Hardcore History 42 & 42.5 Logical Insanity

[Ex-California]

Over the last week we drove up to the Bay Area and back to visit my parents for the holidays. As some of my listening selection, I chose to listen to Logical Insanity and the Logical Insanity Extra again.

I really think that this should be required listening for everyone even if it just makes people think about why the atomic bomb drops were a good thing, let alone the preferred course of exonerating Truman and the rest of the US military high command for the decision to do so

Right after listening to the episode i saw some Facebook Meme from George Takei shared by another Japanese-American friend freaking out about Trump's plan to expand the nuclear arsenal. It was something to the effect of "I had family at Nagasaki" or something. Do all of these people forget the horrors of the firebombing? Or how many Japanese would have died defending the home islands?

I'm firmly in the camp that strategic bombing is a good thing, and wins wars. I think that expanding our nuclear arsenal is a great way to project strength without spending as much money as we do on traditional weapons.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the reason it didn't work in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan is that we didn't bomb enough. In all of those wars, we were too concentrated on "nation building" during the process rather than after. I'm no military expert, but I think the old Roman method of creating a desert and calling it peace is still the best way to win.

So why is this not practiced? Fear of international views of the US military? Lack of people left like LeMay and Bomber Harris? More profits for defense contractors with protracted nation-building affairs?

Even "shock and awe" was pussyfooting around compared to a WWII firebombing or even a WWI artillery assault.

[Smitty-48]

Dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in both theaters in WWII combined, killed more Vietnamese than Germans and Japanese combined, the problem was simply that the Vietnamese nationalist uprising against the colonial puppet government in Saigon, was not an industrial target, and the Vietnamese never massed their forces to provide a decisive battlefield target, thus the bombing was innefective, because it was not bombing the enemy's center of gravity, the enemy was not relying on industry nor massed conventional forces, so there was nothing to bomb at the strategic level, which would have any effect on the outcome.

For industrial strategic bombing to be effective, it requires industrial strategic targets to bomb, in Vietnam, there were no industrial strategic targets of any significant consequence, and so industrial strategic bombing was rendered a pointless and ultimately counterproductive exercise.

In Afghanistan, no industrial strategic targets there neither, none whatsoever.

In Iraq, the US had already bombed all the industrial strategic targets in 1991, but when the US invaded for the purposes of rebuilding Iraq in America's image in 2003, this backfired, because once America broke it and bought it, all those industrial strategic targets which America had bombed, suddenly belonged to America, and turns out America needed them to run the country, so you ended up bombing yourselves there, in a round about way.

[Okeefenokee]

Also, Vietnam was being supported by an ally that wasn't also attacked. Before nukes, that probably wouldn't have happened. Proxy wars are more complicated.

[Smitty-48]

Even without nuclear weapons, inciting World War Three against the Soviets and Chinese, over South Vietnam, would have been insane, clearly South Vietnam does not rate a global industrial total war, nuclear weapons or no nuclear weapons. The insanity of the Vietnam War was that the United States, in its hubris, completely lost all perspective as to the significance of South Vietnam or rather the total lack thereof, commiting itself to a war which it could not win, for an objective which was not even in its interests to fight for.

Escalating with the Chinese and Soviets any further than was already the case, would simply have been going even deeper down into that bottomless rabbit hole, plausibly resulting in the total anihilation of the United States itself in a nuclear war... all for Saigon, which, would have served America right I suppose, if they had been insane enough to go there.

[Ex-California]

So Smitty I figured something along these lines were why strategic bombing didn't work as well in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but what about genocidal levels of attacks on civilians? Would this theoretically "break" these people?

[Smitty-48]

So Smitty I figured something along these lines were why strategic bombing didn't work as well in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but what about genocidal levels of attacks on civilians? Would this theoretically "break" these people?

You killed 3 million Vietnamese, near as I can tell, it just made them fight harder, see, the mistake you're making, and it's the same mistake the Best and Brightest made in Vietnam, is that the purpose of strategic bombing is to kill people in order to force them to surrender, but that's not actually what it does, the purpose is to render their industrial capacity destroyed so that they are reduced below the level of being able to fight an industialized war against you.

You weren't bombing the Germans and Japanese to kill the people, the people were the workers who were building the war machine which you were fighting, so really you were bombing an industrial war machine, the people were just collateral damage, because they were cogs in the machine.

But a popular insurgency is a completely different animal, it's not an industrial war machine, so industrial bombing doesn't stop it, and bombing the people just incited them to resist more, so strategic bombing is the wrong weapon to employ there, a misapplication of force which is not decisive, and is in fact counterproductive.

[Okeefenokee]

You're right about Vietnam not being important, but if it was, and if no one had nukes, to beat Vietnam, old world rules would have meant that those arming our enemies would have also been attacked.

Persia attacked Greece. Didn't win, and wasn't important, but Greece aiding a Persian Greek uprising meant Greece went on the shit list.

[Smitty-48]

Now bear in mind, the decision to go for unconditional surrender and to occupy and reorder Germany and Japan, was entirely poltical, there was no military basis to do that, strategic bombing had already won the war, by rendering German and Japanese offensive industrial war fighting capacity to the stone age, they were already beaten, the US did not have to invade Japan to win the war, the reason why they did it, is because they beleived that Fascism arose to power, because the defeated parties in World War One, Germany and Italy, did not accept that they had been defeated, but rather the Fascists asserted that they had been just about to win, when they were "stabbed in the back by the November criminals", they asserted that the civilians quit the war, just when it was about to be won, and that myth is what allowed the Fascists to incite the next generation to another war of revanchist agression.

So, in WWII, it was seen to be important, that the enemy be totally anihlated, not just militarily, but politically as well, but there was no operational need to do it, the bombing had smashed their military industrial capacity for all intents and purposes, and even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were military industrial targets, Hiroshima was a military headquarters garrison town, and Nagasaki was an industrial prodiuction center.

the US could have simply kept on bombing Japan with nuclear weapons, without them having to surrender, and Japan would have been totally obliterated, the Emporer didn't surrender because the Americans were killing people, he surrendered because the Americans were smashing the last of Japans warfighting capacity to little radioactive bits, so there was no point in going on, because the Americans had already won, without putting one boot on the ground.

[Smitty-48]

OK, now, back to Vietnam, what was America bombing? Military industrial what? There was nothing, nada, zip, bupkis, all they made was rice and rubber, they were not an industialized country, they were an agrarian peasant society, there was nothing industrial to bomb, the enemy was not a war machine that was succeptable to industrial bombing, the enemy; was Vietnamese Nationalist Reunification, the United States was trying to prevent Vietnam from reunifying in the wake of French Colonialism.

But Vietnamese National Reunification; is an idea, you can't bomb an idea into the stone age, there's no way to target an idea with bombs, so this is why the Americans were defeated, the idea was not destroyed by the bombing, it just kept going and going, the more you bombed them, the more they clung tenaciously to their idea of driving you out in order to have their reunification, which they had been fighting for, not for a hundred years, but a thousand years, because before the French were their colonial masters, the Chinese were...

... so America; was trying to fight a thousand year old idea, by bombing it with high explosives.

It was like trying to bomb Jesus out of Christianity; doomed. to. fail. from. the. start.

[Ex-California]

So Smitty I figured something along these lines were why strategic bombing didn't work as well in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but what about genocidal levels of attacks on civilians? Would this theoretically "break" these people?

You killed 3 million Vietnamese, near as I can tell, it just made them fight harder, see, the mistake you're making, and it's the same mistake the Best and Brightest made in Vietnam, is that the purpose of strategic bombing is to kill people in order to force them to surrender, but that's not actually what it does, the purpose is to render their industrial capacity destroyed so that they are reduced below the level of being able to fight an industialized war against you.

You weren't bombing the Germans and Japanese to kill the people, the people were the workers who were building the war machine which you were fighting, so really you were bombing an industrial war machine, the people were just collateral damage, because they were cogs in the machine.

But a popular insurgency is a completely different animal, it's not an industrial war machine, so industrial bombing doesn't stop it, and bombing the people just incited them to resist more, so strategic bombing is the wrong weapon to employ there, a misapplication of force which is not decisive, and is in fact counterproductive.

It all makes sense now, thanks.

What is the weapon to employ then?