A continuing resistance by the West to destroying Hamas includes the increasing promulgation of the idea that a “faster” war will kill more people. Though this seems intuitive, nothing in the historical record supports this. In fact, the opposite is true: The faster you can kill the enemy, the fewer enemy you will have to kill to alter the behavior of the government that deployed warriors against you (the entire point of war), the fewer of your own will be killed in doing so, and the more quickly your adversaries will stop making war on you.
The point of warfare is to make the vanquished completely dependent on the victor for the stuff of life: security, government, food, water, shelter, energy, transportation. Collapsing the opponent’s government is the only way to accomplish this. The more quickly this collapse can be engineered, the fewer people die.
Combat as America has waged it since 1945 is the utterly immoral wasting of men to kill and die when the strategy is not war and the goal not to vanquish the enemy, but to rid the field of opposing warriors while leaving intact the government that fielded them, and will do so again once we have tired of the carnage and left the field, our men having killed and died in vain.
The way America has conducted military campaigns since 1945 has relied on two distinctly Western concepts not adhered to by non-Westerners at any time in history, the “rules” of war.
The first of these “rules” is the idea of combatants and non-combatants. This ahistorical idea arises from the incorrect view that such as thing as “innocent civilians” exists in a state of war. It does not. No country exists other than at the behest, stated or unstated, of its people. This is why Red China reacted so harshly to the protestors for liberty at Tiananmen Square, machine-gunning thousands of their people they saw as a threat to their government.
In regard to Gaza, every poll so far published of the preferences of Gazans is that they support Hamas. Which means they support what Hamas did on October 7, 2023. Which means they support the actions of the government they put into office. “Innocent civilians” is as far from the truth as it is possible to be. These “innocent civilians” put this government in place, support its actions, and supply it warriors (all of whom are civilians), and allow it to steal billions of international aid dollars to buy weapons and build tunnels. While it makes no sense and can be counterproductive to specifically target civilians, they must be seen as of lower value than your own kids sent to war, and as legitimate collateral damage when their government acts violently against others.
The second is the concept that war is about reducing the opponent’s army. This is predicated on the fallacy that war is law enforcement, and the only legitimate targets are armed opponents – military forces. Armed forces simply are policy tools of a government. The purpose of war is to change the behavior of an adversary government. Reducing that government must be the goal. Armed troops are policy tools; destroying the policy tools can lead to the fall of the adversary government, but it is the latter, not the former, that must be the goal. The former is simply a tactic that might, but not always does, cause the latter.
We killed two million Koreans and two million Vietnamese in those campaigns. And did not cause the fall of the opposing governments. We conducted “combat without war,” refusing to win, ensuring the killing and dying and maiming and psychological traumatizing was for nothing. Had we prioritized speed and victory however, and a quicker war – and deployed a nuclear bomb on Pyongyang in 1950 and on Hanoi in 1963, far fewer than four million Koreans & Vietnamese would have been killed – and zero Americans or Allied forces. Using the same percentages of the populations of those cities as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (approximately 40 percent), fewer than 600,000 would have been killed – saving nearly three-and-a-half million lives – and, more than likely, ended the violence.
Nor would we have spent trillions of dollars occupying South Korea for the past 71 years. It is entirely likely that, had we nuked Pyongyang, the entire Vietnam War could have been avoided, not killing those two million Vietnamese nor 70,000-plus Americans. Had America shown seriousness of purpose in Korea, all subsequent military actions might have been avoided: Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.
As president, Dwight Eisenhower, the World War Two Supreme Commander of Allied Forces Europe, announced a strategy of “Massive Retaliation.” Attack us or our allies and America would retaliate “massively.” No one tested him as they knew he was a warrior first and a politician second. He knew all about war and was ready to take whatever measures necessary to avoid or limit it. His biggest fights were with his own Pentagon and those he accurately labelled “the Military Industrial Complex,” as they wanted to continue arming and prepping for massive industrial wars. “How many schools did that bomber cost?” was one of his questions of the brass. He got a resisting Mao to the negotiating table in Panmunjom via a back-channel threat to nuke Pyongyang. A ceasefire was negotiated.
Faster is better in war. Let’s look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as distinct examples.
In 1945, the War Department planners assumed the war in the Pacific would last until 1949, four years longer than it did, thanks to our atomic bombs. But – what about deaths and the idea that killing faster means killing fewer?
The Pacific Theater of Operations in WW2 was a Navy and Marine operation. Though the Army certainly was heavily involved, the brunt of the initial invasions in MacArthur’s “Island Hopping” campaign was borne by the Navy, of which the Marines are a part. In planning for an invasion of Japan – especially following the bloody and brutal fight for Okinawa, the Navy estimated one million American and nine million Japanese would be killed. The Army estimated one million American and five million Japanese killed. The actual attacks, including extended radiation deaths, killed about 220,000 Japanese, zero Americans and ended the war, while saving between six and ten million lives.
In Europe, General Patton move farther, faster, with fewer losses to men and equipment – on both sides – than any army in history. Speed not only counts, but leaves behind fewer dead, not more. It is the slow, grinding, attritional war that results in the most deaths – see Ukraine for a current example.
If American leadership can get past the fallacy that winning is anathema, that opposing civilians must not be sacrificed even as avoiding their deaths costs our own sons, that not using our most productive weapons in the human activity demanding productivity above all others as human lives are at stake, makes any sense at all, we will again understand war and again make it so horrible that we will chose to avoid it if we can, and prosecute it as quickly as possible if we cannot.
General Robert E. Lee said, “It is good that war is so horrible, or we might grow to like it.” We have grown to like it. Bombing bridges and buildings, and machine-gunning men is YouTube entertainment today. If we really want to stop it, we must make it horrible again, to viscerally recoil at its destruction.
We can start by nuking the Houthis attacking global shipping and prosperity. This will make the serious statement, with no nearby cities as collateral, that the civilized world no longer will accept terrorist attacks. Hamas and Iran can choose how to react once the civilized world again shows seriousness in the face of attacks on it. If Teheran strikes out, they must be vaporized, not coddled.
War is a political activity: “War is politics by other means,” (Machiavelli). Nuclear weapons are weapons of politics. Conventional weapons are weapons of combat.
It is past time to again understand war is more than combat, that it is a political activity that must end politically, instantly once engaged.
And get serious about saving lives, peace, prosperity, human rights and civilization.
"No One Understands War Anymore" Want to bet? I was a USMC Intelligence Officer for 49 years be afraid, be VERY AFRAID!!!! Do you know what I found yesterday? My wife was complaining "It stinks outside." That made me smile, but I had to take the dog out and a smell you never forget hit me, NAPALM!!!! Who in the regime was doing it and why? Right now I think it's only Tennessee, but who knows?