Re: USA develops space-based weapons

In article <aranders-25E5E6.16325705112006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Alan Anderson <aranders@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Re: Tet. Vietnam lost millions over the years, but won the war.

They "won", but not because we lost. It was because we quit. We could
do the same thing in Iraq, but it would definitely not be a military
loss.

The US "won" the War of 1812 the same way: Britain quit because the war
was a political embarrassment, saving the US from an 1815 spring offensive
that would probably have destroyed it (if it hadn't been broken up first
by New England seceding to negotiate a separate peace).

In any case, the results are much the same. It's a dangerous delusion to
think that there is some magic wall between the military and political
sides of a war, and that being politically defeated somehow isn't as bad
as being militarily defeated. Not least, this is dangerous because it
leaves you wide open to an enemy who does not recognize the wall's
existence and fights on both sides of it, campaigning to undermine your
country's will to fight as much as to defeat your troops. The North
Vietnamese did that quite well.

One of the most important jobs of a wartime leader is to keep his country
solidly supporting the war. If he has trouble doing that -- e.g., because
he's trying to fight a war as a hobby, rather than putting all else aside
and making whatever compromises are needed to get the country solidly
behind him -- a skillful enemy will see that *that's* his weak spot. And
the most basic principle of strategy is that you attack an enemy where
he's weak, not where he's strong. LBJ didn't want to make compromises for
his war -- in particular, he didn't want to see his Great Society social
programs derailed to strengthen political consensus for the war -- and see
what happened.

Defeated is defeated. There's a relevant saying in the chess world:
"You play the opponent, not the position.".
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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