How can there be victory with insipid, ever changing, rules of engagement, determined by situation lawyers on the battlefield?During our invasion into Iraq, Ted Koppel was talking about how he was imbedded with the Army Command Center. He said he was pleasantly surprised to see that all decisions on the battlefield had to be cleared with the sub-Army of battlefield lawyers before actions were taken under their interpretation of the rules of engagement.
When Koppel is pleased with the actions of our Army, then we are in deep trouble. m/r
Hiroshima’s Lessons for the War on Terror | FrontPage Magazine
By Daniel Greenfield On August 9, 2013
In the summer of ’45, the United States concluded a war that had come to be seen by some as unwinnable after the carnage at Iwo Jima, with a bang.
On August 6th, the bomb fell on Hiroshima. And then on the 9th, it was Nagasaki’s turn. Six days later, Japan, which had been preparing to fight to the last man, surrendered.
For generations of liberals, those two names would come to represent the horror of America’s war machine, when they actually represented a pragmatic ruthlessness that saved countless American and Japanese lives.
There can hardly be a starker contrast to our endless unwinnable nation-building exercises than the way that Truman cut the Gordian Knot and avoided a long campaign that would have depopulated Japan and destroyed the lives of a generation of American soldiers.
That we can talk about Japan as a victory is attributable to that decision to use the bomb. Without it, Japan would have been another Iraq or Vietnam, we might have won it at a terrible cost, but it would have destroyed our willingness to fight any future wars and would have given the USSR an early victory in Asia.
Professional soldiers understand the humanitarian virtue of ruthlessness. The pacifist civilian may gasp in horror at the sight of a mushroom cloud, but the professional soldier knows that the longer way around would have left every Japanese city looking far worse than Hiroshima.
More people died in the Battle of Okinawa on both sides than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 9 out of 10 buildings were destroyed. As much as a third of the island’s population committed suicide, fled into caves that were bombed, were used as human shields and were killed when American soldiers found themselves unable to distinguish between Japanese soldiers posing as civilians and actual civilians.
It does not take much to imagine what trying to capture Honshu would have looked like.
-go to link-
On August 6th, the bomb fell on Hiroshima. And then on the 9th, it was Nagasaki’s turn. Six days later, Japan, which had been preparing to fight to the last man, surrendered.
For generations of liberals, those two names would come to represent the horror of America’s war machine, when they actually represented a pragmatic ruthlessness that saved countless American and Japanese lives.
There can hardly be a starker contrast to our endless unwinnable nation-building exercises than the way that Truman cut the Gordian Knot and avoided a long campaign that would have depopulated Japan and destroyed the lives of a generation of American soldiers.
That we can talk about Japan as a victory is attributable to that decision to use the bomb. Without it, Japan would have been another Iraq or Vietnam, we might have won it at a terrible cost, but it would have destroyed our willingness to fight any future wars and would have given the USSR an early victory in Asia.
Professional soldiers understand the humanitarian virtue of ruthlessness. The pacifist civilian may gasp in horror at the sight of a mushroom cloud, but the professional soldier knows that the longer way around would have left every Japanese city looking far worse than Hiroshima.
More people died in the Battle of Okinawa on both sides than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 9 out of 10 buildings were destroyed. As much as a third of the island’s population committed suicide, fled into caves that were bombed, were used as human shields and were killed when American soldiers found themselves unable to distinguish between Japanese soldiers posing as civilians and actual civilians.
It does not take much to imagine what trying to capture Honshu would have looked like.
-go to link-
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