Quote Originally Posted by Philipvs Vallindervs Calicvla View Post

Morally, one does not make war. If we are making war then we need to do so with the greatest intelligence and proportionality, and that means that we need to consider soldiers' lives as a resource, we need to consider how many lives to spend to achieve an objective and what level of civilian casualties we should accept in the protection of our own forces. In the last part of the calculation we should consider friendly and enemy civilians as having different values, in strategic terms.

The idea is to win the war as quickly as possible, which means much more than just defeating the enemy in battle.
Yes, in a perfectly moral world there would be no war. But you obviously understand that it doesnt work that way.


I attended a lecture by General Sir Rupert Smith, as I understand it the "line charge" is essentially a missile fired down the road - that's how he described it. His opinion was that using the line charge caused long-term resentment in the city in addition to the immediate crisis - the point being that the tactic that saved American lives on the day, by not having to re-mine the road, cost more in the long run because it turned the residents on the city against the Americans, even those who came back after the battle would have seen a city with no electricity and no sanitation.
When David Petraeus came to speak to my army officer cadet class back in 2013 this is one of the things he talked about when it came to counterinsurgency strategy. The needs of the locals must be balanced with the tactical necessity to defeat the enemy. Go too far in one direction and you get trouble with the other. Yes, we could have not used the line charges but that would have been cost-prohibitive in terms of coalition lives since the city was turned into a fortress of barricades, tunnels, trenches, and booby-trapped houses. We could have also not told the populace that we were coming in, resulting in much greater casualties but also we would have killed many more insurgents as a lot of them were able to flee, including the person we were after, al-Zarqawi. A careful balance must be struck and where that balance is to be made is very hard to figure out.


So the people all support the Taliban now? I hear they don't, and they all came out of their houses to cheer when the Afghan army retook parts of the city (and promptly ducked back inside when it all kicked off again).

Intellectual exercise - imagine an American city occupied by the Russians/Chinese/baddy of the week. Has it ceased to be a "friendly" city or is it just "occupied"?
No, I didnt say that. What I said was that the Taliban controlled the city and as such the city was deemed to be in enemy hands. As such, its not deemed to be an allied city. Occupied yes, but the term allied implies that the city is in friendly hands. Thats my understanding anyways.

I rather doubt it - I expect your Congress would be demanding to know why your military destroyed one of your own cities to retake it.
Only one way to find out really. And if it ever really got that bad, by looking at our reaction to 9/11 (like the Patriot Act), I kinda doubt that the government would be all up in arms about damage to a city done in the process of retaking it.