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[Frumple]

... if you're going that route, you'd probably want to go jawas instead, y'know? Desert ewoks, basically.

[Rolepgeek]

Because war is an ever escalating attempt to outwit your opponents and force them to lose. Nothing you're saying is untrue, but it's antiquated now. Yes, we still use machine guns and have hostage standoffs. But now the world is (god I hate that I have to use this seriously now) controlled by memes and the public is more malleable than ever.

We can't do the same because they found the counterpoint to the "no negotiation, no saving people" strategy that negated the popular form of hostage-taking. In all the ever-fucking twists and turns of human strategies, they actually found a way to turn getting bombed and killed into a strength. Continuing to try and outkill the enemy regardless of collateral is no longer how victories are achieved. I'd be in awe of its brilliance if it wasn't so horrible.

The way to really win is to find the new counterpoint. Guerilla and...(sigh) "meme" warfare has finally matured. Kill the leadership, they crop up again. Be utterly brutal, they get more popular. Don't be, they get more popular. The only way out of a situation like this is to develop the next revolution in war, or otherwise keep doing this shit forever, which we can't do because the collective ideas of the public are what are really being attacked.

We know how to deal with guerilla warfare. We just refuse to use those methods, because we're not in the medieval era anymore, where if a town gave you trouble after you took it (in fact, there were essentially laws of war where as soon as the attackers made a 'practicable breach in the defenses', the defenders were expected to stand down, in order to reduce the loss of life. If you continued resisting, they put the whole town to the sword), you slew every man, killed or enslaved the women and children, razed it to the ground, and salted the earth behind you.

We don't practice genocide anymore, but that's what the single most effective way to deal with guerillas is, other than creating a counter-guerilla guerilla movement within the rebel-controlled areas. If countries/societies are organisms, rebel groups are cancers, defecting against the whole in the attempt to grow; that's why they tend to split apart and have such harsh measures for people who try to rebel back against them in turn; it's already made of people prone to pushing back against authority, so you have to make sure they do as they're told if you want to have a cohesive movement, or the coalition falls apart as soon as you make enough gains that it's not life or death.

ISIS are probably Tusken Raiders, except they have a third of Tatooine

[Sergarr]

... are you somehow under the impression we (major nations in general) haven't been willing to accept civilian collateral these last handful of years? That... seems to be what you're saying. If so, you've been missing a bit of what's been going on, heh.

As far as I know, only Russia is really doing that. Seeing as it's the only country that was willing to go out and mass bomb hospitals in an entire city as, presumably, a response to people using them as substitute military bases.

We all remember this thing. Or maybe we don't.

Wasn't that an accident? I don't count in those, or other minor violations. It only gets real when it's massed and regular. Like what Russia is doing in Syria.

Because, as I explained, bombing the hospitals is a winning outcome for the Islamic State. They lose what, forty men and a rocket site in exchange for everybody in the world coming that one step closer to going out in the streets and chanting "Death to America"? That's a major fucking victory for them. They aren't fighting with lives; especially not the groups less centralized than the IS.

And what are those chanting people going to do, throw rocks and burn American flags, before realizing that they have to go to work tomorrow and go back to their homes? The street mob isn't in control of any decent state, and for a good reason.

Because war is an ever escalating attempt to outwit your opponents and force them to lose. Nothing you're saying is untrue, but it's antiquated now. Yes, we still use machine guns and have hostage standoffs. But now the world is (god I hate that I have to use this seriously now) controlled by memes and the public is more malleable than ever.

We can't do the same because they found the counterpoint to the "no negotiation, no saving people" strategy that negated the popular form of hostage-taking. In all the ever-fucking twists and turns of human strategies, they actually found a way to turn getting bombed and killed into a strength. Continuing to try and outkill the enemy regardless of collateral is no longer how victories are achieved. I'd be in awe of its brilliance if it wasn't so horrible.

The way to really win is to find the new counterpoint. Guerilla and...(sigh) "meme" warfare has finally matured. Kill the leadership, they crop up again. Be utterly brutal, they get more popular. Don't be, they get more popular. The only way out of a situation like this is to develop the next revolution in war, or otherwise keep doing this shit forever, which we can't do because the collective ideas of the public are what are really being attacked.

Also, Islamic State is losing, badly. They've lost about half of Mosul, and SDF is already closing in on Raqqa. With those two out, the only place where they'll still have major presence would be Deir-er-Zor. Our current strategies are working, and working pretty well.

Yes, yes, they're getting utterly fucked on the physical battlefield. But as fast as they're falling down, remember how quickly they rose in the first place. The overall situation is only deteriorating. Iraqi and Syrian societies at this point are nearing having lived literal generations of near-constant warlike conditions. There will be another IS after Aleppo falls. Every dead father, brother, or friend is another incentive to join up with whoever seizes the title next time. Escalating poverty and injuries are the same way.

Imagine the difference between this and, say, the end of WWII. Germany was defeated. Iraq has never been defeated. The US Military destroyed their society, but people kept fighting. Hell, they only fought more pervasively because of it. Destroying comprehensive organizations can be done with military force, but that's not actually the basis of the fucking problem.

Kill the leadership, they crop up again.

No they won't. Their leadership was never actually killed, because USA did a very dumb thing when it invaded Iraq - it disbanded Iraqi army and then let the army officers just go away. All of them. And there were a lot of them. Out of 40 ISIS leaders, more than 25 are former Saddam's officers.

Islamic State rose pretty quickly because they've been preparing for this almost since the moment Saddam was overthrown. Those are professional military people, some of the best Middle East had to offer, which is why IS was so incredibly effective at the battlefield.

But kill that core, the IS leadership, along with leadership of a couple more similar scale organizations in Syria, like An-Nusra, whose leadership is, in turn, composed of elite ex-SAA officers, and there won't be another IS. Not soon, at least. These kind of people need multiple years for training, and dedicated training facilities for all that duration, as well.

As long as the USA's dumb mistake in Iraq of letting those trained people to join the terrorist insurgency, or Assad's dumb mistake at not being respected by his own military, allowing large quantities of good officers to defect to rebels and radicalize, aren't repeated, terrorists would have to wait for quite some time until they get their new generation of professional leaders.

And without professional and skilled leaders, all those jihadists are nothing.

[Reelya]

On Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you have to realize that this was when we had beaten the Japanese back to Japan and the only thing left would have been a massive invasion of Japan, but a land invasion of Japan would have been massively costly in lives on both sides and we needed a way out, and so, we really didn't want to have to do that, and the Japanese refused to surrender. The nukes had been developed because we initially thought that Hitler was working on a nuke.

But that was a later justification, which was not used at the time whatsoever:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-it-was-not-to-end-the-war-or-save-lives/5308192

https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Japanese-government-offer-to-surrender-before-an-atomic-bomb-was-dropped-on-them-in-WWII

In fact, the Japanese were already willing to surrender before Hiroshima, but the USA had made an ultimatum in July that they had to abolish the Emperor, which caused the Japanese to dither about it. After the bombings however, America demanded surrender again, on the condition that they kept the Emperor. Clearly fucking with them there.

[smjjames]

Kill the leadership, they crop up again.

No they won't. Their leadership was never actually killed, because USA did a very dumb thing when it invaded Iraq - it disbanded Iraqi army and then let the army officers just go away. All of them. And there were a lot of them. Out of 40 ISIS leaders, more than 25 are former Saddam's officers.

That's because, again, we aren't in the business of genocide. Iraq could have some some sort of war crimes trial where applicable, but I don't know why they didn't do that for those officers while still doing a trial for Saddam.

[Rolepgeek]

Doesn't that second article basically contradict the first one, and say that the Soviets refused to coordinate any peace?

And from what I remember learning, the Japanese had a plan to have the entire civilian populace fight to the death in the wake of an invasion. And Soviet Russia seemed prepared to invade.

I think dropping the bombs was pretty damn bad, but I'm not sure how accurate that is, that Japan was ready to surrender.

[Reelya]

The big difference between WWII Germany/Japan and Iraq, was "de-ba'athification". The first commander in Iraq recruited many ex-Saddam officials to be in charge of a transition, which is normal, as in a one-party state you basically need to be a party member to get a job, even if it's head of the local chess club, it wouldn't be odd for that to be a party member.

This displeased higher-ups in the Bush administraction, who then politicized everything by banning ALL people who'd ever worked for the Ba'ath government from EVER holding an official position. Which pretty much precluded them having any employement in post-war Iraq completely. They ended up with a lot of corrupt incompetents who had no government experience running important ministries. If they'd at least hire corrupt competents then of course things would have been different. So you now had a government staffed with corrupt inexperienced people facing an underground opposition consisting mainly of highly-skilled and experienced military / political commanders who'd all been sidelined from normal life because of Bush's policies.

Germany and Japan worked precisely because we planned for the peace and didn't merely drive all Nazi-era official underground.

[Sergarr]

Kill the leadership, they crop up again.

No they won't. Their leadership was never actually killed, because USA did a very dumb thing when it invaded Iraq - it disbanded Iraqi army and then let the army officers just go away. All of them. And there were a lot of them. Out of 40 ISIS leaders, more than 25 are former Saddam's officers.

That's because, again, we aren't in the business of genocide. Iraq could have some some sort of war crimes trial where applicable, but I don't know why they didn't do that for those officers while still doing a trial for Saddam.

Probably because they thought that they would just reintegrate into civilian life on their own and disappear as a force, because...

Bush administration was fucking dumb as all hell, what else can I say?

EDIT:Oh yeah, and also, that Ba'athist ban holy shit was it dumb.

Doesn't that second article basically contradict the first one, and say that the Soviets refused to coordinate any peace?

And from what I remember learning, the Japanese had a plan to have the entire civilian populace fight to the death in the wake of an invasion. And Soviet Russia seemed prepared to invade.

I think dropping the bombs was pretty damn bad, but I'm not sure how accurate that is, that Japan was ready to surrender.

Japan was not ready to surrender. It was so not ready to surrender that there was literally a coup attempt to stop Emperor of Japan from announcing Japan's capitulation. It almost succeeded, too!

[smjjames]

The big difference between WWII Germany and Japan and Iraq, was "de-ba'athification". The first commander in Iraq recruited many ex-Saddam officials to be in charge of a transition, which is normal, as in a one-party state you basically need to be a party member to get a job, even if it's head of the local chess club, it wouldn't be odd for that to be a party member.

This displeased higher-ups in the Bush administraction, who then politicized everything by banning ALL people who'd ever worked for the Ba'ath government from EVER holding an official position. Can you imagine the problems you'd have in Germany if you e.g. banned everyone who'd been in the Wehrmark and Hitler Youth from ever holding a job?

Huh, didn't know that, and it sounds like a bad idea, yeah.

Doesn't that second article basically contradict the first one, and say that the Soviets refused to coordinate any peace?

And from what I remember learning, the Japanese had a plan to have the entire civilian populace fight to the death in the wake of an invasion. And Soviet Russia seemed prepared to invade.

I think dropping the bombs was pretty damn bad, but I'm not sure how accurate that is, that Japan was ready to surrender.

Japan was not ready to surrender. It was so not ready to surrender that there was literally a coup attempt to stop Emperor of Japan from announcing Japan's capitulation. It almost succeeded, too!

A land invasion for either the Soviets or America, or both, would still have been extremely bloody for both sides.

[Reelya]

The highest ranking officer in the coup was a Major. A single middle-ranking officer being able to agitate some patriots isn't good evidence that Japan, politically was "not ready to surrender". The government itself had been making overtures for a while as to surrender terms.

The Japanese had been mulling over the Potsdam declaration and both the Emperor and Tojo were in favor of surrender. America dropped the nukes literally two weeks after that. America was in a rush to drop the nukes before Japan could officially respond. D'ya think it's reasonable for any government to go over a wide-ranging surrender demand with many complex clauses and have a unanimous decision within two weeks?

BTW, we'd already cracked the code and knew that Japan was formulating surrender terms a good 3-4 months before the bombing. Their entire war effort had already collapsed. They'd had no oil in Japan since April of that year, they had no airforce left at all, no tanks, no vehicles which could move. The "costly invasion" myth is just a myth. Basically you'd have tank divisions vs peasants. It's back-slapping post-hoc feel good bullshit.

Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan's air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.

What was left of Japan's factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.

On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 "Superfortress" bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo's commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 "Superfortress" planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.

Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were "driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age." Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s."

Japan Seeks Peace

Months before the end of the war, Japan's leaders recognized that defeat was inevitable. In April 1945 a new government headed by Kantaro Suzuki took office with the mission of ending the war. When Germany capitulated in early May, the Japanese understood that the British and Americans would now direct the full fury of their awesome military power exclusively against them.

American officials, having long since broken Japan's secret codes, knew from intercepted messages that the country's leaders were seeking to end the war on terms as favorable as possible. Details of these efforts were known from decoded secret communications between the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo and Japanese diplomats abroad.

[smjjames]

Kind of sounds like they were going 'So, we've got two nukes we had planned on using for Germany, what are we supposed to do with them' 'Maybe use them on Japan?' 'EXCELLENT IDEA!'

Whatever the motive, what's dune is done.

[Egan_BW]

I mean, if you've got a super powerful weapon, you can't just not use it, right?
In fact, let's apply this to all the nukes we've got in storage now! It'll be super pretty, double promise.

[Sergarr]

The highest ranking officer in the coup was a Major. A single middle-ranking officer being able to agitate some patriots isn't good evidence that Japan, politically was "not ready to surrender". The government itself had been making overtures for a while as to surrender terms.

The Japanese had been mulling over the Potsdam declaration and both the Emperor and Tojo were in favor of surrender. America dropped the nukes literally two weeks after that. There was no rush to bomb because negotiations hadn't even started on the terms. America was in a rush to drop the nukes before Japan could officially respond.

Politically, maybe. But Japan was practically a military dictatorship at that point. That's why it was the Emperor who was to make the announcement, a practically ceremonial figure at that point in all other situations - he was practically the only figure the genocidal fanatic Japanese military fucks were still respecting and who thus would be able to tell them to stop without expecting a mass rebellion of soldiers and low-ranking officers to overthrow the government.

Nuking Japan has fucking saved them, because if they were to continue fighting, Japanese language would be only spoken in hell. Well, not literally that, but they were on a verge of a massive famine that they've only avoided due to USA's massive food-transportation effort right immediately post-war, in addition to all the fun city-wiping bomber raids goodness and the Japan's official "fight to the death of every last person" policy.

USA has still to run out of Purple Hearts that were prepared for Japan's invasion, for Christ's sake!

[Culise]

The highest ranking officer in the coup was a Major. A single middle-ranking officer being able to agitate some patriots isn't good evidence that Japan, politically was "not ready to surrender". The government itself had been making overtures for a while as to surrender terms.

It's a good indication when the country and Army in question both have a habit of being led by junior-ranking officers who have traditionally made their displeasure with government policies clear by such acts as shooting the Prime Minister of the hour.  The most senior officer of the Mukden Incident was a colonel.  The 2-26 Incident was led by a captain.  The Marco Polo Bridge snowballed after a brigade commander rejected the truce and ordered his forces to shell Chinese positions, and it perhaps marks the highest ranks of these with a lieutenant-general.  The period of "government by assassination" has not passed that far from memory yet, and you can bet your bippy that the most pacifistic members of the military government were well aware of the possibility of catching a bullet as a consequence of any attempt at a surrender.  Hence, why they rejected any idea of an unconditional surrender.  The government could make all the overtures they wished, demanding all sorts of things like the retention of the Emperor, the protection of senior leaders from prosecution, the retention of Korea, Manchukuo, and Formosa, or the like. The Soviet-mediated proposals didn't even get that far as discussing; the Soviets stonewalled to secure the chance to grab Manchuria and Korea for themselves.  It is telling that, in spite of all of this, and in spite of the Allied central policy regarding surrenders (unconditional) since Potsdam, the Japanese did not take the idea of an unconditional surrender seriously in internal or external discussion until (a) the two bombs were dropped (demonstrating their effective inability to resist), and (b) the Soviets invaded Manchuria (closing the door on their last possibility for a mediated settlement).  I personally feel the latter was more important to their surrender than the former, but I'm not entirely clear the Western powers even knew for sure that the Soviets were going to invade on schedule at that point.

EDIT:
Also, fun fact.  When the most senior leaders of the Japanese government (the so-called Big Six) met to discuss surrender after the attack on Hiroshima (during the course of which Nagasaki was nuked as well - news arrived halfway through the meeting), the meeting concluded with a 3-3 split.  This wasn't, however, between an unconditional or conditional surrender, or even surrender versus fighting; the split was deciding how many conditions they'd demand before they started considering peace.  The Emperor's position was without doubt the crux, but added to that condition were also the terms that Japan would disarm on its own terms, that Japanese war criminals would be handled in Japanese courts, and that there would be no occupation of Japan whatsoever.  To reiterate, this was immediately *after* the nukes.  When discussing whether Japan could fight on with his senior officers outside his innermost circle, only the field marshal in charge of the Japanese army tasked with actually fighting off the offensive expressed his doubts to the Emperor.  I wonder if the Emperor would have overruled his entire military without the proof of the nuclear bomb.

[Wolfhunter107]

The Japanese overtures for "surrender" would have required the allies to accept these four conditions:

·Retention of the emperor

·No Allied occupation of the Japanese mainland

·Japan would disarm itself

·Japan would try its own war criminals

These barely construed a surrender in the first place, and the latter three would have been unacceptable to the allies, a fact that the leader of the antisurrender faction, who was responsible for the four conditions, knew. They were written that way to prevent a diplomatic solution, which is quite great look into the mindset of the Imperial Japanese high command.

Kind of sounds like they were going 'So, we've got two nukes we had planned on using for Germany, what are we supposed to do with them' 'Maybe use them on Japan?' 'EXCELLENT IDEA!'

Whatever the motive, what's dune is done.

Again, no. The nukes were used because they were the only way to force Japan's surrender without a costly land invasion. The only thing that the Japanese through more valuable than their honor was their Emporer, and his continued well-being. They were confident they could protect him from a fire-bombing raid-they had actually done so in March, during what was actually the most deadly raid of the war. They knew that they couldn't protect him from an atomic bomb strike on Tokyo (which was exactly what the allies were threatening to do). Hirohito knew it too, and that's why he forced them to surrender. That near-worship of the Emporer was actually why the attempted coup didn't have anyone higher than a major involved--he was the one thing more valuable than their honor. The fact that a good number of them had already committed suicide also played a role, too.