner!

For Americans, anyhow.

I do not agree that it could be done now, although of course we could have cut the number of U.S. casualties from the current two actions in half - if we'd been willing to spend the money to do so.

That we did not was a political decision, like that of the Clinton administration denying tanks to the Somali command, leading directly to the Mogadishu debacle and the ignoble American retreat from Somalia.

It's been feasible for sixty years.

oj:

Yeah, right.

Being an American, I wouldn't particularly mind if you immolated the rest of the world, but it's delusional to believe that the American public would have gone for it.

Further, it's not a blowback free weapon, and the more that it was used, the worse the other effects would have been to America.

Also, we didn't have NEARLY enough to do the job.
They are powerful, not miraculous.

Unless you're talking about carpet-bombing the world, some adversaries would have gotten through, and there would definitely have been U.S. casualties, the largest and worst being the culture and idea of America.

We would have become the USSR.

And, thus, we didn't do it.

When have Americans ever objected to our killing enemies?

September 12th 2001

BJW:

W could have bombed the entire Middle East that day and the strongest objection would have been: "You left out Indonesia"

Americans like to kill their enemies, but not the wholesale slaughter of innocents.

Essentially, you're theorizing that we should have forced the rest of the world into asymmetrical warfare in the 50s, by using our big club on anything that was clearly dangerous.

OK, that works for awhile, but what happens when your enemies and potential enemies:

A) Comprise everyone in all the rest of the world

B) Blend in to the population

C) Don't announce their attacks in advance

Are you going to nuke a major city at random every time someone derails a train or blows up a fuel refinery in the U.S. ?

For how long can you do that before Americans get tired of turning of the abattoir ?

As you've oft noted, liberal democracies get tired of brutality and oppression pretty quickly, even if they're the ones dishing it out, and would benefit by continuing to do so.

There have been nations, cultures and societies that could have successfully pulled off what you're proposing, (for awhile, maybe hundreds of years), but none of those nations or cultures include the USA.

Note also, you'd have to suppress all medical and biological research, since any government with a few biologists could eventually whip up another Black(er) Death, and if the alternative was to fry, they might well release it, even knowing that half of their own population would die.

today's situation obtains because of what we didn't do after WWI, then after WWII, then during the Cold War.

democracies get tired of their citizens dying. Not other people's.

Orrin would have been correct had he lived a bit earlier, before secularism weakened our belief that slaughtering heretics would earn us credit with the Big Spook.

Secured the hell out of His Blessings to us.

oj:

Then why have you argued in the past that the U.S. always leaves wars half-done, because we quit once we've vanquished the foe's military ?

Because staying around after the killing's done is pointless.

Depends who you include in 'us'

Harry:

No, it doesn't. You're Blessed too.