We thought this ponder from Tam self-evidently obvious, and reference it for truth, as using multi-million dollar missiles to shoot down multi-hundred dollar drones is asinine beyond belief, despite the shrieking caterwauling objections from people who think Common Core is actual mathematics, and that the world's #1 problem is Joooooooooooooooooos!
But contrary to years of evidence to the contrary, at least one or two people in the Five-Sided A$$hole Palace realized that the correct answer to the Houthi problem wasn't expending scarce and expensive missiles from an under-supplied fleet, it was doing alpha strikes from aircraft carriers, and dropping metric fucktons of iron bombs on deserving jackholes, just like any other time since about 1943.
Some lackwit will always plaintively whinge "How many is 'enough'...?"
Well, Sh*t-for-Brains, here's your One-Step Cluebat For The Calculationally Impaired:
Q.: Are they still fighting?
Yes: Load up another metric fuckton of bombs, and sortie again.
No: Success!
So simple, a caveman can do it.
19 comments:
I know a bunch of B-52 drivers who would love to get in on the party.
As long as islam exists we will be at war with islamists. They will accept no other reality. We must accept that reality as well.
The next front in WWIII? Perhaps.
re: Some lackwit will always plaintively whinge "How many is 'enough'...?"
The math is pretty complicated but you can round it down to: UNTIL IT STOPS.
I like the phrase Ward Carroll (a retired Navy NFO) uses on his YT videos on this: "Shoot Archers, not arrows".
I highly recommend his channel for a viewpoint based on having been there/done that in Navy Aviation
I think Dan has a winner there.
Does make me wonder if there remain ANY generals or admirals that understand warfare.
Sadly, if there are, the DIE civilian "leaders" will not listen. This is the main downfall of ideology, they never accept truth or evidence contrary to the fantasy world in their heads, of course all greased by $$$ from self serving oligarchs.
Except, don't you see, the purpose of this lopsided military engagement is exactly to reduce to zero our superior weapons so that the war can favor the side with the most bodies armed with cheap AK's. After WW III some scholar will write, in Chinese or Russian, about the incredibly ingenious tactic to force the superpower to use up all it's effective munitions/weapons so that they can then be taken down by armies with massive manpower and little more than cheap rifles. There will be a footnote to the incredible geniuses from China and Russia who bribed high level politicians to help them in this battle AND even printed up millions of fake ballots to elect one of those traitors as president. Another footnote will attribute the development and release of a bioweapon to facilitate the election steal.
When the mainstream press showed Houthi's out in the streets shouting
Death To America the other day, my first thought was how come these people aren't being vaporized or flying through the air propelled by exploding ordinance. 'Course if we did that, the snowflake press would be crying about "innocent civilians being murdered" to which the response should be "don't start actions you can't finish, kinda like what's happening in Gaza right now".
I've noticed that the rocket launches from Gaza have pretty much ceased. Funny how that works when you kill the people launching them.
Nemo
Gunboat diplomacy usually doesn’t work, period. It’s too fleeting.
Iran will keep supplying the arms to try and cause another crisis in the Red Sea comparable to the Suez Canal blockage, and just bombing from the sky is no more effective (or less expensive) than missile interception.
If we are to use lemay’s logic, then we ought to be using chemical weapons and/or nukes (neutron bombs would be the best option) against the desert savages. Lemay and Sun Tsu would both agree on how awesome WMDs are, and how enthusiastic about using them we should be.
@Michael Gladius,
Please explain to the class why LeMay's Theorem didn't work, the casualties suffered in the inevitably necessary subsequent Invasion of Japan in 1945-46, and all the trouble caused by those pesky and intractable Japanese despite the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Failing that, perhaps stop spouting fluent b.s.
Gunboat diplomacy works every time, provided thew gunboats use their guns, rather than merely loudspeakers broadcasting diplomatic solutions. CF.: Barbary Pirates.
People are funny about becoming compliant when you start killing them for non-compliance, and Iran shipping them weapons doesn't matter if there's no one to pick them up and use them.
But it justifies Phase II: Turning Iranian ports of embarkation and cargo shipments into smoking holes as well. If Iran wants to look like Iragq and A-stan in Phase III, that's not a difficult thing to arrange, and twelve other Gulf State neighbors will quietly cheer that outcome, despite any public posturing to the contrary, a denouement that's about 44 years overdue.
https://www.rainforthreport.com/p/i-filmed-illegal-aliens-african-islamists?publication_id=1102435&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=2gg75o
here ya go.
@ Aesop
Nice attempt at being snide, but your comment fails on two accounts:
1) WW2 was not gunboat diplomacy. A sustained bombing campaign, naval blockade, and systematic destruction of the Japanese Army is, by definition, not gunboat diplomacy. Gunboat diplomacy is more like a drive-by shooting equivalent of “shock and awe.”
2) apparently you missed the part about using nuclear weapons being closer to lemay’s meaning. You know, the only time we ever used them??? Or how Lemay turned the strategic air command into a modern, efficient nuclear sword hanging over the USSR’s neck?
Also, the Barbary pirates fail to qualify as gunboat diplomacy. We didn’t shoot them up and sail away, we landed ground troops, toppled their leaders, and put pretenders onto the throne. Basically no different to how Britain managed Afghanistan.
Calling either example “gunboat diplomacy” is akin to mixing up maneuver warfare and the battle of verdun. -200 points for making the dictionary cry.
Back at ya, Slick.
You're the one who dragged "gunboat diplomacy" in as an exact equivalent of LeMay's Theorem. So by all means, take your -200 point penalty for "making the dictionary cry" yourself, and own it.
And another minus 50 points for building a Straw Man, and another 50 points for Moving The Goalposts.
If one of these things is not like the other, perhaps stop trying to force-fit the two into being the same thing.
I gave you what LeMay practiced, and you tried (and failed) to denigrate that practice. It had a 100% success rate.
Using nuclear weapons had little to do with LeMay's meaning. We killed more people with the conventional bombing of Tokyo than by Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Nuclear weapons merely saved wear and tear on another 200 bombers which we were sending over daily in conventional raids, and chemical weapons, despite their easy availability, were never used, nor were ever part of LeMay's strategy, nor meaning. You don't get to retroactively put words into the man's mouth to suit your own propganda.
Gunboat diplomacy fails, precisely because it's all diplomacy, and little if any gunboat.
That's why I selected the example of the Barbary pirates, because it exemplifies how it's supposed to be done (hence the success) versus the impotent saber-rattling you imagine when you dragged the term into a topic where it's hopelessly opposite to what's going on.
Nobody's trying to cow the Houthis with a toothless show of force. We're literally blowing them to hell in job lots with alpha strikes. (Rather than pissing away multi-million dollar missiles to intercept Achmed's Bargain Basement Model Rockets).
It's you who tried to make that - the literal non-definition of gunboat diplomacy - into a sad little bathtub flotilla exercise.
You own any failure thereby.
I repeat, stop speaking fluent b.s.
And stop trying to paint sound military strategy as impotence to suit your agenda.
There is no fix and there will be no fix. The enemies, many different countries, intend to defeat us by first draining us of our superior weapons in an endless chase of cheap and expendable weapons and people until we are too weak to fend off the big guns. It isn't a complex or brilliant strategy but it will work. Mostly it will work because we are unwilling to recognize what they are doing and we will willingly and eagerly fire off multi-million dollar missiles at their water pipe missiles until we have nothing left.
What we should do is take the big step. A massive and extensive bombing strike on their country until it is destroyed and most of their people dead. A wakeup call to anyone who chooses to take us on. Harsh! Yes I know but so much better than allowing them to win. But we won't do it. We will instead choose to go one on one with their unlimited supply of cheap weapons and even cheaper lives until by attrition we got nothing left.
Arc Light, aye! Bomb up every BUFF with as many Mk82's as they will carry and send them over the grid squares. Rinse and repeat.
Boat Guy
Carpet bombing an enemy into prolonged homelessness and starvation seems to have the desired effect on the most intractable populations eventually. The key to success seems to be once they cry Uncle, jump into their homeland with both feet and mercilessly crush any hint of rebellion. Seemed to work back in 45-46.
That worked with a population that revered its leader the emperor.
That doesn't work with Moslems.
they've been doing this for 1,400 years.
Solution?
Eradicate the death cult on every continent.
It worked with a fanatical religious death cult last time.
It will again.
If we need to substitute Mecca and Medina for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fiat lux.
"If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting." still applies.
"Enough" is the only variable. If enough = all...? Challenge accepted.
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